Cliff May has an important piece on the West’s reluctance to recognize the nature of the enemy we face:
We Americans are uncomfortable with such ideas as holy war and religiously motivated mass murder. Raised to believe in equality, tolerance, and diversity, we cannot imagine slaughtering fellow human beings so that adherents of the “true faith” might prevail over “enemies of God.” Nor can most of us imagine others acting in this way. Our imaginations are failing us.
As May explains, the averting-our-eyes problem is exacerbated by dim liberals searching for sociological or economic motivations for terrorists and by jihadist propagandists:
For example, Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born academic — he holds the His Highness Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani Chair in Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford (no kidding) — last week told the Washington Post that jihad “has nothing to do with holy war. … Where you are trying to resist bad temptations and reform yourself with good aspirations that you have, this is a jihad of the self.”
What makes this lie so brazen — though the Post did not think to question it — is that Ramadan is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, who in 1928 founded the Muslim Brotherhood. Al-Banna himself stated clearly that the Qur’an and other Islamic doctrines “summon people … to jihad, to warfare, to the armed forces, and all means of land and sea fighting.”
But, of course, the current administration has made the problem much worse, by refusing to name the enemy and by systematically downplaying in our Middle East diplomacy the nature of the jihadist threat. (This was on display in the Rashad Hussain interview, even as corrected by the State Department.) This only undermines the position of moderate Muslims:
Commenting on the Times Square bombing attempt, Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a prominent American Muslim reformer, stated what so many others will not: “Islamists are at war intellectually and kinetically with western liberal democracies.” He added that while Americans are often the victims, “most Islamists globally actually target moderate Muslims who are their greatest existential threat.”
Anti-Islamist Muslims know, too, that the Islamists have not “hijacked” a “religion of peace,” comforting as that might be for us to believe. Islamists are fundamentalists, not heretics. Their reading of Islam is neither new nor unorthodox. They advocate a return to Islam as it was practiced in the seventh century. In that era, Islam was, without apology or ambiguity, a warrior faith dedicated to conquest — with power, wealth, and glory accruing to conquerors.
Americans’ natural disinclination to take at face value the extremist ideology of its foes can only be corrected by leadership from the president and his administration. It is their obligation to explain what we are fighting, to give support to anti-jihadist Muslims, and to focus all our anti-terror policies on aggressively combating an ideological foe. Until this is accomplished, we remain at a severe disadvantage against an enemy that suffers no lack of clarity, determination, and ideological focus.
