Late in September, a Muslim named Hosam Maher Husein Smadi, was arrested after placing an inert car bomb at a 60-story office tower in downtown Dallas. In March 2009, according to his indictment in U.S. District Court, Smadi declared his intention to wage war in the name of Islam. Yet characteristically, if dispiritingly, Muslims in the Dallas area are now expressing fears of a “backlash,” rather than taking the hard steps necessary to make sure there are no more jihad plotters who are inspired by Islamic teachings, as was Hosam Smadi.

Smadi was very clear about the Islamic motivation for his plot: “I truly say it that [sic] my dream is to be among God’s soldiers, first for the support of Islam and my beloved Sheik Usama, may God give him long life.” He decried the “world plan to destroy Islam, Muslims, and to seize their lands for the benefit of the Jews and for the love of infidelity.” He swore: “In the name of God, the Gracious and Merciful, this is my vow to you, my brother, that I am ready. And if you were a lover of Jihad as I am, then, by God, I am ready for the Jihadi life.” And he affirmed: “The reign is only for the living and powerful God.”

Smadi also said that “with the permission of the Almighty Lord of the Worlds, we will have victory and allies from God Almighty. He is the powerful and helpful. Victory is coming, is coming to defeat the Romans [i.e., Christians] and for the destruction of the Jews. God is Most Great. We shall attack them in their very homes.”

Yet despite the strong Islamic content of Smadi’s statements, Islamic spokesmen have – instead of honestly acknowledging Smadi’s Islamic motivation and offering steps toward reform of the elements of Islam that incited Smadi to violence – disingenuously pretended that Smadi’s Islam was incidental to his terror plot. Chief among those practicing this deception was Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC). Al-Marayati complained, according to the Dallas Morning News, that “when non-Muslims commit extreme acts, they are quickly dismissed as being crazy or weird or having some deep-seated emotional problem, and are not viewed as representative of an entire group of people. But Muslim bad actors, he said, don’t get the same treatment. ‘When a Christian does something … that’s how it’s reported, that they happen to be a Christian,’ Al-Marayati said. ‘But if it’s a Muslim, it’s as if it’s the [Muslim] religion that’s driving it.”

Of course, it was manifestly the Muslim religion that was driving Smadi, but Al-Marayati said nothing about that. He pretended not to notice the elephant in the living room – the fact that people see the Muslim religion as driving terrorist acts not because of some inveterate “Islamphobia,” but because Islamic jihadists say that that’s what drives them. Just days ago the American-born jihadist Anwar al-Awlaki exhorted Muslims: “Whenever you see the word terrorism, replace it with the word jihad.” Jihad, of course, is a concept of Islamic theology. And al-Awlaki was not alone.

In March 2009, five Muslims accused of helping plot the September 11 attacks, including the notorious Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, wrote an “Islamic Response to the Government’s Nine Accusations.” In it they quote the Koran to justify their jihad war against the American Infidels. “In God’s book,” asserts the letter, “he ordered us to fight you everywhere we find you, even if you were inside the holiest of all holy cities, The Mosque in Mecca, and the holy city of Mecca, and even during sacred months. In God’s book, verse 9 [actually verse 5], Al-Tawbah [the Koran’s 9th chapter]: Then fight and slay the pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, and besiege them and lie in wait for them in each and every ambush.”

Osama bin Laden’s communiqués have also quoted the Koran copiously. In his 1996 “Declaration of War against the Americans Occupying the Land of the Two Holy Places,” he quotes seven Koran verses: 3:145; 47:4-6; 2:154; 9:14; 47:19; 8:72; and the notorious “Verse of the Sword,” 9:5. Bin Laden began his October 6, 2002, letter to the American people with two Koran quotations, both of a martial bent: “Permission to fight (against disbelievers) is given to those (believers) who are fought against, because they have been wronged and surely, Allah is Able to give them (believers) victory” (22:39) and “Those who believe, fight in the Cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Taghut (anything worshipped other than Allah e.g. Satan). So fight you against the friends of Satan; ever feeble is indeed the plot of Satan” (4:76).”

In a sermon broadcast in 2003, bin Laden rejoiced in a Koranic exhortation to violence as being a means to establish the truth: “Praise be to Allah who revealed the verse of the Sword to his servant and messenger [the Islamic Prophet Muhammad], in order to establish truth and abolish falsehood.” The “Verse of the Sword” is Koran 9:5: “Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is Forgiving, Merciful.”

The idea that the Koran commands them to do violence to unbelievers runs from the very top of the international jihadist movement — Osama bin Laden — down to the rank and file. Overall, it is extremely rare — if not impossible — to find a jihadist who does not cite the Koran to justify his actions. Britain-based jihadist preacher, Abu Yahya, asserts simply, “It says in the Koran that we must try as much as we can to terrorise the enemy.” And Pakistani jihad leader Beitullah Mehsud claimed in 2007 that “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God’s orders. Only jihad can bring peace to the world.” He specified that his jihad — struggle in Arabic — was an offensive military operation: “We will continue our struggle until foreign troops are thrown out. Then we will attack them in the US and Britain until they either accept Islam or agree to pay jazia.” The “jazia,” or jizya, is a tax that the Koran (9:29) specifies must be levied on Jews, Christians, and some other non-Muslim faiths as a sign of their subjugation under the Islamic social order.

One pro-Osama website put it this way: “The truth is that a Muslim who reads the Koran with devotion is determined to reach the battlefield in order to attain the reality of Jihad. It is solely for this reason that the Kufaar [unbelievers] conspire to keep the Muslims far away from understanding the Koran, knowing that Muslims who understand the Koran will not distance themselves from Jihad.”

That is what al-Marayati would not have us notice. There are simply no Christians or Jews committing violence and justifying it with reference to Biblical texts. The situation in Islam is very different. Yet instead of confronting any of this, Dallas-area Muslims are whining about a “backlash” — something that has hardly ever materialized despite constant mainstream media focusing upon it after virtually every jihad arrest — and claiming victim status. “Being a Muslim in America today is not easy,” complained Hadi Jawad, a Dallas Muslim. “We feel under siege. There is open season on our faith. Muslims are painted with a broad brush.”

Memo to Hadi Jawad: want to make sure there is no backlash? Here are some easy steps that Dallas Muslims, and Muslims all over the U.S., can take:

1. Stop committing violent acts. When you hear Muslims plotting violent acts in your local mosque, call the police and FBI.

2. Confront those Muslims who justify violence and Islamic supremacism by reference to the Qur’an and Sunnah, and argue against the applicability of those passages to our age or any other age in the future.

3. Confront and report those Muslims who say violent or hateful things in private when they think no non-Muslims are around.

4. Begin comprehensive and transparently inspectable programs in your mosques and schools to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism, and the virtues of the U.S. Constitutional principles of non-establishment of religion, equality of rights for all, and freedom of speech.

5. Actively work with Western law enforcement officials on long-range programs to identify and apprehend jihadists and root out the jihad doctrine and Islamic supremacism from within Western Muslim communities.

If Muslims did these things, there would be no chance of any “backlash” anywhere.