I’ve been meaning to write about this subject for a long time. I haven’t as of yet because I wasn’t exactly sure how to get my sentiments across. There are so many things to say that I don’t know where to begin.
Let me start with the following. The source of all the major problems in the world today is Islam. That’s quite a mouthful. But I believe it to be accurate. Islam is the source for the vast majority of terror and intimidation in the world today. I don’t just mean Radical or Fundamentalist Islam. I mean... Islam!
Islam is a religion that is at the core very primitive and it caters to a primitive mind. Now I will admit that I do not really know much about the Koran or its tenets. But I think it is fair to say that the actions and re-actions of adherents of Islam demonstrate quite clearly how they think. One need look no further than the current "cartoon intifada" to see just how primitve a great number of Muslims are.
Religious Muslims believe that their religion is the only way humanity should live and that heaven can only be attained through their belief system. They have absolutely no respect for any other belief system and consider all other beliefs to an impediment to an Islamic lifestyle and, therefore, to be fought to the point of death. To a Muslim, mankind must either submit to Islam or is condemned to hell. The slightest impediment to a Pan Islamic world is to be treated as an impediment to be destroyed. This means... whatever it takes even if one commits suicide and kills innocent victims in the process. The only difference between Radical Islamists and the rest of the Islamic world is the willingness to act on it.
That is why when the Twin Towers came down at the hand of Islamist terrorists the rest of the Islamic world cheered. It was a mark in the win column for them. They perceive the US and its support for Israel as the greatest current impediment to the goal of a world run by Islamic law. To be sure there were many Muslims who rejected and condemned the attacks. But not with any real sincerity and it was always followed by “well, we have to look at the source of the problem”... (a euphemism for Israel).
Islam cannot by definition countenance a State of Israel. The vast majority of Muslims do not think Jews have any right what-so-ever to be there. It doesn’t matter to them that before the Balfour declaration in an under developed Israel there were hardly any Arabs other than Bedouins in that location. It doesn’t matter that Palestinians were invented as a group well past the founding of the state. It doesn’t really have anything to do with who was there first. It has to do with their view that the Jews do not belong there. The land is theirs theologically. They do not recognize our legitimate religious claims to the land promised to us by God. They think the promise was made to Yishmael, not Yitzchak.
So all the terrorism really boils down to the Jewish people usurping their holy Islamic land. And whether it be Palestinians themselves or the non Arab Iranians, or the secular Iraq of Sadaam Hussein, or the fanatic Wahabism of Saudi Arabia... they blame all of their ills on the Jews. Not too much unlike like Hitler, they look at all Jews as the source of their problem and believe just about any negative story about us as truth.
This does not mean to say that Palestinians aren’t suffering at our hands. Of course they are. But, they have brought it upon themselves by killing our people. In order to have security we now target Palestinians for extra surveillance which by its nature causes them tremendous hardship. The hatred is thereby increased so that many a young Arab has enough of a reason to hate us even if he didn’t start out with the religious hatred against Jews preached at them from the Madrosses and Mosques for many, many decades. But of course that have that as the starting point of hatred anyway.
All of this is really a prelude to what I am about to say and doesn’t really scratch the surface of the problem. But I hope it at least sets the stage.
There is a problem in how the US government is addressing the terrorism threat. Only recently has there begun a realization of the real problem. The President has... and still is... referring to the problem as the war on terror. Occasionally he speaks of radical Islam as the problem and then immediately follows it up with apologetics about separating Islam from Radical Islam. This is incorrect. Radical Islam is merely the military wing of Islam in its Jihad against the non Islamic world. All of Islam agrees that an Islamic world is the ultimate goal. They don’t all actively pursue it as a goal only because they realize the absolute impracticability of it and futility of any actions on that front. But don’t think for a minute that the Islamist suicide bombers aren’t looked at as heroes and martyrs by the vast majority of them. They most certainly are. I’m not sure if the President realizes this.
The war in Iraq was initiated as a response to 911. There is no doubt about this in my mind. Iraq was a legitimate target in this respect because its government led by Saadam Hussein perpetrated crimes against humanity and was believed to be seeking weapons of mass destruction. Additionally he was certainly making payments to families who gave up sons as suicide bombers in Israel. He was and still is a true Jew hater. It is also absolutely a fact that the vast majority of terrorists and suicide bombers are being drawn to Iraq to fight the Jihad against the US. So it is imperative to continue the fight there until we win. Any other option would be to surrender to Islam who would then take control of Iraq and make it a world terrorist base with the goal of wiping Israel off the face of the map and then destroying the West and replacing it with Pan Islamism.
But I submit that Iraq was the wrong target. True it was an evil dictatorship that deserved to be overthrown but it was a secular dictatorship, not a religious one. It was not Iraq that was preaching Radical Islam but Iran. They should have been the target.
I realize that there are many more factors as to why the US chose to attack Iraq over Iran, but the fact is that if Islamism has its base it is Iran. At no time is this more evident than now with this new President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. But it should not have been an epiphany. Anyone with even an ounce of knowledge about what Iran is all about, ...who runs it, and what it has been doing since its take-over by radical Islam 26 years ago... should have realized that this would have been a more logical target than Iraq.
It is Iran that actually attacked the US when it took over the US embassy in 1980 and took the embassy staff hostage. It is Iran that exported terrorism to Lebanon by creating and funding the first terrorist group to practice suicide bombing... Hezboallah. They are the ones who export Islamist terrorism and ideology more than any other single country and have forced Islamic law on its own citizenry. They preach hatred, mostly of Jews but also of Western values... in their schools and import that message to the all Muslims of the world
Currently, they are the ones who are flaunting their arrogance by proceeding with the development of nuclear weaponry and the proclaimed goal of wiping the Jewish state off the map. They are the ones who unabashedly say that the Jews made up the holocaust. And spread anti-Semitic literature such as the discredited “Protoclols of the Elders of Zion” as truth. They espouse the beliefs of virtually all Muslims in the Arab world and because of their religious zeal, feel empowered to flaunt and promote those beliefs more publicly than any other Arab Nation. So, THEY are the ones who need to be stopped and should have been attacked, not Iraq. That is the “bud” which should have been “nipped”.
Is it too late? Is our military over stretched? I don’t know, but I think that the US government would do well to re-asses its position with respect to Iran, re-examine the root of the problem and connect with it head on. They have declared a religious war, a Jihad, with the rest of the world and they believe they have God on their side. Nothing will stop a true believer from carrying out his mission, no matter what the odds. It is time the US recognized this and gave them the religious war they asked for. They started the Jihad. We ought to finish it. There is no other way to proceed but to destroy the enemy and the enemy is Islam.
