The War Against Radical Islam & The Battlefield of Ideas

Andrew McCarthy, writing at NRO, is effuse in his praise for Newt Gingrich's remarks concerning our war against "radical Islam" in both its militaristic and 'fifth column' forms. Gingrich, he says, is that exceedingly rare combination of a politician who both understands the nature of the threat and is willing to speak out about it honestly. This from Mr. McCarthy:

. . . Gingrich grasps that there is an enemy here and that it is a mortal threat to freedom. He knows that if we are to remain a free people, it is an enemy we must defeat. That enemy is Islamism, and its operatives — whether they come as terrorists or stealth saboteurs — are the purveyors of sharia, Islam’s authoritarian legal and political system. . . .

The single purpose of this jihad is the imposition of sharia. On that score, Gingrich made two points of surpassing importance. First, some Islamists employ mass-murder attacks while others prefer a gradual march through our institutions — our legal, political, academic, and financial systems, as well as our broader culture; the goal of both, though, is the same. The stealth Islamists occasionally feign outrage at the terrorists, but their quarrel is over methodology and pace. Both camps covet the same outcome.

Second, that outcome is the death of freedom. In Islamist ideology, sharia is deemed to be the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society — for Islam is not merely a religious doctrine, but a comprehensive socio-economic and political system. As the former speaker elaborated, sharia embodies principles and punishments that are abhorrent to Western values. Indeed, its foundational premise is anti-American, holding that we are not free people at liberty to govern ourselves irrespective of any theocratic code, that people are instead beholden to the Islamic state, which is divinely enjoined to impose Allah’s laws.

Sharia, moreover, is anti-equality. It subjugates women and brutally punishes transgressors, particularly homosexuals and apostates. While our law forbids cruel and unusual punishments, Gingrich observed that the brutality in sharia sanctions is not gratuitous, but intentional: It is meant to enforce Allah’s will by striking example.

On this last point, Gingrich offered a salient insight, one well worth internalizing in the Sun Tzu sense of knowing one’s enemy. Islamists, violent or not, have very good reasons for the wanting to destroy the West. Those reasons are not crazy or wanton — and they have nothing to do with Gitmo, Israel, cartoons, or any other excuse we conjure to explain the savagery away. Islamists devoutly believe, based on a well-founded interpretation of Islamic doctrine, that they have been commanded by Allah to kill, convert, or subdue all who do not adhere to sharia — because they regard Allah as their only master (“There is no God but Allah”). It is thus entirely rational (albeit frightening to us) that they accept the scriptural instruction that the very existence of those who resist sharia is offensive to Allah, and that a powerful example must be made of those resisters in order to induce the submission of all — “submission” being the meaning of Islam.

It makes no sense to dismiss our enemies as lunatics just because “secular socialist” elites, as Gingrich called them, cannot imagine a fervor that stems from religious devotion. We ought to respect our enemies, he said. Not “respect” in Obama-speak, which translates as “appease,” but in the sense of taking them seriously, understanding that they are absolutely determined to win, and realizing that they are implacable. There is no “moderate” sharia devotee, for sharia is not moderate. . . . Islamism is not a movement to be engaged, it is an enemy to be defeated.

Victory, Gingrich said, will be very long in coming — longer, perhaps, than the nearly half-century it took to win the Cold War. . . .

Debate over all of this is essential. The crucial point is that we must have the debate with eyes open. It is a debate about which Gingrich has put down impressive markers: The main front in the war is not Afghanistan or Iraq but the United States. The war is about the survival of Western civilization, and we should make no apologies for the fact that the West’s freedom culture is a Judeo-Christian culture — a fact that was unabashedly acknowledged, Gingrich reminded his audience, by FDR and Churchill. To ensure victory in the United States we must, once again, save Europe, where the enemy has advanced markedly. There is no separating our national security and our economic prosperity — they are interdependent. And while the Middle East poses challenges of immense complexity, Gingrich contended that addressing two of them — Iran, the chief backer of violent jihad, and Saudi Arabia, the chief backer of stealth jihad — would go a long way toward improving our prospects on the rest.

Most significant, there is sharia. By pressing the issue, Newt Gingrich accomplishes two things. First, he gives us a metric for determining whether those who would presume to lead us will fight or surrender. Second, at long last, someone is empowering truly moderate Muslims — assuming they exist in the numbers we’re constantly assured of. Our allies are the Muslims who embrace our freedom culture — those for whom sharia is a matter of private belief, not public mission. Our enemies are those who want sharia to supplant American law and Western culture. When we call out the latter, and marginalize them, we may finally energize the former. . . .

These are points that I have been making ad infinitum on this blog. For but one example, see National Security At The End Of Obama's First Year (its a long post - scroll half way through to get to the section on 'war of ideas'). The bottom line is that we have to engage in the war of ideas or the Islamist's war against the West will still be being fought by our grandchildren's grandchildren. Moreover, given the push of radicals for weapons of mass destruction, the far too widespread support for radicals throughout the Islamic world, and the continued push of Salafi Islam into the West on the back of Saudi petrodollars, the chances are very high that the war will likely become far more bloody and expensive as time goes on, as well as ever more threatening to the fundamental freedoms of Western civilization. This is a war that we could indeed lose if we fail to engage.

Step one in the war of ideas is to identify the enemy. We have to expose Wahhabi / Salafi Islam and shine a light on it in to engage the strongest force in any democracy - public opinion. Bush never did this. Obama is exponentially worse, pretending that there is no threat to the West originating out of Islam. It is not merely an incredibly dangerous falsehood, it is treasonous. Gingrich is the first major politician of either party to step up.

Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards has done two recent posts on this topic, both of which should be required reading. In Brilliance At Midnight, Dafydd notes that the threat from radical Islam to Western society is really two fold:

The take-away from the massive dumping of leaked U.S. military documents on WikiLeaks, documents related to the conduct and progress of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is this: The putative "rift" between Islamist terrorists on the one hand, and radical Islamists who "reject terrorism" (at specific times and places) on the other hand, has nothing to do with any ultimate goal of Islamism.

The rift reflects only a difference of opinion about the precise strategies and tactics for achieving that goal. Islamist victory conditions are the same in both groups: a pure, radical Islamism dominant across the globe, with sharia the final law in every country. . . .

Our soldiers in Afghanistan and Iraq are involved in the physical war against this threat, but in the long run, it is the war of ideas that matters more. In Brilliance at Midnight - the Dawn, Dafydd flushes out the tools available to us to engage in the war of ideas:

. . . The most important task before launching into a war of ideas is to fully arm and equip our "soldiers" -- in this case, our soldiers comprise all Americans willing and able to defend Western values of individual liberty, property and Capitalism, freedom of speech and religion (not merely freedom of worship, as Obama would have it), actual rule of law, and governance by the consent of the governed. Bluntly, I mean educating the masses about the Grand Jihad, its goals, its methods, and the existential danger it poses. . . .

Do read both of his posts. We fail to engage in the war of ideas at our own existential peril.

Lastly, as to Gingrich himself, I wrote recently that I consider him the best candidate for President the Republicans could field in 2012. His above remarks on the threat we face from Islamism merely increase my conviction exponentially.

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Much Lizardly Ado About . . . A Little Something (Updated)

Our Watcher’s Council alum, Dafydd at Big Lizards, has tossed down the gauntlet on an issue of supreme importance – our efforts at countering radical Islam in the ideological plane. He wrote a pair of scathing, well reasoned posts taking to task Bret Stephens and Thomas Joscelyn, among others, for criticizing efforts at changing the way our government talks about "radical Islam" and "jihadis." Joscelyn responded in an article at the Weekly Standard, opening thusly:

DAFYDD AT BIG LIZARDS has all sorts of bad things to say about my review of Andrew McCarthy's excellent new book, Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad. I will avoid addressing the snarky insults in Dafydd's post and stick to his attempts at substantive criticism.

Wow. After breaking out the popcorn and ordering a pizza, I sat down to read it all with an expectation of some quality entertainment. But after thoroughly reviewing the arguments and the documents, it became apparent that everyone seems to be missing the forest through the trees. It's not much ado about nothing, but it certainly misses the real issue.
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The DHS, several weeks ago, decided to alter the semantics of how they refer to Islamic terrorists. That was a decision that has been much derided by many commentators, including me, perhaps unduly harshly. Dafydd is strongly of the school of thought that supports the DHS approach "in order to open . . . an ideological counterinsurgency." This approach involves using alternatives to the terms such as "jihadi" and "Islamofacism." "Jihadi" means a "holy warrior," which is precisely the status to which those motivated by Islam to commit terror aspire. Calling them "jihadis" elevates them to that status in their eyes and the eyes of the world. Calling them something else would stop that. Dafydd sees such efforts as a nascent step towards engaging in the ideological battlefield. He sees this semantic effort as a way of discrediting the terrorists and driving a stake in between them and Muslims who do not support terrorism.

People in the second school of thought, which includes Mr. Stephens and Mr. Jocelyn, have been highly critical of that approach. They see it as obfuscation and a wholly useless effort in semantics. For those who want to break out the popcorn and enjoy this blog version of the UFC, here are the relevant posts, documents and articles.

January 8 DHS Memo – Terminology to Define the Terrorists: Recommendations From American Muslims

March 14 Memo from the Counter Terrorism Communications Center – Words that Work and Words That Don’t: A Guide For Counterterrorism Comunication

Bret Stephen’s WSJ Article – Homeland Security Newspeak

Jocelyn’s book review at the Weekly Standard of Andrew McCarthy’s book, Willful Blindness

Dafyyd’s first post – criticizing Brit Stephens over the DHS memo

Dafyyd’s second post – criticizing Thomas Jocelyn

Jocelyn’s Response in the Weekly Standard

The problem with the topic of this argument is it misses the real issue. We are facing, in radical Islam, an ideology that sees terrorism and the murder of others as supported in the Koran and thus as legitimate tactics to advance their Islamic faith. Dafydd is right, we absolutely need an ideological counterinsurgency. Defeating al Qaeda physically and stopping Iran’s deadly meddling throughout the Middle East are only treating the symptoms. Both could go away tomorrow, yet our nation will still not be safe from terrorism in the long run at the hands of radical Islamists. That is because the ideology underlying "radical Islam" is what has to be countered. And on that issue, we have failed utterly because have never defined "radical Islam."

Zhudi Jasser, former U.S. naval officer, physician and President of American Islamic Forum For Democracy (AIFD) is possibly the most eloquent speaker on this precise topic. He engaged in a debate a month ago with a Saudi cleric that was largely on this issue. I have the entire debate here. If you have not seen it, you need to sit through it. I cannot emphasize that strongly enough. Watch it. It is a crash course in radical Islam and what must be done to counter it. It also gives the Wahhabi view on such issues as wiping out Israel and the death sentence for apostacy.

As Dr. Jasser states, the starting point of an ideological challenge must be with identifying the problem – which in the case of radical Islam are the Wahhabi, Salafi and Khomeinist interpretations – and then attack the theoretical underpinnings. Here is an except from that debate that I have transcribed:

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The bottom line is that if we do not address the theological underpinnings of the koranic derivation, of the koranic interpretation of bin Laden, of Zarkawi, of Zawahiri and others, we will get nowhere.

There are serious, serious legal underpinnings of Islamic jurisprudence that say in the Salafi tradition . . . that says that if someone leaves the faith, you kill them. . . . We need to address [such interpretations as this] as Muslims. It empowers radicals to kill people. . . . The bottom line is, this is not just psychotic people. . . The reality of the fact is that the Islamic jurisprudence, the Imams that are teaching jurisprudence in . . . Saudi Arabia, Syria, and many of the mosques around the world are spreading a doctrine that teaches that the end justifies the means . . . that occupied people in Israel have a right to kill innocents, that’s not terrorism. That is not Islam. That is radicalism. That is barbarism, and its being done in the name of Islam, but it certainly is corruption.

There is a legal tradition that we have to own up to, we have to reform. . . . Many of us are reformed by the way we practice, . . . but [it is not reformed] in the educational system. So let’s step away from the nice stories of platitudes . . . let’s start . . . separating our spiritual path, separating the moral code and the clarity of our faith from a political movement that uses the name of Islam, uses certain scriptures to [justify their crimes and barbarism]

The only way to [change this] is by us taking them on in their interpretations and spreading literature around the world that contradicts Wahhabism, that contradicts Salafism, and to starts to say that the example of the Prophet had value for his behavior, had value for his morality, but no longer has is it relevant for statecraft and for Islam to have a role in government. . . .

I could not agree more with Dr. Jasser. My problem with Dafydd’s approach is that it goes around the first hurdle – i.e., identifying the sources of radical Islam and their interpretations that allow them to conduct murder and mayhem, and instead engage in semantic denunciations alone. As Marcus Aurelius famously asked:

This thing, what is it in itself, in its own constitution? What is its substance and material? And what its causal nature [or form]? And what is it doing in the world? And how long does it subsist?

From The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius. Unless we can answer Marcus Aurelius’s questions within the context of radical Islam, it is impossible to engage in a war of ideas, or as Dafydd puts it, an ideological counterinsurgency.

Understand that among those who favor Dafydd’s approach are all of the Wahhabi / Salafi and Muslim Brotherhood organizations in the U.S. Those organizations have spared no expense and no effort to get the U.S. to stop making a connection between Islam, terrorism and jihadism. I fully realize this is not what Dafydd is advocating, but the danger of only going forward on the semantics is that you obfuscate the true nature of the problem and allow the Wahhabists and Salafists off the hook. Their goal is simple – they want to metasticize in the West without challenge. Without the first step of utter and absolute clarity about the Wahhabi / Salafi / Khomeini sources of Islamic terrorism and the specifics of their dogma, mere semantic changes will only further obfuscate the issues – with a net gain to the Salafists.

That said, my criticism of Mr. Jocelyn is no less deep. While he in his article takes Dafydd’s approach to task as useless – with which I now disagree – he, like DHS and the rest of our government, equally does not identify the first hurdle as something that must be done.

If you wonder why that has not happened, rest assured it is not because there are clueless people in our government. Many, if not most, are well aware of the precise problem. It is not hard to surmise that the deliberate obfuscation by the government is because Wahhabi / Salafi Islam is the bloody cult that controls Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia has us by the oily short hairs. All the more reason to start drilling in ANWR and start engaging radical Islam in a true war of ideas.

The war is already joined by the Wahhabits and Khomeinists and people like Dr. Jasser. It is an existential war for the soul of Islam. We have every bit as much at stake here as do the world's Muslims, yet we are doing nothing as a nation to help Dr. Jasser win. The single greatest strength of a democratic nation is the critical eye of an informed and concerned populace. Dafydd's belief in changing semantics is fully justified if we join the battle and enlist the populace. It is many years past time that we did.

Update 1: Apparently, this topic has also been the raised over the past few days at the NYT, Hot Air (see here and here) and Robert Spencer at Jihad Watch.

Update 2: Dafydd responded to the above Jihad Watch post here and then was kind enough to do a dual response both to Mr. Jocelyn's article at the Weekly Standard and to this post.

In his response, Dafydd clarifies his thoughts - though the mistake upon rereading his posts was wholly mine. At any rate, Dafydd makes plain that he believes that we need a robust ideological counterinsurgency that challenges the interprative underpinnings of radical Islam.

Dafydd makes several critical points as to what is needed in such an ideological counterinsurgency:

1. We -- by we, I mean everybody who opposes the radical militant Islamists -- must clearly identify the schools, both physical facilities and schools of thought, that teach/preach the radical interpretations of Islam that theologically underpin the Islamic death cults;

2. We must counter those schools and their arguments with alternative interpretations that are just as theologically sound... which means, I am convinced, working with Islamic scholars and clerics who have already been doing this for many years, including (a non-exhaustive list):

The "Quietist" school of Shiism, whose spiritual leader at the moment is Iraqi Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani in Najaf;

The Indonesian Sunni organization Nahdlatul Ulama -- the largest Moslem organization in the world with perhaps as many as 40 million members -- which is headed by Abdurrahman Wahid, a.k.a. Gus Dur;

And the Turks, who are currently opening schools around the world that are teaching a non-violent (or at least much less violent) sect of Islam to counter the influence of the Salafist/Wahhabist schools financed and run by radical Saudi clerics.

They have far more credibilty than we; but we must be careful not to buddy up to them too closely, lest we create an obvious line of attack against them by our enemies. Nobody trusts a sock puppet (except maybe Glenn Greenwald).

3. And most important, we must get both State and Defense on board with the program... and also Congress. I'm afraid this will be the hardest task, but it's vital if we're to present a unified front against the enemy. About the only hope would be if the Senate would confirm a "John Bolton"-like nominee as Secretary of State, one who could actually clean house in that wretched, out of control bureaucracy, whose Statethink has swallowed up my second favorite gal, Condoleezza Rice.

I could not agree more with all of the above points. I would expound upon his mention of Grand Ayatollah Sistani and the quietist school of Shia Islam. Indeed, it goes to the heart of the most critical reason for remaining in Iraq and insuring the sovereignty of that nation from the predatory acts of Iran. As I wrote in an earlier post:

The greatest threat to Iran today comes from a democratic Iraq on its border that honors the traditional Shia practice of quietism - i.e., maintaining a wall between mosque and state, to put it in American terms. Iran is a deeply troubled country of 60 million people held under the rule of a medieval theocracy by ever increasing repression. The theocracy itself is illegitimate when looked at in terms of a millenium of apolitical Shia tradition - a tradition shredded in 1979 by Ayatollah Khomeini and his velyat-e-faqi, a new philosophy justifying and requiring theocratic rule. And indeed, the most popular religious figure in both Iraq and Iran is now Grand Ayatolah Ali Sistani, an adherent to the quietist school. This is deeply problematic for Iran.

. . . Since 2003, Iran has won tactical victories in both Gaza and, just days ago, Lebanon. But in Iraq, the theocracy of Iran is facing a mortal threat to its legitimacy and an enticing example of democracy to its deeply troubled populace that, not a decade ago, appeared on the edge of a counter-revolution. . . . Indeed, unless the U.S. leaves Iraq and allows the Iranians to resume their Lebanization of Iraq - something that would happen if troops are withdrawn too soon, as General Petraeus noted days ago in written testimony to the Senate - Iran's theocracy is far more threatened by their peaceful neighbor than by Saddam Hussein or the Taliban. . .

Read the entire post. I have no doubt that if Iran dominates Iraq, you will see the quietist school extinguished following the death of the 80 year old Grand Ayaollah Ali Sistani. Following the 1979 revolution, Iran executed, jailed or placed under house arrest all clerics who still honored the quietist school and who spoke out against the velyat e faqi. Indeed, when Khomeini died, none of the Grand Ayatollah's in Iran were deemed sufficiently wedded to the velyat e faqi philosophy (or in the case of Khomeini's original designated successor, Grand Ayatollah Montazeri, he was deemed too highly critical of how it was being imposed). The current Supreme Guide, Khamenei, was chosen for his position even though he was only a mid-level cleric. This shows both the extent to which Iran will go to impose its system and it shows just how bastardized the system is.

Dafydd also notes the efforts being made by Turkey. As an aside, the BBC ran an excellent article on efforts by Turkey to reinterpret the Hadiths (see here). We will have to see how that pans out, but if it is extensive, it could mark a major step towards an Islamic Enlightenment.

Dafydd sums up precisely what we need to be working towards:

The only remaining question is whether we have the will -- the stomach -- to inaugurate an all-out propaganda campaign to win whatever hearts and minds we can, hoping they will form the nucleus of the only real, long-term solution to our problem: an Islamic Enlightenment, similar to what Christianity went through in the eighteenth century.

As best I can tell, we have yet to engage seriously in any sort of propaganda campaign. Given that it is the most critical aspect of the war on terror, I think we are very far behind the power curve. Lastly, I would just add that a little over a year ago, I wrote a lengthy essay, positing that what Islam most needed was to go through its period of Enlightenment. I explained in that essay why it had not yet happened but how the tools for such a revolution in Islam exist within the religion itself - in the Koran, in the Hadiths, and in the accepted practice of ijtihad. I agree completely with Dafydd - such a revolution is the only true and lasting solution. We need to be doing all we can to support it.

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