After the Orlando massacre, when an armed Muslim killed 49 people in a homosexual nightclub, al-Qaeda published a guide urging more such “lone wolf” attacks, but with one caveat: to exclusively target white Americans.
According to the jihadi group’s online publication, “Inspire guide: Orlando operation,” killing homosexuals is “the most binding duty.” Nonetheless, would be jihadis are advised to “avoid targeting places and crowds where minorities are generally found in America,” and rather to target “areas where the Anglo-Saxon community is generally concentrated.”
Several talking heads and pundits responded by warning that al-Qaeda is shifting gear, somehow trying to portray itself as a “social justice warrior.” In fact, al-Qaeda has long presented itself to the West in this manner, and these latest guidelines are hardly new. Rather, they help explain the real differences between al-Qaeda and ISIS, and the stage of jihad they see themselves in.
Although The Al Qaeda Reader documents al-Qaeda’s dual approach—preach unrelenting jihad to Muslims, whine about grievances to Westerners—a nearly decade-old communique from al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri is sufficient. In it, he spoke to the many “under-privileged” of the world:
That’s why I want blacks in America, people of color, American Indians, Hispanics, and all the weak and oppressed in North and South America, in Africa and Asia, and all over the world, to know that when we wage jihad in Allah’s path, we aren’t waging jihad to lift oppression from Muslims only; we are waging jihad to lift oppression from all mankind, because Allah has ordered us never to accept oppression, whatever it may be…This is why I want every oppressed one on the face of the earth to know that our victory over America and the Crusading West — with Allah’s permission — is a victory for them, because they shall be freed from the most powerful tyrannical force in the history of mankind.
American blacks, however, were Zawahiri’s primary targets. Zawahiri praised and quoted from the convert to Islam, Malcolm X: “Anytime you beg another man to set you free, you will never be free. Freedom is something you have to do for yourself. The price of freedom is death.”
The al-Qaeda leader appealed to another potentially sympathetic segment: environmentalists: “[The U.S.] went out and ruined for the entire world, the atmosphere and climate with the gases emitted by its factories,” said the terror leader. Years, earlier Osama bin Laden himself complained about the U.S.’ failure to sign the Kyoto protocols: “You [the U.S.] have destroyed nature with your industrial waste and gases more than any other nation in history.”
What does this ostensibly disparate group of people—“third worlders,” environmentalists, and disaffected American blacks—have in common? They all harbor anti-Western sentiments that can be exploited by the jihadis. Hence why al-Qaeda is again reaffirming that, while killing homosexuals is “the most binding duty,” it’s still best to continue targeting non-minorities in America, i.e., traditional whites, they who are so easy to demonize.
He used the same strategy in Egypt in 2014. During a particularly bad bout of Christian persecution—dozens of churches were burned—Zawahiri counseled Egypt’s Muslims to stop attacking the Coptic Christians. The al-Qaeda leader who on numerous occasions had exhibited his antipathy for Christians made clear his call was for “PR” purposes, for the jihad’s image in the West.
While agreeing to the most draconian of Sharia’s tenets, al-Qaeda also knows that many of these—for example, the destruction of churches and subjugation of “infidel” Christians—need to be curtailed or hidden from the Western world. Otherwise al-Qaeda’s efforts of portraying jihadis as “freedom fighters” resisting an oppressive West risk being undermined.
On the other hand, ISIS (or al-Qaeda 2.0) represents the unapologetic and indifferent to Western opinion jihad. By widely broadcasting its savage triumphalism in the name of Islam, ISIS forfeits the “social warrior” card and instead plays the “strength” card, thus inspiring hundreds of millions of Muslims, according to polls.
Put differently, al-Qaeda was born at a time when deceiving the West about the aims of the jihad was deemed necessary; ISIS has been born at a time when deceiving an already passive West is no longer deemed important. Time will tell which strategy is better.
So persecution of Christians in Muslims countries is bad(which is),but persecution of blacks in USA is OK?And you think environmentalist have a secret agenda.So do Muslims.Right in USA is as anti-gay as Muslims.
Why be so intentionally obtuse? There was nothing in the article that implied agreement or support of anything. You’re lumping and lumping is as ignorant as al Qaeda and ISIS excepting the violence, mayhem and death of course. Note how I avoided the lump at the end there.
no one is persecuting blacks in the USA. I live next door to some, they play in the park across the street from me, I work with them, my kids go to school with them.
When they are persecuted – it is from their own. The ones that have it bad off are when they live in majority black neighborhoods and their own murder each other more than anyone else. their mothers abort them, and many have parents (if they have more than one and even at that if the one is not brain dead due to drugs) do little to care if they get educated. It is their own that are their own worse enemy AND the group that is in this BLM movement are moslems – mostly black moslems who are from the Nation of Shitslam.
Thank you for the reminder and the analysis.
Thank you Raymond. As ever, a gimlet-eyed analysis of the Islamic issue, which flies way over the heads of the morally pusillanimous Left.
However, I do believe we still have to contend with a multi-pronged attack of naked aggression and deceitful passivity, the former acting largely to deflect attention from the latter. Every atrocity by the former gives excuse to the latter’s perverted, cynical demands for “religious tolerance”, and the foolish Left, in its desperate attempt to evade the challenge of a moral judgement, demands that we all blindly accept the lies, as they do.
Which strategy is better? I am quite sure you are as well aware as I that the two dovetail very neatly, and dangerously. There is also a third component in cahoots with them – quietly and demographically working under cover of the others’ bluster to outbreed and outvote the locals. The new London Mayor was, I am quite sure, elected by all the London Muslims, voting on the orders of their Imams for the sole benefit of Islam, and not by a general majority of Londoners voting individually for the benefit of London. So dies democracy, effectively by its own hand.
The only solution I can see is a total ban on the practice and preaching of Islam by any Western culture that would like to remain a Western culture. Islam and the West can no more mix than oil and water can. If Western authorities continue kow-towing to the Left in refusing to face up to that patently obvious fact, then Western Civilisation – that our ancesters built to the huge benefit of mankind, and we should be handing on to our descendants intact – will vanish beneath a repressive, brain-dead tidal wave of ignorant savagery and cultural destruction.
Whatever the Lefties may claim, I cannot see our children thanking us for that.