By Andrew C. McCarthy
Saturday, February 11, 2017
‘Do you think Islam needs reform?”
Wouldn’t it be interesting, wouldn’t it get us to the
crux of the immigration debate, if our best news anchors — I’m looking at you,
Chris Wallace and Bret Baier — would put that question to every major
politician in Washington?
Instead, the press is asking not just the wrong question
but one that utterly misses the point, namely: “How many terrorist attacks have
been committed by immigrants from this handful of Muslim-majority countries?”
It is the same wrong question posed by the imperious federal judge in Seattle
who suspended President Trump’s temporary travel ban on aliens from those countries
— seven of them. It is the same wrong question that animated the incorrigible
Ninth Circuit appeals court in upholding this suspension — and intimating along
the way that Trump, and by implication all who fear for the future of our
country, are anti-Muslim bigots crusading against religious liberty (the Ninth
Circuit being notoriously selective when it comes to protecting religious
traditions).
Does the Trump administration realize it’s the wrong
question? I wonder. Instead of attacking the question’s premise, the
administration undertakes to answer it. It seems not to grasp that the security
argument is not advanced, much less won, by compiling a list of terrorist
plots.
Let’s try this again.
Islam does need
reform. This is critical to our national security for two reasons that bear
directly on the question of which aliens should, and which should not, be
allowed into our country.
First, reform is essential because the broader Islamic
religion includes a significant subset of Muslims who adhere to an
anti-American totalitarian political ideology that demands implementation of
sharia — Islamic law. This ideology and
the repressive legal code on which it rests are not religion. We are not
talking about the undeniably theological tenets of Islam (e.g., the oneness of
Allah, the acceptance of Mohammed as the final prophet, and the Koran as
Allah’s revelation). We are talking about a framework for the political
organization of the state, and about the implementation of a legal corpus that
is blatantly discriminatory, hostile to liberty, and — in its prescriptions of
crime and punishment — cruel.
Islam must reform so that this totalitarian political
ideology, sharia supremacism (or, if you prefer, “radical Islam”), is expressly
severable from Islam’s truly religious tenets. To fashion an immigration policy
that serves our vital national-security interests without violating our
commitment to religious liberty, we must be able to exclude sharia supremacists
while admitting Muslims who reject sharia supremacism and would be loyal to the
Constitution.
Second, sharia supremacists are acting on a “voluntary
apartheid” strategy of gradual conquest. You needn’t take my word for it.
Influential sharia supremacists encourage Muslims of the Middle East and North
Africa to integrate into Western societies without assimilating Western
culture. The renowned Muslim Brotherhood jurist Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, who
vows that “Islam will conquer Europe, conquer America,” urges Muslim migrants
to demand the right to live in accordance with sharia. Turkey’s
sharia-supremacist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, admonishes that pressuring
Muslims to assimilate is “a crime against humanity.” The Organisation of
Islamic Cooperation, a bloc of 57 Muslim governments that purports to speak as
a quasi-caliphate, promulgated its “Declaration of Human Rights in Islam” in
1990 — precisely because what the United Nations in 1948 presumptuously called
the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is neither “universal” nor suitable
to a sharia culture.
Voluntary apartheid does not require insinuating
terrorists into migrant populations. It
requires insinuating assimilation-resistant migrant populations into Western
countries. Those populations form sharia-supremacist enclaves, which (a)
demand the autonomy to conduct their affairs under Islamic law as a challenge
to the sovereign authority of the host country and (b) become safe havens for
incitement, radicalization, paramilitary training, fundraising, and jihadist
conspiracy — the prerequisites for terrorism.
The problem is not that our “See No Islam” policies may
be letting some small percentage of trained terrorists into the country
(although that is certainly a
problem). The main problem is that we
are creating the conditions under which anti-American enclaves can take root,
the Constitution can be undermined, and today’s young Muslim teenager becomes
tomorrow’s radicalized jihadist.
We cannot grapple with these challenges if we are
intimidated into silence by such questions as whether a “Muslim ban” is being
proposed; whether heightened scrutiny would be tantamount to a “religion test”;
how many refugees or aliens from this or that Muslim-majority country have been
charged with terrorism crimes; whether Muslims would be disproportionately
affected by immigration exclusions; and whether a ban on a few Muslim-majority
countries can be justified if most Muslim-majority countries are exempted.
Such questions are designed to make vetting Muslims seem
inconceivable. They are meant to exhaust you into conceding: “If we have to
fret so mightily about the potential impact of immigration laws against
Muslims, how could we possibly contemplate examining Muslims directly to sort
out sharia supremacists from pro-American Muslims?” You are to pretend that
there is no obvious subset of Muslims who are hostile to our country. You are
to assume that screening for hostile Muslims would be illegal because to ask
about Islam would offend religious liberty — but because you know there are
hostile Muslims, you silently hope the authorities have figured out some
sneaky, roundabout way to screen for them without appearing to screen for them.
Enough of that. We need to move beyond the “are we
targeting Muslims” nonsense and get to the critical question: How do we embrace
our Islamic friends while excluding our sharia-supremacist enemies?
Here’s a suggestion: Bring our Muslim friends, loud and
proud, into the process.
The only people who may have more interest than we do in
Islamic reform are Islamic reformers: courageous Muslims who embrace American
constitutional principles of liberty and equality. And at great risk to
themselves: Under the supremacist view of sharia, those who depart from
Islamic-law principles set in stone a millennium ago are apostates, subject to
the penalty of death. You’re not supposed to question that, though, because
it’s, you know, “religion.”
How about we stop consulting with the Muslim Brotherhood
and other sharia supremacists who tell us Islam is just fine as is, even as its
aggressions mount? How about we bring the reformers very publicly into the
vetting process, to help the administration tell the good guys from the bad
guys? To help the administration show that it is not Muslims but anti-American
totalitarians that we seek to exclude?
It is the reform Muslims who tell us that Islam can
separate sharia from spiritual life and that pro-Western Muslims do exactly
that. It is the sharia supremacists who are outraged by the very suggestion
that reform is possible, let alone necessary. If we continue taking our cues
from the latter, it means that their noxious political ideology is part and
parcel of Islam, and therefore that screening to keep that ideology out of our
country is a violation of First Amendment religious liberty.
In other words, if you’re unwilling to say that Islam
needs reform, then we can’t vet . . . and we are doomed. On the other hand, if
Islam does need reform, isn’t it imperative that we identify the Muslims who
resist reform — the sharia supremacists who seek not to join but to radically
change our free, constitutional society?
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