I appreciate Candace’s ongoing efforts to detail how our colleges and universities are veritable fountains of disinformation regarding the jihadist threat. When it comes to understanding our enemy, the American public literally has no idea, and our college students, sadly, may be amongst the least educated of all. I felt like I had read and studied quite a bit before I left for Iraq (as the days of my deployment approached, I started reading at a near-frantic pace to absorb as much knowledge as I could). Yet I was shocked . . . no, stunned . . . at the depravity of the enemy. What are some things America and its students need to know?
First and foremost, our enemy is brutal at a level you can’t comprehend unless you see it. To write, “They shot babies in the face to send messages to their parents,” or “They used their own young children as suicide bombers to blow up other members of their family,” or “They raped women for the purpose of ‘shaming’ them into becoming living bombs,” or “They would tape decapitations of entire villages,” is to just write words. It is an entirely different thing to see the intel photos, to walk past the blood-stained walls of a home, and to step over the tiny, blood-stained shoes of its former inhabitants.
Second, our enemy is more hypocritical than it is “religious.” While there are certainly true believers out there, I fear that the Western press has almost romanticized the religiosity of your typical jihadist terrorist, casting them in almost quasi-mystical terms. But how “religious” is a thug who — on the one hand — forbids women from shopping for cucumbers but — on the other hand — has a stack of Turkish porn in his safe house, maintains multiple lovers, and uses any drug he can get his hands on? Al-Qaeda thugs are often four parts Scarface for every one part Muhammed.
Because of these two realities, it is beyond strange to me that academic Muslims (and Middle East Studies departments) are not tripping over themselves to denounce the likes of AQI, Hamas, Hezbollah, etc. from the highest hilltop. Ironically, as “mainstream” Muslims try to get us to “understand” people who slaughter innocents while marinating in gangster-style decadence, it is they, and not the jihadists, who tie Islam closer to terror.