By Larry Kudlow
Friday, January 16, 2015
‘Let’s be honest here. Islam has a problem.”
Those are key sentences in an incredibly hard-hitting
speech that Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal will give in London on Monday. It
is the toughest speech I have read on the whole issue of Islamic radicalism and
its destructive, murdering, barbarous ways which are upsetting the entire
world.
Early in the speech Jindal says he’s not going to be politically
correct. And he uses the term “radical Islamists” without hesitation, placing
much of the blame for the Paris murders and all radical Islamist terrorism on a
refusal of Muslim leaders to denounce these acts.
Jindal says, “Muslim leaders must make clear that anyone
who commits acts of terror in the name of Islam is in fact not practicing Islam
at all. If they refuse to say this, then they are condoning these acts of
barbarism. There is no middle ground.”
Then he adds, specifically, “Muslim leaders need to
condemn anyone who commits these acts of violence and clearly state that these
people are evil and are enemies of Islam. It’s not enough to simply condemn
violence, they must stand up and loudly proclaim that these people are not
martyrs who will receive a reward in the afterlife, and rather they are
murderers who are going to hell. If they refuse to do that, then they’re part
of the problem. There is no middle ground here.”
I want to know who in the Muslim community in the United
States has said this. Which leaders? I don’t normally cover this beat, so I may
well have missed it. Hence I ask readers to tell me if so-called American
Muslim leaders have said what Governor Jindal is saying.
And by the way, what Bobby Jindal is saying is very
similar to what Egyptian president al-Sisi said earlier in the year to a group
of Muslim imams.
Said al-Sisi, “It’s inconceivable that the thinking we
hold most sacred should cause the entire umma [Islamic world] to be a source of
anxiety, danger, killing and destruction for the rest of the world.”
He then asks, “How is it possible that 1.6 billion
Muslims should want to kill the rest of the world’s inhabitants — that is 7
billion — so that they themselves may live?” He concludes, if this is not
changed, “it may eventually lead to the religion’s self destruction.”
That’s President al-Sisi of Egypt, which I believe has
the largest Muslim population in the world.
And what Jindal and al-Sisi are saying is not so
different from the thinking of French intellectual Bernard-Henri Lévy. Writing
in the Wall Street Journal, he calls the Charlie Hebdo murders “the
Churchillian moment of France’s Fifth Republic.” He essentially says France and
the world must slam “the useful idiots of a radical Islam immersed in the
sociology of poverty and frustration.” He adds, “Those whose faith is Islam
must proclaim very loudly, very often, and in great numbers their rejection of
this corrupt and abject form of theocratic passion. . . . Islam must be freed
from radical Islam.”
So three very different people — a young southern
governor who may run for president, the political leader of the largest Muslim
population in the world, and a prominent Western European intellectual — are
saying that most of the problem and most of the solution rests with the people
of the Islamic religion themselves. If they fail to take action, the radicals
will swallow up the whole religion and cause the destruction of the entire
Middle East and possibly large swaths of the rest of the world.
Lévy called this a Churchillian moment. And London mayor
Boris Johnson argues in his book The Churchill Factor that Winston Churchill
was the most important 20th century figure because his bravery in 1940 stopped
the triumph of totalitarianism. So today’s battle with the Islamic radicals is
akin to the Cold War battle of freedom vs. totalitarianism.
But returning to Governor Jindal, the U.S. is not
helpless. Jindal argues that America must restore its proper leadership role in
international affairs. (Of course, Obama has taken us in the opposite
direction, and won’t even use the phrase “Islamic radicals.”) And Jindal
invokes Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher by saying, “The tried and true
prescription must be employed again: a strong economy, a strong military, and
leaders willing and able to assert moral, economic, and military leadership in
the cause of freedom.”
Reagan always argued that weakness at home leads to
weakness abroad. A strong growing economy provides the resources for military
and national security. Right now we’re uncomfortably close to having neither.
This is the great challenge of our time. In the early
years of the 21st century, it appears the great goal of our age is the defeat
of radical Islam.
Jindal gets it.
No comments:
Post a Comment