Krauthammer On Obama's Complete Withdrawal From The War Of Ideas

Charles Krauthammer used his Wasington Post column last week to address the Obama administration's refusal to identify those with whom we are at war - what should be step one if we are to engage in and win the war on terror. This from Mr. Krauthammer:

The Fort Hood shooter, the Christmas Day bomber, the Times Square attacker. On May 13, the following exchange occurred at a hearing of the House Judiciary Committee:

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Tex.): Do you feel that these individuals might have been incited to take the actions that they did because of radical Islam?

Attorney General Eric Holder: There are a variety of reasons why I think people have taken these actions. . . .

Smith: Okay, but radical Islam could have been one of the reasons?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people --

Smith: But was radical Islam one of them?

Holder: There are a variety of reasons why people do these things. Some of them are potentially religious-based.

Potentially, mind you. This went on until the questioner gave up in exasperation.

A similar question arose last week in U.S. District Court when Faisal Shahzad, the Times Square attacker, pleaded guilty. Explained Shahzad:

"One has to understand where I'm coming from . . . I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier."

Well, that is clarifying. As was the self-printed business card of Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, identifying himself as SoA: Soldier of Allah.

Holder's avoidance of the obvious continues the absurd and embarrassing refusal of the Obama administration to acknowledge who out there is trying to kill Americans and why. In fact, it has banned from its official vocabulary the terms jihadist, Islamist and Islamic terrorism.

Instead, President Obama's National Security Strategy insists on calling the enemy -- how else do you define those seeking your destruction? -- "a loose network of violent extremists." But this is utterly meaningless. This is not an anger-management therapy group gone rogue. These are people professing a powerful ideology rooted in a radical interpretation of Islam, in whose name they propagandize, proselytize, terrorize and kill.

Why is this important? Because the first rule of war is to know your enemy. If you don't, you wander into intellectual cul-de-sacs and ignore the real causes that might allow you to prevent recurrences. . . .

I am glad to see a major columnist finally address this issue. It is simply amazing to me that in the U.S., nine years after 9-11, we still have our government pretending that Islam generally is unrelated to terrorism, let alone the real facts, that it is Wahhabi/Salafi Islam and the sects it has heavilly influenced, including Khomei Shia'ism, that are the driving forces behind Islamic terrorism. I have been driving this point home for years, including most recently in National Security At The End Of Obama's First Year:

The physical war on terror is necessary to stop the immediate attacks. But it is in the war of ideas that the true battle lies, for if we do not stop the radicalization of Muslims, then the war on terror will never end. . . .

The threshold issue in the war of ideas is to identify who, as a group, constitutes “radicalized Muslims.” Islam, like Christianity, is subdivided into numerous different sects, many of which, such as Sufi for example, are peaceful and counsel coexistence. Individually, there are hundreds of millions of Muslims in the world, most of whom would make good citizens, good friends, good neighbors and good family members in the West. Only a portion of them become “radicalized” whether as members of al Qaeda or some of the other radical Islamic groups, such as the Muslim Brotherhood, the Taliban, and Jamat-I-Islami to name but a few. Those who belong to these groups do in fact share a common thread – virtually all are adherents to the Salafi/Wahhabi school of Islam or a school, such as Deobandi, that has been heavily influenced in all relevant respects by Salafism. . . .

. . . In the war of ideas, one of the most important steps that Obama could take would be to publicly shine a light on Salafism, both as the feeder for radical Islam and for the barbarity of some of its dogma. That would go very far to starting the type of discussion that could actually bring some semblance of evolution and peaceful change to Salafism. Ignoring Salafism - which, according to ex-CIA agent Bob Baer we have done ever since the 1970's when the Saudi's first began to buy influence in the American body politic - allows it to metastasize in the dark. And it is metastasizing at rapid speed today on the back of Saudi petrodollars. That is a recipe for disaster.

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This is a critical issue that will mean losses in American blood and gold until we begin to engage in the war of ideas. The tack taken by the Obama administration is 180 degrees of wrong.

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A Discordant Note On Christmas (Updated)

I have blogged here often on the mistreatment of Christians and Jews in Muslim states. As I wrote a few months ago:

. . . [The] Wahhabi, Salafi, and Deobandi sects in particular interpret the Koran to mean that they can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. [Update: For specific references to these Salafi doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.] . . .

In . . . Pakistan, the charge of blasphemy against the Prophet is being used to steal vast tracts of land from Christians In Algeria, Christians are being jailed by kangaroo courts for practicing their religion. In Saudi Arabia, there is no freedom to practice any religion but Islam, even in the privacy of one's home. No churches can be built in Turkey. Christians are being systematically persecuted and driven from Palestinian controlled portions of the Holy Land. Christains and Jews are second class citizens in virtually all Muslim dominated countries.

Despite all of this, you will recall Obama praising the Muslim world for its history of religious tolerance during his Cairo speech. Yet what he said is naught but another example in an endless line of examples of cowardly and morally weak Western politicial leader ignoring the bloody religious intolerance of Islamic states, pretending that this cancer does not exist. It is not that we should be intolerant in turn - to the contrary. But we have a moral duty to speak up and to hold these nations to account for their actions. Phyllis Chesler, writing at PJM, weighs in on this topic today. She asks the question, "could Jesus live safely in Bethleham today?" The answer is no.

This from Ms. Chesler:

It is Christmas 2009, and instead of peace on earth and good will towards all, Muslims are busily blowing up churches and Christians all over the Islamic world.

This is an awful reality but it is neither recent nor unexpected. Perhaps what is even more awful is the world’s silence and seeming passivity. We in the West who believe in religious tolerance have not stopped the persecution of Christians in Muslim countries. In the name of political correctness, we have also “tolerated” the often aggressive demands for mosques, public prayer, minarets, and loudspeakers on our own soil even though there is absolutely no reciprocity towards Christianity (or any other non-Muslim religion) in most Arab and Muslim countries. . . .

First they came for the Jews … and indeed, most Jews, all 800,000 of us, fled the Arab and Muslim world in the 1940s and 1950s. No one stopped this “silent exodus” or really cared that it had happened. Individual Muslims and the Muslim governments happily, greedily, confiscated Jewish homes, factories, and farms; those Jews who were not slaughtered were allowed to leave with ten dollars in their pocket. Unlike the Palestinian refugees, the Jews and Israel took care of their own. Unfortunately, the Muslim world turned parasitically to the United Nations and to the world to fund the very Palestinians whom they would not allow to remain in their countries as refugees or citizens.

As to our Christian brothers and sisters:

Two days ago, in Mosul, Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox Church of St. Thomas, founded in 770 AD, was bombed — killing two civilians and wounding five others. This was the “sixth attack on Christians there in less than a month.” Ironically, according to their identity cards, the two murder victims were actually Muslims. However, according to Father Abdul Massih Dalmay of this church, “Christians are being targeted during Christmas time.” Father Dalmay feels that the government has not provided enough security for churches at this time and views this as “negligence on their part.”

The Syrian Orthodox Parish of the Immaculate Virgin was attacked a week ago. An infant girl was killed and forty people were wounded. Father Faez Wadiha, of this church, says, with irony: “This is certainly a Christmas present for Mosul, a message of congratulations why we are celebrating a feast of love and peace. But we will pray in the streets, in homes, in shops. God is everywhere, not just in churches.” The Syrian Catholic Church of the Annunciation , the (Chaldean) Church of St Ephrem, and the St. Theresa Church were all bombed in Mosul in the last month. According to another Christian Father: “These attacks are aimed at forcing Christians to leave the country.”

Some might say: There is an unwanted (and perceived as) Christian-American military presence in Iraq and Afghanistan. These bombings are in retaliation …well, not so fast. There are other Muslim countries where there is no (unwanted) American military presence and where both Jews and Christians have lived long before Islam even came into being — countries in which Christians are now under siege. Let’s look at what’s happening to Christians who live in some Muslim countries today.

Egypt

For years now, Islamist “gangs” have been forcibly converting Christian children to Islam by drugging, kidnapping, gang-raping, photographing the rapes, blackmailing, and “marrying” the female child, as young as twelve, to Muslim men. The Egyptian police have been unwilling to stop this criminal activity. Recently, a Christian television channel broadcast a program about this in Arabic. Many Egyptians were shocked. Here is one of the kidnappers’ tactics:

“The latest fraud mentioned on the TV program is that Muslim gangs who dress as Coptic priests, offer a car lift to Christian girls and then abduct them. ‘The Coptic Church has warned its congregation against letting any unknown person dressed as a priest into their homes or accepting a lift.’” (My thanks to John Peter Maher for this information).

A substantial Christian population has always lived in Egypt. They have increasingly been bombed, tortured and murdered. . . .

Pakistan

For a long time now, Christians have been persecuted in Pakistan. Their female children have been kidnapped, forced to convert and forcibly married to Muslims; both priests and believers have been attacked, and often murdered. . . .

Turkey

Last month, Turkish authorities uncovered a detailed plot by Turkish naval officers to commit violence against their country’s non-Muslims in an effort to unseat Turkey’s Islamist government. “Entitled the ‘Operation Cage Action Plan,’ the plot outlines a plethora of planned threat campaigns, bomb attacks, kidnappings and assassinations targeting the nation’s tiny religious minority communities. …The scheme ultimately called for bombings of homes and buildings owned by non-Muslims, setting fire to homes, vehicles and businesses of Christian and Jewish citizens, and murdering prominent leaders among the religious minorities.” Nine hundred and thirty nine Turkish non-Muslims were specifically marked as targets. . . .

Indonesia

In the rapidly Islamifying Indonesia, in Jakarta, “hundreds of Muslims celebrated the eve of the Islamic New Year last Thursday (Dec. 17) by attacking a Catholic church building under construction in Bekasi, West Java. A crowd of approximately 1,000 men, women and children from the Bebalan and Taruma Jaha areas of Bekasi walking in a New Year’s Eve procession stopped at the 60 percent-completed Santo Albertus Catholic Church building, where many ransacked and set fires to it, church leaders said. Damage was said to be extensive, but no one was injured.”

Somalia

“Islamic extremists controlling part of the Somali capital of Mogadishu this month executed a young Christian whom they accused of trying to convert a 15-year-old Muslim to Christianity. Members of the Islamic extremist group al Shabaab had taken 23-year-old Mumin Abdikarim Yusuf into custody on Oct. 28 after the 15-year-old boy reported him to the militants. Yusuf’s body was found on Nov. 14 on an empty residential street in Mogadishu, with sources saying the convert from Islam was shot to death, probably some hours before dawn.”

Thus, Christians and other non-Muslims have been continuously attacked and persecuted in Egypt, Pakistan, Turkey, Indonesia, and Somalia.

Christmas approaches. What about the Holy Land? What kind of Christmas may we expect there?

The Jewish King David was born in Bethlehem, as was Jesus. Nevertheless, fewer and fewer Christians (and no Jews) live there year-round; pilgrims come to visit at this time of year but that’s about it. According to Benny Avni, writing in the New York Post, “fifty years ago, Christians made up 70 percent of Bethlehem’s population; today, about 15 percent…Practically the only place where the Christian population is growing is in Israel.”

As to the Church of the Nativity, it was treated abominably by Palestinian terrorists who, in 2002, held priests hostage there and treated it as a combination garbage dump and toilet. Israeli forces had to rescue the priests and arrange a cease-fire and surrender.

In the West Bank, churches, Christian cemeteries, and Christian-owned businesses have been attacked and defaced. Christians have been leaving in droves. According to Benny Avni, the current “West Bank Christian population (not counting Jerusalem)…is now less than 8 percent of the population.”

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Daniel Schwammenthal focuses on the persecution of Arab Christians in Bethlehem and especially on how the Western media has refused to cover this fact. When we read about the persecution of Palestinians it is only ascribed to Israel, never to Hamas, Hezbollah, or to the Palestinian Authority. The firebombing of Christian homes and of the only Christian bookstore in Bethlehem, the mass Islamic prayers in Manger Square, the intimidation of students at a Christian Bible college by Muslims who stand outside and loudly chant from the Qu’ran — are all daily realities for Christians in Bethlehem. A Christian spokesman in Bethlehem says: “We have never suffered as we are now suffering.”

Only the Jewish government of Israel guards and cherishes the holy places of all religions over which it has sovereignty. Only the Jewish Israeli government has offered permanent asylum to the Baha’i who fled Iran and temporary asylum to the black African Muslims and Christians who fled persecution and genocide at the hands of ethnic Arab Muslims in Sudan.

What in God’s name, are we to conclude from all this? Nina Shea, in National Review, draws some of the necessary conclusions:

“The disappearance of living Christian communities would signal the disappearance of religious pluralism and a moderating influence from the heart of the Muslim world. Within our lifetime, the Middle East could be wholly Islamicized for the first time in history. Without the experience of living alongside Christians and other non-Muslims at home, what would prepare it to peacefully coexist with the West? This religious polarization would undoubtedly have geopolitical significance. So far, official Washington has not taken this under consideration.”

As I’ve said: What happens to the Jews, at least under Islam, is bound to happen to Christians next. And so it has.

Of course, Muslims persecuted, colonized, and genocidally exterminated other non-Muslim groups too. Let’s not forget the Hindus in India who were under genocidal attack for 700 years; the Zoroastrians and Baha’i who were under attack in Iran; and the Armenians who were genocidally exterminated by Turkish Muslims. Armenians are a Christian ethnic group whose members belong to the Armenian Apostolic Church. To this day, the Turks still refuse to admit their responsibility.

So, on the one hand we have a relatively passive Christian West which has chosen not to actively stop the persecution of Christians in Muslim lands. On the other hand, we have allegedly “peaceful” Muslims who look the other way as Christians are persecuted and who are, understandably, also unwilling to … die to save Christians. For that matter, they are simply trying to live their lives and they are also unwilling to risk their lives to save other Muslims as well. “Peaceful” Muslims do not necessarily feel responsible for what is happening. Culturally and psychologically, they have been well trained to blame others, never themselves and to never act alone, as individuals, and/or against the family, clan, tribe, or ummah.

For example, the other day, I engaged my taxi driver in conversation. He was a young man from Turkey. He told me that he was a religious Muslim, that his wife wore hijab — and that he was committed to peace.

“Do you understand the Islamic jihadists who massacre innocent civilians in the name of Islam”?

Calmly, he answered. “Madame, they are not real Muslims. No real Muslim would do anything like that. I don’t know any Muslims like that.” He was very definite about this.

Said I: “But don’t you want to stop such criminals from committing atrocities in the name of your religion?”

He remained silent. Perhaps my question embarrassed him or made him sad; perhaps he was angry and could not afford to show it. Perhaps my question even threatened him because it assumed, even demanded, that he should be “doing” something. However, this soft-spoken man expressed no sorrow, no sense of responsibility, no guilt. His practice of Islam rendered him superior to it all; thus, evil had nothing to do with him, he had disassociated himself from it entirely.

As the world celebrates the birth of the Prince of Peace — originally a Jewish rabbi from Bethlehem–let’s be clear: In these times, Jesus would not be safe in the city where he was born, neither as a Jew nor as a Christian.

A final thought. Obama condemns the U.S. as having a "broken moral compass" for "torturing" the perpetrators of the greatest mass murder in U.S. history in order to stop other such acts, yet he white washes daily acts of murder, torture, and blatant discrimination in Muslim states directed against Christians. His morality is but skin deep. His cowardice goes to his core.

Update: At the WSJ, Daniel Schwammenthal has an article on the mistreatment and terrorizing of Christians within the Palestinian terrirtories, including Bethleham:

. . . On the rare occasion that Western media cover the plight of Christians in the Palestinian territories, it is often to denounce Israel and its security barrier. Yet until Palestinian terrorist groups turned Bethlehem into a safe haven for suicide bombers, Bethlehemites were free to enter Israel, just as many Israelis routinely visited Bethlehem.

The other truth usually ignored by the Western press is that the barrier helped restore calm and security not just in Israel, but also in the West Bank including Bethlehem. The Church of the Nativity, which Palestinian gunmen stormed and defiled in 2002 to escape from Israeli security forces, is now filled again with tourists and pilgrims from around the world.

But even here in Jesus' birthplace, which is under the control of the Palestinian Authority (PA), Christians live on a knife's edge. Mr. Khoury tells me that Muslims often stand in front of the gate of the Bible College and read from the Quran to intimidate Christian students. Other Muslims like to roll out their prayer rugs right in Manger Square.

. . . Christians have only recently begun to talk about how Muslim gangs simply come and take possession of Christian-owned land while the Palestinian security services, almost exclusively staffed by Muslims, stand by. Mr. Qumsieh's own home was firebombed three years ago. The perpetrators were never caught.

"We have never suffered as we are suffering now," Mr. Qumsieh confesses, . . .

Always a minority religion among the predominantly Muslim Palestinians, Christians are, Mr. Qumsieh says, "melting away," even in Bethlehem. While they represented about 80% of the city's population 60 years ago, their numbers are now down to about 20%, a result not just of Muslims' higher birth rates but also widespread Christian emigration. "Our future as a Christian community here is gloomy," Mr. Qumsieh says.

Palestinian plight not attributable to Israel barely seems to register in the West's collective conscience. As Christians around the world remember Jesus' birth, perhaps we can think of Mr. Khoury and those Christians still suffering in Gaza and Bethlehem.

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Pakistan and the War on Terror

Want a short primer on Pakistan - you probably can do no better than reading Faoud Ajami, professor of Middle East Studies at The Johns Hopkins University. He writes today in the WSJ to discuss the rise of Islamism in Pakistan and he has some choice words for the Obama administration's approach to Iraq and Pakistan.

This from Prof. Ajami:

The drama of the Swat Valley -- its cynical abandonment to the mercy of the Taliban, the terror unleashed on it by the militants, then the recognition that the concession to the forces of darkness had not worked -- is of a piece with the larger history of religious extremism in the world of Islam. . . .

The decision by Pakistan to retrieve the ground it had ceded to the Taliban was long overdue. We should not underestimate the strength of the Pakistani state, and of the consensus that underpins it. The army is a huge institution, and its mandate is like that of the Turkish army, which sees itself as a defender of secular politics.

The place of Islam in Pakistani political culture has never been a simple matter. It was not religious piety that gave birth to Pakistan. The leaders who opted for separation from India were a worldly, modern breed who could not reconcile themselves to political subservience in a Hindu-ruled India. The Muslims had fallen behind in the race to modernity, and Pakistan was their consolation and their shelter.

Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the founder of Pakistan, was secular through and through. The pillars of his political life had been British law and Indian nationalism. Both had given way, and he set out for his new state, in 1947, an ailing old man, only to die a year later. He was sincere in his belief that Pakistan could keep religion at bay.

Jinnah's vision held sway for three decades. It was only in the late 1970s that political Islam began its assault against the secular edifice. A military dictator, Zia ul-Haq, had seized power in 1977; he was to send his predecessor, the flamboyant populist Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, to the gallows. Zia was to recast Pakistan's political culture. It was during his decade in power that the madrassas, the religious schools, proliferated. (There had been no more than 250 madrassas in 1947. There would be a dozen times as many by 1988, and at least 12,000 by latest count.)

Zia had been brutally effective in manipulating the jihad in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. His country was awash with guns and Saudi and American money. He draped his despotism in Islamic garb. He made room for the mullahs and the mullahs brought the gunmen with them.

Say what you will about the ways of Pakistan, its people have never voted for the darkness that descended on Swat and its surroundings. In the national elections of 2008 the secular and regional parties had carried the day; the fundamentalists were trounced at the polls. The concessions in Swat were a gift the militants had not earned. . . .

In the 1980s, Pakistan led to Afghanistan, and to the final battle of the Cold War. Nowadays, the struggle in Afghanistan leads back to Pakistan, and for a battle on behalf of Muslim modernity. The stakes in Pakistan for the U.S. are vital. . . .

In his days on the stump, candidate Barack Obama had maintained that he would begin with active diplomacy over the long-standing Pakistani-Indian dispute over Kashmir. But by any reckoning, India's weight and power preclude taking up that question. No government in New Delhi would countenance any change in the status in Kashmir.

In truth, the U.S. can't alter the balance of power between India and Pakistan. For six decades now, Pakistan has lived in the shadow of India's success. This has tormented Pakistanis and helped radicalize their politics. The obsession with the unfinished business of partition (Kashmir) has been no small factor in the descent of Pakistan into religious and political extremism. The choice for Pakistan can be starkly put: the primacy of Kashmir in political life or the repair of the country, the renewal of its institutions, and the urgent task of putting in place an educational system that would undercut the power of the religious reactionaries.

In his desire to be the un-Bush, President Obama seems bent on waging this war in the "AfPak theater" without ennobling it, without giving it a name or a stirring call. We are not to see this struggle through the lens of the "long war" against jihadism and Islamism, for this would give vindication to the way George W. Bush saw the world in the aftermath of 9/11. Besides, we had declared that war done and over with, a great overreach.

By the Obama administration's practice and admonition, we are not to see the ideological trail from the Middle East to South Asia that has put the world of Islam and its fragile modernism in great peril. Ours is a stealth campaign. We want to "degrade, dismantle, and defeat" al Qaeda, deny it the ability to do us harm. In Afghanistan, and in the Pashtun belt in Pakistan, we wish to separate the "reconcilables" of the Taliban from al Qaeda and the forces of the global jihad. But the people themselves, we hold at arm's length. We are not to invest ourselves in their affairs in the way George W. Bush invested himself in the reform and freedom of the Greater Middle East.
For a man of words, a bestselling author at that, the reticence of Mr. Obama about the stakes in this struggle is odd and bewildering. Ideology is "so yesterday," Secretary of State Hillary Clinton recently said, telling us volumes about our current diplomatic practice. So for Mr. Obama, it was two days in Turkey -- which has hectored us now for the full length of a decade and given voice to the most malignant fantasies of anti-Americanism -- and four hours in Camp Victory. Under Mr. Obama we are not to embrace the Iraqis, and claim the victory we won there and the decent democratic example we implanted on so unpromising a soil. In the same vein, we are to "do Pakistan," but clinically, without giving a name to the dangers that attend it or to the better heritage we should be calling it to.

For so pragmatic a people, Americans have done best when called to great undertakings. It is not enough to carry to this contested landscape in South Asia the cold-bloodedness of the so-called foreign policy realists.

Read the entire article. Our larger problem in the War on Terror is that we have yet to engage in the true central issue - the war of ideas. More than anything else, this is a war about the heart and soul of Islam - whether it will modernize and go through its period of Enlightenment, or whether it will continue to fall ever more under the sway of the Wahhabi / Deobandi sects that preach death and war as part of their 7th century version of the religion. We only touched this issue tentatively under Bush. Obama has abandoned it totally. This guarantees that the "war on terror" will be a long war indeed.

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The Rot Of British Socialism

There is an utter rot at the heart of British socialism. Four stories over the past few days from across the pond highlight that rot - the joint attack on British identity by socialists and Muslims, the refusal to let Ghurkas immigrate to the UK, Health and Safety nazis run wild, and the British government's disarming of its citizenry, leaving them unable to defend themselves when their lives are at stake:

The Trinity Cross is a medal that has been awarded to "62 distinguished residents of the former colony of Trinidad and Tobago over more than 40 years." No longer. It has now been ruled "too Christian" and its design changed after a complaint was lodged by a Muslim lawyer. If the people of Trinidad and Tobago wish not to receive an award of a Trinity Cross, they can certainly refuse it. Why on earth should Britain acquiesce in order to assuage what is clearly just one more in a series of relentless attacks from today's politicized Muslims aimed at discrediting Britain's history and destroying it's Christian identity? Obviously, it suits the socialists of Britain who have in fact, since acquiesced to the Muslim demands. As I pointed out in the post Change and the Cessation of British History, the UK's socialists fully share the same interim goals as the radical Muslims - to defeat Christianity and discredit British history as something evil.

In Britain, immigration is at crisis proportions, largely because EU law mandates open borders. This has led to an ever growing spike in the radical Muslim population. Now, the Labour government has finally seen fit to draw a line in the sand as to that portion of immigration which it can control. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims who wish to destroy Western Civilization, they can immigrate. A few thousand Ghurkas, famed warriors whose regiments have fought and died for British freedom and the protection of Western civilization in all of her wars since WWI, they can't.

It is impossible to imagine a more skewed view. Indeed, the most recent idiotic justification for this policy was offered yesterday by Phil Woolas, the socialist Labour Party's Immigration Minister, who said "I can't say "let the nice people in and the nasty people not". We have to have a law." That statement came on the day another Ghurka died fighting for the UK in Afghanistan.

The socialist chattering class in Britain is so deeply immersed in multiculturalism that they seem congenitally unable to distinguish real friend from real foe. The UK's governing socialists reach out to Muslims without distinguishing between the non-radical and the radical, pretending they are all benign because they see in them a reliable voting bloc. They ignore the brutal reality that the huge portion of radicals among them are a viper in their midst that will, at the first chance, consume them and all of Britain whole. (I wrote on a similar, though exponentialy less severe problem in the U.S. here).

It would seem that the socialist's see their greatest enemy as those citizens within their borders who threaten socialist dogma. Thus we see socialists spend their greatest efforts in a war on free speech and Christianity (see also here) in an effort to destroy traditional society and remake it in their own secular marxian vision. As to actual external enemies, socialists invariably rationalize their hostility as justified using the canard of moral relativism. Thus these socialists clearly feel no great compulsion to act with loyalty to those who have defended Britain's traditional values against an enemy the socialists view as equal or morally superior to Britain itself. It is a travesty and a national disgrace.

Then there are the Health and Safety Nazis - another innovation of the socialists taken with the best of intentions - to protect the public from themselves by exercising intrusive control over their daily lives. The latest comes from Oxford University's Bodleian library, where a series of historic books have been kept on equally historic high shelves that, for four centuries, have been accessed, by step ladders. No longer. The public can't access these books anymore because the Health & Safety Officer has decided that using a step ladder is too dangerous for the general public. Using the dictatorial powers of her office, she has effectively shut down a portion of the library to the public.

This mentality, of not trusting the average person to take care of themselves, is a hallmark of the socialist left. Under Health and Safety laws, it simply stifles daily life. Its consequences turn deadly, however, when the government takes away all means for a person to defend themselves from society's predators. In Britain of today, you cannot protect yourself with a handgun as they are illegal. You cannot use a taser to momentarily stun an attacker, they too are illegal. You cannot even use pepper spray, as even that is illegal. What is left to allow the weak to defend themselves from the strong, the prey to fend off the human predator?

Well, there is the government, acting through the police. But police act retrospectively to arrest for crimes committed. They are not, as a rule, a particularly effective means to stop attacks before they happen. By the very nature of crime and predation, the chance of police being on the scene and able to intervene to stop an attack as it occurs is infinitesimal. And thus do you have people such as Melanie Griffiths, 39 year old mother of three, murdered in her house by a man who stalked her for over a month and after she called the police and asked for help on the eve of her murder. This from the Daily Times:

Mary Griffiths, a 38-year- old fitness instructor, had told friends that she was concerned for her safety because of the unwanted attentions of a man. At around 6pm on Tuesday she dialled 999 saying she was being harassed and asking for help.

Police assured her they would be with her within an hour, but never showed up.
She was discovered dying from stab wounds to the chest at her home in Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, in the early hours of Wednesday.

. . . IPCC Commissioner Len Jackson said: 'People will be understandably shocked and concerned by this vicious attack on a woman in her own home. It is important that we look carefully at how the police chose to respond to contact from Mary Griffiths prior to her death. 'We will therefore carry out a full and independent investigation into the police response.'

The investigation is far too limited. It needs to include an examination of why Ms. Griffiths was denied all means of protecting herself by the British government. Indeed, as I wrote in the post A Constitutional Lesson In British History, the right to own a weapon for self protection is a part of the 1689 British Bill of Rights and, until less then a century ago, in a much more peaceful and law abiding Britain, anyone could own a firearm and travel about with it. Is the enlightened socialist Britain of today better off? If Ms. Griffith, who had been stalked for some time according to the article, knew full well the dangerousness of her situation, why was she not allowed the tools for her own defense. Are we all children in the eyes of the socialists, unable to live life without their constant adult supervision?

The Socialists of Britain can be credited with solving the class distinction problems that existed in the UK when they took power decades ago. Britain of today is much more of a meritocracy today, and the better for it. But that necessary cure was imposed along with a bevy of unnecessary toxins. Those toxins will destroy Britain if it stays on its current trajectory. I oft wonder when the rank and file of Britain will finally say, enough is enough, and force the issue.

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In The UK, A True Muslim Reformer

Dr. Taj Hargey is a Muslim Cleric who blames British mosques for the 7/7 bombings, says multiculturalism is a disaster and would throw Islamic fanatics out.
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The Daily Mail has posted a great article about Dr Taj Hargey, an outspoken Muslim cleric and history professor who is trying to lead a revolution against the Wabbists in the UK. He is a devout believer in the Koran, but he spouts a unique philosophy when it comes to the Hadiths upon which so much of the radical Islamist philosophy of Wabbism relies. Dr. Hargey teaches his flock not to honor the Hadiths unless they are, one, not in conflict with the Koran and, two, they make logical sense. Well, perhaps it is not too unique, as even Turkey is attempting to provide a modern interpretation of the hadiths that divorces them from their 7th century tribal foundation. But it does make Dr. Hargey stand out as a true Muslim reformer, along the lines of Tawfiq Hamid and our own Zuhdi Jasser.

At any rate, here are some excerpts from Britain's Daily Mail article on Dr. Hargey:

. . . In an age when the highest-profile Muslim preachers are bearded, anti-Western firebrands such as Abu Hamza or Omar Bakri Dr Hargey seems an anomaly.

He does not care much for male facial hair. He believes that women can be both seen and heard, even in a mosque at Friday prayers.

And don't even get him started on the sort of fanatics who blow up London buses, or the poisonous teachings that inspired them.

After three men were cleared this week on charges of assisting the July 7 bombers, there have been calls for an inquiry into blunders made by the security services.

But Dr Hargey has little doubt who, and what, is truly to blame for unleashing such terrorism on our streets.

'It is the extremist ideology present in many UK mosques which is the cement behind nihilistic plots such as this,' he says. 'They are twisting Islam.'

He has little or no time for the Government's 'pussyfooting' policy of encouraging multiculturalism.

'That is the biggest disaster to happen to Britain since World War II,' he says. 'It has given the extremist mullahs the green light for radicalism and segregation. We have to, we must, adjust to British society. And we can do so without losing our faith.'

Hardly surprisingly, such statements have made him wildly unpopular among those who adhere to the brand of ultra-conservative Saudi-funded Wahhabi Islam which currently makes most noise in Britain and around the world.

Certainly, if you Google Dr Hargey's name you will find him vilified as a 'charlatan' on any number of Islamic website forums.

In return, he is quite happy to describe his critics as 'fanatics'. Recently, one hostile publication went too far.

When we meet, Dr Hargey, 56, is still basking in the glow of his successful libel action against the English-language Muslim Weekly newspaper, which had accused him of being a heretic.

Earlier this month it agreed to pay him a five-figure sum and issue a grovelling apology, which was a little more esoteric than most heard in the High Court.

It stated: 'Dr Taj Hargey has never subscribed to, belonged to or been affiliated with any sect or minority group, religious or otherwise. On the contrary, Dr Hargey has consistently and openly reiterated his unconditional belief in the absolute finality of prophethood in Islam and Mohammed (peace and blessings upon him) as God's last prophet and final messenger.'

Afterwards, the cleric described the case as a 'watershed moment' in the battle between 'progressives' such as himself and what he called the 'Muslim McCarthyists', after the U.S. senator who accused opponents of being communist and 'un-American' with little or no evidence.

But despite his victory, or perhaps because of it, when his phone rings now it is still almost as likely to be an anonymous death threat as a request for spiritual guidance.

Certainly more people hate him than follow him.

'The masses have been brainwashed by the mullahs,' he says.

Which begs the question: can this intellectual Oxford imam really succeed with his ambition to lead a 'reformation' of British Islam? Or will medieval orthodoxy triumph in the end?

. . . His latest venture is the Muslim Education Centre of Oxford, of which he is founding chairman.

He also leads the city's Summertown Islamic congregation. 'The most progressive pulpit in the land, from which we do everything in English except prayer,' he states.

From a borrowed Masonic hall rather than a dedicated mosque, his enemies sneer.

The ideological core of his opposition towards the fashionable Islamic fundamentalists lies in his rejection of the absolute importance of hadith and Sharia law.

To explain, the Koran is the teaching of Allah, handed down to the Prophet Mohammed.

The hadiths, meanwhile, comprise the sayings and actions of Mohammed, as recorded by others, some time after his death.

For many Muslims, the hadiths are a fundamental guide and part of their faith. For Hargey, they are often unreliable and an obstacle to the integration of Islam into contemporary society. He believes the Koran is all.

'This is a big fight for the hearts and minds of Islam. There is nothing in the Koran which is incompatible with (living in) British society, unlike what I call "Mullah Islam" and their reliance on hadiths.'

And so he explains his position: 'These people say they have a right to stone adulterous women. We say show us where it says that in the Koran.

'The Koran must have precedence. It must be sovereign. Everything else is supplementary or subservient. All that stuff about jihad, women's rights, apostasy, all these issues come from the hadiths.

'We do not say get rid of the hadiths. But we do say that every hadith must pass two litmus tests.

First, it must not conflict with the Koran. Second, it must not conflict with reason or logic.

'One of the hadiths, for example, says the majority of people in Hell will be women. But let's do a forensic examination of this. First, let's look at the fact that 88 per cent of crimes are committed by men rather than women.

'How then, logically, can there be more women in Hell? Theologically, the Koran says that every human irrespective of gender will be rewarded for what they did and punished for what they did not.'

Of Sharia law he is even more dismissive. 'The Koran is clear that blasphemy is dealt with in the next life by God. The Sharia, meanwhile, is a medieval compilation of religious opinion which is not immutable, not eternal.

'How can we be dependant on 10th-11th-century jurists and scholars? It makes no sense.'

He also wants Muslims to integrate more with mainstream Britain.

'The (Muslim) reaction to 9/11 was to withdraw. I think the best way is to go out and belong.

'If you met me walking down the street, for example, would you know I am a Muslim? No.

'I know I am a Muslim in my heart and my actions, not in my beard or the niqab face mask. The niqab only comes from a hadith and even that only refers to the Prophet's wives. This is a big fight for the hearts and minds of Islam. There is nothing in the Koran that is incompatible with (living in) British society.'

Of the cries of 'heretic' to which he is frequently subjected, he argues: 'Faith is between the person and God. No one can pronounce you a heretic (in Islam) and I think that is a wonderful thing.

'But we do need a reformation in Islam. We have to go back to the pristine principles in our faith. We need a British Islam and by that I do not mean a compromise.

'Christianity was once an alien faith. We have to integrate in a matter of decades rather than centuries.'

But what of the accusations that he is simply a State stooge? This angers him.

'I have called for Bush and Blair to be indicted at the international criminal court for their wars. What kind of stooge does that make me? We have a multicultural community of men and women, including converts. We are not fanatics and appeal to a very broad constituency. We do not appeal to those who have been brainwashed by the mullahs.

These people refuse to debate with me and instead send their minions to do their dirty work on the internet or via anonymous phone calls. We get death threats, intimidation and blackmail tactics. But it does not dissuade us.

'Our group is based on the "Three Es": Enlightenment, Egalitarianism and Erudition.

But the Government, with its anti-terrorist strategy, has never contacted us, even though we say violence and suicide bombing are against the faith.

'What a mistake. In this city we have the Wahhabi-backed Oxford Centre of Islamic Studies. It preaches the most repressive and egregious theology.

'We want to establish an Oxford Centre for British Islam. We will have a mosque and the leader could be either male or female.'

So, for example, he has supported a state school which banned the niqab, much to the fury of his Muslim foes.

And last October he hosted the appearance in Oxford of Professor Amina Wadud, a female Islamic academic, who gave a sermon at Friday prayers before a mixed-gender congregation, which was anathema to the extremists.

Dr Hargey says: 'She is the undisputed authority on women in the Koran. We invited this heavyweight intellectual and the people who made the most protest outside our prayer hall were women dressed in niqabs who had been brainwashed by their menfolk.

'It was like the time of Emmeline Pankhurst and the suffragettes agitating for the vote.

'Then, many of the women were conditioned to think their behaviour a scandal. Now look at all those women walking past us who have the vote and think nothing of it.'

He also frowned on the recent extremist demonstration against the troops parading through Luton.

'While we feel it was an illegal war, you cannot punish the average squaddie for what is done in the name of New Labour and that toxic Texan.

'Yes, the war was wrong, but you cannot call soldiers murderers, or cowards. My life's work is to make British Muslims integrated.'

He is also utterly dismissive of the Muslim Council of Britain, which until the Government's recent reversal of policy, was the state's contact point with British Islam.

'They are Indo-Pakistani and sexist,' he says. 'It's a reactionary group, infused with the repressive ideology of the Wahhabis.

'If we go along their path we will have a ghetto mentality, segregated and giving our enemies such as the British National Party the opportunity to target us like the Jews in the 1930s. Isolation is our greatest peril.'

For the record, he supported BNP leader Nick Griffin's recent appearance at an Oxford Union debate, although he certainly did not endorse his views.

'We should not silence him. We should expose him.

'I love this country, I follow Spurs and I go to the pub, if only to drink orange juice. I am also a Muslim. But I am not a threat. If people like me are smothered then we will all sleep less safely in our beds.

'These people are religious fascists. The view that Islam is incompatible with British society is something that the Muslim Council of Britain and their hangers- on have promulgated.'

And with that, he adjusts the knot in his mustard tie, drains the last drop of his (non-alcoholic) drink and leaves the bar.

He may be a deeply controversial imam. But he is undoubtedly a brave one.

Read the entire article. And while I may dispute his political views on the war in Iraq, I think he is precisely on target on all else. Indeed, one of my first posts on this blog was to give a thumbnail history of Islam and make the case that Islam desperately needs to go through its period of Enlightenment and a Reformation - acts being desperately fought by the Wahhabi Islamists that pose such a danger to not only the West, but all of the Islamic World.

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Melanie Phillips: UK Is Sleepwalking Into Islamisation

Melanie Phillips, author of Londonistan, is perhaps the most articulate voice in the UK to warn of the destruction to British society being brought about by the multiculturalists who hold all the power in Britain today. Their's is a steady diet of appeasement of the radical Islamists who claim to speak for the entire British Muslim population. To call the socialist Labour government's approach to this issue counterproductive is the height of understatement.
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This from Ms. Phillips:

Three years after the London Tube and bus bombings, it is alarming beyond measure to record that Britain is even now sleepwalking into Islamisation. Some people will think this is mere hyperbole. However, that’s the problem. Britain still doesn’t grasp that it is facing a pincer attack from both terrorism and cultural infiltration and usurpation.

The former is understood; the latter is generally not acknowledged or is even denied, and those who call attention to it are pilloried as either ‘ Islamophobes’ or alarmists who have taken up residence on Planet Paranoia.

Certainly, the police and security service have been foiling plot after plot and are bringing to court a steady stream of Islamist radicals –an improvement without doubt from three years ago. And so, particularly within the British elite, people think that things are broadly under control.

They fail to realise that the attempt to take over our culture is even more deadly to this society than terrorism. They are simply blind to the ruthless way in which the Islamists are exploiting our chronic muddle of well-meaning tolerance and political correctness (backed up by the threat of more violence) to put Islam on a special — indeed, unique — footing within Britain.

As a result, the steady Islamisation of British public life is either being ignored or even tacitly encouraged by a political, security and judicial establishment that is failing to identify the stealthy and mind-bending game that is being played.

The official counter-radicalisation programme illustrates the problem. The Government wants to tackle radicalisation within Britain’s Muslim community by winning hearts and minds within that community. Its strategy is based on isolating the extremists and encouraging the moderates.

The problem, however, is that it doesn’t understand what Muslim extremism is. Believing that Islamic terrorism is motivated by an ideology which has ‘hijacked’ and distorted Islam, it will not acknowledge the extremism within mainstream Islam itself.

The reason so many older British Muslims are traditionally moderate is that they were brought up in the Asian subcontinent under a tamed form of Islam, deriving from centuries of colonial rule, which glossed over much of the teaching of the religion.

The Government believes that Islamic radicalism can be countered by teaching authentic Islam to Muslims. But since Islamic radicalism is based upon those very authentic religious precepts, this will undoubtedly have the effect of radicalising people who otherwise would never have thought in this way.

The Mosques and Imams National Advisory Board (MINAB) was set up to put into effect the Government’s aim of ensuring moderation in the mosques. This was always unlikely, given that members of Islamist groupings were on the steering committee. Although MINAB’s chairman, Manazir Ahsan, presents himself as a reformer, he is the director of the Islamic Foundation, which follows the writings of Maulana Maududi — who preached an end to the sovereignty and supremacy of unbelievers who should be made to live in a state of subordination to Islam.

Similarly, Dr Ataullah Siddiqui, the Government’s chief adviser on Islamic Studies, is a senior member of the Islamic Foundation. A report he wrote for the Government last year, Islam at Universities in England, which was publicly welcomed by the Prime Minister, urged that among other special privileges for Muslims, they should be allowed to teach Islamic subjects in British universities and that non-Muslims should be banned from doing so.

In any event, the universities are steadily being Islamised, with academic objectivity in the teaching of Islam and Middle East studies being set aside in favour of indoctrination and propaganda.

A report by Professor Anthony Glees due to be published in the autumn will argue that extremist ideas are being spread by Islamic study centres linked to British universities and backed by multimillion-pound donations from Saudi Arabia and Muslim organisations.

He says: ‘Britain’s universities will have to generate two national cultures: one non-Muslim and largely secular, the other Muslim. We will have two identities, two sets of allegiance and two legal and political systems. This must, by the Government’s own logic, hugely increase the risk of terrorism.’

Even more terrifying is the increasing Islamisation of the police. It has been reported that up to eight police officers and civilian staff working in the Metropolitan Police and other forces are suspected of links to extremist groups, including Al Qaeda, with some even believed to have attended terror training camps in Pakistan or Afghanistan. One suspected jihadist officer working in the South East has been allowed to keep his job despite being caught circulating internet images of beheadings and roadside bombings in Iraq.

No less disturbing is the fact that the police are intentionally bringing Islamists into the force in the utterly misguided belief (shared by many in the security service) that they can help counter Islamic radicalism.

Commander Robert Lambert, who until this year ran the Metropolitan Police Muslim Contact Unit, observed that terrorism could not be fought by contact with moderate Muslims but through partnerships with Salafists (Sunni extremists who believe in Islamic supremacy over the secular state) — one of whom was actually an officer in his own police department.

Commander Lambert believed that this would enable the police to understand the way extremists thought before they committed any acts of terror.

But it surely goes without saying that an officer who is committed to the overthrow of the West, and its replacement by an Islamic society poses a security risk of the first order. For a police counter-terrorism specialist to be promoting this situation beggars belief.

Deeply alarmed sources have furthermore told me that, in the overriding concern by police forces to hire more ethnic minority officers, they have junked vetting criteria — particularly when it comes to hiring Police Community Support Officers, who after two years can become fully fledged police officers with no further vetting required. The result, say these sources, is that the security of police operations is potentially compromised.

Moreover, there have been disturbing examples of the police protecting Islamic extremism. In 2007, the Channel Four Dispatches programme uncovered evidence of incitement to murder of homosexuals, the killing of British soldiers and hatred of ‘unbelievers’ going on below the official radar in ostensibly respectable British mosques.

But instead of prosecuting such fanatics, the West Midlands Police first tried to prosecute the programme makers and then accused them of selective editing and distortion and undermining community cohesion — a libel for which the police and the Crown Prosecution Service were subsequently forced to apologise.

A report by the Centre for Social Cohesion on honour killings and similar violence revealed that several women’s groups, particularly in the Midlands and northern England, say they are often reluctant to go to the police with women who have run away from home to escape violence, because they cannot trust Asian police officers not to betray the girls to their abusing families.

In February, Christian evangelists Arthur Cunningham and Joseph Abraham were handing out Bible extracts in Alum Rock, Birmingham. They were stopped by a Muslim Police Community Support Officer, threatened with arrest if they carried on preaching in ‘a Muslim area’, and warned that they might get beaten up if they came back.

What on earth is happening when, in the heart of England, a British police support officer, employed by the British state to enforce the law of England, aggressively prevents Christians from preaching the established faith of England on the grounds that this is now a ‘hate crime’?

. . . When the Bishop of Rochester, Dr Michael Nazir-Ali, warned that Britain was developing Muslim nogo areas, he was denounced as Islamophobic.

The Establishment queued up to say they didn’t recognise the Britain he was describing. But British public life is progressively being Islamised, with Muslim radicals in areas with large concentrations of Muslims increasingly intimidating non-Muslims.

After a vicar in East London, Canon Michael Ainsworth, was beaten up by three Muslims in his own churchyard in March, it was revealed that there had been many attacks on churches in the area by such youths, who on one occasion shouted: ‘This should not be a church, this should be a mosque.’

Yet last month, one of the youths in the Ainsworth attack walked free after a judge accepted his claim that the attack was not religiously motivated.

Sharia law is steadily encroaching into British institutions. Last week, Lord Phillips, the most senior judge in England and Wales, said it could play a role in some parts of the legal system. This followed comments by the Archbishop of Canterbury who declared that Muslim families should be able to choose between English and Islamic law in marital and family issues.

But the fact is that Britain is already developing a parallel sharia jurisdiction in such matters, with a blind eye being turned to such practices as forced marriage, cousin marriage, female genital mutilation and polygamy; indeed, welfare benefits are now given to the multiple wives of Muslim men.

Meanwhile, the courts still appear to be bending over backwards to appease Muslim radicalism. Last month, a judge freed from prison Abu Qatada, the most important Al Qaeda operative in Europe and the lynchpin of numerous European terror attacks, who was being held pending deportation to Jordan to stand trial.

His release on bail — into a kind of house arrest — followed an Appeal Court ruling that he could not be deported to Jordan because any prosecution there might have been obtained as a result of a witness being tortured — a breach of the European Convention on Human Rights.

Why do the British authorities appear to go out of their way to thwart efforts to fight and defeat jihadi terror? While Islamists are being appeased, the Christian church is being discriminated against. The Bishop of Rochester said that the decline of Christian values was destroying Britishness and had created a ‘moral vacuum’ which radical Islam was filling

In reply to this cri de coeur from a civilisation under siege, Hazel Blears, the Communities Secretary, maintained it was right that more money and effort was spent on Islam than Christianity because of the threat from extremism and homegrown terrorism.

But Islamism will be repulsed only if Britain once again regains the confidence of its own culture, heritage and traditions. And these are based on Christianity.

Ms Blears’s lamentable comment graphically illustrates the problem. While the ordinary people of Britain are increasingly aghast at the way their country is being transformed by Islamism, the political, judicial, security and intellectual elites are busy denying the nature of the danger and making it far, far worse through a combination of extreme ignorance, arrogance and sheer funk.

The Islamists launched their jihad against the West because they perceived it was so weak and confused it would not possess the wherewithal to defend itself. When it comes to Britain, they never spoke a truer word.

Read the entire post. I would add that most of the points Ms. Phillips makes, I have covered in excruciating detail here and here - and about the insanity of MINAB here. Britain has a huge problem that is only growing by leaps and bounds. But an even bigger one is that the socialists in power either do not recognize reality or are being deliberately ignorant because of some combination of their utopian multicultural ethos and the cynical practicality. The rapidly expanding Muslim population makes up a solid Labour constituency. Because what is happening is destructive to traditional society and because the policies being followed seem based on pure fantasy, a day of reckoning seems inevitable.

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Bang That Drum, Dr. Pipes

Step one to defeating an enemy - identify it. This is a drum I've been beating in this "war on terror" for years. Indeed, as I wrote six months ago, "Western governments are failing in their duty to define 'radical Islam.'" It is in the ideological battlefield that we will ultimately defeat radical Islam - or face the prospect of being ever threatened by it. There are a lot of individual Muslims and small groups who have joined that fight and are today in an existential contest for the heart and soul of their religion. Arrayed against them are the Salafists, Deobandis and Khomeinists - the radical Islamists - funded with near unlimited oil wealth. By failing to acknowledge this struggle and identify our enemy, we have yet to even join the fight - one equally as important to our security as Iraq and Afghanistan. Dr. Daniel Pipes weighs in on precisely the same topic.
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This from Dr. Pipes:

If you cannot name your enemy, how can you defeat it? Just as a physician must identify a disease before curing a patient, so a strategist must identify the foe before winning a war. Yet Westerners have proven reluctant to identify the opponent in the conflict the U.S. government variously (and euphemistically) calls the "global war on terror," the "long war," the "global struggle against violent extremism," or even the "global struggle for security and progress."

This timidity translates into an inability to define war goals. Two high-level U.S. statements from late 2001 typify the vague and ineffective declarations issued by Western governments. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld defined victory as establishing "an environment where we can in fact fulfill and live [our] freedoms." In contrast, George W. Bush announced a narrower goal, "the defeat of the global terror network" – whatever that undefined network might be.

"Defeating terrorism" has, indeed, remained the basic war goal. By implication, terrorists are the enemy and counterterrorism is the main response.

But observers have increasingly concluded that terrorism is just a tactic, not an enemy. Bush effectively admitted this much in mid-2004, acknowledging that "We actually misnamed the war on terror." Instead, he called the war a "struggle against ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world."

A year later, in the aftermath of the 7/7 London transport bombings, British prime minister Tony Blair advanced the discussion by speaking of the enemy as "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam." Soon after, Bush himself used the terms "Islamic radicalism," "militant Jihadism," and "Islamo-fascism." But these words prompted much criticism and he backtracked.

. . . In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law (Shari‘a).

Thus defined, the needed response becomes clear. It is two-fold: vanquish Islamism and help Muslims develop an alternative form of Islam. Not coincidentally, this approach roughly parallels what the allied powers accomplished vis-à-vis the two prior radical utopian movements, fascism and communism.

First comes the burden of defeating an ideological enemy. As in 1945 and 1991, the goal must be to marginalize and weaken a coherent and aggressive ideological movement, so that it no longer attracts followers nor poses a world-shaking threat. World War II, won through blood, steel, and atomic bombs, offers one model for victory, the Cold War, with its deterrence, complexity, and nearly-peaceful collapse, offers quite another.

Victory against Islamism, presumably, will draw on both these legacies and mix them into a novel brew of conventional war, counterterrorism, counterpropaganda, and many other strategies. At one end, the war effort led to the overthrow of the Taliban government in Afghanistan; at the other, it requires repelling the lawful Islamists who work legitimately within the educational, religious, media, legal, and political arenas.

The second goal involves helping Muslims who oppose Islamist goals and wish to offer an alternative to Islamism's depravities by reconciling Islam with the best of modern ways. But such Muslims are weak, being but fractured individuals who have only just begun the hard work of researching, communicating, organizing, funding, and mobilizing.

To do all this more quickly and effectively, these moderates need non-Muslim encouragement and sponsorship. However unimpressive they may be at present, moderates, with Western support, alone hold the potential to modernize Islam, and thereby to terminate the threat of Islamism.

In the final analysis, Islamism presents two main challenges to Westerners: To speak frankly and to aim for victory. Neither comes naturally to the modern person, who tends to prefer political correctness and conflict resolution, or even appeasement. But once these hurdles are overcome, the Islamist enemy's objective weakness in terms of arsenal, economy, and resources means it can readily be defeated.

Read the entire article. To see the ideological struggle for the heart of Islam in stark relief, I suggest that you watch Parts II and III (at least) of Dr. Zhudi Jasser's debate with a Salafi Imam that I have posted here. Step one for our government to insure Dr. Jasser wins is for the U.S. to join the ideological battle. We fail to do so at our peril.

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Dear Pakistan

Dear Pakistan:

We understand that a high level delegation from your country is coming to the West to request that we "amend laws regarding freedom of expression in order to prevent offensive incidents such as the printing of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) and the production of an anti-Islam film by a Dutch legislator." We understand that you are making this plea in order to forestall Muslims reacting with justifiable homicidal mania to any perceived slight by word or picture - or in the case of Teddy Bears, naming. Indeed, you have stated that the recent suicide bombing outside the gates of the Danish Embassy was preventable if we in the West would just silence all criticism of Islam. Since you have been so kind as to take the first step and open up a dialogue on the topic, there are just a few minor things that we too find offensive and were wondering if you perhaps could do something about them.



- Do you think you could discuss your Koranic interpretations that are used to legitimize terrorism and indiscriminate murder to advance Islam. We realize that the Wahhabi, Salafi, and Deobandi sects in particular interpret the Koran to mean that they can freely murder non-Muslims or enslave them and rape them. [Update: For specific references to these doctrines being taught in a Saudi school in Virginia, read the USCIFR report here.] Perhaps you can understand why we might find that offensive. This is made all the more problematic when one realizes that those sects hold that challenging their existing Salafi Koranic interpretations are "redda (apostasy) punishable by death . . ." Thus some of us could misinterpret your reasonable request to alter our laws of free speech to criminalize the criticism of Islam as a backdoor attempt to impose your will and your religion on the West. Perhaps you can clarify that for us.



While we are on the topic of terrorism, you have allowed your country to become ever more radicalized over the past four decades by throwing open your doors to Saudi madrassas that promote incredible racism, xenephobia and violence. You knowingly allowed the A.Q. Khan network to operate as a nuclear Walmart for the most dangerous regimes around the world. You created the Taliban movement and are, today, at most doing less than nothing to combat it, and at worst, actively supporting it in its efforts to retake Afghanistan. Hopefully you will understand why we find that a trifle problematic and, in the long run, untenable. While we ponder offending you, perhaps you might ponder your role in killing us and spreading terrorism.


- Some have expressed dismay at your treatment of Muslims who decide they do not believe in Islam or that convert to another faith, such as Christianity. We take some offense at executing people for their religious beliefs. I realize that despite the threat of death, conversions to Christianity from Islam are occuring with ever greater rapidity. Are you so unsure of your religion that you can only maintain outward belief and retention by threatening death? And on a related topic, do you think you can get the Saudis to stop cutting off peoples heads for witchcraft? Not to be too judgmental, but the emphasis of your religious police on ferreting out witches and breaking spells (which accroding to the grand inquistor are to be found in the sea) seems all a trifle medieval. Perhaps it becomes understandable when one realizes that Saudi Arabia only put the flat earth theory behind them with the recent turn of the millenium. A fatwa issued by the Grand Mufti in 1993 instructed "the earth is flat. Whoever claims it is round is an atheist deserving of punishment."



- Your ideas of religious freedom seem a tad lacking to us. In your country, Pakistan, the charge of blasphemy against the Prophet is being used to steal vast tracts of land from Christians In Algeria, Christians are being jailed by kangaroo courts for practicing their religion. In Saudi Arabia, there is no freedom to practice any religion but Islam, even in the privacy of one's home. No churches can be built in Turkey. Christians are being systematically persecuted and driven from Palestinian controlled portions of the Holy Land. Christains and Jews are second class citizens in virtually all Muslim dominated countries. As long as we are discussing things that bring offense, pehaps you might consider those things.



- About this honor violence and the treatment of women thing, do you think you can work on that? It really does offend some of us in the West - though admittedly not the major feminist groups. I realize women can seem a bit threatening, but do you have to stone them to save your idea of honor? Or gang rape them? Or beat them to death? Or set them on fire? And do you really have to perform female genital mutilation?



- Most of us in the West are a might offended by pedeophilia. I realize the Prophet deflowered a nine year old girl when he was fifty-four, but times have changed over the last millenium and a half. What do you say, can you do away with arranged marriages to and sex with pre-pubescent girls in order to stop offending us?



- Some have noted that court systems applying Sharia law discriminate based on gender and religion. Is there any reason you can think of that a Muslim male's testimony should count twice that of a non-Muslim's or a woman's? We do find such systemic discrimination a bit troubling.



- Is there a reason you keep hanging gays? A substantial number of us are offended by killing or beating a person for their sexual orientation.








Lastly, there are many of us who take offense at the fact that you feel that your interpretation of your religion is above criticism - and indeed, that you act as psychopathic children at any real or imagined slight in an effort to bully the West into silence and dhimmitude. It is difficult to think of anything that would be more dangerous or counterproductive to the West than silencing criticism of Islam or freedom of speech in whatever form. Several of the major sects of your religion - Wahhabi, Salafi, Deobandi, Khomeinist - preach an interpretation of the Koran and Hadiths that are quite literally mired in the Dark Ages and aimed at imposing Muslim domination on the world by any method. They are in desperate need of their period of Enlightenment and maturation that can and will only come through critical thought and debate - or to put it in Islamic terms, ijtihad. Your request to silence free speech in the West would effectively stop that process in its tracks.

I'll tell you what, why don't you get cracking on the things that offend us, and then we'll talk some more about silencing our freedom of speech to keep you happy. Or are our concerns just more Islamophobia on our part? Well, what say you my Paki friends?

Sincerely,

GW


P.S. In countries that already have laws limiting criticism of Islam, we have seen the UK issue a warrant for the arrest of a British blogger for critizing Islam, and in Canada, Mark Steyn was charged with a human rights violation for merely quoting a Wahhabi cleric. Another blogger from Finland was recently jailed for two years for insulting Islam. What more could you ask for, really? Just remember, pigs get fat, hogs get slaughtered in the West.

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