SOFT POWER, HARD TRUTHS Victor Davis Hanson Wall Street Journal, February 22, 2005 Recent books have raved that the European Union is the way of the future. In contrast, a supposedly exhausted, broke and post-imperial United States chases the terrorist chimera, running up debts and deficits as it tilts at the autocratic windmills of the Arab World. That caricature frames the visit of the president to Europe� Europe is huffy, but strangely tentative in its new prickliness. Short-term positive indicators�trade surpluses, the strong euro, low inflation and expansion of the EU�are showcased to prove that its statism and pacifism are the preferable Western paradigm. But privately bureaucrats in Brussels are far more worried about different and scarier long-term concomitant signs: high unemployment, low birthrates, Islamicist minorities�and a high sounding pacifism that is being increasingly seen world-wide as base appeasement by friend and enemy alike. The adage goes that the European Union counts on a more sophisticated and nuanced �soft power.� In reality, that translates to using transnational organizations and its own economic clout to soothe or buy off potential adversaries� Everything from idly watching Milosevic and the Hutus butcher unchecked to unilateral intervention in the Ivory Coast or no action in [Darfur] usually finds either the proper humanitarian exegesis or the culpable American bogeyman. Yet contrary to the mythologies of Michael Moore and the high talk of Kyoto, most of the international sins of the recent age--selling a reactor to Saddam, setting up a new arms market in China, whitewashing Hezbollah, or subsidizing Hamas�were the work of European avatars of peace. Such opportunism and its accompanying rhetoric were also predicated on the convenient specter of the bad-cop America. We all knew the fall-guy script: Try as they might, the more sober Europeans could still fail to restrain reckless Americans�or so they used to warn everyone from Saddam to the mullahs, especially more recently in the case of scary George, smoke-�em-out, Bush. Deal with, or buy from, a sane France or Germany now�or run for cover from the crazy Americans later. When the Europeans did occasionally intervene from Kosovo to the Ivory Coast, there was usually an American supply ship or C-130 somewhere to be found in the shadows. After September 11 all that one-sided way of doing business is in jeopardy� George Bush turned out not just to be a bombs-away Texan, but a visionary of the Woodrow Wilson and FDR stripe, who risked his re-election, the American economy, world oil markets�on spreading democracy throughout the Middle East... If this idealism works, liberated Afghans, Iraqis, Iranians, and others might see the U.S. as principled as Europe proved conniving in the days of Oil for Food and extracting oil concessions from Saddam. America, in other words, is learning far more about soft power than the still disarmed Europeans have about hard power� The Europeans worry not just about American muscular idealism usurping their prized role as the backroom moral arbiters of globalized society. Berlin will soon be in range of Tehran�s missiles. Jihadists went to Afghanistan, the West Bank, or Iraq from Marseilles or Amsterdam, not from Detroit and the Bronx. Enemies of the U.S.�unlike Europe�s�more likely have to get in rather than come from within... After the Cold War, we only acerbated an already unwholesome parent-teenager relationship with the Europeans, who bragged of their new independence, snapped at their benefactors, but always counted on our subsidized protection. That simultaneous denial of and insistence on dependency was not healthy for a continent with a larger population and economy than the United States, as contemporary European insecurity always warred with past glories and unrealized potential capabilities. Yet, if Europeans are ever going to enter into a full partnership with America, then we better let them move out, encourage them to rearm�or hope they find that the world works according to the refined protocols of The Hague. America must have the confidence that the European pandemic continent has evolved beyond warring against itself�and us as well. For all the diplomacy of Secretary Rice and President Bush, it is the Europeans� choice, not our call. Until postmodern Europe rightly assumes a role commensurate with its moral rhetoric, population, and economic strength, out of envy or pride it will often seek to undercut and occasionally embarrass the U.S.�at least up to that fine, though ambiguous, point of not quite alienating its hyperpower patron. For our part, we cannot ridicule Europe�s present military impotence only to oppose its nascent efforts at a unified defense establishment. So go to it, Europe�one voice, one army, one U.N. Security Council seat! The United States should ignore all this ankle-biting, praise the EU to the skies, but not take very seriously their views on the world until we learn exactly what is going on inside Europe during these years of its uncertainty. America is watching enormous historical forces being unleashed on the continent from its own depopulation, new anti-Semitism, and rising Islamicism to Turkish demands for EU membership and further expansion of the Union�that will bring it to the doorstep of Russia. Whether its politics and economy will evolve to embrace more personal freedom, its popular culture will integrate its minorities, and its military will step up to protect Western values and visions is unclear. But what is certain is that the U.S. cannot remain a true ally of a militarily weak but shrill Europe should its policies grow even more resentful and neutralist, always nursing old wounds and new conspiracies, amoral in its inability to act, quite ready to preach to those who do. We keep assuming that Europeans are like Britain and Japan when in fact long ago they devolved more into a Switzerland and Sweden�friendly neutrals but no longer real allies. In the meantime, let us Americans keep much more quiet, wait, and watch�even as we carry a far bigger stick. (Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and senior fellow at Stanford�s Hoover Institution, is the author, most recently, of A War like No Other, to be published this autumn by Random House.) THE WAR FOR EURABIA Caroline Fourest Wall Street Journal, February 2, 2005 The Western world, but Europe in particular, is the main battleground for the Islamists. Secret services regularly thwart terror attacks whose targets are on European soil. In the past few weeks, France, Germany and Italy separately uncovered alleged terrorist cells, including recruiters for the insurgency in Iraq. But Europe is also the frontline for Islamists who have chosen a more "political" approach. Nearly five years ago, Sheik Yusuf Qaradhawi, star imam on the al-Jazeera news channel and president of the European Fatwa Council, was very clear: "With Allah's will, Islam shall return to Europe, and Europeans shall convert to Islam. They will then be able to propagate Islam to the world."� The Islamists who were trained or influenced by the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian group founded by Hassan al-Banna in 1928, share this vision. Since their failed attempt to seize power in Egypt, and even more since they lost the civil war in Algeria, Europe has become the top priority: the Islamists' third round� Their strategies diverge. Terrorists target symbols of the West through violence. Reformers, on the other hand, have made the struggle against Westernization the priority--one they lead from Europe, through mosques and radio shows and publications. In North Africa or the Middle East, where they pose a direct threat to the regimes in place, they are closely watched, even chased. But in Europe, they take advantage of free speech and democracy as well as the failure of Arab immigrants to integrate. Here, they recruit at their leisure--offering renewed pride and a political family united by a belief in radical Islam to thousands of alienated Muslims. The West is used as a formidable base camp to recruit new troops. With them, the Islamists hope to take their revenge in the East. That's why the leaders of radical political Islam are found more often in London or Geneva than in Kabul or Baghdad� Yusuf Qaradhawi, the telegenic imam, was once expected to become the Official Guide of the Muslim Brotherhood movement in Egypt. But he refused, saying that his mission in Europe was the priority. In fact, he retains great power of influence by presiding over the European Council of the Fatwa, based in London, which pronounces fatwas (religious rulings) for European Muslims. One of these fatwas justifies the use of suicide bombings against civilians. No other Islamic authority, in Egypt or in Iran, has ever dared to pass a similar ruling. Hamas, the armed branch of the Muslim Brotherhood in Palestine, has used this European ruling to justify its operations. The man who guides the Muslims of Europe also says that any contacts with Jews must be with "the sword and the gun." Yet it is Mr. Qaradhawi whom the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, took in his arms July 17 during a rally in favor of the chador organized in the British capital� Less talked about is the Leicester Foundation, created by Pakistani Islamists to propagate the ideas of Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian thinker who inspired bin Laden's call for Jihad against the "apostate tyrants," and Sayyid Abu'l-A'la Mawdudi, the Pakistani theologian who advocates a return to Sharia law. Though a radical propaganda institute, the foundation received a prize from Prince Charles--more proof that the Islamists are quite right to bet on the na�vet� of Western democracies� Another Islamist safe haven hasn't yet decided to act: Switzerland. With its long tradition of neutrality and its role as an international banking center, the country is hesitant to harass Islamists who still have the moral--and often financial--backing of Saudi investors. At the beginning of the 1960s, with the patronage and protection of the Saudi royal family, Hassan al-Banna's favorite disciple, Sa�d Ramadan, was able to establish an Islamic Center in Geneva, which served as a refuge for the Muslim Brotherhood and as a base camp for fundamentalists trying to Islamize the Continent. Since his death in 1995, his sons, all on the administrative board of the Geneva Islamic Center, have kept up the fight. The center's official director, Hani Ramadan, has just been fired by the Swiss Ministry of Education for condoning stoning as an act of purification and calling AIDS God's punishment in an article in the French daily Le Monde� A report from the Swiss secret services also includes testimony from a former Geneva Islamic Center insider who says that he took part in 1991 in a meeting between Aymen al-Zawahiri, Omar Abdel-Rhaman, the man behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, and two of Sa�d Ramadan's sons: Hani and Tariq Ramadan. Tariq Ramadan has provoked ample discussion in Europe and the United States. Hired last year by Notre Dame to teach "peace between civilizations," the U.S. denied him a visa on security grounds, bringing criticism from many quarters. But despite his apparently angelic and irreproachable message, Tariq Ramadan is indeed unqualified to teach on "peace between civilizations." On television sets and in the many interviews�he presents himself as a man of dialogue, with no links to the Muslim Brotherhood� But in his cassettes and books, distributed in radical Islamist libraries and shops, he employs a different discourse that explains and praises the teachings and methods of Hassan al-Banna, without any critical analysis� Tariq Ramadan openly supports Hamas as a "resistance" movement. When he's asked whether he approves of the killing of an 8-year-old Israeli child who will grow up to be a soldier, he answers: "That act in itself is morally condemnable but contextually explicable," since "the international community has put the Palestinians in the arms of the oppressors." True to the Muslim Brotherhood's new orientation, Tariq Ramadan has pronounced the West to be "dar el shaada," which is to say the land where he is to undertake his religious mission� [F]or all matters relating to theology, he advises his listeners to turn to his mentor: Yusuf Qaradhawi. Just like Mr. Qaradhawi, Tariq Ramadan says that he is waiting for the proof that al Qaeda is�responsible for September 11. Tariq Ramadan wants to make America his next mission, hoping to seduce the African-American community, and even the American left-wing. Though intellectuals--often Arab and/or Muslim ones--have warned against his influence for the past 15 years, there have always been other intellectuals, more often than not progressive ones from the West, who get tricked by his double message, to the point of taking his defense. Even, and especially, when he claims to be a victim of an Islamophobic or Zionist conspiracy. Herein lies the greatness and weakness of democracy: Even those who despise it know how to use it to their advantage. Whether terrorist or "simply" political ones, the Islamists post a grave threat to Western democracies. Can this underground guerrilla movement against individual and public liberties be endlessly tolerated in the name of these same liberties? And on the other hand, can these liberties be weakened without abandoning the ideals that make us different from the enemies of democracy? The solution probably lies in the middle. And it certainly requires that extreme vigilance be maintained. (Caroline Fourest is the author of Fr�re Tariq (Grasset, 2004). Alfred de Montesquiou translated this article from French.) CIJR's daily "ISRANET BRIEFING" is available by fax and e-mail. Please urge colleagues, friends and family to visit our web-site for more information on our Briefing series. To join our distribution list, or to unsubscribe, contact us at http://www.isranet.org/. The daily ISRANET BRIEFING is a service of CIJR. We hope that you find it useful and that you will support it and our pro-Israel educational work by forwarding a minimum $36.00 tax-deductible contribution [please send a cheque or VISA/Mastercard information to CIJR (see cover page for address)]. 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