A TERRIFIC TWOFER FROM ANDREW McCARTHY…ON BRENNAN AND ON THE FLOTILLA
National Review Online
Andrew C. McCarthy
NR Contributing Editor
June 1, 2010 12:00 P.M.
http://article.nationalreview.com/435292/an-islam-of-their-very-own/andrew-c-mccarthy
An Islam of Their Very Own
Obama’s counterterrorism chief trivializes jihad.
Well, at least he had it half right. For John Brennan, President Obama’s al-Quds lovin’ counterterrorism guru, that’s a significant improvement.
Last week, Brennan interrupted his search for the “moderate elements†of Hezbollah, and his finger-wagging at Americans for their “ignorant feelings†about Muslim-man-caused disasters, to offer some signature insights about Islam at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a pleasantly surprising start, he conceded that the United States has an “enemy,†which he further admitted was neither “terrorismâ€â€”a “tacticâ€â€”nor “terror†—“a state of mind.â€
So far so good. For a guy who figures “20 percent isn’t that bad†a recidivism rate for released mass murderers, this was pretty good stuff.
Then he got to jihad.
Brennan admonished that we must not “describe our enemy as ‘jihadists.’†Why not? “Because jihad is a holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam.†Right again. There is no gainsaying that jihad is deemed to be a divine injunction in Islam. If one regards all forms of Islam as “legitimate,†then jihad, too, must be legitimate. Yet “legitimate†is a slippery concept. It could mean that something is good. Or it could just mean that something is authentic — something that it really exists, for good or ill.
Islam falls into the latter category. It exists. In many of its iterations — not just al-Qaeda’s ideology but Islamist ideology, which is quite mainstream — Islam means the West existential harm. This is why we are supportive of reformist Muslims, however pessimistic some of us may be about their prospects. The point, though, is that Islam is not going away. It is part of the hand we are dealt, like it or not. We don’t need to trash-talk it gratuitously, but neither should we pretend that it is an asset on our security ledger. It’s not.
Alas, the Hope administration doesn’t see it that way. For Brennan, as for Obama, Islam is immovably in the first category: “legitimate†as in “good†— end of discussion. To sculpt this alternative reality, two things are required. First, we must ignore Islam’s many troublesome elements — e.g., its supremacism, inequality, intolerance, denial of freedom of conscience, endorsement of violence, etc. Second, to the extent that the resulting atrocities can’t be ignored, we must pretend that what ails the Islamic world is our fault, not Islam’s.
Thus we get the priceless Brennan on jihad. According our counterterrorism czar (or is it now counter-tactic czar?), the “holy struggle†is wholly anodyne. Jihad, he insists, merely “mean[s] to purify oneself or one’s community.†Therefore, there can be “nothing holy or legitimate or Islamic about murdering innocent men, women, and children.†If innocent men, women, and children are being killed, don’t blame jihad. There must be some other explanation: Israel, cartoons, Gitmo, South Park, teddy bears named Mohammed, dismay over the health-care bill — anything but jihad.
In his never-to-be-missed Saturday column, Mark Steyn observes the fictional scenes imprinted on euro currency, a perfect emblem for the pie-in-the-sky vision of a united Europe. It’s as if Hope could make Change if you just pretended hard enough: “If you invent a currency for a united Europe,†Mark writes of the EU fantasists, “a united Europe is sure to follow.†So, too, do Brennan, Obama, and the rest set about dreaming up an Islam of their very own. They are far from alone in this. For years, the project has consumed progressive solons in America and Europe — from Pres. George W. Bush’s “religion of peace†sermon, delivered while thousands of limbs were being removed from the rubble of the World Trade Center, to British Home Secretary Jacqui Smith’s Brennanesque insistence that terrorism had to be “un-Islamic activity†simply because it was terrorism.
Like Brennan, the Right Honorable Ms. Smith occupied a national-security position calling for clear-eyed realism, for counseling the government to deal with the world as it is, not as we wish it were. Instead, we get Judy Garland singing “Somewhere over the Rainbow,†except Garland at least knew she was dreaming.
While our top officials imagine an Islam that isn’t, jihad is something the rest of us needn’t imagine, because it is all too real. And it is simple. Jihad is, always and everywhere, the mission to implement, spread, or defend sharia, the Islamic legal code. It is not exclusively violent; an army doesn’t need to be violent if its enemies are willing to give ground. But jihad only “means to purify oneself or one’s community†in a very narrow sense. It is not the syrupy quest to become a better person but the command to become a better Muslim; it is not the smiley-face mission to “purify†one’s community of crime but the command to cleanse one’s community of non-Islamic influences.
The inextricable bond between jihad and sharia is also easily explained. In Muslim doctrine, sharia is deemed the necessary precondition for Islamicizing a society. Islam’s designs are hegemonic: Even in its less threatening iterations, it is taken as a given that believers must call all of humanity to the faith. What separates the true moderates from the faux moderates and the terrorists are the lengths to which one is willing to go in carrying out that injunction. That it is an injunction, however, is not open to debate.
Our political leaders can continue to trivialize jihad as if it were some benign struggle to brush after every meal. They can continue to ignore the core tenets that make sharia antithetical to a free, self-determining society. But they can’t do that and do the only job we need them to do: protect our lives and our liberties.
— Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.
NRO — The Corner
Tuesday, June 01, 2010
The Grand Jihad and the “Humanitarian” Flotilla [Andy McCarthy]
The main points of my new book, The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America, are (a) that the West, including Israel, is under attack by Islamism, a “civilizational” movement (that’s how it describes itself) that is much broader and more sophisticated than Islamist terrorism; and (b) that this movement collaborates energetically with the modern hard Left because, for all their differences, Islamists and Leftists are in harmony on several important matters, including who their enemy is: us — Western civilization, American constitutional republicanism, and the culture of individual liberty. It was my hope that the book would accurately describe the challenge. I was not banking on there so quickly appearing incidents that prove my point.
Steve Emerson’s Investigative Project on Terrorism reports today on the “humanitarian” flotilla that so clearly provoked the deadly confrontation with Israelis who are trying to protect themselves from Iran-backed Hamas — the Muslim Brotherhood’s Palestinian “resistance” faction that exists for no other purpose than to destroy Israel. As Steve points out, the pertinent background goes back to Leftists led by George Galloway:
It’s worth remembering why the aid was being transported by sea in the first place. A convoy led by then-British MP George Galloway ended in violence at the Egyptian-Gaza border in early January after authorities delayed their entry into Gaza.
An Egyptian police officer was shot and killed by Hamas gunmen. Egypt deported Galloway, made it clear he was unwelcome there again, and told the convoy it could no longer enter through its crossing. Galloway’s partner in that convoy was the Turkish-based International Humanitarian Relief Foundation (IHH), which helped lead the flotilla.
IHH was a key player in the Free Gaza Movement flotilla. Israeli officials say IHH is tied to Hamas, and even to al Qaeda, and it was banned in Israel in 2008 for being “part of Hamas’s fundraising network.” Court papers in the U.S. prosecution of Abdurahman Alamoudi also tie it to terrorist activity, citing French intelligence expert Jean Louis-Bruguiere’s assessment that IHH played “[a]n important role” in the Millennium bomb plot.
IHH also is part of the Union of Good, a collection of charities run by Muslim Brotherhood spiritual leader Yusuf al-Qaradawi. The union was designated by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2008 as a terrorist entity due to its fund-raising activities on behalf of Hamas and Hamas-controlled organizations in the West Bank and Gaza.
I write at length in the book about Qaradawi, who is probably the most influential Sunni cleric in the world and whose recent accomplishments include sparking the rioting over the Danish cartoons, giving the Islamic jurisprudential seal of approval to “martyrdom” suicide terrorist attacks by Muslim women, and similarly endorsing terrorist attacks against American troops in Iraq.
Steve continues:
During the past year, the Investigative Project on Terrorism has chronicled the Hamas-ties of relief convoy participants, led by Galloway. In March 2009, he defiantly handed a bag of cash directly to a Hamas minister and announced that:
“By Allah, we carried a lot of cash here. You thought we were all fat. We are not fat. This is money that we have around our waists … We are giving you now 100 vehicles and all of the contents. And we make no apology for what I am about to say: We are giving them to the elected government of Palestine; to the Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh.”
After the January convoy, a Palestinian media outlet reported that Hamas political and militant leaders were fighting for control of $1 million delivered in the Viva Palestina/IHH convoy. And last week, before the confrontation on the Mediterranean, Palestinian political scientist Talal Okal told the Christian Science Monitor that Hamas controls anything that comes in from the relief efforts. Hamas activists were even seen driving ambulances the convoy left behind:
“They want to show that they dominate everything, and that everything in Gaza passes under their eyes. So, if these boats arrive, Hamas will receive it [the aid] and distribute it how they want, to their supporters and according to their policies.”
With that in mind, Israel’s concern that the flotilla might carry goods Hamas could use in weapons and explosives isn’t so far-fetched.
No, not far-fetched in the slightest. In fact, that’s the plan. And it’s been the plan since Hamas came into existence in 1987 — including when, as I mentioned yesterday, Hamas was run from Virginia for several years during the Intifada.
The rest of Steve’s report is here.
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