Sunday, November 15, 2015

FIGHTING TERRORISM OR APPEASING ISLAM?

"This is war", declared the French President Francois Hollande yesterday, after the attacks on Paris in which over 120 people were killed and many more were wounded. The awareness that this is in fact a war, is a new one and a step forward. But how could the West make such a basic mistake?



Sebastian Gorka, the Major General Matthew C. Horner Distinguished Chair of Military Theory at Marine Corps University.

Despite the fact that Obama had just declared that Islamic State has finally been contained (source), the terror group managed to kill 224 people in a Russian airliner over Sinai, 41 in the Beirut bombings, and well over 120  in Paris, and counting. It is clear that this war is far from over. It is actually only just beginning. But it won't happen until the West understands that, in order to win it,  it has to break the back of Islamo Fascism. It is therefore becoming more than urgent to set the record straight over a policy that has been failing us since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The West, and primarily the US, must first make some very, very hard choices. We can either fight terrorism, or we can appease Muslim countries. We can't do both.

American diplomats have been trying to deal with Islamic terrorism, while at the same time maintaining good relations with the Islamic world since the Iranian Revolution. But terrorism and Islam are so intrinsically entwined, that it is impossible to separate the two. Peace is a moral duty to Western Internationalists (source), but a wish doesn't make it so! Nor is appeasing the intolerant at the expense of the innocent, a virtue.

Most Muslims do not even understand the concept of terrorism. It is violence against non-combatants. But the Western construct that distinguishes between the military and civilians is unknown in Islam. War in Islam is war against Infidels: there are no innocent non-combatants! Islam is an 8th century ideology of conquest. 

The history of this diplomatic conundrum of separating Islam from terrorism was detailed in 2014 in an article entitled "The Poison Tree". It reviews a report by Katherine Gorka of the Council on Global Security, “The Bad Science Behind America’s Counter-Terrorism Strategy. (PDF) (Source)
One of Gorka’s earliest examples of this policy comes from former Assistant Secretary of State Edward Djerejian (wiki) (website), who said in 1992, “The U.S. government does not view Islam as the next ‘ism’ confronting the West or threatening world peace.” Similar assurances were uttered by officials in the Clinton administration, by Clinton himself, and by President George W. Bush. 
The policy was meant to delegitimize terrorism by denying the terrorists’ claim that they are acting according to religious precepts. “Policymakers believed that by tempering their language with regard to Islam, they might forestall further radicalization of moderate Muslims and indeed even potentially win moderates into the American circle of friendship.” 
George W. Bush, Gorka notes, combined his rhetorical appeals to moderate Muslims with denunciations of the immorality of terrorism and illiberalism. And yet, for the government at large, downplaying the religious and ideological component to terrorist activities became an end in itself. The Global War on Terror was renamed the “global struggle against violent extremism.” 
In 2008 the Department of Homeland Security published a lexicon of terrorism that said, “Our terminology must be properly calibrated to diminish the recruitment efforts of extremists who argue that the West is at war with Islam.” State Department guidelines issued in 2008 said, “Never use the terms jihadist or mujahedeen to describe a terrorist.” Then came Obama.  (...) (Source) 
This policy error stresses the danger of trying to understand the world, not by identifying things as they are in reality, but as people perceive them. It is the domain of tradesmen, marketeers and diplomats. It is their job to see the world through the eyes of the other. But when we use subjectivism to understand reality, we are on a very slippery slope. It can't end well. 

Policy must always be based on objective reality. This subjective world view can never succeed, because almost no two people see the world in the same way, let alone two very distinctive and mutually exclusive world visions, as the virtually unchanged 8th century cult of Islam and Western philosophy, based on Enlightenment values.

There is a fundamental difference between fact and opinion, between objective and subjective. For politicians not to understand the two -- which is a typical fallacy of postmodernism -- is currently costing an untold number of people their lives, and it is making us lose the existential war for civilization. 

The choice is a hard one: we can either be friends with the likes of Saudi Arabia, Iran, Turkey and Qatar that are bankrolling and facilitating all this civilian death and destruction, or we can put a stop to the terror masters once and for all. But we can't have our cake and eat it too.




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