After a quarter-century of willful blindness, it was at least a start. We should note, moreover, that it\u2019s a start we owe to the president-elect. Washington, meaning both parties, had erected such barriers to a rational public discussion of our enemies that breaking through took Trump\u2019s outsized persona, in all its abrasive turns and its excesses. Comparative anonymities (looking down at my shoes, now) could try terrorism cases and fill shelves with books and pamphlets and columns on the ideology behind the jihad from now until the end of time. But no matter how many terrorist attacks Americans endured, the public examination of the enemy was not going to happen unless a credible candidate for the world\u2019s most important job dramatically shifted the parameters of acceptable discourse.
What we Cassandras have really been trying to highlight is a simple fact, as patent as it was unremarkable from the time of Sun Tsu until the 1993 World Trade Center bombing: To defeat the enemy, you must know the enemy \u2014 who he is, what motivates him, what he is trying to achieve. Being willing to name the enemy is a start. But it is just a start \u2014 the beginning, not the end, of understanding.
In his major campaign speech on the subject, Trump asserted that the enemy is \u201cradical Islamic terrorism.\u201d Terrorism, surely, is the business end of the spear, but \u201cradical Islamic terrorism\u201d is an incomplete portrait. Dangerously incomplete? That depends on whether the term (a) is Trump\u2019s shorthand for a threat he realizes is significantly broader than terrorism, or (b) reflects his actual \u2014 and thus insufficient \u2014 grasp of the challenge.
Trump intimated some understanding of this, too. He vowed to \u201cspeak out against the oppression of women, gays, and people of different faith [i.e., non-Muslims].\u201d He promised, in addition, to work with \u201call moderate Muslim reformers in the Middle East.\u201d The objects of radical Islamic oppression are targeted because of ideological tenets that call for dominion by sharia, Islam\u2019s ancient totalitarian law. It is those tenets that reformers are trying to reform.
If ISIS and al-Qaeda disappeared tomorrow, other jihadist networks would take their places. It will be that way until sharia supremacism is discredited and marginalized.
That is a tall order, not to be underestimated. The audience in which the ideology must be discredited is not Western; it does not share our value system \u2014 our sense of what is credible and meritorious. Plus, the sharia that our enemies strive to implement (i.e., \u201cjihad in Allah\u2019s way\u201d) is undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. It will not be easy \u2014 it may not be possible \u2014 to discredit a literalist construction of Islam that has been backed by revered scholars for 14 centuries.
There is, furthermore, an on-the-ground reality of much greater moment than theological infighting: A large percentage of the world\u2019s approximately 1.6 billion Muslims reject sharia supremacism. Many of them provide us with essential help in fighting the enemy. To condemn Islam, rather than those who seek to impose Islam\u2019s ruling system on us, can only alienate our allies. They are allies we need in an ideological conflict.
The sensible strategy, therefore, calls for supporting the Islamic reformers President-elect Trump says he wants to befriend. That would be an epic improvement over outreach to Islamists, whom our government has inanely courted and empowered for a quarter-century. To the extent we can (and that may be limited), we should support the reinterpretation of what Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi courageously acknowledged as \u201cthe corpus of texts and ideas that we [Muslims] have sacralized over the centuries, to the point that departing from them has become almost impossible\u201d even though they are \u201cantagonizing the entire world.\u201d
Sisi, it is worth noting, is a devout Muslim who knows a lot more about Islam than Barack Obama and John Kerry do. In any event, it\u2019s better to confront with open eyes the scripturally rooted ideological foundation of radical Islam. As we\u2019ve seen over the last three presidential administrations (or the last six, if you want to go back to Carter and Khomeini\u2019s revolution), pretending that the ideology does not exist, or that it represents a \u201cfalse Islam,\u201d is fantasy. As a national-security strategy, fantasy is a prescription for failure.
It has been the Obama prescription, right up to the end.
While candidate Trump was demanding that the enemy be named, and me-too Hillary was thus goaded into the occasional mention of \u201cjihadists,\u201d Obama tried to defend his refusal to invoke radical Islam. The defense was classic Obama. Part One was flat wrong: \u201cThere\u2019s no religious rationale ,\u201d he maintained, that would justify\u201d the \u201cbarbarism\u201d in which terrorists engage \u2014 something that could only be right if we ignore scripture and adopt Obama\u2019s eccentric notion of \u201creligious rationale.\u201d Part Two drew on Obama\u2019s bottomless supply of straw men: \u201c Using the phrase \u2018radical Islam ,\u2019\u201d he lectured, will not make the terrorist threat \u201cgo away\u201d \u2014 as if anyone had claimed it would.
The point, of course, is not that there is talismanic power in uttering an enemy\u2019s identity. It is to convey, to the enemy and to an anxious American public, that our leader comprehends who the enemy is, what the enemy\u2019s objectives are, and what drives the enemy to achieve them.
Obviously, Obama is too smart not to know this. After eight infuriating years, I am beyond trying to fathom whether his intentional gibberish masks some misguided but well-meaning strategy, some dogma to which he is hopelessly beholden, or something more sinister. The imperative now is to address the mess he is leaving behind, not unwind how and why he came to make it.
What does this have to do with our enemy\u2019s ideology? Everything.
Further, radical Islam regards the presence of a sovereign Jewish state in Islamic territory as an intolerable affront. Again, the reason is doctrinal. Do not take my word for it; have a look at the 1988 Hamas Charter (\u201cThe Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement\u201d). Article 7, in particular, includes this statement by the prophet Muhammad:
The Day of Judgement will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say, \u201cO Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.\u201d\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0.\u00a0(Related by al-Bukhari and Muslim).
Understand: Al-Bukhari and Muslim are authoritative collections of hadith. These memorializations of the prophet\u2019s sayings and deeds have scriptural status in Islam. Hamas is not lying \u2014 this story of an end-of-times annihilation of Jews is related, repeatedly, in Islamic scripture. (See, e.g., here .) And please spare me the twaddle about how there are competing interpretations that discount or \u201ccontextualize\u201d these hadith. It doesn\u2019t matter which, if any, interpretation represents the \u201ctrue Islam\u201d (if there is one). What matters for purposes of our security is that millions of Muslims, including our enemies, believe these hadith mean what they say \u2014 unalterable, for all time.
Even after all the mass-murder attacks we have endured over the last few decades, and for all their claptrap about respecting Islam as \u201cone of the world\u2019s great religions,\u201d transnational progressives cannot bring themselves to accept that something as pass\u00e9 as religious doctrine could dictate 21st-century conflicts. So, they tell themselves, the Israeli\u2013Palestinian conflict is simply about territorial boundaries and refugee rights. It could be settled if Israel, which they reckon would never have been established but for a regrettable bout of post-Holocaust remorse, would just make a few concessions regarding land it was never ceded in the first place (conveniently overlooking that East Jerusalem and the West Bank are disputed territories, and were not \u201cPalestinian\u201d when Israel took them in the 1967 war of Arab aggression).
It is not just fantasy but willfully blind idiocy. No one who took a few minutes to understand the ideology of radical Islam would contemplate for a moment a resolution such as the one Obama just choreographed.
We are not merely in a shooting war with jihadists. We are in an ideological war with sharia supremacists. Mass murder is not their sole tactic; they attack at the negotiating table, in the councils of government, in the media, on the campus, in the courtroom \u2014 at every political and cultural pressure point. To defeat jihadists, it is necessary to discredit the ideology that catalyzes them. You don\u2019t discredit an ideology by ignoring its existence, denying its power, and accommodating it at every turn.
President Obama never got this. Will President Trump?
In his campaign, Trump made a welcome start by naming the enemy. Now it is time to know the enemy \u2014 such that it is clear to the enemy that we understand his objectives and his motivation, and that we will deny him because our own principles require it.
That would tell radical Islam that America rejects its objectives as well as its tactics, that we will fight its ideology as well as its terrorism. This is not just about restoring our reputation as a dependable ally. Our security depends on it.<\/p>\n