by Clare M. Lopez
Western liberal democratic civilization is under assault by the forces of shariah Islam. The so-called “Arab Spring” that swept across the Middle East in 2011, while encompassing the hopes and dreams of millions who seek freedom from tyranny, unfortunately has been commandeered for the violent phase of the Islamic Awakening that began in the 20th century. The jihadist drivers of that Islamic movement seek the re-establishment of the caliphate and global imposition of Islamic law. They are determined and sophisticated, deftly deploying information warfare to co-opt and neutralize what little remains of Western defenses.
There will be no democratic transformation of the Arab Middle East until and unless the United States and all who treasure the principles of equality, individual liberty, pluralism, and tolerance as understood through exercise of human reason begin to champion those ideals and confront those who are willing to fight and kill and die for Islam not just on the kinetic battlefield but in the far more important War of Ideas. The war we fight is far along at this point: shariah is advancing not only across North Africa and the Middle East, but throughout the Western world as well.
Jihadi terror and violence on the physical battlefields of Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, and the streets of Jerusalem, London, and New York are important to the enemy but secondary to the ideological confrontation taking place inside Europe and the U.S. While jihadis with IEDs (Improvised Explosive Devices) and Kalashnikovs sap our will to fight by draining us of blood and treasure, front groups posing as the “moderate” alternative and led by the Muslim Brotherhood, boast openly that they are working at “eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their [our] hands and thehands of the believers so that Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.” Both the terrorists who grab so much of the public attention and the stealth warriors of groups like the Brotherhood seek the same two objectives: shariah and the caliphate. Shariah is Islamic law derived from the Qur’an and hadiths; it’s the basis for constitutions in Muslim countries around the world and is utterly antithetical to Western law and the U.S. Constitution in myriad respects. The caliphate is an Islamic empire. It is obligatory for all Muslims everywhere for all time to engage in warfare (jihad) to spread Islam as a “complete way of life” and to subjugate the entire world to its dictates. Our failure to understand these fundamental realities cripples our ability to mount an effective strategy to defeat this enemy. Distracted, as intended, by the bombings, kidnappings, and killings of the kinetic wars, and unwilling to acknowledge and name the enemy even as he describes himself, we are gradually succumbing to that subversion from within. In the end, the battlefield that matters, the one where we will lose our civilization if we don’t wake up is the Information Battle Space. Read the rest on:
No comments:
Post a Comment