Mirror, Mirror &mdash; why Americans Don&#8217;t Understand the Threat of Jihadism
<p><em>(Third in a series.)</em></p>
<p>In <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#6">What<br />
al-Qaeda Wants</a> and the first essay in this series, <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/index.php?m=200206#48">The<br />
Mirage of Moderate Islam</a>, I have described Islam as a warlike and<br />
bloody religion subject to periodic fits of violent fundamentalist<br />
revival.  I have analyzed the roots of Islamic terror in the Koranic<br />
duty of jihad, and elucidated Osama bin Laden&#8217;s goal as nothing less<br />
than the destruction of the West and the establishment of a global<br />
Islamic theocracy.</p>
<p>I have further explained why it is difficult for anyone living<br />
within the Islamic worldview to reject or argue against these goals.<br />
Jihadism &mdash; the belief that Muslims have not merely the right<br />
but the <em>duty</em> to smite the infidel and propagate the Faith by<br />
force &mdash; proceeds direct from the Koran and is accepted as a core<br />
religious duty by almost all Muslims.</p>
<p>These are simple truths, readily discernable from reading the words<br />
of the Koran, the study of even an outline of Islamic history, and the<br />
propaganda of Osama bin Laden himself.  Yet they are truths that<br />
almost no one in the West is speaking in public, in plain language.<br />
In this essay, I will examine the reasons Americans are not yet<br />
ideologically prepared to fight the war against terror as it must be<br />
fought if we are to win.</p>
<p>First, the U.S. government is telling a Big Lie for diplomatic<br />
reasons.  It is trying to sell the idea that Islam is a `religion of<br />
peace&#8217;, with al-Qaeda representing only a small fringe of extremists.<br />
Part of this is in order not to be seen attacking the religion of our<br />
Arab allies in the Middle East.</p>
<p>But domestic politics is an even more important motive for this Big<br />
Lie.  U.S. policymakers in the know may well fear that if they<br />
described the relationship between terrorism and Islamic doctrine<br />
accurately, the current broad consensus on war policy might collapse<br />
under a hailstorm of accusations of bigotry, prejudice, and<br />
intolerance by the <em>bien pensants</em> who run the national media<br />
and academe.  In a political climate where directing extra scrutiny at<br />
young male Middle Eastern air travellers is attacked as unacceptable<br />
`racial profiling&#8217;, this fear would be well-grounded.</p>
<p>Second, the academy has failed us.  Americans are almost<br />
universally ignorant of Islamic doctrine and history.  Most of the few<br />
who have some knowledge of the area cannot connect that knowledge to<br />
current events.  The Islamic-studies and Middle Eastern history<br />
establishment completely, utterly failed to anticipate al-Qaeda&#8217;s<br />
revival of jihadism, ignored or rationalized the decade of<br />
anti-American terrorist acts that led up to 9/11, and is presently<br />
incapable of supplying any significant analytical help to defeating<br />
the terrorists.</p>
<p>The exact anatomy of this failure is well described in Martin<br />
Kramer&#8217;s <a href="http://www.jewishworldreview.com/1101/wrong.asp">Ivory Towers On<br />
Sand</a>.  One background problem was a Marxist-influenced tendency to<br />
see political change as all-important and dismiss religious fervor as<br />
a spent force.  Another was a reluctance to confront or discuss the<br />
continuing phenomenon of terrorism at all except through the lens of<br />
`post-colonial theory&#8217; that excused it as a legitimate tactic of the<br />
Palestinian or anti-imperialist struggle. Yet a third was the<br />
postmodern belief that objective truth is impossible.  In effect, the<br />
Marxist/multiculturalist/postmodernist preoccupations of the<br />
Islamic-studies establishment rendered it incapable of seeing,<br />
thinking, or passing judgment. Confronted by the smoking hole where<br />
the World Trade Center used to be and Osama bin-Laden&#8217;s gloating<br />
videos, the academics had no way of connecting their theoretical<br />
abstractions to the brutal facts and nothing to say.  Nine months<br />
later, they still doesn&#8217;t.</p>
<p>Americans outside of universities have few grounds for smugness,<br />
however.  While most of the rest of us have not had our critical<br />
faculties rotted out by Marxism, multiculturalism and postmodernism in<br />
their explicit forms, a lower-grade version of the same infections has<br />
done much to damage our capacity to understand the threat of jihadism.</p>
<p>Americans have always had the odd parochial habit of assuming that,<br />
down deep underneath, everyone is basically like us &mdash; sharing<br />
our historically peculiar mix of pragmatism and idealism; valuing<br />
honesty and fair dealing; tolerant, materialistic, freedom-loving,<br />
open-minded, tempting to value comfort and success over ideology.  We<br />
reflexively believe that everyone can be reasoned with essentially in<br />
our own terms.  Most Americans don&#8217;t understand fanaticism and violent<br />
evil.  We have a tendency to be `fair&#8217; by assuming that in any dispute<br />
there must be some right and some wrong on both sides.  It&#8217;s telling<br />
that we use `extreme&#8217; as a political pejorative.</p>
<p>Since at least the end of World War II, this parochialism has<br />
become so acute that it has almost blinded us to serious threats.<br />
While more of the left-liberals who shilled for the Soviets and Mao<br />
Zedong and Ho Chi Minh and Pol Pot during the Cold War were closet<br />
Communists than is yet publicly admitted, a good many were honest<br />
dupes who simply couldn&#8217;t believe that Communists were actually<br />
motivated by the sinister craziness of hard Marxism, and therefore<br />
assumed that America must somehow be at fault.  Conservatives<br />
apologizing for unsavory pro-American strongmen mostly weren&#8217;t closet<br />
fascists, either; a good many of them had obvious trouble seeing<br />
caudillos as more than cigar-chomping CEOs running a particularly<br />
tough business, and never mind the gold braid and funny hats.</p>
<p>The see-no-evil tendency in American folk psychology created<br />
fertile ground for the rather less benign dogmas of multiculturalism<br />
(&#8220;all cultures present ways of living that are equally morally valid&#8221;)<br />
and postmodernism (&#8220;there is no objective truth&#8221;).  Originally<br />
constructed by Marxists (and one ex-Fascist) as part of a program to<br />
ideologically disarm the West against the radical evil of Communism,<br />
these dogmas have both outlived their original ends and seeped into<br />
American pop culture.  Their effect is that many of us can no longer<br />
bring ourselves to think of any political movement, religion, or<br />
culture as radically evil unless it is safely part of history (and,<br />
for political correctness, was run by dead white European males when<br />
it was alive and kicking).</p>
<p>This was a relatively harmless form of self-delusion between 1992<br />
and 2001, the decade of self-indulgence bracketed by the fall of the<br />
Soviet Empire and 9/11.  No longer.  We are at war.  Western<br />
civilization is under attack by a foe that revels in the wholesale<br />
slaughter of civilians, one that proudly announces its intention to<br />
bring a second Holocaust of fire and blood down upon us all.</p>
<p>If our civilization is to survive, we will need to recover the<br />
moral judgment needed to recognize radical evil, the language in which<br />
to condemn it, and the determination to act.</p>
<p>In a perverse way, al-Qaeda has made this easy.  They have murdered<br />
thousands in a single attack on one of our heart cities, they have<br />
attempted to unleash biological weapons on us, and have actively<br />
planned to detonate nuclear/radiological weapons in our population<br />
centers.  Those who cannot recognize even this as radical evil<br />
&mdash; those who persist in arguing that the 9/11 attack was somehow<br />
justified by something United Fruit did in Guatemala or the Israelis<br />
did in Lebanon &mdash; are rapidly dealing themselves out of the game<br />
of deciding how we shall respond.</p>
<p>Having recognized al-Qaeda&#8217;s behavior as radically evil, we must<br />
next recognize that its motivating ideology is evil, too.  And the<br />
first step there is recognizing that Islam&#8217;s apologists are<br />
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=18062002-044316-3353r"><br />
systematically lying to us</a> about what they believe and intend.<br />
Outside of a few fringe groups like the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0226056767/qid%3D1024685562/sr%3D1-1/ref%3Dsr%5F1%5F1/002-8067869-9300863">Dauri<br />
Bohras</a> and a tiny minority of intellectual reformers who generally<br />
dare not speak their ideas in their own home countries, there is<br />
simply no constituency in Islam prepared to recognize Western concepts<br />
of peace, tolerance, and pluralism.</p>
<p>We will not be prepared to win the war against Islamic terror until<br />
we understand the following things:</p>
<ul>
<li>Islam is a religion of war and conversion by the sword, not peace.</li>
<li>The primary threat of terrorism comes from Arabs and<br />
middle-easterners between the ages of fifteen and forty, and we must summon<br />
the will to profile accordingly.</li>
<li>We are dealing with religious fanaticism rather than rational grievances<br />
against America or the West.</li>
<li>Our enemies cannot be reasoned with or appeased anywhere<br />
short of surrender and submission to shari&#8217;a law.</li>
<li>Apologists for mainstream Islam are systematically<br />
lying to us about Islamic doctrine in order to shield terrorists who<br />
they know are acting in strict accordance with that doctrine.</li>
</ul>
<p>The hardest challenge for Americans is to grasp is the fact that<br />
the evil of the 9/11 hijackings, the destruction of the World Trade<br />
Center, and the threat of al-Qaeda weapons of mass destruction set off<br />
in American cities is not simply the evil of al-Qaeda.  It is in fact<br />
the Koranically-correct expression of the tendency of Islam (Sunni<br />
fundamentalism) which is has been pre-eminent through most of Islamic<br />
history and now encompasses over 90% of the worlds Muslims.</p>
<p>We need to face the fact that we are confronting not just a<br />
barbaric and evil group of men, but a barbaric and evil religion. To<br />
protect ourselves, we must either force the complete reform of Islam<br />
(purging it of jihadism and its tendency towards periodic<br />
fundamentalist outbreaks) or destroy its hold over its followers.</p>
<p>This is a problem for Americans; first, because we have been taught<br />
that we that we must not be intolerant of other peoples&#8217; religions;<br />
and second, because fully grasping the nature of the danger Islamic<br />
poses to Western civilization requires thinking uncomfortable<br />
thoughts about the dominant Christian religion of our own culture.</p>
<p>The reader is at this point invited to learn more about the<br />
<a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A61275-2002Jun16.html"><br />
developing alliance</a> between Islamic and Christian fundamentalisms.<br />
Then, to learn all about <a href="http://www.jhuger.com/kisshank.mv">Kissing Hank&#8217;s Ass.</a><br />
Before 9/11, &#8220;Kissing Hank&#8217;s Ass&#8221; was an edgy joke.  Today it<br />
demonstrates why ending the threat of religiously-motivated terror will<br />
require us to confront and destroy the fundamentalist/jihadist impulse<br />
not merely in Islam, but also in Christianity and all other<br />
eschatological monotheisms where it finds a natural home.</p>
<p>Christianity, like Islam (and unlike almost all of the other<br />
religions of the world) has violent intolerance of other religions and<br />
the impulse to conversion by the sword wired into its doctrinal DNA.<br />
Most Americans have trouble believing the Koran means what it says<br />
about the duty of jihad because for most Christians, the parallel<br />
Christian duty to smite the infidel is a historical dead letter.  But<br />
counterparts of al-Qaeda such as the <a href="http://www.religioustolerance.org/cr_ident.htm">Christian<br />
Identity Movement</a> exist in the West, imbued with all of<br />
al-Qaeda&#8217;s rage.  Christian fundamentalists express the same<br />
hatred of modernity and determination to jam the world back into<br />
a medieval mold that motivates Osama bin Laden.</p>
<p>To win the war on terror, we must understand jihadism and clearly<br />
distinguish it from ethical self-defense.  We must be prepared not<br />
merely to counter fanaticism not merely by killing the fanatical in<br />
self-defense, but also by discrediting the doctrines and habits of<br />
thought that make fanatics in the first place &mdash; whether they occur in<br />
the other guy&#8217;s religion or our own.  Islam has declared itself the<br />
immediate adversary of modernity &mdash; but more than one world religion<br />
will have to go under the knife before our children can sleep in<br />
peace.</p>
<p><em>(To be continued&#8230;)</em></p>
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