The Christmas Tree Bomber and Oregons Culpability (Robert Spencer Article)

FrontPage Magazine h/t:

….II. The local mosque: Mohamed who?

Yet despite Mohamud’s avowedly Islamic motivations, the Imam Yosof Wanly of the Salman Al-Farisi Islamic Center in Corvallis, Oregon, followed a predictable and oft-repeated pattern when he downplayed Mohamud’s connection to the local Muslim community. Every jihadist who has ever lived for any time in the United States has been simultaneously a devout and informed Muslim by his own account, and by the account of the local mosque leaders, someone they seldom saw and who was at odds with the larger community when he did show up. It raises a large question that no journalist ever has the wit or courage to ask: if these jihad terrorists really had little or nothing to do with their local mosques, and if their understanding of Islam differs so sharply from that of the area Muslims, where did they learn the version of Islam that impelled them to attempt mass-murder of infidels?

In the course of various media interviews, however, Wanly did end up revealing that he had more of a relationship with Mohamud than he would be likely to have with a peripheral member of his congregation whom he seldom saw. He said that he and Mohamud had “average teacher-student” discussions, and characterized Mohamud, a dropout from Oregon State University, as, according to the Associated Press, “a normal student who went to athletic events, drank the occasional beer and was into rap music and culture.” Even though this statement seems calculated to give the picture of anything but a devout, observant, serious Muslim, it also shows that Wanly knew Mohamud better than one might expect a busy imam in a major city to know a sometime college student who attended his mosque only occasionally.

[….]

Former Classmates Input
Another of Mohamud’s former classmates remembered a fight the two had over a messy locker. “The main thing was, the way he said he hated Americans,” said Andy Stull. “It was serious. He looked me in the eye and had this look in his eye, like it was his determination in life – ‘I hate Americans!'” (Jihad Watch)

V. The portrayal of Muslims as victims

Generally after a jihad attack in the United States, whether successful or not, mainstream media outlets run multiple stories about how Muslim communities fear a “backlash” against innocent Muslims from enraged “Islamophobic” rednecks. Of course, such “backlashes” never materialize, but the purpose of such stories is to shift the public’s attention away from the reality of Islamic jihad and onto the fiction of Muslims as victims, living in fear of vigilante attack in the United States. In reality, hate crimes against Muslims accounted for only eight percent of crimes thus classified in the U.S. in 2009, according to a recently released FBI report (see below). Blacks and Jews were far more likely to be victimized – and far less likely to be the subject of fawning media reports featuring hand-wringing over a “backlash” against them.

FBI REPORT — Numbers:

WASHINGTON (AFP) – Blacks and Jews were the most likely victims of hate crimes driven by racial or religious intolerance in the United States last year, the FBI said Monday in an annual report.

Out of 6,604 hate crimes committed in the United States in 2009, some 4,000 were racially motivated and nearly 1,600 were driven by hatred for a particular religion, the FBI said.

Blacks made up around three-quarters of victims of the racially motivated hate crimes and Jews made up the same percentage of victims of anti-religious hate crimes, the report said.

Manufactured Victimhood
The Hamas-linked Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has claimed that “anti-Muslim hate crimes” have risen sharply in the U.S. since 9/11. In fact, the rate of such crimes has actually dropped, and as this new study shows, it is quite low compared to hate crimes against other groups. CAIR exaggerates the number and seriousness of hate crimes against Muslims because it knows that victimhood is big business: insofar as it can claim protected victim status for Muslims in the U.S., it can deflect unwanted scrutiny and any critical examination of how jihadists use Islamic texts and teachings to justify violence and supremacism. (Jihad Watch)

Anti-Muslim crimes were a distant second to crimes against Jews, making up just eight percent of the hate crimes driven by religious intolerance….

…(read more)…

More from Spencer:

IV. The search for alternate explanations

If he wasn’t really an Islamic jihadist, despite the testimony of his own words, then why did Mohamud try to blow up the Christmas tree lighting ceremony? Wanly said that he had a difficult childhood after moving with his parents to the U.S. from Somalia when he was five years old. According to the New York Daily News, “neighbors say Mohamud was doted on by his family but embraced militant Islam not long after his parents split up. ‘He was a quiet kid, but with his folks splitting up, who knows?’ Adam Napier, who lived next door to Mohamed Osman Mohamud for years told the newspaper.”

Yes, who knows? The divorce of parents has driven many an unhappy child to try to set off a bomb in a crowded place and murder hundreds, if not thousands, of people, hasn’t it?

Of course, many more terrorist attacks have been committed by Islamic jihadists who read and took seriously the Qur’an’s commands to wage war against infidels than by children traumatized by their parents’ divorce, but never mind: when it comes to exonerating Islamic texts and teachings of any responsibility for motivating violent jihadists, government, law enforcement and media officials join Islamic spokesmen in grabbing hold of any alternative explanation, no matter how implausible.

In the following video you will see how this last section (#IV) is mentioned next to how Oregon rejected FBI and multi-city help to its law enforcement. Thank Fox & Friends for this nugget: