CIA Director John Brennan: Jihad a Product of Injustices, Economics, and Ignorance

Here again, Obama’s CIA director John Brennan engages in the same dangerous obfuscation and deception that has put America in the crosshairs, leading us to sure catastrophe. He insists that jihad is a legitimate tenet of Islam. Indeed. So he knows.

Jihad is not motivated by ignorance or poverty. Those who waged jihad on September 11th, the Christmas underwear bomber, the Glasgow airport bombers, etc. etc. etc. were well off, well educated.

So what is the CIA chief’s explanation as to why such a “perverse and very corrupt” understanding of Islam—one that has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad”— resonates among Muslims?

These endless lies about a vicious and lethal enemy are designed to disarm the American people. Perhaps Brennan is engaging in taqiyya. I am surprised that Brennan didn’t make these remarks in Arabic, as he has been known to do.

Bear in mind, there have been rumors swirling for years that Brennan converted to Islam when stationed in Saudi Arabia.

CIA director John Brennan is at it again—equivocating over the nature of jihad by evoking paradigms familiar to the West.

Last Tuesday, “during an event at the Council of Foreign Relations, Brennan was asked about the ‘war of ideas’ surrounding Islam, which the questioner said many Americans tend to equate with violence.”

The CIA chief responded by saying that al-Qaeda’s ideology is “a perverse and very corrupt interpretation of the Qur’an”; that “al-Qaeda has hijacked” Islam; that “they have really distorted the teachings of Muhammad.”

Even so, “that ideology, that agenda of al-Qaeda,” confirmed Brennan, “has gained resonance and following in many parts of the world.”

So what is the CIA chief’s explanation as to why such a “perverse and very corrupt” understanding of Islam—one that has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad”— resonates among Muslims?

He gives none—other than to say that this ideology is “fed a lot of times by, you know, political repression, by economic, you know, disenfranchisement, by, you know, lack of education and ignorance, so there—there are a number of phenomena right now that I think are fueling the fires of, you know, this ideology.”

Interestingly, if you watch the video clip of Brennan talking, you will note that he only “you knows” in the above quotation (four times) and right before it, when he says that al-Qaeda has “distorted the teachings of Muhammad, you know, for violent purposes.”

The rest of his talk is relatively smooth.

Could Brennan be self-conscious of his own equivocations—hence all these stilted “you knows” in one sentence?

Could he be aware of the Rand Corporation report on counterterrorism, prepared for the Office of the Secretary of Defense in 2009?   It found that “Terrorists are not particularly impoverished, uneducated, or afflicted by mental disease. Demographically, their most important characteristic is normalcy (within their environment). Terrorist leaders actually tend to come from relatively privileged backgrounds.”

At any rate, this is all déjà vu.  Back in May 2010, I closely examined Brennan’s apologetics on jihad in an article that, in light of these recent remarks of his, is just as applicable today as it was nearly four years ago.  It follows:

Obama’s Top Counterterror Adviser’s Inability to Think Outside the Box Bodes Disaster

“The greatest hurdle Americans need to get over in order to properly respond to the growing threat of radical Islam is purely intellectual in nature; specifically, it is epistemological, and revolves around the abstract realm of ‘knowledge.’ Before attempting to formulate a long-term strategy to counter radical Islam, Americans must first and foremost understand Islam, particularly its laws and doctrines, the same way Muslims understand it—without giving it undue Western (liberal) interpretations. This is apparently not as simple as expected: all peoples of whatever civilizations and religions tend to assume that other peoples more or less share in their worldview, which they assume is objective, including notions of right and wrong, good and bad. …. [T]he secular, Western experience has been such that people respond with violence primarily when they feel they are politically, economically, or socially oppressed. While true that many non-Western peoples may fit into this paradigm, the fact is, the ideologies of radical Islam have the intrinsic capacity to prompt Muslims to violence and intolerance vis-à-vis the ‘other,’ irrespective of grievances…. Being able to understand all this, being able to appreciate it without any conceptual or intellectual constraints is paramount for Americans to truly understand the nature of the enemy and his ultimate goals.”

Such were the words that opened my testimony to Congress. One year later, none other than President Obama’s top counter-terror adviser, John Brennan, has come to personify the approach I warned against, that is, the misguided phenomenon of westernizing Islamic concepts.

A Fox New’s report, titled “Counterterror Adviser Defends Jihad as ‘Legitimate Tenet of Islam,’” has the details:

During a speech at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, John Brennan described violent extremists as victims of “political, economic and social forces,” but said that those plotting attacks on the United States should not be described in “religious terms.”

In other words, despite the fact that Islamists describe all their goals in “religious terms,” Brennan sees them as naught more than victims of the system. And why is that? Because Brennan believes that “political, economic and social forces”—the three I specifically stressed in my excerpt above—are the only precipitators to violence. So jihadis can openly articulate their violent bloodlust through religious terms all they want, it matters not: Brennan and his ilk have their intellectual blinders shut tight and refuse to venture outside the box.

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Barry Wendell Jackson, Esq.

8 years ago

From what I have read, I surmise John Brennan converted to Sunni Muslim Salafism, which is the dominant form in Saudi Arabia. Salafism is also called Wahhabism (but not by adherents.)

Salafists consider the Shia Muslims to be apostates, who should be assassinated. And they have in recent decades assassinated millions of Shia Muslims.
By now Shia Muslim leaders in the U.S. know whether Brennan is a Salafist. They need to let Congress know! (President Obama appears to be committed to Brennan.)

Salafists are not peaceful. I gather, from what I have read, that all Muslim Terrorists in the U.S. that have been convicted (or are dead) attended the dozen or so Salafist Mosques, with Salafist Imams. (There are many more mosques in the U.S.)

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