The Missing Link Wore Underpants

Forget midnight football practice. Michigan’s most famous visiting jihadist, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, aka, the Underwear Bomber, showed what Ramadan observance really means when, “in defense of Muhammad [Peace be Upon Him]” . . . . he “assaulted several officers from his cell” in Milan Prison on Wednesda, “in the Holy Month of Ramadan.”
 
And it’s not just me saying he committed assault. The words above are the U-Bomber’s very own verbatim description of his actions in the handwritten motion he submitted Thursday to the US District Court in Detroit.  In it, he demands that officers not be allowed to respond with “excessive force” when all he was doing was “justly defending Muhammad [PBUH] and his Religion.” Defending them, that is, by launching a pre-emptive and unprovoked assault on several officers.
 
U-Bomber’s motion is in the hallowed jailhouse tradition of inmates who denounce the wicked jailers who brutalize them for no reason when all the inmate was doing was minding his own business.  In U-Bomb’s case, his description of himself minding his own business happens to include charging, unprovoked, several of his guards.  For this, he argues, there is absolutely no reason why he should be punished.

By the U-Bomber’s concept of justice, one he shares with millions of jihadists around the world, an aggressive act is a permissible “defensive” act when waged against anyone defaming Muhammad.   So fundamental a truth is this in the U-Bomber’s  mind that he sees no need to include in his motion any details, real or invented, of any wrongdoing or provcative behavior on the part of the officers that could explain his outbrust of violence.  He never says the officers flushed his Koran, or called him an Islamophobic name, or tried to read to him from the polytheist Bible.  What he does say is that the “ United States legally allows the defamation of Muhammad (PBUH), and by allowing so it is defaming and Abusing Him] PBUH.”
  
This is his legal argument, that because the American system of free speech doesn’t prohibit criticism of Muhammad under pain of execution, (à la Saudi Arabia, Iran, or, soon, Egypt) then it’s clearly lawful for any Muslim to attack Americans whenever and wherever the opportunity arises.
  
To his (Islamic) way of thinking, the U-Bomber’s “defensive jihad”against the officers he attacked was self-evidently justified because, for merely representing an unIslamic legal system that isn’t constituted according to Sharia, the officers were ipso facto aggressors against Islam.


Abdulmutallab isn’t crazy, and he isn’t stupid. Read his motion and it’s clear that not only is he not a raving lunatic, but he’s able to write English better than the average American can.  His rationale is completely consistent.  His failed attack on Flight 253, his attack on the officers this week, and his explanations for both attacks (and what I’m sure will be many more unprovoked attacks through the duration of his long and miserable life as a failed jihadist), follow the conventional Islamist jurisprudence that blesses unprovoked belligerence against nonMuslims. By defining the mere existence of people who willfully choose to disbelieve in Islam as an attack upon the Ummah, every attack on a nonMuslim can be justified as a defense of Allah and his prophet.

And this isn’t just the idiosyncratic misunderstanding of Islam by a deranged, misguided individual who is never going to draw a free breath again.  His views are important especially because they are the views of the imams, the mosques, the Brotherhood, and the Ummah that sent him here to kill as many Americans as possible.
 
Last fall Andrew McCarthy reported how Times Square bomber Feisal Shahzad, “[d]efiant and remorseless to the end,” responded  when asked by Judge Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, as she sentenced him to life in prison, if he seriously believed the Koran wanted him to kill innocent people?

“The Koran gives you the right to defend,” he replied, adding, ”That’s all I’m doing.”

Robert Spencer wrote that Osama bin Ladin relied on Qur’an 22:39 in his communiques, justifying al Qaeda’s war as “defensive jihad,” not “war because of differences in religion, or in search of spoils of war.”
It is unbelief itself, Spencer explain, that constitutes

aggression for some Islamic authorities, and given the Qur’anic command to fight unbelievers until ‘religion is all for Allah’ (8:39), it is cold comfort to unbelievers, and no restraint for jihadists, to remind them that they should only be fighting aggression.

This is consistent with the views of the Muslim Brotherhood’s intellectual godfather, Sayyid Qutb when, as Spencer recounts, Qutb says that

“aggression has been committed in the first place, against God's Lordship of the universe and against other human beings who are forced to submit to deities other than God.” “Aggression,” then, is rebelling against God and submission to deities other than God: he sees the aggression simply as not believing in Islam.

While it may be a slight overstatement to say that just by sharing the planet with a Muslim an unbeliever in Islam is provoking a retaliation, there still is no shortage of fresh examples of that logic being applied.  Just yesterday Clifford May described what is happening now that Albania has become the first European member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference: 

When local authorities in the northern Albanian, majority-Catholic city of Shkoder announced that Mother Teresa would be commemorated with a statue, three Muslim NGOs protested — calling that a “provocation” against Islam.

Commemorating Mother Teresa a provocation of Islam?  It’s almost as if, in his evil genius, Muhammad had contrived to sanctify and transform into a virtue the base and ancient brutality that Cain used to justify slaying Abel, the harmless brother who provoked him just by being who he was.
Forget that local CAIR and ISNA spokesmen are saying whatever they can to distance Abdulmutallab, our living, breathing, Koran-invoking specimen of Homo Jihadicus, from the fairy image of mainstream Islam they’re determined to project. The reason ISNA’s Imam Steve Mustapha Eltruk calls Abdulmutallab a fool, and Dawud Walid’s public comments sound like desperate signals to his fellow Muslim Brotherhood member that “[h]e really needs to be quiet with these sideshow antics,” is that the U-Bomber, talking, is as destructive to the Brotherhood’s dawa as the U-Bomber, blowing up, was meant to be destructive to Flight 253’s infidels.

Anwar al-Awlaki never assigned Abdulmutallab to be either an apologist for Islam nor one of its taqiyya specialists, pulling wool over our eyes in the Dar-al-Harb.  All he was meant to be were the remains of Seat Zero in the smoldering rubble of Northwest Flight 253 after it came down in a ball of fire on top of my freaking garage. Now he’s still alive by some cruel joke of Allah, giving the local Ikhwan fits when he recites in open court passages from the not-so-Top Secret jihadi training manual.

Properly made use of, (which I doubt very much he will be), the U-Bomber could be priceless as a living diorama for demonstrating to skeptical Americans that there really is an unmistakeable chain linking the attacks of 9/11 with thousands of violent events before and after in what the Muslim Brotherhood defines as the Grand Jihad.

The same way the evolutionary Missing Link (if he weren’t Missing) would complete the Chain of Being between prehistoric apes and your most recent grandchild, the Underwear Bomber directly links contemporary global jihadism, as preached by al Awlaki, Choudhary, Ahmadinejad, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Muslim Brotherhood in North America, just to name a few, with the attacks perpetrated by Mohammed Atta, bin  Ladin, and al Qaeda in 2001.  In other words, we shouldn't be memorializing the attack, but preparing for the next one.
 
Americans in 2011 by and large are harbouring the dangerous delusion that the World Trade Center attacks were an historically isolated incident representing just a few individuals who were misinformed about their own faith -- and the entire threat they posed died with them. This delusion only stays alive and spreads because most of our enemies, and too many of our friends, keep repeating that a billion Muslims couldn’t possibly wish us any harm.

The Underwear Bomber says otherwise.  And I mean he is literally saying otherwise. Because among the ways Missing Link Abdulmutallab differs from the evolutionary version are that a) he actually exists, and b) he’s not fossilized bones but alive and eager to share with us the details of his primitive worldview.    I can’t imagine Richard Dawkins, upon meeting Neanderthal in the flesh, would not want to hear all about his dear old gorilla grandmother and his gifted toolmaking grandson?   Now here we have U-Bomb in captivity, not only having tried to blow our airliner up, but talking about why he was trying to blow our airliner up. Imagine if somehow Mohammed Atta had survived, and instead of plaintively asking oursleves, “Why do they hate us so much?” we couwould be able to ask him: “So, Mohammed? Why do you hate us so much?”
  
And wouldn’t we be insane not to listen to the answer?
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