Andy McCarthy, on how political correctness has taken over both major parties, to the detriment of our security.
The Obama administration and the Republican establishment would have us live a lie — a lie that endangers our liberties and our security. The lie is this: There is a difference between mainstream Islamic ideology and what they call “violent extremism.”
The vogue term “violent extremism” is chosen very deliberately. To be sure, we’ve always bent over backwards to be politically correct. Until Obama came to power, we used to use terms like “violent jihadism” or “Islamic extremism” in order to make sure everyone knew that we were not condemning all of Islam, that we were distinguishing Muslim terrorists from other Muslims. (In a more sensible time, we did not say “German Nazis” — we said “Germans” or “Nazis” and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.) But now, the Obama administration and the Republican establishment prefer to say “violent extremism” because this term has no hint of Islam.
According to the Obama Left and the Republican establishment (personified today by the likes of Sen. John McCain and many, but by no means all, former high-ranking officials from the Bush 43 administration), the only Muslims we need to be concerned about are terrorists, and there is nothing relevant in the fact that they happen to be Muslims. “Violent extremists” are not motivated by a coherent ideology, much less by scriptures from “one of the world’s great religions.” Instead, they are seized by a psychological disorder that inexplicably makes them prone to mass-murder attacks.
The fall-out from this line of thinking is that we must conclude mainstream Islam, everywhere on earth including the Middle East, has nothing to do with violence, and therefore, it is “moderate,” and even “admirable.” Sure, it may be advocating the adoption of something called “sharia,” but we needn’t worry about that. After all, we have Western scholars of Islamic studies (mostly working in university departments created by lavish donations from Saudi royals) who will tell you that sharia is amorphous and evolving — such that nobody really knows exactly what it is, anyway. Consequently, nothing to see here, move along. You are to accept as an article of faith that there is no reason to believe people steeped in mainstream Islam will resist real democracy or that they will remain hostile to the United States. And, yeah, sure they are opposed to Israel, but that is just a “political dispute” about “territory”; it has nothing to do with ideology or mainstream Islam per se.
This reminds me of Jonah’s thesis in his new book of how full of it leftists are when they claim to have no ideology. No, they’re just “pragmatists,” who just want to do “what works.” If we continue to deny that sharia is the goal of our enemies, then we will not fight it, and we will lose. We have to recognize that the “Arab spring” is giving way to a new form of Nazism in the Middle East, except one of Arab supremacy rather than Aryan, but just as totalitarian.
In a more sensible time, we did not say “German Nazis” — we said “Germans” or “Nazis” and put the burden on non-Nazi Germans, rather than on ourselves, to separate themselves from the aggressors.
There is a slight but meaningful difference there.
In the Second World War, we were at war with the Nation of Germany and its government; thus “Germans” referred to that nation and its nationals – and even the non-Nazis within it, by virtue of their having to practically support that government, like it or not. And the government and State of Germany were a Nazi government, thus the interchangeability.
There is no “state” of Islam, no government that compels Muslims to one notional identity that we are at war with.
Thus the distinction is far, far more meaningful than a notional one between “Germans-as-an-ethnic-group” and “Germans-as-German-nationals-in-Germany” and “Nazis”.
There is no “state” of Islam
I say there is and it is bigger than any one country. Violence is not the only danger, nor the only means used by this ‘state of Islam’ to progress toward their clearly identified goal of universal world sovereignty under sharia law.
The fact that this state can not be clearly defined on a map is a very useful quality of this state for achieving their ends. Make no mistake, that state exists within our borders.
I say there is and it is bigger than any one country.
Yeah, its called the Caliphate, and it’s what Muslims believe.
I think AM’s choice of calling the names Jackson and Kennedy is the perfect example of how far the (D) Party has moved left. Those men understood the word ‘enemy’. ‘Enemy’ to the (D)’s is best defined now as, ‘anyone who disagrees with me’!
Much of the (R) side isn’t any better at knowing the ‘enemy’. I guess that’s what happens when the the entire political set up in our country moves WAY to the left. After all, average (R) leader now looks and talks like a Moderate (D) from the 1960’s.
And the average (D) leader looks and sounds like the college radicals from that same time period. Mainly because it’s the SAME people. What I can’t figure our, is why the (R)s are so far left now too.
The West disentangled canon and common law almost 400 years ago. Without that disentanglement, it’s unlikely we’d have modern industrial society. The problem with Sharia isn’t Sharia itself, which embodies a perfectly consistent (albeit abhorrent to westerners) analogue to canon law. The problem is that Islamic societies didn’t have a common law tradition to go with it. Instead they had little smidgeons of common law forcibly grafted on during their colonial periods, to which their dictators paid lip service as they became independent states.
Western common law is 1200 years old. Common law in Islamic countries is 100 years old. It’s not surprising that 100 years isn’t enough time to assimilate a completely alien legal tradition. Like it or not, now that some element of populism has crept into the politics of the Middle East, common law is going to be replaced by Sharia.
The real question is what to do about it. Obama has decided to go with, “do whatever you like as long as it’s democratic”. Pretty easy for him to do, since his administration will be long gone when it turns out that it’s not democratic. But what’s the alternative? Condemn the Islamist parties, and then look even more feckless than usual when they take power anyway?
Ironically, Obama’s real mistake was that he inconsistently continued the Bush Doctrine. That was an easy mistake to make. It’s a domestic political no-brainer to support democratic uprisings against dictatorships. Of course, his failure to support the Iranian democratic uprising makes the whole exercise kinda stupid, but maybe that was just a rookie mistake. But once he enabled the Arab Spring with the Libya thing, he didn’t understand that he was initiating a big experiment. We’re now going to see whether a big block of modern states can thrive with no other legal basis than Sharia.
If those states are successful, we need to overtly contain them–which Obama won’t do, but even if he’s re-elected he’ll be out of office before they’ll be a problem. If those states fail, we need to covertly contain the little metastatic terrorist cells that flake off of them.
Meanwhile, I think you’ve misinterpreted McCarthy. There is a difference between “mainstream Islamic ideology” and “violent extremism”. McCarthy’s saying that there’s no practical difference between Islamic ideology and Islamism, i.e., a doctrine of exporting Sharia as much as possible.
I’m not worried about peaceful Islamists. Sharia is pathetically unsuited for governing a modern society, a fact that will be obvious to everyone in another twenty years. It’s sad that the Middle East is going to have to endure the consequences for that long, but it would have taken a foreign policy orders of magnitude more deft than Obama is capable of executing to prevent it. H.W. Bush, Eisenhower, and Truman might have pulled it off, but all the other post-war administrations would have failed as well. Meanwhile, the backlash against all this nonsense is building in Europe. People really do pay attention at some point.
And as for the violent Islamists, we still have to answer the same old questions we’ve been arguing about for the last fifteen years:
Where do we use political and diplomatic tactics?
Where do we use law enforcement tactics?
Where do we use military tactics?
The good news is that we were able to figure out the answers to these questions during the Cold War, from which we can adopt a pretty decent strategy for combating Islamism: Contain it, and wait for it to wither.
maybe that was just a rookie mistake
If it didn’t fit a pattern your argument would be more persuasive. He’s been on the wrong side of everything he hasn’t inherited.
The people of Honduras weren’t having any of it, but others not so good.
maybe that was just a rookie mistake
Not considering the pattern. Thankfully Honduras wasn’t having any of it.
“The West” disentangling common and canon law would be a great story if you wholly redefine the west as england and don’t know the history of common law. It never existed outside of England or the anglosphere.
Common law is a unique product of English culture and history. It also didn’t begin to take shape until after the Norman conquest and Royal Courts were established which slowly took jurisdiction over matters which were considered a breach of the kings peace. Prior to the Norman conquest there was not anything which we would consider law in the modern sense. Canon law never carried much truck in England until the 1200’s, about the same time that common law was developing.
Today, common law is pretty much non-existent as it governs society except for its creaking remnants in tort law. In the anglosphere, it has been almost wholly supplanted by legislative statutes.