Divide & Conquer Muslims from Islamists

Yousef H. Aboul-Enein was born in Mississippi, but grew up in Saudi Arabia. He joined the US Navy Medical Service Corps, rose to Commander (Lt Col), and is now special advisor on Islamic militancy at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs. In his new book, "Miltant Islamist Ideology", Aboul-Enein divides Muslim world into three groups: Muslims, Islamists, and Militant Islamists:

"Militant Islamist" Aboul-Enein defines as "a group or individual advocating Islamist ideological goals, principally by violent means." Islamists are a group who advocate "Islam as a political as well as religious system.

Chief Islamist objectives include implementing sharia (Islamic) law "as the basis of all statutory issues." Islam is "the religious faith of Muslims, involving ... belief in Allah as the sole deity and in Muhammad as his prophet."

Militant Islamist ideology he condemns as a vicious fraud, for it "is composed of fragmented pieces of Islam ... they are recombined out of context to make up the bulwark of Militant Islamist ideology, which is not the religion of Islam." Militant Islamist ideology "seeks to establish a totalitarian state steeped in the language, symbols and narrowly selective aspects of Islam."

Aboul-Enein says faithful Muslims play a central role in defeating Militant Islamism, arguably the key role.

"Unlike communism," he writes, "against which free enterprise and democracy were used as ideological counterweights, Militant Islamist ideology can be opposed among the Muslim masses only by Islamic counter-argumentation. We cannot contain Militant Islamist ideology but only work to marginalize, de-popularize, and erode its influence and mass appeal by identifying it as different from Islam or even from Islamist political groups."

It's a clever argument and strategy but I'm not convinced that most ordinary Muslims aren't Islamists at heart.

Moshe Holtzberg

Moshe Holtzberg, aged two, was with his parents, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg (see below), in the Nariman House in Mumbai, India when two Muslim terrorists attacked their house, part of the larger attack that included the train station and Taj Mahal Hotel. Moshe is pictured above at his parents memorial. Gavriel was 29, Rivka 28.

Gavriel was a rabbi with the Chabad-Lubavitch Movement who had come to the Chabad center in 2003 to run a synagogue and Torah classes to serve the small Jewish community in Mumbai. That small presence was too much for the Muslims who took the Holtzbergs and six other people hostage and then executed them. An Indian doctor who examined the bodies said they were tortured. Rivka was several months pregnant.

Sandra Samuel, the Holtzberg's nanny, locked herself into a room on the first floor when the Muslim gunmen came, escaping their notice. She could hear Rivka screaming from the second floor, "Sandra help!" Then it stopped.

That night Indian commandoes stormed the six story building from the air and fought it out with the two Muslims, who were high on amphetamines and cocaine. The next morning, it was quiet. Sandra could hear the baby crying.


Sandra unbolted the door and crept upstairs to a gory scene (above). She found Moshe alive next to his dead parents and two guests, soaked in their blood. The two terrorists were up on the roof. She snatched Moshe up and ran outside. Sandra has since flown to Israel with Moshe to give him to his grandparents. His parents were buried Tuesday on Jerusalem’s Mount of Olives.

The terrorists were from Pakistan, from the poor and rural Punjab, to be exact. It's doubtful that any of them had ever met a Jew before they encountered the Holtzbergs. Everything they knew about Jews they heard from the radical mullahs who indoctrinated them to hate them.

Hopefully, Moshe will have no memory of his parents deaths. His only memories are likely to be abstract ones, like this image of him and his Dad.

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, where the Muslim terrorists were equipped and trained, the local state-run television claimed that the terror plot was neither Muslim nor Pakistani in origin, but the act of Western Zionists, Hindu Zionists, Israelis, and Mossad.

Some Muslims celebrated the slaughter, like Bilal from Britain:

"It was pleasantly refreshing to hear they targeted Chabad Lubavitch. Allah will destroy His enemies wherever they are in the world. You will know when the Muslims have ignited in an insurrection when there is blood on the streets of London and New York like there is blood on the streets of Fallujah (and Mumbai). There is nowhere they can hide from the wrath of Allah and His soldiers."