Resist 'civilization jihad,' NRB speakers urge

NASHVILLE (BP) -- The U.S. government has been unwittingly complicit with a "pre-violent" form of Islamist attack on the West known as "civilization jihad."



That was the allegation of Center for Security Policy president Frank Gaffney and other speakers during a Feb. 25 lunch at Proclaim 16, the National Religious Broadcasters' International Christian Media Convention in Nashville. Part of civilization jihad, speakers argued, involves silencing critics of radical Islam and preventing law enforcement officials from investigating potential terrorists based exclusively on their ties with extremist Muslim groups.



The success of this tactic, speakers alleged, was one reason two terrorists in San Bernardino, Calif., were able to kill 14 people in December without being apprehended beforehand by law enforcement.



Civilization jihad "is a stealthy, not so much nonviolent as pre-violent form of jihad," Gaffney said, "something that will be used to accomplish exactly the same purposes as the Islamic State, al-Qaeda, the Taliban, Boko Haram, al-Shabab [and] al-Nusra Front." Those purposes are "the triumph of Sharia [an Islamic legal system] and the rule of some religious authority."



Civilization jihad is a useful tactic in situations where radical Islamists "are not strong enough" to establish Sharia "by brute force," said Gaffney, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.



The strategy of civilization jihad was outlined in a 1991 memo written by Mohamed Akram, a senior Hamas leader and board of directors member for the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, the U.S. chapter of an Egyptian Islamist organization. An English translation of Akram's memo became public when the federal government used it as evidence in the 2007 trial of the terrorist organization The Holy Land Foundation.



The "role of the Muslim Brother [sic] in North America," Akram wrote according to the government's English translation of his memo, includes "a 'Civilization-Jihadist Process' with all the word means."

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