RUTHFULLY YOURS

Linda Sarsour bores me. She is the radical flavor-of-the-month. But she is a numbingly familiar type to longtime observers of sharia supremacists in the West: the forked tongue, the flag-draped anti-Americanism, the close partnership with the hard left, and so on. Eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Grand Jihad about this breed of Muslim Brotherhood-mold operative. Sarsour fits the pathology to a tee … but once you’re on to them, these people are a dime a dozen. Yawn.

She got my attention, though, with her call for “jihad” in executing the Islamist-Leftist “resistance” to Donald Trump. Naturally, this has led to a brouhaha about whether she was really calling for violence or using “jihad” in the revisionist non-violent sense of “an internal struggle for personal betterment.”

I have no doubt that Lee Smith (in Tablet) is correct: Sarsour is a provocateur who was trying to call attention to herself while laying the groundwork to play the victim when she was inevitably criticized. What I have found amusing, however, are the two premises urged by her apologists: (a) we should take the jihad revisionism seriously; and (b) she must have meant “non-violent” jihad because she introduced the term by referring to a hadith in which Mohammed, Islam’s prophet, explains that, rather than violence, “the best form of jihad” is to speak “a word of truth” before a tyrant.

On the first point, jihad is essentially a forcible struggle. As Lee Smith points out, the evidence of sense should tell us all we need to know about it: just look at what is happening “on the killing fields of the Middle East.” Still, we do not need to make a deduction because the meaning of the word is clear, and because non-violent connotations of jihad are understood to be in support of the same mission as forcible jihad: the implementation of sharia, Islam’s societal framework and legal code.

Derivatives of “jihad” are used numerous times in the Koran in the militaristic sense. As I explained in Willful Blindness, my memoir about prosecuting jihadist terrorists in the mid-nineties, Bernard Lewis, the West’s pre-eminent historian of Islam, observes that “some modern Muslim theologians” have attempted to interpret the term as “striving … in a spiritual and moral sense.” Yet, he counters, “The overwhelming majority of early authorities,… citing relevant passages in the Qur’an and in the tradition, discuss jihad in military terms.”

Furthermore, Thomas Patrick Hughes’s renowned A Dictionary of Islam (1895) defines jihad as follows:

A religious war with those who are unbelievers in the mission of Muhammad. It is an incumbent religious duty, established in the Qur’an and in the Traditions as a divine institution, and enjoined specially for the purpose of advancing Islam and of repelling evil from Muslims.

Note here that there is nothing contradictory in the concepts of (a) waging war to establish the reign of Islamic law, and (b) striving in other ways to advance Islam and repel evil from Muslims – which, Islam teaches, is also done by establishing sharia. Thus, the premise that the non-violent jihad negates violent jihad has always been nonsense. The varieties of jihad work together toward the same end. To take a prominent example, many American Islamists who claim to reject terrorist jihad nonetheless support Hamas; they rationalize this contradiction by claiming that Hamas’s jihad is “resistance” not “terrorism” – got it?

In any event, we should note that Sarsour gave her jihad speech at the annual convention of the Islamic Society of North America. ISNA was established by the Muslim Brotherhood to be a progression from the Muslim Students Association, the Brotherhood’s foundational building block in the West. In the Justice Department’s terrorism financing prosecution, the Holy Land Foundation case, ISNA was an unindicted co-conspirator because the evidence demonstrated that it participated in the movement of funds to Hamas.

ISNA has a close collaborative relationship with the Brotherhood’s American think tank, the International Institute of Islamic Thought. IIIT provided an endorsement to Reliance of the Traveller, the English translation of an ancient sharia manual. The manual (sec. o9.0) relates this duality of jihad as a fundamentally military concept, in which forcible and non-forcible means are joined in the mission of implementing sharia:

Jihad means to war against non-Muslims, and is etymologically derived from the word mujahada, signifying warfare to establish the religion. And it is the lesser jihad. As for the greater jihad, it is the spiritual warfare against the lower self ( nafs), which is why the Prophet (Allah bless him and give him peace) said as he was returning from jihad, “We have returned from the lesser jihad to the greater jihad.”

On Friday, I spoke on Capitol Hill at the Federalist Society’s symposium “The Constitutional War Powers of the Executive and Legislative Branches.” This weekend’s column is adapted from those remarks.

As we gather here on Capitol Hill today, the United States armed forces are engaged in combat operations in several global hot spots. In Syria, we have not only conducted attacks against the regime without any congressional authorization; we are now occupying territory as well.

Ostensibly, we are there to fight not the regime or its Russian and Iranian allies but the Islamic State jihadist organization (also known as ISIS). But to the extent that is a legally “authorized” conflict, it is against an enemy that arguably did not exist when the relevant authorizations for the use of military force (AUMF) were debated and enacted about 15 years ago.

Now, you could say, as we have been saying, that ISIS is merely a breakaway faction of al-Qaeda — it began as the terror network’s Iraqi franchise. Consequently, it is covered under the existing AUMF. This, however, ignores the inconvenience that al-Qaeda, along with its allied Islamist factions, is also fighting ISIS and the Assad regime in Syria. Essentially, the enemy that we started out fighting after it attacked America in 2001, and that still regards the United States as its mortal enemy, is nevertheless fighting in Syria alongside the “rebel” elements that we support.

In that sense, the situation mirrors our misadventure in Libya. That was another recent conflict in which a president, without congressional authorization, launched an aggressive war against a foreign sovereign that not only posed no threat to the United States but was actually regarded as a key counterterrorism ally — precisely because, for all its many flaws, the Qaddafi regime was providing us with intelligence about militants in places like Benghazi and Derna, the Libyan support hubs for the jihad against the United States in Iraq and Afghanistan.

That is to say, in Libya, we initiated an unnecessary war without any debate among the people’s representatives, much less any congressional authorization, and the result was a catastrophe: the undoing of a counterterrorism ally in a dangerous neighborhood, the empowerment of our jihadist enemies, a failed state, and an administration reduced to absurd rationalizations about how its aerial bombing raids on regime targets were somehow not acts of war.

It is tempting on this record to draw the conclusion that modern practice has superseded the Constitution’s separation of war powers and division of war-making authorities between the commander-in-chief and the Congress. But when we get down to brass tacks, this simply is not true.

It is not true for a reason that is often forgotten in our debates about war powers, which are dominated by lawyers. They tend to take place under the auspices of legal academic institutions or organizations like our host today, my good friends and colleagues of the Federalist Society.

The reason is this: We are a body politic, not a legal community — at least, not in the main. For any free society to flourish, it must of course be undergirded by the rule of law. But the Constitution is basically a political document, not a legal one. It is the assignment and division of political authority among actors who compete and collude based on the attendant circumstances.

This is critical because war is a political exercise — “politics by other means,” as Carl von Clausewitz memorably put it. There are legal elements to it, but it is basically a political endeavor — the use of government power, in this instance force, against a foreign enemy in order to break the enemy’s will. Though you wouldn’t know it to listen to most war-powers discussions, there is a limit to how much war can be “judicialized” or subjected to antecedent legal rules and procedures.

A state of war, after all, is the antithesis of our domestic peacetime footing. It is the proud boast of our legal system that we would rather see the guilty go free than have a single person wrongly convicted. Thus, we presume against the government. The accused is presumed to be innocent and has no burden to prove anything. The government must meet weighty standards of proof to conduct a search, obtain a wiretap, make an arrest, or secure a conviction. Our bottom line, as former Bush-41 attorney general William Barr has observed, is that we would rather see the government lose — i.e., justice is not the conviction of the guilty; it is a government forced to meet its burden under strict due-process rules.

War is entirely different. In war, we don’t want the government to lose, and we cannot give the enemy the presumption of innocence. In war, it is in the national interest that the government prevail. Yes, our troops are the world’s best trained and most disciplined, and we demand of them adherence to the laws and customs of civilized warfare. But the highest national interest is to defeat the enemy and to achieve the objective so vital that it was worth going to war over.

David Gerlenter writing in the Wall Street Journal says something self-evidently true. The Left seems to have won every single culture battle fought.

Although the right reads the left, the left rarely reads the right. Why should it, when the left owns American culture? Nearly every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation. The left wrapped up the culture war two generations ago. Throughout my own adult lifetime, the right has never made one significant move against the liberal culture machine.

The late Andrew Breitbart noticed the same thing. Observing that “politics is downstream from culture” he argued the Left has made us the villains of our own stories.

Our lives — indeed, our very species — has storytelling wound into our DNA. … Popular culture is delivered to us in the form of story via books, TV, film, music, video games, and new media. …

Thus we come to politics … the vast majority of those with the power of content creation are Liberals. … Liberals control story. …What is some of that messaging? Think about movies and TV. Corporations are evil — using unwitting poor Africans for pharmaceutical testing (Constant Gardener) or dumping toxic chemicals into nature (Erin Brockovich, A Civil Action) or responsible for the end of mankind (Rise of the Planet of the Apes). American soldiers are bloodthirsty lawbreaking maniacs (Any military film). The CIA conducts illegal, secret operations that have nothing to do with protecting America. Radical Muslim terrorists are never villains. Trial lawyers are crusading do-gooders. David Letterman and Saturday Night Live ridicule the Right 95% of the time. Jon Stewart pretends to be centrist, but in fact jumps all over the Right far more often than the Left.

Liberal political candidates are the embodiments of those Liberal tenets. The goal is to associate them in voter minds via the vehicle of popular culture.

Even before Breitbart’s warning there was Orwell who understood that the Left’s ultimate ability was to uproot the past and plant their chosen seed for the future. His famous dictum “he who controls the past controls the future. He who controls the present controls the past” is an unsurpassed indictment of groupthink totalitarianism. There seemed no doubt they would succeed. Within its bubble the Left’s control of culture is so absolute they can watch 1984 without realizing it’s about them.

Yet the real mystery — one which even Orwell himself did not anticipate — is why, despite having won every culture battle, the Left has lost the war. Look around you. Every single country which adopted socialism as an economic system went bankrupt. The Soviet Union collapsed. Now the Western Gramscian project is self-immolating in the fires of its own absurdity. The current political crisis is the collective shudder of mortality passing through “every university, newspaper, TV network, Hollywood studio, publisher, education school and museum in the nation”. The left may have “wrapped up the culture war two generations ago” but it is rotting inside the wrapping.

The search is on for the regicide.

The only thing one can be sure of is that the Republican Party didn’t cause it; nor did their tame and feeble publications. In fact not even publications like Breitbart, valiant though their efforts were, can claim credit. Trump couldn’t have done it either, since the proud tower that Gerlenter describes would have been impervious to the mere touch of the orange-hued real estate mogul without some other factor in play.

Yet most of us know who did it, though we hesitate to name the obvious suspect. The Left even in its downfall has stilled our tongues. The word comes to the edge of our lips before we choke it back, fearful even now of the ridicule and abuse we will get should we blurt it. That word is God. God killed the Left. Of course one could legitimately use some other term. “Reality”, “consequences”, the “laws of nature”, “economics”, even “truth” will do. Through some process of increasing entropy, failed memory management or unanticipated side effects the status quo — the one dominated by the Left — is collapsing. CONTINUE AT SITE