By Ted Belman
Yesterday I attended a lecture by Daniel Pipes in Jerusalem on the matter of Islam. As you can imagine, his oft repeated line “Radical Islam is the problem, moderate Islam is the solution” was repeated. He acknowledged that his criticism comes from the right who insist that there is only one Islam. He said that when he asks them what is their answer, they have none. He prefers to look to moderate Islam for the answer which he admits is showing no signs of life.
He still espouses the belief that the Palestinians must be utterly defeated before Israel should negotiate peace.
He took pains to note that the American people were waking up, even if the liberal progressives weren’t, to Islam as evidenced in the Mosque and Koran burning issues.
Which brings me to my hobby horse of late, Islam is a danger to us (America) and we must defend ourselves. I collaborated with Mathew Hausman resulting in his article Freedom of Belief is absolute, freedom of practice isn’t. Other articles posted here, fortified this theme.
Today, American Thinker published The Shariah Threat to America by David Yerushalmi. He stresses two things.
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FACT ONE: The shariah doctrine which calls for the murder of apostates and jihad against the infidels is not some perversion of a peaceful Islamic law.
FACT TWO: U.S. law enforcement, intelligence, military, and political authorities have not as of yet conducted a serious study and analysis of shariah as the common enemy threat doctrine.
He reasons as follows,
- That is, the authorities who have taken an oath to protect and defend our lives and our Constitution from this nation’s enemies have consciously chosen not to engage the enemy by willfully failing to “Know the Enemy,” the most fundamental rule of successful warfare.
What drives this failing is not the lack of empirical evidence of the threat doctrine, but the politically correct fear that identifying shariah as the enemy threat doctrine will somehow make hundreds of millions of “moderate” Muslims go “radical” and join the jihad, either in body or in spirit via aid and comfort. Ergo, we live in a P.C.-fear mode, ever mindful of the threat from “radicalized” “moderate” Muslims.
But then provides a glimmer of hope.
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All of this came to an end yesterday, September 15, 2010, with the publication of The Shariah Threat To America, published under the auspices of the Center for Security Policy, the Washington, D.C.-based think tank founded in 1988 and headed by Frank Gaffney. Mr. Gaffney was acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Policy, the senior position in the Defense Department with responsibility for policies involving nuclear forces, arms control, and U.S.-European defense relations, under President Reagan. [..]
Quite simply, the 2010 version of Team B’s competitive analysis challenges the politically correct dogma dominating our defense, law enforcement, and intelligence establishment elites. To wit, the terrorism conducted throughout the world against the U.S. and its allies has nothing to do with Islam, and to the extent it does, it is an absolute perversion of extant and authoritative Islamic law and doctrine. As with many dogmatic positions, very little substantive analysis of the empirical evidence supports this politically correct narrative myth, which nine years after 9/11 continues to dominate and blind those in charge of our national defense from knowing who our enemies are and, even more importantly, why they have aligned against us in a global war of terror.[..]
Lets hope that Pipe;s observation and this Report will herald in a new beginning.
Stupid statements like this from Pipes and others reinforce my contention that they are either total fools or total frauds.
Yes the enemy should be totally defeated but if they are totally defeated, why negotiate peace? We have had peace with Syria since 1973 albeit a de-facto peace but our border with Syria has been mostly quiet. Yes they have built a formidable missile deterrent but they also know we could blow Syria to pieces,along with Assad if push comes to shove. We have peace without having to give anything up. That should be our peace model.
Pipes as well as you know this conflict will never end as it is a conflict of religious ideologies and they will survive to fight another day and all the agreements and PEACE TREATIES in the world won’t change that fact. Nor will seminal papers that few will read and even fewer understand or care to understand. But if as you describe what was in the American Thinker essay as important may I quote from it to show none of you either get it our have the balls to say or write it in public:
This statement like Pipes shows that the author has no real grasp of what Islam is all about and has injected arrogant American myopic interpretations that are false here. Islam is at war in one form or another with the whole non Muslim world. She is aggressive where she is allowed to be aggressive like a target of opportunity. When Islam was weak she was mostly dormant but the West has allowed Islam into their living rooms and even agreed to share with them the house. Why shouldn’t Islam exploit the obvious weaknesses of Europe and America?
It isn’t terrorist or just Shariah Law. Terrorism is a consequence of what Islam is about but not just. The problem isn’t the specific components of Islam it is Islam itself. Unless you view and deal with Islam as a whole construct your parsing just those elements that are obviously threatening and an anathema to the West is self defeating and bound to fail. The danger and enemy is Islam itself not just it’s violent manifestations.
Based on what I’ve read here and from your statements of late I don’t believe you really understand the threat or are willing if you do, to declare that a total war must be fought against Islam itself and if no choice then against all those who hold to the ideology and belief in Islam where ever they be.