.... In American Jihad, Emerson expands substantially on his television documentary Jihad in America, which the Public Broadcasting System aired in 1994
.... Its message is clear: Hamas operatives and Islamic clerics are preaching war against Israel and America. This war, this jihad, is not a war of words. It is a violent, murderous struggle for absolute supremacy and the losers will have to convert or they will be killed.
..... Emerson and his staff have not just collected written materials and incriminating videos, but have personally interviewed many of the major villains in this nightmarish story. Throughout his impressive - and depressing - indictment, Emerson reminds us that jihadist Islam has made its many nests in this country precisely because of the freedoms and laws that protect every religion, no matter how vicious or seditious their message. The imams' vituperative demagoguery has made a mockery of our compulsive insistence on freedom of speech and religion.
.....Most of the major Muslim groups in this country support the jihadist program and Emerson's investigations show they are so slanderous, so mendacious and so hostile to all the good America stands for that their continued presence in this country would defy understanding were it not for the guarantees of verbal and religious freedoms provided in good faith by our culture and our courts.
.....The tenacious foothold of this insidious movement has not only been gained through the graces of our Bill of Rights. ...It is also due to the incredible blindness of those who support this evil. .....American Jihad provides ample evidence that these supporters have not emerged exclusively from the ranks of Muslims.
.....Rightists and Leftists, academicians and politicians - from all over the Western world - have jumped on the jihadist bandwagon. Many of these individuals wield considerable power and influence.
.....They may be motivated in part by a willing suspension of disbelief; they may be the victims of intellectual sloth; or they may take their stand on the jihadist soapbox because of financial incentives.
.....But the fundamental motive in the great majority of cases is the oldest of hatreds, the hatred of the Jews.
.....America is viewed as the epitome of Western culture and the Jews, so the tirades go, have not only produced the values that inform the Western way of life, they control it. The enormous sums of money that have been collected from believers and sympathetic oil magnates provide more than ample support for the Islamists hatred and murder; more than enough to train, subsidize and defend terrorists; more than enough to conceal the truth and cover this vicious reality with convincing congeniality.American Jihad provides a composite view of this enemy through direct quotes obtained from actual interviews and published documents.
.... What emerges is the fact that we are faced with a movement that transcends social and economic classes: doctors, lawyers and scientists shrilly advocate its hatreds.
......In addition, there are many major players in that world and Osama bin Laden is just one of them. .....The ideology of this enemy rivals the worst manifestations of Nazi dehumanization; in fact, it adopts the main engine of the Nazi killing machine, which was hatred of the Jew.
....We see this clearly in the Hamas charter of 1988, which is viciously antisemitic, aggressively seditious and leans heavily on the outrageous Protocols of the Elders of Zion. What is the meaning of 'free speech' in the context of the following statement by abu Faris, a spokesman for Hamas: ...'There is only one way to liberate Palestine and Al-Aqsa [the mosque], and that is the fighting, that is the Jihad, that is the slaughtering, that is the butchering . . . call it dialogue.'
.... How is one to comprehend the obstinate insistence by so many European governments that Hamas is a charitable organization when we hear the following refrain in a Hamas song:
....'We buy Paradise with the blood of Jews.'
....The chapter entitled Jihad in the Academy reveals in a nutshell how fertile American soil has been for the jihadists. Emerson writes: 'From 1991 to 1995 one of the world's most lethal terrorist factions used a think tank affiliated with the University of South Florida (along with a separate nonprofit organization) as a base for some of its top leaders. The formula was simple: use the laws, freedoms and loopholes of the most liberal nation on earth to help finance and direct one of the most violent international terrorism groups in the world.' Much of this chapter deals with Sami al-Arian, a Palestinian professor of engineering who became a faculty member of USF in 1986, and who quickly assumed leadership of various organizations which attacked Jews, Israel and the United States. Al-Arian would consistently present the most benign, humanitarian persona to the general public, and at the same time would spew the vilest injunctions against the so-called enemies of Islam in the company of fellow Islamic extremists. While insisting that he was solely promoting cultural, social and charitable activities, he would exhort his followers to destroy and murder. The University of South Florida was bombarded by letters and e-mails concerning this notorious promoter of genocide. The action taken by the administration was a joke: it placed al-Arian on indefinite administrative leave. This means he was allowed to continue drawing the salary of a tenured professor!
...Emerson asks: 'With liberties like these, why wouldn't the international jihad movement want to settle here?'
....The other case studies are hardly different. The pathological, simplistic banality of the jihadist platform would be laughable, were it not so dangerous.
.....American Jihad establishes beyond any doubt that jihadist Islam is flourishing in America.
.... Its vanguard is deeply entrenched and its supporters are multiplying rapidly. From pulpits and lecture halls all over this country, the message delivered by these Muslims is so divorced from what one would expect in any main-stream religion that reading their diatribes is to be transported to an incredibly monochrome world of hatred and bloodlust.
.....Militant Muslims cry out for violence and killing, and Emerson repeatedly warns us that these firebrands are after American blood as well as Jewish. Every American who is not a Muslim must die.
....The pluralistic, democratic values which Americans treasure, and the values for which our people have fought and died, are decried as Satanic.
....These moral alchemists transform the most precious accomplishments of a great modern nation into the basest of human values, and their goal is to replace them with dogmatism, xenophobia and genocide.
