Report: McMaster Takes Issue With White House ‘Islamic Terrorism’ Mantra

Taking my cues here from the first and second paragraphs of our article above, and speaking now in more general terms:

Are terrorist acts — undertaken in the name and/or service of one’s religion — are these such terrorist acts “corrupting” to said religion? Likewise,

Are terrorist acts — undertaken in the name and/or service of one’s religion — are these such terrorist acts, in fact, “un-religious.”

Alternative Test Case No. One: The Jewish Zealots versus the Pagan Romans:

“Zealot: A member of a Jewish sect noted for its uncompromising opposition to pagan Rome and the polytheism it professed. The Zealots were an aggressive political party whose concern for the national and religious life of the Jewish people led them to despise even Jews who sought peace and conciliation with the Roman authorities. A census of Galilee ordered by Rome in AD 6 spurred the Zealots to rally the populace to noncompliance on the grounds that agreement was an implicit acknowledgment by Jews of the right of pagans to rule their nation. Extremists among the Zealots turned to terrorism and assassination and became known as Sicarii (Greek sikarioi, “dagger men”). They frequented public places with hidden daggers to strike down persons friendly to Rome. In the first revolt against Rome (ad 66–70) the Zealots played a leading role, and at Masada in 73 they committed suicide rather than surrender the fortress, but they were still a force to be reckoned with in the first part of the following century. A few scholars see a possible relationship between the Zealots and the Jewish religious community mentioned in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”

https://www.britannica.com/topic/Zealot

Alternative Test Case No. Two: The Islamists — in Afghanistan and elsewhere — versus the secular Soviets/the communists:

“The overt attack on Afghan social values was presented, by the resistance forces, as an attack on Islamic values. This was also seen as an attack on the honor of women. The initiatives introduced by PDPA — to impose literacy on women and girls — inevitably raised questions as to the potential role of women outside the the home. This provoked defensive actions from men, concerned with protecting the honor of women with their families, and to also ensure that traditional roles of women within the domestic sphere continued to be performed. It also generated fears that the important roles of women, as the primary vehicles for passing traditional and Islamic values from one generation to another, would be undermined if they were exposed to external and, particularly, non-Islamic values. This enabled the exiled radical Islamic parties to claim leadership of the resistance and to also declare a jihad.”

https://books.google.com/books?id=YeYBAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA58&lpg=PA58&dq=The+overt+attack+on+Afghan+social+values+was+presented,+by+the+resistance+forces,+as+an+attack+on+Islamic+values.&source=bl&ots=s8ictlb5rq&sig=ibHDoFXHPXiZcXANBXTTCka_og0&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjP2tihkrHSAhVCYyYKHX17CxoQ6AEIGjAA#v=onepage&q=The%20overt%20attack%20on%20Afghan%20social%20values%20was%20presented%2C%20by%20the%20resistance%20forces%2C%20as%20an%20attack%20on%20Islamic%20values.&f=false

Bottom Line Questions — Based on the Above:

Were the terrorist actions, undertaken by the Jewish Zealots vis-a-vis the Roman Pagans in Alternative Test Case No. One — and/or by the Islamists vis-a-vis the Soviets/the communists in Alternative Test Case No. Two — were either of these such terrorist actions:

a. “Corrupting” to their respective religions? Likewise were they, respectively,

b. “Un-Jewish” or “un-Islamic?”

“Terrorists,” in both alternative cases noted above, thus to be seen more as religious/civilizational “outlaws,” “outliers” and, generally speaking, “troublemakers;” this, rather than as religious/ civilizational champions, patriots and heroes (to wit: necessary “means to an end” guys — at times when the weak must try to defend themselves against the strong)?

The two Alternative Test Cases that I have offered below (Jewish Zealots versus the Pagan Romans; the Islamists versus the secular Soviets/communists); these appear to fit well with our actual, present-day case — of the secular U.S./the West versus the Islamists (et al.) today — this, given that ALL these such cases appear to involve:

a. Great foreign powers,

b. Bent on gaining greater power, influence and control throughout the world and

c. Attempting to do this by:

1. Transforming the “outlying” states and societies of the world more along the great foreign power’s own, unusual and unique — and thus often alien and profane — political, economic, social and value lines. And by these great foreign powers attempting to:

2. Incorporate such “outlying” states and societies more into their (the foreign great power’s) “sphere” of power, influence and control.

Thus shall we agree that, in all such instances noted above (the Jewish Zealots v. Pagan Romans case, the Islamists v. the secular Soviets/communists case and, indeed, the Islamists v. the secular U.S./the West case of today as well);

That in all these such instances, what is “corrupting” to the religion of the natives (and, by logical extension, to their “religious-based” political, economic, social and values ideas, institutions and norms as well?); this, quite obviously, is:

a. Not “terrorism” (undertaken by the natives in the defense of their — religious-oriented — way of life, way of governance and values, attitudes and beliefs?). But, indeed,

b. The “transformation and assimilation” efforts of the intervening/invading/occupying foreign great powers?

Thus, to suggest — in direct contradiction to the suggestions made by McMaster above — that in ALL the instances we have been discussing here (Jewish Zealots v. the Pagan Romans, the Islamists v. the secular Soviets/communist and the Islamists v. the secular U.S./the West); that in all these such cases:

a. “Terrorism” does not “corrupt” Islam” — nor does it “corrupt” a specific religion or “religion” generally? Likewise, in all such instances noted above:

b. “Terrorism” is not “un-Islamic” — nor is it “un-religious” re: any specific religion or re: “religion” generally.

In stark contrast, what would appear to actually be “corrupting” of Islam (and of any threatened religion generally) — and indeed what would appear to actually be “un-Islamic” (and “un-religious” re: any threatened religion generally) — this would seem to be, quite obviously:

a. The efforts by foreign intervening/invading/occupying great powers; this, to:

b. “Transform and assimilate” (more along foreign great power’s own alien and profane political, economic, social and/or value lines) the outlying states, societies and civilizations of the world?

(Even the recent election of President Trump here at home to be understood somewhat along these lines; wherein, [a] a revolt by certain elements of our population; this is brought on by [b] the perceived threats to same posed by “foreign” individuals, “foreign” ideas and norms, and what appears to be a “foreign” [in our case “internationalist?”] agenda?)

‘Lieutenant General H.R. McMaster told members of the National Security Council that the use of the term “radical Islamic terrorism” was counterproductive because the actions of terrorists are “un-Islamic,” according to the New York Times newspaper.’

As far as I’m concerned this is the first, the supreme, the most far-reaching act of judgment we need to accept if we hope to achieve the political Ends that benefit our national interest.

Having interrogated dozens of so-called ‘jihadis’ and observed thousands in their unguarded moments over many years, I can count on one hand the number of ‘jihadis’ who’s claim to be motivated by a genuine understanding of Koranic doctrine to be genuine.

The difficulty of reading Classic Arabic means that hundreds of millions of Muslims cannot even provide a literal translation of the 5 daily prayers they utter every day of their lives. The spiritual nuances contained in a book two inches thick uttered in poetic koine by the Archangel Gabriel 1500 years ago are a formidable intellectual challenge to the most studious of Arabic scholars. Within the ‘jihadi’rank and file who can’t even write their own name in their native language….?

This un-Islamic ignorance is overwhelmingly obvious when you are face to face with the average ‘jihadi’ at the sharp end. IMHO anyone who claims the nature of the task we are currently undertaking is grounded in a spiritual interpretation of Islam needs a new line of work. I hear Moscow is hiring.

I imagine McMaster considers the cognitive lens that fixates on a Islamic strategic menace beholds the same promise the Domino Theory heralded 60 years ago.

RC

TO OUTLAW 09: CONSOLIDATED RESPONSE

Outlaw 09: “…I would bluntly argue that white supremacy or better worded white nationalism has not disappeared at all…in fact both terms mean exactly the same thing…”

You and your ellipsis! It drives me up the wall when it’s not three periods.

White Supremacy and White Nationalism are related and membership is highly correlated, but they are not “exactly the same”, as White Nationalists include egalitarian separatists who desire a separate but equal society segregated on the basis of race. Conversely, Black Nationalism includes supremacist separatists as well as supremacist integrationists, the latter of which desiring an integrated society in which blacks receive special privileges on the basis of their race such as reparations, autonomy, etc.

Outlaw 09: “…what the MB…AQ and IS are pushing is in fact a version of Muslim nationalism nothing more nothing less…”

Yes, I agree. However, Muslims were unified in a single unitary state from the 7th to 10th Centuries. Despite competition and fragmentation from the 10th Century on, the Ottoman Empire nevertheless was considered the successor to the early Caliphates, and therefore Muslims could look to a supra-national Muslim state until the early 20th Century.

Outlaw 09: “IMHO though what we are seeing with AQ…IS..Hezbollah…Iraqi Shia militia and say the IRGC is a form of true Islamic fascism…but that is another discussion…”

Yet what of Sudan, Saudi Arabia and Pakistan? Admittedly, continuing with the reference to Fascism, Saudi Arabia is more analogous to Portugal or Spain, than it is to say Germany or Italy.

If there was a Muslim supremacist coup d’état in Islamabad, our troubles in North Korea and Iran would seem very minor indeed.

Outlaw 09: “When we talk about AQ and moreover IS we need to use the term “Takfirists” why because only a Muslim can in fact kill another Muslim over an “interpretation of the Koran”…and that Muslim can only be a Takfirist…”

I completely agree with you on this point, and I have argued with others that Wahhabism is very different from the type of Takfiri Salafism espoused by Qutb and others, given that no Daesh, Al Qaeda or Al Shabaab leaders want to accept higher authority in secular or religious matters, other than their own interpretation of Islam.

Outlaw 09: “…there have been far more Muslims killed by these groups…”

There is nothing surprising here. The conflicts in Ireland in the 20th Century were overwhelmingly Irishmen killing other Irishmen, with Britons comprising less than 10% of the total dead. Stalin spent far more time and energy killing and enslaving his own citizens suspected of less-than-total loyalty, than he did killing and enslaving the Fascists and Western democracies which were supposedly the Soviet Union’s sworn enemies. Hitler, despite his racial policies, spent the war killing tens of millions that were far closer culturally and genetically to the German people, than his allies or clients in France, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Croatia, Spain and Japan. The Thirty Years War’s Battle of Luetzen supposedly involved a Catholic Austrian-led army facing off against a Protestant Swedish-led army; in reality, even the two ethnically-Swedish units by now comprised Germans. Luther himself declared that it was preferable for a person to be killed at the hands of a Muslim than it was for them to follow Catholicism.

Outlaw 09: “So in some aspects using the term “un-Islamic” simply means that the jihad that they are on is being taken out of context in the Koran and corrupted to fit their version of Islam…”

I can think of a variety of Christian practices and doctrines that are arguably “taken of context” from the Bible and “corrupted to fit” various sects and churches’ versions of Christianity. The divide between the Greek and Catholic Churches has lasted over one millennium and other Christian sectarian divides have lasted several centuries (Catholic-Orthodox-Protestant and intra-Protestant). So what is Christian and what is “un-Christian” in this context?

Outlaw 09: “Really read some of the academic works on the life of Mohammed and you will actually see that his view of Islam is not exactly what is being pushed today…in both the global Sunni and Shia community…and this is due to the various “Islamic centers of learning for both sects” having their influence and sway over their interpretation of Islam…Mohammed…the Sunnahs…and the Koran…and it goes back 1500 years to the killing of what Shia claim was the rightful ruler that should have be chosen after Mohammed died…Hussain.”

Again, to refer back to Europe’s Wars of Religion, peace was not achieved by appeal to Scripture or the decisions of ecumenical councils. Were all the pale blonds with colored eyes in Norway, Denmark, Poland, Belarus and Russia able to deter Hitler’s genocide by appealing to National Socialist racial theories? Were the victims of Stalin’s NKVD and KGB able to save their lives by demonstrating adherence to Marxist-Leninist theory? Unfortunately, that’s not how it works.

Outlaw 09: “Part of the problem lies within Islam itself and the way it is structured…any Mullah and or Imam can interpret for his “community” at will what he thinks Mohammed said and or did…then take in the Sunnahs and Koran….and presto we have a new “local interpretation…”

Nearly all ideologies lend themselves to convenient and local interpretations. The more salient problem with Islam is notions of Tawhid and that the Quran is directly from God rather than a human translation, work against diverse interpretations.

Outlaw 09: “This is exactly what AQ and IS have in fact done…so in some sense McMaster is correct when he uses the term un-Islamic…”

Firstly, McMaster is not a theologian whereby he can make a determination that one interpretation of Islam is correct and another isn’t.

Secondly, our objectives should be to quell the political violence associated with Islam, whether or not Islam permits or encourages such violence.

Outlaw 09: “…white nationalism is white nationalism a totally different beast…”

Where there are whites, there is White Nationalism and White Supremacism. The question is: is it a significant problem on a relative or per capita basis? In the United States, on both a relative and absolute basis, Muslim supremacist terrorism is a significant problem, whereas White Supremacist terrorism is about as minimized as it can be and is not a significant problem.

Outlaw 09: “…Islam accepts fully Judaism as it does Christianity as being “people of the book”…and surprise surprise it virtually accepts all the prophets of those two religions and hold Abraham and the Virgin Mary in high esteem…”

And Christianity accepts Judaism. Arguably, Islam is a form of Judaism adapted for the Arab tribes and Mohammed’s preferences.

Yet how is this helpful? Did the Orthodox, Catholic, Lutheran and Anabaptist Christians primarily fight those whose beliefs differed the most from their own or those whose beliefs were most similar? Was Hitler’s genocidal wars directed at people furthest or closest to his conception of the “Master Race”? Did Stalin spend more time killing the foreigners seeking to bring down the Soviet Union or citizens suspected of being influenced by foreigners?

Azor….Muslim on Muslim violence as actually since I come from Texas…white on Muslim violence….

https://www.buzzfeed.com/albertsamaha/four-mosques-burn-as-2017-begins?utm_term=.ymZW9xXvv#.ofGeo4OJJ

Four Mosques Have Burned In Seven Weeks — Leaving Many Muslims and Advocates Stunned

“The short answer is we haven’t seen anything like this in the past.”

On January 7, the Islamic Center of Lake Travis, in Austin, Texas, which had been under construction, caught on fire. A week later, on January 14, the Islamic Center of Eastside, in Bellevue, Washington, burned.
Two weeks after that, on January 27, several hours after President Donald Trump signed an executive order banning immigrants from seven Muslim-majority countries, a fire destroyed the Islamic Center of Victoria, in Texas.
Then, this past Friday, February 24, a small blaze broke out at the front entrance of the Daarus Salaam Mosque, near Tampa, Florida.
Authorities have ruled that three of the four fires were caused by arson. An official at the Travis County Fire Marshal told BuzzFeed News that the investigation into the cause of the fire at the Islamic Center of Lake Travis remains open.
“We’ve never seen four mosques burned within seven weeks of each other,” said Mark Potok, a senior fellow at the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups around the country. “It’s part of a whole series of dramatic attacks on Muslims.”
The mosque fires come amid increased fear about hate crimes against minority religious groups. In recent weeks, scores of bomb threats were called into Jewish community centers and schools around the country and graveyards in Jewish cemeteries in three states were vandalized. On Sunday, somebody threw a rock through a window of the Masjid Abu Bakr mosque in Denver. In Redmond, Washington, vandals destroyed the Muslim Association of Puget Sound mosque’s entrance sign on two occasions within two months of the election. Two days after the Inauguration, a woman shattered the windows of the Davis Islamic Center, in California, and left strips of raw bacon on a door handle. In January, a white nationalist fatally shot six people at a mosque in Quebec City, Canada. Last week, a white man shot two Indian men, one fatally, at a Kansas bar after making racial slurs, questioning their immigration status, and shouting, “Get out of my country.”
“The short answer is we haven’t seen anything like this in the past,” Potok said, referring to the overall surge in reported hate crimes across the country. “This is my 18th year here and I haven’t seen anything remotely like this.”
To have three mosque fires ruled arson within six weeks is highly unusual, said Corey Saylor, director of the Department to Monitor and Combat Islamophobia at the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “In normal times, I will see one to two mosque incidents of any type per month, and rarely is it arson,” he said. “I can tell you for sure I have not seen levels of violence like this since I started tracking this stuff” in 2009.
The fire at the Islamic Center of Lake Travis — which nearly two months later is still under investigation — destroyed the partially constructed frame. Community members began raising funds for the building four years earlier.
“There are a lot more people who are in support of us building this back again than people who oppose us but it takes one crazy guy to do something,” Shakeel Rashed, an executive board member of the Islamic Center of Lake Travis, told the Texas Tribune in January.
“Everybody believes we need to be more vigilant. When we start reconstruction we definitely want to plan the security of the place better, have more cameras,” Rashed said.
In Bellevue, Washington, six days before the inauguration, surveillance cameras caught a man walking toward the Islamic Center of Eastside while carrying a backpack and a gallon jug shortly before 2:45 am, the Seattle Times reported. Less than a minute later, the mosque was on fire. Investigators at the scene found a melted gallon jug and a gas can. Officers arrested Isaac Wayne Wilson, who remained at the scene, smelled of gasoline, and confessed to setting the blaze, according to police. Authorities said there was no evidence it was a hate crime. A year earlier, Wilson, who has a history of mental illness, had been convicted of misdemeanor assault after an incident at the mosque.
Hours after President Donald Trump signed the controversial executive order banning immigration from seven Muslim-majority countries, someone intentionally set fire to the Islamic Center of Victoria in Texas in the middle of the night, according to investigators, who have yet to identify a suspect. The blaze caused more than $500,000 in damage, and completely destroyed the 16-year-old mosque, shaking the Muslim American community in south Texas. The mosque’s president, Dr. Shahid Hashmi, told the Texas Tribune his community would forgive whoever set the fire, but added, “there’s no way we can forget. There’s no way our children can forget.”
The fire at the Daarus Salaam Mosque in Thonotosassa, Florida, on Friday was at least the third time in seven months that a mosque in the Tampa area had been set on fire, following incidents at the Islamic Education Center in July and the Masjid Omar mosque in August.

I get tired of this argument. The only question is: “Does using the phrase ‘Radical Islamic Terrorist’ further our information Operations Campaign, or the Enemy’s Information Operations Campaign. In this case, it assists the Enemy’s by verifying and reinforcing their narrative that this is a war between Islam and the West. Therefore, it should not be used. Terms like “ISIS Terrorist” or “al Qaeda Terrorist” separates and isolates the terrorist from the larger Muslim community. It separated them out as something not Islamic. This is not rocket science. I fail to see why there is even a debate.

BTW, Gorka saying that the terrorist were “jihadists” is also not helpful. Jihad is a sacred duty of all Muslims and has a positive connotation similar to the connotation that “Martyr” does for Christians. Jihadist should never be used in conjunction with a terrorist, least you raise their status to that of a Christian Martyr or Saint. Again, not rocket science. Basic Information Operations.