The ninth anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11,
2001 was, as it should always be, a highly political day. Because
the terrorists’ act and motivation were political, so must be our
response. But our leaders — Obama and Bush before him — have
chosen not to speak candidly about the nexus among terrorism,
politics, and Islam.
Our Malaisean president’s statement at the Pentagon on
9-11 is redundant proof. Speaking of terrorists, Obama said,
“They may seek to spark conflict between different faiths,
but as Americans, we are not — and never will be — at war
with Islam.” Barry added, “It was not a religion that attacked us
that September day; it was al Qaeda — a sorry band of men which
perverts religion. Just as we condemn intolerance and
extremism abroad, so will we stay true to our traditions at home as
a diverse and tolerant nation.”
What Obama and Bush have refused to understand is that
terrorism is a political act. It can be an act of war between
Westphalian states, as when Iran, Syria and others sponsor
terrorism, or it can be a smaller but nevertheless political act of
a single person. And because it is a political act, and because
those who sponsor it do so in pursuit of their political goals, it
is essential that we treat it as such.
The hijackers who crashed four airliners into the World
Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field on 9-11
committed a political act of suicide driven by a religion that
intentionally combines politics with religion.
Islam is not only a religion, but an integrated system of
beliefs that requires the imposition of a particular theocracy. And
Islam is based on intolerance. The Koran is replete with statements
such as, “O believers, take not for your intimates outside
yourselves; such men spare nothing to ruin you; they yearn for you
to suffer.” It is a religiously required paranoia that creates an
unyielding intolerance of those who are not adherents to
Islam.
When Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey reacted to the
Fort Hood massacre by saying, “What happened at Fort Hood was
a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our
diversity becomes a casualty here,” he betrayed the soldiers under
his command, and surrendered to Islam’s most potent weapon against
the West: our fear of intolerance within
ourselves.
Feisal Rauf, the imam of the proposed Ground Zero mosque,
plays on that fear relentlessly, and our president and the liberal
media have so thoroughly surrendered to his agitprop that they
repeat it consistently as disinformation. (A former communist
intelligence chief explained this crucial distinction: when someone
spouts propaganda, it is less effective than when the propagandist
persuades the adversary to repeat it as though it were his own
thought. The latter is disinformation.) The New York
Times, ever eager to publish disinformation, wrote in July of
Rauf’s new mosque, “The Cordoba House was supposed to be a monument
to religious tolerance, an homage to the city in Spain where
Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived together centuries ago in the
midst of religious foment.”
Cordoba, the capital of Islamic Spain, was nothing of the
sort. According to Philip Hitti’s indispensable History of the
Arabs (1937), the conquest of Spain began in July 710 and was
completed only after warring Arabs settled their differences and
established Spain as part of the Umayyad caliphate. All across
Spain, Hitti writes, “From the beginning the policy followed by the
Arab conquerors in the treatment of their subjects in Spain was not
fundamentally different from that pursued in other conquered
lands.” Christians and Jews were required to pay a poll tax
relieved only by their conversion to Islam. Territories acquired by
conquest — from the church and fleeing nobles — were confiscated,
landowners made into sharecroppers. Under these oppressions many
Christians and Jews converted to Islam, some secretly worshipping
their own faiths, fearful of the penalty of death for Islamic
apostates. That was the reality of idyllic, tolerant
Cordoba.
Ever-tolerant Rauf insists that the chosen site for the
Ground Zero mosque must not be changed. His motivation is political
and so is the weapon he chooses to achieve his goal. He preys on
our fear of intolerance. Last week, he told CNN, “If we move from
that location, the story will be the radicals have taken over the
discourse. The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is
under attack.” On Sunday he told Christiane Amanpour that if we
make the wrong move it will expand and strengthen the radicals and
that his proposed mosque is intended to build inter-faith
understanding. Nonsense. If it were, it would be not a mosque but a
non-denominational chapel.
It is always thus: those who use political actions to
oppose Islamic political aggression are threatened with the
reaction that liberals fear so much. But Rauf — and the useful
idiots who agree, such as Mayor Bloomberg and President Obama —
have a political goal that is as bad, or worse, than the
construction of “Cordoba House”: they want to make any protest
against Islamic political action illegitimate. It is a tactic in
political warfare that aims to limit free speech and end debate by
rendering opposing positions beyond the pale.
Former British PM Tony Blair gets it right. In the
postscript to his memoir, Blair writes that the terrorist threat
has to be fought politically, its ideology attacked and defeated:
“[The threat] doesn’t begin on the battlefield, it begins in the
school. It starts not with talk of military weapons but with talk
of religion. You have to take on the clerics who foment extremism,
not just the people who engage actively in terrorism…The ideology
is not born of a desire for military domination; it is born of a
world view based on belief in God’s will. Not only its narrative
but also its ideology has to be systematically dismantled, just as
it has been systematically constructed.” Just so.
A week after 9-11, President Bush said, “…the
face of terror is not the true faith of Islam.” Perhaps. But the
face of Islam is a political face, and by fearing to oppose even
the most aggressive Islamic political action — on the battlefield
or in New York City’s mosque controversy — we surrender our
political rights.
Obama’s 9-11 statement reveals his belief that — like
George Casey — he believes that tolerance and diversity are more
important than defending the nation. George Bush didn’t have the
courage to fight the ideological war and Obama is pre-emptively
surrendering.
9-11 isn’t a day to worship the gods of tolerance and
diversity. It’s a day of remembrance, resolve and rededication to
defeat the enemy decisively wherever he appears with every weapon
at our disposal.
