Wednesday, January 16, 2019

‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’ is Not a Bigoted Term


In a New Jersey Star-Ledger guest column, Trump's unwelcoming message to Muslim Americans like me, Fakhruddin Ahmed wrote:

Muslims immigrate to America not to change the American way of life but to embrace it. Muslims are attracted to America because of the way it is; they have no intention of changing or harming America. Muslims know that if they had settled here first, modern America would probably look like the Middle East, and would not be a welcoming beacon of freedom and innovation. Few Muslims dream of emigrating to China or Russia!

Muslims are traversing the same path of hope trodden by millions of immigrants before them. If President Donald Trump understood these simple truths, perhaps his misgivings about Muslims would subside.

As more Americans decouple from organized religion and embrace tribal and racial identities, some fear that Muslims will fill the religious void. They need not worry.  Muslim Americans are following the same trend that has delivered other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.

Ahmed goes on to back up his contention, which I believe is largely true. I think it’s also largely true that “The overwhelming majority of Muslims are on America's side as it fights these terrorists.” But does that invalidate Trump’s (and others’) “rationale for repeatedly brandishing the phrase ‘radical Islamic terrorism’,” which he say “conflate[s] Islam itself with terrorism and offend[s] the world's 1.6 billion Muslims who do not see a link between the two?”

I left these comments:

I sympathize with the sentiments expressed here. Muslim Americans should not be automatically lumped in with and treated like terrorists.

But there is one glaring problem—Ahmed’s rejection of the term "radical Islamic terrorism.” It is a serious mistake, especially for Muslim-Americans, to evade the actual nature of the terrorist movement, which is precisely motivated by a totalitarian ideology rooted in the Islamic religion. If this barbaric movement is to be wiped off the face of the Earth, all people—Muslim and non-Muslim, religionists and atheists—must properly identify this enemy of civilization.

The Star-Ledger recently ran a guest column by John Farmer Jr., doing just that. Farmer informed of a new report from the Bipartisan Policy Center, chaired by Tom Kean and Lee Hamilton of the original 9/11 Commission, which attempted to answer the question of why the Bush strategy failed. Key quotes from the column:

"For all of its battlefield and intelligence successes," the BPC Report notes, "the United States has demonstrated little ability to degrade support for the ideology underlying jihadist terrorism."

That ideology rejects the idea of a nation state as a western creation foisted upon Islam by colonial powers. It advocates a world as a unified caliphate under a single Islamist banner, and rejects utterly the notion of the separation of church and state, believing that "the Koran is our constitution" and that religious law should inform all aspects of daily life.

Just as only Muslims can be effective in countering the Islamist version of Islam, only America and the west can be effective in countering the Islamist totalitarian rejection of our freedoms and way of life.

Ayn Rand Institute scholar Elan Journo makes the same point:

[T]he jihadists have never made their cause secret. Our enemy is defined, not primarily by their use of terrorist means, but by their ideological ends. They fight to create a society wherein Islamic religious law, or sharia, dominates every last detail of every individual’s life, a cause inspired and funded by patrons such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf States, and above all, Iran. In our book, we call this political-ideological movement Islamic totalitarianism.

These are not Anti-Muslim bigots. These are not “Islamophobes.” These are sober, objective intellectuals. “Radical Islamic terrorism” does not mean all Muslims. It does properly conceptualize the faction of Islam we are fighting. Proper identification is the vital prelude to winning. It’s great to know that “Muslim Americans are following the same trend that has delivered other religious groups to the doorsteps of secularism.” They must be explicit. Just as American Christians rejected their totalitarian Inquisitional past by embracing the separation of church and state, so American Muslims must reject the totalitarian branch of their religion and explicitly embrace separation of mosque and state. That will definitively distinguish peaceful Muslims from the jihadists. Freedom of religion and conscience is a core unifying principle of all Americans.



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