Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
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Muslims in their late teens and early twenties have recently been arrested in Michigan, New Jersey, and Washington state. They all seem to have been involved in plotting jihad massacres for the Islamic State: the Michigan jihadis wanted to hit gay bars in Detroit, and the Seattle and New Jersey jihadis were formulating plans for jihad massacres at Jewish targets. Such jihad plots are certain to become increasingly common in the U.S., given mass Muslim migration with the unshakeable assumption that every Muslim who enters the country is a “moderate.” The jihadis in Washington and New Jersey, however, show the falsity of another core assumption: that poverty and lack of education leads to terrorism.
The would-be jihad mass murderers in question, Milo Sedarat and Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel, are both spoiled rich kids who have lived lives of privilege. The New York Post reported Thursday that nineteen-year-old Milo Sedarat, who is the son of famous Iranian-American poet, Roger Sedarat, “bragged about being ‘the biggest antisemite in America’” and “ranted about how he wanted to murder his artist mom’s Jewish friends.” He also “menacingly posed for pictures in his $1.2 million family home with swords and knives,” while apparently Dad was nearby placidly writing poetry.
Sedarat told an online friend: “I can’t wait for the day I get to execute like 10 yahood,” that is, Jews. He added: “Line up like 500 Jews and execute them in front of their wives and family. Then take all their wives [as] slaves. Imma [that is, I’m going to] have like 10 yahood slave girls inshallah.”
Meanwhile, Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel, also 19 and the son of a UN diplomat, volunteered to behead people for propaganda videos, and said that he wanted the group to “do something that’s going to leave a mark in history. Something that’s gonna make them create a documentary on you on Netflix. Something that’s gonna make you have a Wikipedia page.”
This sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen, at least according to the conventional wisdom. Learned analysts since 9/11, and before that, have told us repeatedly that terrorism is a result of desperation, a desperate lashing-out on the part of people who are suffering under grinding poverty and lack of opportunity. As they have no opportunity to get adequate instruction in their peaceful religion of Islam, they are susceptible to the twisted, hijacked version of Islam that jihad preachers present to them. Further enticing them is the promise of virgins in paradise, as well as earthly rewards for their families from the government of the Palestinian Authority and others.
The solution to jihad terrorism, seen in this light, is money. If non-Muslims shower money on Muslim communities, and build roads and schools and hospitals for them, Muslims will go to the schools and learn that their religion actually teaches peace, tolerance, and love. Once they graduate, they’ll be able to pursue all manner of opportunities, and thus have no problem resisting the lure of the jihad preachers.
This is the strategy that the U.S. pursued in Iraq and Afghanistan, and continues to pursue. When Old Joe Biden’s regime sent $100 million to Gaza and $20 billion to Iran after the October 7 jihad attacks, it was pursuing this strategy. It is quite clear, however, and has been for years, that this approach doesn’t work. Muslims don’t turn to jihad because they’re poor and uneducated, and showering money upon them won’t make them love the United States. Osama bin Laden, after all, was one of the world’s richest men, and yet he chose the path of jihad anyway.
And so did these two spoiled rich kids, Milo Sedarat and Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzel. Hijackers of Islam didn’t bamboozle them. They clearly found the Qur’an’s numerous denunciations of Jews, and calls for violence against unbelievers, to be compelling. And this is the alternative to the mainstream view in general: if poverty and lack of opportunity don’t cause terrorism, what does? Ideology. Beliefs. No one in the U.S. government, however, at any point on the political spectrum, wants to go near this quite obvious fact, because we have been indoctrinated relentlessly for a quarter-century to assume that to recognize this was a kind of “bigotry” and “hatred.”
The result of our continuing willful ignorance will be that there will be many more Milo Sedarats and Tomas Kaan Jimenez-Guzels. If, one day, they succeed in their goal of destroying this nation completely as a free society, as the remaining Americans are led into dhimmitude and impoverishment they can at least congratulate themselves that they were never “Islamophobic.”
