The war within the west

Sunday, 20th January 2008

The Pentagon’s abrupt removal of its principal expert on Islam, Major Stephen Coughlin, is an extremely serious development that should be of great concern to all defenders of the west. Its significance in marking the steadily widening disintegration of American resolve in identifying and resisting the spread of Islamism within American society is hard to exaggerate. Coughlin was fired because the Defence Department took the side of Hesham Islam, a personal aide to Deputy Defence Secretary Gordon England. Islam called

Coughlin a ‘Christian zealot with a pen’.

And what had Coughlin said to provoke such a claim? According to Investor’s Business Daily, Coughlin’s crime was to warn the U.S. military that major US Muslim groups were fronting for the Muslim Brotherhood, the global jihadist movement based in Egypt.

Turns out Islam, who was born and raised in Egypt, is heavily involved with one of the groups — the Islamic Society of North America, which U.S. prosecutors last year named an unindicted co-conspirator in a major terror-funding case…In a 333-page report submitted to the National Defense Intelligence College, he [Coughlin] warned that Islamic law sanctions violence. In fact, he wrote that the Quran and other Islamic texts make clear that it is an obligatory requirement for Muslims to wage jihad when non-Muslim forces enter Muslim lands. ‘So how does one explain the prevailing assumption that Islam does not stand for such violence undertaken in its name with the fact that its law and education materials validate the very acts undertaken by “extremists” in Iraq?’he asked, logically.

The mandate to wage jihad is also taught, still, in Saudi school textbooks, Coughlin says, and explains why the home to Islam's holiest shrines is the No. 1 foreign supplier of suicide bombers in Iraq. ‘The first “radicalizing” lesson that Saudi youth receive that motivates them to travel to Iraq and fight coalition forces does not come from 'extremist' groups like al-Qaida,’ he observed, ‘but rather is taught as part of Saudi Arabia's standard secondary school curriculum.’ Bottom line: ‘The enemy is driven by Islamic law,’ he warned — not poverty, lack of education or other socioeconomic factors often used by official Washington and the punditry to blur the demonstrable link between Islamic devotion and terror. Unfortunately, Coughlin's critical findings were too politically hot for Pentagon brass trying to make nice with Muslim groups at the urging of Muslim aides involved with them. So instead of the aides, he got the boot, which is outrageous but not surprising for Washington.

As the Washington Times observed, if the roles had been reversed and Coughlin had called Islam an ‘Islamic zealot’ all hell would have broken loose in the American media. As it is, a scandal which strikes at the heart of America’s ability and willingness to defend itself has passed almost unremarked. Only a tiny handful of American papers has reported this development.

I guess this really is America’s inconvenient truth -- just as it is in Britain.

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Helen

January 21st, 2008 11:18am

Good grief.

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Melanie Phillips is a Daily Mail columnist. She also writes for the Jewish Chronicle and is a panellist on BBC Radio Four's Moral Maze. Her most recent book is 'The World Turned Upside Down: The Global Battle over God, Truth and Power', published by Encounter.

For a complete set of Melanie's articles click here