The Great War on Militant Islam You may have heard it called "The War on Terror." Let's stop kidding ourselves
McCARTHY, ANDREW C.
The Great War on Militant Islam You may have heard it called "The War on Terror." Let's stop kidding ourselves. BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY Allahu akb IT HAS BECOME A DRUMBEAT, a soundtrack...
...Thus would Pearl's grisly murder be cast as turnabout for the mere imprisonment of Muslim warriors, rather than as further evidence of militant Islam's inhumanity and its blood-soaked designs on world hegemony...
...When Danny Pearl sought out the afflatus of militancy in the person of a charismatic Islamic cleric, he was thus treading the epicenter of this age's fundamental, and most irresponsibly ignored, quake...
...Insofar as it does, moreover, we are quick to stress¡ªinstinctively, defensively and, indeed, apologetically¡ªthat our sole interest lies in the legal transgression itself, not in the animating belief system...
...Concededly, there have been some meaningful tactical adjustments...
...It had been no different in spring 1993, for a group of mostly Sudanese jihadists huddled in a dank New York City garage, constructing the bombs they hoped would destroy the United Nations complex and the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels...
...This is jihad...
...Mohammed, according to knowledgeable statements reportedly made to Pakistani authorities) and he was savagely decapitated, his severed head held aloft as a trophy by his killers¡ªAllahu akbar...
...Nor just any kind of terror, but a terror sprung from a very particular and poisonous fount¡ªmilitant Islam, the central challenge of our age...
...As the militants have learned, the complacent Western press is guaranteed to follow the script¡ªto report any subsequent atrocity, in morally equivalent terms, as "retaliation" for the cited American action, as opposed to what it manifestly is...
...To conduct such an examination was plainly not to declare oneself an enemy of Islam itself¡ªa libel that is a commonplace among the enemy, for obvious reasons, and the faint of heart, who cleave to the "War on Terror" rhetoric because, for them, the fear of being slandered as bigots trumps the national security imperative of concretely identifying that which we must defeat...
...Jihad'...means jihad with the sword, with the cannon, with the grenades, and with the missile...
...Many Muslims¡ªno doubt most¡ªdisagree,but few indeed will condemn with the authority and gravitas so urgently needed if the militants are to be isolated and marginalized...
...In the U.S., belief is sacrosanct, and religious exercise is regarded as beyond the watchful eye of regulation so long as it does not transgress civil laws of general application...
...Appeals, however, have been interminably delayed, with the Pakistani government seemingly in no hurry either to have sentences executed or to bring the actual murderers to justice...
...the failed attempt on the eve of the Millennium to destroy Los Angeles International Airport...
...Allahu akbar...
...the 1998 obliteration of American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, killing over 250...
...therefore, Islamic doctrine itself requires none of our attention...
...the source of authorityto make law...
...and the West, finally, to come to grips with the potent force that was actively seeking their demise...
...The war is on militant Islam...
...For maximum propaganda purposes, Pearl was further made to criticize American policies, particularly the detention in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, of terrorist combatants seized from the battlefield in Afghanistan after the 9/11 attacks...
...Tradition, though, stub THE GREAT WAR ON MILITANT ISLAM bornly complicates their effort: jihad, classically, is a military concept...
...Andrew C. McCarthy is a former chief assistant U.S...
...What they are taught to hate are infidels¡ªJews, Christians, and Americans...
...delusionally comforts itself to limn...
...As the Jerusalem Post reported in a post-mortem profile, though Jewish he was not particularly observant, and, far from pre-disposed to hostility, he befriended Muslims and walked easily¡ªif too unwarily¡ªin the Islamic world...
...This is as it must be...
...As a result, when we put our blinders on, we are effectively averting our glance from many matters that are not, strictly speaking, issues of mere religious doctrine: the legal status of women...
...He was probing what was then the most notorious near-miss in militant Islam's defiant answer to America's post-9/11 campaign: the attempt by a Briton named Richard C. Reid to bring down an American Airlines flight as it sailed over the Atlantic...
...All the handiwork of zealots, jihad warriors, some suicidal and all galvanized by militant Islam...
...Like the totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century that strove for cruel hegemony, militant Islam must be identified, acknowledged, and defeated utterly...
...He was lured to Karachi on the false promise of an interview by a militant named Omar Ahmed Saeed Sheikh...
...Because, though the stormy skies now thunder "Allahu akbarr into a second decade, the West, led by the United States, remains mulishly frozen in the politesse of the pre-9/11 world...
...purportedly charitable giving that in fact subsidizes much¡ªincluding terror¡ªthat has little to do with what we think of as "charity...
...Danny Pearl, however, had far more insight...
...Air Force servicemen...
...Plus, Sheikh was free to terrorize again...
...Pearl was far more interested in why Richard Reid would do such a thing...
...While questions about his ordeal abound, his savage murder parallels eerily with that of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl two years earlier...
...Islam, however, is not just a religion...
...In the long haul, it may prove suicidal...
...It was under Gilani's tutelage that Reid had become radicalized¡ªhad become inspired to incinerate a fuselage full of men, women, and children who meant him no harm, whom he did not even know...
...And now, once again, militant Islam has symbolically, and barbarously, targeted individuals...
...It led him to Islamabad, in search of Sheikh Mubarak Shah Gilani, a Pakistani cleric who led an organization called al-Fuqra, one of dozens of such groups proselytizing Islamic militancy in the U.S., Europe, and elsewhere...
...Offhandedly, we categorize it as a "religion" and place it in the blinders bucket with other faiths...
...It is a force, all the more, because of another little understood feature of this largely unexamined creed...
...There, he fulfilled a widely followed model, becoming a leader in Jaish- e-Mohammed (the "Army of Mohammed"), among countless militant groups that orbit together¡ªplotting ad hoc terror conspiracies against perceived "enemies of Islam"¡ªwithin the global network known as al Qaeda...
...government and the Western media instantly turned Reid into "the Shoe Bomber," rather than "the jihadist...
...BY ANDREW C. McCARTHY Allahu akb IT HAS BECOME A DRUMBEAT, a soundtrack of atrocity...
...All the world, it holds, must either adopt Islam or submit to the authority of the Muslim state¡ªnot in the afterlife but, urgently, in the here and now...
...As if to underscore that reality, it is now on shocking display again in the inhuman hacking of Nicholas Berg, a 26-year-old American Jew whose decapitated body was found on May 8 strewn on the outskirts of Baghdad...
...and of episodic and unended conflict with Christendom that did not see Muslim armies finally turned away from the gates of Western Europe until the late 15th century...
...With such a high-value target in militant clutche s¡ªa Jewish American journalist whose captivity had spawned intense international media coverage¡ªthe owner of the compound, Saud Memon, is said to have arrived on January 31 or February 1 with three Arabic-speaking men, one of whom is believed to have been Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, al Qaeda's top operations commander, generally credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks...
...and its killings, far from condemnation, provoke tepid admiration if not outright adulation in a further, considerable cross-section of the Muslim world...
...And so he did...
...Nearly three years later, the aftershocks of 9/11 yet quake in the mounting body-counts of Djerba, Bali, Casablanca, Istanbul, Baghdad, and now Madrid...
...Whatever the viability of such a claim, it serves only to obscure the incontestable truth glaring defiantly before us: the root evil is militant Islam...
...More than two years later, Danny Pearl's unspeakable murder has not been solved...
...T HE APOGEE OF THIS ONSLAUGHT was the cataclysm that became September 11, 2001, in which over 3,000 Americans were slaughtered by 19 suicide hijackers who plunged aircraft into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and whose attempt to destroy yetanother symbolic target was foiled by heroic passengers who forced a crash landing in Pennsylvania...
...ebration of divine bounty and mercy...
...And it is a history that will not easily fade away because it is relentlessly invigorated...
...and the 2000 suicide strike on the USS Cole as it docked in Aden, Yemen, killing 17 American sailors...
...For the most part, maddeningly, we don't seem to want to know what Danny Pearl appears to have died trying to understand...
...Though militants serially commit what must objectively be seen as atrocities, they are not roundly condemned and marginalized in the Muslim world because there is no dynamic consensus that they are wrong...
...Thus do we weave willful ignorance into policy...
...But those are aberrational and instantly condemned by the rest of the faithful...
...God is great...
...We allow ourselves to see only the symptom, terror...
...Understandably and admirably, moderate Muslims, seeking an Islam whose tenets are more congenial to modern sensibilities, assiduously bowdlerize this obligation: re-interpreting jihad as a striving to become a better person, the struggle to rid neighborhoods of menaces like drug-trafficking, and the like...
...F INALLY CAME ANOTHER standard and monstrous agitprop: the capital show trial...
...The bombing, however, served as militant Islam's declaration of war against America, and the jihadists' intention had been for the towers to collapse, one into the next, killing thousands upon thousands...
...It goes, however, far beyond this ambitious premise...
...Unbowed, he saw himself as a successful jihad warrior, his sentence a minor setback in militant Islam's inevitable march to hegemony...
...Far less is known about his captivity than about Danny Pearl's, but the parallels are striking...
...With literally thousands dead and the airwaves braying promises of greater carnage to come, we remain deaf to the chant¡ªAllahu akbar, Allahu akbar!¡ªeven as it overwhelms the glottal agony of Nicholas Berg, decapitated on film in early May...
...Allahu akbar, the leitmotif stringing together a 1995 plot to blow U.S...
...attorney who led the 1995 terrorism prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman et aL in connection with the first World Trade Center bombing...
...Military power, at least for now, has supplanted the judicial system as the point of America's responsive spear...
...Danny Pearl was on to something as his research took him to Islamabad, Pakistan, in January 2002...
...The message to the militants, as always, was clear: terrorism works...
...Declining to confront that fact is not merely self-defeating...
...At least 16 militantswere implicated, but only four¡ªSheikh and three other kidnappers¡ªwere tried and convicted, with Sheikh sentenced to death and the others to life imprisonment...
...Militant Islam murders repeatedly, unabashedly, and globally...
...Why...
...It has brutalized us for a dozen years...
...That, however, was largely an illusion...
...Implicitly, he saw that to examine the existence and rationale of Islamic militancy was essential to understanding the threat facing not only the West but the millions of Muslim moderates struggling to construct an Islam that assimilates peacefully and tolerantly in the modern world...
...The official version of history is written thus: Nineteen suicide terrorists hijacked a great religion, a religion of peace...
...It aspires to be much more: a self-contained, comprehensive religious, political, and social system...
...Militant Islam, the same centrifugal force that spurs suicide bombers to sacrifice all just to kill a relative few, had plainly galvanized Salameh, not merely in the execution of a heinous crime but in his chiding disdain for the 32 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY/AUGUST 2004 ANDREW C. McCARTHY power that presumed to impose a crushing penalty...
...Moreover, that faction, militant Islam, is plainly far more robust and extensive than the scant lunatic fringe the U.S...
...the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S...
...The journalist was forced to admit his "crimes" with the camera rolling: "I am a Jew," he acknowledged, adding that his parents, too, were Jews...
...In small compass, the failure to learn the lessons of Pearl has led to the travesty of Berg, just as, writ large, nescience about the real war¡ªthe one with militant Islam¡ªmay lead to disarray and defeat in the so-called "War on Terror...
...His cautious reporting over the years bespoke a sophisticated awareness of the tension between hardliners and moderates, and of that tension's salience for the future of Islam...
...The wild-eyed chant¡ªAllahu akbar!¡ªshould have seared into the American consciousness in 1994, when the first Islamic militants to crave destruction of New York City's Twin Towers were sentenced...
...Instead, ¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡¡their antithesis, the relentless coda of terror...
...During a videotaped exe cution, Berg was made to identify himself...
...Presciently, they were confident that the mainstream American media would report the atrocity as retaliation rather than as innate evil...
...From this hospitable soil sprouts militant Islam which, as the estimable scholar Daniel Pipes has observed, is not so much a religion as a "radical utopian movement...
...It should therefore come as no surprise that jihad is often rendered as holy war, although it more literally means to strive or struggle (jihad fi sabil Allah¡ªstriving for the sake of God...
...For a short time, this seemed an epoch-shattering event: changing everything, forcing the U.S...
...J IHAD IS NOT, AS MANY WISH TO BELIEVE and as our government obstinately suggests, a modern corruption...
...Any urge to examine doctrine is thus dismissed, either as ultra vires or quaint...
...The Prophet Mohammed was himself a warrior, and Islam's early history is one of virtually constant military engagements and conquests¡ªto the point of lasting domination in what is now entrenched as the Islamic world (Mesopotamia, the Middle East, much of Eastern Europe and Africa, etc...
...Sheikh, in fact, personally became a trusted confederate of the network's leader, Osama bin Laden, and thus enjoyed access to its highest echelons...
...Thus, it is readily portrayed and taught as a duty to do violence...
...the rights of non-Muslims...
...Taking a lit match to explosive-laden footwear was self-evidently "terrorism...
...Why is this so, and what does it mean for us...
...airliners out of the sky over the Pacific, during a test-run for which a Japanese tourist was callously killed and the rest of the crowded flight nearly taken down...
...Furthermore, unlike other transcendent creeds for which the earthly realm is a mere preparation phase for life in the next, Islam is extensively fixed on the events of this world in all their comparative minutia...
...Heresy, as the preeminent Bernard Lewis has written, is a Christian idea that has "little or no relevance to the history of Islam, which has no synods, churches, or councils to define orthodoxy, and therefore none to define and condemn departures from orthodoxy?' As a result, an influential cleric, such as Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman¡ªthe inspiration behind the 1993 World Trade Center bombing who holds a doctorate from al Azhar University in Egypt, the world's premier center of Islamic learning¡ªis free to pronounce, virtually without challenge, that "[t]here is no such thing as commerce, industry, and science in jihad...
...With characteristically myopic focus on terror tactics, and assiduous avoidance of terror causes, the U.S...
...For all the hulla baloo over perfect con viction records, the Justice Department's terror trials from 1993 through mid-2001 managed to halt fewer than three dozen jihadists¡ªduring an interval when the inter national militant ranks swelled into the tens of thousands, and more...
...THE GREAT WAR ON MILITANT ISLAM Our war, we insist, is not with Islam...
...the legitimacy of rule by consent of the governed (as opposed to dictate of the divine¡ªas interpreted, naturally, by influential Muslims...
...Nevertheless, the blind-eye persists, driven by a doctrinaire reticence so desperate to be loved, so anxious to be perceived tolerant, it resists any inspection bearing the faintest whiff of judgment...
...First Daniel Pearl, now Nicholas Berg¡ªJewish Americans slain, two years apart, while reaching out peacefully to the Muslim world...
...At high noon on February 26, 1993, they had detonated a powerful urea nitrate bomb as well over 50,000 innocents packed the World Trade Center complex...
...T HIS Is a phenomenon unique to Islam in the modern world...
...Sheikh, like Richard Reid and like so many others, was educated and radicalized in the slumbering West¡ªa Briton born of Pakistani immigrants in London...
...Miraculously, only six (including a pregnant woman) were killed...
...Until we come to grips with, and act on, that truth, we sentence ourselves to hearing that refrain over and over again...
...Like Islam, the militant strain has a universalist vision...
...For years, countless millions of dollars, mostly from the Saudi Wahabist strongholds of the oil-rich Gulf, have sluiced through mosques, madrassas, and Islamic social centers worldwide, promoting brutality and inculcating jihad as a forcible duty in children, who thus learn to hate before they know how to reason...
...ICK BERG, OF COURSE, was only ¡¡¡¡¡¡the most recent victim _._ beheaded for no better reasons than that he was an American and a Jew...
...The war is not on "terror...
...By militant Islam...
...Adding to this tawdry state of affairs, the renowned French philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy, after spending a year investigating the case, published a book last year, Who Killed Daniel Pearl?, theorizing that the Pakistani Intelligence Service¡ªlong suspected of ties to militant Islam¡ªwas complicit in the homicide (and that Sheikh was in fact one of its covert agents...
...Even if this were a sound approach¡ªand it is anything but¡ªIslam should be viewed as exceptional...
...Not a celar...
...Islamic mil itants then read a scathing indictment of President Bush and American foreign policy¡ªpurporting to jus tify the barbarism they were about to visit on Berg by the American abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison...
...What the militants have wrought is not a fringe...
...We wall off church from state, a doctrine much of Europe has transmogrified into such official hostility to the ecclesiastical that religion's dwindling vestiges have nearly been driven from the public square, and thus from the public consciousness...
...So it was throughout relentless cannonades of the 1990s...
...The victim having served all his captors' execrable purposes, he was dismembered and interred in a shallow grave outside Karachi...
...Yes, they too proselytize, and they have their occasional religiously motivated murderers...
...The ostensible reason for not scrutinizing Islam is our traditional deference to religious freedom...
...On the Planet Earth today, only Islam sports an unbridled faction that systematically inculcates hatred, system ANDREW C. McCARTHY atically dehumanizes non-adherents, and systematically kills massively and indiscriminately...
...He was, first and foremost, a journalist driven by curiosity about truth and culture, not hype...
...Still, we avert our eyes¡ªand our ears...
...Sentence, then, was not so much pronounced as executed: Daniel Pearl's throat was slashed (by K.S...
...Allahu akbar, their commander exhorted, concurrently annealing his charges and dehumanizing the countless thousands they were bent on slaughtering¡ªand would have, had not an informer infiltrated their circle, recording their exertions and frustrating their designs...
...the manner for assessing credibility in court proceedings (so dependent on whether witnesses happen to be Muslims or non-Muslims...
...And of course, there is jihad...
...Berg was then beheaded, with his minute of chilling, tor tured screams answered by his assassins' hypnotic antiphony: Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar...
...But we have met the enemy and it, surely, is militant Islam...
...Yet, in less than three years since 9/11, even as the militants' atrocities have continued world wide and even as our military fights on in Afghanistan and Iraq, resolve has waned and focus on the true enemy¡ªto the limited extent it was ever there¡ªhas evaporated...
...Sheikh, working in conjunction with at least two other Pakistani groups, Lashkar-eJhangvi and Harkat-ul-Mujahideen-Al Alami, devised a compartmented plan in which one cell was responsible for Danny Pearl's kidnapping¡ªwhich was accomplished when the victim was snatched near a Karachi restaurant on January 22, 2002, having been lured there on the false promise of an inter ANDREW C. McCARTHY view with the cleric, Gilani¡ªand another cell was responsible for his detention at a compound a short distance away...
...It is this: When influential imams exhort Muslims to violent jihad, they are¡ªfar from hijacking a peaceful religion¡ªspeaking with history on their side...
...Sheikh was an experienced kidnapper, having been jailed for five years by the Indian government¡ªa major target of militant Islam's Pakistani gangs¡ªfor detaining American and British tourists...
...Danny Pearl never got a chance to meet with Sheik Ali Gilani, to draw out and perhaps challenge his views...
...and the duty to take up arms...
...He traveled to the badlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, trained on the militants' proving grounds, became further enmeshed in the early 1990s by the Bosnian Muslims' jihad against the Serbs, and relocated again to Pakistan...
...It is an ascendant, intimidating, carefully nurtured cultural force...
...Indeed, armed conflict is at the core of the militant Islamic Weltanschauung, which divides the world into two spheres: Dar al Islam, the domain of the Muslims, and Dar al Harb, the realm of war...
...Other religions familiar to the West¡ªbranches of Christianity and Judaism in particular¡ªregard themselves, like Islam regards itself, as a final, divinely revealed truth...
...the propriety of charging interest in financial transactions...
...It is, instead, a central tenet of Islam, an enduring pillar of the system in its seventh century origins...
...India, however, falling into an all too familiar appeasement pattern, made the historic error of negotiating with Islamic terror...
...As a district judge meted out 240-year jail terms to the bombers, one, Palestinian-born Mohammed Salameh, rabidly pounded the table, shouting Allahu akbar, Allahu akbar...
...In 1999, Sheikh and other militants were traded by India in exchange for the freedom of 155 hostages hijacked to Kanadahar in an India Airlines plane...
...Our willful blinders eschew even recognition, let alone treatment, of the disease...
...Terrorist acts are not sensibly labeled as heterodoxy...
...Pearl's efforts to escape during the ensuing week were thwarted¡ªhe was physically abused and chained to a car engine...
Vol. 37 • July 2004 • No. 6
