Predictably, within days of Tamerlan’s death and Dzhokhar’s arrest, U.S. officials were telling the media that the brothers were “lone wolves” motivated by radical Islam but not connected with any terrorist group. In the first six months of 2015, the FBI had announced arrests of at least thirty U.S. citizens involved in a “lone wolf” terrorist plot of some kind. That’s on top of the recent “lone wolf” attacks in Canada where, in separate incidents, terrorists murdered a soldier in Quebec and then, just two days later, another soldier in Ottawa. Reports say that both killers had recently converted to Islam.
A “lone wolf” here, a “lone wolf” there—at some point, you’d think the media would press law enforcement officials and our leaders to admit we have a growing pack of jihadi wolves stalking us in our own backyard.
Instead, they tiptoe around the truth. Homeland security secretary Jeh Johnson says the government is concerned “about the independent actor, and the independent actor who is here in the homeland who may strike with little or no warning.” Yet Johnson is maddeningly vague about who those independent actors might be or what cause they might espouse. It could be a right-wing militia member for all he knows, or maybe the Weather Underground is making a comeback. The people responsible for defending the nation simply won’t publicly admit the connection between jihad abroad and the threat of jihad at home.
The government is not just wishy-washy about connections to Islam; it also often provides halfhearted defenses of free expression in the face of repeated attacks. In response to the Danish cartoon flap, Bush State Department spokesman Sean McCormack called the illustrations offensive and said, “Anti-Muslim images are as unacceptable as anti-Semitic images, as anti-Christian images, or any other religious belief.”
First of all—no—none of these things are unacceptable; they are the very definition of protected speech. But even if we go along and play that game, the obvious difference is that Christians and Jews don’t try to murder people who publish anti-Christian or anti-Jewish cartoons.
The Obama administration actually took the side of the jihadists over free speech. The president, along with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and U.S. United Nations ambassador Susan Rice, tried to blame an anti-Islam YouTube video for the September 11, 2012, attacks on the U.S. embassy in Cairo and the horrific murders in Benghazi, Libya, of U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and three other consulate personnel. The administration went so far as to arrest the video’s producer and director, Nakoula Nakoula, for allegedly violating conditions of his parole in a completely unrelated case. Nakoula wound up spending a year in a federal prison cell because the Obama White House apparently needed a scapegoat for its inept handling of a foreign policy disaster.
Two weeks after the Benghazi debacle, the president addressed the United Nations and made an outrageous comparison between Americans who insult Muslims and Muslims who want to kill Americans, Christians, and Jews. “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam,” the president told the assembled dignitaries, most of whom routinely persecute and jail political and religious dissenters in their home countries.
“Yet to be credible,” he added, “those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see when the image of Jesus Christ is desecrated, churches are destroyed, or the Holocaust is denied.”
The president could have set an example to the nation and the world by standing before the General Assembly and saying the future must not belong to those who would kill for the prophet of Islam. He could have made a clear and unequivocal statement that the United States stands for unfettered freedom of speech and true freedom of religion. Instead he descended into moral equivalence and political pandering.
In the face of this crisis, the United States not only needs leaders to stand in the face of violence and intimidation; it needs citizens who are unafraid to speak the truth about the origins of the threat we face and hold our leaders accountable when they resort to political correctness or refuse to call a spade a spade.
3. WE MUST UNDERSTAND OUR TRADITIONS—AND OURSELVES
At this moment, all around the United States, mosques and community organizations affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood are quietly pushing to introduce sharia law into the fabric of our society and our judicial system. And they’re succeeding.
As we covered earlier, Muslims in the Dallas suburb of Irving, Texas, established what the Christian Broadcasting Network described as “the first official shariah law system in the United States.” Tribunal judge Imam Moujahed Bakhach denied that the sharia court he runs with three other local imams is anything like what orthodox Islamic teachings say. “The misconception about what they see through the media is that sharia means cut the head, chop the heads, cut the hands and we are not in that,” he said. “We are not here to invade the White House or invade Austin.”
It’s true that sharia isn’t only about cutting off heads and hands as punishment. Islamic law also has rules about what Muslims may eat and drink, how Muslims should dress, how a woman’s court testimony is worth only half of a man’s, and how religious minorities must be treated as inferiors. But groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations don’t want to talk about any of that.
Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of CAIR’s Houston chapter, told the Austin Chronicle that sharia is an essential part of a practicing Muslim’s life—just as Christians and Jews have their own religious guidelines to follow. “Sharia is getting married, getting buried,” Carroll said. “It is the Islamic principles that Muslims live by.”
That’s true as far as it goes. But, as we’ve already seen, sharia law is central to Islam. Orthodox Muslims and Islamic State jihadists alike believe that man-made law is un-Islamic. Democracy itself is un-Islamic—a man’s vote cannot supersede God’s law. Sharia does not respect individual rights, as the West has understood the concept for centuries. Sharia is incompatible with our Constitution and the principles of equality and liberty embodied in our Declaration of Independence.
Needless to say, Carroll and his fellow activists have been working hard to downplay those differences. They’re also successfully lobbying against legislation that would prevent state courts from using sharia in their proceedings. A Texas anti-sharia bill failed again in 2015—the third time in three years. The liberal Texas press portrayed the legislation’s Republican sponsors—Representatives Jeff Leach and Molly White—as bigoted kooks because they had the nerve to ask members of the Muslim community to publicly announce their allegiance to America and our laws.
The threat is real, and it must be stopped. But how?
In our ongoing struggle with the barbarity that appears tragically inherent in Islam, we need to return to first principles and restore the integrity of our nation’s heritage.
Easier said than done, I realize. Our leaders have failed us. Our media is against us. Our Constitution is being eroded away and our culture is becoming ever more secular. Many of us have forgotten who we are as a people and a country. We’ve forgotten God.
Our enemies have turned many of our strengths into weaknesses. Americans are the most tolerant and charitable people on the face of the earth. We have welcomed millions of refugees from across the globe in the course of our history. That was fine and noble when America had a strong assimilationist ethic. But the past thirty years have seen a shift from assimilation into the melting pot toward a divisive and dangerous form of multiculturalism that encourages ethnic separation.
The United States has had a strange immigration policy since 9/11. Our Muslim population has doubled to more than 2 million between 2001 and 2010. We’re accepting thousands of Syrians displaced by the civil war and Democratic lawmakers want the Obama administration to open the gates even wider. In May 2015, a group of fourteen U.S. senators wrote a letter to the president urging the resettlement of as many as 65,000 more Syrian refugees, despite the fact that the FBI says there is no way it can possibly screen the hundreds of people who’ve entered the country f
rom that war-torn country already.
If our experience with Somalian refugees is any indication, taking in tens of thousands of Syrians would be a recipe for disaster. Since 1991, more than 100,000 Somalis have resettled in the United States. Almost all of them are Muslim and the vast majority of them have planted roots in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood of Minneapolis, which has become known as “Little Mogadishu.” Not coincidentally, Minneapolis has become a hotbed of jihadi recruitment, with at least forty young men having traveled from Minnesota to join the Islamic State.
A sane immigration and resettlement policy would take careful account of who these newcomers are, and where they’ve come from.
I think an excellent way to approach America’s Muslim population—especially immigrants and refugees—would be to emulate George Washington.
In 1783, the year our fledgling nation finally won its independence from King George III, General Washington wrote a letter welcoming Irish Catholic immigrants who had recently landed in New York City. Remember, many Americans of the founding generation considered Catholics to be wholly undesirable citizens. They were subjects of the pope, not cut out for freedom in a young republic—or so the opinion went. John Adams summed up the sentiment in a letter to his daughter-in-law, Louisa: “Liberty and Popery cannot live together.”
Washington disagreed. “The bosom of America,” he wrote on December 2, 1783, “is open to receive not only the Opulent and respectable Stranger, but the oppressed and persecuted of all Nations and Religions; whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges, if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment.”
In a private letter a few months later to Tench Tilghman, Washington asked his former aide-de-camp if he could hire a bricklayer and a house joiner to work on his estate at Mount Vernon. “I would not confine you to Palatines (Germans),” he wrote. “If they are good workmen, they may be of Assia [sic], Africa, or Europe. They may be Mahometans, Jews, or Christians of any Sect—or they may be Atheists.”
But perhaps the statement most relevant to our challenge right now is President Washington’s August 1790 letter to the Hebrew Congregation of Newport, Rhode Island. “The Citizens of the United States of America have a right to applaud themselves for having given to mankind examples of an enlarged and liberal policy: a policy worthy of imitation. All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship,” he wrote.
“It is now no more that toleration is of, as if it were the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights,” the president continued. “For, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.”
Understand what Washington was saying: The United States is the first nation on earth to embrace true religious liberty. Your rights as an immigrant or as a citizen do not depend on your profession of a particular faith or creed. Everyone has a God-given liberty of conscience.
But also notice that in each of those letters, Washington adds a crucial condition: newcomers enjoy all of our rights “if by decency and propriety of conduct they appear to merit the enjoyment”; we will pay little mind to where they come from or what they believe if they are “good workmen”; and they may practice their religion freely as long as they “demean themselves as good citizens” and give the country “on all occasions their effectual support” (emphasis added).
President George W. Bush seemed to echo Washington in an April 30, 2002, speech in San Jose, California, promoting “compassionate conservatism.” “America rejects bigotry,” he said. “We reject every act of hatred against people of Arab background or Muslim faith. America values and welcomes peaceful people of all faiths—Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu and many others. Every faith is practiced and protected here, because we are one country. Every immigrant can be fully and equally American because we’re one country. Race and color should not divide us, because America is one country.”
The question facing us now is whether America is still one country.
We remember the 2,997 innocent lives taken in service of that awful mission on 9/11, but many people may not realize how much else the nineteen hijackers stole from our culture and Western civilization that day.
Countless historical documents, records, and irreplaceable artworks were lost forever when the twin towers fell. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings, drawings, and sculptures by the likes of Pablo Picasso, Roy Lichtenstein, and Auguste Rodin were obliterated. Five World Trade Center was home to the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, the Broadway Theatre Archive, and a collection of forty thousand negatives of photos by Jacques Lowe that recorded John F. Kennedy’s presidency. Underground archives below Six World Trade Center housed millions of objects and artifacts of New York dating back to the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The tiny Church of St. Nicholas, a Greek Orthodox parish crushed by debris from tower two, contained relics of fourth- and sixth-century saints and icons dating from nineteenth-century Russia.
The list goes on and on. All of that art, architecture, culture, and history turned to rubble and ash in the name of jihad.
If we are not careful, jihad will take from us much more than physical artifacts—it will destroy our entire way of life.
4. WE CANNOT REFORM ISLAM—ONLY MUSLIMS CAN DO THAT
One of the greatest mistakes the United States made in the aftermath of 9/11 was to adopt the idea that the lessons of history did not apply in the war against radical Islam.
Our leaders believed without a shadow of a doubt that the Muslims of the Middle East—men, women, and children who had known nothing but despotism and dictatorship—desperately wanted everything that Americans have and enjoy. As one enthusiastic Iraqi put it shortly after the fall of Baghdad in 2003: “Democracy, whiskey, sexy.”
President George W. Bush gave this idealistic worldview a more elegant spin in his 2004 State of the Union address: “[I]t is mistaken, and condescending, to assume that whole cultures and great religions are incompatible with liberty and self-government. I believe that God has planted in every human heart the desire to live in freedom.”
As we’ve learned at tremendous cost in lives and treasure, the more condescending view was to assume that most Iraqis’ understanding of freedom was the same as ours. It’s just not true. The Islamic State believes in freedom. But it’s the freedom that comes with submission to Allah and his laws.
As long as we harbor misunderstandings about what is and what is not “true Islam,” we’ll get nowhere. For years, we’ve heard talk about the need for an Islamic reformation like the Protestant Reformation of five hundred years ago. If we were to go back in time and tell Martin Luther that papal indulgences had nothing to do with Christianity, we’d look like idiots. For good and for ill, indulgences were an integral part of European Christian life in the early 1500s. That’s how the vast majority of Christians understood their lives and their world.
We tend to downplay how difficult—and how bloody—the Reformation turned out to be. Protestantism unleashed roughly two centuries of religious warfare, decimated large swaths of continental Europe, displaced millions of people, and ultimately led to the full flowering of individualism and liberal democracy in the New World.
Would an Islamic reformation play out in much the same way? Who knows? It’s safe to say, however, that any reforms would be incredibly difficult. As the late, great political scientist James Q. Wilson observed in 2004, the prospect of reshaping the Islamic world along similar lines as the Protestant Reformation is “highly doubtful.”
“There is neither a papacy nor a priesthood against which to rebel; nor are mosques comparable to churches in the Catholic sense of dispensing sacraments,” Wilson wrote. “There will never be a Muslim Martin Luther or a hereditary Islamic ruler who,
by embracing a rival faith, can thereby create an opportunity for lay rule.”
Never? I know that many would-be reformers—Muslim and non-Muslim alike—hope Wilson is wrong.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the ex-Muslim who has written heroically about her life growing up in Somalia and her escape to freedom in the Netherlands and the United States, argues that, as recently as the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, parts of the Muslim world made a steady transition into modernity. “By the end of World War II,” she wrote, “the central features of sharia had been replaced in many Muslim countries by laws based on European models. . . . At the same time, Islam itself was increasingly being reinterpreted as part of a long continuum in man’s attempts to achieve social justice, even being used at times to validate socialist doctrines of redistribution and other efforts to remake society.”
Liberal Islamic convert Thomas J. Haidon has argued, “Any genuine movement for Islamic reform must first seek to acknowledge that aspects particular to Islam and our understanding of Islam are problematic, and hence they need critical re-evaluation.” The biggest stumbling block is the view that Islam is simply impervious to change because it is “the essence of perfection: the undisputed word of God, and the comprehensive tradition of the Prophet Muhammad.”
But, Haidon says, “Unless reformist organizations develop effective, grass roots strategies to achieve goals that are firmly rooted in theological principles . . . the reformist discourse will prove to be nothing but rhetoric.”
If there is a glimmer of hope in the unrepentant barbarism of the Islamic State, it is that their “management of savagery” as they call it is beginning to offend Muslims, even the hard-core Islamists. A case in point is a gentleman by the name of Abd al-Rauf Kara, a hardened Libyan Salafist who is neither a friend to democracy nor a peacemaker. He’s the head of Islamist militias that have helped create chaos in the country in the months after the U.S. compound in Benghazi was attacked. But he’s finding that Daesh, as the Islamic State is known locally, is too brutal even for him. “Daesh now has a 70-kilometer stretch of the coast,” says Kara. “It is a key stretch for launching people-smuggler boats, and Europe should be worried that Daesh can disguise their people as migrants.” This is hardly a reformation, but it may be an encouraging sign that more and more Muslims will stand up to oppose the Islamic supremacist ideology that threatens the free world.