By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, December 31, 2016
It was the key national-security debate of the 2016
election. Donald Trump won the election, in no small part, because he appeared
to be on the right side of it. Appeared
is used advisedly: Trump was at least in the general vicinity of the
bull’s-eye; his opponent wouldn’t even acknowledge the target existed — except
in the most grudging of ways, and only because Trump had forced the issue.
The question boiled down to this: Are you willing to name the enemy?
After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at
least a start. We should note, moreover, that it’s a start we owe to the
president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to
a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump’s
outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses. Comparative
anonymities (looking down at my shoes, now) could try terrorism cases and fill
shelves with books and pamphlets and columns on the ideology behind the jihad
from now until the end of time. But no matter how many terrorist attacks
Americans endured, the public examination of the enemy was not going to happen
unless a credible candidate for the world’s most important job dramatically
shifted the parameters of acceptable discourse.
Trump forced the issue into the light of day. And once he
did — voilà! — what was yesterday’s
“Islamophobia” became today’s conventional wisdom. In reality, it was never
either of these things. The former is an enemy-crafted smear (a wildly
successful one) to scare off examination of the enemy; the latter is frequently
wrong.
What we Cassandras have really been trying to highlight
is a simple fact, as patent as it was unremarkable from the time of Sun Tsu
until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: To defeat the enemy, you must know
the enemy — who he is, what motivates him, what he is trying to achieve. Being
willing to name the enemy is a start. But it is just a start — the beginning,
not the end, of understanding.
In his major campaign speech on the subject, Trump
asserted that the enemy is “radical Islamic terrorism.” Terrorism, surely, is
the business end of the spear, but “radical Islamic terrorism” is an incomplete
portrait. Dangerously incomplete? That depends on whether the term (a) is
Trump’s shorthand for a threat he realizes is significantly broader than
terrorism, or (b) reflects his actual — and thus insufficient — grasp of the
challenge.
The speech provided reasons for hope. For one thing,
Trump compared “radical Islamic terrorism” to the 20th-century challenges of
fascism, Nazism, and Communism. These were ideological
enemies. The capacity to project force was by no means the totality of the
threat each represented — which is why it is so foolish to be dismissive of
today’s enemy just because jihadist networks cannot compare militarily to Nazi
Germany or the Soviet Union.
Furthermore, toward the end of his speech, Trump used
“radical Islamic terrorism” interchangeably with “radical Islam.” Ending the
spread of radical Islam, he said, must be our objective. He even referred to it
as an “ideology” — though he called it an “ideology of death,” which misses the
point; it is an ideology of conquest.
Trump intimated some understanding of this, too. He vowed
to “speak out against the oppression of women, gays, and people of different
faith [i.e., non-Muslims].” He promised, in addition, to work with “all
moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East.” The objects of radical Islamic
oppression are targeted because of ideological tenets that call for dominion by
sharia, Islam’s ancient totalitarian law. It is those tenets that reformers are
trying to reform.
In sum, Trump showed signs of awareness that there are
more than bombs, hijacked planes, weaponized trucks, and jihadist gunmen to
confront. Still, his focus was terrorists
— specifically ISIS, which he claimed was created by Obama-Clinton policy.
While he clearly knows there is more to the threat than ISIS, he explicitly
added only al-Qaeda and “Iran-backed Hamas and Hezbollah.”
To the contrary, ISIS is a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda
that existed before Barack Obama came to power. Hamas, though certainly
supported by Shiite Iran, is a Sunni terrorist organization spawned by the
Muslim Brotherhood. More crucially: All of the groups Trump listed, and the
regimes that sponsor them, were created
by the ideology. While I’ll go with “radical Islam,” the ideology is more
accurately described as “sharia supremacism” — alas, in the parts of the world
Trump was talking about, “radical Islam” is not so radical. It is the ideology
that creates jihadist groups and regimes, not American policy, no matter how
clueless and counterproductive our policy has been at times.
If ISIS and al-Qaeda disappeared tomorrow, other jihadist
networks would take their places. It will be that way until sharia supremacism
is discredited and marginalized.
That is a tall order, not to be underestimated. The
audience in which the ideology must be discredited is not Western; it does not
share our value system — our sense of what is credible and meritorious. Plus,
the sharia that our enemies strive to implement (i.e., “jihad in Allah’s way”)
is undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. It will not be easy — it may not be
possible — to discredit a literalist construction of Islam that has been backed
by revered scholars for 14 centuries.
That is why some detractors of Islam argue with
considerable force that we should stop mincing words: If the problem is rooted
in Islamic doctrine, they contend, then the problem is Islam, not “radical Islam.” Yet this overlooks significant facts.
There is fierce intramural Islamic debate about doctrinal interpretation. Our
own Judeo-Christian experience tells us that doctrine and religious practice
can evolve. Belief systems, moreover, are ultimately about more than doctrine.
Culture counts for a great deal. Yes, sharia supremacism is pretty much the
same wherever you go (and becomes more aggressive and threatening as its
adherents increase in number); but the understanding and practice of Islam
varies from Riyadh to Cairo to Kabul to Ankara to Jakarta to Tirana to London.
There is, furthermore, an on-the-ground reality of much
greater moment than theological infighting: A large percentage of the world’s
approximately 1.6 billion Muslims reject sharia supremacism. Many of them provide
us with essential help in fighting the enemy. To condemn Islam, rather than
those who seek to impose Islam’s ruling system on us, can only alienate our
allies. They are allies we need in an ideological conflict.
The sensible strategy, therefore, calls for supporting
the Islamic reformers President-elect Trump says he wants to befriend. That
would be an epic improvement over outreach to Islamists, whom our government
has inanely courted and empowered for a quarter-century. To the extent we can
(and that may be limited), we should support the reinterpretation of what
Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi courageously acknowledged as “the
corpus of texts and ideas that we [Muslims] have sacralized over the centuries,
to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible” even though
they are “antagonizing the entire world.”
Sisi, it is worth noting, is a devout Muslim who knows a
lot more about Islam than Barack Obama and John Kerry do. In any event, it’s
better to confront with open eyes the scripturally rooted ideological
foundation of radical Islam. As we’ve seen over the last three presidential
administrations (or the last six, if you want to go back to Carter and
Khomeini’s revolution), pretending that the ideology does not exist, or that it
represents a “false Islam,” is fantasy. As a national-security strategy,
fantasy is a prescription for failure.
It has been the Obama prescription, right up to the end.
While candidate Trump was demanding that the enemy be
named, and me-too Hillary was thus goaded into the occasional mention of
“jihadists,” Obama tried to defend his refusal to invoke radical Islam. The
defense was classic Obama. Part One was flat wrong: “There’s no religious
rationale,” he maintained, that would justify” the “barbarism” in which
terrorists engage — something that could only be right if we ignore scripture
and adopt Obama’s eccentric notion of “religious rationale.” Part Two drew on
Obama’s bottomless supply of straw men: “Using the phrase ‘radical Islam,’” he
lectured, will not make the terrorist threat “go away” — as if anyone had
claimed it would.
The point, of course, is not that there is talismanic
power in uttering an enemy’s identity. It is to convey, to the enemy and to an
anxious American public, that our leader comprehends who the enemy is, what the
enemy’s objectives are, and what drives the enemy to achieve them.
Obviously, Obama is too smart not to know this. After
eight infuriating years, I am beyond trying to fathom whether his intentional
gibberish masks some misguided but well-meaning strategy, some dogma to which
he is hopelessly beholden, or something more sinister. The imperative now is to
address the mess he is leaving behind, not unwind how and why he came to make
it.
This week, Obama betrayed our Israeli allies by
orchestrating (and cravenly abstaining from) a U.N. Security Council
resolution. As I’ve explained, the ostensible
purpose of the resolution is to condemn the construction of Israeli settlements
in the disputed territories of East Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria that Israel
has controlled since 1967; the real
purpose is to declare that those territories are sovereign Palestinian land,
and thus that Israel is “occupying” it in violation of international law
(“international law” is the gussied-up term for the hyper-political, intensely
anti-Israeli Security Council’s say-so).
What does this have to do with our enemy’s ideology?
Everything.
The Palestinians and the Islamist regimes that support
them frame their struggle against Israel in terms of Islamic obligation. Hamas,
the aforementioned Muslim Brotherhood branch that has been lavishly supported
by Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey, and other Muslim governments, is more explicit
about this than its rival for Palestinian leadership, Fatah. But both are clear
on the matter. They take the doctrinal position that any territory that comes
under Islamic control for any duration of time is Islam’s forever. (That’s why
Islamists still refer to Spain as al-Andalus
and vow to retake it, notwithstanding that they lost it half a millennium ago.)
Further, radical Islam regards the presence of a
sovereign Jewish state in Islamic territory as an intolerable affront. Again,
the reason is doctrinal. Do not take my word for it; have a look at the 1988
Hamas Charter (“The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement”). Article 7,
in particular, includes this statement by the prophet Muhammad:
The Day of Judgement will not come
about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide
behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, “O Muslims, O Abdulla,
there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” . . . (Related by al-Bukhari and
Muslim).
Understand: Al-Bukhari and Muslim are authoritative
collections of hadith. These memorializations of the prophet’s sayings and
deeds have scriptural status in Islam. Hamas is not lying — this story of an
end-of-times annihilation of Jews is related, repeatedly, in Islamic scripture.
(See, e.g., here.)
And please spare me the twaddle about how there are competing interpretations
that discount or “contextualize” these hadith. It doesn’t matter which, if any,
interpretation represents the “true Islam” (if there is one). What matters for
purposes of our security is that millions of Muslims, including our enemies,
believe these hadith mean what they say — unalterable, for all time.
Even after all the mass-murder attacks we have endured
over the last few decades, and for all their claptrap about respecting Islam as
“one of the world’s great religions,” transnational progressives cannot bring
themselves to accept that something as passé as religious doctrine could
dictate 21st-century conflicts. So, they tell themselves, the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict is simply about territorial boundaries and refugee
rights. It could be settled if Israel, which they reckon would never have been
established but for a regrettable bout of post-Holocaust remorse, would just
make a few concessions regarding land it was never ceded in the first place
(conveniently overlooking that East Jerusalem and the West Bank are disputed
territories, and were not “Palestinian” when Israel took them in the 1967 war
of Arab aggression).
Transnational progressives see Israel as intransigent,
notwithstanding its many attempts to trade land for peace. They rationalize
Palestinian terrorism as the product of that intransigence, not of ideology.
Thus their smug calculation that branding Israel as an “occupier” of
“Palestinian land” in gross “violation of international law” is the nudge
Israel needs to settle. This will effectively grant the Palestinians their
coveted sovereign state. Thus accommodated, Palestinians will surely moderate
and co-exist with Israel — if not in peace, then in the same uneasy state in which
Parisians coexist with their banlieues
and Berliners with their refugees.
It is not just fantasy but willfully blind idiocy. No one
who took a few minutes to understand the ideology of radical Islam would
contemplate for a moment a resolution such as the one Obama just choreographed.
Under Islamic law, the Palestinians regard all of the territory — not just East
Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria but all of
Israel — as Muslim territory. Furthermore, they deem the presence of a
Jewish-ruled state on that territory as anathema. A Security Council resolution
that declares Israeli control of the disputed territory not merely an “obstacle
to peace” but illegitimate tells the
Islamists that their jihad has succeeded, that non-Muslim powers accede to
their sharia-based demands. It can only encourage them to continue their jihad
toward their ultimate regional goal of eradicating the Jewish state. After all,
Mahmoud Abbas has stated his racist terms: Not a single Israeli will be
permitted to reside
in the Palestinian state. As Islamists see it (and why shouldn’t they?),
Obama’s reaction was not to condemn Abbas; it was to appease Abbas. As
Islamists see it, Allah is rewarding their fidelity to Islamic doctrine; of course they will persevere in it.
We are not merely in a shooting war with jihadists. We
are in an ideological war with sharia supremacists. Mass murder is not their
sole tactic; they attack at the negotiating table, in the councils of
government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom — at every political
and cultural pressure point. To defeat jihadists, it is necessary to discredit
the ideology that catalyzes them. You don’t discredit an ideology by ignoring
its existence, denying its power, and accommodating it at every turn.
President Obama never got this. Will President Trump?
In his campaign, Trump made a welcome start by naming the
enemy. Now it is time to know the enemy — such that it is clear to the enemy
that we understand his objectives and his motivation, and that we will deny him
because our own principles require it.
The new president should begin by renouncing Obama’s
Palestinian power-play: Revoke any state recognition Obama gives the
Palestinians; defund them; clarify the disputed
(not occupied) status of the territories; move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem;
reaffirm the principle that the conflict may only be settled by direct
negotiations between the parties; and make clear that the United States will
consider the Palestinians pariahs until they acknowledge Israel’s right to
exist as a Jewish state, stop indoctrinating their children in doctrinal
Jew-hatred, and convincingly abandon terrorism.
That would tell radical Islam that America rejects its
objectives as well as its tactics, that we will fight its ideology as well as
its terrorism. This is not just about restoring our reputation as a dependable
ally. Our security depends on it.
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