Stealth Jihad (Review of Robert Spencer's New Book)

The irony of Robert Spencer’s new book, Stealth Jihad, is that he will now have to prove to his opponents that they were partly right about Islam. For years, apologists for the Religion of Peace have argued that the correct understanding of jihad need not imply terrorism or violence; it is merely a quest for justice, according to the dictates of Islamic law. Now that Spencer documents in great detail the broader attempt to impose Shari’a on America and the West through non-violent means – in the media, the courts, the workplace, schoolhouses, universities, and the government – another redefinition will be required.

Spencer confronts the unusual terminology on the first page of his book. “For many people,” he writes, the term Stealth Jihad “will be nonsensical.” This is only so to those with little understanding of the tenets and dogmas of Islam – which is most of the American public.

Contrary to post-9/11 spin, Islam does not mean “peace” but submission. Thus, the Koran states conquered People of the Book” (Christians and Jews) must pay an extra tax to “feel themselves subdued” (9:29), a concept repugnant to Western notions of personal conviction and freedom of conscience. Muslims believe the Koran is the literal word of Allah, which demands obeisance from all, even those who reject its authority.

Spencer marshals evidence of Islam’s universal scope from the Koran and the hadiths, from early Islamic jurists and current representatives of American “Muslim civil rights” organizations. Chief in importance is Hasan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, that international fount of stealth and frequently conspicuous jihad, who wrote, “Islam is an all-embracing concept which regulates every aspect of life, adjudicating on every one of its concerns and prescribing for it a solid and rigorous order.” Spencer quotes influential, contemporary Muslim scholars who state Islam is “by its very nature a universal state” that “tolerates the existence of no other state than itself.” Its goal, they declare, is “the establishment of an imperial world state,” realized through “absorption” of the secular West. To this end, the Brotherhood has had a chapter in Paris since 1937…and allies on hundreds of college campuses, funded by taxpayer dollars.

Lest he be accused of seeing jihadists under every burqa, Spencer states the obvious: just as there are varying degrees of fervor among adherents of any religion, “there are innumerable Muslims in this country today who are happy to live in a pluralistic society in which there is no established religion.” Al-Banna acknowledged there are many levels of jihad, including mere “interior spiritual struggle” – which he deemed the lowest level. Waging warfare against the infidel was the highest expression of fidelity. Stealth Jihad documents those who pursue the myriad gradations in between.

The author begins by noting the concerted effort to portray all those who tell the truth about Islam as “Islamophobes,” followed by legal and sometimes physical intimidation. He relates Muslim threats in the wake of the publication of cartoons depicting Muhammad, Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, the thought-crime of Theo van Gogh, and a number of lesser known events. (Conspicuously absent is the case of Pim Fortuyn, the assassinated Dutch politician who addressed the book’s thesis head-on from a socially progressive standpoint in his own book, Against the Islamization of Our Culture.) At other times, leveraging their allies on the multicultural Left, stealth jihadists make use of speech codes and nuisance legal cases. The author’s personal persecution could fill a book-length volume, but Spencer cites merely a smattering of his own experiences, focusing instead on the legal harassment of FrontPage Magazine contributor Rachel Ehrenfeld, NRO’s Mark Steyn, and the late Oriana Fallaci (FrontPage Magazine’s Woman of the Year 2005).

However, one need not be a critical opponent of Shari’a to experience the wrath of al-Banna’s middling moralists. One can merely be a Catholic employee who dares to eat pork in the workplace. Or an employer who refuses special privileges to his Muslim employees to take prayer breaks while their dhimmi co-workers continue laboring away.

…Or the parent of a young child who attends public school. Textbooks teach schoolchildren that, while Crusaders plundered and slashed their way through the Middle East (to reclaim the land the Crescent subjected by the sword), Islam “spread” peacefully, aided by its “tolerance for other religions.” Others force boys and girls to parrot Islamic religious dogmas. His exposé of the Muslim organization tasked with censoring textbooks is an eye-opener. His chapters on public education, university professors (especially John Esposito and the Middle Eastern Studies Association), and the growing industry of Shari’a-compliant finance are worth the price of the book.

None is as chilling as the infiltration of the Department of Homeland Security and the nation’s intelligence community in general.

Spencer lays bare the underground network of Muslim “advocacy” organizations who work in concert to promote their supremacist agenda. Stealth Jihad includes the most comprehensive and irrefutable portrait of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) yet written. (Its partners are organizations Jihad Watch, FrontPage Magazine, and DiscoverTheNetworks.org have been exposing since going into print.)

His coverage reveals another cause for concern: for jihadists, peace and violence are not polar opposites, as they were to Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X; they are two sides of the same jihadist coin, pursued cyclically, or in tandem, to promote the goal of an Islamic-compliant world. As a result, he often finds those involved in non-violent jihad have ties to terrorism, which he also documents.

Spencer, a religious scholar who has lectured the U.S. Central Command and the U.S. intelligence community, is editor of this website’s sister publication, Jihad Watch. In 2006, al-Qaeda offered him an ultimatum: convert to Islam or die. (To date, Spencer remains a faithful part of the Church Militant.) No one is more qualified to comment on the topic, as this well-written, thoroughly documented volume demonstrates. After systematically presenting the theology of Islamic supremacy, he examines each area of influence, proving the drive to bend all Americans to follow Shari’a with one example after another.

Analyzing the problem is one thing; solving it is another. Spencer’s prescriptions on what to do will rankle some and lead to his further character assassination. He is at his best when calling for the government to impose existing laws – and most gets to the point when he calls for a revival of patriotism, the self-assurance necessary to deny Islamic encroachment, white liberal guilt, and multiculturalist recriminations of the greatest nation in the history of the world. He is at his most questionable in calling on the government to “End Muslim immigration into the United States.”

Spencer will be criticized – but not merely for his immigration policy. The same people who denied the Soviet Union’s malicious designs now see no worldwide Islamic threat, neither at home nor abroad, violent nor voluntary. The intellectual heirs of those who defended Alger Hiss now bemoan the martyrdom of Sami al-Arian. Yet it is the irreligious and the “progressive” who should be most concerned about the growing influence – of thought, of action, and of silencing their critics – Islamists exert in secular society. Somehow, publications that have commissioned dozens of articles depicting omnipresent “Christian Dominionists” scheming with every school board in America to teach the Bible as literature maintain an agnostic indifference to Shari’a’s would-be enforcers, content to shoot the messengers. As Spencer proves, they would be better served casting a critical glance at those whose aim is submission, rather than salvation.

Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs, is available from Amazon.com for $18.45, more than one-third off the cover price.

"He is at his best when calling for the government to impose existing laws – and most gets to the point when he calls for a revival of patriotism, the self-assurance necessary to deny Islamic encroachment, white liberal guilt, and multiculturalist recriminations of the greatest nation in the history of the world. He is at his most questionable in calling on the government to “End Muslim immigration into the United States.”

Good review for what seems to be a good book, but why is demanding an end to Muslim immigration "questionable?"

The can't kill us, afterall, if we don't let them into America in the first place, right?

The can't kill us, afterall, if we don't let them into America in the first place, right?

You're forgetting all the Muslims that are American citizens. The camel's in the tent.

“You’re forgetting all the Muslims that are American citizens. The camel’s in the tent.”

Ok, then how about we let in more camels under the tent?

Certainly, it is logical to assume the more Muslims we let in, the higher the chances of an attack, right?

Furthermore, it is easier to keep an eye on the ones already here, provided their numbers are small and we aren’t inflating their population via immigration.

Ok, then how about we let in more camels under the tent?

I meant,

How about we NOT let in more camels under the tent?

Spencer is the most dangerous man in the world, to Islam. His work and courage are effectively unparalleled.

The West must learn that Islam is *not* a religion. It is a political system *disguised* as a religion. And that political system is tyrannical and unyielding. Like National Socialsm (who it has a long and disgusting history of kissing up to), Islam must not be tolerated. It must be abused, harassed, outlawed, and where necessary, violently fought. It has no valid place in the present or future of mankind, any more that Nazism or Communism (its two closest ideological companions).

Agreed. Its a totalitarian ideology masquerading as a religion and it regards all non-Muslims on the order of pigs and apes fit only to be exterminated. This is what we are up against with those who preach and pursue jihad against the West.

"Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." - Manuel II Palelologus

“If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen, we must live through all time, or die by suicide.” —— Abraham Lincoln

Our own laws and institutions may be the instruments of our national suicide.

This is a very dark and terrible thing for westerners in general and Americans in particular to come to grips with. We are a people (half of us anyway) who are raised to understand that everyone is created in God's image, and that everyone deserves equal, decent treatment under an objective, "non-respecter of persons" model. To come across an entire sub-civilization that thinks, writes, and acts as though it was a superior, rabid predator entitled to feed on us and our children indicates that it is in need of a merciful bullet to the brain. This is quite a shock. Nobody enjoys terminating a diseased and dangerous animal. But there is no choice and it must be done.

Islam is not peaceful, and Spencer was right and furthermore is not changing what he said. What Muslims found is that violence didn’t work in the case of the US. And that’s why they infiltrated and got us to elect our very own leftist Muslim president, who will very soon sell us all out. I’m praying that the Supreme Court takes up the birth certificate case and he never makes it to the inauguration, but I’m not hopeful.

Aside from that, however, I think we should have NO Muslim immigration.

So, what do you think? They’re going to mob us and trample us into the dust? At what percentage of Muslims to the total population should we just surrender?

“At what percentage of Muslims to the total population should we just surrender?”

My opinion is the lower the population of muslims in any nonmuslim country, the less the chance of terrorism in said country.

I question the very existence of patriotism and loyalty among devout Muslims who holds U.S. citizenship.

For they have sworn falsely, those Muslims who swore to support and defend the Constitution of the United States. Their ultimate loyalty is to Allah, the giver of Sharia Law which abrogates all merely human institutions of law and governance, and to his messenger Muhammad who commands every Muslim to wage jihad against `unbelievers’ until the world Islamic caliphate is brought about.

Islam in America is a cancer upon this Nation.

Then you’ll be among the millions of patriots who will be demanding the deportation of the Muslim traitors? Or, maybe less difficult, putting them in concentrations camps? How about just open season with a bag limit of two?

“Deportation, concentration camps, or summary execution for Muslims in America”?

Not very different from the recent fate of Jews and Christians in Islamic states, is it?

Sorry, we’re not buying. Try again in your effort to seize the moral high ground away from those who regard Islam as inherently violent toward “kafirs”.

And study the Koran, Sira, and Hadiths while you’re at it. Deus vult!

If Muslims launch another 911 level terror attack or worse, and there is an anti-Muslim immigrant backlash, it is going to be their fault for throwing the first punch.

It is a shame if that happens, but the religion is just not assimilable in a nonMuslim country and at a minimum there should be no more importation of Muslims into America.

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