War On Islamofascism: Jihadists and their sympathizers are gaining ground on the propaganda front, and some concerned patriots are calling for a counter-education campaign. It's about time.
Educating the public about jihad and the long-term threat it poses is a weak link in our war against Islamic terror. The enemy is winning the war of words, and we have barely fired a shot.
Al-Jazeera, Osama bin Laden's favorite network, is now broadcasting in English, while the Council on American-Islamic Relations, flush with a $50 million gift from an Arab state tied to 9/11, is promoting Islamist interests in America through major media and advertising campaigns.
This month, for example, CAIR is running billboards in Florida exhorting drivers to "Explore the life of the Prophet Muhammad" and visit CAIR's Web site for pro-Islamist books and DVDs. The group has pushed the same propaganda on neighborhood and college librarians. Many have complied by stocking its materials, while censoring those CAIR deems offensive.
Meanwhile, professors across the country are poisoning young minds with 9/11 conspiracy theories, and whitewashing jihad as a peaceful "internal struggle" against sin, such as smoking or drinking, rather than holy war.
"Scholars for 9/11 Truth" founder Kevin Barrett, a Muslim convert, teaches a course on Islam at the University of Wisconsin. He claims the 9/11 attacks were an "inside job" carried out by Bush officials and not Islamic terrorists.
Courts also are targets. Prosecutors have lost anti-terror cases to Saudi-backed defense lawyers and their expert Islamic witnesses who convinced judges and jurors that the "jihad" that Muslim suspects spoke of was not a conspiracy to do violence.
Mideast studies professor Walid Phares, a Lebanese Christian who has appeared as an expert witness for prosecutors, complains that jurors can't understand the content of jihadist materials or the jihadist tactic of "taqiya" (dissembling to protect the faith and co-religionists), because they've never been exposed to even basic concepts of "jihad against the infidels" in the classroom.
Phares, author of "Future Jihad," proposes a strategic plan for educating the public that includes:
• Setting up a national social-studies curriculum for middle and high schools that introduces youths to the history and evolution of the enemy's ideas.
• Reforming college Mideast studies programs by focusing on the jihadist roots of problems and crises in the region, while protecting such programs from Saudi funding and influence.
• Equipping public libraries with learning materials that focus on the terrorist threat, encompassing the 1,400-year history of jihad against the West.
• Directing federal grants to NGOs, think tanks and publications that support educational projects in these areas.
• Balancing Al-Jazeera and CAIR propaganda regarding the terror threat by leveraging changes in the content and focus of PBS, C-Span, NPR and other public media.
Unlike the anti-communist movement created during the Cold War, there is little organized intellectual resistance to counter the spread of what Phares calls the Islamic "terror apologist culture" in the media and academia.
Yet this war, against a stateless enemy that prides itself on patience, may last even longer. Americans must rally to undertake their own education jihad.