House Speaker Nancy Pelosi last week reached a new low in recklessness, even for her. She dismissed as no big deal the toppling of a Christopher Columbus statue by a mob who then tossed it into a nearby harbor in her hometown of Baltimore. “People will do what they do,” Pelosi said. “I don’t care that much about the statues.” Pelosi evidently doesn’t care much about mob rule either.

Most Americans do care about preserving the statues and other monuments dedicated to our nation’s heroes. Most Americans certainly do not believe that mobs should decide who does or does not deserve to be honored as part of America’s heritage. But leftists don’t trust the American people. The cancel culture crowd think they are entitled to cancel the American story of great progress towards a more perfect union and replace it with their own alternative of dystopian fiction. According to CNN anchor Don Lemon, for example, young people “have asked for decades” for the removal of certain statues and now “the chickens are coming home to roost.” Lemon said that Americans for too long have been taught “propaganda” and added that “some things you have to un-learn so that you can become a better citizen.” That sounds like what the Chinese Communists were saying during their cultural revolution.

Christopher Columbus is on the left-wingers’ hit list. No longer are elementary school students introduced to the rhyme that generations of students before them had recited, “In fourteen hundred and ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue.” Leftists demand that school curricula portray Christopher Columbus’s forays to the “New World” as the original sin of colonialist exploitation of indigenous peoples living in a heretofore untouched ‘paradise.’ Leftists’ stereotyping of Columbus as an evil imperialist motivated solely by greed and lust for power over hapless indigenous people is the false mirror image of their outrageous attempt to delegitimize the United States itself as the embodiment of white supremacy.

Human bondage already existed on the islands that Columbus visited, as well as cannibalism – not exactly an indigenous peoples’ ‘paradise.’ Moreover, acknowledging Columbus’s far from spotless record in how he treated the people he encountered in the lands he explored does not negate the historic importance of what he accomplished. Columbus deserves to be honored as a courageous visionary who set in motion by his explorations a chain of events that would lead ultimately to the creation of the world’s leading beacon of hope, opportunity and freedom.

The iconoclasts of the far left also demonize our nation’s founding fathers – their reputations trashed, and statues toppled or defaced. They were just a bunch of slave-owning white supremacists who should be reviled, not revered, according to the far left narrative.

Like Christopher Columbus, our nation’s founding fathers were neither saints nor devils. They were complex human beings who were imperfect to be sure. However, the founding fathers were visionaries who put into practice the principles of the Age of Enlightenment based on reason and science rather than superstition and divine right of kings. They had the wisdom and foresight to design a flexible system of self-government that could progress over time and move closer towards full realization of the nation’s founding ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

Moreover, contrary to the far left narrative, not all the founding fathers were diehard slaveowners. John Adams, for instance, never owned any slaves. Benjamin Franklin’s two slaves were freed during his lifetime. He became the president of an abolitionist group called the Society for Promoting the Abolition of Slavery and the Relief of Negroes Unlawfully Held in Bondage.

George Washington remained a slaveowner during his lifetime but arranged in his will for his slaves to be freed after his death. Towards the end of his life, Washington wrote, “The unfortunate condition of the persons, whose labour in part I employed, has been the only unavoidable subject of regret.” He expressed some sympathy for the emerging abolitionist cause and indicated that he would support the elimination of slavery if done through the legislative process.

Alexander Hamilton supported the idea of freeing those slaves who joined the Continental Army. Having emigrated to America from a Caribbean island where he observed slavery firsthand, he would later write that there was no reason why “one man should exercise any power or pre-eminence over his fellow-creatures. . . unless they have voluntarily vested him with it.”  But leftists today do not think that is good enough. They have even recently demanded the cancellation of the highly acclaimed musical ‘Hamilton,’ which depicted the life of the immigrant Alexander Hamilton, after it was shown on Disney+. Leftist critics bemoaned the musical’s romanticizing of Hamilton and the other founding fathers, and its glossing over their association with slavery. Hamilton did not own any slaves himself. However, his “sins” apparently included working for a slave-trading firm as a teenager before he emigrated to America and the fact that he married into a prominent New York slaveholding family.

#CancelHamilton” trended on Twitter after the musical’s showing on Disney+. Even a musical honoring diversity and the contribution of immigrants to American history is suspect because it dared to also honor America itself and its founders. Instead of defending what he was trying to do and pushing back against the expanding cancel culture, the show’s creator, Lin Manuel-Miranda, apologized. “That we have not yet firmly spoken the inarguable truth that Black Lives Matter and denounced systematic racism and white supremacy from our official ‘Hamilton’ channels is a moral failure on our part,” Manuel-Miranda said in a groveling video. “As the writer of the show, I take responsibility and apologize for my part in this moral failure.”

Thomas Jefferson is the leftists’ favorite founding father punching bag, representing to them the preeminent white supremacist hypocrite among the founders. True, Jefferson did enslave more than six hundred people during his lifetime while publicly condemning slavery as contrary to the laws of nature that he espoused in the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson held on to his slaves for his personal benefit even as he tried in his first draft of the Declaration of Independence to incorporate a specific paragraph denouncing slavery introduced by the British to the American colonies. Jefferson was unsuccessful because the Southern colony delegates insisted on its removal as a condition for supporting the Declaration of Independence. Jefferson endorsed the principle of gradual emancipation without setting an example himself in his lifetime. All of that can be legitimately discussed, however, without throwing Jefferson’s positive legacy into the dustbin of history. Thomas Jefferson’s personal shortcomings do not erase the fact that his more noble self was able to set down the principle of equality and inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness that remain our nation’s North Star. Martin Luther King recognized this when he said that the words of Jefferson and the other “architects of our republic” were a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir.”

The cancel culture leftists want to destroy Americans’ liberties. In order to do so, they must delegitimize the America created by our founding fathers. They must destroy the symbols that generations of Americans have grown up revering. They seek to turn American history into the dark chronicle of horrors for which the ‘white supremacist oppressor’ class must be punished and atone. All freedom-loving Americans should stand up to these destructive mobs and cancel out their cancel culture hatred of the values we hold dear.

Bruce Thornton is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Last week Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced that on July 24 Hagia Sophia, for a thousand years one of Christendom’s most storied and significant churches, will once again become a mosque. So far, the remnant of established Christianity has been silent. But this affront to the faith that is one of the pillars upon which the West was founded reveals how damaging has been the historical amnesia and appeasing double-standards that have compromised our response to the challenge of Islamic jihadism.

Until recently Turkey had been a poster-boy for the dubious globalist consensus that liberal democracy and free-market capitalism are the destiny of all humanity, including Muslims. In 1923 founder Kemal Atatürk created Turkey to be a modern Western nation-state, with religion separated from the secular government. He abolished the caliphate, closed Islamic courts, gave women equal rights in divorce and inheritance, allowed them to vote, restricted sharia to religion, and secularized education for females as well as males. In 1934 Hagia Sophia was turned into a museum, part of Atatürk’s program to recognize Turkey’s pre-Muslim history and strengthen Turkey’s modern global identity and prestige.

But over the years it took the military to maintain this modernizing, secular program in the face of the more traditional and conservative Muslim masses and their discontent. Starting as mayor of Istanbul in 1994, Erdoğan became their champion, and as president has abandoned Atatürk’s democratic, secular program: He has jailed more journalists than any other country, and built 17,000 new mosques. Nearly a century of efforts to reconcile Islam with liberal democracy are failing under Erdoğan’s incremental Islamization. Turning Hagia Sophia back into a mosque is an important sign of his success, and a gesture of defiance of the “rules-based international order.”

And it is a repudiation of the West’s belief that transforming Islamic majority states into secular liberal democracies, what we spent lives and resources futilely attempting to do in Iraq and Afghanistan, could defuse the materialist and political dysfunctions that the idealistic internationalists champions claimed created jihadist terrorism. This belief is a colossal failure of imagination, enabled by a refusal to take seriously the traditional doctrines, scriptures, jurisprudence, and behavior documented in 14 centuries of Islamic history.

One constant of that history is the totalizing role Islam plays in Muslim societies, and the depths of a religious fervor now nearly extinct in the Christian West, where Christianity has been driven from the public square, and relegated to private and, at holidays, commercial life. Contrary to our focus on material causes to account for historical and political change, as Bernard Lewis has written, Islam’s “most characteristic, significant and original political and intellectual responses [to Islam’s retreat before the West] have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and the community overwhelmed by infidels.”

Given that religious focus, Lewis also writes, “In most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.” Given how secularized the West is, we discount faith and its doctrines and look for material, economic, political, or psychological causes of jihadist terrorism and violence, from the lack of economic development to justified anger over the West’s sins such as imperialism, colonialism and modern versions like globalism.

Moreover, our fashionable civilizational self-loathing leads us to accept these specious causes, even to the point of whitewashing Islam’s long history of violence in the name of Allah, and styling Islam, as presidents from both parties have done, as the “religion of peace.” This bad habit explains as well the relative indifference of Western politicians and clergy to Erdoğan’s announcement that one of the West’s most glorious and beautiful cultural treasures, already partially defaced by its first conquerors in 1453, will be turned into a venue for the faith that attacked, plundered, occupied, and enslaved Westerners for a thousand years, and continues today to slaughter and enslave Christians.

This dismissal of faith has also led to a double standard in the West’s responses to events. Addled by multiculturalism and its noble-savage fantasies of the exotic “other,” we strain out the Western mite and swallow whole herds of non-Western camels. Churches across Christendom are vandalized or demolished with scarcely a “tut-tut” from our political and ecclesiastical leaders. But let one mosque be defaced with graffiti, and passionate denunciations of “racism” and “Islamophobia” will fill the airwaves and bandwidth for days.

Similarly, scarcely a day passes when we don’t hear heated complaints about Israel’s “illegal occupation” of its traditional homeland as documented in historical writing, inscriptions, and archeological finds. But seldom, if ever, do we hear that for nearly 50 years Turkey has illegally occupied and colonized northern Cyprus, ethnically cleansing Greek Cypriots; destroying, looting, and vandalizing more than 550 churches; and refusing to this day to inform the Greeks about the fate of over 2000 of their compatriots who disappeared during the invasion.

Worst of all, we allow mosques to arise on Western lands and solicitously protect them, even as many are centers of jihadist recruitment and indoctrination. Germany alone has 2400, 900 of which are controlled by Turkey. Yet Saudi Arabia will not allow a single church on its territory, and punishes Christian evangelism with death. Other Muslim countries restrict, according to sharia law, the number and size of Christian churches, which are frequent targets of vandalism or destruction. Turkey continues to forbid new churches, though a few years ago it did allow a new church to be built––the first in 90 years.

Perhaps nothing illustrates this cringing double-standard as well as the continuing Arab control over the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The holiest site of Judaism, it was strictly off-limits to Jews during Jordan’s occupation, as was the Old City. Forty to fifty thousand headstones from the Mount of Olives cemetery were desecrated, some being used to pave latrines, and 56 synagogues were destroyed.

Yet despite this record of destruction and contempt, after the 1967 Six Days War and Israel’s reconquest of Jerusalem, Israelis didn’t just let the two mosques on the Temple Mount survive, but allowed Arabs to maintain significant control over the Mount. Worse yet, in 1996 a new mosque and prayer hall was built below the Temple Mount on the remains of Solomon’s Stables, and during construction excavations thousands of precious artifacts from the as far back as the First Temple era were contemptuously dumped in the Kidron Valley along with excavation spoil. Israeli archaeologists for years had to sift from the mounds of dirt 1000 ancient objects like coins, inscriptions, building stones from the two temples, and tools.

Finally, this myopic and cringing double standard is manifested in the use of “imperialism” and “colonialism” as epithets to delegitimize the West and Israel, which in Arab propaganda is routinely characterized as a Western colonial and imperial outpost. This bad habit is particularly cringing, given Islam’s long record of imperial conquest, colonization, and occupation: At one point three quarters of the Roman Empire and over a third of what was then known as Christendom were occupied. From the beginning, as historian Efraim Karsh writes, Muslim armies “acted in a typically imperialist fashion . . . subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth and labor.” And whereas Western imperial powers abandoned almost all their colonies and continue to aid those peoples in determine their own political destiny, the descendants of Muslim invaders, colonists, and occupiers continue to live and rule most of the territories they conquered centuries ago: all of North Africa, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Turkey, Iran––all except the last had been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, i.e. proto-Western, for as long as nearly 3000 years before Islam even existed.

Which raises some questions: By what moral calculus do the imperialism and colonialism of the past in the West come in for constant condemnation and scapegoating for the rest of the world’s problems, while no one holds Islam and its colonial and imperialist sins to the same standards of judgment and accountability? Or why does the West’s history of brutal slavery remain an indelible stain on today’s Westerners, while Islam’s much longer and more brutal history of slavery, not just of Africans, but of millions of Europeans, is scarcely mentioned, though it continues to this day? Or why are the richest, freest women in the world defended by militant feminists against sexist “microagressions,” while in many Muslim countries, the misogynistic customs and laws, including polygamy, veils, genital mutilation, honor killings, and inequality before the law, are, when not just ignored, admired as exotic chic by ignorant Western activists?

Accepting a double-standard is always a sign of weakness, inferiority, and fear. We may think we’re just displaying our high-minded principles and cosmopolitanism, but our enemies know the score: We are displaying a civilizational failure of nerve, and a sordid materialism that will not let us risk our rich dolce vita lifestyle. Just like the current destruction of America’s history as expressed in statues and monuments, and just like the libelous revision of American history to legitimize an illiberal collectivist ideology and its impossible utopias, the shrugging off­­––with a few exceptions like Secretary of State Mike Pompeo­­––of Turkey’s conversion of Hagia Sophia into a mosque bespeaks a civilization that no longer is willing to defend and fight for its ideals, its history, its achievements, and its future.

The word for that condition is “decline.”

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Photo credit: Rabe!

When future historians analyze The Great Covid-19 Virus Pandemic of 2020, they might find it to be the most cynically-manipulated episode in American political history.

Despite a recent increase in cases, the death toll declined for nine successive weeks as of June 27. On July 3, the Centers for Disease Control announced it would stop classifying the outbreak as an epidemic if the death toll continues decreasing.

Nevertheless, the Democrats demand that every American wear a mask to decrease the risk of transmission. Governors, mostly Democrats, are mandating masks in public. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the party’s Presidential nominee, and Rep. Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House, advocate making masks mandatory nationwide.

But medical experts not only believe masks are ineffective in containing the virus. They also assert that masks create worse problems in the long run.

In April, the Annals of Internal Medicine published a study showing that neither cloth nor medical masks can stop Covid-19 transmission. The virus is smaller than the particles that the masks can block. The editors demanded and received a retraction from the researchers but one commenter on the journal’s website expressed skepticism:

“In your retraction statement, (the researchers) said, ‘We proposed correcting the reported data with new experimental data from additional patients, but the editors requested retraction.’ This is concerning. The scientific and medical community should welcome corrected reporting and new data. That’s how we learn and grow and come closer to the truth. There is no downside to allowing you to public and updated/corrected study. This makes no sense and raises concerns about the motivations of the editors.”

In 2015, researchers published the first randomized control study about the effects of cloth masks on health-care workers as opposed to medical masks. That study in the British Medical Journal reported that workers wearing cloth masks were 13 times more likely to contract the flu than those wearing medical masks. Cloth masks allowed 97 percent of viruses to penetrate while medical masks allowed 44 percent.

“It’s basically like mosquitos going through a chain-link wire fence,” said Shiva Ayyadurai, who holds a doctorate in biological engineering from MIT.

The January edition of Respiratory Care included a study on N95 masks, reserved for medical workers, that determined the following:

— N95 masks, if worn for longer than one hour, increase the risk of headaches in people prone to headaches.

— N95 masks increase shortness of breath or other breathing discomfort in people with COPD

— N95 masks, after one hour, impede oxygen intake by an average of 37 percent in the elderly, pregnant women and people with breathing disorders or chronic lung disease.

In 2011, The Annals of Occupational Hygiene published a study showing that wearing masks adversely affects the body’s ability to control its own temperature by inhibiting respiration and the work of the skin’s thermal receptors. “Modifications in (face mask) structure, components and materials might allow for improved heat dissipation and enhanced compliance with use,” stated the abstract.

Even Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, admitted early in the pandemic that masks have extremely limited utility. “The masks are important for someone who’s infected to prevent them from infecting someone else,” Fauci said in March. “When you are in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. Right now, in the United States people should not be walking around with masks.”

If that was true in March, why is it no longer true in July?

The Democrats’ fastidiousness concerning Covid-19 contrasts sharply with their apathy toward the potential for worse diseases coming from the large homeless population in cities, many of which Democrats govern. Rev. Andy Bales, CEO of the Union Rescue Mission on Los Angeles’ Skid Row, lost his lower left leg to a flesh-eating disease after stepping in human excrement while distributing bottled water.

“There’s a special type of (tuberculosis) found only in Skid Row and it’s a strong, powerful strain,” Bales said. “There’s the flesh-eating disease, like I had, which consists of E-Coli, strep and staph. I’ve seen it in other people on the streets. I’ve seen people with a black thumb, losing a leg. When it happened to me, people made a big deal. But it was happening to others long before my situation brought it to light.

“There’s also Hepatitis A. All my co-workers have to get vaccinated. It’s quite risky to work where we work. There’s typhus, which is carried by fleas on rats. Then the police at the station one block from us got typhoid fever. I’ve only seen that once in Haiti — a little boy in a makeshift house.”

California has the largest homeless population of any state. More homeless live in the city and county of Los Angeles than any other metropolitan area except New York. Mayor Eric Garcetti, the city attorney, controller and 14 of the 15 City Council members are Democrats.

So if masks are effectively useless against Covid-19, why do Democrats insist on them? Because they believe exaggerating the danger will provide political benefits.

First, the Democrats are using the pandemic to promote mail-in voting, which can invite fraud, as a study prepared by Caltech and MIT warned in 2001. Most of the figures involved in major recent electoral scandals are Democrats.

On Sept. 23, Sherikia Hawkins, the city clerk of Southfield, Mich., was charged with six felony counts associated with election fraud. Hawkins is accused of altering 193 absentee ballots during the 2018 midterm elections. Hawkins allegedly committed fraud by changing 193 voter files to show either invalid signatures or return dates and dumping the legitimate records in the trash.

Ironically, Hawkins received the Michigan Democratic Party’s highest award four months earlier.

In March, Domenick DeMuro, a former election judge in Philadelphia, pled guilty to multiple counts of election fraud in the 2014, 2015 and 2016 Democratic primaries. A political consultant bribed DeMuro to increase the vote totals for certain candidates.

“DeMuro fraudulently stuffed the ballot box over and over, as fast as he could, while he thought the coast was clear,” said United States Attorney William B. McSwain, who announced the conviction May 21. DeMuro issued his plea in a sealed procedure.

On June 25, four men were indicted for election fraud during a special election May 12 in Paterson, N.J., the state’s third largest city. Two belong to the City Council: Michael Jackson, the Council’s vice-president, and Councilman-Elect Alex Mendez. A third, Shelim Khalique, was running for a Council seat.

All four were charged with a combined 16 counts related to collecting mail-in ballots improperly through ballot harvesting. The charges included submitting fraudulently marked and improperly sealed ballots, possessing improperly obtained ballots and falsifying the identities of intermediaries who gave the ballots to the election board. Nearly 19 percent of all ballots had to be disqualified.

What happened to the legitimate ballots? Members of the United States Postal Inspection Service found hundreds of them in mailboxes in Paterson and a nearby borough.

As a result, the election remains contested. Paterson’s NAACP chapter wants the election invalidated.

Significantly, officials mandated mail-in voting for the special election because of the pandemic. The state also encouraged citizens to vote by mail for the July 7 primary.“These kinds of acts make people not want to vote anymore,” the Rev. Kenneth Clayton of Paterson’s NAACP chapter said about election fraud. “They feel disenfranchised, disconnected, that their votes don’t count, and that is not fair to people.”

Attorney General William Barr agreed. “When state governments start adopting these practices like mail-in ballots that open the floodgates of potential fraud, then people’s confidence in the outcome of the election is going to be undermined,” Barr said “That could take the country to a very dark place if we lose confidence in the outcomes of our elections.”

The Democrats also could use the pandemic as an excuse to impede John Durham’s criminal investigation into potential misconduct by the FBI and the Justice Department under President Barack Obama. Durham’s investigation concerns possible illegal surveillance of Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign.

Covid-19 has hindered Durham’s work.

“There has been a delay because of the pandemic, yes,” Barr said. “It has been a fact that there have not been grand juries in virtually all districts for a long period of time. Also, people have been reluctant to travel for interviews. It has slowed things down. But he’s been working where he can on other matters that aren’t affected by the pandemic.”

Finally, and most importantly, the Democrats are conditioning Americans to accept authoritarianism blindly.

“Mandatory masks are a critical predicate conditioning us to accept abuses of our liberty,” said Molly McCann, who joined Sidney Powell in getting Gen. Michael Flynn’s perjury case dismissed. “Mandatory masking provides the foundation on which governments continue to justify emergency measures and rule by executive fiat, and it creates a national mood of consent that America will accept indefinite government expansion because we face a ‘new normal.’ “

Given their current behavior, the Democrats apparently want that “new normal” to be a one-party state that they and their left-wing allies control.

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Photo credit: vpereman

The so-called peace deal between the U.S. and Afghanistan never addressed an important fact: the powers-that-be ignored all the players in the game, somehow missing an endless supply of terrorists who are all heads connected to the same body.

In a post 9/11 interview, Osama bin Laden told Al-Jazeera television correspondent Tayseer Alouni that “all the Muslims are brothers.” Following this statement, he explained that a training camp established by Abu Ebeida El-Banashiri for mujahideen fighting against the former Soviet Union became known as al-Qaeda (the base). As far back as the late 1980s, these “sons of the nation” were considered “brothers in Islam from the Middle East, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Pakistan and as far as Mauritania,” he revealed. And it is this aged, subtle point which remains quite relevant — and often-overlooked — today.

The version of al-Qaeda dating back to the Soviet-Afghan War era is not the same al-Qaeda of today, as many have failed to recognize. In February 1998, the transnational Salafist organization was reformed at the World Islamic Front (WIF) by five prominent Islamic leaders: Osama bin Laden; Ayman al-Zawahiri, emir of the Jihad Group in Egypt; Ahmed Refai Taha of the Egyptian Islamic Group; Mir Hamzah, secretary of the Jamiat-ul-Ulema-e-Pakistan; and Fazlur Rahman, emir of the Jihad Movement in Bangladesh.

The WIF was comprised of at least 14 international pro-jihad organizations, including Abu Sayyaf in the Philippines, Chechen Jihad Group, the Islamic Jihad Group (Egypt), the Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan, Lashkar-e-Taiba, North Caucasian Jihad Group, the Turkistan Islamic Movement, the 055 Brigade (the Shadow Army), Harkat-ul-Jihad-al-Islami (Afghanistan), Harkat-ul-Mujahideen (Pakistan), Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (Afghanistan), Sipah-e-Sahaba (Pakistan), Uyghur Jihad Groups (Western China), and the Taliban.

To this day, according to the U.S. State Department’s Country Reports on Terrorism 2019, Pakistan is a “safe haven” for many “regionally focused terrorist groups.” These include, but are not limited to, the Taliban, al-Qaeda, Harakat ul-Jihad-i-Islami, Harakat-ul-Mujahideen, Hizbul Mujahideen, Jaish-e-Mohommad, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Tehreek-e-Nafaz-e-Shariat-e-Mohammadi.

The majority of WIF founders and the organizations above have something uniquely in common. Apart from Osama bin Laden and his successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri, the other three founders subscribed to the Asian branch of Islam. They are Deobandi. Furthermore, the latter seven of the 14 WIF organizations and at least half of the organizations operating safely out of Pakistan, today, also have something uniquely in common. They, too, are Deobandi.

The U.S. would be wise to make note of these ideological ties as it keeps a watchful eye on the future of Afghanistan amid the withdrawal of troops. The Taliban has a near-endless supply of Deobandi jihadists (including suicide bombers) coming from the east to join the effort to overthrow the Afghan government. Al-Qaeda and many others will continue to assist the effort to reestablish the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan. Practicing the original form of Islam through a strict implementation of sharia is their desire.

Not recognizing these facts has had and will continue to have grave consequences. U.S. efforts to bring the Taliban to the negotiating table for peace in Afghanistan was an outright failure in foreign policy. The Deobandi influence to providing a near-endless supply of fighters to the region appears to have gone unnoticed. And without calling upon the Taliban to publicly denounce ties and visibly separate itself from the likes of al-Qaeda and their affiliates, for example, the plan for bringing peace to Afghanistan was doomed from the start.

Dozens of heads connected to the same body of an Islamic hydra have been operating in Afghanistan with the support of Pakistan for decades. “Brothers in Islam from the Middle East, Philippines, Malaysia, India, Pakistan and as far as Mauritania” will continue to be a substantial threat to the world — and their vicious plot to destroy the West is far from over. Osama bin Laden was only the beginning of a persistent global threat, which will continue to rear its ugly head out of South Asia. Heed this warning, America – be careful dealing with this powerful global Ummah who are, indeed, brothers in Islam. They will return to haunt future administrations soon enough.

Terry Bishop’s writings and interests focus on the strategic influence of terrorism and subversion, counter-terrorism and national security. His research includes armed conflict and violence in South Asia with a  focus on al-Qaeda in the Indian Subcontinent (AQS), the Taliban, and other Deobandi-linked terror groups. His writings have been published by American Thinker, Defence & Security Alert, and Indian Defence Review.