Extinguishing the Fire of Radical Islam

Check out the following letter to the editor, from John L. Sorg, of McCordeville, Indiana, in response to last Friday's Frederick Kagan commentary in the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Kagan's message that security for the Iraqi people is a prerequisite for defeating al Qaeda is correct. It's also necessary for defeating the Sadrists, other "extremists/terrorists" and laying the foundation for political compromise on key issues like oil-revenue sharing at the federal level. The idea that politics will lead to defeating terrorists without security coming first has it exactly backward.

Despite the mantra of the left that Iraq is a failure and is separate and apart from the war on radical Islam, success in Iraq is essential to turning the tide against the radical, worldwide jihadist movement, which seeks to force its will on the rest of Islam and, ultimately, the rest of the world. The fact that most of the Democratic Party cannot acknowledge this disqualifies those Democrats running for president from effectively operating as commander in chief. In World War II there was a national consensus regarding the need to defeat the evil of Nazism. Many Democrats have not recognized the need to defeat the similar evil of a radical Islam that will stop at nothing to impose its will on the world.

We must stay in Iraq for as long as it takes with the forces necessary to achieve victory. Instead, let's talk about "strategic redeployment" of our troops out of Europe and Asia if it means we can solidify our presence in the Middle East and put out the fire of radical Islam. No one wants to "occupy" the Middle East indefinitely, but occupy we must until the jihadists understand that we will not allow defeat. Only then will they give up. The antiwar leftists have served only to prolong the war by giving the evil ones hope that they can outlast us. I believe that if the Democrats win the presidency, hope will be renewed for the terrorists.

See also yesterday's Bartle Bull commentary in WSJ, which argues that we have indeed turned the tide in Iraq, with military victories forcing the realignment of Iraq's sectarian parties, which has in turn consolidated the current Shiite political order.

Hope in the Mideast?

Mortimer Zuckerman's new commentary at U.S. News suggests the possibility of a diplomatic breakthough on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis. His defense of Israel in the opening segment is a nice primer on the Jewish state's moral legitimacy, a point that bears reiteration following Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's visit to New York and the ongoing Palestinian campaign to undermine Israel's right to exist:

This campaign of repudiation cuts deeply into the Israeli psyche. The Israelis know that the Jews have lived in the land of Israel without interruption for nearly 4,000 years. They know that, except for a short Crusader kingdom, they are the only people who have had independent sovereignty on this land. And they are the only people for whom Jerusalem has been their capital.

They are not a foreign occupier because the State of Israel is the child not of European colonialism but rather of Ottoman decolonialization. It was that Jewish historical bond that led the League of Nations 85 years ago to establish the right of the Jewish people to reconstitute a Jewish homeland on all the territories west of the Jordan River, all the way to the Mediterranean. That same right to a national home was sanctioned again 59 years ago by the new United Nations. After an Arab invasion 40 years ago, the U.N. passed a resolution affirming Israel's right to "secure and recognized boundaries." As Winston Churchill noted in 1922, "The Jews are in Palestine by right, not sufferance." The refusal of the Palestinians and of Ahmadinejad to recognize this has, for decades, undercut Israeli confidence in their true motives.

Read the whole thing. Zuckerman suggests that November's proposed summit between Israelis and Palestinians - to be held under the good offices of the United States - might bear fruit should moderates forces, such as new Palestinian Prime Minister Salaam Fayad, succeed in shifting the Palestinians away for their perpetual strategy of victimhood to one of honesty, pragmatism, strength, and institutional performance.

Zuckerman's a realist, though, and he's careful to point out the wisdom of keeping expectations reasonable (especially with reference to Mahmound Abbas).

Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week

Theo Spark published an excellent guest-post over at Jules Crittenden's yesterday. He discusses the global struggle against fanatical Islamist terrorism, and makes the special case that liberalism itself is a destabilizing fifth column infecting Western societies.

Some of the most hardcore elements of the left are in open alliance with the forces of Islamist totalitarianism. I've blogged about the relationship on occasion.

I'm not sure how well known this ideological-religious alliance is, but I'm pleased to see that David Horowitz's Freedom Center is planning a national series of campus demonstrations to raise awareness on the nature of Islamo-fascism. The events will take place during Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week, scheduled for October 22-26.

Here are the goals of the events:

TO EXPLAIN WHO THE ENEMY IS -- not “terror,” but a fanatical religious movement associated with the Muslim Brotherhood and the sponsors of the Muslim Student Association; it is a movement including al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades -- whose common goal is the creation of a global Muslim empire ruled by an Islamic “pope” or caliphate, to be based in Iraq, once America is defeated.

TO COUNTER THE LEFT’S BIG LIE -- that “George Bush created the war on terror,” and to do this by means of campus demonstrations, guest speakers, and documentary films. The speakers will include former Senator Rick Santorum, Robert Spencer, Christopher Hitchens, Nonie Darwish, Wafa Sultan, David Horowitz, Daniel Pipes, Steve Emerson, Frank Gaffney, Cliff May, Phyllis Chessler and Ibn Warraq. The films will include Obsession; Suicide Killers; Border; Islam vs. Islam; and Islam: What the West Needs to Know.

TO PROTEST THE VIOLENT OPPRESSION OF WOMEN IN ISLAM -- the “honor killings,” arranged marriages, child brides, and second-class citizenship of Muslim women.

TO STRENGTHEN THOSE ON CAMPUS WHO REJECT THE ANTI-AMERICAN CURRICULUM OF THE TENURED LEFT which teaches that America is a racist, sexist, homophobic, imperialist “Great Satan” whose little Eichmanns deserve what they get at the hands of Medieval religious fanatics armed with the latest technologies of death.

TO TEACH AN ALTERNATIVE CURRICULUM THAT WILL ARM AMERICA AGAINST THE RADICAL JIHAD – This curriculum will teach that Islam, as currently practiced in Muslim states, oppresses women, gays, Christians, Jews and atheists. It will teach that “Islamo-fascists hate us not because we are oppressors but because we are Christians, Jews, atheists, gays, and liberated women, and because we are tolerant, generous and free."

Check out the whole article. FrontPageMag has called out the Muslim Students Association, a group which has refused to denounce Islamofascism, and one that has close ties to the hardline anti-American organization, International ANSWER.

Apparently the local UCLA chapter of the MSA solicited student donations for the Middle East terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah (during rallies at their "anti-Zionist week").

Further, FrontPageMag notes that a MSA speaker at Queensborough Community College in New York told the crowd "The only relationship you should have with America is to topple it!"

A Guilty British Liberal Loses His Innocence

In his weekend article, Andrew Anthony, a writer at London's Sunday Observer, tells how after September 11 he was torn between his longstanding progressive beliefs and the nagging clarity of evil that unpinned the murder of thousands of innocents in America that day. He was facing an ideological reckoning.

His awakening came slowly, and was prompted by stream of leftist commentary he was reading following the attacks, which held the United States to be the source of the world's evils, and held up a standard of moral relativism justifying the terrorist barbarity:

What all these reactions had in common, I realised, was not complexity but simplicity. For all of them this was an issue of the powerless striking back at the powerful, the oppressed against the oppressor, the rebels against the imperialists. It was Han Solo and Luke Skywalker taking on the Death Star. There was no serious attempt to examine what kind of power the powerless wanted to assume, or over whom they wanted to exercise it, and no one thought to ask by what authority these suicidal killers had been designated the voice of the oppressed. It was enough that Palestinians had danced in the West Bank. The scale of the suffering, the innocence of the victims and the aims of the perpetrators barely seemed to register in many of the comments. Was this a sign of shock or complacency? Or was it something else, a kind of atrophying of moral faculties, brought on by prolonged use of fixed ideas, that prevented the sufferer from recognising a new paradigm when it arrived, no matter how spectacular its announcement?

In the end I reached the conclusion that 11 September had already brutally confirmed: there were other forces, far more malign than America, that lay in wait in the world. But having faced up to the basic issue of comparative international threats, could I stop the political reassessment there? If I had been wrong about the relative danger of America, could I be wrong about all the other things I previously held to be true? I tried hard to suppress this thought, to ring-fence the global situation, grant it exceptional status and keep it in a separate part of my mind. I had too much vested in my image of myself as a 'liberal'. I had bought into the idea, for instance, that all social ills stemmed from inequality and racism. I knew that crime was solely a function of poverty. That to be British was cause for shame, never pride. And to be white was to bear an unshakable burden of guilt. I held the view, or at least was unprepared to challenge it, that it was wrong to single out any culture for censure, except, of course, Western culture, which should be admonished at every opportunity. I was confident, too, that Israel was the source of most of the troubles in the Middle East. These were non-negotiables for any right-thinking decent person. I couldn't question these received wisdoms without questioning my own identity. And I had grown too comfortable with seeing myself as one of the good guys, the well-meaning people, to want to do anything that upset that image. I viewed myself as understanding, and to maintain that self-perception it was imperative that I didn't try to understand myself.

In a sense 11 September was the ultimate mugging, a murderous assertion of a new reality, or rather a reality that already existed but which we preferred not to see. Over the years I had absorbed a notion of liberalism that was passive, defeatist, guilt-ridden. Feelings of guilt governed my world view: post-colonial guilt, white guilt, middle-class guilt, British guilt. But if I was guilty, 9/11 shattered my innocence. More than anything it challenged us all to wake up and open our eyes to what was real. It took me far too long to meet that challenge. For while I realised almost straight away that 9/11 would change the world, it would be several years before I accepted that it had also changed me. I had been wrong. This was my story, after all.

Read the whole thing. Anthony's got a kind of interesting high-brow demeanor to his writing. Perhaps it's just a bit of British intellectualism (although I don't get the same feeling when reading Tony Blair's pieces).

In any case, Anthony's story is welcomed and good (check his new book, here). It's reminiscent of many stories of moderate Americans who became 9/11 conservatives amid their disgust at the rekindling of hard-left anti-Americanism that followed the terrorist attacks.

Suicide of Reason? Radical Islam and the West

I picked up a copy of Lee Harris' new book yesterday, The Suicide of Reason: Radical Islam's Threat to the West. I've just read the preface thus far, but I thought I'd share a blurb from the book jacket with readers. This is what John McWhorter had to say about the volume:

Once again Lee Harris throws cold water on thinking Americans' tendency to view Islamist terrorists as noble freedom fighters in the vein of black Americans during the civil rights movement or East Timorese throwing off the Indonesian yoke. Harris understands that we are faced with an ememy who seeks not reasoned negotiation but the destruction of the Western way of life, and that holding to self-critical, multi-culti pieties during this crisis will spell self-sabotage.

I'm familiar with some of Harris' other writings. He's also the author of Civilization and its Enemies.

Plus, his article in Policy Review, "The Intellectual Origins of Anti-Americanism," is a modern classic. Here's a great quote from that article, dissecting blame-America ideology, which holds the United States as the source of evil in the world:

America-bashing is anti-Americanism at its most radical and totalizing. Its goal is not to advise, but to condemn; not to fix, but to destroy. It repudiates every thought of reform in any normal sense; it sees no difference between American liberals and American conservatives; it views every American action, both present and past, as an act of deliberate oppression and systemic exploitation. It is not that America went wrong here or there; it is that it is wrong root and branch. The conviction at the heart of those who engage in it is really quite simple: that America is an unmitigated evil, an irredeemable enormity.

Harris' stuff is great. Happy reading!