American Jewry's Comfort Level Present and Future Facing Jihad JCPA Manfred Gerstenfeld

LIMITLESS SUPPLY OF SUPPORT FOR THE JIHAD…….

Writing at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, Dr.Manfred Gerstenfled, chairman of the Board of Fellows at the JCPA, discusses the challenges facing American Jews now and in the near future. One of those challenges that caught the Tundra Tabloids’ eye, is an issue that Dr.Gerstenfeld mentions -that effects us all, Jew and non-Jew alike-concerning the continual threat of violent jihad. In the portion of the article titled “The Future of Jihadism”, Dr.Gerstenfeld writes*:
In a world whose main elements are becoming opaque for an increasing number of people, is Muslim jihadism going to disappear, or at least greatly weaken? That seems unlikely both in view of the fanatically ideological commitment of its promoters and because people are inclined to look in an amorphous world for something they perceive as more certain.
The Muslim world is permeated with a clear-cut recipe for an apocalyptic totalitarian future. This does not contradict the possibility that even more Muslims will reject extremism. Some surveys show declining public support for suicide bombings among many Muslim populations. A 2009 Pew study, however, also found that more than 20 percent of Muslims in Indonesia, Jordan, and Egypt (more than 100 million radical Muslims**) have confidence in Osama bin Laden doing “the right thing in world affairs.” Among Nigerian Muslims this percentage was over 50 percent. When President Barack Obama said in his Cairo speech of June 2009 that the extremists were a “small but potent minority,” he was clearly understating the problem.
The Pew study and other data indicate that there are many more current adherents of extremist Islam than the number of Nazis at the time Hitler invaded Poland in 1939. They are far from a majority in the Muslim world. The same, however, is true of the committed moderate and secular Muslims on the other side of the ideological spectrum. These are also less well organized. A large, presently uncommitted center will usually side with the likely winner”.
Gerstenfeld is of course right about the “uncommitted center”, it was exactly this majority demographic Nathan Sharansky was talking about in his seminal book, “The Case For Democracy“. The Doublthinker is the third group Sharansky draws the reader’s attention to after the “True Believers” and the “Dissidents” on pg.47, stating:
“If a fear society is repressive enough, it will appear to an outside observer to consist of only true believers when in reality it may have thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions, tens of millions, or even hundreds of millions of doublethinkers living in terror.”
Though Sharansky was talking about highly tyrannical, oppressive societies in general, and Dr.Gerstenfled is talking about Islam and Muslims inparticular, (many of whom live in many different kinds of societies, ranging from the tyrannical to a softer kind of tyranny) the situation is exactly the same, for Islam is a top down oppressive ideology and the Islamic center will fall to which ever side they deem will eventually have the upper hand.
But this of course means that in no uncertain terms, can or should, anyone paper over the unpleasant facts that surrounds the Mohammedan faith. It remains unchanged since the time of Mohamed, which means it still contains the seeds to violence to be used whenever a substantial number deem the moment right for jihad.
Then there is also the stealth jihad, that Robert Spencer has dedicated much of his time and effort to alerting the general public about, as well as confronting it face on. Even in the event that the violent jihad is effectively beaten, or at least beaten back substantially, there still remains the stealth jihad, which the Tundra Tabloids deem the more destructive of the two jihads, and will take even more time and effort to properly educate the public and to counter.
Now with the stealth version of the jihad, there is absolutely no indicator whatsoever whether the vast majority of Muslims “that reside in the center” would have any problem in seeing the west Islamized to the point that they (the Muslims) would “feel better at home”.

Therein lies the greater danger for Jews, Israel and the west, for while the vast majority of Muslims, in the TT’s opinion, may indeed reject violent jihad, the overwhelming majority however, would find it very difficult to challenge let alone to disagree with the stealth jihad, or in other words the Islamization of the west, in any significant way. So in regards to the violent jihad, the Muslim center needs to be fought for, but in the stealth jihad, they have to be considered an automatic fifth column. KGS

*Manfred Gerstenfeld and Steven Bayme American Jewry’s Comfort Level Present and Future, (Jersualem, JCPA & AJC, 2010) 57-58.

** The Pew research document itself is not explicit but if you take the number of Muslims in specific countries mentioned there and multiply them with the percentage of people who share Bin Laden’s world view and add them up, you come out at about 100 million. These are convinced Bin Laden adherents and as said they are more than Hitler had followers when Germany marched into Poland in 1939. People are simply not aware how big the jihadi Muslim problem is. If you had the figures for the other tens of Muslim countries, it would increase further. A hundred million is already a big enough figure to make an impression.

2 Responses

  1. The Jihad is fueled by money; petrodollars.

    At the risk of repeating myself yet again:

    The strategic path to victory in the war against Islamic terror is the elimination of petroleum as the prime mover of our transportation system.

  2. But if you read the rest of the article, you'll observe that the chief threat is teh stealth jihad, which in all honesty relies far less on cash the violent version. The stealth jihad can be carried out here in the west through money generated in the west.

    While I acknowledge the premise in your argument to have great merit, it however has little bearing on the Islamization of the west, which can be funded through little effort at home and from abroad.

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