Pirate's Cove

Over at the NY Times, Jack Healy discusses the pipeline from Minnesota to militancy (hey, Jack, it’s called terrorism), but still does he utter Leftist best to soft-pedal the notion that this is really about modern Islam

It was a friendship that began in high school and ended in militant jihad.

As Minnesota teenagers growing up in the 1990s, Troy Kastigar and Douglas McAuthur McCain shared almost everything. They played pickup basketball on neighborhood courts, wrote freewheeling raps in each other’s bedrooms and posed together for snapshots, a skinny white young man with close-cropped hair locking his arm around his African-American friend with a shadow of a mustache.

They walked parallel paths to trouble, never graduating from high school and racking up arrests. They converted to Islam around the same time and exalted their new faith to family and friends, declaring that they had found truth and certainty. One after the other, both men abandoned their American lives for distant battlefields.

“This is the real Disneyland,” Mr. Kastigar said with a grin in a video shot after he joined Islamist militants in Somalia in late 2008. Mr. McCain wrote on Twitter this past June, after he left the United States to fight with the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, “I’m with the brothers now.”

How did the two get to this? The same way so many others did

Today, both are dead. While their lives ended five years and over 2,000 miles apart, their intertwined journeys toward militancy offer a sharp example of how the allure of Islamist extremism has evolved, enticing similar pools of troubled, pliable young Americans to conflicts in different parts of the world. The tools of online propaganda and shadowy networks of facilitators that once beckoned Mr. Kastigar and Somali men to the Horn of Africa are now drawing hundreds of Europeans and about a dozen known Americans to fight with ISIS, according to American law enforcement and counterterrorism officials.

This occurred with dozens of young Somalis from Minnesota, as they rushed off to join al-Shabab

Mr. McCain and Mr. Kastigar grew up in a different world from the towering apartment complexes and rows of Somali barbershops and restaurants that were a backdrop for Mr. Muhumed’s life. But they found a passion for Islam and, ultimately, a path to militancy.

The ultimate problem here is that authorities just do not really know how young 1st Word men (and a few women) end up as radical Islamists. And let’s be brutally honest: the Internet is extremely important, but it is those “shadowy networks of facilitators” of concern, because they aren’t necessarily shadowy. They are in mosques and madrassas (Islamic schools) and Islamic centers. The preach and teach the extremist version of Islam, sometimes quietly, sometimes not. They foment hate for the West and for Israel. They talk about a global caliphate. And along the way we end not just with a few hardcores who head out to perform jihad, but many more who are radicalized but aren’t fighting, but still hold that hatred and the extremist view of Islam. So this is ever growing, no matter how much some people want to stick their heads in the ground.

Ms. Boada said she still did not know exactly how her son had ended up in Somalia, hoisting an assault rifle and wearing a checkered head scarf. She said he had never been motivated by hate, but by a belief that somehow he could be a hero. Sometimes, she said, people will ask her about his death. But more often than not, she does not discuss it.

They see themselves as hero’s for Allah and Mohammed. Radical Islam will continue to grow until the so-called Moderate Muslims stand up and say “no more!” Where are they? Good question. There are some, we see them on TV now and then. Then we consider how many stood up and cheered and danced in the streets after terrorist attacks like 9/11 and 7/7. How many stand with Hamas when they attack Israel. The radicalization isn’t just about violence. Many learn to push the extremist view quietly, in an attempt to change societies and governments towards radical Islam. This is how we end up with people, like Mark Steyn, being prosecuted for insulting Islam. Radical Islamists running all over England. Islamists instituting Sharia law areas in Europe and Canada, and attempting to do this even in America.

(Breitbart) Residents of the German city of Wuppertal have expressed concern after a group of young radical Islamists started taking to the streets late at night, trying to deter revellers from drinking and gambling.

The self-styled “Sharia Police” have been patrolling an area around the city’s main train station, declaring the popular nightlife area to be a “Sharia Controlled Zone”. Deutshe Welle reports that witnesses have seen them handing out leaflets urging people not to drink alcohol, attend concerts, gamble, watch pornography or visit prostitutes.

The men are believed to be from the Salafi sect of Islam, which is closely related to the puritanical Wahhabi belief practised in Saudi Arabia. They walk around dressed in orange high-visibility vests with the words “Sharia Police” written on the back in English.

It seems benign, right? Just a bunch of concerned citizens patrolling the city streets, preaching. But, that’s how it begins, and soon it grows. It starts becoming mandatory. Governments start complying. They take advantage of our open societies, and tropes like multiculturalism and diversity. They get upset over church flyers, and Katy Perry’s Dark Horse video, and dogs, and non-Halal foods, and restaurant signs that show bacon. We get dhimmis like Nick Clegg, concerned that teaching British values will upset moderate Muslims. If they’re moderate, why worry? But, if you call them out, you’re called an Islamaphobe. They’ve taken a page out of the Democrat playbook to shut down any pushback.

(Breitbart) …What is certainly true is that American politicians, mostly Christian or atheist, know less about the nature of Islam and Islamic radicalism than members of ISIS. To suggest that a cursory examination of platitudes about the Koran provides enough knowledge to spout paternalistic expertise about the religion is insulting to Muslims of all stripes.

Here’s what we do know: the polls show that Islamic extremism is on the rise. That’s not because it’s a fringe element. It’s because the West has swallowed multiculturalism wholesale, to the point where it’s politically unpalatable to condemn Islamic extremism for the mass rape of children.

So, here is the evidence that the enemy we face is not a “tiny minority” of Muslims, let alone a rootless philosophy unconnected to Islam entirely. It’s not just the thousands of westerners now attempting to join ISIS. It’s millions of Muslims who support their general goals, even if they don’t support the group itself. (a description of polls follows, skipping to the American one)

United States. A 2013 poll from Pew showed that 13% of American Muslims said that violence against civilians is often, sometimes or rarely justified to defend Islam. A 2011 poll from Pew showed that 21 percent of Muslims are concerned about extremism among Muslim Americans. 19 percent of American Muslims as of 2011 said they were either favorable toward Al Qaeda or didn’t know.

If that many support the violence, how many more support the non-violent hardcore versions?

Crossed at Right Wing News.

Read: NY Times: Say, This Pipeline Of American Jihadi Recruits Is Not Good »