The War for Islam

Two columns should be considered absolutely required reading by every American concerned with their personal security and the dangers we may face as a nation in the future. While the two have slightly different focuses — the first, by Pulitzer Prize-winning essayist Charles Krauthammer in todays Washington Post, and the second, by syndicated columnist Paul Greenberg — they have a common theme: The United States and the Western world more generally face a serious, determined and dangerous adversary in radical Islamists. But so does the rest of the Muslim world.

Dr. Krauthammer — who was recognized in 2002 for his extraordinary writing with the Center for Security Policys Mightier Pen award — explores this reality through the prism of the current McCarthyist attack against President Bushs nominee for the U.S. Institute of Peaces Board of Directors, Daniel Pipes.

Pipes has for years been warning that the radical element within Islam posed a serious and growing threat to the United States.During the decades when America slept, Pipes was among the very first to understand the dangers of Islamic radicalism. In his many writings he identified it, explained its roots — including, most notably, Wahhabism as practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia — and warned of its plans to infiltrate and make war on the United States itself.Sept. 11 demonstrated his prescience. Like most prophets, he is now being punished for being right. The main charge is that he is anti-Muslim. This is false. Pipes is scrupulous in making the distinction between radical Islam and moderate Islam. Indeed, he says, Militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.⁽¹⁾

Mr. Greenberg examines the topic from an historical perspective — observing correctly that, as in the past, the civilized world may face a multifaceted threat but it should be under no illusion of the motivation its enemies share:

Today, [as in pre-World War II era], Western civilization faces a common enemy. That danger, too, goes by different names — a sign that we have yet to get a handle on the ideological threat out there. But whether it’s called Islamism, radical Islam, or Islamofascism, it is all much the same. These haters may have their factional rivalries, but one driving force unites all of them: a fierce resentment of the West, of modernity, of tolerance, of any society that lets people be themselves.

As Messrs. Krauthammer and Greenberg fully appreciate, Americans — and those who govern them — must urgently comprehend the threat Islamists pose to our society, our freedoms and our safety. In doing so, they should reject as legitimate interlocutors on behalf of peaceable, tolerant and law-abiding Muslims the self-declared Muslim-American and Arab-American organizations that associate with, support or simply apologize for the Islamists, especially those bankrolled or otherwise abetted by Wahhabi Saudi Arabia.

THE TRUTH ABOUT DANIEL PIPES

By Charles Krauthammer

The Washington Post, 15 August 2003

The president has nominated Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace. This has resulted in a nasty eruption of McCarthyism. Pipes’s nomination has been greeted by charges of Islamophobia, bigotry and extremism. Three Democratic senators (Ted Kennedy, Christopher Dodd and Tom Harkin) have shamefully signed on to this campaign, with quasi-Democrat Jim Jeffords tagging along.

Who is Daniel Pipes? Pipes is a former professor at the U.S. Naval War College. He has taught history and Islamic studies at Harvard and the University of Chicago. He is a scholar and the author of 12 books, four of which are on Islam. Unlike most of the complacent and clueless Middle East academic establishment, which specializes in the brotherhood of man and the perfidy of the United States, Pipes has for years been warning that the radical element within Islam posed a serious and growing threat to the United States.

During the decades when America slept, Pipes was among the very first to understand the dangers of Islamic radicalism. In his many writings he identified it, explained its roots — including, most notably, Wahhabism as practiced and promoted by Saudi Arabia — and warned of its plans to infiltrate and make war on the United States itself.

Sept. 11, 2001, demonstrated his prescience. Like most prophets, he is now being punished for being right. The main charge is that he is anti-Muslim. This is false. Pipes is scrupulous in making the distinction between radical Islam and moderate Islam. Indeed, he says, “Militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution.”

The dilemma for a free society is that radical Islam lives within the bosom of moderate Islam. The general Islamic community is the place radicals can best disguise themselves and hide. Mosques are institutions that they can exploit to advance the cause. These are obvious truths.

But when Pipes states them, he is accused of bigotry. For example, critics thunder against Pipes’s assertion that “mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches and temples.”

This is bigoted? How is this even controversial? Wahhabists and other radical Islamists have established mosques and other religious institutions in dozens of countries. Some of these — most notoriously in Pakistan — had become the locus of not just radical but terrorist activity. Where do you think Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, was radicalized and recruited? In a Buddhist monastery? He was hatched in the now notorious Finsbury Park mosque in London.

Does that mean that all mosques or a majority of mosques or even many mosques harbor such activity? No. But it does mean any given mosque is more likely to harbor such activity than any given synagogue or church.

The attack on Pipes for stating this obvious truth is just another symptom of the absurd political correctness surrounding Islamic radicalism. It is the same political correctness that prohibits ethnic profiling on airplanes. We are all supposed to pretend that we have equal suspicions of terrorist intent and thus must give equal scrutiny to a 70-year-old Irish nun, a 50-year-old Jewish seminarian, and a 30-year-old man from Saudi Arabia. Your daughter is on that plane: To whom do you want the security guards to give their attention?

President Bush is considering bypassing the Senate and giving Pipes a recess appointment while Congress is out of town. For Bush, this would be an act of characteristic principle and courage. The problem, however, is that such an act makes the appointment look furtive. Worse, it lets the McCarthyites off too easy.

Pipes’s appointment would be a great asset to the U.S. Institute of Peace. But it would be an even greater asset to the country to bring the Democrats’ surrender to political correctness into the open. Let them declare themselves. Let the country see that for some of the most senior Democratic leaders, speaking the truth about Islamic radicalism is a disqualification for serious office.

Pipes’s nomination has been endorsed by, among others, Fouad Ajami, Walter Berns, Donald Kagan, Sir John Keegan, Paul Kennedy, Harvey Mansfield and James Q. Wilson.

Who are you going to believe? Such unimpeachable and independent scholars? Or a quartet of craven senators?

FOES’ NAMES MAY DIFFER, BUT THE WAR IS THE SAME

By Paul Greenberg

A couple of phrases in a wire story last week stuck in the memory and the craw. They leapt out of a dispatch about the attack on the Jordanian Embassy in Baghdad, and both reflect a common misunderstanding about the nature of terrorism in today’s world:

The assumption that at it can be sliced and diced, and one kind of terror distinguished from another. As though they weren’t just different faces of the same enemy.

The attack on the Jordanian Embassy, said the story, “raised concerns that Iraq’s violence could be broadening from resistance to the U.S. occupation toward a terrorist insurgency.”

But what’s the difference between the remnants of Saddam Hussein’s Ba’athists and Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaida? Disparate as they may seem at times, both are part of the same worldwide movement that declared war on the West years ago. Both are part of a common threat that wasn’t taken seriously until Sept. 11, 2001.

Americans were at war for years before this generation experienced its own Pearl Harbor; we just didn’t know it.

The earlier bombing of the World Trade Center, the murderous explosions at American embassies in Africa, the attack on the USS Cole a pattern was forming, but our intelligence agencies failed to see it.

Just as there were many indications before Dec. 7, 1941, that Pearl Harbor was coming, but the pieces of the puzzle weren’t put together till afterward. There were lengthy postmortems back then, too, and charges that the administration had seen the attack coming but had done nothing to prevent it.

Some pundits and politicians warned that the war in Iraq would distract from the war against terror – as if they weren’t part of the same conflict against a common enemy.

That enemy is motivated by a common ideology, whatever its variations from locale to locale.

There were those in the century just passed who also tried to make distinctions between Mussolini’s fascism and Hitler’s national socialism, between Franco’s Falange and Tojo’s militarism.

Today, too, Western civilization faces a common enemy. That danger, too, goes by different names – a sign that we have yet to get a handle on the ideological threat out there. But whether it’s called Islamism, radical Islam, or Islamofascism, it is all much the same.

These haters may have their factional rivalries, but one driving force unites all of them: a fierce resentment of the West, of modernity, of tolerance, of any society that lets people be themselves. Their ideology is transnational.

A long-simmering frustration with the Rise of the West and its dominance has bred a taste for violence, and the violence has become an end in itself.

Today’s network of terrorists and their host regimes is but the visible manifestation of a shared rage. We have seen this kind of fanaticism before – in the death’s head on Nazi uniforms, in the kamikaze attacks on the American fleet in the closing days of World War II. Today’s terrorism is but one more form of death worship in the modern world.

The outcome will determine whether Islamic civilization, which was once the most advanced, hospitable and creative in the world, will recede farther into resentment and violence. And drag the rest of the world down with it. This is not a war against Islam. It is a war for Islam.

1. Similar themes to Dr. Krauthammers are examined in an outstanding editorial addressed particularly to Democrats in the current issue of the New Republic and an essay by David Frum distributed on National Review Online.