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By Paul J Cella Posted in free speech | the Jihad | War — Comments (7) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Now this is impressive. Writing in the New York Daily News, a former Jihadist by the name of Tawfik Hamid proclaims some hard truths:

The real way to strengthen moderate Muslims in their fight against the radicals is to spotlight radical teachings and flush out those who believe in them. [. . .]

This is especially true in war: define your enemy correctly, and you will rally legitimate allies to your side. Blur what a battle is about and, stuck in the muddle, you are bound to lose.

Yes, the word "jihad" has several, including some peaceful, meanings — but that doesn't change the fact that most authoritative Islamic texts and systems of jurisprudence maintain that its primary meaning is "warfare to subjugate the world to Islam." Closely allied with this predominant concept of jihad is the threefold choice given to infidels: conversion, submission and tribute or death. And it is simply a fact that jihad, as taught by Sunni Islam's four schools of jurisprudence, is either a war to defend Muslims or to impose Islam on non-Muslims.

It may be uncomfortable to admit these facts — and doing so may run certain risks. But it is true, and the costs of ignoring reality are far higher than the benefits of glossing over it.

Amen to all that, and read on.

Mr. Hamid continues, rounding out his argument: “One of the most devious tactics used by the Islamists” is that common posture of outrage, bluster, intimidation which forbids “speaking the plain truth about this virulent strain of Islam, for fear it might alienate or offend millions of moderate Muslims.” I have heard this very argument innumerable times. The effect of it is simple and ghastly: it “ensures that no one will directly confront their violent ideologies and the books that contain them — since, under Islamic Sharia law, no one is even allowed to challenge their contents.”

Politicians and opinion-makers in the West have over time adopted a peculiar rhetorical habit in response to this “devious tactic”: the piling up of adjectives to describe the enemy. “Radical Islamic extremism,” “Violent Islamic radicalism,” etc — anything to indicate that, in the speaker’s mind, there is an unbridgeable conceptual gap between Islam as such and the enemy.

The vital thing to understand is that this rhetorical habit is not a product of study and experience; it does not emerge from facts and history. It is imposed a priori from a frame of mind, an ideology even, borne of conformity to what we call political correctness.

To repeat my position: we must keep open, in our own minds and in the public square, the possibility that our enemy is the organic inheritor of the primitive orthodoxy of Islam. I do not use the word “primitive” as a derogative, but merely as a descriptor. The Jihadists are not innovators. Have you read their literature? It is stale, repetitious stuff. Its pattern was set hundreds of years ago. These men move in a tradition that is not of their own making. It is the tradition wherein the “predominant concept of jihad is the threefold choice given to infidels: conversion, submission and tribute or death.”

Now in my view we what we should emphatically not keep open, is the possibility that this “threefold concept of jihad” is acceptable. That question we should close with a loud and decisive thud, like the heavy door to a crypt where death and rot do dwell. We should remove the promulgation of this doctrine from the protection of our laws, and expose its agitators, theorists, preachers, recruiters, and provocateurs to the harassment, disrepute, and disability of proscription. We should declare it, in the grand gestures of public resolution so common in republics, anathema to our political tradition and moral imagination. We should have no truck with this wicked system.

For we are a people who hold certain truths, and by their declaration elevated ourselves to that “separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God” entitle us; and I’ll be damned if these truths do not include a loathing of wicked systems.

In any case, I salute Mr. Hamid and The New York Daily News, for writing and printing one of the better articles on the Jihad yet seen in the press.