Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Podcast

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon, Chapter Four Podcast Five

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter four and introduces the deadly Western women of the Caliphate.
 
Deadly Women
 
            Some women, like some men, are sadistic and power hungry, and the Islamic State provides them with opportunities. The British “White Widow” Samantha Lewthwaite married one of the perpetrators of the 2005 London bombings. She developed a sinister and legendary status as one of the world’s most wanted women. The London University dropout is credited with killing over 400 people in coordination with the terrorist group al Shabaab. A senior Somali official called her “an evil person, but a very clever operator.” She is not known to be currently associated with the Caliphate.
 
            The middle-aged Belgian Muriel Degauque blasted herself into history, if only in a footnote, as the first known European Muslim female suicide bomber.  American Colleen LaRose, known as “Jihad Jane,” was sent to prison for planning to kill Swedish cartoonist Lars Vilks.
 
            These three women represent a cross-section of Western society. Intelligent Lewthwaite attended university; ordinary Degauque was from the industrial working class; and pathetic LaRose had a pitiable childhood. All turned to Islam to fill a spiritual void, as has happened with many other Western women.
 
Psychological and Social Drivers—Peace Symbols and Black Flags
 
The heart’s longings lead the mind, and the existential filler of ISIS nourishes the desperate and vulnerable soul, however much one is surrounded by material comfort.
 
Collective judgments of four psychiatrists referring to why Westerners are drawn to the Caliphate, 2015
 
            The draw of utopia and the compulsion of Jihad explain two of the broad lures of the Caliphate. The third group of motivators is grounded in psychology and social themes. Anger at perceived discrimination, alienation, fatalism, and a need to belong to a mass movement are psychosocial drivers for some Western Muslims. Today’s generation of Western Muslims is more attracted to Jihad than that of their parents or grandparents.
 
            Western youth joining the Caliphate are usually eager to make war. Among young men, there is a hypermasculine and virile ethos. The State’s recruiting themes cultivate the image of the heroic horseman who is master of his environment and admired by his fellow warriors. Elizabeth van der Heide, of the Dutch Center for Terrorism and Counterterrorism, said young males see the war as a video game: “Those are primarily young people who relocate to the war game in Syria and Iraq from a video game.”
 
            Another study observed that the most effective recruitment approach is to target a candidate’s sense of self-worth. The study cited the Florida killer Omar Mateen as “the perfect fit” for the Caliphate’s approach. Young men who felt neglected or weak as boys can become a part of something powerful and victorious. One young man who was not weak but still needed a purpose in life was Thundercat, profiled below.
 
Profile Eleven: Thundercat! “A Prince of a Man”
 
“[He was] a prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.”  A friend of Thundercat, 2015
 
            One Jihadi who fought for the State did not have an apparent need to validate his masculinity. He had repeatedly proven it in the ring as a two-time Thai boxing world champion from Germany. Valdet Gashi traveled to Syria with three other Thai boxers to fight with weapons, rather than fists.
 
            Gashi arrived in Germany from Albania as a six-year-old boy and was raised in a relatively secular home. As a young man, he shot up the kickboxing ranks, and the local boys described him as a “prince who everyone on the street knew and greeted.” He fought 152 fights under the name Thundercat.  Some of his fights were posted on YouTube, and his speed and style are clearly devastating.
 
            Thundercat married his local sweetheart and then sired two daughters. But the fighter was drawn to the German Islamic Salafist program called Read, and he developed a moral obligation to leave his wife and daughters and join the Caliphate to fight for Islam. He said he would rather die for Allah than live as a coward.
 
            In an interview in May 2015, Thundercat declared his respect for the State, which, in his view, was deeply misunderstood in the West. As a Muslim, he could only be happy by “doing something good for Islam.” But many of his fans were disappointed, and some Muay Thai fans hoped to strip him of his championship titles. His father was fed up, too. Enver Gashi said, “Valdet’s place is with us—with his children, his wife, and his parents. . . . I want him to stop this nonsense, and I hope he’ll come back to us one day, because his place is here and nowhere else.” But Thundercat never came home.
 
            The champ tweeted from Syria that he was patrolling the Euphrates River to intercept smugglers. “If I die while doing good, I am sure I will be happy.” He did die, killed in a mission in July 2015. His brother eulogized him on social media and prayed that he rest in peace. Thundercat’s fights were over.
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World,” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Four

Sexual Jihad
 
“There are a lot of things about us women that sadden me, considering how men see us as rascals.”     Lysistrata, from the play Lysistrata by Arisotphanes”
 
            As the Greek play goes, Athenian women were fed up with the war against the Spartans. Lysistrata organized a sex strike to force their men to stop killing Spartans, who, according to plan, would stop killing Athenians in turn. The older Athenian women seized the state treasury. The men, without money to buy wine or women to enjoy, made peace with each other, laid down their arms, and reveled in Bacchus and women. But this is not the story of the Islamic State.
 
            In the Caliphate, sexual Jihad is the obligation for women and girls to provide male Jihadis with sexual outlets to relieve the pent-up frustrations brought on by combat. Sexual intercourse is a recurring theme in Islamic sacred texts—when to have it, with whom to have it, where to have it, and the consequences of having it improperly. All kinds of advice about sex are given by the Islamic State. Posters in public places in Mosul read, “We call upon the people of this country to bring their unmarried girls so they can fulfill their duty in sex Jihad for their warrior brothers in the city.”
 
            There is the “groupie” effect. Some women are drawn to the sexual Jihad because of the charisma and derring-do of the Caliphate’s alpha males. The Caliphate’s propagandists use “Jihotties” to play on the hormonal drives of young women and girls. The British comedian Shazia Mirza, mentioned earlier, stresses, “This is not about radicalization; its sexualisation.” The repressed, sexually driven teenage girls have built a fantasy world around their longing for romance and adventure. Mirza argued that for them, State fighters promise “no-guilt halal sex of which Allah approves.”
 
            The matrimonial pairing is sometimes facilitated by a “fixer,” who acts as a matchmaker. There is also an electronic facilitator, “Jihad Matchmaker.”  Women seeking husbands may submit a photo of themselves, and men may select a woman. Women already living in Syria have more options. As one female Jihadi tweeted, “They’ll get a male foreign fighter in a room, and the girls will all walk up and down covered, and the fighter will have the opportunity to look at their face, and he will choose one.”
 
            Photographs of young men with bandoleros crisscrossing their chests populate the Caliphate’s websites. This led a Saudi woman to divorce her husband and smuggle herself and her two children into Syria and then Iraq. Her aim was to marry Abu Musab Al-Zarqawi, the paladin of al Qaeda in Iraq.
 
            Another example is the case of a young Dutch woman who was arrested upon her return to Holland from Syria. Earlier, she had gone to Raqqa to marry a Dutch-Turkish jihadist who had served in the Dutch military. She found him irresistibly attractive. The young woman’s mother explained her daughter’s overheated imagination: “She saw him as a sort of Robin Hood.”
The mother made the dangerous trip to fetch her daughter from Syria. She succeeded, and the romantic adventure was over.
 
War Widows—“It’s Like a Celebration”
 
            The call for sexual Jihad has had some successes and failures. Besotted women have trekked to the Middle East, but their sojourns usually do not end in the Gothic romance they expected. Some are initially glad to sexually service the warriors, but most soon regret their decision.  Many of those who leave the relative comforts and security of the West soon begin to tweet their regrets to their parents and friends.
 
            Some of these Western women become widowed soon after marriage. Many cannot mourn men they did not know. One explained, “In the whole year I probably saw him for less than one month altogether. Then he was martyred.” She then married an Egyptian, who left her to return to Egypt. She did not love either man.
 
            Western widows, particularly the less attractive ones, need to wait for new husbands. But many widows see the wait as an act of piety. “It’s not hard [the wait] because it’s for the sake of Allah, we are happy to observe it. When one husband gets martyred, it’s like a celebration.” But others enjoy the lifestyle and do not mind the replicable husbands. One of them is Aqsa Mahmood.
 
Profile Ten: Aqsa Mahmood “You Are a Disgrace to Your Family and the People of Scotland”
“I will become a martyr.” —Aqsa Mahmood
 
            The Mahmood family of Glasgow, Scotland, was taken completely by surprise. The parents could not explain why their daughter, a twenty-year-old Aqsa (also spelled Aksa), vanished for Syria to kill for the Caliphate. Aqsa’s mother and father became particularly alarmed when they saw a photograph of her holding a severed head as a trophy.
 
            A girl of relative privilege, Aqsa had studied at a tony all-girls’ school, where, it is thought, she developed radical beliefs. Her high school friends described her as “ambitious and talented” and as a “normal girl.” In her final year of school, as she prepared to begin a radiology course, she began wearing a hijab. In November 2013, she withdrew from university and moved to Syria. Something had happened to her.
 
            By September 2014, Mahmood had a new family in Syria and was encouraging her Facebook fans to follow her lead: “The family you get in exchange for leaving the ones behind is like the pearl in comparison to the shell you threw away into the foam of the sea.” She married an Islamic State fighter in Syria, who was killed in battle, and she penned a survival guide for Jihadi war widows. Her blog commentary soon became morbid, and she became a leader of an all-women morality police force. She saluted her sisters’ “desires and cravings to participate in the battlefield and give away your blood.” She was in her element.
 
            Aqsa has developed an international fan club, but her parents have yet to join. Her mother and father openly and repeatedly pled to Aqsa to return home, where she would be forgiven and loved. They whispered that they had raised her “with love and affection in a happy home.”  But she no longer loves her parents; she belongs to the Caliphate. In her words, “I [belong] only to our beloved Ameer, destroyer of the enemies, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and to the Islamic State.”
 
            Aqsa’s parents’ initial hope turned to anger and then despair. They called her a “bedroom radical.” They also sent a message to Aqsa: “You are a disgrace to your family and the people of Scotland, your actions are a perverted and evil distortion of Islam.” Mr. Mahmood is haunted by the last words his daughter said to him. She promised, “I will see you on the day of judgment. I will take you to heaven, I will hold your hand. I will become a martyr.” According to her father, “That’s what she said.”
 
 
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Two

Profile Nine: Maria, Fatima, and Alessandra
            By the time she was in her early twenties, Muslim convert Maria Giulia Sergio had become famous in her country of birth, Italy. She was also well known in her new home, the Islamic State, under her new name, Fatima. The former biotechnology student at the University of Milan said, “I can’t wait to die as a martyr,” according to L’Espresso magazine. Sergio celebrated the Charlie Hebdo killings. “When we behead someone, we’re obeying Sharia Law.”
 
            For Maria, Jihad became a family affair. She persuaded her entire Catholic family to convert to Islam. She also had success with her in-laws. This made news because the general pattern of family radicalization begins with parental pressure. But it was the young Maria who made Muslims of her family. She then traveled to Syria and beckoned her father, “Dad, you are called by Islam, you are the master at home: bring Mum here to Syria. You are her husband: She’s obliged to obey.”  Her mother and father tried to do so, but were held by the police. Five Albanian in-laws connected to Sergio’s husband were arrested for planning to join their daughter-in-law.
            While living in Italy, Maria sought to present Islam to her Italian compatriots. But not all Italians are enamored of Maria and her Islamist designs. In 2009, the fiery Muslima met her match with El Duce’s granddaughter, Alessandra Mussolini. In the 1980s, Mussolini posed for European men’s magazines, sometimes without wearing a top. Decades later, the two sparred on television. Hijab-clad Maria lectured Mussolini on feminine decorum, insisting that women should never wear revealing clothes that might excite men. But Mussolini, today a right-oriented European parliamentarian, was unconvinced. She, as well as her maternal aunt, Sophia Loren, made no apologies for the beauty of a woman’s form.
 
Jihad—Duty, Honor, Caliphate
 
“There’s no life, no life without Jihad.”  A Briton found guilty of terrorism in 2014, explaining his motives to a court in London
 
            Some of the Caliphate’s recruiting tropes have timeless and universal appeal. These refrains are duty, honor, and country. Pericles’s funeral oration of the Athenian dead of the First Peloponnesian War saluted the fallen and praised the living. It set a historical model for other Democratic leaders. Napoleon’s farewell to the Old Guard acknowledged France’s sacrifice. Both contained patriotic and martial themes that are used in the Caliphate’s information operations.
 
            Duty, honor, and country are also woven into the Caliphate’s general call for Jihad, which is the second general attraction. Jihad is a core tenet of Islam and is often described as the sixth pillar. Some have likened Jihad to self-improvement or spiritual yoga. This is the Greater Jihad, which often means becoming more pious.
 
            Generally, however, Jihad has meant defending Islam, expanding Islam’s domain by conquest, or subjugating cultures under its sway. It is a matter of obligation and honor for all Muslims to heed this call and migrate to the Islamic State. This has been the general Western, as well as consensus Islamic, view. Tocqueville wrote, in 1838, “Jihad, Holy War, is an obligation for all believers. The state of war is the natural state with regard to infidels.” The late political scientist Samuel Huntington referenced “Islam’s bloody borders” in the context of Jihad. Bernard Lewis said, “The Muslim Jihad was perceived as unlimited, as a religious obligation that would continue until the entire world had adopted the Muslim faith or submitted to a Muslim Ruler.” This is the Caliphate’s view.
 
            Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian, was the late-twentieth-century activist-theologian who rallied the Islamic world to Jihad. He became the theorist of global Jihad in the 1980s. In the absence of a Caliphate, individuals could pursue their own Jihad. He was later killed, perhaps on the orders of Osama bin Laden, but his voice and writings gave individual Muslims a prominent role in the current anti-Western Jihad. Today, European-raised propagandists beckon Westerners to the Jihad.
 
 
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast Three

For the first two years of the Caliphate’s existence, it was easy for Westerners to travel to its cities. Security services did not expect the lure of the Caliphate, and man border controls in Europe had been removed. From 2014 to early 2016, it was relatively easy for those with support and guidance to travel from most European cities to the Caliphate.
            A Daily Mail undercover sting operation, undertaken in coordination with the London police, demonstrates the ease of travel and the assistance provided to the traveler at each step of the journey. A journalist posing as a fixer for the State advertised on Twitter, Kik, Surespot, and Telegram. A young woman living in Syria responded and asked the undercover journalist to help transport her sixteen-year-old sister to Syria. The fixer and the Jihadi’s sister would meet at a fast-food restaurant in niqabs, book a holiday to Basle, Switzerland, and pay with it on the fixer’s credit card. They would pack secretly and leave before dawn, dressed in Western attire. From Switzerland, they would book a one-way trip to Istanbul. From Istanbul, they would take a bus to Gaziantep, where they would be met by the State’s fixers. They would be escorted to a safe house, where they would be introduced to the man who would be the girl’s husband. However, police had been monitoring this from the outset and made arrests as a result.
 
            Travel from Europe is not expensive. A cheap flight from the continent to Turkey can cost as little as $150. In 2014, 2015, and 2016, a visa was generally not required to enter Turkey, the gateway to Syria. Smugglers ferrying pistachios, food, sugar, and fuel also transport Jihadis. Some of the smugglers act out of solidarity, others have mercenary motives, and still others do it because the State pressures and threatens them.
Women Hear the Caliphate’s Call
 
“Keep it Halal and get married.”
 
            There has long been a mystique associated with European women and the Islamic world. Stories of young, blonde beauties captured by Muslim pirates and imprisoned in harems were imagined in penny-dreadful Victorian novels and on the canvases of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Eugène Delacroix. Mozart had some musical fun with a harem in his opera Abduction from the Seraglio. Fair-skinned, blue-eyed, blonde-haired girls and women were historically prized captives for Muslims. And today, European-appearing female captives fetch a handsome price in the Caliphate as sex slaves. However, only rarely did women voluntarily forgo European or American lifestyles to live as traditional Muslims in the Islamic world. But history does record several.
 
            Margaret Marcus was a well-to-do New Yorker who, as an adolescent, dreamed of a “new golden age” of Jews and Muslims. In early adulthood, she became tormented by schizophrenia. She converted to Islam and tried to build a new life in Pakistan, but her mental illness continued to stalk her there, too.
 
            A love-smitten twentysomething, Phyllis Chessler, followed her poetry-reciting Afghan sweetheart to Kabul and found herself trapped in a harem. She escaped to write a memoir about it. So did Betty Mahmoody, who fled Iran, as recounted in the docudrama Not Without My Daughter. These women learned, too late, that their husbands, like many men in the Islamic world, held deeply ingrained traditional Islamic values.
 
            This makes the Islamic State’s allure perplexing. In the Islamic world and in Western Islamic enclaves, girls and women can be psychologically or physically tormented for wearing fashionable clothes and makeup, for befriending non-Muslim schoolmates, and for demanding to chart their life’s course. Most horrific are “honor killings,” in which family members collude to snuff out the lives of women and girls, often in the flower of their youth. Flirtations, idle chatting with boys or men, and being seen with males to whom they are not related can be serious, sometimes capital, offenses for girls and women in traditional Islamic families.
 
            Women nevertheless journey to the Caliphate. Some come to Raqqa to find husbands, expecting an avalanche of manly suitors. Others travel to assume leadership roles and develop skills. As an analyst notes, “The girls go around making cookies. It’s almost like a Jihadi Tupperware party.” Anne Birgitta Nilsen, an associate professor at Oslo University College, researched the Facebook activity of European women who want to join the State. She pointed out the “gentle” day-to-day nature of information operations. The Caliphate’s media operations show children playing in schoolyards. And then there is sex.
.
 

Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Four Podcast One

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This excerpt comes from chapter three and turns to Western universities and militant Islam.
 
Blue-Eyed Jihad: The Caliphate’s Foreign Legion, Part One
 
Introduction
            Earlier chapters provide the background for examining foreign fighters. Chapter 4 explains the draw of the Caliphate. Who is an average foreign fighter? A think tank with the US Military Academy at West Point processed 4,000 captured records of foreign fighters. The average age was twenty-six, but the age range went from teenagers to men in their sixties. Many were uneducated, but several had advanced degrees. About 60 percent were single, but some were married with families. A third had gone to high school, and a quarter had some college education. Most are laborers.
 
            Westerners have heard the Caliphate’s call and have come by the thousands. There are three basic drives to the State: utopia, Jihad, and psychosocial factors.
 
Black Utopia—Heaven on Earth
 
“I left to build us all a house in heaven, Allah promised us heaven if we sacrifice our world life. . . . I’m not coming back. A London-raised mother writing from Raqqa, October 2014
 
            Some European foreign fighters go to the Middle East to build a paradise. Well-to-do as well as out-of-luck Western Muslims see limitless prospects in a society they can help create. The world they envision is ordained and described by Allah as the perfect society. It is an Islamic utopia, a heaven on earth.
 
            Other religions and civilizations have imagined perfect worlds. In his 1516 masterwork, Thomas More wrote of a pretend island named Utopia, translated as “happy land.” Its upbeat citizens dressed plainly, eat communally, and owned no private property. A darker utopic vision was crafted in the steamy, disease-ridden jungles of Paraguay in 1886. New Germany was to be protected from the contaminants of modernity, materialism, and racial spoilation. But it collapsed, and little remains today but a scattering of German family names and Nordic appearances in South American jungles.5 The Islamic State’s philosophy bears little resemblance to these societies. However, it shares some characteristics with totalitarian dystopias of the 1930s and 1940s, such as the Soviet Union and the Third Reich.
 
Three Utopias
 
            Like the Soviets and Nazis, today’s Islamist State adherents see their utopia as void of significant political or social faults. The Soviets sought to build a workers’ paradise of goods and services distributed equally. They saw the major defects in the world the result of unfair distribution of national and political wealth. The Nazis’ paradise was to build on the foundations of a pseudoscience of race. As with the Soviets, the Nazis envisioned a society in which its citizens would enjoy health care, education, nutrition, and wealth.
 
            All three philosophies are atavistic. Like the Marxists and Nazis, Jihadists want to eliminate the roots of war and to re-create elements of a largely mythical past. The Caliphate seeks to return to a period of “rightly guided” Muslims, namely the first generation of Muslims. Although modern technology has been employed, it would be a socially primitive society in which all human activity is circumscribed by Islamic law and Koranic revelation. A young Indonesian explained, “The Islamic State is like a dream come true for me and all Muslims. Now is the time to return to Islamic glory, like . . . in the old days.” The State would provide all the basic necessities for Muslims.
 
            All three philosophies are romantic. Nazis hoped to re-create a pure Aryan society, as expressed in German mythology and folklore. Similarly, Marxists hoped to recreate a world without private property. Islamists, too, look to a distant, largely imagined past. Jessica Stern and J. M. Berger, writers on terrorism, speak of the Caliphate’s hope to return Islam to an imaginary ideal of original purity.  Harvard’s Noah Feldman, a scholar of Islam, adds, “The more medieval the practice, the more they like it.”
 
            Like the Soviets and the Nazis, the Caliphate sees itself as constantly threatened by internal and external enemies. Yehuda Bauer, a scholar of the Nazi period, notes common elements of other twentieth-century utopias. “All three—Nazis, Stalinists, Islamists—aspired, or aspire, to rule over the entire world, promising a utopia and an apocalyptic end to history. All three were, or are, genocidal.”
 
Blogging the Life in Utopia
 
“Power is in tearing human minds to pieces and putting them together again in new shapes of your own choosing.” George Orwell, 1984, 1949
 
            The utopic aspirations of the State’s foreign fighters can be gleaned from their blog entries. Blogging is a large part of the Caliphate’s information operations. In 2011, before the creation of the Islamic State, a blogger on the al-Tahaddi Islamic Network described utopia as a “divine system, the Islamic system,” which is completely free of discrimination, injustice, or any social flaws. “It is not Arab nor regional, rather, it is Islamic.” This captures the utopic goal of the Caliphate today.
           
A recurring word in the Caliphate’s literature is “freedom,” which is promised in abundance in the Islamic State. But its usage contrasts with the Western understanding of freedom, which generally means the unfettered ability to say, believe, vote, and, often, behave as one would like. For the Caliphate, freedom is the ability to practice Islam unconstrained and to live in an exclusively Muslim society. This Islamic world has no legally defined borders because it aspires to global dominance. There is no clearly articulated concept of individual freedom in Islamic law, or Sharia. Islamic utopia is predicated on religious conformity.
 
            But many of the world’s Muslims support a level of religious freedom that would be antithetical to the State. In 2013, a Pew poll concluded that most Muslims around the world express support for democracy, and most say it is a good thing when others are very free to practice their religion. At the same time, many Muslims want religious leaders to have at least some influence in political matters.
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel, and the World” will be available in spring 2026. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.

Jihad and the West - Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Three Podcast Six

            Popular culture—movies, television, comedy, art, drama—has explored the Caliphate, and so has academia. There have been myriad panels, discussion groups, speaking engagements, and resolutions passed on university campuses. Some see it as a campus craze. This is important because universities prepare future generations of journalists, public intellectuals, and scholars for leadership worldwide. Professors and other intellectuals shape public debate. On television, radio, the internet, and social media, professors are a key source of informed commentary on the Islamic State. Today’s university students are tomorrow’s political and cultural leaders.
 
            Debates about the Islamic State are often framed within the broader context of Western–Islamic relations. In universities’ Middle East Studies and liberal arts departments, there is broad agreement that Western policies have provoked Muslims around the world. Some of this consensus reflects the red-green campus alliance, an informal and confusing solidarity among left-leaning professors and Muslims. As discussed earlier, leftists and Islamists seem like strange bedfellows, given their often-clashing views on women, homosexuality, religious piety, and certain democratic norms, yet both converge on Antonio Gramsci’s concept of establishing “cultural hegemony” and are highly critical of existing Western values.
 
            Within this campus alliance, there is broad agreement that Western foreign policy in the Middle East has often been ill-advised, counterproductive, and unjust. Many professors view the Caliphate's popularity as an unintended consequence of American-led wars in Iraq and of general American belligerence. These acerbic themes are underscored in academic publications, conferences, and campus-based advocacy. For example, celebrated American scholar Noam Chomsky holds that the root causes of the terrorist attacks in Paris were the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan.
 
            This was also true of Columbia professor Hamid Dabashi, who equated “ISIL’s atrocities [with] Trump’s vulgarities.” The behaviors of both the Caliphate and the presidential aspirant were “pornotopic.” Dabashi explained to al Jazeera that “pornotopic” refers to “the spatial formation of biopolitics in modernity, a dreadful exhibitionism transcending the false binaries we usually make between democracy and terrorism, between modern and medieval, between normative and barbaric.”
 
           
 
            University life has offered opportunities to prankster activists. James O’Keefe, a conservative provocateur, turned his attention to the academy. Pretending to be a Muslim, O’Keefe asked Cornell University’s assistant dean for students to invite a Caliphate “freedom fighter” to lead a campus “training camp” under the guise of a “sports camp.” The dean agreed. After the gag was revealed, O’Keefe said Cornell owed “people an apology, or at least an explanation.” But Cornell’s president offered neither.
 
            At a similar sting at Catholic University, an undercover student journalist posed as a spokesperson for “Sympathetic Students in Support of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria.” She confided, “I want to start fundraising efforts on campus, and what I want to do is raise funds to send overseas.” She received sympathetic consideration. At Barry College, a faculty adviser also agreed to permit fundraising for the Islamic State. This campus controversy is typified by two scholars with opposing views. Both Mark LeVine and Daniel Pipes have much to say about the Caliphate and political Islam, as discussed below.
 

Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon - Chapter Three Podcast Five

Weaponized Humor and the Caliphate
            Some American leaders have turned to Hollywood to develop a propaganda strategy against the Caliphate. This action has precedent; presidents have partnered with movie studios to confront an external enemy before, including during World War II, when films boosted morale on the home front and many celebrities went to war against the Axis powers. Three generations later, the Obama administration is recruiting Hollywood to battle the Caliphate. In February 2016, Secretary of State John Kerry sought strategic advice from Hollywood producers, executives, and actors.
 
            Hollywood had some answers. The rock band U2’s lead singer, Bono, long an advocate for political causes, suggested that the White House build a team including comedian Sacha Baron Cohen and others who connect with millennials. They would joke and make sarcastic comments about the Caliphate. But some are skeptical that that would make for effective propaganda. “Bono says fight extremism with comedy? Yeah Bono, like that worked for Charlie Hebdo.”
 
            In Canada, a trio of Middle Eastern–raised Muslims host the Weekly Show, which lampoons hot issues in the Arab world, including sexual harassment and the Caliphate. One host explains, “Our message to young Muslims is that ISIS is using Islam in a sick way.”
            Western civil servants seek to undermine the State’s popularity by appealing to moderate Western Muslims. In Europe, some governments have subsidized anti-Caliphate popular culture. Belgian authorities funded a play titled Djihad, in which three Belgian Muslims stumble to Syria to fight for a cause they don’t understand. One of the militants is an Elvis impersonator. Belgian educators liked the play and subsidized its performance because young people found it funny.
 
            Elsewhere in Europe, government officials occasionally serve as talent scouts for entertainers who can keep young people away from the Caliphate. Britain’s Humza Arshad is a popular Muslim comedian. An eighteen-year-old woman explained that his popularity stems from his warmth, empathy, and wit. She said, “A lot of students look at police and think they don’t know what they’re talking about or don’t see things from our perspective. But Humza . . . we’ve grown up watching him. He raises awareness in a way we can understand.” For this reason, police have hired him to counter the Caliphate’s appeal.
 
            In Britain, funny-lady Shazia Mirza used comedy in her acclaimed 2015 one-woman show, The Kardashians Made Me Do It, in which she asks why so many young Western Muslim girls choose to run away to join the Islamic State. She crafted her script from public hearings of three teenage girls who left Britain for the Caliphate. Mirza was intrigued by what one of the girls took with her: “an epilator, a packet of new knickers, and body lotion. I thought, ‘You’re going to join a barbaric terrorist organization, and you are thinking of your bikini line?’”
 
            In Germany, satirists had fun with the Green Party’s focus on nonlethal force to stop the flurry of migrant violence. In one sketch, an actor dressed as a German police officer speaks to the camera, endorsing a new, nonlethal response to the random stabbings and machete slashings. He demonstrates a new tactic as a burly man, dressed in black and wielding a two-bladed axe, charges him. The police officer ducks, hugs his assailant, and says, “I love you.”
 
            The Iraqi government promotes parody on national television. One sketch portrays a coy European-looking journalist, anticipating the interview of her life, asking Caliph Abu Bakr if he had slaughtered a sheep in her honor. He replies, “A sheep? I slaughtered 300 men in your honor.”
            There is also far more stark satire than that presented in the West. A roaming band of avant-garde poets and activists travels to Iraqi towns reciting poetry in absurd situations. Wearing orange jumpsuits, they perform from a prisoners’ cage, an ambulance, even body bags. The poets kneel down with their hands tied behind their backs and orate. They burlesque the killing fields of their homeland and taunt the Caliphate through verse in what has been called “poetry of the absurd.”
 
Cringe Humor, Gallows Humor, and Caliphate Humor
 
            Some American comedians have fun with the Caliphate, too, but few joke about its Islamic component. They may find nothing humorous about Sharia or do not wish to meet the fate of the French satirical cartoonists. A late-night entertainer, Bill Maher has been a leading celebrity critic of the Caliphate, but he often feels alone. He admits, “I just don’t understand how liberals who fought the battle for civil rights in the  1960s, fought against apartheid in the 1980s, can then just simply ignore Sharia law in forty countries.” Milo Yiannopoulos, editor of the conservative Breitbart news outlet, said that it is “obscene that the political left . . . is happy to pander to and mollycoddle people that want me [referring to his homosexuality] dead . . . And I’m tired of being polite about it. . . . The problem is Islam.”
 
            Some Caliphate-connected humor has panicked the audience. In May 2016, there was no laughing when guests at a swanky hotel in Cannes, France, fled for their lives after a boat with a black flag and six men landed on the Riviera. Guests at the tony Hotel Du Cap Eden-Roc scrambled, hid, prayed, and clutched each other while sneering men in commando dress and make-believe suicide vests roamed the area. However, it turned out to be a publicity stunt by a French internet startup, which received the attention it sought.
 
            Far from the Riviera, many suffer the reality wrought by the Islamic State. Some use humor as both an escape and a means of protest. Hundreds of thousands of displaced persons subsist in the haunts and despair of vast refugee camps in the Levant. Some are under attack from all sides of the conflict. Mohammed is one of them, as shown below.
 
Profile Seven: Snickering from the Refugee Camp—“We Also Killed the Dentists”
 
            The unrelenting despondency of Caliphate-created refugee camps offers both opportunities and challenges for Syrian comics. An example of Mesopotamian cringe comedy comes from the comedian “Mohammed,” a refugee who wrote a story for an American audience. First, he apologized for being late in blogging his heartbreak at the death of Cecil the Lion, who was killed by a wealthy American dentist on an African bow-hunting safari. The death of the feline made world news. Wrote Mohammed, “Not Cecil the Lion! Not him! Truly, is there no innocence left in this world?”
 
            In thinly disguised mockery, Mohammed explained that he couldn’t use his email to communicate his sorrow at the lion’s death because Americans had bombed the local power plant, plunging his village into complete darkness. He wrote that he had had to walk for two days to reach an internet café, ducking fighters along the way, hopscotching over decomposing corpses of old friends, avoiding the blasts of Syrian barrel bombs, watching State soldiers decapitate boys, and wiping the tears off of the faces of girls who had had acid thrown at them. His journey was interrupted when “ISIS discovered my brother was gay and . . . they forced [me] to throw him off a building.” Mohammed then had to bury his daughter, who had died of cholera. He did not have to feed his wife because she had been carted off as a sex slave months ago.
 
            Mohammed could brave all of this. But the death of Cecil the Lion was too distressing to endure. Finally, stepping out of comedic character and now deadly serious, Mohammed wondered, “What is wrong with America?” and concluded, “You do not hear stories like this in Syria, partly because we already killed all our lions but also because we killed all our dentists.”
 
 

Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Two Podcast Four

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security.
 
Profile Four: The Ever-Angry Mr. Bukhari Wants His Shoe Back
 
            Asghar Bukhari is a leading voice for angry Muslims in Britain. A founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Committee UK, he discusses world events on European television and radio. He has appeared on Sky News, Russia Today, the BBC, the VIP, the James O’Brien Show, and many other media outlets to discuss the Islamic State. He has a supportive audience. Some viewers see his analysis of Islamic–Western relations as conspiratorial and incoherent; others see it as insightful. When he speaks on television talk shows, bearded men and hijab-clad women in the audience clap, smile, and nod in agreement.
 
            He defined the Caliphate as a “Sunni uprising.” Its members are not terrorists, and according to Bukhari, they do not pose a significant threat to Britain. “ISIS is not the problem.” Rather, Western elites are intent on forging a new “Sykes-Picot” version of the Middle East. “Muslims are the most oppressed people on earth. We have been denied our freedom, our equality, any justice, and even the right to tell the world our own story.” The public intellectual Douglas Murray accused him of living in “intellectual fever swamps.”
 
            Whatever the case, Bukhari is convinced he is being stalked by Zionist agents. He cites a recent break-in at his home by Zionists as an example. A Jew stole one of his shoes. According to Bukhari, the goal was not financial gain but intimidation. “They left one shoe behind, to let me know someone had been there.” He concedes that this sounds implausible but adds, “Why are you so shocked that a Zionist would try to intimidate or steal something from me? Man, they stole Palestine! Are you crazy?” Some bloggers clowned back. On the blog Israellycool, Aussie Dave wrote, “If Zionists harvest organs, will he next claim we stole his brain? Who stole his meds?” Another blogger, Bullfrogger, snickered, “I believe that I have been targeted by Muslim spies. I awoke this morning and my goat and her two favorite outfits are missing.”
 
            But not everyone is chuckling, and some fear that figures like the snarling Bukhari may portend Britain’s future. In 2006, Bukhari bemoaned the failing leadership among British Muslims, whom he described as “well intentioned . . . but out of touch.” They were a crusty old lot. He demanded that Britain’s Muslims “hand over the reins to a new generation of leaders more in tune with today’s young Muslims.” A decade later, Bukhari may be part of that new leadership.
 
Summary
 
            Muslims and non-Muslims in the West wrestle to accommodate each other while holding on to their traditions and values. At the same time, a widespread mutual distrust just below society’s surface is burbling. Muslims decry Islamophobia in the West, but many Westerners feel besieged by Muslim immigrants. When Sadiq Khan was elected mayor of London, some people tweeted their fear and fatalism under the hashtag “Londonhasfallen.”
 
            By mid-2016, the head of Britain’s Equalities and Human Rights Commission, who had popularized the term “Islamophobia,” regretted ever using this word. In self-effacing candor uncommon among senior public officials, Trevor Phillips publicly admitted that he had been well intentioned but naïve about the blistering Muslim integration into British society: “I thought Muslims would blend into Britain . . . I should have known better.”
 
Other Westerners have gone further, claiming to suffer from “Islamonausea,” which is queasiness and fatigue at insatiable Muslim demands on democratic values and a growing fatalism that the conquering tide of Islam is now irreversible. They do not want to live in a “global village” or share in its burdens. Many are fatigued by what they see as empty gestures by preening politicians and of Sharia elbowing itself into common culture and law. One pundit wrote, “Je suis sick of it.” This and more is the subject of chapter 3, to which we invite you to listen..
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Dr. Silinsky’s latest book, “Cauldron of Terror – Hamas, Israel and the World will be available for purchase in spring 2026.  Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.
 
 

Jihad and the West Black Flag over Babylon Chapter Two Podcast Three

Profile Three: Portrait of an English Village—“Even the Ice Cream Lady Wears a Burka”
            In many ways, the West Yorkshire town of Dewsbury is unremarkable. Along its terraced streets are a few pubs, snooker clubs, and tea shops. The elderly tend their English gardens. Jean Wood, reflecting on her seventy-five years in Dewsbury, notes its transformation: “The change happened so quickly. One day it seemed it was all whites, and then it was all Asians.” The first Asians in Dewsbury were novelties. “We peered at them, and they peered back.”
 
Slowly, the churches were shuttered, as were the garment-producing industries. The town’s cricket pavilion was torn down. A journalist noted that almost everyone seemed to be Muslim. “Even the woman serving ice cream . . . was wearing a burka.” Girls waiting in line to buy ice cream were also swathed in Islamic garb. Today, Dewsbury boasts a disquieting distinction; it has produced more Islamic suicide bombers per capita than any other town in England.
 
            The leader of the pack of suicide bombers responsible for the attack in London on July 7, 2005, came from this town. The blasts killed fifty-two people. One of Britain’s youngest convicted terrorists, then sixteen years old, was arrested carrying bags of ball bearings. His brother, along with a friend, had traveled to Syria to fight for the Caliphate. There were other Islamic extremists linked to the town’s mosques.
 
            The town’s Muslims publicly condemn the suicide bombing. A journalist asking man-in-the-street questions heard, “He is not a martyr . . . is a statistic,” “He was . . . brainwashed,” and similar comments that disassociate Dewsbury’s Muslims from violence. They denounced the Caliphate. Former Tory minister Baroness Warsi, from Dewsbury, hopes to unmask the “drivers of radicalization” in her hometown.
            Nonetheless, many of the remaining non-Muslims are dissatisfied with the demographics. Jean Wood is unhappy about the rise in crime and white flight. Once, some Asians threw stones at her church’s bus, which alarmed her. Most of her friends are gone. Jean Wood misses the long-lost Dewsbury of her youth. England was very different then.
 
Islamophobia—The Muslim Side of the Story
 
            Many Muslims are dissatisfied with their status in the West, particularly in Europe. Tensions between Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe are high. Restive and alienated second- and third-generation Muslims feel like victims in a secular Europe. They see a continent beset by “Islamophobia,” a neologism for an irrational fear or hatred of Muslims. Outside their immediate Islamic neighborhoods, many do not feel at home. This has prompted some to leave for the Caliphate.
 
            Many young Muslims share a fatalism about their social status in Europe. This cohort is a recruiting pool for Islamists. Many Western Muslims who have joined the State say they did so because they could not live according to their faith in Europe. One wedge issue centers on Muslim apparel. In 2004, the hijab, the Islamic headscarf, was banned from French public schools and government office buildings. Women who left for Syria have cited what they claim as unwanted and hostile glares by non-Muslims in Europe when they wear their hijab in public.61
 
Europe’s Daunting Demographics
 
“There are twenty million refugees waiting at the doorstep of Europe.” Johannes Hahn, European Union Commissioner for European Neighbourhood Policy and Enlargement Negotiations, summer 2015
 
            Whatever the current state of relations, Europe’s future is likely to become notably more Islamic because of the high fertility rate of Muslim Europeans, patterns of immigration, and conversion to Islam. Domestic and foreign-funded efforts to convert Europeans to Islam have been steady, dynamic, and successful. In 2016, a former Archbishop of Canterbury warned that the Church of England is “one generation away from extinction.”
 
            A void of faith in the West creates opportunities for Muslims to proselytize and recruit for the Islamic State. Islam comprises a broad community of adherents who share religious, social, and, in many contexts, political values. Some converts to Islam have become enthusiastic soldiers in the Caliphate’s ranks. Other European Muslims provide rhetorical, financial, and logistical support to the State. In many European cities, the Islamic State has its champions, usually young, known as “fanboys.”
 
            Finally, there is a net emigration of native-born Europeans. For example, more Swedes chose to emigrate in 2015 than at any other time since the famine 160 years earlier. The most popular destination was the United States. If many young secular or Christian Europeans are trying to leave for the United States, many Muslim Europeans are content to live on the continent without becoming part of its dominant culture. Others loathe the non-Muslim West, and Asghar Bukhari is one of them. He is profiled in the next reading.
 

Jihad and the West - Black Flag Over Babylon Chapter Two Podcast Two

Welcome to an excerpt from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. It was published by Indiana University Press in Bloomington and Indianapolis. This reading is presented by Kensington Security Consulting, which brings education to national security. This comes from chapter two and will examine “Eurabia” – the crossroad of a secular Europe and an impassioned and mushrooming Islamic cohort there.
 
Eurabia
 
            Many Europeans were initially nonchalant about the cultural shift, but some later regretted this indifference. Many late-middle-aged and elderly intellectuals today miss the artistic and cultural freedoms of their youth in the 1950s and 1960s. Today’s Continental literati reminisce on a long-faded, culturally confident, and economically prosperous Europe. For years after the Second World War, Europe was exciting and liberal, and it arts scene burst with creative energies. But the freedoms then turned to restraint, which turned to self-censorship driven by fear of angering Muslims. European journalists have been threatened with death for unfavorable commentary on the Caliphate. Often, journalists cannot ask man-in-the-street questions in heavily Muslim areas because they are attacked. Some have been killed.
 
            British moderate Muslims also face challenges. In 2009, Baroness Warsi of Dewsbury literally had egg on her face after pleading with her coreligionists to embrace women’s rights. A convert to Islam pelted her with eggs while he and others chanted in Urdu and English for more Sharia in Britain. More cynical public intellectuals foresee a European future, sometime later this century, in which churches are replaced by mosques, civil law by Sharia, and the liberal values of the Enlightenment by a strict Islamic code of conduct.
 
            A prominent man of letters, Bernard Lewis, warned that Europe was becoming “part of the Arab West, the Maghreb.” Some Muslims gloat at the prospect. An example appears in a YouTube video by a man who crowns the march of Islam in Germany as inevitable: “Islam is coming to take over Germany whether you want it or not.” The tool of conquest, he says, is not war but reproduction, because “Muslims have seven or eight children each.” He says, “What does the German man have? One child and maybe a little pet dog!” And for the future? “Your daughters will wear the hijab.”
 
            The surge of migrants entering Europe in 2015 and 2016 brought shocks to the continent. In several countries, young women, some of whom had welcomed Middle Eastern and Eurasian migrants, were molested. Local police advised fair-skinned, blonde women, particularly in Northern Europe, to change their lifestyles and appearances. Police counseled them to dress modestly and dye their hair dark. Local municipalities established separate hours for male and female use of public swimming pools. For the first time in modern memory, train station waiting rooms had separate areas for men and women. Many Continentals no longer trust their local police or government. In 2015 and 2016, applications for firearm permits and membership in European shooting clubs increased perceptibly.
 
            All this terrifies vulnerable minorities. The Islamic State is just one of many outlets that churn out anti-Semitic, misogynistic, and anti-homosexual literature. Jews in traditional religious clothing and identifiable homosexuals can no longer stroll through some of Europe’s streets without fear of being spat on, beaten, or slashed. This increasingly dark world has become untenable for some Europeans, who feel there are few safe zones left. Many are emigrating to escape what they see as the unremitting buzz saw of Muslim immigration. Michel Houellebecq (pronounced “Wellbeck”) writes about this with a very sharp pen, as shown below.
 
Profile Two: French “Bad Boy” Michel Houellebecq—No Submission!
 
            Some see him as a poseur; others see him as a literary prophet. Editors of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo placed him on the cover with the words “The predictions of the Great Houellebecq.” The famous novelist was dressed as a magician and said, “In 2015, I will lose my teeth. In 2022, I will celebrate Ramadan.” Others see him as an alarmist Islamophobe and call him the bad boy of French letters. But most of the French intelligentsia are simply fascinated by his maverick novels and poetry. Le Figaro and Le Monde published a series on his life, views, ambitions, and the impact of his work on France. Some wondered whether this late-middle-aged, mild-mannered intellectual was determined to have a fatwa placed on his head.
 
            For years, Michel Houellebecq had been France’s enfant terrible of salon culture. He draws his literary inspiration from Albert Camus, and one American literary critic compares his style to Martin Amis’s, “at heart a deeply braised moralist, an unflinching observer of ugly human nature.” One literary highbrow described his style as a fusion of Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, and Dennis Miller.
 
            If French antihate laws muzzle his open criticism of Muslims, Houellebecq grants his fictional characters unfettered freedom. In his novel Platform, a character relishes the deaths of Palestinian terrorists or children because “it meant one less Muslim.”38 The same character adds, “Islam could only have been born in a stupid desert among filthy Bedouins who had nothing better to do than—excuse my language—shag their camels.” In a physiological metaphor, he describes Muslims as “clots” in Europe’s “blood vessels.”
 
His sixth novel, Submission, catapulted him to international literary fame. Readers are asked to imagine France in 2022, when the ruling French Socialists partner with Islamists to govern the country. The Sorbonne is now an Islamic university. France has absorbed Francophone North Africa, becoming a Muslim superstate. France itself is governed by Muslims, collaborators, and unctuous civil servants. The narrator of Submission, François, is a middle-aged literature professor. He is underpaid, jaded, pathetic, and lonely.
 
Within days of the book’s publication, Prime Minister Manuel Valls assured the nation that “France is not Submission, it’s not Michel Houellebecq, it’s not intolerance, hate, or fear.” France would not sell the Sorbonne to Saudi Arabia, period! The French left erupted in outrage! But the timing of the publication boosted sales. The book was first available on January 7, 2015—the same day Islamists slaughtered Charlie Hebdo cartoonists.
 
Contested Zones in the West—Breeding Grounds for the Caliphate
 
“It does not take people long to discover that the Global Village is in reality the dark incarnation of Gotham City without Batman.”  Geert Wilders, Dutch parliamentarian, 2016
 
            Some Europeans have left the cities for the non-Muslim suburbs, and others have emigrated to the United States or Israel. But others lack the resources or inclination to escape what they perceive as pools of social pathology stagnating at the outskirts of their own cities. They call these places “no-go zones,” and some members of the Caliphate have grown up there.43 This hotly debated expression refers to the Muslim-dominated, chaotic neighborhoods that saturate Western Europe. London, Paris, Stockholm, and Berlin are home to more than 900 areas where authorities have limited control.
 
            In France, areas of high immigrant density are called banlieues or quartiers, originally built to house immigrants from former French colonies.45 European leaders dislike the term “no-go zone,” and so do many journalists and scholars. Some refer to them as “cultural islands.” Daniel Pipes considers the “no-go” term gratuitously derogatory and prefers the official French nomenclature: “sensitive urban zones.”
 
            In January 2015, American journalist Steven Emerson claimed, “there are actual cities like Birmingham that are totally Muslim, where non-Muslims just simply don’t go in,” and was roundly censured. Some are gritty metropolitan areas hidden from tourists. An example is Nice, France. Dozens of its Muslim residents have traveled to Syria to fight for the State. In Germany, the Berlin Wall that separated the East from the West has long since crumbled, but there is a new civilizational divide, according to local Germans; they call it the “Arab Street.” A play on words, “Arab streets” are geographic locations in Europe where Muslims outnumber non-Muslims. It is also a synonym for Arab public opinion.
 
            But whether called “no-go zones,” “sensitive urban zones,” or occasional armed camps, these Muslim-only areas serve as recruiting pools for criminal syndicates. These areas are ideal for grooming foot soldiers for the Caliphate, and the Caliphate’s leaders have promised to use Muslims from those zones to attack Western targets. They provide sanctuary for the Caliphate’s cells, some of which fester in Dewsbury, in the next reading
 
This concludes a reading from Jihad and the West, Black Flag over Babylon, by Mark Silinsky, with a foreword by Sebastian Gorka. If you enjoyed this, please consider subscribing and pressing the “like button.” Jihad and the West is available for purchase online and in select bookstores worldwide. Nothing in this reading or any other reading in Jihad and the West represents the official position of any person or agency of the United States government. On behalf of Kensington Security Consulting, thank you for listening.