Mark Steyn - America Alone

Richard Reid, the shoe-bomber, was converted to radical Islamism while in prison by a chaplain who came to Britain under a fast-track immigration program for imams set up by Her Majesty’s Government. They felt they had a shortage of Muslim chaplains, and not knowing much about the mullah business or where to look for ’em, felt it easiest to put up a big sign at Heathrow saying, “Hey, imams, come on down.” It all seemed to be working well until they noticed that these guys appeared to be the spiritual mentors of a lot of the wackiest terrorists.

The jihad’s marketing strategists singled out the prison populations of North America, Australia, and Western Europe as a ripe target demographic. Granted, a lot of religions seek to convert the fallen, but, to be honest, a wimp church like the Congregational crowd doesn’t have much appeal to the average jailbird. The salient feature about Islamism is that, if you’re a violent thug, embracing this particular religion doesn’t mean having to do anything icky like help with the church bazaar or be nice to gay people. As an Islamist, you can pretty much carry on doing all the things you like doing and the only difference is you’ll be doing them for your new religion: you can lie, cheat, steal, rape, kill women and children, and as long as you’re doing it for Allah and his victory over the infidels, it’s cool. So we have not just a global terrorist movement and a global political project but a global gang culture insulated within the West’s fastest-growing demographic.

If you’re thinking of profiling dodgy-looking fellows with beards and robes when you’re next on the subway, how are you going to spot Assem Hammoud? Arrested for plotting to blow up the Holland Tunnel, Mr. Hammoud said he had been ordered by Osama bin Laden to “live the life of a playboy… live a life of fun and indulgence.” That way he would avoid detection. Cunning, eh? Just to show how seriously he took his assignment, there was a picture of Assem with a trio of burqa-less hotties on a “mission” in Canada, looking like a traveling man who’s decided to blow the last night of expenses on the three-girl special. What a master of disguise. “I was proud,” declared Mr. Hammoud, “to carry out my orders” — even though they required him to booze it up and bed beautiful infidels all week long. But it’s okay, because he was nailing chicks for Allah. So he gamely put on a brave show of partying like it’s 1999 even though, as a devout Muslim, he’d obviously much rather party like it’s 799.

As religious fanaticism goes, that doesn’t sound to me like a movement that’s going to have recruitment problems.

In globalized terms, Islam is a unitary ideology with multiple appeals. For the likes of Zac Moussaoui and Richard Reid, it’s the ultimate global gang; for many European females, it’s a refuge from the slatternly image of post-feminist Western womanhood; for Assem Hammoud, it’s a great way to meet slatternly Western women; for impressionable types from John Walker Lindh to the Prince of Wales, its eastern exoticism has more appeal than the dreary occidental faiths; for a particular strain of old-school bigotry, it’s the current home for up-to-the-minute thinking about the international Jewish conspiracy; for Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and the slaughterers of the Beslan schoolchildren and the death cultists of Hamas, it’s the ultimate in nihilist depravity. A while back I took my little girl to a science exhibition in Vermont and we spent a fun half-hour flipping balls into one of those big mechanical contraptions full of levels and runways and elevators. But no matter which corner of the table you tossed the ball in, eventually it dropped into a little bucket and was deposited in the hole in the center. That’s the way it is with the ideology du jour: you come at it from the Richard Reid or the John Walker Lindh or the Taliban end, but you all drop down the same big hole in the center.

We still have no strategy for dealing with the ideology. Indeed, for the first few years of the war on “terror,” our leaders declined to acknowledge there was an ideology. And, as the years roll on, groups with terrorist ties are still able to insert their recruiters into America’s military bases, prisons, and pretty much anywhere else they get a yen to go. How come?

What gives the jihad its global reach? It’s not difficult to figure out: Wahhabism is the most militant form of Islam, the one followed by all nineteen of the September 11 terrorists and by Osama bin Laden. The Saudis, whose state religion is Wahhabism, export their faith and affiliated local strains in lavishly endowed schools and mosques all over the world and, as a result, traditionally moderate Muslim populations from the Balkans to South Asia have been dramatically radicalized.

That kind of operation doesn’t come cheap. So who pays for it?

You do. After September 11, George W. Bush told the world, “You’re either with us or with the terrorists.” In fact, much of the world is with neither, and much of the rest is with both. And why should anyone take the president’s demand to choose sides seriously when America itself refuses to: the United States is both “with us” and “with the terrorists.” American taxpayers are in the onerous position of funding both sides in this way. In the five years after September 11, the price of oil rose from $12 per barrel to hit an all-time high of $70 — so, if you sell oil, your revenues are five times what they were. And there’s nothing like bigger oil windfalls, to drive powerful despots down ever crazier paths. “Looking at it another way,” wrote Frank Gaffney in his book War Footing, “Saudi Arabia — which currently exports about ten mbd [million barrels of oil a day] — receives an extra half billion dollars every day. “Where does that extra half-bil go? It goes to the mosques and madrassas that the Saudis fund in every corner of the planet. Oil isn’t the principal Saudi export, ideology is — petroleum merely bankrolls it. How could the federal government be so complacent as to subcontract the certification of chaplains in U.S. military bases to Wahhabist institutions?

Well, because they didn’t notice it until it was too late — like SARS in that Toronto hospital. If your idea of globalization is a McDonald’s in Belgrade or a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lahore, who’s running the imams in British and American jails doesn’t seem terribly important. The Saudis fund mosques that radicalize distant Muslim populations from Indonesia to Oregon, and schools that turn out terrorists on every continent on the face of the Earth. They set up Islamic lobby groups that put spies in our military bases and terror recruiters in our prisons. They endow think tanks that buy up and neuter the massed ranks of retired diplomats, and assistant secretaries of state, and national security advisers: as the journalist Matt Welch remarked, if you close your eyes, America’s ex-ambassadors to Saudi Arabia sound like they’re Saudi.

Oh, and the wife of the Saudi ambassador to America “accidentally” funded the September 11 killers: Princess Haifa makes monthly payments of several thousand dollars by cashier’s check from the Riggs Bank in Washington to Majeda Ibrahim, an allegedly financially strapped woman in Virginia she supposedly doesn’t know, and Majeda Ibrahim signs at least some of those checks over to a friend of hers who’s married to a guy in San Diego who’s paying the rent for Khalid Almidhar and Nawaf Alhamzi, who subsequently fly Flight 77 into the Pentagon. Pure coincidence, say the smooth-talking Saudi princelings put up on the talk-show circuit when the story breaks. Could happen to any kind-hearted princess. And Barbara Bush, wife of the first President Bush, and Alma Powell, wife of Colin, call the princess to commiserate at all this unnecessary publicity. For a bunch of ramshackle Bedouin, the Saudis got the hang of global networking quicker than the Canadians and Scandinavians.