RUTHFULLY YOURS

President Trump’s much-anticipated speech at the Islamic Summit in Riyadh didn’t begin auspiciously. Trump started with: “I want to thank King Salman for his extraordinary words” — yet among Salman’s “extraordinary words” were the risible claims that “Islam was and will always be the religion of mercy, tolerance, and coexistence,” and that “in its prosperous times, Islam provided the best examples of coexistence and harmony between countries and individuals.”

However, Trump’s speech did include some elements of a realistic approach to the jihad threat, ideas that have been glaringly lacking from U.S. foreign policy for nearly sixteen years now.

Trump sounded conciliatory notes, saying that he came to “deliver a message of friendship and hope,” and “that is why I chose to make my first foreign visit a trip to the heart of the Muslim world, to the nation that serves as custodian of the two holiest sites in the Islamic Faith.” Accordingly, he reminded the assembled Muslim leaders of his inaugural address, in which he “promised that America will not seek to impose our way of life on others.”

Trump no doubt thought that Muslim leaders would welcome this promise in light of the ill-fated Bush/Obama attempts to establish Western-style republics in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the disastrous effects of “regime change” in Libya and elsewhere. And that is doubtless true: a respite from Obama’s reckless and self-defeating interventionism is most welcome.

But it should also be remembered that America never tried in any serious way to impose its way of life upon Iraq or Afghanistan. In both countries, American forces oversaw the implementation of constitutions that enshrined Sharia as the highest law of the land.

America did not stand strongly for the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, and equality of rights for women and non-Muslims — all of which Sharia denies. If America had offered refuge to those who wanted to live in freedom, who knows how many millions of Muslims would have chosen liberty over Sharia. But we will never know.

Trump also spoke proudly of “a $110 billion Saudi-funded defense purchase,” which “will help the Saudi military to take a greater role in security operations.” The clear target here is Iran. But later in the speech, he included among the Iranian mullahs’ transgressions their “vowing the destruction of Israel” — and surely, many among his Sunni audience thought: “Well, that’s the one thing Shia Iran gets right.”

It is all too easy to imagine a scenario in which these Saudi arms are used against Israel.

President Trump also announced “a new Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology — located right here, in this central part of the Islamic World.” That its name is similar to Obama’s euphemistic “Countering Violent Extremism” program, so named to avoid any hint that Islam might have something to do with terrorism, was not a good sign.

Nor was Trump’s statement that “this groundbreaking new center represents a clear declaration that Muslim-majority countries must take the lead in combatting radicalization.” The world has been calling upon, and waiting, for Muslim-majority countries to take the lead in combatting radicalization since 9/11, and long before that.

So where is the global Muslim movement to reform Islam and counter the jihadists’ interpretation of its core texts? Egypt’s al-Sisi, who was present at Trump’s speech, several years ago called upon the Islamic scholars of al-Azhar, the most prestigious and influential institution in Sunni Islam, to work toward reforming Islam to curb its violent elements. Nothing has yet been done.

How long will we wait? How much longer will non-Muslim and reformist Muslim leaders issue these calls before realizing nothing is going to be done?

Trump did make several positive departures from the Obama legacy, however. He spoke of “defeating terrorism and the ideology that drives it,” and later put teeth on his call for defeating the jihad ideology — in a way Barack Obama never did — by calling for “honestly confronting the crisis of Islamist extremism and the Islamist terror groups it inspires.”

An actual honest confrontation of the crisis of Islamist extremism would require an honest and thorough examination of the motivating ideology of jihad terrorists. President George W. Bush hamstrung this effort when he declared, shortly after 9/11, that Islam was a “religion of peace.” Barack Obama made it altogether impossible when he heeded the demands of Muslim, Leftist, and other allied groups in 2011 by ordering the removal of all mentions of Islam and jihad from counterterror training.

Trump, to his credit, assumed that the terrorists were Muslim, calling upon the Muslim leaders to “drive them out of your places of worship.”

This was a far cry from Hillary Clinton’s 2015 statement: “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” And this was worlds away from Obama’s claims: “For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace,” and “Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity.” CONTINUE AT SITE

While the “land for peace” formula — pressuring Israel to hand over land to those it has defeated for the promise of peace to come — pleased Arab governments and career diplomats at the State Department, it was a disaster on the ground. Each new concession was seen by Palestinian leaders as signaling an Israeli weakness ripe for exploitation, stoking their fantasies of ultimate victory and thus prolonging the misery of the Palestinian people and everyone involved.

History shows that wars end definitively only when one side has no more hope at all of success, as happened in Germany and Japan after World War II. The Palestinians still have not given up their fantasy of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

The best way for Washington to advance a peace process is by convincing the Palestinian leaders of Israel’s insurmountable strength. “After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict,” explains Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes, the driving intellectual force behind the newly-created Israel Victory Congressional Caucus.

In Saudi Arabia on Sunday, President Trump declared unswerving American commitment to help Riyadh in “confronting the crisis of Islamic extremism and the Islamist and Islamic terror of all kinds.” A new coalition of American lawmakers believes he should make an equally important commitment to Israel when he lands there today.

Official U.S. policy on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute has long been centered on a “grievance-based approach” to conflict resolution and counterterrorism. Addressing the stated grievances of Palestinian extremists, the reasoning goes, reduces their motivations for fighting and enables their leaders and those of Arab states to make peace. Thus the perennial goal of American diplomacy has been to pressure or coax the democratic State of Israel into making concessions to the authoritarian PLO-turned-Palestinian Authority (PA) in hopes that they will placate the Palestinian masses (most of whom, including 1.6 million in Hamas-ruled Gaza, do not live in disputed territory).

While the “land for peace” formula — pressuring Israel to hand over land to those it has defeated for the promise of peace to come — pleased Arab governments and career diplomats at the State Department, it was a disaster on the ground. Each new concession was seen by Palestinian leaders as signaling an Israeli weakness ripe for exploitation, stoking their fantasies of ultimate victory and thus prolonging the misery of the Palestinian people and everyone involved.

History shows that wars end definitively only when one side has no more hope at all of success, as happened in Germany and Japan after World War II.

Of course, unconditional surrenders of the kind that took place on the deck of the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay have been rare since the creation of the UN shortly thereafter. Wars often linger on for years, even decades, as winning sides are dissuaded by international pressure from bringing conflicts to an end.

An old-school exception to this rule came in 2009, when Sri Lanka broke free of its decades-old cycle of conflict with the separatist Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelan (LTTE). Eschewing yet another round of negotiation, followed by impasse, terrorist strikes, and government retaliation, the government launched a decisive, all-out war to defeat the LTTE and fully reclaim the northern part of the island nation.

Since then, Sri Lanka has been effectively terrorism-free. Tamil nationalists still have their grievances, of course. But with Sri Lanka having risen over the past eight years to become “South Asia’s most prosperous country” and an oasis of calm considered to be “at the forefront of the hot destinations queue” for South African tourists, few feel aggrieved enough to pick up a gun.

Israel’s situation is not so very different than that of Sri Lanka. The Palestinians still have not given up their fantasy of a Palestinian state “from the river to the sea.”

The best way for Washington to advance a peace process is by convincing the Palestinian leaders of Israel’s insurmountable strength. “After the leadership recognizes this reality, the Palestinian population at large will follow, as will eventually other Arab and Muslim states, leading to a resolution of the conflict,” explains Middle East Forum President Daniel Pipes, the driving intellectual force behind the newly-created Israel Victory Congressional Caucus.

If President Trump really wants to succeed where others have failed in resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict, he should demonstrate that the U.S. supports its Israeli ally unreservedly. He might start, for example, by announcing from Israel this afternoon that the United States is moving its embassy to the country’s capital of Jerusalem.

On June 4, 2009, Barack Obama went to Cairo and delivered a speech, addressed to the Muslim world, that was full of praise for Islam and apologies on behalf of the West. In the address, entitled “A New Beginning” (“I’ve come here to Cairo,” he explained, “to seek a new beginning between the United States and Muslims around the world”), he called the university at which he was speaking (which, if it were anywhere in the West, would probably not be able to gain accreditation) “a beacon of Islamic learning”; he blamed tensions between the West and Islam largely on Western “colonialism”; he said “Salaam aleikum” and kept referring to “the Holy Koran”; he asserted, in a ridiculous example of hyperbole, that “Islam has always been part of America’s story”; he served up a big wallop of revised history, giving Islam unmerited praise for centuries-old accomplishments in science, architecture, music, art, and medicine and even holding it up as “a model of tolerance and equality” (at one point, he seemed to imply that in some ways women’s rights are more advanced in the Muslim world than in the U.S.); and, with utter predictability, he quoted the the “Holy Koran” out of context, plucking out that favorite verse of all Western apologists that supposedly teaches “that if one kills an innocent, it is as if it he has killed all of mankind.”

And of course, as always, he talked about himself: a descendant of “generations of Muslims” in Kenya; a man who, in his Indonesian boyhood, daily heard the beautiful Islamic call to prayer; a president who had “known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed.” As someone with such intimate ties to the Religion of Peace, asserted Obama, he saw it as part of his job to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam.” Yes, he spoke about the need to fight terror, but he was quick to maintain that “Islam is not part of the problem” but rather “an important part of promoting peace.” He defended U.S. ties to Israel and recognized the “reality of the Holocaust,” but quickly pivoted to the “suffering” of Palestinians, the “pain of dislocation” they experienced, and the “daily humiliations” of the “occupation” – preaching, in short, to Israel from a Cairo pulpit. He quoted from the Talmud, but was careful not to call it holy. He implied that the histories of the Jews and Palestinians were equally tragic. And he preached to America too, suggesting that when Americans criticize the “choice” of women – and girls (!) – to wear hijab they were disguising their “hostility” to Islam “behind the pretense of liberalism.” Similarly, instead of thundering against the evil of 9/11, Obama apologized for the supposed excesses of some Americans’ responses to that atrocity, saying with nauseating chagrin that “in some cases it led us to acts contrary to our principles and our ideals.” Oh, and he vowed to close Guantánamo “by early next year.”