THE REAL THREAT LEVELS: BILL SIEGEL
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The Real Threat Levels
August 18, 2010 – Bill Siegel
The Ground Zero Mosque controversy has not raised our terror threat level one color. It affords us, however, an excellent opportunity to sort out the actual levels of threat we face from those who seek to destroy America as it is and transform it into an Islamic Sharia based territory.
Let’s bypass the common but unhelpful questions “Is Islam a religion of peace?†and “Where are the Moderate Muslims?†and “Isn’t the American Muslim assimilated into our culture and doesn’t he share our beliefs and values?†and agree that some number of Muslims are openly devoted to, quietly in conformity with, or poised to fall in line with those who seek to establish Sharia law and secure Islam globally- our Islamist Enemy. Its actual numbers would astonish most Americans.
This enemy operates on at least three different levels. The most familiar and easiest to comprehend is that of terrorism. While the U.N. has difficulty deciding on a definition of terrorism, for “level†purposes we all know it when we see it- violent acts geared to intimidate in support of the supposed rights of the Islamic community. This level covers the many killings, bombings, beheadings, and kidnappings we have seen worldwide for decades executed in the name of Islam, including by individuals, small groups, and well known entities such as Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah and other proxies for the Islamic Republic of Iran. While the Obama administration has made it politically incorrect to combine the words “Islam†and “terror,†few are fooled by this idiocy.
A more insidious level of threat labeled the “Civilizational Jihad (“CJâ€) in the Muslim Brotherhood documents that outline its agenda and strategies. This is the level upon which our Islamic Enemy seeks to use our Constitution to destroy our Constitution. It uses our courts to expand Islam’s scope and ability to assert itself, to intimidate and threaten any challenge to such expansion, and to establish a posture of “victimhood†from which to manipulate the good will of Americans. It infiltrates our public and private institutions. This is the level on which seemingly “moderate†organizations utilize the Islamic permission and commands to deceive our population in order to establish a foothold; utilizing Islam’s “religious†face to Trojan Horse its anti-American forces into our land.
This is the level upon which the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s largest Islamic organization, controls the expansion, ever aware that the violence on the terrorism level is fully counterproductive to its long term goal. They are on Islamic time; a clock that moves towards only one point- the time at which Islam rules throughout the entire world.
Islam is only a religion of peace in the sense that peace comes when this clock reaches that point. Andrew McCarthy’s The Grand Jihad and Robert Spencer’s Stealth Jihad, coupled with the work of Sylvain Besson and Patrick Poole, are excellent expositions of this level.
There is a third and under exposed level, that of the “International Institutional Jihad (“IIJâ€)†This is where Islamic goals are furthered under the auspices of the U.N. and other institutions established by agreement with and among Islamic nations. This is where the Organization of Islamic Conference, the 57 member state assembly, asserts Islamic goals as international principles in an effort to force them into non-Islamic lands as Bat Ye’or and others have described. This is where national constitutions and organizational charters merge to access the full power of nations to spread Sharia globally, step by step. While there are many intra-Islamic differences such as the Sunni-Shia divide which make some alliances difficult, this level seeks to overlook those conflicts in the interest of advancing the global goals of Islam that unite them all when beneficial. As Islam impresses itself more powerfully on the world stage, this level becomes better able to push through its agenda.
What makes this level analysis so critical is that so much is achieved through “level confusion.†President Obama has sought to reduce the conflict with our Islamic Enemy to the terrorism level, and even more so, to Al Qaeda alone. We have a sense of how to fight terrorism, through both police and military action. We have some sense of how to punish terrorism, again either through criminal or military court action or on the battlefield. For all the disputes concerning interrogation techniques and Guantanamo etc. we have some confidence that terrorism can be fought. By defining our threat as Al Qaeda, Obama, for political purposes, defines the problem by virtue of the solution he sees available. He endangers us all the more, however, by obfuscating the full picture of the other levels on which we are being assaulted. Unfortunately, the nation is so petrified of truly seeing the enemy in all its power that many buy directly into Obama’s level distortion
This level confusion prevents us from dealing with the CJ. That is, in assessing the Muslim Brotherhood organizations (CAIR, MSA, ISNA etc.), the inquiry has been into whether they “support†terrorism or engage in any violent acts upon civilians. While there are many such connections to be revealed, the threat on this level exists by virtue of their objectives, not their demonstrable connections to terrorist organizations.
This is where the Ground Zero Mosque issue sits. The condemnation of Imam Feisal Rauf is largely based on his alleged deception and clarity of purpose as an Islamic supremacist. Absent a terror or violence link, we are at a loss as to how to stop him. And this is precisely the problem- our Constitution provides no real mechanism to stop those who seek to use it to destroy it. Unfortunately, seeking to tie the CJ efforts to terrorism will not solve this Constitutional paradox. This is especially true in an era of progressive multicultural judicial activism.
Talk show host Joe Scarborough is a perfect example of one suffering from level confusion. He recently castigated Newt Gingrich for charging that Rauf is a “radical Islamist.†Scarborough, without hesitation, converted Gingrich’s comments into a charge that Rauf is a “terrorist.†Half an hour of ridiculous “conversation†followed premised on this error, intentional or not, attempting to substitute Gingrich as our real enemy. The key to the CJ is precisely that its actors are not terrorists; they view any violence as hazardous to their cause. In this case, Rauf even has fellow host Pat Buchanan convinced he is a peaceful Sufi. What would make Rauf a “radical†is his intentions, fully in line with the CJ; not any act of terror. Because Scarborough, like so many others, is completely ignorant of the threat level differences while parading himself as a critical thinker, he is particularly dangerous to our effort to sort out the threat levels. (Curiously, in the same show, fellow host Mika Brzezinski, criticizing Jon Stewart for making a joke about Obama she did not favor, said “I think that talk show hosts and comedians kinda need to get over themselves.â€)
Similarly, we are ill prepared to combat the IIJ. Having glorified globalization, some Americans feels hard pressed to counteract the growing power of international institutions in setting agendas, moral and legal standards, and methods of enforcement. Wilsonian principles appeared sanctified enough as long as we had sufficient control over the institutional apparatus- most importantly the ability to choose when or not to participate, to turn away when it is in our interests to do so. And, as former U.S. Ambassador John Bolton describes, the process of “norming†(whereby principles such as restrictions on free speech that would otherwise not be approved domestically are pressured to be imported through participation in treaties or through other international obligations) is becoming more pressing. As America loses power and as the Islamic presence asserts itself more aggressively, the IIJ becomes a formidable threat to force upon us much that is not in our interests.
Tracking the different threat levels is an important task as we learn to adapt to the enemy we face. An honest look reveals that we do not, as yet, have effective strategies for confronting each level. Until we have clarity and cease attempting to address, for instance, the CJ by framing it in terms of terrorism, we will only keep ourselves in the dark. The lesson of the Ground Zero Mosque is to force ourselves to look upon the CJ as its own beachhead and develop a defense on its own terms: a constitutionally acceptable resolution to the paradox “How do we give freedoms to those who seek to destroy freedoms?†If these levels had colors, the Mosque affair should certainly move us to red.
Bill Siegel lives in New York and is a Contributing Editor to FamilySecurityMatters.org.
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