“The 9-11 commission has been completely undermined. You cannot defeat an enemy you are not allowed to define. By definition, this administration has no strategy to defeat this enemy since they refuse to define it.”
Stephen Coughlin
Jihad: The Political Third Rail – What They Are Not Telling You is a conference featuring some of the premier American and international voices of resistance to the global jihad and Islamic supremacism. This inaugural event of the Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI), a new activist organization founded by myself and Robert Spencer, will be held at the Mariott Wardman Park Hotel, the site of CPAC, on February 19 from 10AM to Noon, in the Virginia Ballroom.
Speaker Spotlight: Steve Coughlin [Who refused to moderate his position on Islam & got fired]
Late in 2007, Major Stephen Coughlin, USAR, the Pentagon’s lone expert on Islamic law (Sharia) on the Joint Staff, was asked by Hesham Islam, special assistant for international affairs for the Deputy Secretary of Defense, Gordon R. England, to moderate his statements about Islam’s doctrines mandating warfare against and the subjugation of unbelievers. In response, Coughlin, cited Islamic sources to show that he was portraying Islamic teaching accurately. According to journalist Bill Gertz in the Washington Times, Islam and other Muslims in the Pentagon then began campaigning to have Coughlin fired, calling him a “Christian zealot with a pen.” Ultimately, Coughlin’s contract was not renewed.
This was despite the high quality of Coughlin’s work. Said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney: “Steve Coughlin is the most knowledgeable person in the U.S. government on Islamic law.” LTC Joseph C. Myers, Army Advisor to the Air Command and Staff College, told the truth: “The termination of Stephen Coughlin on the Joint Staff is an act of intellectual cowardice.”
Coughlin insisted that we must speak clearly about the nature of the threat we face. In his thesis [PDF file], “‘To Our Great Detriment’: Ignoring What Extremists Say About Jihad,” submitted to the National Defense Intelligence College in July 2007, he argued that the politically correct refusal to name the enemy was placing the United States at a strategic disadvantage.
Even worse, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, Hesham Islam was “an Islamist with a pro-Muslim Brotherhood bent who has brought in groups to the Pentagon who have been unindicted co-conspirators.” Gertz reported that Islam had brought Muslim Brotherhood operatives into Pentagon community outreach programs: “Coughlin came under fire from pro-Muslim officials after a memorandum he wrote identified several groups that are being courted by Mr. Islam’s community outreach program as front organizations for the pro-extremist Muslim Brotherhood.”
Islam also prevailed upon England to host members of the Islamic Society of North America, a Brotherhood organization, at the Pentagon in April 2008, “raising concerns,” said Gertz, “that the deputy defense secretary does not understand clearly the nature of the Islamist threat he is working against as the No. 2 official.”
The Stephen Coughlin affair illustrated most vividly the infiltration at the highest levels of the U.S. government. At the Freedom Defense Initiative event, Coughlin will make his first public appearance since the sad and telling events that led to his termination from the Defense Department. His message about Muslim Brotherhood influence at high levels of our government is deeply disturbing – and it is crucial that he be heard.
Synopsis of Couglin's Speech
(which, of course, was not covered by the MSM. You'd think they'd be a touch curious. It's entirely possible that his firing will be mentioned in future history books as a watershed event in US security policy)
Robert Spencer introduced the next speaker – Stephen Coughlin – a former Pentagon Islamic law specialist who was fired from his job for his analysis of Islamic infiltration.
Coughlin provided a clear and cogent analysis of the Islamic threat. He explained that the question of whether or not these terrorists are following ‘true’ Islam is irrelevant from a fact-driven perspective. They have repeatedly told us these are the reasons they fight jihad.
A vital part of Coughlin’s discussion dealt with the doctrine of abrogation within Islam. This doctrine states that Mohammed was given progressive revelation of Allah’s will, and that the later Koranic verses supersede and nullify earlier contradictory more peaceful verses. This is something that is recognized by ALL schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
Coughlin also demonstrated that since the 9-11 commission report, political correctness has expunged words such as Muslim, enemy, Al-Qaeda and Islam from official government documents including the Ft. Hood massacre report.
Coughlin:
“The 9-11 commission has been completely undermined. You cannot defeat an enemy you are not allowed to define. By definition, this administration has no strategy to defeat this enemy since they refuse to define it.”
Former Defense Department analyst Stephen Coughlin was exceedingly informative, and his point that official American self-censorship regarding Islam and jihad has given the enemy a "decisive victory in the information battlespace" was truly chilling.
Coughlin, whose perceptions got him crosswise with Deputy Defense Secretary Gordon England’s Muslim sidekick Hesham Islam and later excluded from the DoD, insisted that those entrusted with protecting Americans from Islamic terrorism have a “professional duty to know” about the roots of said terrorism’s doctrine in Islamic scripture and tradition.
After all, he pointed out, the murderous rampage at Fort Hood, Texas, by Muslim U.S. Army Major Nidal Hasan had a “doctrinal driver,” as evinced by Hasan’s own presentation to his Army medical colleagues calling for Muslim service personnel to be accorded conscientious objector status lest “adverse events” occur.
The enemy, Coughlin observed, has stated his doctrine. Can we, he enquired, be politically correct and threat-focused at the same time? No way – because, he concluded, “You cannot defeat an enemy you will not define.”
Coughlin's thesis on jihad doctrine may be accessed here. It is lengthy but gripping, and is a must-read.
Coughlin (and other speakers) Presentation Clips here and here
For those who may not read Coughlin's thesis, here is a synopsis by Carol Iannone, a blogger for National Review:
"'To Our Great Detriment': Ignoring What Extremists Say about Jihad," submitted to the National Defense Intelligence College. [NOTE: Complete thesis linked above in pdf format]:
I've been reading Stephen Coughlin's master's thesis...and I can see why it got him into trouble. He frankly declares that this administration has been wrong on the relation of Islam to jihadism and terrorism. While members of the administration sternly warn of the dire threats we face and how we must know our enemy, they themselves are lost in illusions about that enemy. The enemy is not Islamo-Fascism, but the jihadist elements of Islam itself.
Coughlin points out that on the basis of very little, Bush, Rice, and other Administration people blithely declare Islam a religion of peace that has been hijacked by a few violent extremists for their own agenda, an agenda which they insist has nothing to do with Islam. They ignore all the evidence from Islamic sources that support violence in the name of spreading or defending the faith and bypass the professed and frequently stated aims of the jihadists.
Coughlin's thesis suggests that there are not two schools of thought on Islamic terror, those who think it is simply a criminal problem and those who think it is a war we will be fighting for a long time, but three. First, there is the view that largely comes from the liberal-left, that thinks there really is no Islamic threat, that it's really America and its actions that have called forth violence from Muslims, that if there is violence, it is from a tiny few and can be managed by the world community like an international criminal problem. Then there is the conservative-right view, that there is indeed a terrible threat, a virtual World War Four, and the threat is from Islamo-Fascism, not from Islam itself, but from the aberrations of radicals who are creating some distorted blending of Islamic beliefs with 20th century fascist concepts. This is only a recent development, according to this view, not centuries old, and therefore we can be very hopeful about stomping it out.
About ten percent of the world's Muslims do believe in Islamo-Fascist jihad, and that is a serious number, but ninety percent of Muslims don't believe in it and want what we all want, material security and prosperity. In fact, the underlying causes of terrorism arise from the material deprivation and lack of freedom and opportunity in the Muslim world. There is thus no conflict between Islam and liberal democracy and modernity in general, and certainly no clash of civilizations. The Islamic world will not be able to resist the march of liberal democracy and the irresistible call of freedom. This view is largely that of President Bush.
The third view says that there is indeed a problem with Islam itself, that even if only a minority of Muslims will ever take up jihad, most Muslims know that that is mandated by their religion and they do support it in belief and sometimes financially. The term Islamo-Fascism is really a euphemism for those who wish to deny or ignore the violence inherent in Islam.
This view sees that jihad has been a feature of Islam from its beginnings and that martyrdom is honored and rewarded in Islam. This view also finds that Islam may well be in conflict with liberal democracy. Muslims are told that they are meant to Islamicize the countries they live in, through "peaceful" means if they can, and violent means when necessary, and we already see signs of this in Europe and America.
So, to return more strictly to Coughlin's thesis, he says that we are hampered in dealing with the enemy and in producing good intelligence for our strategic plans because instead of listening to what the enemy is saying, we impose our own hopeful, optimistic kind of view on the Islamic world, that everyone is really like us at heart and that we will see this in the end.
And lastly, an Interview [YouTube] with Stephen Coughlin: Who's Innocent, According to Shariah?