Jewish World Review July 15, 2005 / 8 Taamuz,
Can you fight an idea?
One was a young father of an 8-month-old. Another was a cricket
fan. A third was supposedly "proud to be British." Yet these four young
Britons of Pakistani and Jamaican extraction committed an act of mass murder
and suicide last week in the heart of London.
What were the danger signs? There were none, the stricken
families of the terrorists report. The young men, between the ages of 19 and
30, showed no signs of violent intentions toward anyone. Only in retrospect
does one red flag stand out: Several of them had, within the past two years,
displayed a sudden increase in religious zeal.
Radical Islam is unlike any other modern religion. Imagine being
afraid of someone because he had recently become a committed Christian, or
Buddhist, or Jew, or Hindu? And indeed, most Muslims around the world are
peaceable. But radical Islam is like a throwback to violent cults of
mankind's more primitive past. We know that Aztecs cut the hearts out of
young men and women as they offered them to the gods. We know that many
early civilizations practiced child sacrifice. People are evidently capable
of any atrocity, provided they are convinced that the act is ordained by
G-d or some substitute for G-d, like Nazism or communism. And it is a
most powerful idea indeed that can induce young, healthy men not just to
kill infidels but to kill themselves for the satisfaction of killing
We have declared a war on terror, but the critics of this
imprecision in language are right. Failing to name the true enemy obscures
our task. The enemy is Islamism the radical interpretation of Islam that
sanctions violent jihad, and whose grievances include, to paraphrase
Christopher Hitchens, the unveiled female face, the existence of the Jews,
the existence of Hindus, music, literature, democracy, and nearly everything
we hold dear.
Until we clarify the enemy, we fumble about in the dark when it
comes to fighting this war. Europeans have long tolerated the presence of
radical mosques in their midst. As Louis Caprioli, formerly head of the DST,
France's equivalent of the FBI, told the Weekly Standard, "Behind every
Muslim terrorist is a radical imam." Geert Wilders, a Dutch politician who
has risen to prominence since the murder of Theo van Gogh in 2004, declares,
"For too long we've been tolerant of the intolerant."
As are we here in the United States. Saudi money is infiltrating
many of the mosques in America. With Saudi money come Wahhabi imams,
textbooks and agitators. Saudi financed and controlled organizations have
trained Muslim chaplains for the U.S. armed services. And radical Islamists
are making inroads in Muslim student organizations on American campuses.
The U.S. Justice Department inspector general warned recently that federal
prisoners were being radicalized by religious services performed entirely in
Arabic. Even among native-born English-speaking inmates, radical Islam is
making inroads. The Bureau of Prisons was cited in 2003 for hiring Wahhabi
imams. According to the Associated Press, 25 percent of the inmates at New
York's Riker's Island prison are Muslims. It is impossible to know what
percentage may be Islamists but among a population of already disaffected
men, it isn't difficult to imagine the allure of an angry faith. The FBI has
called America's prisons "fertile ground for extremists."
At the end of the day, lovers of freedom, decency and
enlightenment must prove themselves as dedicated to preserving their
civilization as the Islamists are to destroying it. Surely a healthy step in
that direction would be simply to stop "tolerating the intolerant." We need
not open our prisons to Islamist chaplains, nor our military to radical
imams. How about doing the opposite beating the bushes for the Islamist
killers and purveyors of hate? Deportation, anyone?
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