The Imaginary Islamic Radical
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
The debate over Islamic terrorism has shifted so
far from reality that it has now become an argument
between the administration, which insists that there
is nothing Islamic about ISIS, and critics who
contend that a minority of Islamic extremists are
the ones causing all the problems.
But
what makes an Islamic radical, extremist? Where is
the line between ordinary Muslim practice and its
extremist dark side? It can’t be beheading people in
public.
Saudi Arabia just did that and was praised for its
progressiveness by the UN Secretary General, had
flags flown at half-staff in the honor of its
deceased tyrant in the UK and that same tyrant was
honored by Obama, in preference to such minor events
as the Paris Unity March and the Auschwitz
commemoration.
It can’t be terrorism either. Not when the US funds
the PLO and three successive administrations
invested massive amounts of political capital into
turning the terrorist group into a state. While the
US and the EU fund the Palestinian Authority’s
homicidal kleptocracy; its media urges stabbing
Jews.
Clearly that’s not Islamic extremism either. At
least it’s not too extreme for Obama.
And there are few Islamic terrorist groups that
don’t have friends in high places in the Muslim
world.
If blowing up civilians in Allah’s name isn’t
extreme, what do our radicals have to do to get
really radical?
Sex slavery? The Saudis only abolished it in 1962;
officially. Unofficially it continues. Every few
years a Saudi bigwig gets busted for it abroad. The
third in line for the Saudi throne was the son of a
“slave girl”.
Ethnic cleansing? Genocide? The “moderate” Islamists
we backed in Syria, Libya and Egypt have been busy
doing it with the weapons and support that we gave
them. So that can’t be extreme either.
If terrorism, ethnic cleansing, sex slavery and
beheading are just the behavior of moderate Muslims,
what does a Jihadist have to do to be officially
extreme? What is it that makes ISIS extreme?
From a Muslim perspective, ISIS is radical because
it declared a Caliphate and is casual about
declaring other Muslims infidels. That’s a serious
issue for Muslims and when we distinguish between
radicals and moderates based not on their treatment
of people, but their treatment of Muslims, we define
radicalism from the perspective of Islamic
supremacism, rather than our own American values.
The position that the Muslim Brotherhood is moderate
and Al Qaeda is extreme because the Brotherhood
kills Christians and Jews while Al Qaeda kills
Muslims is Islamic Supremacism. The idea of the
moderate Muslim places the lives of Muslims over
those of every other human being on earth.
Our Countering Violent Extremism program emphasizes
the centrality of Islamic legal authority as the
best means of fighting Islamic terrorists. Our
ideological warfare slams terrorists for not
accepting the proper Islamic chain of command. Our
solution to Islamic terrorism is a call for Sharia
submission.
That’s not an American position. It’s an Islamic
position and it puts us in the strange position of
arguing Islamic legalism with Islamic terrorists.
Our politicians, generals and cops insist that the
Islamic terrorists we’re dealing with know nothing
about Islam because that is what their Saudi
liaisons told them to say.
It’s as if we were fighting Marxist terrorist groups
by reproving them for not accepting the authority of
the USSR or the Fourth International. It’s not only
stupid of us to nitpick another ideology’s fine
points, especially when our leaders don’t know what
they’re talking about, but our path to victory
involves uniting our enemies behind one central
theocracy. That’s even worse than arming and
training them, which we’re also doing (but only for
the moderate genocidal terrorists, not the
extremists).
Our government’s definition of moderate often
hinges on a willingness to negotiate regardless of
the results. The moderate Taliban were the ones
willing to talk us. They just weren’t willing to
make a deal. Iran’s new government is moderate
because it engages in aimless negotiations while
pushing its nuclear program forward and issuing
violent threats, instead of just pushing and
threatening without the negotiations. Nothing has
come of the negotiations, but the very willingness
to negotiate is moderate.
The Saudis would talk to us all day long while they
continued sponsoring terrorists and setting up
terror mosques in the West. That made them
moderates. Qatar keeps talking to us while arming
terrorists and propping up the Muslim Brotherhood.
So they too are moderate. The Muslim Brotherhood
talked to us even while its thugs burned churches,
tortured protesters and worked with terrorist groups
in the Sinai.
A radical terrorist will kill you. A moderate
terrorist will talk to you and then kill someone
else. And you’ll ignore it because the conversation
is a sign that they’re willing to pretend to be
reasonable.
That’s more than Secretary of State Kerry is willing
to be.
Kerry views accusations of extremism as already too
extreme. ISIS, he insists, are nihilists and
anarchists.
Nihilism is the exact opposite of the highly
structured Islamic system of the Caliphate. It might
be a more accurate description of Kerry. But as
irrational as Kerry’s claims might be, they have a
source. The Saudis and the Muslim Brotherhood
successfully sold the Western security establishment
on the idea that the only way to defeat Islamic
terrorism was by denying any Islamic links to its
actions.
This was like an arsonist convincing the fire
department that the best way to fight fires was to
pretend that they happened randomly on their own.
Victory through denial demands that we pretend that
Islamic terrorism has nothing to do with Islam. It’s
a wholly irrational position, but the alternative of
a tiny minority of extremists is nearly as
irrational.
If ISIS is extreme and Islam is moderate, what did
ISIS do that Mohammed did not?
The answers usually have a whole lot to do with the
internal structures of Islam and very little to do
with such pragmatic things as not raping women or
not killing non-Muslims.
Early on we decided to take sides between Islamic
dictators and Islamic terrorists, deeming the former
moderate and the latter extremists. But the
dictators were backing their own terrorists. And
when it came to human rights, there wasn’t all that
much of a difference between the two.
It made sense for us to put down Islamic terrorists
because they often represented a more direct threat,
but allowing the Islamic dictators to convince us
that they and the terrorists followed two different
brands of Islam and that the only solution to
Islamic terrorism lay in their theocracy was foolish
of us.
The Islamic terrorist group is more mobile, more
agile and more willing to take risks. It plays the
short game and so its violent actions are more
apparent in the short term. The Islamic dictatorship
takes the longer view and its long game, such as
immigration, is harder to spot, but much more
destructive.
ISIS
and the Saudis differ in their tactics, but there
was very little in the way of differences when it
came to how they saw us and non-Muslims in general.
The Soviet Union was not moderate because it chose
to defer a nuclear confrontation and because it was
forced to come to the negotiating table. It was
still playing a long game that it never got a chance
to finish. The Saudis are not moderate. They are
playing the long game. We can’t win the War on
Terror through their theocracy. That way lies a real
Caliphate.
Our problem is not the Islamic radical, but the
inherent radicalism of Islam. Islam is a radical
religion. It radicalizes those who follow it. Every
atrocity we associate with Islamic radicals is
already in Islam. The Koran is not the solution to
Islamic radicalism, it is the cause.
Our enemy is not radicalism, but a hostile
civilization bearing grudges and ambitions.
We aren’t fighting nihilists or radicals. We are at
war with the inheritors of an old empire seeking to
reestablish its supremacy not only in the
hinterlands of the east, but in the megalopolises of
the west.