Jihadi Quotes

Bashir paused to watch a live CNN feed... Bashir was struck silent by the images of wailing Iraqi women carrying children's bodies out of the rubble of a bombed building. As he studied the screen, Bashir's bullish shoulders slumped. "People like me are America's best friends in the region," Bashir said at last shaking his head ruefully, "I'm a moderate Msulim, an educated man. But watching this, even I could become a jihadi. How can Americans say they are making themselves safer?" Bashir asked, struggling not to direct his anger toward the large American target on the other side of the desk. "Your president Bush had done a wonderful job of uniting one billion Muslims against America for the next two hundred years.

Zinah had not lost her touch, had she? She had a way with these girls. Amirah now ached to become more devout. Another win.

The sooner the jihadis go up to their imagined #heaven, the sooner our earth would be a heaven.

Perhaps this was the greatest genius of the cyber jihadis: the monopoly they clinched on information. They realized how helplessly addicted the population had become to knowing in this information age. So what if news was tainted or unreliable? - people needed their daily fix.

The murky world of terrorism is more relevant than ever today: terrorist organizations, whether Bolshevik at the beginning of the twentieth century or Jihadi at the start of the twenty-first, have much in common.

For America, Britain, and the Western powers, the rise of ISIS and the caliphate is the ultimate disaster. Whatever they intended by their invasion of Iraq in 2003 and their efforts to unseat Assad in Syria since 2011, it was not to see the creation of a jihadi state spanning northern Iraq and Syria, run by a movement a hundred times bigger and much better organized than the al-Qaeda of Osama bin Laden. The war on terror for which civil liberties have been curtailed and hundreds of billions of dollars spent has failed miserably.

It is too bad that most Olympians do not train as hard as the Lashkar jihadis whose main aim in life is to kill people.

Black Label–sipping Pakistani generals with London flats and daughters on Ivy League campuses had been managing jihadi guerrilla campaigns against India and in Afghanistan for two decades.

Allah desires that you die in his name (Qur’an 3:169-70; 9:39; 19:70-72); Yahweh died for you to have abundant life in his name (John 10:10).

The CIA has a great reputation and a terrible record. It relies on machines, not men, to understand the other side. They counted Soviet weapons with spy satellites but never figured that in the meantime communism was crumbling. They poured billions into Afghanistan to give the Russians their Vietnam – which they did, only by ending up breeding an entirely new menace, the Islamic jihadis. They claimed the existence of WMD in Iraq and provided a war-mongering President with a pretext for war. Want me to go on?’ Harry snorted.

People who do not understand irony cannot understand fiction.

But radical feminist or not, Alesha Parkhurst loved British freedoms as much as Karen Andersen.

Tamaris to her fellow jihadi: "Don't pray-- shoot!

High-fiving some jihadi’s face into martyrdom with a suppressed AR-15? That’s just a warm slice of freedom pie with an ice-cold scoop of America on the side.

You must remember, the so-called Jihadis who are in reality, mentally unstable individuals run by Quranic fundamentalists, do not represent the whole Muslim population of the world.

Today those who stand, almost alone, against the Jihadis are young American soldiers, sailors, airmen, Guardsmen, and Marines. We should thank God that they still volunteer to serve.

How to describe the things we see onscreen, experiences we have that are not ours? After so many hours (days, weeks, years) of watching TV—the morning talk shows, the daily soaps, the nightly news and then into prime time (The Bachelor, Game of Thrones, The Voice)—after a decade of studying the viral videos of late-night hosts and Funny or Die clips emailed by friends, how are we to tell the difference between them, if the experience of watching them is the same? To watch the Twin Towers fall and on the same device in the same room then watch a marathon of Everybody Loves Raymond. To Netflix an episode of The Care Bears with your children, and then later that night (after the kids are in bed) search for amateur couples who’ve filmed themselves breaking the laws of several states. To videoconference from your work computer with Jan and Michael from the Akron office (about the new time-sheet protocols), then click (against your better instincts) on an embedded link to a jihadi beheading video. How do we separate these things in our brains when the experience of watching them—sitting or standing before the screen, perhaps eating a bowl of cereal, either alone or with others, but, in any case, always with part of us still rooted in our own daily slog (distracted by deadlines, trying to decide what to wear on a date later)—is the same? Watching, by definition, is different from doing.

I never thought that I would be saying these words. I would rather have died than utter these words a few months ago. But my whole mindset had undergone a drastic change since then. The Amir’s speech was the straw that broke the back of my jihadi resolve. In fact, I now secretly resolved that my personal jihad would be against the evil Pakistan-sponsored jihadi movement that focused on slaughtering innocent civilians.

If this were a dream, then the dream within the dream would puncture the illusion, like a MyPillow commercial in between jihadi execution videos, because my cheap-ass captors wouldn’t spring for YouTube Premium.

True white supremacists want to enslave, subjugate, or annihilate nonwhites—much as true jihadis think that those who refuse to submit to Islam ought to die. Ordinary Europeans who express concern that waiting lists for hospital services and housing will worsen as more migrants enter the country are not white supremacists. However, simply ignoring their concerns or labeling them racist will only create political opportunities for true racists.

Gerry: So your point is, maybe a bunch of Jihadi terrorists have renamed themselves to the Gaelic name for a creature from Irish mythology? Niall: Well… there’s no need to try and make me sound stupid, Gerry. Gerry: I’m not Niall, that was all you.

...can one really believe if there is no freedom to disbelieve? What is the credit in having faith if you allow others and yourself no real choice at all?

One way to ruin your life is to have dreams bigger than your abilities.

Many in the West see the greatest threat to their security and way of life coming from the Arab and Islamic worlds, in what is now known as jihadi terror. They don’t understand that many in the Arab and Islamic worlds see the greatest threat to their security and way of life coming from the West. What should be apparent to both sides is that there is a real connection between Arab stagnation and frustration, on the one hand, and the terror threat that so preoccupies Western democracies, on the other. Western

One more thing is absolutely forbidden in the capital of the Islamic State: mocking Muslims or Islam. And on May 3, 2015, jihadis loyal to ISIS attempted to impose the death penalty on offenders against that rule—including some Christians, a Jewish woman, and an atheist—who had dared to mock Islam and its Prophet. But the criminals who were guilty of flouting the absolute respect that the Islamic State demands for their religion on pain of death were not in Raqqa. We were in Garland, Texas—as were our would-be executioners.

Dust. You forget about the dust. It hangs over the landscape like a ragged curtain. It scratches your throat. The air tastes of sulphur, saltpetre, cordite, burning rubber and burning oil from the pipelines and wells sabotaged by ISIS to disrupt aerial surveillance.

Even today, after all that has happened, I keep this scarf wrapped around my hair because of men's interest in me. It is not because of faith any more; I still believe in Allah, don't misunderstand me, but I do not think Allah is a fashion designer. He observes people's hearts, not their clothes.

Any diplomat must be able to engage people across all kinds of political and moral divide; any historian, any student of foreign policy, must come to understand a wide variety of attitudes and opinions that, often for extremely good reasons, are largely unacceptable in polite American society today. Whether the issue is racism, misogyny, jihadi ideology, Islamophobia, homophobia, xenophobia, communism, fascism, or, yes, antisemitism, the student of foreign policy must develop the capacity to engage calmly, dispassionately, and sometimes even cooperatively with people committed to utterly revolting ideas.

In short, Obama and then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton took a stable, albeit repressive country that had been an ally in the fight against terrorism and turned it into a breeding ground for the most radical of jihadis in a feeble attempt at nation-building. The Obama/Clinton misadventure was everything many disliked about the war in Iraq only much, much worse. Unlike Iraq, Obama committed U.S. forces for the intervention in Libya without a congressional declaration of war, violating the War Powers Act of 1973.117 Libya, like Iraq, suffered greatly at the hands of Obama’s foreign policy decisions, turning the once stable and prosperous country into a terrorist haven.118

Contemporary jihads were worldly, not spiritual, said the Sheikh. The men waging them operated not from an excess of piety, but a lack of it: "It is just the Islamicization of violence," he said. "People think they can use Islam to fight for land, or honor, or respect, or money. But these are not religious people. They are just following non-Islamic examples." The jihadis tended to be far more Westernized, in a superficial sense, than the Sheikh and his fellow ulama. Contrary to popular belief, most of the jihadi extremists weren't trained in madrasas. Rather than studying the nuances of classical Islamic thought, their training tended to be secular and technical, in subjects like engineering, computer programming, or medicine.

For the first time in two or three days, I heard the cry of birds—oh well, it was a crow, but even a crow's croaking sounded wonderful. There still was life. There were birds and the breeze. There were clouds in the blue sky. And we could look at them for a moment, hear them again. You have no idea how beautiful the world looks and sounds in the hours after a battle stops!

Harriott maintained that Zafar was the evil genius and linchpin behind an international Muslim conspiracy stretching from Constantinople, Mecca and Iran to the walls of the Red Fort. His intent, declared Harriott, was to subvert the British Empire and put the Mughals in its place. Contrary to all the evidence that the Uprising broke out first among the overwhelmingly Hindu sepoys, and that it was high-caste Hindu sepoys who all along formed the bulk of the fighting force; and ignoring all the evident distinctions between the sepoys, the jihadis, the Shia Muslims of Persia and the Sunni court of Delhi, Major Harriott argued that the Mutiny was the product of the convergence of all these conspiring forces around the fanatical Islamic dynastic ambitions of Zafar:

All these complexities are lost on many commentators, often the same ones who would single out the Arabs for being Arabs; now there is a keen interest in explaining any social evolution or political process through the exclusive prism of Islam. According to such commentators, Muslims act in a certain way mainly because they are Muslims, not because they are Moroccans or Jordanians, blue-collared or self-employed, educated or illiterate, urbanites or peasant, straight or gay, young or old, Arabic speakers or native Berbers, and of course their class background and financial resources are meaningless compared with their religious affiliation. Those analysts share one thing in common with the Jihadis, they believe Islam provides all the answers. The Arab Revolution: Ten Lessons From the Democratic Uprisisng

Why did Allah have to create Shaitan, or God have to create Satan? Why create evil? We were told then—as I was told at home—that it was to test humanity. But why test humanity if you are all-powerful and purely good? Why not just drench humanity in pure goodness, as if in your divine rays? The answer—don't laugh at me—that I have now is this: Evil is precondition to goodness. Goodness reveals itself only in its capacity to tolerate the pettiness and dullness of evil. Goodness has to live with the possibility of evil, not eradicate it. As long as it does so, the evil that confronts goodness stays petty, dull, limited, essentially unimportant. But when goodness wants to become pure and alone, that is when it turns evil, truly evil; not the grubby evil that it has to tolerate in order to be goodness, but Evil itself.

ASIO turned up on Hamza's doorstep a year ago, after he and his mate, both in their mid-twenties, returned from Yemen. They weren't charged with anything but they were placed on no-fly lists. Hamza is convinced ASIO is monitoring their phones and watching their homes. So, as a workaround, he, the paladin dwarf, and his mate, a gnome, skip through forests in World of Warcraft, chatting business over their headsets. I ask him what he was doing in Yemen. 'Okay, now this... what you're getting to now, is a dangerous area.' He pauses. 'I was eating pizza.' He asks for a selfie with me. He says the gnome will be stoked because they had to lie low at one point and were confined to a small apartment in Yemen. They passed the time watching Breaking Bad and John Safran vs God. Pretty chuffed by the inroads I've made into the jihadi demographic.

Extremism frequently turns its champions into angry people, driven by conflicting desires. At first, I pitied my less enlightened parents and siblings. Then I felt superior to them, poor sinners that they were. Then I lost patience with their unwillingness to see the one true path and resorted to threats, intimidation, and yelling. At night, I was tormented by thoughts of what would happen to all us of when we reached our graves.

It’s no exaggeration to say Libya has descended into a state of Mad Max–like anarchy. Rival militias—some affiliated with ISIS or al-Qaeda; others merely bloodthirsty—fight over its major cities. Awash in weapons, divided between east and west, and bereft of functioning state institutions, Libya is a seedbed for militancy that has spread west and south across Africa. It has become the most important Islamic State stronghold outside Syria and Iraq, drawing fighters from as far away as Senegal and forcing the United States to send warplanes back to the country in the winter of 2016 to strike their training camps. It supplies jihadi fighters to ISIS and Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria. It sends waves of desperate migrants across the Mediterranean, where they drown in capsized vessels within sight of Europe. It stands as a tragic rebuke to the well-intentioned activists in Paris and Washington.

veteran Turkish smuggler claimed in November 2014 that he had sent “more than ten” Islamic State jihadis into Europe. His claim couldn’t be proven, but it was eminently plausible: he said he charged $2,500 for every person he brought out of the Islamic State and into Europe through Turkey, and that the jihadis he had helped get to Europe were pretending to be refugees. But according to the smuggler they are actually jihadis biding their time: “They are waiting for their orders. Just wait. You will see. . . . The Western world thinks there is no ISIS in their countries—that all the jihadis have gone to fight and die in Syria.” He recalled that one of the Islamic State jihadis he helped get to Europe told him about Muslims from Europe who had been killed in Syria, “We are sending our fighters to take their places.” He told the smuggler, “We want you to bring our brothers too.” The smuggler noted that it was easy for them to go to Europe. “They can come to any smuggler and say they are refugees.

To this day, people in Washington can’t even agree about what to call this group. Some refer to it as ISIS—the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Others, such as President Obama, refer to it as ISIL—the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant. Yet in reality neither name is correct. In war, names matter. An intelligence preparation of the battlefield does not describe enemies capriciously. The way we talk about our foes is a function of the raw intelligence we put into the system, and the names we give them are a reflection of what they call themselves. We called the Third Reich the Third Reich because that was what the Nazis called themselves. The same was true with the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. If we wish to be accurate, we should refer to our current enemy as the “Islamic State.” That is what they have called themselves since Abu Bakr al Baghdadi declared the caliphate reborn in the summer of 2014. And indeed such major publications as the Financial Times and the Economist refer to the jihadi group as IS.

Still, there was a basic contradiction at the heart of Obama’s decision to intervene that contributed to this unraveling. His focus on a front-end solution—consciously trying to avoid the nation-building missteps of George W. Bush—foreclosed any meaningful American role in the postwar stabilization or reconstruction of Libya. There would be no peacekeepers, trainers, or advisers. That distinguished Libya from Iraq and Afghanistan, but also from Bosnia, Kosovo, and virtually every other American intervention since World War II. The absence of boots on the ground deprived the United States of leverage in dealing with Libya’s new leaders. While these leaders squabbled among themselves in Tripoli, the radical jihadi groups helped themselves to assault rifles and machine guns from Colonel Qaddafi’s ransacked armories. As in Iraq half a decade earlier, the lack of security proved to be Libya’s undoing: The militias poured in to fill the vacuum left by Qaddafi. What had been hailed by many as a “model intervention” turned out to be a blueprint for chaos.

What had I decided to do? I had no idea. If there was anything I had decided to do, weeks ago, it was to do just what was necessary to survive, and nothing more. To survive until some stroke of fortune released me into the wider world outside. I had so often rejected that world for being imperfect and thus an affront to the perfection of my God, but its human imperfection was exactly what I had grown to respect in this place where all talk of perfection and purity led, by a straight and narrow road, directly to suffering, mistrust, destruction and death.

General Kennedy raised his hand. “Once we’ve destroyed these pigs, are we going to get our payback for their crucifixions?” he asked. The Marine commanders, who were beyond enraged, jumped in. “We found over 153 Marines crucified when we re-secured the Ben-Gurion University campus near Negev the other day,” blurted General Peeler, eyes burning with rage. “I know everyone wants payback for the crucifixions, and I assure you we will have it. Once the battlefields have been secured and the grave registration units move in, they are going to bury the IR forces in mass graves. They will do their best to identify the IR soldiers so that they can be properly marked. Prior to the graves being filled in, they have been instructed to cover all the bodies in pig’s blood, which the Germans and Brits have supplied. We have documented over 5,000 crucifixions of US Forces, so we will bury their dead in pig’s blood in retaliation. They believe that this will prevent them from entering Paradise, so we will test that theory.” A few laughs, snickers and whoops could be heard, mostly from the NCO’s. This was a tactic used by General “Black Jack” Pershing in the Philippines prior to World War One. The US had taken possession of the Philippines during the Spanish American War of 1898. In 1911, a Muslim uprising took place in Mindanao, and General Pershing had the insurgents shot with bullets dipped in pig’s blood and then their bodies were buried with the guts of the pig. This discouraged future Muslim attacks by future Jihadis because they believed they would be prevented from entering Paradise if they were buried with the blood from a pig and its guts. General Gardner’s staff wanted to take a page from history and see if it would make a difference in this war--any small advantage that could be gained was something worth pursuing, no matter how strange or unconventional it may be.

The Pakistani film International Gorillay (International guerillas), produced by Sajjad Gul, told the story of a group of local heroes - of the type that would, in the language of a later age, come to be known as jihadis, or terrorists - who vowed to find and kill an author called "Salman Rushdie" . The quest for "Rushdie" formed the main action of the film and "his" death was the film's version of happy ending. "Rushdie" himself was depicted as a drunk, constantly swigging from a bottle, and a sadist. He lived in what looked very like a palace on what looked very like an island in the Philippines (clearly all novelists had second homes of this kind), being protected by what looked very like the Israeli Army (this presumably being a service offered by Israel to all novelists), and he was plotting the overthrow of Pakistan by the fiendish means of opening chains of discotheques and gambling dens across that pure and virtuous land, a perfidious notion for which, as the British Muslim "leader" Iqbal Sacranie might have said, death was too light a punishment. "Rushdie" was dressed exclusively in a series of hideously coloured safari suits - vermilion safari suits, aubergine safari suits, cerise safari suits - and the camera, whenever it fell upon the figure of this vile personage, invariably started at his feet and then panned [sic] with slow menace up to his face. So the safari suits got a lot of screen time, and when he saw a videotape of the film the fashion insult wounded him deeply. It was, however, oddly satisfying to read that one result of the film's popularity in Pakistan was that the actor playing "Rushdie" became so hated by the film-going public that he had to go into hiding. At a certain point in the film one of the international gorillay was captured by the Israeli Army and tied to a tree in the garden of the palace in the Philippines so that "Rushdie" could have his evil way with him. Once "Rushdie" had finished drinking form his bottle and lashing the poor terrorist with a whip, once he had slaked his filthy lust for violence upon the young man's body, he handed the innocent would-be murderer over to the Israeli soldiers and uttered the only genuinely funny line in the film. "Take him away," he cried, "and read to him from The Satanic Verses all night!" Well, of course, the poor fellow cracked completely. Not that, anything but that, he blubbered as the Israelis led him away. At the end of the film "Rushdie" was indeed killed - not by the international gorillay, but by the Word itself, by thunderbolts unleashed by three large Qurans hanging in the sky over his head, which reduced the monster to ash. Personally fried by the Book of the Almighty: there was dignity in that.

Kurt was crazy, who wouldn't have been?

Both Islamists and jihadis have the same goal--to spread Islam, but they have different methods. Islamists want to do this through passive means such as politics, immigration, and childbirth. However, jihadis prefer the method used by the first Muslims: the sword.

Time is fixed and time is flexible. It is an invention by man and the curse of man. We all need more time.

But the most profound effect of that era was on the Pakistan military’s thinking. Intoxicated by victory, the ISI sought to replicate its success in Afghanistan by employing the same tactics elsewhere. Through the 1990s, it established its own jihadi groups and deployed them to attack Indian soldiers in Kashmir, and it funnelled cash to foreign Islamist guerrillas as far afield as the Philippines. At home, the emboldened spy agency meddled aggressively in politics, mostly in an effort to oust Benazir Bhutto. ISI officers rigged elections, bought politicians and strong-armed troublesome judges. Critics began to speak of a ‘state within a state’.

Syrian Christians were a prominent minority community with full religious freedoms. Obviously, that changed once parts of the country fell to ISIS, al Qaeda, and other jihadi groups.

Sixty seconds is a long time on the battlefield.

YouTube video: "Can a person become Jewish?" By JihadiJew 2:27 … Another question people ask is how is it possible that you have Jews who have no interest in Judaism as a religion who may not even believe in God, are nevertheless are fully Jewish, or considered fully Jewish, and then you have converts who have to commit themselves to this rigorous lifestyle of commandments. The best I can answer that is to kind of think of Jewishness as a kind of national identity. We’re called Am Yisrael – the Jewish People, related to the Arabic word Ummah, people. So as part of this membership you get citizenship. Well, one way you get citizenship is the way I got citizenship in the United States – I was born. I was born in the United States and I received my citizenship not because I knew anything about America, just because I was born here. I don’t need to know anything about America. I don’t need to know the constitution. I don’t need to know American History. I just have to be born here. On the other hand, if I wanted to become a naturalized citizen, I’d have to study the constitution, I’d have to study history and I’d have to commit myself to the ideals of the United States. The same way with converts. In order to become a citizen of the Jewish people, well then you have to commit yourself to the ideals of the Jewish people and you’d have to be willing to observe what the Jewish people are supposed to observe…

If we are one world then the only patriotism can be for the world.

Patience isn’t a gift. It is learned.

Ironically, however—and as with other historically Muslim institutions that have been whitewashed¶—this abduction, forced conversion, and jihadi indoctrination of Christian children is portrayed by several leading academics “as the equivalent of sending a child away for a prestigious education and training for a lucrative career.”30 What is true is that whoever survived the indoctrination and dehumanization of this ordeal of fire emerged with a fanatical appetite for war on infidels and became the most feared element of the Ottoman army: a Janissary, a “new soldier.” That they exhibited a “dog-like devotion to the sultan,” the man responsible for abducting them from their families and faith, and engaged in “wild behavior” against his enemies31—that is, against their former families and faith—is further proof that they are among recorded history’s earliest victims of Stockholm Syndrome.*

Life isn’t what it is. It’s what it can be.

When trees are treated as a commodity, cutting them down is good for business. When people are a commodity, enslaving them, exploiting them and underpaying them is good for business. When everything is a commodity, the landscape grows barren, and the earth turns to dust.

Wannabe jihadis don’t get disillusioned.

The only thing the English have left is their past.

If I have learned anything in my lifelong study of crime, it is this: the most dangerous criminals in the world are often the most ridiculous. Tamerlan was one such poser. When he arrived in Dagestan, the other men his age were wearing tracksuits. Tamerlan, meanwhile, was dressed how he thought a jihadi fighter was supposed to dress, based on propaganda he had read online, including a caftan and dark eyeliner, as was first reported by the Boston Globe.

The Jihadis who bombed Coimbatore and killed 58 innocents have just been released in a vile display of appeasement. Here, I ask the Chief Justice of India: The very terrorists who you denied bail are roaming free. Why are you silent? Where is your power? Where is your justice?

Hamas is not part of that world of Jihadi terror with no clear vision or goals. The Palestinian liberation movement from its very inception had a political Islamic group within it. In fact, all the anticolonialist movements in the Arab and Muslim world included a vein of political Islam.

In the Muslim world according to bin Laden, the Ottomans hardly count. Islamic fundamentalists look back almost exclusively to the Arab caliphate, particularly its early years. Those who see history as bin Laden did are generally called Salafi Muslims. Those who want to act like bin Laden to change the system through violence are called Salafi jihadis. Al-Qaeda is a Salafi jihadi movement. Salafism is Islam as Allah recited it, and jihadi means “through war,” so it is a militant movement seeking an “originalist” form of Islam and willing to use force to get there. Salafism is often associated with the Wahhabi movement, an equally austere branch of Sunni Islam that arose in the early part of the eighteenth century. Wahhabis dominate Saudi Arabia, the paymaster and invisible hand behind many political machinations in the Middle East. In

These female fighters believe that ISIS fighters are afraid of them because they will not be permitted to enter paradise if they are killed by a woman.

Jihadis! Please go to your imaginary heaven - out there, nowhere. Us, the infidel lot, have helluva lot to do after you leave. Out here.

Ironic that rarely is anybody a jihadi until he has thoroughly read and fully understood his holy book.

The San Bernardino massacre of the innocent by jihadis saw a very swift response by local law enforcement: they were there in about four minutes. But, by that time, 14 people were dead and 22 wounded.

Inside a jihadi brain, the neuropsychological elements of aggression and rage run rampant, due to socio-political conditions. These overwhelming mental elements of young souls, when attached to the sacred texts of the Quran, by the authoritarian groups of fundamentalists, become weapons of mass destruction in the pursuit of the exclusive supremacy of one religion over the others.

His primary weapon, which he used nightly, was a Heckler & Koch 416 assault rifle based on the famous M4 family. He had equipped it with a ten-inch barrel for maneuverability, an EOTech optical red dot sight with a 3x magnifier, and an AAC sound suppressor. For missions where stealth was a priority, he brought a suppressed HKMP7 submachine gun. It didn’t have the stopping power of the 416’s 5.56 round, but it could easily take out a room full of jihadis without waking their friends next door. For backup, he had the standard navy-issue SIG Sauer P226 and an HK45C. On each of his weapons, the expert armorers at DEVGRU had taken care to customize the triggers and grips to his precise specifications. Suspended to the rack by a pushpin was a photo of his wife, Sandra, and their five-year-old son, Ben. Another child was due at the end of spring, but they didn’t know if it would be a boy or a girl. Sandra was waiting for him to find out. He would be with them soon, one bite at a time.

[S]ome teachers are tempted to adapt to the increasing passive support for jihadi identity politics evident among pupils. This is especially true in parts of France. One French teacher recalled a student who had refused [to] keep the one minute's silence for Hebdo victims by saying, 'I'm not Charlie; I think the terrorists did the right thing'. The teacher's response was telling: 'Children have the right to say silly things, to even say offensive things'. That's true. This is a book defending that right. But arguing for free speech and political tolerance is not an excuse for this sort of cultural cringe in the face of abhorrent ideas. We need to confront pupils who say stupid things, yet too often these sorts of views are indulged: 'So you favor Caliphate and and think 9/11 is a Zionist plot? That's an interesting idea. Any other views?'.

Killing a bunch of Jihadis may be morally justified, to save humanity from their wrath, but it won't terminate Jihad for long. Jihad or Holy war would keep festering one way or another, until religious fundamentalism is eradicated from the human society. Until the whole humanity learns to scrutinize its most revered scriptures with the sharp tool of reasoning, Jihad will keep on striking over the world. If one does not have the basic conscientious capacity to refute the primitive textual verses of the scriptures that demand one to kill or torture another being for holding a different belief system than one's own, then that entity is no being of the civilized human society, it is merely a pest from the stone-age. No Quran, no Bible, no Gita, no Cow, is greater than the human self. There shall be hope for harmony and peace in the world, only when fundamentalism is destroyed forever. Harmony is not a luxury, it is an existential necessity of the species. And to achieve it, if a hundred Bibles have to be sacrificed, then be it. But for no Bible, Quran or Gita, can harmony be compromised.

Since then, the newspapers have relegated to their inside pages the day’s, or week’s, account of the slaughter in the south, almost invariably involving the barbaric beheading of lone rubber-tappers cycling to work at dawn, when the sap flows most freely—a thankless, poorly paid job that these often elderly victims nonetheless undertake to eke out a living for themselves and their families. Sometimes these easy, innocent targets are Thai Buddhists, sometimes they are Malay Muslims, and such is the heroism of the jihadis of southern Thailand rising up against their oppressor in the name of Allah.

Those who champion a so-called Independent America will tell you that drones create more enemies than they kill, and that America will attract more admirers by perfecting American democracy. Do you really believe that young men living among the tribes of the Afghan-Pakistan border are less likely to support extremist ideologies if we build better schools in Ohio and better hospitals in Arkansas? Do you accept that Somali jihadis are less likely to plan attacks on Western targets or that U.S. embassies around the world will be safer if U.S. policymakers redouble their commitment to American civil liberties? In the real world, a leader must often choose the least bad of many bad options. Drones achieve military objectives with much less risk for our military and at much lower cost to our economy. Use them. Never

The Saudis, and in some cases the CIA, had encouraged and funded their foreign jihads, and these men had seen combat, lived hard in the mountains, did what their religion asked them to do. Then they came home to Egypt and were rewarded with a death sentence. The result was the creation of a standing army of jihadis who couldn’t go home. They would go on to found al-Qaeda, which became something of a jihadi veterans association. History is always obvious in retrospect, but in this case the rise of al-Qaeda should have been fairly easy to predict.

Kathwari had headed Ethan Allen in 1985 before buying it out a few years later, and it turned him into a multi-millionaire. He became an influential person in the US, selling furniture to even the White House, and setting up the Kashmir Study Group (KSG), which comprised legislators and academics. According to the KSG website, current members include Teresita Schaffer and her husband Howard, both old South Asia hands; Robert Wirsig; Representative Gary Ackerman; and Dr Ainslie Embree. Kathwari had long taken the pro-independence line on Kashmir. Along the way he had also been sobered by the fact that two of his sons died as jihadis in Afghanistan.

US Vice President Joe Biden gave the US government’s real view of its regional and Syrian allies with undiplomatic frankness when speaking at the John F. Kennedy Jr. Forum at Harvard University’s Institute of Politics on October 2. He told his audience that Saudi Arabia, Turkey, and UAE were so determined to take down Assad and essentially have a proxy Sunni-Shia war. What did they do? They poured hundreds of millions of dollars and tens of thousands of tons of weapons into anyone who would fight against Assad, except that the people who were being supplied were al-Nusra and al-Qaeda and the extremist elements of jihadis coming from other parts of the world.

Indeed, Robert Jordan, the U.S. ambassador to Saudi Arabia, noted in 2003: “We have noticed lately in influential mosques the imam has condemned terrorism and preached in favor of tolerance, then closed the sermon with ‘O God, please destroy the Jews, the infidels, and all who support them.’ ”53 And while it was true that the Saudis managed to get Sheikh Ali bin al-Khudair, in late November 2003, to renounce his radical jihadi stance on prime-time Saudi television, 54 al-Khudair actually dealt largely with the doctrine of takfir—proclaiming Muslims to be infidels. His renunciation might help stop militant Muslim violence against other Muslims, but it simply did not address the problem of jihadi violence against Americans or others outside of Saudi Arabia. His statement seemed designed primarily to preclude attacks against the Saudi government and foreigners inside Saudi Arabia.

We are so beguiled with ideology, we miss the fact that jihadis and neo-Nazis have a lot in common,” said John Horgan, the author of “The Psychology of Terrorism” and director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell.

For instance, was it wise for Tony Abbott to announce to the House that the federal police had set up counter-terrorism units to intercept would-be jihadis at Sydney and Melbourne airports and that other airports would follow later? Or was it a premature disclosure that tipped off terrorists to escape detection by using Brisbane or Adelaide instead?

The importance of Saudi Arabia in the rise and return of al-Qaeda is often misunderstood and understated. Saudi Arabia is influential because its oil and vast wealth make it powerful in the Middle East and beyond. But it is not financial resources alone that make it such an important player. Another factor is its propagating of Wahhabism, the fundamentalist, eighteenth-century version of Islam that imposes sharia law, relegates women to the status of second-class citizens, and regards Shia and Sufi Muslims as non-Muslims to be persecuted along with Christians and Jews. This religious intolerance and political authoritarianism, which in its readiness to use violence has many similarities with European fascism in the 1930s, is getting worse rather than better. For example, in recent years, a Saudi who set up a liberal website on which clerics could be criticized was sentenced to a thousand lashes and seven years in prison. The ideology of al-Qaeda and ISIS draws a great deal from Wahhabism. Critics of this new trend in Islam from elsewhere in the Muslim world do not survive long; they are forced to flee or are murdered. Denouncing jihadi leaders in Kabul in 2003, an Afghan editor described them as “holy fascists” who were misusing Islam as “an instrument to take over power.” Unsurprisingly, he was accused of insulting Islam and had to leave the country.

Just imagine for a moment you are a Yazidi sex slave, spending an eternity of days being beaten and mounted by some filthy jihadi old man with cigarette-stained teeth and the blood of Christian children still splattered on his shirt. Then, U.S. Army Rangers storm the room, sending the rapist to the Hell he was long overdue for. They wrap you in a blanket and take care of you. Feed you. Mend your wounds, and do their best to salve your emotional and spiritual scars. They send you to America as a refugee. Blessed to live in a free and prosperous nation, you decide to take advantage of all America has to offer. You go to a good college on a scholarship and while there some woman authority figure with open-toed shoes and a closed mind tells you that you have it no better here than you did in that tent back in the desert. This talk isn’t just dumb. It’s not just dangerous. It is, quite simply, evil. [Responding to article by Amy Lauricella, staff attorney at Global Rights for Women, asserting that "While ISIS endorses rape, American college administrations similarly facilitate the rape of women on campuses"]

It was a rather disturbing thing to watch, like one of those Jihadi beheading videos or a Miley Cyrus concert.     “Please

Como fizeste, assim te será feito.

I had not lost my faith—I still have not—but I had lost my belief in the exact ways I had been brought up to follow my faith in. It did not make sense any more—this intense hatred and violence being practised in the name of a religion that stood for peace, this endless nitpicking bureaucratic intolerance being practised in the name of a God whose most common attributes, as I had been told from the time I was an infant, were mercy and forgiveness!

[Those two Kurdish women soldiers] made me feel guilty towards the goodness I had not seen because pettiness had blinded me to it. How had I failed to register the many people who did accept me as I was, veiled and alien in their world, just because there were some who stared, or muttered—or shouted, like that crazy woman on the bus? How had I failed to see the decency of vibrant parks with children, care for the weak and unemployed—for what can one call it but decency? How, I sometimes wondered with shock and pain, how had I failed to register this basic decency, simply because there were also idiots in the world who excluded me and mine?

Is this what I had come to: the inability to trust even my best friend? If human beings cannot have faith in other human beings, despite all their mutual failures, then can they ever have faith in the Almighty, I wondered.

You've said that even if God existed you could not know the mind of God, for that would be a sacrilege from any religious perspective. Divinity is divinity only to the extent that it exceeds the bounds of human understanding, you said. That was one of the statements that made me think of accosting you here. Well, perhaps, happiness is like that too: we cannot really understand the happiness of other people. Or their sorrow.

Marriage had always been something like the swirling rumours of a distant war; now, suddenly, the cannons were at my doorstep.

Perhaps it is those who are most vulnerable in their hearts who learn to grow the toughest skin.

[A Muslim woman opts] out of the glitter of the West because of [her] belief. It takes strength to do so. More strength than Muslim men realize: I wonder if imams would insist on the hijab as much as they do if they had to put it on themselves and cope with the consequences in ordinary life. It takes strength and character.

You read articles about how the Internet has created a lonelier world, with people isolating themselves behind their screens, connecting to a flat keyboard rather than to other people in a park or a party. Yes and no. Yes and no. It depends on who you are, and where. Some of us never had parks or parties to connect in. Some of us never will.

Halide gave [the goat] a name: 'Kaplan'. 'What does it mean?' I asked her. 'Oh, it means tiger in Turkish,' she said, laughing. 'Don't you think it is a ferocious little thing?' Halide would also, when she could, go out and whisper in Turkish to the goat. When I asked her about it, she said, in her sombre manner, 'But of course, animals understand what you say. They just do not speak. Every good farmer knows that.

You have to care for the animal you sacrifice; you have to love it. Why should you offer Allah a sacrifice that means nothing to you?

...evidently Europeans cannot stop themselves from giving new names to people and places. I guess it must be hard to stop after all those centuries of renaming stuff in the colonies.

I have seen the kids of divorce with their parents: a meeting starts well and ends badly; a meeting starts badly and ends well.

Do you have such periods too? Periods you wish you could go back to, because you let them pass, because you wasted them, not realizing how precious they were? Periods you threw away like—how does the line go—like pearls before swine? Periods that, if only you could turn the wheel of time back to them, you would knit and embroider forever into your being, never letting them go?

Yes, there were thousands of women like them. Yes, they were Muslims. No, they did not think Allah would punish them. No, she was not afraid of what Daesh might do. Yes, that is what she would call them—Daesh—whether they liked it or not. Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to woman? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?

Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to woman? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?

Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to women? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?

Yes, there were thousands of women like them. Yes, they were Muslims. No, they did not think Allah would punish them. No, she was not afraid of what Daesh might do. Yes, that is what she would call them—Daesh—whether they liked it or not. Wasn't she afraid of the violence men can do to women? Yes, she was—where is the woman who isn't—but what sort of man, who takes the name of God, would even speak of such things?

No, don't think she is weak because she is sobbing; she is a Kurdish girl; she is not weak; never underestimate a Kurdish woman, as you will find out soon, if you haven't yet, you men of Daesh.

...I wonder now if she noticed the irony of it all: how she had left a world in order to rebel, to fight for what she considered right, and now, now...