The politicians and media continue to spew and sputter about the NYC mosque, with much of their commentary now turning to ask: ‘Why are Americans so fearful of and hateful toward Islam and Muslims?” The obvious answer is that Americans are so fearful of and hateful toward Islam and Muslims because their leading politicians and the media have taught them to be.
Since the Cold War’s end, the administrations of Ivy League-educated presidents Bush, Clinton, Bush, and Obama have told Americans that Muslims hate them because they have freedom, personal liberty, gender equality, erotic moves, and beer. Moreover, the argument has continued, Muslims want to take all of these things from Americans and impose Sharia law on them. This last is a bit of an inconsistency from the politicians as they also claim the Islamists attacking America have absolutely nothing to do with Islam.
The media — left and right — have inculcated the same belief in their readers, listeners, and viewers. From Sean Hannity to Keith Olberman, from CNN to CBS to NPR, and from the Washington Times to the New York Times the message is the same: They [Muslims] hate Americans for who we are and how we think, not for what the U.S. government does. The media, too, chant that al-Qaeda and its allies are criminals and have nothing to do with Islam.
The two foregoing paragraphs encapsulate a knowing and utterly destructive lie that is being foisted on Americans by their political leaders and the media. There is precisely no evidence to show we are at war with the Islamists because they intend to impose Sharia in the United States, intend to make my granddaughters wear burqas to grammar school, or yearn to re-establish prohibition. When the Islamists win in Iraq, Somalia, Jordan, Yemen, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere they will surely not install alcohol, gender equality, or a Western-style rule of law, but neither do they give a hoot about whether we indulge in North America in what they regard to one degree or another as the devil’s handiwork.
The Muslim enemy described by U.S. politicians and the media, then, is a deliberate lie, but a useful one to them in three senses. First, it presents a looming and monolithic enemy that is easily described, sure to appear predatory to Americans, and easy to motivate Americans to hate. Second, it portrays the causes of the current war as items that are non-negotiable, as in “My granddaughters will never go to school wearing burqas!” Third, it allows the politicians and media to hide the vital role Islam plays in the war by assuring Americans that the Muslims Americans they need to fear are limited in number and, as noted, have nothing to do with the Islamic religion. In fact, the Islamists have hijacked the faith and are no more than criminals. How the few criminals the politicians define as America’s enemies could possibly high-jack, redefine, and control the faith of 1.4 billion Muslims is never really explained.
The negative reaction of many ordinary Americans to the NYC mosque, then, is the product of the education about Islam they have received at the hands of extraordinarily well-educated presidents, politicians, and journalists. And, today, these elite teachers are now criticizing and often damning ordinary Americans for believing what presidents, politicians, and journalists have for 20 years told them is the truth. It is all a bit dizzying.
What is the answer? Well maybe we should try the truth:
1.) Most Muslims, in the United States and overseas, do not hate Americans because of their freedom, liberty, beer, and gender equality. We have yet to see an Islamist fighter blow himself up because Americans look forward to Miller Time or because there are women in America’s workplaces. That said, the West — at the bidding of its crazed Amazons who lust to kill all male Muslims opposed to womens’ rights — has killed many thousands of Muslims who believe their faith mandates that they defend the separation of the sexes.
2.) Most Muslims, in the United States and overseas, perceive U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world and its impact as aimed at undermining or destroying Islam, and as being dictated by Israel. This empirical reality is so obvious and quantifiable that even U.S. politicians and journalists cannot be unaware of it. Their failure to acknowledge it, therefore, must be attributed to their decision that they cannot possibly retain their posts or audiences if they told Americans two fundamental and irrefutable truths:
–(1) Our lack of energy self-sufficiency, and our longtime acceptance of this cowardly and demeaning status quo, makes the U.S. federal government — under both parties — the single largest supporter of tyranny in the contemporary world. Because Washington refuses to do anything constructive about energy policy, we are the main supporters and protectors of the fascist police states that rule and oppress Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the UAE, Algeria, and Egypt. (NB: Egypt gets billions in U.S. support not because it has oil but because Washington needs to bribe Mubarak to pretend he and his countrymen do not passionately and eternally hate Israel.) As can be imagined, this policy wins America few friends in the Muslim masses and makes our advocacy of freedom and democracy ring a bit hollow. And as to why the media and the politicians deliberately lie? One would suppose that while a publicity slogan akin to “Vote for or watch us because we make the world safe for tyranny!” would be truthful, it might not rally the nation’s support.
–(2) Our unquestioning and vastly expensive support for Israel makes us the enemy of the entire Muslim world, Sunni and Shia. The question to ask is not whether we should provide such support, but, rather, what do we get for providing it? The answer to the second and completely appropriate question is twofold: (a) We get absolutely nothing from our relationship with Israel that America could not easily live without; and (b) We get an endless war with 1.4 billion Muslims that will soon see fronts opening in the United States. The right follow-up question would be to ask: What we would get from letting Israel sink or swim on its own? Answer: (a) A reduced level but not an end to warfare with Islam, and (b) The well-deserved destruction and legal prosecution of the criminal gang of U.S.-citizen Israel supporters that corrupts the U.S. political system and buys either the silence or support of the U.S. media.
Energy dependence, pro-tyranny policies, and support for Israel — those are the three most basic answers to the question “Why are Muslims attacking us?” There are others: the U.S. presence on the Arabian Peninsula; the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Yemen; and Washington’s support for Russia in the North Caucasus and China’s Tibet-like, genocide-by-inundation-of-Han-Chinese in its Muslim Xinjiang province. But the core of Muslim motivation to attack America coalesces around the points sketched above.
Now, there is no reason to change U.S. policy simply because Muslims do not like it. If Americans decide current policies in the Muslim world are essential to U.S. security, then they must be kept. But to so decide, Americans first must be able debate the issue an a factual basis, and not on the basis of the insane “Muslims hate us because of our freedoms” mantra endless chanted by our politicians and the media. Let it be said precisely: Those Muslims who hate and attack the United States do so because of what the U.S. government intervenes to do in the Islamic world, and not because of how Americans think and live in North America.
Fortunately, this realization also underscores that fact that America’s problem with the Islamic world is eminently solvable in one of two ways; either we maintain the policy status quo — and prepare for an endless and massively bloody war with Islam at home and abroad — or we dump policies that involve us in other peoples’ religious wars and thereby redirect the violence to where it belongs, with Israelis and Muslims fighting and killing each other to their hatred-filled hearts are content.
Finally, the lies of the politicians and the media are susceptible to a quick but painful cure if U.S. Muslim leaders at long last step forward and tell the truth. U.S.-citizen Muslims know better than anyone else that Muslims do not hate America’s freedoms and liberties; if that was true, these men and women surely would not have come to America to raise their families and make their future.
U.S. Muslim leaders know that Osama bin Laden, his allies, and tens of millions of other Muslims are motivated to wage jihad by the impact of U.S. foreign policy in the Islamic world. They also know that Muslims who are fighting the United States believe — and rightly so in terms of theology — that they are resisting infidel invasions of Islamic lands and the infidel-supported maintenance or imposition of rule by tyrannical apostate regimes. Indeed, the main reason U.S. Muslim leaders are not as damning of bin Laden and his ilk as U.S. politicians and media want them to be is because they know that fully siding with Washington would be to support Arab tyrannies and Israel’s behavior and territorial expansion at the cost of their credibility with other U.S. Muslims and their brethren overseas.
Although small in number, U.S. Muslim leaders now have an opportunity to be responsible U.S. citizens by frankly squaring with their fellow citizens and defeating the lies of the politicians and the media, both of which are abetted, scripted, and largely paid for by U.S.-citizen Israel Firsters. Only U.S. Muslim leaders have the ability to speak the truth directly to their adopted country and to begin to end the fantasy that Islamists are attacking America because of its freedoms, liberties, and lifestyle. U.S. Muslim leaders must tell their fellow citizens that this is a much bigger and more dangerous war than has been described by their recent quartet of Ivy League presidents.
With the moral courage to speak frankly and then defy the vilification they will get from Neoconservatives and Israel-First-influenced websites, newspapers, magazines, and politicians, U.S. Muslim leaders can help Americans see that they are not fighting an insignificant number of unIslamic criminals, but rather are at war with growing numbers of Muslims who are inspired by U.S. interventionism and a legitimate interpretation of their faith. Such frankness would allow U.S. Muslim leaders to warn Americans that Washington’s interventionism is pushing the United States ever deeper into a religious war with much of the Islamic world. Their words would give all Americans the facts with which to force a debate with the lairs who flog the self-defeating “they hate us for our freedoms” doctrine.
And, rather poignantly, U.S. Muslim leaders who decide to speak with stark honesty on this issue will be serving themselves as parents, for they know best that an increasing number of their U.S.-born sons are becoming jihadis here at home and overseas because they hate U.S. foreign policy and not because of the liberties they and all Americans share.
My policy has been and will continue to be ... to be on friendly terms with, but independent of, all nations on earth. To share in the broils of none. To supply their wants, and be carriers for them all; being thoroughly convinced that it is our policy and interest to do so; and that nothing short of self-respect, and that justice which is essential to a national character, ought to involve us in war.
In the “Obama-vs-History” contest, Obama and America are sure losers
I started out to write a piece about the whole of President Obama’s predictable and deceitful speech last night about Iraq. On reflecting a bit more, however, I came to focus on the president’s phrase: “It is time to turn the page on Iraq,” a phrase which underscores how woefully ignorant Obama and his colleagues in both parties are about the power of history and the world that exists outside of their closed minds and Washington, D.C.
Obama can say what he wants, but he and our governing elite will find that history’s pages are not that easy to deal with. You can turn the page, blot the page, and tear out and shred the page, but history remains clear, vibrant, pertinent to all human affairs, and potentially fatal if ignored, suppressed, or forgotten. At best, you can run from history for a time, but, as Mr. Lincoln said, you cannot escape history. This is especially the case when the page-turning is unilateral and the others involved in the history you are fleeing have it graven in their minds and hearts.
The Iraq war will henceforth be seen as having set several historical trends in motion:
1.) The invasion and occupation of Iraq by a U.S.-led coalition will be remembered by Muslims as the perfect Koranic predicate for a defensive jihad: An infidel state invaded a Muslim nation without provocation and installed man-made, not God-made laws and government. As years pass, the U.S.-led invasion will be seen as the most important and durable legitimizing agent for the defensive jihad Osama bin Laden declared in 1996. Washington and London did for bin Laden what he could do not do for himself: They invaded Iraq and thereby made the jihad a worldwide phenomenon.
2.) The U.S. military lost the war in Iraq. It came home in defeat, suffering from a near-complete lack of credibility amongst its Islamic enemies, and in dire need to somehow defeat someone, at some time, on some battlefield. Because they authored the defeat, Mr. Obama, his party, and the Republicans are doing all they can to praise the military for being completely successful. But soldiers and Marines — except for most of their generals — are hard-headed. They know defeat and uselessly killed-and-crippled colleagues when they see them, and they saw both as Iraq steadily slipped toward a regionally destabilizing sectarian civil war as they marched out. Thus, the Islamists will perceive — and perception is reality — that they have defeated the second superpower after having beaten the USSR in Afghanistan. All told, the one thing more damaging to the United States than starting the Iraq war, was the Bush-Obama decision to deliberately lose it. This can only yield positive results for the Islamists in terms of morale, recruits, donations, and admiration across the Muslim world, and especially among young Muslim males in the United States and its three most important allies, the UK, Canada, and Australia.
3.) Washington destroyed the single most important U.S. ally against the forces led and inspired by Osama bin Laden: Saddam Hussein. So long as Saddam ruled Iraq, the Islamist mujahedin were stuck in South Asia and the Persian Gulf and they were not coming west in any great numbers. Yes, Saddam was murderous toward his own people and helped Palestinians kill Israelis, but neither of those activities had the slightest negative impact on U.S. security. Indeed, the cost of those activities was a small price to pay — and one that did not have to be paid by Americans — for keeping the jihadis locked in South Asia. (And, as was shown in 1991 and 2003, Saddam and his army could be easily destroyed at any time by U.S. forces, so there was no harm allowing him to serve as the cork in the neck of the jihadi bottle for as long as he kept performing that service.)
4.) By removing Saddam, U.S. and UK political leaders built a westward-bound jihadi highway from South Asia through Iraq: Bush and Blair roughed it out, and Obama, Brown, and Cameron paved it. To date, this roadway has given Sunni Salafi fighters a base in Iraq from which — for the first time — they can enter Turkey, the Levant (Jordan Syria, Lebanon, and Israel), and Saudi Arabia with only moderate difficulty. And in what is a delicious, nearly sublime irony, the Neoconservatives and Israel Firsters who forced the unnecessary invasion of Iraq to make Israel more secure have ended up ensuring Israel’s demise. Israel now faces a scenario in which battle-hardened Sunni Salafists are joining Islamist Palestinians to form an enemy that cannot be bribed, intimidated, and corrupted as was/is Fatah. Israel’s U.S.-supplied advanced-conventional and nuclear weapons are useless against such a face-to-face enemy, and Israeli attacks on Iran, Syria, or Lebanon would only strengthen the Salafi Sunnis. By starting the Iraq war, Israel’s U.S.-citizen “best friends” signed its death warrant.
5.) U.S. defeat in Iraq ensures — if any more assurance was needed — that the United States and NATO will lose in Afghanistan. How so? The Afghans know they defeated the Red Army and believe they are in the midst of a winning campaign against the U.S.-NATO coalition; the West, after all, has pledged to leave without winning. For the Taleban and its allies, this adds up to complete confidence in God’s promise of victory over Islam’s enemies if the believers keep fighting in His name. Having seen the Iraqis realize God’s promise by their efforts, the Afghans will not be outdone in making sure they notch the defeat of the second superpower into the stocks of their AK-47s.
These five points add up to a sixth: From here out, America’s war with militant Islamists will increase in cost, ferocity, and bloodiness, and will be fought at home as well as overseas. Under Presidents Bush and Obama, Washington has proven that it and most of its generals no longer know how to fight and win wars; that is, they have neither the manliness nor historical acuity to know that wars end once and for all only when enough of the enemy and his infrastructure, supporters, and families have been killed to convince those remaining that game is not worth playing. This fact is invaluable knowledge for Islamist enemies who are willing to pay any human or material price in a war meant to defeat the enemies of God.
And if you doubt more bloody-and-losing wars are coming because of our easy willingness to be beaten in Iraq and Afghanistan, think about the lures the Islamists are now dangling in front us in Yemen and Somalia. The U.S. Intelligence Community has said — wrongly I think — that al-Qaeda in Yemen is more dangerous to U.S. interests than its counterpart in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and yesterday the media reported that the Western- and UN-backed Somali regime is on the brink of losing Mogadishu to the pro-al-Qaeda group al-Shabbab. The Islamists are betting that Washington will eventually gulp down both lures, begin interventions in both places, and thereby add to the overwhelming U.S. debt, further debilitate an exhausted, undermanned, and little-feared military, and create more political dissension in the United States.
President Obama may have turned the page of history in the sheltered, unrealistic world in which he and his advisers think and reside, but for America’s Islamist enemies the page is still being written, and they will keep using the blood and taxes of non-elite Americans to write the story of what now increasingly looks like their eventual victory.