The threat of 'stealth jihad'

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By Frank J. Gaffney Jr.

A Denver airport shuttle driver from Afghanistan who plotted to blow up subway trains in New York City. A Jordanian who tried to destroy one of Dallas' tallest skyscrapers. An American who thought he was detonating a truck bomb aimed at a federal courthouse in Springfield, Ill.

Law enforcement authorities who successfully stymied these attacks have been at pains to emphasize that there are no connections between the three.

Of course there are.

Maybe it will prove to be the case that the three suspects at the heart of these interrupted plots - Najibullah Zazi, Hosam Maher Husein Smadi and Michael C. Finton (also known as Talib Islam) - had no connection in a tactical or operational sense.

Still, it is absurd, and extremely dangerous, to insist that they are not connected in at least one way: What apparently animated all three of these suspects (and perhaps a number of others believed to have been involved in the New York plot who are still at large) is the seditious, supremacist theo-political-legal program authoritative Islam calls Shariah.

Shariah requires its adherents to engage in jihad - the struggle to bring about the triumph of Islam worldwide through whatever means are available. Shariah explicitly calls for the use of violent techniques designed to instill terror in those who stand in the way of a global Muslim theocracy.

Lethal truck bombs, pellet-laced explosive vests and backpacks and bombs or hijackers aboard aircraft already have been used for this purpose. It is a matter of time before vastly more destructive weapons of mass destruction (chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear) become available to jihadists who believe that, pursuant to Shariah, they are fulfilling Allah's will when they kill "infidels" or otherwise force them to submit to Islam.

Even more insidious, though, is what Robert Spencer calls "stealth jihad." This practice involves using myriad nonviolent measures to insinuate Shariah into non-Muslim societies. Adherents demand such concessions as special treatment for them and their faith in public spaces, private corporations, schools, communities and government at every level.

The prime mover behind these demands is the Muslim Brotherhood, an organization that shares the violent jihadists' commitment to advance Shariah's end state of a global caliphate, but seek (for the moment, at least) to do so nonviolently.

The successful prosecution last year of one Brotherhood front, the Holy Land Foundation, established that the organization's mission is "to destroy Western civilization from within ... by its own miserable hand."