JVLV: IT'S THE KORAN, STUPID! WE MUST WORK WITH RUSSIA. By Jiri and Leni Friedman Valenta, 12-5-15

The San Bernardino Killers

Days before the anniversary of Pearl Harbor came the December 2nd  massacre of Christmas party celebrants at a San Bernardino, California health center. No, it wasn’t “workplace violence” or some hybrid thereof, no matter how President Barack Obama tries to slice it! Nor was a minor scuffle between one of the shooters and a health center official before the massacre of decisive significance. The gun was already cocked. The culprits, a married Muslim couple, Syed Farook and Tashfeen Malik, were Jihadists. One of them, the wife, had pledged allegiance to ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on her Facebook.  The two terrorists have since been hailed as "supporters" by ISIS radio.

Neither was “workplace violence”, as the President insisted, responsible for Major Nidal Malik Hasan’s Fort Hood Texas massacre in June, 2009.  Hasan, who killed 13 people and wounded 30 others, was not only in contact with an al Qaida leader in Yemen, but also he shouted “Allah Akbar.” In July  Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez attacked  a U.S. Navy reserve and a military recruiting center, killing four defenseless marines and one sailor in Tennessee. In early May, Jihadist roommates Elton Simpson and Nadir Soofi were killed by Garland, Texas police as they tried to massacre participants in a cartoon contest featuring the prophet, Mohammad. Like Tashfeen, one had posted his allegiance to Baghdadi on social media.

It is by now clear that the president and his National Security Council disdain to acknowledge the Jihadist ties of people who clearly possess them. It is also disheartening that the FBI, because of White House pressure, was for two days unwilling to classify this latest episode as Islamic terrorism. The fact is that terrorism specialists can easily divine the tell-tale signs of Jihadism that separate Jihadist killers from the mentally deranged.

They know that the mentally ill who execute “workplace violence” do not, like killers Farook and Tashfeen, work in an apartment that is a virtual bomb-making factory, with several thousand rounds of ammo and signature al Qaida remote control devices. Nor do they precede an attack by ripping hard drives out of their computers and smashing cell phones to cover their digital tracks.

 Our President’s Peculiar Behavior

One must surely ponder the president’s peculiar behavior with regard to Islamic terrorism. Recall he was M.I.A. in Paris during the January 2015 Solidarity Rally of world leaders after the Charlie Hebdo massacres. There, Francois Hollande and Israeli Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu led a procession of many leaders protesting the killings. Obama’s absence was a signal to the Jihadists they need not fear a hesitant and incoherent White House.

Following the latest Paris massacre, he still did not name the problem as “Islamic terrorism. What finally got him to Paris was a conference on climate change, which of course, endorses his claim that this --not Islamic terrorism-- is the greatest threat to our national security,

We are now facing a major turning point in world history where once again we must oppose an implacable and evil enemy. Yet sadly our leader does not want to lead. The man who is leading is French President Hollande, a different kind of democratic socialist than Bernie Sanders. Unlike naïve Bernie, but much like his west European forbears who fought both fascism and communism, democratic socialist Hollande seeks to build a coalition against our mutual foes.

What Must Be Done To Defeat ISIS

Meanwhile, since we are not getting unwavering leadership from the White House, here are some starting points about what has to be done.

First, the time has come to look squarely at the truth about Islam. There are no “lone wolves.”   There is only the connective tissue of an ideology based on certain passages in the Koran that posit the necessity of building a worldwide caliphate based on Sharia law. Some parts of the sacred book also uniquely confer on Muslims alone the right to inhabit this planet As American expert Jake Neuman explained

”The underlying cause of the Jihad carnage in California and others is not Self-Radicalization or anything like this as our elites keep repeating. It is radicalization of Muslims by the teachings of the Quran, Sunna and Islamic Sharia Law – all of which demand the destruction of the non-Muslim way of life and its replacement with the Islamic order. Muslims carrying out terrorist attacks are simply trying to be good Muslims by following what the Quran and Muhammad's tradition teaches them to do."

Fortunately, most Muslims in our country have evolved and preserved the enlightened passages of the Koran that also reside in other great religions. Just as Jews and Christians gave up Biblical but barbaric habits such as stoning to death adulterous women, American Muslims have been largely unwilling to implement the more barbaric prescriptions of their Koran.

However, as long as ISIS continues to metastasize and have battlefield successes, there will be some Muslims, even American ones like Farook, who can be under the influence of committed Jihadists from Muslim countries like his wife, Tashfeen. Sadly our immigration laws are lax enough to have permitted the immigration of the attractive female bewitched by the cruelty inherent in the Koran.

Seductive Koran

Let us not underestimate the stranglehold of religious ideology in the Koran. It is so powerful that Farook and Tashfeen, parents of a six month old baby girl, preferred martyrdom to parenthood. In a religion that strictly forbids any physical contact between the sexes until marriage, it also holds out to hot blooded Muslim youth the myth of perpetual fornication with virgins as a reward for their martyrdom.

Donald Trump is right. Clearly, our mosques must be put under surveillance. We would advocate the same measure if churches and synagogues were preaching the stoning or murdering of fellow Americans. Freedom of religion does not mean freedom to deny others the right to live. Three days ago, France closed three suspicious mosques and we must be prepared to do the same.

Our American Muslims can assist our ideological front and we surely must support the emergence of groups that try to interpret the Moslem religion without its medieval cruelty.

Strict Immigration Laws!

“Something there is that does not love a wall,” wrote the great American poet, Robert Frost. Apropos to our immigration problems, his poem “Mending Wall” incorporates both the human desire to break down barriers between people, but also the necessity for maintaining proper boundaries. Thus as the poet helps to mend their dividing wall, his neighbor concludes, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

Despite our great American tradition of opening our arms to immigrants, we must clearly build a wall at our southern borders and stop the flow of  illegal immigrants.  Please do not refer to undocumented immigrants. The so-called undocumented immigrants are illegal immigrants. From a security point of view, moreover, the most propitious approach with respect to Syrian immigration, would be to first admit Syrian Christians.

This is not religious or racial discrimination, but simply homeland security combined with reports that the number of Syrian Christians thus far admitted under our present administration is largely under-represented.

We must also close loopholes in the vetting process.  Senator Dianne Feinstein (D) California, and Donald Trump have both called attention to the “fiancée visa” on which Pakistan-born, Qatar citizen Tashfeen was able to come to the U.S.   Still more pressing are the waivers which allow citizens of 28 EU countries to travel to the U.S. without obtaining a visa. Remember there are hundreds of thousands of Muslims that are now citizens of Great Britain, France, Belgium and Germany. Feinstein and Senator Jeff Flake ® Arizona, are introducing appropriate, bi-partisan, congressional legislation to introduce visas and it should be speedily adopted,

Besides building the wall at our southern borders, we should be moving our military intelligence assets there – and perhaps to our borders with Canada as well. Moreover, we should be supporting with economic aid and creative diplomacy, other nations that are building their own walls  such as Hungary and Macedonia.  There is a need to slow down the massive Muslim immigration that threatens the survival of the European Union.

Closing Foreign Doors to Illegal Immigration

Moving beyond our homeland, we must radically change our foreign policy. There cannot be any containment in this struggle, but only victory. Our Islamist foes find nothing more intoxicating than success. We must finally recognize we are in a dangerous global war, with our present enemy, Islamo-fascists, metastasizing on a global scale as were the Nazi fascists in 1938.

We must support the efforts of our European allies to close the doors to massive, immigration. One such door is on the Turkish-Syrian borders. Turkey is presently closing its eyes but not its door to Muslims from Europe, Russia and America who seek to join ISIS in Syria. It is also permitting the flood of Muslims emigrating from the Middle East a passage to Europe. One of the perpetrators of the latest Paris attack came through that door, and it must be shut. Another door is in Libya, where a flood of new immigrants to Europe is riding the waters of the Mediterranean to Sicily in Italy.

Still other doors reside in both the Caribbean Basin and Central America. Eventually, many of these immigrants end up trying to breach our southern borders as some of the Syrians recently did. Anti-U.S. Venezuela has hundreds of immigrants from Lebanon, some of them Shiite sleepers.

Above all, we must go to the source, the Middle East, and build our coalition there with care. This will not be an easy task. The complexity here involves playing with chess pieces that can sometimes unexpectedly change sides. Two admirable scholars of terrorism, Kolia Zhivago and Alexander Athos, have repeatedly warned of the dangers of the Salafi brand of Wahhabi Islam that is centered in one of our allies --Saudi Arabia.  Germany’s BND intelligence service concurs with them.

Unfortunately, it is this brand of Islam that provides the ideological basis for both ISIS and al Qaida, and it has only gotten worse since the present king, Alman bin Abdul-Taziz, took the throne, and his son became Defense Minister in January 2015.

Our joint, anti-ISIS coalition in Syria, however, should include not only our special forces and staunch Kurdish allies, but those from other Muslim Sunni allies that are directly threatened by ISIS – Jordan, Egypt and Turkey. Consider too that Turkey is nominally a NATO ally, but has proved to be an unreliable one. Here we should support Putin that Turkey not only close the already mentioned door, but should cease buying oil from ISIS.

Limited Partnership with Russia

Clearly, we must forge a limited partnership with Russia, something we have been advocating for years in The National Interest. This can only be accomplished, however, if we simultaneously resolve with Russia, the conflicts in Syria and the eastern Ukraine. In Syria, President Bashir Assad must be eventually replaced by another Alowite figure, and a new regime forged through a national Syrian election. Some of the governing Alowite structure supportive of Syrian Christians should be preserved. 

We must not repeat the mistakes of our wars in Iraq and Libya where the “W”- Condi war in Iraq, and then the Barack-Hillary war in Libya, destroyed all governing structures inviting chaos and the rise of Islamist foes.

The Ukraine conflict cannot just be frozen and wait until the war in Syria is over. We should accept autonomy for the eastern Ukraine, but never accept partition of the country. Russian “volunteers” must be disbanded and Ukraine’s territorial integrity restored.  Neither should we ever recognize the occupation of the Crimea as a fait accompli. Rather we should treat its annexation by Russia the way we treated the illegal annexation of the Baltic Republics by Stalin in 1940, not accepting it but not contesting it.

For cooperation with Russia we have the precedence of Winston Churchill forging an alliance against the Nazi fascists with Stalin in 1941.  Then the game-changer was the June 22, attack on Russia by the Nazi fascists. This time it may have already been the downing of a Russia plane over Sinai by Islamo fascists and their beheading of a Russian citizen. We shall see.

‘As we write, British Prime Minister David Cameron has just finished a plea to the House of Commons to launch an RAF air war against Syria in alliance with France, Russia and the United States.  As Cameron put it, “The danger of inaction is greater than the danger of action.” Cameron again provides an example for us that our own President has not.  Seventy-four years ago, another P.M. made a similar wise decision to the same House of Commons to work with Stalin. If Hitler invaded hell,” said Winston Churchill, “I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons!"

Dr. Jiri Valenta is the President of the Institute of Post-Communist Studies and Terrorism (jvlv.net), a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, and author of numerous studies on Russian interventionism and terrorism. Among his books are Soviet Intervention in Czechoslovakia, 1968, Anatomy of a Decision and Soviet Decision-making for National Security.   While presiding over his former Institute of Soviet and East European Studies (ISEES) at the Univesity of Miami, he organized a dialogue between Norman Podhoretz and William Maynes, "Terrorism—Reagan's Response,"  University of Miami, Working Paper, 1986.  Valenta has served as a Brookings and Wilson Fellow, but also as a Trustee of the Heritage Foundation and collaborator with the American Enterprise Institute.

He has also co-authored with Leni Friedman Valenta, the CEO and co-writer of their institute, scholarly articles in The National Interest, Aspen Review and other scholarly journals. Dr. Valenta has also written articles for both the New York Times but also for the Washington Times. Both have contributed to the Miami Herald, Kyiv Post, Tico Times and Georgian Messenger.

Their JVLV site is the only one worldwide that deals with two issues challenging America’s vital national interests: for U.S. policy-makers; Russian interventionism (Ukraine and Baltics) and Islamic terrorism. Their Twitter motto is “America, Freedom, Unafraid and Bi-partisan.” Leni, a graduate of Brandeis and Yale, is a playwright and painter and co-writer/editor of their website, jvlv.net.