Townhall...
Where
Are We, Ten Years After 9/11?
By Frank Gaffney
9/8/2011
So,
where are we ten years after 9/11?
It is comforting that we have been blessed with a near-unbroken decade
without
further mass-casualty attacks since those that killed nearly 3,000
Americans on
September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, our government is pursuing policies
that can
only encourage those who aspire to do us harm to redouble their efforts.
Such
an assessment was implicit in a
critique of President Obama’s new counter-terrorism”strategy” delivered
last
week by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman.
The
Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut described the President’s
so-called “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in
the United
States” white paper as “ultimately a big disappointment”:
The
administration’s plan... suffers
from several significant weaknesses. The first is that the
administration still
refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name, violent
Islamist
extremism. We can find names that are comparable to that, but not the
one that
the administration continues to use which [is] ‘violent extremism.’ It
is not
just violent extremism. There are many forms of violent extremism.
There’s
white racist extremism, there’s been some eco-extremism, there’s been
animal
rights extremism. You can go on and on and on. There’s skinhead
extremism, but
we’re not in a global war with those.
Sen.
Lieberman observed, “We’re in a
global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists.
To call
our enemy violent extremism is so general and vague that it ultimately
has no
meaning. The other term used sometimes is ‘Al-Qaida and its allies.’
Now,
that’s better, but it still is too narrow.”
The
Homeland Security Committee
chairman concluded:
It
is vital to understand that we’re
not just fighting an organization Al-Qaida, 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 will come consequently not
when a
single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated, but when
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, Sen. Lieberman is, like
President 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)
The threat from adherents to the “politicized ideology that has fueled
this
war” are also using non-violent - or, more accurately, pre-violent -
techniques
to wage it against us. And 2) that ideology is actually 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 is
surely not “separate” from it.
Read
the rest of the column at
Townhall
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