RUTHFULLY YOURS

There have been two historic speeches given in the past year. You’ve probably not heard of either one because they were given by foreign leaders in Egypt and Britain and have nothing at all to do with our presidential election next year.

It’s time for another break from the who-trumps-Trump ongoing media circus so that we can pay attention to events that might actually affect our national security, foreign relations and national future.

The predicate for these speeches appeared in The Economist, a liberal British magazine, in its July 5, 2014 issue. It noted that the fruits of the “Arab spring” had rotted and ended by engendering more autocracy and fanaticism. It said that “…only the Arabs can reverse their civilizational decline.” It said that Islam is at the core of the Arabs’ deep troubles.

The first of the two historic speeches that followed was given on January 1 by Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. In it, al-Sisi called radical Islam to account.
He did so in what would be shocking, intolerable terms if they had been spoken by a non-Muslim. His central theme was the insanity of Islam trying to set itself apart from – and to conquer – the rest of the world. His words flew in the face of all the terrorist network leaders saying, “It is inconceivable that the wrong ideas that we sacralize should make the entire umma [Muslim community] a source of concern, danger, killing, and destruction for the whole world. This is not possible.”

Al-Sisi thus condemned not Islam itself, but those who say that Islam’s sacred texts should be read to demand that it dominate the entire world, to set itself at war with all other religions. But, he said, that is precisely what has occurred. “We have reached the point that Muslims have antagonized the entire world. Is it conceivable that 1.6 billion [Muslims] want to kill the rest of the world’s population of 7 billion, so that Muslims prosper? This is not possible.”

In short, al-Sisi called on all Muslims to reform their own religion, and warned that if they do not, they will be held responsible for the acts of terrorists. “The terrible terrorist attacks and this terrible image of Muslims led us to think that we must stop and think and change the religious discourse and remove from it things that have led to violence and extremism.”

This brave leader was essentially ignored by his fellow Muslims and by President Obama. His call should have been praised immediately by our president but, of course, it was not.

From America’s viewpoint, what al-Sisi said was and remains a crucial statement in the ideological war we should have been fighting since Usama bin Laden declared his religious war against America and the West in a “fatwa” in 1996.

As I have written and said many times, the war we are fighting against Islamic terrorism is at its heard an ideological war. Islam is as much an ideology as it is a religion. But the interpretation of it – by the Iranian mullahs and their terrorist proxies, by al-Qaida, Hizballah, Lashkar e-Taiba and the dozens of others who infest this planet – is as vile an ideology as were Nazism and Communism. It has to be defeated in an ideological assault.

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The memoirs of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney don’t mention this ideological struggle. Donald Rumsfeld understood it and wanted to fight both the kinetic war and its ideological half. Of the Western leaders who understood that we cannot win the kinetic war without also fighting and winning the ideological war, only the British Prime Minister on 9-11, Tony Blair, understood it and wrote about it in his memoir.

Now, one of Blair’s successors – current British PM David Cameron – has made it a national policy to fight the ideological war.

In the most significant speech since al-Sisi’s, Cameron spoke out on July 20 outlining his policy of fighting the ideology that propels the terrorist networks.
In his speech, Cameron used words and phrases artfully to paint a picture designed to not only establish a national policy but also to place the burden on moderate Muslims to speak out against the radicals who use terror for their ideological purposes.

Cameron first stated the obvious: that radical Islam, the Islam of the terrorists, is an extremist doctrine and, he said, an ideology that is subversive to Western democracies.

He said that the ideology is based on a sort of paranoia. It’s based on conspiracy theories that are a warped view of the world such as Jews exercise malevolent power in the West seeking to destroy Islam, that 9-11 was inspired by Mossad to justify the invasion of Afghanistan and that the terrorist attacks on London’s buses and subways were tolerated by the British security services to provoke an anti-Muslim backlash.

Cameron’s outline of the ideological war he wants to fight was very clear. He wants to remind people that the Iraq war came after 9-11, and that terrorists aren’t driven by poverty but by their radical, extremist ideology.

Though he didn’t name al-Sisi, he said that “…the adherents of this ideology are overpowering other voices within the Muslim debate, especially those trying to challenge it.”

Cameron’s call to ideological war included the problem that many Muslims don’t want to assimilate into the cultures of the Western countries in which they live. “For all our successes as a multi-racial, multi-faith democracy, we have to confront a tragic truth, that there are people born and raised in this country who don’t really identify with Britain – and who feel little or no attachment to other people here. Indeed, there is a danger in some communities that you can go your whole life and have little to do with people from other faiths or backgrounds.”

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And, perhaps most importantly, he called upon all Britons to recognize that their system of government is vastly superior to that of the terrorists and the nations they dominate:

First, any strategy to defeat extremism must confront, head on, the extreme ideology that underpins it. We must take its component parts to pieces – the cultish worldview, the conspiracy theories, and yes, the so-called glamorous parts of it as well.

In doing so, let’s not forget our strongest weapon: our own liberal values. We should expose their extremism for what it is – a belief system that glorifies violence and subjugates its people – not least Muslim people.

We should contrast their bigotry, aggression and theocracy with our values. We have, in our country, a very clear creed and we need to promote it much more confidently. Wherever we are from, whatever our background, whatever our religion, there are things we share together.

Cameron sent a message to young people thinking of going anywhere to join the terrorist cause:

And here’s my message to any young person here in Britain thinking of going out there:

You won’t be some valued member of a movement. You are cannon fodder for them. They will use you.

If you are a boy, they will brainwash you, strap bombs to your body and blow you up.

If you are a girl, they will enslave and abuse you.

That is the sick and brutal reality of ISIL.

Cameron’s speech, combined with al-Sisi’s, is a powerful answer to the ideology that propels terrorism. It should be adopted by every American politician from the president down to the lowliest congressman.

It won’t be, at least until we get a president who understands the values of America and is willing to engage in the ideological war the terrorists and their partners such as Ayatollah Khamenei, Bashar Assad and the Arab leaders who refuse to stop funding, manning and arming the terror networks.