Dallastan
03.31.2008 - 10:09 AMHow are we going to win the long war against Islamic radicalism? The first and most essential step is to understand what we are up against. Part of that effort involves keeping track of the whereabouts and activities of extremist movements and grouplets. But beyond that, it is vitally important to understand how our adversaries think.
Current Trends in Islamist Ideology, a journal published by the Hudson Institute, has already emerged as indispensable source for both purposes. The current issue has a series of extraordinary–and extremely alarming — essays on the Muslim Brotherhood network in the United States.
One of them is by Rod Dreher, an editor at the Dallas Morning News, which recounts in close detail developments in his own community. It focuses especially on the efforts of various Brotherhood-linked organizations like the Islamic Society of North American and the Council on American-Islamic Relations to use the charge of “Islamophobia” to intimidate the local press into silence about their own linkages to terrorists and terrorist theoreticians.
“I cannot say how typical the Dallas experience is of the broader American experience,” writes Dreher. That question remains to be answered. But what can be said with assurance is that the U.S. government’s response to these groups is not in synch with the danger they present.
In the same issue of Current Trends, Zeyno Baran, a senior fellow at Hudson, takes note of our government’s continuing attempts to conduct a dialog with the domestic radicals:
When the US government engages with Islamist organizations in conferences or government outreach programs, it lends legitimacy to an ideology that does not represent — at least not yet — the views of the majority of American Muslims. American policymakers who advocate pursuing such a strategy are actually facilitating Islamism by endorsing it as a mainstream ideology. Both at home and abroad, this policy is leading to disaster. Liberal and non-Islamist Muslims — having already been denounced by Islamists as apostates — are now being told by Western governments that they do not represent “real” Islam.
We are still in the early stages of our battle with radical Islam. As in the cold war, it’s going to take time, and serious setbacks, before we settle on policies that are effective in combating a domestic danger that poses a unique challenge to our constitutional order.
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March 31st, 2008 at 12:20 PM
This should remind us forcibly of the ties between government officials and the international Communist Party in the 1930s and 1940s.
Dreher’s article is excellent, as always. We should put this in perspective, however, and recognize that the Justice Department is hardly confining itself to manning outreach booths at ISNA conventions. The FBI and Homeland Security investigate and analyze hundreds of leads a day on suspicious Islamic activity in the US. This effort can always be done better, but the fact that Dreher is not aware of the surveillance prominent Muslim clerics activists may be under doesn’t mean the government is turning a blind eye to them.
A more difficult problem is surveillance from the local level. It’s at the level of county sheriffs and city police that complaints of profiling and violation of civil rights are typically heard. These complaints do have the effect of inhibiting surveillance, and keeping it from getting better. That is a real problem, because one of the most important changes since 9/11 — worldwide — has been increased reporting of the suspicious activity of apparent Arabs, south Asians, and Muslims, by citizens and beat cops. Local authorities in the US report whatever they get to Homeland Security/FBI, and reports of this kind — often voluntary and unsolicited — figure in the investigations of every plot detected and broken up before it could carried out.
This form of reporting is not to be dismissed, although I can’t tell you how many times I’ve encountered ignorant people, who know nothing about intelligence or police work, laughing it off as though it must be unimportant. They are wrong. We stay ahead of terrorists plots today as much because of alert neighbors, merchants, and bank tellers in Nairobi, London, Manila, and Chicago as because of wiretapping, forensic accounting, and covert espionage.
Letting ourselves be deceived about the tameness of Muslim associations in America inhibits the police and neighborhood alertness that produces advance warning. It’s truly a problem for Americans, because we rightly judge that we can’t afford to treat Muslims in our midst differently in terms of civil rights, social suspicion, and innocence until guilt is proven. No open society can long tolerate sequestering one segment of it, and according it fewer rights. But neither can we afford to simply wait until all guilt is proven by bombs and American corpses.
March 31st, 2008 at 4:02 PM
I predict that the US will follow Europe in appeasing radical islam. It is already doing it both externally and internally.
oao
http://fallofknowledgeandreason.blogspot.com/
March 31st, 2008 at 4:04 PM
the academia is already taken, schools are already affected and the govt is already engaged.
April 1st, 2008 at 2:50 AM
Mr. Schoenfeld,
I hope we do a better job in WWIV than we did in the Cold War. Winning the Cold War by bankrupting the Soviet Union was an accident, and the Russians managed to poison our society with Marxism.
April 1st, 2008 at 9:35 AM
“…are now being told by Western governments that they do not represent “real” Islam.”
These are the same Western governments who generally refused to recognized black leaders some four decades ago unless that were minimally radical socialists and anti-anti-Communists like Martin Luther King, Jr. Those of a more conservative disposition were deemed “inauthentic.”
April 4th, 2008 at 6:44 PM
We do understand what we are up against and how our adversary thinks. That is no mystery. He keeps telling us every day. Moreover, with that information he has told us how to flip him on his back and make him helpless. The mystery is why we have not done precisely that.
We prefer to assume we must and can “keep track of the whereabouts and activities of extremist movements and grouplets”, and grapple with them as they pop up. We in effect insist on a “long war against Islamic radicalism” that need not be. Why is that? Why do we impose on ourselves a long war that is unnecessary?
It is a failure of imagination, that and the timidity of Jews, and as well as a wariness of Jews. That and an appetite for war, for a safe war we know we won’t lose, but which offers a great adventure, nevermind a whole new industry with hundreds of thousands of well paid jobs.
Consider that in every other war there is a defensive and offensive aspect, a way to retreat and a way to advance, a way to shield against the enemy’s thrusts, and a way of thrusting at him.
But not in this conflict. The Iraqi imbroglio is the result of invading an unfriendly beach, but one lacking the enemy we need to destroy. It is certainly not his key bastion. We didn’t just attack the wrong beach, we attacked with weapons that don’t hurt him. This is virtually an enemy out of science fiction. He cannot be killed.
His home base is not in Iraq or Saudi Arabia or Pakistan, or anywhere on earth. It is a vain effort to track him to his countless hiding places in Afghan caves, in Northwest Frontier shanties, to villages in Yemen and Lebanon and Sudan, to the banlieues and ghettos and inner cities of the West. To reach him in his myriad hiding places, we must corner him in his mindset. And we can. We have precisely the weapon wherewith to hurt him in the one way he fears.
He is happy to die while blowing us up. He is prepared to be brave and defy any odds. What he is not up to and what can defeat him is very briefly explained in the
orange nacl link heading this post.