Jihad Never Sleeps Nor does our willful blindness. by Bruce Thornton
https://www.frontpagemag.com/jihad-never-sleeps/
The age of modern jihadism began in 1928 with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924. Eighty years later Osama bin Laden called that event a “catastrophe” and a “humiliation and disgrace,” for it marked the culmination of the infidel West’s domination of Islam, the religion of some of the greatest warriors in history.
The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to restore Islam to the global power and dominance of Christendom it had wielded for a millennium; and to return Islam to its divine destiny, which founder Hasan al-Bana wrote is “to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws [Sharia] on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
Most Westerners didn’t notice or think about the loss of the Caliphate and the epochal shift in the geopolitical order, especially since their secularist culture had relentlessly been diminishing the role of Christianity in our culture and civilization. By the Thirties, Hilaire Belloc could write, “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.”
Despite the gruesome bloody reminders on 9/11 that jihadism and Islam were still a threat, many of our credentialed cognitive elites dismissed criticism of Islam’s doctrines, especially jihad, as Islamophobic slanders and bigotry. Moreover, although the outcome of Hamas’ butchery on Oct. 7 last year seems to be a failure, it is itself an object lesson in the continuing danger of jihadist violence. The collapse of Bashar al Assad’s regime in Syria, mostly at the hands of jihadist forces, should be a warning that jihad never sleeps, and we should not blind ourselves to its nature as documented in Islam’s doctrines and historical practice.
Another signal that Islam was reviving, one louder, clearer, and globally consequential than the Muslim Brotherhood, was the Iranian Revolution begun in 1978. While Western foreign policy mavens spoke of “national self-determination,” “anticolonialism,” “democracy,” and other tenets of the “rules-based international order,” the catalyst of the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini, explicitly cast the revolution as a jihad waged to institute an Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and to fight against the Western infidels who had usurped Islam’s rightful place as what the Koran calls “the best of nations.”
In November of 1979, for example, Khomeini preached, “The Muslims must rise up in this struggle, which is more a struggle between unbelievers and Islam than one between Iran and America: between all unbelievers and the Muslims. The Muslims must rise up and triumph in the struggle” –– the very definition of “jihad.”
Yet our foreign policy establishment, with a few exceptions, dismissed Khomeini as a “beard from the fringe,” a religious crank like Jim Jones or David Koresh. Typical of secularist bias was the comments of Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, who predicted that, as David Farber summarized in his book Taken Hostage, “experts and secularists of various stripes would replace Islamic fundamentalists in key decision-making posts.” Similarly, an Assistant Secretary of State said that “after a transition period common interests could provide a basis for future cooperation”––a failure of imagination and the ignorance of Islamic doctrine we saw reprised in Obama’s 2019 “nuclear deal.”
The loss of our critical Cold War ally Iran has turned out to be a geopolitical disaster for the West, one still resonating today. Iran has fomented throughout the region jihadist violence with its proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, Iraq, and Syria. They and especially their Iranian sponsor have the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands, most grievously the 241 U.S. military personnel murdered in Beirut in 1983. The mullahs have taken a giant step towards fulfilling Khomeini’s promise that “We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.”
Worse, appeasement of that violence–– whether through a political failure of nerve, a cognitive failure of imagination, or economic interests––emboldened the theocratic regime, further encouraging the Mullahs, who have been checked only by Israel’s stout and devastating resistance. But unless the West destroys Iran’s nuclear weapons program and infrastructure, the next time might have a different ending.
Israel’s success, however, has also led to a new danger growing in Syria, which is now ruled by another jihadist outfit that many Westerners are misunderstanding or whitewashing–– Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS, as the insurgents controlling Damascus are called. Uzay Bulut of the Gatestone Institute reports, “In 2022, the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom . . . stated, ‘The al-Qaeda offshoot Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) continues to brutalize and displace religious minority communities in the northwestern region of Idlib, and the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has increased its presence in eastern Syria, waging almost daily attacks and destabilizing the region for religious minorities. Opposition groups leverage their Turkish financing and military support to wage campaigns of religious and ethnic cleansing in Afrin.’”
Moreover, according to Matthew Lewis of the Los Angeles Times, “social media is replete with images of jihadist rebels in Syria describing their victory there as a first, not last, step. In one, a group of rebels appear and proclaim: ‘We entered the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus chanting Allah Akbar and with the help of Allah we will also enter the Al-Aqsa Mosque and we will also enter the Prophet Muhammad’s Mosque and the Kaaba in Mecca,’ referring to sites in Jerusalem and Saudi Arabia.”
These reports show that the jihadists in Syria think that what we call a “revolution” against a tyrant that violates his people’s rights, is in reality the continuation of the jihad that Hassan al-Banna called for, and Khomeini achieved in Iran.
What this all means is that we can no longer afford to reprise yet again the blunders, secularist disdain for religion, feckless foreign policy idealism, and Islamophilic delusions that we’ve indulged for nearly half a century. Consider, for example, the plans for the Afghan people codified in the 2002 Bonn Conference, convened to establish the goals for rebuilding Afghanistan: “To freely determine their own political future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism and social justice.”
The dangerous begged question is that the core principles of Islam and Sharia can actually be reconciled with secular Western political ideals such as the separation of church and state, or the equality of the sexes. The Islamic [N.B.] Republic of Iran has demonstrated for over forty years that such a reconciliation is not possible for devout Muslims.
Hence, we cannot, as Andrew McCarthy writes in National Review, “persist in willful blindness to what remains the most basic, incorrigible fact about the region: the predominance of sharia supremacism. Fundamentalist Islam, which has developed for over a millennium, is not merely a religious creed; it is a comprehensive legal and societal framework that is self-consciously hostile to Western liberalism and, thus, to the principles of the American republic.”
Nor, McCarthy suggests, should we delude ourselves into thinking that the leader of HTS, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani––for now the dominant leader in Syria and most likely to take control of the state–– will be a “moderate” and a “nationalist,” and create a normal state that will join the “rules-based international order.”
On the contrary, the violence against religious minorities and the Kurds will worsen. “According to the human rights organization Open Doors,” Gatestone’s Butut points out, “‘there are around 579,000 Christians in Syria. Many of them fled cities and villages seized by jihadists, to take refuge in the formerly government-controlled Wadi al-Nasara (‘Valley of Christians’). With the collapse of the Assad regime, the Valley has fallen to jihadists, and the lives of those Christians are in danger.’”
The West has for decades indulged such democracy promotion pipe-dreams about Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, yet an Islamic liberal democracy has still not come to pass. That’s because most Muslims have managed to keep their faith alive and intact, and avoided the secularism, metaphysical materialism, programmatic skepticism, relativism, and hedonism that characterize the West. As Belloc wrote, “In Islam, there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe.”
Many apologists for traditional Islam as it has existed for millennia dishonor that faith by bowdlerizing its tenets and reducing them to our own secularist political principles and assumptions. But as Belloc reminds us, Islam “is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.”
There are 1.5 billion Muslims in the world, and not all of them share what historian Efraim Karsh calls the jihadist’s “imperial dream of world domination.” But it “has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many Muslims.” And as history continues to remind us, jihad never sleeps.
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