Analyst's note: Absolutely must read this stunning report. If you've only got time for one article today then this is it. After 10 years, our government has failed to even so much as name our Islamist, shariah-adherent jihadist enemy who attacked us. If you are of the persuasion that it was just al Qaeda, then read on to learn the full story. Please don't miss the related materials listed below.
We are fighting far more than just "violent extremism." Mr. Obama, his national security council, and our Homeland Security Committee chairman has failed to show any evidence of understanding this enemy who is working to destroy our centers of American economic, military and government power from without and from within our government. Instead our government officials -- who follows the suggestions of the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, Heather & Paul Booth, director of a Saul Alinsky-style community organizing group,and the Weather Underground domestic terrorist organization just to name a few -- are pursing policies that encourages our jihadist enemies.
[....] The Homeland Security Committee chairman concluded: “[I]t is vital to understand that we’re not just fighting an organization, al Qaeda, but we are up against a broader ideology, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam that has fueled this war. Success in the war consequently will come not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated, but when [a] broader set of ideas associated with it are rejected and discarded. The reluctance to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas.”
As it happens, Mr. Lieberman is, like Mr. Obama, right up to a point. If we are properly to recognize the enemy we face, however, we must appreciate two facts the senator misses, as well: (1) Adherents to the “politicized theology … that has fueled this war” are also using nonviolent - or, more accurately, pre-violent - techniques to wage it against us, and (2) that ideology is not “separate from the religion of Islam.” Rather, this politico-military-legal doctrine known as Shariah is derived from the sacred texts, interpretations, rulings and scholarly consensuses of Islam. The reality that many Muslims around the world practice their faith without following the dictates of Shariah simply means that some believe this code is separable from Islam. But it surely is not “separate” from it.
These errors are at the heart of the present danger 10 years after Sept. 11 - namely, a failure to recognize that in addition to “violent extremism” at the hands of Islamists, we confront what professor Richard Landes of Boston University has characterized as those foes’ concerted efforts in the area of “cognitive warfare.” The author of a timely new book, “Heaven on Earth: The Varieties of the Millennial Experience,” writes the following in a riveting essay published online at tabletmag.com:
“Cognitive warfare aims to paralyze the will of the enemy to resist attack, to maneuver that enemy into adopting vulnerable positions, and eventually to get him to give up in a conflict. In cognitive warfare, real violence (such as terror attacks) are adjuncts to the mental conflict, and the targets of such warfare are large audiences both among populations at home (recruitment and mobilization) and, still more significantly, among the enemy (paralysis). …
“One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon … is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet [known as “Shariah blasphemy” laws]. Thus, a major battlefield of the cognitive war between jihadis and the West concerns tolerance for criticism of the other.”
Cognitive warfare, or what the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad,” is about creating the conditions under which so-called “nonviolent” Islamists can achieve their ultimate objective, which is precisely the same as the one pursued by their violent co-religionists: imposing Shariah worldwide and a caliph to rule according to it.
So where are we 10 years after Shariah-adherent Islamists sought to destroy the centers of American economic, military and government power? We remain dangerously exposed to similar sorts of violence from an enemy President Obama declines to name. Worse yet, to the extent we fail to perceive the cognitive war being waged against us by al Qaeda’s partners in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation - to say nothing of persisting in the Obama administration’s willingness to give ground in that war by submitting our freedom of speech to Shariah blasphemy laws - our Islamist foes will only be emboldened.
And that means a heightened likelihood of success in the violent attacks the Shariah-adherent jihadists are sure to mount in the years to come.
Frank J. Gaffney Jr. is president of the Center for Security Policy (SecureFreedom.org), a columnist for The Washington Times and host of the nationally syndicated program “Secure Freedom Radio,” heard in Washington weekdays at 9 p.m. on WRC-AM 1260.
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