Not to beat a dead horse, but unless we have clear idea of who the enemy is in this war with Islamists, Islamo-fascists, or whoever you call the enemy, we can to hope to present a defense against them. We ARE at war and between the Republicans that can’t bring themselves to identify the real enemy due to Muslim sensibilities and the Democrats who think they don’t exist – just misunderstood – we can’t seem to put a face on the enemy in order to create some defensive tactics. The dominant western response to Islamic terror is compromise, dialogue, apology and calls for understanding.
We won’t get into the offensive tactics in t his post. That will not occur until the real shooting war starts and is supported by the entire non-Muslim world.
Here’s even a better question. How can we identify the enemy in a way that the far Left, Progressives and even the ACLU can be against it? The term of Islamists are just to general. Islamo-fascism is perceived by the left as just too hateful. And don’t even call it Islam or you will catch the ire of over a billion Muslims – and the ACLU - in the world. So what do you do? If you can’t identify your opposition than how can you defend against it?
At TownHall.com, Diana West knows who the enemy is and it fits perfectly into the theme of my blog. She uses a make believe speech from Bush as an example. In the fantasy speech, Bush says:
I made this democratization process the centerpiece of my second term, the core of my political strategy against global terrorism, because history has taught us that democracies don't make war, or support terrorist attacks, on one another. I didn't, as one predecessor of mine famously put it, simply want "to make the world safe for democracy." I wanted to make the world -- that part of the world from which terrorism mainly springs -- democratic, and therefore, safe…..On the contrary, each of these new democracies has produced constitutions that enshrine Islamic law…...With their devotion to Islamic tradition, then, these new democracies have, in effect, peacefully voted themselves into the same doctrinal camp as the many terror groups that violently strike at the non-Muslim world in the name of jihad for the sake of a caliphate -- a Muslim world government ruled according to sharia.
More Muslims endorse violence than are violent themselves. Falling into this camp is any Muslim who accepts, loudly or tacitly, the political ideology of totalitarian Islam. Totalitarian Islam is the view that Islamic law should govern human action in all spheres, and especially in politics.
West’s musings identifies the enemy in this war perfectly. It’s not Muslims, Islamo-fascists, terrorists, or radical Islamists. The enemy we should fight is the goal that the wish to achieve. For if the achieve the goal of instituting the law of sharia in Muslim and non-Muslim societies – both through violent and non-violent methods – they would have won the clash between civilizations. Bush’s fantasy speech goes on:
What I mean by that is it is neither in the national interest nor in the national will for the United States of America to attempt to reshape such a culture to conform to our notions of liberty and justice for all. It is neither in the national interest nor in the national will to attempt to reform a belief system that animates this culture to conform to our notions of freedom of worship. It is, however, in our national interest, and must become a part of our national will, to ensure that Islamic law does not come to our own shores, whether by means of violent jihad terrorism as practiced by the likes of Al Qaeda or Hezbollah, or through peaceful patterns of migration, such as those that have already Islamized large parts of Europe.
I would add, of course, the successful tactics of intimidation and infiltration of non-Muslim societies combined with the use of disinformation to confuse and stunt any defensive response. Once small example of this non-violent means.
In his article at Little Green Footballs, Paul Sperry writes:
In our brave new schools, Johnny can't say the pledge, but he can recite the Quran. Yup, the same court that found the phrase "under God" unconstitutional now endorses Islamic catechism in public school. In a recent federal decision that got surprisingly little press, even from conservative talk radio, California's 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled it's OK to put public-school kids through Muslim role-playing exercises, including:
When parents complained they were told that “the state was merely teaching kids about another culture” and to “get over it.”
So the touchstone of who supports the implementation of sharia law through out-right or creeping means is the enemy we need to oppose.
Back to the President’s fantasy speech.
The shift I am describing -- from a pro-democracy offensive to an anti-sharia defensive -- means a national course correction. I will henceforth emphasize the prevention of sharia from reaching the West as our key tool in the war on terror.
Wherever support for sharia law from radical, fundamentalist or moderate Muslims in any form raises it’s ugly head, we need as a societies and a cultures to ‘Just say no!” This is a war against an ideology not individuals and we must treat the enemy ideology most potent weapon against our civilization no different if it were Nazism or Communism of old.
A final word from the President’s speech.
At home, the line of defense is clear. It is our border. My new strategy calls on us to think of our border as more than just a line on a map. We need to see the border as a cultural line also, a defining line of freedom against proponents of Shariah, which, I cannot emphasize enough, poses a direct threat to our founding principles of liberty and equality. It is that simple….This, the most crucial domestic component of my anti-Shariah program, will undoubtedly be regarded as the most controversial because it necessitates making a definitive judgment against the laws promulgated by Islam, a religion.
And what’s new about that? Isn’t the secular Left using the very same tactics against anything Christian – of religious in nature? Framing the enemy as a campaign against religious law that will usurp the secular agenda would make the hypocritical secular Left drool at the prospect.
Right? Yeah, right.