“We will bring freedom to others, and we will prevail, ” said President George W. Bush. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld suggested that terrorists are being created faster than we can arrest or kill them.
One might wonder if they’re fighting different wars. Bush suggests “reprogramming” his enemy; Rumsfeld wants to wipe them out.
Daniel Pipes, a scholar specializing in militant Islam puts it correctly: “Ending terrorism requires more than targeting terrorists, their leaders, or their organizations. It requires recognizing and defeating the body of ideas known as militant Islam or Islamism. The war cannot be won until politicians and others focus on this ideology (taught in the madrassas, Islamic schools) rather than [just] on terrorism, which is merely its manifestation.”
Bush and Rumsfeld are indeed fighting the same war. Rumsfeld suggests the need to use invasive therapy to root out that enemy; Bush wants to “inoculate” Iraqi society with a healthy dose of preventative medicine: democracy.
This two-pronged “war-and-peace” plan will not be easy to pull off. The medicine has had unexpected and unwelcome side-effects. The patient has not responded as we had hoped. One of the problems is that the patient did not request our services. Sure, he feels better now, but he still doesn’t trust us. Also, the source of his illness is still there. That source is radical Islam. Specifically, Wahabbi Islam.
Wahabbism embraces an inflexible doctrine responsible for sowing intolerance, sedition, violence, hatred and “holy” war in the Muslim world and elsewhere. This doctrine feeds radical Islamism. According to Pipes, ten to fifteen percent of the world’s 1.2 billion Muslims adhere to militant Islam. That percentage translates into an “army” of 120-180 million – and some feel that Pipes’s figures are an understatement.
The West preaches freedom and equality – two notions in very short supply in Arab/Muslim culture – and this is why Islamists see the West as their enemy. Islamists have declared war on America, Israel, Spain and, indeed, the entire West. The West was never their enemy, but now we must recognize that radical Islamic fundamentalists are our enemy.
Attempts to coddle them in the hope that they will finally “get it” and cut themselves free of Middle Age barbarism are naive. Indeed, rather than waiting for them to “get it,” it is time to “give it to them.”
We must unapologetically take steps to counter the rise of the belligerent and ruthless juggernaut of radical Islamism. No efforts should be spared to “encourage” Arab/Muslim leaders to reduce significantly or totally remove the hostility toward the non-Muslim world expressed overtly in their nations’ schoolbooks, in their mosques and in their government-controlled media.
Some might argue that things are getting better vis-a-vis the Arab-Islamic world and Israel. Egypt and Jordan have both signed peace treaties with Israel. Maybe other Arab states will follow. Is this a realistic expectation, or simplistic naivete? Let’s take a look at how these “moderates” relate to the “Great Satan’s evil child. Here are some of the “calls for peace” coming from these sought-after “moderate” Arab voices:
* Saudi sermon: “Time for Christians and Jews to convert to Islam.” (Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia TV1 in Arabic, official television station of the Saudi government; carried live on February 27, 2004, from the mosque in Mecca.)
* Another Saudi sermon: “Jewish paws,” “defeat the usurper Jews.” (Riyadh, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia TV2 in Arabic, official television station of the Saudi government, carried live on February 6, 2004, from the mosque in Medina.)
* Jordanian sermon: “O God, destroy your enemies, the Jewish and crusader enemies of Islam.” (Amman Television Channel 1 in Arabic, official television station of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, carried live on March 5, 2004, from Martyr King Abdallah mosque in Amman.)