One woman’s view on how to confront Islamic terrorism
CHRISTIANITY comes in so many flavors that no one is surprised by the wide gulf of beliefs between, say, adherents of Seventh Day Adventism and those of Roman Catholicism. Yet the West continues to view Islam as a united belief system.
It’s far from that. Therein lies a profound lesson in how to counter the violent extremism of some Muslims.
Terror on a London bridge this month was but the latest example of radical beliefs carried to an extreme. It’s not enough to say that most Muslims aren’t violent. American leaders, particularly those in the “tolerant” wing of politics, need a greater understanding of how Islamic beliefs have evolved.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali offers such an understanding in an insightful Hoover Institution publication released March 22. Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist and author. Her conclusion is that to battle Islamic terrorism, any American president needs the tools to “dismantle the infrastructure” of dawa — which Ali described as activities by Islamists “to win adherents and enlist them in a campaign to impose sharia law on all societies.”
Dawa (also spelled dawah) is a component of what she calls “political Islam,” a distinct, radical and dangerous movement within the Islamic faith.
Donald Trump has set this country on a distinctly different path to battling terrorism than the one chosen by his predecessor. At times, Ali notes, Barack Obama seemed more worried about Islamophobia than about Islamic terrorism. In so doing, he put the country on a more dangerous road. The same is true of many European leaders, who continue to oversimplify the radical Islamic threat.
Trump minces no words on the subject, but it’s not clear if he also doesn’t recognize the challenges presented by political Islam. Here is the crux of the problem, in Ali’s words:
“Political Islam rejects any kind of distinction between religion and politics, mosque and state. Political Islam even rejects the modern state in favor of a caliphate. My central argument is that political Islam implies a constitutional order fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution and with the constitution of liberty that is the foundation of the American way of life.”
Since 9/11, Ali posits, nearly $2 trillion has been spent on waging war and reconstruction in Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Some $3.6 trillion was spent on warfare and homeland security from 2001 through 2016. Despite the loss of more than 5,000 lives in the armed services of Western allies, political Islam is on the rise around the world.
Dawa isn’t the same as jihad. Instead, says Ali, it’s the “subversive, indoctrinating precursor to jihad.” Thus, tolerance for radicals who “merely” preach hate rather than crash aircraft into buildings is misguided and potentially lethal.
Ali’s comprehensive list of recommendations for countering dawa includes many items the tolerant class would find objectionable. These include increased surveillance, immigration restrictions and IRS targeting of dawa-supporting groups in this country.
It goes without saying that a belief system diametrically opposed to the constitutional protections enjoyed by Americans will fight any crackdown using legal arguments based on those protections.
As political Islam continues to spread its poison, our leaders are eager to prosecute acts of violence but loath to mitigate the ideology that inspires those acts. Unless this changes, dawa-inspired jihadism will inspire many more incidents like the one on a London bridge this spring.