Islamophobia" and Today's Ideological jihad
sentationsof Islam are most often the result of ignorance on the part of non-
Musl ims and relu ctan ce on the part of Musl ims to arti cula te thei r
case .' That soun ds great if you'r e a weep y PC type—but the cureCAI R
offers may be worse than the disease.
Dhimmitude from media andofficials
Whether from a fear of alarmin g the popula ce or a PC unwilli ngness to
caus e offe nse to Musl ims, or both , auth orit ies have on occa sion been
absu rdly reti cent about drawi ng conc lusi ons from evid ence that poin ts
tojihad terrorist activity in the United States.
In April 2005, firefighters conducting a routine inspection in a Brooklyn
supermarket found two hundred automobile airbags and a room lined
with posters of Osama bin Laden and beheadings in Iraq, An element in
the airbags can be used to make pipe bombs, The owner of the building,
acc ord ingto theNe wYol kPost, "servedjai l time in the lat e 1970 s and
early 1980s for arson, reckless endangerment, weapons possession and
conspiracy, according to the records," But officials were definite: "The hid-
den stockpile had nothing to do with terrorism."
It doesn't? What does it have to do with, then? Macrame?
Similarly, when explosions killed fifteen people and injured over a
hundred at an oil refinery in Texas City, Texas, on March 23, 2005,
theFBIquick ly ruled out terro rism as a possi ble cause .' When a group
calling itself Qaeda al-Jihad and another Islamic group both claimed
responsibility, the FBI was still dismissive.' But then it came to tight that
inves tigat ors did not visit the blast site until eight days after the explo-
sions and after they ruled out terrorism as a possibility. A more
independent-minded investigator asked, "How do you rule out one pos-
sib ili ty when you don 't have any ide a wha t the cau se is? "" Sti ll lat er
cam ethe revela tion thatinitial report s of a single blast were inaccur ate;
therewere as many as five different explosions at the refinery."