The events of September 11th, 2001 are an excellent example: The twin towers, gleaming models of America’s global financial dominance and cornerstones of New York’s character, were chosen so as to maximize the sense of grief and loss felt by Americans following the attacks. The targeting of the Pentagon was similarly strategic in nature: choosing key locations which, when compromised, will cause the most disorder in the American system. Theatricality was also achieved through the use of hijacked planes, rather than say—discreetly placed bombs, or myriads of other destructive machinations. The combination of these elements, coupled with the priceless help of the media in metastasizing the actual terror of the events by a hundredfold helped sear a permanent image in the public’s memory of the terror caused by ‘Islamic extremists’ on that fateful day. If their goal was to terrorize the American psyche in an amount disproportionate to the calamity of the events for years to come and to thus convey the message of the vulnerability of the West loud and clear for the whole world to hear, then certainly the 19 ‘self-chosen martyrs’ were successful in their acts of Jihad.
Jihad is not only an external threat posed by Islamists in other countries however, nor is it solely military in its attempts at conquest of the United States and the Western ‘amoral’ culture which it represents. No, Jihad is also an inside job performed by many of America’s Muslim associations: the Muslim Brotherhood Association, the Islamic Circle of North America, the Council on American-Islamic relations, as well as the Council for Islamic thought—are all organizations which have established bases in the U.S.A but have been shown to espouse Islamist ideologies. Mohamed Akram, the top leader of the Muslim Brotherhood Association in 1991, has been found to have written “[The Ikhwan] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house…so that it [Islam] is eliminated and made victorious over all other religions”. (McCarthy, 58) Former US intelligence analysts properly characterize the threat posed by Islamist groups in the U.S. as “seeking nothing less than the usurpation and replacement of America’s foundations—Judeo-Christianity and Western Liberalism—by Islam” (McCarthy, 60)
This form of Jihad by sabotage (also called Dawa) is perhaps the most serious threat to our American way of life primarily because as of current, it is not recognized by the government as a legitimate means of terrorism, since at face value it endorses peace. The ‘peace’ it endorses however is merely an illusion to keep the American public unaware of the sabotage occurring right under their noses, as their goals are essentially the same as that of the terrorist Islamist—the two groups differing only in the means to their common end. Sheikh Qaradawi, somewhat of a scholar on the topic of Islamicizing Western societies, writes of the American public “We’re tunnel focused on terrorism, concerned only about forcible damage to life, limb, and property. As long as we’re told there will be no harm, we go back to sleep—amenable to all manner of accommodation even to sowing the seeds of our own destruction”. (McCarthy, 95) This would seem to suggest that Islamist terrorism is not geared towards its goal of a new Islamic world order directly, but rather is indirectly aimed at unsettling the American psyche (Western, in general) just enough so that declarations of the same virulent ideology behind the terrorism which do not involve violence, are seen as moderate and are let slide unnoticed. Due to the fact that the American government, and its populace in general, is more concerned with the violence associated with these acts of Jihad than with the ideology which motivates them, Islamists are able to operate and spread their totalitarian regime slowly, quietly, but steadily with relative anonymity and virtually no resistance.
