Note: Generally my opinion of Ibn Warraq is as high as my opinions of any
author
can get. This is true for most of the following remarks. Unfortunately,
Warraq,
while he makes valid points about Ronald Reagan in the context of this
essay,
leaves the impression that in general Reagan is an heroic figure to be
emulated.
This viewpoint strikes me as ridiculous. About Islam, Reagan knew almost
nothing, about social values Reagan was little or no different than any
Cultural Marxist you can name; he has my profound disrespect.
Otherwise this article by Ibn Warraq is very good, makes succinct and valid
points,
and, as with all of his writings, he adds to our knowledge of Islam.
Billy R.
=========================================
Atlas Shrugs
November 18, 2014
Ibn Warraq at Yale
[Introductory comments omitted.]
Now onto my main points:
Our foreign policy should be guided by understanding and admitting the
following realities:
1.
We are engaged in a war of ideas, with our principal enemy: an ideology.
An ideology that will not collapse out of economic incompetence.
1. The ideology of the terrorists is religiously based and derived
from Islam and its founding texts, the Koran, hadith, and the sunna, and the
history of the early caliphate.
2. One, but not the only, way we know this is because they tell us so.
First , if you want to understand the enemy “Read what they say”. They
constantly justify their acts with accurate and apt citations from the Koran
and Hadith. They also refer to, among others, Sayyid Qutb’s work
Milestones, Abdullah Azzam’s Defense of the Muslim Lands, S. K. Malik’s The
Quranic
Concept of Power, and Ayman Al-Zawahiri’s Knights Under the Prophet’s
Banner. Some of the latter have doctorates from recognized Islamic
universities, and to hear John Kerry trying to tell them their ideas have
nothing to
do with Islam is comical.
3. Islamic terrorism is not caused by “poverty, lack of education,
sexual deprivation, psychological problems, or lack of economic opportunity..”
, Western Imperialism, or Western decadence, or the Arab-Israeli conflict.
4. There are two kinds of Jihad: terrorism, and slow penetration of
Western institutions subverting Western laws and customs from within.
5. Ignorance, naivety, arrogance, political correctness , sheer
laziness, sentimentality, and Saudi, Qatari and Iranian money have led to
Islamist successes in penetrating Western institutions, from the Voice of
America,
The Pentagon, CIA, FBI, DHS, PBS, to the universities and colleges where
Islamic propaganda is shamelessly and openly disseminated.
6. While groups such as ISIS, al-Qaeda, and others are non-state
actors, they are funded by states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. These
three countries, for example, also provide the necessary Islamic support,
framework, and propaganda that spews forth anti-Western and anti-American
hatred. They should be warned or face the consequences.
7. It is also important to point out that it is not something we have
done that is impelling the Islamists. Constantly apologising, Mr President,
is pointless; they will not like or respect you the more.
8. We must learn the lessons of the cold war, for there are striking
similarities between the Islamist ideology and that of Soviet Russia [Cf
B.Russell, Jules Monnerot, Maxime Rodinson]
9. Speak out in support of the Christians who are being persecuted,
and being killed almost every day in Islamic countries. Profound importance
of this act of solidarity not realised by many in West.
10. In order to succeed we need urgently to recover our civilizational
self-confidence.
11. One way we can fight jihadist ideology is to undermine their
certainties, and one can accomplish this with Koranic Criticism. In the West,
Spinoza hastened the Enlightenment by his Biblical Criticism.
There is an obvious need to understand the Islamic ideology to understand
the mindset of the Islamic terrorists. Terrorism is not caused by poverty,
and so on. It is their ideology that motivates them and is the source of its
moral legitimacy. Without it, terrorism cannot exist. Terrorists are
produced by a totalitarian ideology justifying terrorism.
While America has had some impressive tactical successes, and has managed
to kill Osama bin Laden (May 2011) and Anwar al-Awlaki (in Sept.2011) it
still fails to understand their goals, their ideology. The reasons for this
failure are many:
First, there is a reluctance to address the religious inspiration of the
acts of terrorism,to admit that their ideology is derived from Islam and its
founding texts, the Koran, the Hadith, the Sunna and the early history of
the Caliphate. Instead, the present administration exhorts us to use
euphemisms such as “violent extremist”. “Whereas The 9/11 Commission Report,
published under the presidency of George W. Bush in July 2004 as a bipartisan
product, had used the word Islam 322 times, Muslim 145 times, jihad 126
times, and jihadist 32 times,The National Intelligence Strategy of the United
States, issued by the Obama administration in August 2009, used the term
Islam 0 times, Muslim 0 times, jihad 0 times.” Now Obama’s policy applies to
internal government documents as well, which can only have disastrous
consequences for our understanding of political groups and events in the
Middle
East, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and South and South East Asia. “How can one
possibly analyze the power and appeal of this ideology, the way that ideas
set its strategy and tactics, why it is such a huge menace if any reference
to the Islamic religion and its texts or doctrines isn’t permitted?”
Perhaps it was only in 1946, when George Kennan’s wrote his classified ‘
Long Telegram’ that America began to understand the nature of the Soviet
Union, why it acted the way it did, how the Kremlin thought, and why the USSR
was a grave threat to America. In other words it took three decades to
understand the mind of the enemy.
To complicate matters further, today there are two enemies: first,
non-European, religiously informed non-state terrorist groups, like ISIS.
Second,
and equally dangerous, states that, in fact, fund and support them. There
is evidence that, as the The Atlantic reported in June, 2014, “Two of the
most successful factions fighting Assad’s forces are Islamist extremist
groups: Jabhat al-Nusra and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). And
their success is in part due to the support they have received from two
Persian
Gulf countries: Qatar and Saudi Arabia.”
Our ability to fight al Qaeda and similar transnational terrorist actors
will depend upon our capacity to communicate to our own citizens and to the
world what it is we are fighting for and what it is that the ideology of
Jihad threatens in terms of the values we hold so dear.
To quote Sun Tsu, in war it is not enough to know the enemy in order to
win. One must first know oneself. However, with the end of the Cold War
America and the West understandably lost clarity with regard to what it was
about its way of life that was precious and worth fighting for.
James Burnham explains with exemplary clarity the reasons for this loss of
self-confidence, and what he wrote is still, mutatis mutandis, relevant:
“Judging a group of human beings- a race, nation, class or party- that he
considers to possess less than their due of well-being and liberty, the
liberal is hard put to it to condemn that group morally for acts that he would
not hesitate to condemn in his fellows.
“When the Western liberal’s feeling of guilt and his associated feeling of
moral vulnerability before the sorrows and demands of the wretched become
obsessive, he often develops a generalized hatred of Western civilization
and of his own country as a part of the West. We can frequently sense this
hatred in …[journals like] The Nation.”
In order to succeed we need urgently recover our civilizational
self-confidence.
Ronald Reagan was able to succeed because he was supremely confident of the
moral and spiritual superiority of his cause. He was thus able to state
with certainty and without hesitation that the SovietEmpire was evil. He was
not afraid to confront reality. He was able to defend our values because he
believed in them totally. He told an audience at Moscow State University, “
Go into any schoolroom [in America], and there you will see children being
taught the Declaration of Independence, that they are endowed by their
Creator with certain unalienable rights-among them life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness-that no government can justly deny….”
John Lenczowski describes what Reagan advocated unapologetically, “
Altogether, the various ideas of freedom, democracy, human rights, moral
order,
and the dignity of the human person were promoted not only by the President’s
rhetoric and personal moral witness but by the Administration as a whole
in numerous forms: in Voice of America editorials, Radio Free Europe/ Radio
Liberty broadcasts, in articles in United States Information
Agency-published magazines targeted at Soviet-bloc populations, on the
USIA-run billboard
on the sidewalk outside the U.S. embassy in Moscow, in American diplomats’
addresses at various international for[ums], in the distribution of books
to Soviet bloc audiences and U.S. libraries abroad, in films distributed
abroad, and so on.”
To quote Asian columnist Banyan in the Economist,“For all its flaws and
mis-steps, [America] represents not just economic and military might, but an
ideal to aspire to, in a way that China does not. And when American leaders
appear to give less weight to that ideal, they not only diminish America’s
attractions, they also lend more credence to the idea of its relative
economic and military decline.”
The rest of the world recognizes the virtues of the West. As Arthur
Schlesinger remarked, “when Chinese students cried and died for democracy in
Tiananmen Square, they brought with them not representations of Confucius or
Buddha but a model of the Statue of Liberty.”
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