Do we understand our enemy?

We are still at war. With the upcoming inauguration and the lessening of hostile action in Iraq, we seem to have forgotten that. We seem to think that if we only a) kill/capture Bin Laden b) free the oppressed muslims from tyranny c) kill all of the "radical" muslims that we will have peace.

We don't seem to realize that, like any faithful, the "typical" muslim takes the words and tenets of their religion to heart. Their worldview does not seem strange or dangerous to themselves. While the majority of muslims don't take up arms, they also won't try to stop "militants" from attacking non-muslims. Islam is both a religion and a political system. While western Christians may apply the teachings of Christ to their daily lives, their religion does not have the rule of law.
Islam IS THE LAW. If one breaks the tenets of the Quran, that person is penalized by the society.

We will not be able to "change the minds" of the majority of the 1 billion or so muslims in the world. We can only hope that they do not wish to take up arms.

The alternative is horrible.


WorldNetDaily - Benjamin Shapiro gets it. Tell me why he's wrong.

Enough with the pseudonyms. Western civilization isn't at war with terrorism any more than it is at war with grenades.

Enough with the psychoanalysis. They don't hate us because of Israel.

Enough with the niceties. We don't lose our souls when we treat our enemies as enemies.

Enough with the words. Talking with Iran without wielding the threat of force, either economic or military, won't help.

Enough with the faux allies. We don't gain anything by pretending that Saudi Arabia and Pakistan are true allies.

Enough with the myths. Not everyone on earth is crying out for freedom.

Enough with the lies. Stop telling us that Islam is a religion of peace. If it is, prove it through action.

Enough. After the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, the plane downed in Pennsylvania, the endless suicide bombings, shootings and rocket attacks in Israel, the Bali bombings, the synagogue bombing in Tunisia, the LAX shootings, the Kenyan hotel bombing, the Casablanca attacks, the Turkey synagogue attacks, the Madrid bombings, the London bombings, and the repeated attacks in India culminating in the Mumbai massacres – among literally thousands of others – it's about time that the West got the point: We're in a war. Our enemies are determined. They will not quit just because we offer them Big Macs, Christina Aguilera CDs, or even the freedom to vote. They will not quit just because we ensure that they have Qurans in their Guantanamo cells, or because we offer to ban "The Satanic Verses" (as India did). They will only quit when they are dead. It is our job to make them so, and to eliminate every obstacle to their destruction.

So enough. No more empty talk. No more idle promises. No more happy ignorance, half measures, or appeasement-minded platitudes. The time for hard-nosed, uncompromising action hasn't merely come – it's been overdue by seven years. The voice of our brothers' blood cries out from the ground.


And the writer at Mere Rhetoric have a very interesting take on the Isreal-Palestine conflict:

And of course - as left-leaning peace process diplomats now admit openly - it's actually Palestinian political instability that suffocates the peace process. Abbas can't make peace and Hamas won't make peace. But somehow that turns out to be Israel's fault. Because if it wasn't then Israeli concessions wouldn't translate into a peace deal. And then it wouldn't be possible to diplomatically stabilize the Middle East. And then where would the State Department be? So Rice is angling to have UN call for a new Arab state. Because why not?

And because I've now gotten two obnoxious emails on this question in two days: the problem with misguided US foreign policy toward Israel isn't just that it screws a major US ally. It's that diplomats who focus obsessively on Israel do it as a result of willful denial about political Islam. If you believe that political Islam is a global threat driven by a pathological ideology expressed through asymmetric and urban warfare - then Israel is incidental. But if you really need terrorism to be an misguided response to underlying political problems - which is to say, if you're the State Department - then Israel becomes the central issue.


And in a more immediate example: Why does Khalid Sheik Mohammed want to be executed? Who cares? by Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online.

We don’t understand our enemies any better than we did when they first strode out on that great American stage, the federal courtroom, 15 years ago.

What we don’t yet seem to grasp, even after all that’s gone on these last two decades, is that our politics and our law are of interest only to us. They matter nothing to jihadists. It’s a fatuous exercise in self-absorption to suppose otherwise — and a foolish one since it demonstrates for all to see that we still don’t get it. The delusion that we can change our enemies by changing ourselves is what makes the useful idiots useful.

KSM doesn’t see Bush or Obama. He sees an American president. He sees a symbol — the embodiment of a people and culture that are his mortal enemy.

Republican or Democrat, conservative or liberal, cowboy or solon — these distinctions matter to us. KSM couldn’t care less.

For radical Islam, it’s not about us; it’s about them. KSM isn’t about us. He’s about KSM. There is no system we can devise, nothing we can do or not do, no one we can elect or anoint, that will alter how we are perceived by the millions who share the jihadist worldview, if not jihadist methods.

We don't seem to understand our enemy. From SaneWorks.

What explains the fact that Sunni Wahhabi Salafi followers of Saudi Arabia (9/11) and Deobandis in Pakistan (Mumbai) embrace the same essential doctrine of Jihad against the infidels? Or, the fact that also the Shia Muslims of Iran and of course the Shia Hizbullah in Lebanon adhere to this shared theo-political-military doctrine? And, to these we can add the Jihadis of Morocco, Tunisia, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Chechen, the Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Gaza, London, Europe and the United States.

The narrative we most often hear is that somehow--usually due to poverty, oppression, colonialism, or imperialism--this eclectic group of mujahideen have somehow taken a noble and peaceable religion and applied incredibly the same "toxic ideology" to a love-peace-mercy theology and that it has metastasized into global jihad. The problem with this "toxicity" narrative is the rather stubborn fact that such disparate groups sharing no common national interests, racial affinities, cultural ties, and language have each come down on all fours on the almost identical legal doctrine of Jihad and they all rely explicitly on traditional, authoritative, and pedigreed Shariah in their respective understandings of this law of Jihad.