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Radical Islam Must Be Fought on the Cultural as Well as the Military Front

Aug. 25 2017

Ayaan Hirsi Ali and the author who goes by the pen-name Ibn Warraq are apostate Muslims who have bravely written about the threat that jihadism poses to Western civilization, and have sharply criticized Western leaders for obfuscating this threat by adhering to “politically correct” taboos and pieties. Reviewing recent books by each of these authors, Fred Siegel and Sol Stern argue for the necessity of fighting a cultural and intellectual battle against radical Islam, and use the experience of the cold war as a model:

The international Communist movement was adept at advancing Soviet imperial interests through the use of front groups—student organizations, labor unions, artists’ associations—operating freely within the Western democracies. These “progressive” organizations peddled innocent-sounding slogans about the need for disarmament, world peace, and social justice, while covering up the fact that they had been penetrated by Communist fellow travelers and agents of influence and were actively abetting Soviet expansionism. [In similar fashion], Hirsi Ali unequivocally identifies seemingly innocent-sounding Muslim groups as agents of an Islamist agenda. . . .

[During the cold war], while the U.S. and its allies “contained” the Soviet military threat, they . . . vigorously pursued the anti-Communist struggle in the political, economic, and cultural spheres. . . . [T]he Truman administration created a program to mobilize pro-democracy civic groups in the U.S. and Europe to oppose the Communist propaganda machine. . . . [T]he CIA covertly funded some of these groups. . . . [T]here is little question that bolstering the pro-democracy groups, particularly in confronting the far more sinister and clandestine foreign operations carried out by the Comintern and KGB, paid off in the life-and-death struggle against Soviet totalitarianism.

In their latest works, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ibn Warraq have produced a call to action in the United States and the free world. . . . Now is the time for the U.S. and other Western democracies to recognize that combating Islamist terrorism by military means alone will not work, and that a full-scale cultural counterattack is needed to convince Westerners of the danger—and to convince Muslims in the West that Islamism is a dead end for their own communities as well as for the entire Muslim world.

Siegel and Stern also note Ibn Warraq’s insights into Islamic anti-Semitism:

[T]he Hamas covenant makes clear that Israel must be destroyed not merely because it is a “Jewish state” but also because of the enduring Islamic principle that any territory once controlled by Muslims must be returned to Islamic dominion. . . . Islamic anti-Semitism, [Ibn Warraq argues], is not a 20th-century doctrine given additional potency by the Nazis. It is deeply embedded in all of [Islam’s] sacred texts, including the Quran, the sunna, and the hadith. For American and Western policymakers, this textual connection is key to understanding the motivation of Hamas (also known as the Islamic Resistance Movement) and its close ally, the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Islamic holy texts are even relevant for understanding the sources of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. According to Ibn Warraq, it is in the life and works of the founding father of Palestinian nationalism, the Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Husseini, that one clearly sees the confluence of the original Islamic commandments and modern Arab and Palestinian hatred of Jews. . . . Ibn Warraq notes that the mufti not only succeeded in Islamicizing the Palestinian resistance to the Zionist project; he also was responsible for radical Islam’s survival in the 1950s and 1960s and its 1970s revival.

Read more at City Journal

More about: Anti-Semitism, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Cold War, Hamas, Politics & Current Affairs, Radical Islam, U.S. Foreign policy, War on Terror

The Summary: 10/7/20

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.

Read more at Mosaic