Maj. Stephen Coughlin is a retired U.S. Army officer and one of the foremost experts on Islamic law in the United States. For years he was well-known inside the Beltway for his “Red Pill” briefings of military commanders and defense officials on the topics of jihad and sharia. He was so effective in his work that the Muslim Brotherhood successfully arranged to have him pushed out of the Pentagon.
More recently, he is the author of Catastrophic Failure: Blindfolding America in the Face of Jihad
The videos below are the first two portions of a “Red Pill” briefing Maj. Coughlin gave to the Wiener Akademikerbund on May 23 under the auspices of Bürgerbewegung Pax Europa, following his participation with the team at the OSCE conference in Vienna.
Many thanks to Henrik Ræder Clausen for recording these videos, and to Vlad Tepes for editing and uploading them.
Part 1:
Part 2:
For links to previous articles about the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, see the OSCE Archives.
For more on the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, see the OIC Archives.
Coughlin needs to improve his pronunciation of Islamic terms. He says SHARia.
No offense, but how sharia is pronounced is the least of our worries. Wouldn’t you agree?
YES
Is that it?
Did we get the whole presentation?
Thank you for providing parts one and two. But I wonder if there isn’t more to it than these parts. I’m hungry for more.
I own the book, “Catastrophic Failure,” BTW. So I am intensely interested in viewing whatever might be available from this presentation in Vienna. The Interfaith players are of particular interest to me; I want names!!!!
However it is pronounced, its intent is evil.
We’re going to hear a lot of people say , “I own the book — Catastrophic Failure.” It is 788 pages long — a little over 500 pages before the appendices, footnotes and index. It lays out in scrupulous detail the case against our self-declared enemy — the Muslim Brotherhood — and the failure of the government to take even the most elementary steps of “knowing your enemy.” Owing the book is not the same as understanding it.
What we need to hear from our government representatives and candidates is that they understand the objectives of the Explanatory Memorandum, the impact of abrogation on the Quran, the Milestone Process, and the long-range strategy of using mosques scattered across the nation as the training bases for the jihadist battalions. Until people start talking about these critical issues with regard to our national security policy, we will not have an effective defense decision making process.
READ the book, and insist that others read it, too.
I don’t think most of the people in government today really care about learning anything from Mr. Coughlin. If one were to ask any of them to read the book or to try to understand what is being presented, he most likely would respond with something like “we have a government to run, legislation to make, and elections to win.” For most of them, government is the end, not the means. They take pride in making legislation like a cook takes pride in making a dish. It is the making of legislation that is important. Don’t bother them about the big picture. They have “more important things” to do with their time.
The process of a War of Ideas isn’t a simplex process where the Movement waging that war presents information to those who don’t yet agree with the Movement’s platform, and then those people either have a Damascus experience or they don’t. Nor is it useful to prejudge our situation already in those starkly Manichean terms, heavily implying that no effort is practical, since all the lines are already drawn, those who are evil in the West (defined tendentiously and circularly), being evil, will remain evil, and no amount of persuasion over time will change them.
Rather, a War of Ideas usually (and apparently in our actual context) is a long, drawn out process, involving a variety of modes & media, and presuming — and only making sense if there exists — a critical mass of relatively decent and intelligent people beholden to a kind of “quantum ignorance”, whereby relatively good virtues & values in their hearts and minds are psychologically and culturally re-routed, so to speak, by the dominant, mainstream and fashionable Weltanschauung (which, currently, happens to be PC MC).
Many (if not most) of Coughlin’s facts and interpretations of facts imply significant challenges and provocations of the PC MC paradigm. As a typical Western percipient & recipient begins the long process of absorbing Coughlin’s thesis, he will semi-conciously experience a threat to his worldview — not to the whole of it, necessarily, but to one particular bastion which he knows, semi-consciously and deep down, is unavoidably connected to other axioms, shibboleths, givens, assumptions, attitudes and feelings that form the Whole.
Coughlin is not the only one performing more or less this same function; there are myriad voices out there, some more well-known, some less known, some not known at all by the Counter-Jihad, or in the mainstream, or in the Blogosphere. Indeed, it’s likely useful for many different voices and styles and modes and media pressing against the prevailing paradigm, over time stimulating responses and reactions from among those millions of relatively decent and intelligent people in the West — in government, in academe, in the media, as well as out of these spheres.
The process of reorientation on the receiving end of the War of Ideas process will take time, and assumes that the West is not already lost to an apocalyptic mortal disease.
Excellent summary, Hesperado. I couldn’t agree more.
Thanks, Baron.
The reality to face up to is we’re going to face the choice between complete surrender or all out war with the OIC bloc of nations. I pray to God the nightmare scenario of the West turning to the far right to defeat jihad as the only game in town occurs. In Europe we need a democratic electoral force to contest otherwise meaningless Euro-Elections on a counter-jihad ticket to force the hand of domestic leaders.
“Insist”? Are you serious?
Suggest and urge perhaps, but not insist.
I insist that you read the Bible. Are you going to do it? Are you going to believe the Gospel that comes with it?
After all, this world is passing away, and the Bible treats of eternal matters.
Our world is a mess; and Coughlin’s book illuminates the contours of just one of its messes.
But it will do you no good at all at the Second Coming of Christ.
Do you know that for certain? Where is it written that holding Coughlin’s book will “do you no good at all at the Second Coming of Christ”? Why it could be the case that those holding copies of Steve’s book will be told to go to the front of the line.
IOW, let’s stick to what we know.
And for the record, I do not think we’re going to hear a lot of people saying they own the book. This is a rarefied atmosphere, is Coughlin’s work.
Unless you think “a lot of people” are the handful of readers at GoV or those in the know at the Center for Security Policy.
Again, I demur from your conclusion about the future as I do also from Chris LA’s prediction about what people will do with the book if they own it.
For one thing, this book is a distillation and expansion of many briefings given to members of Congress, their staffs, Pentagon groups, etc. The popularity of those briefings, particularly to various legislative groups, was the engine that drove Coughlin’s work into book form and then into publication.
As for what you do with it once you own it…I bought that lovely tome,
Reliance of the Traveller: A Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law
And once I got it, realized there was no way I’d ever read the whole thing. Ugh. Toxic journey & life is too short, etc. But I sure do “own” it and refer to it often for information. Beautifully bound, it sits on the desk next to the B’s computer. When he’s busy and I’m just resting up there in the quiet, I sometimes take the book down and lay it on the bed next to me, flipping through the pages the same way I would a dictionary, stopping here and there.
Same with Diana West’s book:
American Betrayal: The Secret Assault on Our Nation’s Character
I have two versions of Betrayal and usually prefer the Kindle for easier reading of her text. However, the paperback is helpful for flipping through the sources she sites.
My reading habits with non-fiction (and some fiction that I think I probably won’t finish), seldom lead me to the beginning. I’ll start with the Foreword, Introduction, Index, and peruse the footnotes (if they’re at the back of the book). Then I’ll read the last chapter because I want the conclusions. After that, I’ll choose chapters based on personal interest. Only as I’m finished with those will I skim the book in its printed order. IOW, I’m a severely ADD reader.
All reference books (which “Traveler” surely is) don’t need a linear approach any more than a dictionary does.
BTW, for entertaining reading, the comment section of “Betrayal” on Amazon’s site is most informative. I was over there the other day, re-reading a five-star review by a former Russian who loves the book.
The five-star reviews have increased in the two years since the book went up on Amazon’s site. There are VERY few new additions to the one-star reviews and they’re sadly, predictably the same as the 2013 versions. When I first began looking at what people had to say, there were less than 90 five stars reviews. Now there are over 235 of them, while the one-star condemnations have hardly moved up from their original sock-puppet status. Few of those smack-downs are verified sales, either. Maybe they got together and passed one book around? Or perhaps they’re among the many “I-didn’t-read-this-book-but…” souls who felt free to opine ex nihilo.
Whatev. By now, the predictable slimes essaying forth from National Review simply push up the sales of the book…again. Without their slanderous (is it slander when a reviewer repeatedly accuses an author of making claims that never ever appear in the book?) attacks, would “Betrayal” have sold as well as it did? Hey maybe the publisher thought of this as a way to push sales??
Everyone is suffering from information overload at this point. It’s no longer possible for everyone to read absolutely everything they’d like to, cover to cover. In many cases people have to decide on a detail threshold and skip anything beyond it, otherwise they’ll end up knowing nothing except for everything about frogs or some such.
may I suggest Bat Ye’or’s book on the coming caliphate. It is very much the material in these videos.
Too few know what is happening and thanks to this site at least some is getting out.
Thanks
Coughlin at one point speaks of the O.I.C. and emphasizes their under-appreciated importance in the context of the problem of Islam:
“Who here has ever heard of the O.I.C. – the Organization for Islamic Cooperation? I could brief at national security levels in the United States and find that nobody has ever heard of this organization! But this is an organization that represents every Islamic country at the head of state level – all 57 member states – where they make treaties that they serve to the United Nations that have the force of law. And our national leaders do not even know that this entity exists.”
(Then he goes on to show a major example of the O.I.C.’s influence and power – their central role in the 1992 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights as a Sharia replacement of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights which reflects what we in the West define as human rights.)
One significant gap in Coughlin’s presentation here is that he conveys the impression that the O.I.C. is a mere geopolitical entity; but in fact its organization and implementation centrally involves the ulema of each of those 57 countries. What is the ulema ? They are a body of Islamic scholars who decide what is Islam (see: http://tiny.cc/ph0bzx). As we in the Counter-Jihad know by now, there is no such thing as “political Islam” as a coherent entity distinct from Islam; for, in fact, we know (or should know by now) that all of Islam is political. Islam fuses politics and religion (and everything else in life, from diet, to toilet hygiene, to family relations, to marriage, to child-rearing, to education, to public works, laws, morality, philosophy, etc.) into one indissoluble whole. When the state leader members of the O.I.C. convene and discuss & decide matters, they do so with the ulema .
While an examination and analysis of the ulema of various Muslim states and societies around the world may reveal much ostensible diversity, we in the Counter-Jihad must begin, prejudicially and inductively, with the assumption that all the ulema of the world are in essential agreement on all aspects of Islam that are evil and dangerous to the free world (with only distractingly diverse appearances of disagreement on matters which only a trivializing sophistry would try to argue are significant enough to dilute our concern for the unity-in-diversity of the Islamic Hydra monster).
Yes, it continues with Red Pill Part 3, http://bit.ly/1C6LUxv