Glenn Beck on the Flying Imams, plus rambling on the difference in politics and terror

Pretty good stuff here from Glenn Beck. He runs a good show, and I'm glad he's on the air. I don't think this will be too new to readers who have tracked this story in the blogosphere, but it's good to hear it laid out on CNN.

You're not even Bert Parks.

Now, a question and a problem with Beck's take:

First, with about 20 seconds left in the clip,as Beck reels off locations where Sharia is being advanced and dissent is being silenced, he mentions Norman, Oklahoma. That's a new one to me. Anyone care to enlighten me? (Do you think he meant Jamal Miftah in Tulsa? Or the OU student who blew himself up last year?)

And second: I agree that this was a deliberate stunt with a political goal. I don't think it was a "dry run" (which Beck didn't say, but others have), which would mean that these Imams were deliberately testing airline security measures and gathering intelligence for an actual terror plot. That term gets thrown about too often, I think. That doesn't mean that the response to this incident isn't being analyzed by terrorists, but that wasn't their intent. If you are surveilling a target, this sort of attention isn't what you would seek--and it's not what the 9/11 teams did. A dry run is a tactical exercise, like casing a bank you plan to rob. This was a political exercise.

A view that I read a lot around the blogs, and that Beck gets near but never quite says, is that this stunt was designed to make us more susceptible to terrorism--that it was designed to get us to "not notice things that were dangerous or out of the ordinary", with the implication that it was conceived by the imams with the specific intention of making it easier for future airline hijackings to succeed. Again, I don't think that's what this crew intended--though that is certainly a foreseeable outcome of their caper. It probably occurred to someone involved in the planning of the stunt, or if not at the planning stage, after it was done when the complaints and the publicity started. But I don't think if you could get inside the mind of Omar Shahin and company, they were thinking "I'm doing this so the next Mohammed Atta will have an easier time of it".

I just don't think this was much more complicated than a political exercise--an attempt to generate exactly the sort of "Rosa Parks" fawning coverage and sympathy for the plight of "oppressed" Muslims in America that the MSM was happy to provide. It was primarily, I think, a bid to establish Shahin and company as visible and credible spokesmen for Islam in America, and to scoop up some of the sweet Moral Authority that comes from victimhood. I think the primary intended audience was the American Muslim community who were supposed to appreciate the Flying Imams' leadership.

The secondary intended audience of this message--though still an important one--was the media elite and through them the larger American public, whom they were trying to shame with their supposed racism for noticing, e.g., six imams deliberately making a spectacle of their devotions and asking for seat-belt extensions that could be used as weapons (and that they weren't chubby enough to need). They thought this was a surefire gotcha, one that would discredit critics of their agenda as racists and intimidate them into silence, and one with which the MSM would play along.

I had thought about explaining this with a Godfather analogy-- the Imams were Tom Hagen instead of Al Qaeda's Clemenza: persuasion and veiled threats versus horse heads and tommyguns, but that implies that they both knowingly serve the same organization. That's what I'm trying to get away from here. Maybe there are some rich fellows in Arabia or Egypt or Pakistan who put a check in the mail to CAIR or MPAC or to Imam Shahin's mosque, and the same day hawala some cash to a terror training camp in Waziristan or the Cotswolds. But there's no Godfather, no Five Families, pulling all the strings here.

Islamism is decentralized. It's made up of independent, distributed nodes running similar software--linked through an unknowable, organic network of friendships, affinities, doctrines, trust, families, convenience. They can cooperate, they can compete, they can sell each other out or they can coordinate. But there aren't marching orders coming down, and there isn't always going to be a nice smoking-gun direct link between the different actors.

I'm writing at this unusual length because I think it's important to separate Islamist political actors from Islamic terrorists. All terrorists are political actors, since terrorism is a political act. But obviously not every political actor is a terrorist. Both may share some or all of the same long-term goals. Their rolodexes might contain a few of the same names. Political types like Shahin aren't above playing off terrorist acts to advance their political agenda, and terrorists won't be above exploiting the complacency created by Shahin to carry out their atrocities.

There are analogues in other countries, and the relationship is often much closer. Groups like Al-Muharijoun or Hizb-ut-Tahrir are prime examples of non-violent (but often intimidating) groups advancing a caliphate without resorting to terrorism (although they sometimes miscalculate and get themselves kicked out of countries). HuT came close to terrorism with their role in the Cartoon Riots (and I called them "sub-terrorists"). But although the cartoon imams in Denmark planned out their dishonest and inflammatory stunt in much the same way that the Flying Imams planned theirs, that doesn't make either group terrorists.

We need to be accurate, and we need to understand the dynamic nature of this game. Islamism wins media victories when we don't. The Imams' ploy was to try to induce a false alarm by airline passengers who would, they thought, assume that all Muslims must be terrorists and accuse them of being terrorists when they really weren't. Fortunately, the passengers were careful in describing the reasons for their suspicions, and even engaged in a little counterintelligence of their own. Quoting my own analysis of the police report from December:

The most interesting thing is the conversation of a witness with the Bakersfield Imam, Mohamed Said Mitwaly Ibrahim. He told the witness he was doing Ph.D. work in Bakersfield (ahem) and then when pressed changed his story to say he was only "using the library" in Bakersfield, but was really "advocating/representing [M]uslims here in the U.S. and not doing the work he said related to his P.H.D....he expressed views I consider to be extreme fundamentalist Muslim views. He expressed the problems of non-shariah (Islamic law) and the extensive problems of this even in the Middle East." The witness says he mentioned problems in Turkey and Egypt, and then "he indicated that it was necessary to go to whatever measures necessary to obey all that's set out in the Qu'ran."

This guy wasn't a terrorist and he didn't even need to know any terrorists. (Chief Flying Imam Omar Shahin, of course, used to raise money for terror-linked groups, as Beck points out in the clip, and 9-11 hijacker Hani Hanjour was radicalized at Shahin's Tucson mosque. That makes him either a foolish dupe or evil, but it doesn't mean he's about to get blood on his hands.) In fact, much of the Islamic world justifies their continuing political advocacy for Islamism by denying Islamism's violent excesses (case in point: blaming 9-11 on Republicans and Jews). Many Islamists (and their allies on the Left) are, in fact, more effective advocates precisely because they are convinced that worldwide political Islam is basically peaceful and misunderstood and wronged, and that terrorism is a manufactured issue ginned up by Islamophobes.

So the six imams were not terrorists, and this was not a "dry run". At the same time they were--admittedly--political Islam's agents, lobbyists, cutouts...What is the word for them? We need a word for these political Islamist advocates. The distinction seems an important and necessary one. And we also need a word for political psy-op activities like the airline stunt or the cartoon protest (and riots) that connotes the Islamist political goal, but which distinguishes them from violent terrorism.

Wordsmiths: to work.

JYB Tailwag for the Glenn Beck video: LGF.