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diabolical logic prompted Donald Trump to propose a travel ban on Muslims: if
the US government can’t distinguish between peaceful and violent Muslims, then
shut the door to all of them. Trump’s instinct for
politicals-as-reality-television buoyed his standing in Republican polls,
as Americans put terrorism at the top of their concerns. According to
Rasmussen, US voters support Trump’s idea by a 46-40% margin. Among
Republicans, the margin is 66%-24%.
Americans by and large aren’t bigots, but the outbreak of Instant Jihad
Syndrome last week convinced them that something was broken, and that the whole
mechanism of Muslim immigration should be mothballed until the problem was
fixed. They know perfectly well that some Muslims want to live in peace with
non-Muslims and other Muslims want to burn down the world, but they don’t know
how to tell the difference. As information about the couple’s longstanding
terror connections trickles into the press, the public doesn’ t trust its
guardians to tell the difference, either. That was the lesson they learned from
the jihadi Bonnie and Clyde of San Bernardino.
Trump chose his words carefully: “Until we are able to determine and
understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot
be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and
have no sense of reason or respect for human life.” That is mischievous.
The Obama administration like the Bush administration before it embraced Muslim
organizations that play coy with the line between peaceful advancement of
Muslim interests and terrorism. At the center of these organizations is the
Muslim Brotherhood, as I reported earlier this
week. Trump knows perfectly well what the Obama administration
is doing, and says in effect: “If our elected leaders can’t distinguish between
peaceful and violent Muslims, let’s keep all of them out.”
I never thought the day would come when I would admonish Americans to
show understanding and forbearance towards Islam. In fact, Islam is
neither a religion of violence nor a religion of peace: it is an ambiguous set
of doctrines from which Muslims may choose peace or violence as they will. To
penalize all Muslims for the actions of those Muslims who choose violence is as
morally misguided as it is strategically stupid: It repudiates those Muslims
who explicitly embrace a peaceful interpretation, for example the president of
the largest Arab country, Egypt’s president Fatah al-Sisi. Western countries in
their own self-defense need to draw a bright line between peaceful and violent
Islam.
It isn’t hard to separate the sheep from the jihadist goats, because
open war is underway between the two interpretations of Islam. The trouble
is that the United States has been on the wrong side of the war: the whole US
foreign policy establishment, Obama liberals and Bush
neo-conservatives, believed that democracy in the Middle East would arise
from political Islam and replace the old Arab dictatorships. US intelligence
failed because it was fitted with political filters.
Westerners seeking to make sense of Islam should consult a short book by
Fr. Samir Khalil Samir, a Jesuit of Arab origin who advised Pope Benedict XVI. 111 Questions
on Islam (Ignatius Press, 2008) explains that both the violent
and peaceful interpretations of Islam are legitimate within Islam’s own terms,
and that the peculiar character of Islamic tradition makes impossible to
exclude either on purely theological grounds. Like many Arab Christians, Fr.
Samir is hostile to
Israel, and I abhor his view of Middle East politics. As an
scholar of Islam, though, he has an important insight. He explains:
Many Westerners fear Islam as a “religion of violence”. Muslims often
call simultaneously for tolerance and understanding as well as for violence and
aggression. In fact, both options are present in the Qur’an and the sunna.
These are two legitimate manners—two distinct ways to inter pret, to
understand, and to live Islam. It is up to the individual Muslim to decide what
he wants Islam to be. . . . (p 18)
. . . If the Qur’an was indeed “sent
down” by Allah, there is no possibility of a critical or historical
interpretation, not even for those aspects that are evidently related to the
customs of a particular historical period and culture. In the history of Islam,
at a certain point, it was decided that it was no longer possible to interpret
the text. Hence, today, even the mere attempt to understand its meaning and
what message it aims to communicate in a certain context is regarded as a
desire to challenge it. . . . (p. 42)
. . . In modern times as well, many
efforts have been made in this direction but almost always in vain. The weight
of the tradition and, above all, the fear of questioning the acquired security
of the text have created a taboo: the Qur’an cannot be interpreted, nor
can it be critically rethought. . . . (p. 43)
. . . I speak about the violence
expressed in the Qur’an and practiced in Muhammad’s life in order to address
the idea, widespread in the West, that the violence we see today is a
deformation of Islam. We must honestly admit that there are two readings
of the Qur’an and the sunna (Islamic traditions connected to Muhammad): one that
opts for the verses that encourage tolerance toward other believers, and one
that prefers the verses that encourage con?ict. Both readings are
legitimate. . . . (p. 65)
. . . Consequently, in the Qur’an there are two different choices, the
aggressive and the peaceful, and both of them are acceptable. There is a need
for an authority, unanimously acknowledged by Muslims, that could say: From now
on, only this verse is valid. But this does not—and probably will never—happen.
. . . (p. 71)
President al-Sisi speaking before a clerical audience at al-Azahr
University last Jan. 1 demanded that Muslims repudiate violence and choose
peace with non-Muslims:
The problem has never
been that of our faith. The problem lies in our ideology, one that has been
sanctified by us…We have to take a painful and difficult look at our current
situation. It is inconceivable that the ideology that we have sanctified helps
make our nation a concern, danger, killings and destruction throughout the
world it is inconceivable that this ideology – I am not referring to religion,
but ideology – that is to say, the corpus of ideas and texts we have sanctified
in the centuries – is rendered to a point where it is almost impossible to
challenge. This ideology has reached a point where it is a threat to the world.
It is inconceivable that 1.6 billion Muslims want to kill the rest of humanity,
or 7 billion people to live only among themselves… Let me say it again: we must
revolutionize our religion. Honourable imam of the Grand Mosque Al Azhar, you wear
this responsibility before God. The whole world awaits your words, because the
Islamic nation is falling apart and destroy itself. It goes directly to his
loss and it is we who are responsible.
Egypt’s leader walks the walk as well as talks the talk. He
suppressed the violence-prone Islamists of the Muslim Brotherhood, and is
fighting a low-intensity civil war with Islamists in the Sinai and terrorists
in Egypt’s major cities. He has contained Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the
Brotherhood, and improved security cooperation with Israel. Al-Sisi represents
a mainstream current of peaceful Islam (as opposed to some minor sects, e.g.
the Turkish Sufis, who are peaceful but irrelevant).
President al-Sisi spoke frankly of an “ideology we have sanctified,” the
ideology of jihad. That is a statement of immense courage. Islam is not
necessarily violent, but it has a proclivity
for violence, unlike Christianity or Judaism. As the great Jewish theologian
Franz
Rosenzweig wrote nearly a century ago, “following the path of Allah
means in the narrowest sense propagating Islam through holy war. In the
obedient journey upon this path, taking upon one’s self the associated dangers,
the observance of the laws prescribed for it, Muslim piety finds its way in the
world.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is the elephant in the parlor. Both the George W.
Bush administration and Obama onboarded Brotherhood operatives as advisors on
counterterrorism and outreach to American Muslims, as Clare Lopez,
a former CIA officer, documents in a report for the Gatestone Institute. Frank Gaffney,
a former Reagan administration official, has produced a series of Internet
videos on the subject. The Brotherhood tries to blur the line between
propagating Islam through peaceful and violent means. In Egypt and Gaza, it
employs violence; through its front organizations in the US, it claims to
employ nonviolent methods.
As veteran defense reporter (and Asia Times contributor) Bill Gertz
wrote earlier this year in the Washington Times:
President Obama and his administration continue to support the global
Islamist militant group known the Muslim
Brotherhood. A White House strategy document regards the group as a
moderate alternative to more violent Islamist groups like al Qaeda and the Islamic
State. The policy of backing the Muslim
Brotherhood is outlined in a secret directive called Presidential
Study Directive-11, or PSD-11. The directive was produced in 2011 and outlines
administration support for political reform in the Middle East and North
Africa, according to officials familiar with the classified study.
The directive outlines why the administration
has chosen the Muslim
Brotherhood, which last year was labeled a terrorist organization by
the governments of Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the United Arab Emirates as a key
vehicle of U.S. backing for so-called political reform in the Middle East…
The UAE government also has labeled two U.S. affiliates of the Muslim
Brotherhood, the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the
Muslim American Society, as terrorist support groups. Both groups denied the
UAE claims. Egypt is considering imposing a death sentence on Mohamed
Morsi, the Muslim
Brotherhood-backed former president who was ousted in military coup
in July 2013.
In Egypt, the Brotherhood is fighting a bloody civil war with the
al-Sisi government. That is, the Obama administration has allied itself with
the embattled enemies of Muslims who propose a peaceful interpretation of
Islam.
Trump’s approach is demagogic; Ted Cruz, by contrast, proposes a
workable policy solution. On Nov. 4 he introduced legislation “urging the
Secretary of State to designate the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist
organization,” according to a campaign press release. “The US has officially
listed individual members, branches and charities of the Muslim Brotherhood as
terrorists, but has not designated the organization as a whole.” The release
adds:
This bill recognizes
the simple fact that the Muslim Brotherhood is a radical Islamic terrorist
group. For years, American presidents of both parties have correctly designated
the Brotherhood’s various affiliates, such as Hamas and Ansar al-Sharia, as
terrorist groups. They have designated individual Muslim Brotherhood leaders
such as Shaykh Abd-al-Majd Al-Zindani, who was complicit in the 2000 attack on
the USS Cole, and Sami Al-Hajj, who was captured on the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border in 2001 running money and weapons for al Qaida, as terrorists. Now we
can reject the fantasy that their parent institution is a political entity that
is somehow separate from these violent activities,” Sen. Cruz said. “A number
of our Muslim allies have taken this common-sense step, including Egypt, Saudi
Arabia, and the UAE. As this bill details, the Brotherhood’s stated goal is to
wage violent jihad against its enemies, and our legislation is a reality check
that the United States is on that list as well.
Designating the Brotherhood as a terrorist organization along with
America’s Arab allies would turn the intentionally blurred line into a bright
line. Marco Rubio has attacked Cruz for opposing more authority for
eavesdropping on domestic telephone calls, but this is a secondary issue. The
great intelligence failure is not due to lack of data but refusal to look at
the obvious.
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