A Hymn for Pentecost: "The Spirit's Fire"

This Sunday is Pentecost and so I'm sharing this Pentecost Hymn with you today. Please feel free to share it with your church and your friends. If you use it in your worship service then please acknowledge its use to CCLI in the usual way.

The Spirit’s Fire  7676
TUNE: Cara

A mighty wind around us,
Is rushing through this place;
God ‘s Spirit full surrounds us,
Defeating time and space.

The Spirit’s fire consuming,
We burn with faith’s desire;
God’s mighty pow’r upon us,
We blaze with holy fire.

Christ calls on us to serve Him,
To witness to His love;
To love and serve our neighbour,
And praise our God above.

Let’s all proclaim His message,
And be His hands and feet;
When we serve Christ our Saviour,
Our lives are made complete.
© 2011 : Colin Gordon-Farleigh

What God says about Marriage

In attempting to redefine marriage the UK Coalition Government is being expressly defiant towards God, as though they know best and God should learn to do what they tell Him rather than doing what He tells them. How arrogant can you get!

If marriage is redefined to incorporate same-sex unions then it weakens the whole institution of marriage as laid down in Scripture, and at the same time it devalues it. This is a time to be telling your political leaders that they should leave things as they are. The electorate are, by and large, extremely angered by the proposals, and this anger will be reflected in the Ballot Box ultimately if this ill-thought out attempt at winning a few extra votes is carried through.

We must remember that God is sovereign, not man. The answer will lie in prayer. The following passage of Scripture says it all:

Matthew Chapter 19: verses 3-5
Some Pharisees came to Jesus, testing Him and asking, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason at all?” (4) And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning MADE THEM MALE AND FEMALE, (5) and said, ‘FOR THIS REASON A MAN SHALL LEAVE HIS FATHER AND MOTHER AND BE JOINED TO HIS WIFE, AND THE TWO SHALL BECOME ONE FLESH’?

Coalition in UK Determined to Destroy the Sanctity of Marriage by Redefining it

Marriage Devastation 

Here in the UK, the House of Commons may be on the verge of devastating marriage by 'redefining it' - a move that would have huge consequences for future generations and change the shape of society.

Now is the time to speak and to pray. In God's grace the Bill could still be defeated.

Next Monday and Tuesday will see the critical Report Stage and Third Reading of the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Bill. If voted through it is expected to go to the House of Lords in early June. We face a crucial six weeks.

Please contact your MP (even if you have done so before) urging them to vote no next week and / or to back a referendum on marriage. When MPs hear from their constituents it can make a real difference. If this issue will affect how you vote at the next general election, please say so (especially if it means you won't vote for them).

Here are some points you can use in urging them to vote against the Bill:

• Referendum: People have never been given the opportunity to vote on this. It has big social and constitutional consequences yet it wasn't in any of the major parties' manifestos or the coalition agreement and the consultation was a sham. MPs should back a referendum if there is to be any possibility of change in this area. 

• Deafness: The Government has ignored the many concerns raised by MPs during the Second Reading and Committee stages of the Bill, failing to introduce appropriate amendments or abandon the Bill.

• Hostility: This Bill would destroy a common understanding of marriage and set up two rival understandings of marriage. It's the beginning of hostility rather than the end because people will be penalised despite the protections that the Government claims. 

• Honesty: This Bill pretends that homosexual and heterosexual relationships are the same when they are not. The problems with trying to define consummation and adultery for same sex couples in the Bill demonstrate this.

• Children: This Bill breaks the link with children (not all married couples have children but all children have a biological mother and father - marriage reflects this reality). God's pattern for marriage and family is the best for adults, children and society.

• Unpopular: A recent ComRes poll shows that this policy is unpopular. Amongst those eligible to vote in this month's local elections, it made: 
• 23% of people less likely to vote Conservative; only 7% of people more likely 
• 17% of people less likely to vote Labour; only 6% of people more likely 
• 23% of people less likely to vote Liberal Democrat; only 4% of people more likely

North Yorkshire Moors Railway : Fabulous!

     

     Last week we spent the week on vacation enjoying the fabulous scenery of North Yorkshire and the National Park and Moors. I'm old enough to have travelled regularly on steam trains in my youth, and I was delighted when we discovered the North Yorkshire Moors Railway went past the Cottage where we were staying. Not only that, but last weekend was a Steam Gala, and so there were trains going by regularly throughout the day, and the sound of the whistle quickly became a notable part of our lives.
     Levisham Station, which featured in one of the Harry Potter movies and also in 'Brideshead Revisited', was a five-minute walk away, and we spent several hours enjoying the hustle and bustle of a busy 1912-design railway station during the course of the week.

We stayed in a beautiful detached cottage on the edge of the Forest which was aptly named 'The Hideaway'.  Why not check it out for yourself by going to this website.

The flaw in American Policy under the Obama Administration

Last year Act for America put out a series of emails describing the purge of any references to radical Islam in federal government counter-terrorism materials.

This didn’t happen by accident. It’s the result of a conscious and deliberate policy decision at the highest levels of the Obama administration.

Please view the short video below, put out by our friends at EMET.

We now know that Russian authorities wire tapped a phone call between Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mother, in which they discussed “jihad.” This phone call was part of the reason the Russians alerted the FBI about Tsarnaev.

Had John Brennan, now our CIA director, listened in on this phone call, he almost certainly would have dismissed any concerns about Tsarnaev.

Why? Because Brennan has stated publicly he believes the notion that “jihad” is connected to terrorism is false. Brennan believes “jihad” is a “holy tenet” of Islam, because he claims it refers only to personal improvement.

Or what our friend Dr. Walid Phares calls “Islamic yoga.”

This administration refuses to acknowledge any jihadist ideology behind Islamic terrorism. The short video below is a must-see in this regard.

We can only speculate what might have happened when the FBI investigated Tamerlan Tsarnaev if our counterterrorism strategy included identifying jihadist ideology as a prime motivator of jihadist attacks.

But since the FBI can’t consider jihadist ideology when it does such investigations, it’s no wonder it dropped its investigation of Tamerlan Tsarnaev.

'Hymn for Today': "He Is Always With Me"

For my choice of the 'Hymn for Today' I am sharing one of the hymns that I have entered for the Hymn-writing Competition. This hymn was recorded by the Tallahassee-based Charlotte Kerce on her album "He is Always With Me."  The album is available from the Sheer Joy Music online store or the tracks can be individually downloaded from iTunes, Amazon and CD Baby. I hope you enjoy singing it. Please feel free to share it as much as you wish, but please report its use in Church Services or School Assemblies to CCLI in the usual way. The lyrics are by Colin Gordon-Farleigh and the music is by Greg Scheer.

He Is Always With Me
TUNE: God’s Spirit

I can feel God's Spirit
stirring in my soul;
I can feel him moving
since Jesus made me whole.
I can feel God's Spirit
stirring in my soul;
since Jesus made me whole.
He is always with me,
each moment of the day;
He is always with me,
and He's teaching me the way.
He is always, always with me.
He is always with me.

He will lead and help me
follow Christ, the Way;
help me in my witness,
and guide me when I pray.
He will lead and help me
follow Christ, the Way;
and guide me when I pray.
He is always with me . . .

I will be a witness,
I will serve my Lord;
I will promise always
to live life by His Word.
I will be a witness,
I will serve my Lord;
to live life by His Word.
He is always with me . . .
© 2007 :  Colin Gordon-Farleigh

A new 'Hymn for Today' : "Heaven's Dawn Breaks"

Heaven’s Dawn Breaks  87 87

TUNE: Brocklesby

Hear the sound of angel’s singing,

Filling up the skies with song;

Now from earth the saints are winging,

Joining with the heav’nly throng.

For the dawn of heav’n is breaking,

Jesus, Saviour, now has come;

He’s returned to earth in glory,

Sound the trumpet, beat the drum!

In a moment, in a twinkling,

He will harvest all that’s sown;

See the brightest dawn a’breaking,

Jesus calls out to His own.

Praising, praising, Christ the Saviour,

He is King and Lord of all;

Join the throng of angels singing,

Heav’n’s dawn breaks, now heed the call.

© 2011 :  Colin Gordon-Farleigh 

Boston Terror Suspects attended Mosque with Radical Ties

Mosque that Boston suspects attended has radical ties

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/04/23/boston-mosque-radicals/2101411/

Oren Dorell, USA TODAY 6:06 a.m. EDT April 24, 2013

Terror suspects, fugitives and radical speakers have passed through the Cambridge mosque that the Tsarnaev brothers are known to have visited.

  (Photo: Shakil Adil, AP)

Story Highlights

Cambridge mosque was founded in 1982 by students at MIT, Harvard and other Boston-area schools. Affiliated with Muslim American Society, which federal prosecutors call an "overt arm" of Muslim Brotherhood. More than half of the $15.5 million used to found the Boston mosque came from Saudi sources

BOSTON — The mosque attended by the two brothers accused in the Boston Marathon double bombing has been associated with other terrorism suspects, has invited radical speakers to a sister mosque in Boston and is affiliated with a Muslim group that critics say nurses grievances that can lead to extremism.

Several people who attended the Islamic Society of Boston mosque in Cambridge, Mass., have been investigated for Islamic terrorism, including a conviction of the mosque's first president, Abdulrahman Alamoudi, in connection with an assassination plot against a Saudi prince.

Its sister mosque in Boston, known as the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, has invited guests who have defended terrorism suspects. A former trustee appears in a series of videos in which he advocates treating gays as criminals, says husbands should sometimes beat their wives and calls on Allah (God) to kill Zionists and Jews, according to Americans for Peace and Tolerance, an interfaith group that has investigated the mosques.

The head of the group is among critics who say the two mosques teach a brand of Islamic thought that encourages grievances against the West, distrust of law enforcement and opposition to Western forms of government, dress and social values.

"We don't know where these boys were radicalized, but this mosque has a curriculum that radicalizes people. Other people have been radicalized there," said the head of the group, Charles Jacobs.

Yusufi Vali, executive director at the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Center, insists his mosque does not spread radical ideology and cannot be blamed for the acts of a few worshipers.

"If there were really any worry about us being extreme," Vali said, U.S. law enforcement agencies such as the FBI and Departments of Justice and Homeland Security would not partner with the Muslim American Society and the Boston mosque in conducting monthly meetings that have been ongoing for four years, he said, in an apparent reference to U.S. government outreach programs in the Muslim community.

The Cambridge and Boston mosques, separated by the Charles River, are owned by the same entity but managed individually. The imam of the Cambridge mosque, Sheik Basyouny Nehela, is on the board of directors of the Boston mosque.

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and his brother, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, attended the Cambridge mosque for services and are accused of setting two bombs that killed three people and injured at least 264 others at the April 15 Boston Marathon.

The FBI has not indicated that either mosque was involved in any criminal activity, but mosque attendees and officials have been implicated in terrorist activity:

• Alamoudi, who signed the articles of incorporation as the Cambridge mosque's president, was sentenced to 23 years in federal court in Alexandria, Va., in 2004 for his role as a facilitator in what federal prosecutors called a Libyan assassination plot against then-crown prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia. Abdullah is now the Saudi king.


Aafia Siddiqui is shown after her graduation from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. (Photo: AP)

• Aafia Siddiqui, who occasionally prayed at the Cambridge mosque, was arrested in Afghanistan in 2008 while in possession of cyanide canisters and plans for a chemical attack in New York City. She tried to grab a rifle while in detention and shot at military officers and FBI agents, for which she was convicted in New York in 2010 and is serving an 86-year sentence.


The 2009 booking photo of Tarek Mehanna, of Sudbury, Mass. (Photo: Sudbury Police Department via AP)

• Tarek Mehanna, who worshiped at the Cambridge mosque, was sentenced in 2012 to 17 years in prison for conspiring to aid al-Qaeda. Mehanna had traveled to Yemen to seek terrorist training and plotted to use automatic weapons to shoot up a mall in the Boston suburbs, federal investigators in Boston alleged.

• Ahmad Abousamra, the son of a former vice president of the Muslim American Society Boston Abdul-Badi Abousamra, was identified by the FBI as Mehanna's co-conspirator. He fled to Syria and is wanted by the FBI on charges of providing support to terrorists and conspiracy to kill Americans in a foreign country.

• Jamal Badawi of Canada, a former trustee of the Islamic Society of Boston Trust, which owns both mosques, was named as a non-indicted co-conspirator in the 2007 Holy Land Foundation terrorism trial in Texas over the funneling of money to Hamas, which is the Palestinian wing of the Muslim Brotherhood.

What both mosques have in common is an affiliation with the Muslim American Society, an organization founded in 1993 that describes itself as an American Islamic revival movement. It has also been described by federal prosecutors in court as the "overt arm" of the Muslim Brotherhood, which calls for Islamic law and is the parent organization of Hamas, a U.S.-designated terrorist group.

Critics say the Muslim American Society promotes a fraught relationship with the United States, expressed in part by the pattern discussed by Americans for Progress and Tolerance in which adherents are made to feel cut off from their home country and to identify with a global Islamist political community rather than with America.

Zhudi Jasser, president of the American Islamic Forum for Democracy, said the radical teachings often follow a theme of recitation of grievances that Islam has with the West, advocacy against U.S. foreign policy and terrorism prosecutions, and efforts "to evangelize Islam in order to improve Western society that is secularized," he says.

Jasser, a veteran of the U.S. Navy and author of the 2012 book A Battle for the Soul of Islam: An American Muslim Patriot Fights to Save His Faith, says the teachings make some followers feel "like their national identity is completely absent and hollow, and that vacuum can be filled by (radical) Islamic ideology, which is supremacist and looks upon the West as evil."

The Cambridge mosque was founded in 1982 by students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and several other Boston-area schools, according to a profile by the Pluralism Project at Harvard University. Its members founded the sister mosque in Boston in 2009.

The leadership of the two mosques is intertwined, and the ideology they teach is the same, Jacobs said. Ilya Feoktistov, director of research at Americans for Peace and Tolerance, said much of the money to create the Boston mosque came not from local Muslims but from foreign sources.

More than half of the $15.5 million used to found the Boston mosque came from Saudi sources, Feoktistov said, who cites financial documents that Jacobs' group obtained when the mosque sued it for defamation. The lawsuit was later dropped.

Vali said that the vast majority of total donors were in the United States and that "no donations were accepted if the donor wanted to have any decision-making influence (even if benign)."

Vali characterized Americans for Peace and Tolerance and its founder, Jacobs, as anti-Muslim activists who spread "lies and half-truths in order to attack and marginalize much of the local Muslim community and many of its institutions."

"It's the new McCarthyism in full swing," he said.

Sheik Basyouny Nehela, the imam of the Cambridge mosque, which is located across the Charles River from Boston, is on the board of directors for the Muslim American Society of Boston, which runs the Boston mosque. The Tsarnaevs attended the Cambridge mosque.

A statement issued by the Cambridge mosque said the Tsarnaev brothers were "occasional visitors." The mosque's office manager, Nichole Mossalam, said neither brother expressed radical views. "They never exhibited any violent sentiments or behaviors. Otherwise, they would have been reported," Mossalam said.

The Cambridge mosque said Tsarnaev, 26, who died Thursday night in a shootout with police, "disagreed with the moderate American-Islamic theology" of the mosque. Tsarnaev challenged an imam who said in his sermon that it was appropriate to celebrate U.S. national holidays and was told to stop such outbursts, the mosque said in a statement.

Talal Eid, a Muslim chaplain at Brandeis University, said focusing on individual radicals that prayed in a building is unfair.

"In 2011, the two brothers were right under the nose of the FBI and they didn't find anything," Eid said, who never met the Tsarnaevs. "How do you want me as an imam to know enough to tell them they are not welcome here? How can I figure out those people have that kind of criminal intent?"

The Muslim American Society says on its website that it is independent of the Muslim Brotherhood. However, early Brotherhood literature is considered "the foundational texts for the intellectual component for Islamic work in America," the website states.

Jacobs says claims of moderate Islam do not square with the mosque's classic jihadi texts in its library and its hosting of radical speakers.

Jacobs said Ahmed Mansour, his co-director at Americans for Peace and Tolerance, found writings by Syed Qutb, the former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and other jihadi texts at the Cambridge mosque's library when Mansour went there in 2003. Qutb pioneered the radical violent ideology espoused by al-Qaeda.

Yusuf al Qaradawi, the Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader who espouses radical views in videos collected by Jacobs' group, was listed as a trustee on the Cambridge mosque's IRS filings until 2000, and on the mosque's website until 2003, when he addressed congregants via recorded video message to raise money for the Boston mosque, according to a screenshot of the announcement that Feoktistov provided.

Vali said Qaradawi was listed as an honorary trustee years ago only because his scholarship and high esteem in Muslim circles would help with fundraising.

Yasir Qadhi, who lectured at the Boston mosque in April 2009, has advocated replacing U.S. democracy with Islamic rule and called Christians "filthy" polytheists whose "life and prosperity … holds no value in the state of Jihad," according to a video obtained by Jacobs' group.

Vali said Qadhi was a guest of a non-profit organization that was renting space at the Boston mosque and has changed his views since that video was made.

Jacobs and others say it is not only renters who express sympathetic views for terrorists. Leaders of the Boston and Cambridge mosques, and invited guests, have advocated on behalf of convicted terrorists, urging followers to seek their release or lenient sentences.

Imam Abdullah Faaruuq, sometimes a spokesman for the Boston mosque, used Siddiqui's case to speak against the USA Patriot Act, the anti-terrorism law passed under the George W. Bush administration. "After they're done with (Siddiqui), they are going to come to your door if they feel like it," he said, according to a video obtained by Americans for Peace and Tolerance.

Anwar Kazmi, a member of the Cambridge mosque's board of trustees, called for leniency for Mehanna and Siddiqui at a Boston rally in February 2012, in a video posted to YouTube. He characterized Siddiqui's 86-year sentence as excessive.

In an interview with USA TODAY, Kazmi insisted that the Cambridge mosque is moderate and condemns the marathon bombings. On Monday, the mosque e-mailed members to caution them that the FBI may question them and that they may want to seek representation.

"This kind of violence, terrorism, it's just completely contrary to the spirit of Islam," Kasmi said. "The words in the Quran say if anybody kills even a single human being without just cause, it's as if you've killed all of humanity." 

Susan Marrs sings "Listen to the Rain" & "Colours" : 2 songs by Colin Gordon-Farleigh and Greg Scheer

A new 'Hymn for Today' : "Let's Stand Together"

Here is my worship song for today. I hope that you enjoy singing it! Please feel free to share it as much as you want, but, as usual, please report its use to CCLI if you use it in your worship services.

Let’s Stand Together  5555 & Refrain
TUNE: Together

Let’s stand together,
Let’s all praise the Lord;
And let’s join in worship
Of the Living Word!
Oh, let’s stand together!
Let’s all praise the Lord.
And let’s join in worship
Of the Living Word!
Let’s stand together!
Let’s stand together
Let’s stand together,
And let’s all praise the Lord!

Let’s praise together,
Let’s all praise the Lord;
And praise Him forever,
The true Living Word!
Oh, let’s praise together!
Let’s all praise the Lord.
And praise Him forever,
The true Living Word!
Let’s stand together!
Let’s stand together
Let’s stand together,
And let’s all praise the Lord!
 © 2007 : Colin Gordon-Farleigh

What a beautiful photograph!

Incandescent morning Photo by Kiredjian Joris
Thank you Kiredjian for this wonderful photograph, which demonstrates that you have soul as well as skill.

Psalm 55 Verse 22

Islamic Fundamentalism is an Evil in Your Midst.

Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away
But willful blindness remains the order of the day.
By Andrew C. McCarthy

http://www.nationalreview.com/article/346145/jihad-will-not-be-wished-away

ANDREW C. MCCARTHY

‘Outlook: Islam.” So reads the personal webpage of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who ravaged Boston this week, along with his now-deceased brother and fellow jihadist, Tamerlan — namesake of a 14th-century Muslim warrior whose campaigns through Asia Minor are legendary for their brutalization of non-Muslims.

Brutalizing our own non-Muslim country has been the principal objective of jihadists for the last 20 years. This week marks a new and chilling chapter: the introduction on our shores of the tactics the self-styled mujahideen have used to great, gory effect for the past decade in Afghanistan and Iraq.

At a point in the race timed to achieve maximum carnage, the Tsarnaev brothers bombed the Boston Marathon with improvised explosive devices. IEDs are small but potent homemade bombs — crude explosives and unforgiving shrapnel encased in easily portable pressure cookers. The bombs are simple to make. They won’t kill thousands or even hundreds of people like hijacked planes or heavy chemical explosives will. But that’s not the objective. The goal is to instill terror into the flow of everyday life. IEDs are made for “soft” targets. They are easily camouflaged amid the traffic, the everyday debris, and the eight-year-old boys frolicking as they wait for Dad to cross the finish line.

Willful blindness remains the order of the day, as it has since the World Trade Center was bombed in 1993. It is freely conceded that, when the identities and thus the motivation of the Marathon terrorists were not known, it would have been irresponsible to dismiss any radical ideology as, potentially, the instigator. But in our politically correct, up-is-down culture, to suggest “Outlook: Islam” was unthinkable. So the most likely scenario — namely, that jihadists who have been at war with us for two decades had, yet again, attacked innocent civilians — became the least likely scenario in the minds of media pundits. Instead, they brazenly prayed (to Gaia, I’m sure) for white conservative culprits with Tea Party hats and Rush 24/7 subscriptions. As our Kevin D. Williamson quipped, the “literal Caucasians” they got were not quite what they had in mind.

To listen to the commentary was to assume that the jihad’s nimble post-9/11 shift from heavy bombs and airliner missiles to IEDs had never happened. Prior to 2009, much agitprop was made over the thousands of American troops killed and maimed by IEDs in Iraq — they signified, the Left told us, that George Bush had brought al-Qaeda to previously jihad-free Baghdad. So did IEDs at the Marathon mean the same jihad had now come to Boston? Perish the thought. Surely the Marathon bombing was the work of either the right-wing extremists Janet Napolitano has been warning us about since 2009, or those notoriously violent Catholics and Evangelicals that today’s Army equates with Hamas and Hezbollah.

But no: It was in fact the jihad that stubbornly refuses to be wished away. It will have to be defeated. It was never a molehill we were exaggerating into Mohammed’s mountain. After 1,400 years of aggression, we can safely say it is not anytime soon going to evolve into the ballyhooed “internal struggle for personal betterment” — not for the tens of millions of Muslims for whom Islamic supremacism is, quite simply, Islam.

So will we be roused to meet the challenge? Doesn’t seem like it. On Friday morning, the damning and utterly predictable details began pouring in the second the jihadists were identified — “Outlook: Islam”; a YouTube playlist called “Terrorists” that included the ditty, “I will dedicate my life to jihad”; a wife who abruptly converted to Islam and began dressing in what a neighbor called “the Islamic style”; an apparent reverence for the notorious sharia jurist Sheikh Feiz Mohammed. Yet the media commentary, even if it grudgingly mentions these things, internalizes none of them. “How shocking it is,” we’ve repeatedly heard, “that the brothers Tsarnaev want to mass-murder Americans. After all, they’re Chechen Muslims, and the Chechens’ beef is with the Russians, not us.”

Good grief. It is the Uighurs all over again. You’ll recall the Uighurs — they were a group of Turkic-speaking jihadists from the Xinjiang region of China, detained at Guantanamo Bay because they trained in Afghanistan with an al-Qaeda-affiliated terrorist organization (the East Turkistan Islamic Movement). At least some of them fought against American forces. Nevertheless, we released them. Stroking its bloated chin, our government rationalized that they could not be enemy combatants because they weren’t our enemies — their beef was really with China, right? After all, Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re very nice people, so why should we assume they might have a problem with us?

We are in a war driven by ideology. “Violent extremism,” which is the label the government and the commentariat prefer to put on our enemies, is not an ideology — it is the brutality that radical ideologies yield. Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.

The fact that you think this is nuts, or that I’m nuts for saying it out loud, has nothing to do with whether they believe it. They do — and they don’t care, even a little, what you think.

You do not defeat an ideology by hoping it will change or disappear. You have to challenge it, to make it defend its baleful tenets in the light of day. You cannot protect yourself from its violent outbursts absent understanding its teaching, reluctantly accepting that its teaching will inevitably lead some Muslims to strike out savagely, and committing to a pro-active, intelligence-based counterterrorism strategy — one that scraps political correctness and ferrets out the jihadists before they strike.

Asked about his “outlook,” Dzhokhar Tsarnaev offered a pregnant response, “Islam,” that raises more questions than it answers. There are all kinds of Islam, including the supremacist kind that is far more widely held than we’re comfortable acknowledging. Until we get beyond that discomfort, until we are prepared to ask, “What Islam?” — and until we are prepared to treat Islamic supremacism as the pariah it should be — Boston’s hellish week will remain our recurring nightmare.