Al Qaeda, Hamas and Islamic terrorism have all become politically acceptable.
In 2025, Hamas and Hezbollah flags became regular sights on Ivy League college campuses, a Muslim immigrant who embraced an unindicted coconspirator in bombing plots in New York City became its mayor, presidential envoys chatted with Hamas and an Al Qaeda leader who used to have a $10 million reward on his head visited the White House and met with the president.
The mainstreaming of Islamic terrorism didn’t happen overnight. A decade ago, the Obama administration backed the Al Qaeda militias that would eventually go on to take over Syria and first forced Israel to negotiate with Hamas after the kidnapping and murder of three teens.
What went on under the cover of plausible deniability a decade ago, where our government pretended we were backing the Free Syrian Army, a ‘democratic’ and ‘secular’ movement, (which critics like me pointed out was just Al-Qaeda in drag), or where our negotiators did not directly meet with Hamas, where anti-Israel campus groups claimed that they supported BDS rather than mass murder, and Muslim politicians denied they were terrorists, is out in the open.
How we got here was inevitable once American leaders responded to 9/11 by trying to draw distinctions between good Islamization and bad Islamization, between moderates and extremists, between good terrorists and bad terrorists in the hopes of dividing our enemies.
The false ‘moderates’ and ‘extremists’ paradigm, which no Muslim leader or movement ever actually accepted, didn’t divide up Islamic terrorists, it mainstreamed them. We lost the ability to draw lines and with it any larger sense of who we were, who they were and what we had set out to accomplish by fighting them until all we wanted to do was find someone to surrender to.
Opportunistic realpolitik led us to the conclusion that a moderate was any Muslim terrorist group willing to pretend they weren’t our enemies, and an extremist was a Muslim terrorist group unwilling to lie to us. Only the purest ISIS terrorists are still considered extremists while the Al Leader and former ISIS ally who took over Syria has joined our anti-ISIS coalition to fight ISIS.
America has reached the stage of allying with ‘moderate’ Al Qaeda against ‘extreme’ Al Qaeda.
While the Al-Jolani visit to the White House was a low point, the unfortunate truth was that we had allied with Taliban warlords in Afghanistan, as long as they weren’t officially Taliban warlords right this moment, and we had backed Al Qaeda militias in Syria, as long as they pretended they weren’t Al Qaeda right now. What seemed like opportunistic realpolitik in the moment didn’t actually change the terrorists, it changed us by defining terrorist deviancy down to nothing.
That is also why we were taken in by the Taliban’s promises of a ‘peaceful transition’ in Afghanistan and why presidential envoys in pursuit of a ‘ceasefire’ are now meeting with and praising Hamas terrorist leaders. Instead of finding moderates, we just gave up our standards.
On college campuses and on the liberal side of the political nexus, support for non-violent opposition to Israel gave way to support for Oct 7 and the violent mass murder of Jews. After being initially greeted with polite revulsion, the terrorist side, including Zohran Mamdani, won the argument with the moral pragmatism of genocide lies. Accuse Israel enough of the worst crimes and suddenly no tactic, including rape and burning children alive, will seem too awful.
Mainstreaming Islamic terrorists happens when we think about anything and everything (regional stability, an end to the fighting, the horrors of war, the tribal cause) rather than look at what we’re doing and what the long term consequences of normalizing terrorism will be. --->READ MORE HERE
If you like what you see, please "Like" and/or Follow us on FACEBOOK here, GETTR here, and TWITTER here.
No comments:
Post a Comment