Robert Maguire's Library tagged violence →  View Popular

A wave
of young British Islamists who trained to fight – who cheered as their
friends bombed this country – have recanted. Now they are using everything
they learned on the inside, to stop the jihad.

Seventeen former radical Islamists have "come out" in the past 12
months and have begun to fight back. Would they be able to tell me the
reasons that pulled them into jihadism, and out again? Could they be the key
to understanding – and defusing – Western jihadism? I have spent three
months exploring their world and befriending their leading figures. Their
story sprawls from forgotten English seaside towns to the jails of Egypt's
dictatorship and the icy mountains of Afghanistan – and back again.

That's Michelle Malkin's broad brush. And that kind of rhetoric can have consequences:

Marine reservist Jasen Bruce was getting clothes out of
the trunk of his car Monday evening when a bearded man in a robe
approached him.

That man, a Greek Orthodox priest named Father Alexios Marakis,
speaks little English and was lost, police said. He wanted directions.

What the priest got instead, police say, was a tire iron to the
head. Then he was chased for three blocks and pinned to the ground — as
the Marine kept a 911 operator on the phone, saying he had captured a
terrorist.

And here's a classic moment:

When officers arrived, police say, Bruce told them he heard the man say “Allahu Akbar” – Arabic for “God is great.” “That’s what they say before they blow you up,” Bruce said, according to police.

But this too is worth noting:

McElroy said Bruce "teared up when we told him that (Marakis) was a Greek Orthodox priest and not a terrorist."

Really? I don’t recall George Tiller’s killing—or Eric Rudolf’s before him—as having touched-off some kind of widespread social or intellectual attack on American Christianity. Indeed, the United States Conference of Bishops responded to the Tiller murder in a manner that, had it been used by CAIR, would have prompted cries of moral equivalence:

“Our bishops’ conference and all its members have repeatedly and publicly denounced all forms of violence in our society, including abortion as well as the misguided resort to violence by anyone opposed to abortion,” Cardinal Rigali said. “Such killing is the opposite of everything we stand for, and everything we want our culture to stand for: respect for the life of each and every human being from its beginning to its natural end. We pray for Dr. Tiller and his family.”

And, I dunno, it is what it is. After all, what are you really supposed to say about religion. After all, not only is the bishops’ statement kind of inadequate, but the central premise of Christian religion (the whole Jesus thing) is—according to me and to Jeff Goldberg too—totally false. Islam too! And yet at the same time we all need to coexist. And fortunately the vast majority of people professing every faith, along with the vast majority of those professing no faith, are rejecting violence and not killing people.

A drone
attack in the Waziristan area, the Taliban's stronghold, had killed the
Pakistani Taliban's chief and U.S. and Pakistani intelligence officials said
that his successor, Hakimullah Mehsud, was killed in a duel to replace him.

Unfortunately, the spate of grisly
attacks during the past week has proven that Hakimullah
Mehsud is very much alive and so is the Taliban -- with renewed confidence and
vengeance to boot.

I was haunted by what I saw. Kids were having sex in the staircases – butt naked – caught on camera sex. As teachers, we were asked to assist the police in checking the bags of students and help waive the metal detecting wand at the front door during random weapons checks. During one of these checks early in the school year, I saw two cops throw a boy out the door and down so hard I was sure we’d need to call an ambulance. “That’s what they be doin’ to niggas,” a student said to me as I watched it happen.

After the weapons check, we were ordered to restore order in our classes and teach kids who felt like objects and criminals, not students. I remember having a particularly hard time going back to class one day after seeing one of my own students getting handcuffed after cops found drugs in the sole of his shoes. Just a day earlier, I had given this boy a book about basketball that he was quietly reading in the back of class.