At long last
the Western world is waking up to the fact that it faces a real and present
danger - nothing less than a determined assault on its very existence. Appeasement is not a practical option. This is
an enemy fired up by religious zeal, utterly committed to its unacceptable purposes
and not susceptible to discussion or negotiation. In short, as much as
liberal opinion in the civilized world may flinch from the prospect, there is a
battle to be fought and won. On Wednesday, September 3 – coincidentally 75
years to the day after Britain declared war on Nazi Germany – US President Obama said: “Our objective is
clear, and that is to degrade and destroy ISIL [the self-styled Islamic State(IS)].”
For his part, UK prime minister David Cameron has vowed that IS will "be squeezed out of
existence". His remarks, made to a packed House of Commons, appeared to be
preparing the ground for a broad coalition to drive out IS, following a formal
invitation from the Iraqi government. At
last week’s NATO summit in Wales,
US Secretary of State John Kerry pulled together a coalition made up of Britain,
France, Germany, Canada, Turkey, Italy, Poland and Denmark, along with
Australia, to do just that, however long it takes.
It has certainly taken a long time for the penny to drop, but now the foe
has been identified –
exemplified by the so-called Islamic State, currently spreading across northern
Iraq and Syria, but far from the enemy’s only manifestation. Old inhibitions among the politically correct
about being dubbed Islamophobic, are rapidly being replaced by an
acknowledgement of the distinction that must be drawn between Islam and
Islamist.
Islamist extremists are scattered across the world in a great variety of
organizations and groupings. To mention
but a few there is Boko Haram (meaning “Western education is sin”) active in
the north of Nigeria; Al-Shabaab,
centred in Somalia, but active in Kenya and across east Africa; Al-Qaida, now headed
by the Egyptian Ayman al-Zawahiri, and active in a variety of countries
including Algeria, northern Mali, and Yemen; the Al-Nusra Front, an official
offshoot of al-Qaida and one of Syria's main rebel groups, though at
loggerheads with IS; the Ansar al-Sharia organizations in Tunisia and Libya; Hezbollah
in Lebanon, now fighting alongside President Bashar Assad’s forces in Syria;
and, of course, Hamas, the Palestinian branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose
goal is the destruction of the state of Israel.
Not all see eye-to-eye on all issues, but all are united in their loathing
of the West, its democracy, its way of life, and its values. All are determined to undermine and
eventually destroy it, spread their concept of extremist Islam back across what
was once the Muslim caliphate, and then beyond it and, if they can, subject the
world to their version of Sharia law.
The
founding of the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928 was a reaction to the formal
abolition of the Ottoman caliphate by Kemal Ataturk in 1924. The Brotherhood’s founder, Hassan al-Banna,
declared: “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose
its law on all nations and to extend its power to the entire planet.”
The
process of infiltrating Europe, as a precursor to destroying it from
within, is well under way. Political author Lorenzo Vidino has demonstrated how, since the early 1960s, Muslim
Brotherhood members and sympathisers have “moved to Europe and slowly but
steadily established a wide and well-organised network of mosques, charities
and Islamic organisations”. The Brotherhood has active branches in the US, the
UK, Germany, France and numerous other European countries. This systematic
penetration into Europe of extreme Islamist notions expounded by extremist
clerics, explains in large measure how young Muslims across the continent have
been indoctrinated to the extent of volunteering to undertake suicide terrorist
attacks and of flocking to join the ranks of IS in Iraq and Syria. It explains, to the evident dismay of both President
Obama and prime minister David Cameron, how it is that a young British-born
Muslim has apparently beheaded, on video, two American journalists, and
threatened to do the same to a third, this time a Briton.
It is not only in Europe
that civilized values are under attack. On September 4, al-Qaida leader Ayman
al-Zawahiri announced a new branch intent on bringing its holy war to India and
South-East Asia. He announced that Islamist
militants in India had been united under one commander, pledging allegiance to
Mullah Omar, the Afghan Taliban leader. It would, he said, "liberate
Muslim lands" and "revive its caliphate". Zawahiri’s support
for a caliphate under Mullah Omar affirms his rejection of the global caliphate
proclaimed by IS. The split between al-Qaida and its offshoot, IS, is
complete.
The emergence of modern international terrorism, practised so
assiduously by Islamist extremists, is directly connected with the Arab-Israel conflict.
In particular, the outcome of the Six Day War in June 1967 led Palestinian
leaders to realize that the Arab world was unable to defeat Israel militarily. So in the late-1960s the belief developed within Arab nationalist movements that terrorism could be effective in reaching
political goals. Radical
Palestinians took advantage of modern communication and transportation systems
to internationalize their struggle. They, and the Islamist extremists who followed, launched a series of hijackings, kidnappings,
bombings, shootings and spectacular onslaughts against Western targets, as in
New York on September 11, 2001.
These
ruthless and indiscriminate terrorist methods, refined by ever more
sophisticated techniques, have characterised the activities of those extreme
Islamists who have taken the fight into the Western world. The same methods are used by Hamas, the de
facto rulers of the Gaza strip, in their more limited vendetta against the
very existence of the state of Israel. Despite their differences, which are
many, Hamas, like the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaida, IS, and the other jihadi
groupings, have the identical overall aim –
the eventual triumph of their particular extreme version of Islam over the
values of the West, which they despise.
It
is in this sense that, for the past forty years, Israel has been in the
vanguard of the fight against the forces that would undermine, tear down, and
replace the open, democratic way of life that the vast majority in the Western
world cherish. But realization comes
slowly. Yes, the inhuman slaughter of
the two journalists seems to have stiffened the resolve of some Western leaders
to bring down IS. Yet the US, unhappy at
Egyptian President al-Sisi’s clampdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, has apparently
been pressurizing the new Egyptian administration to allow Islamists to
participate in the political process.
“The
Americans,” said the former Egyptian foreign minister, Nabil Fahmy, in
a television interview on August 31, “have not appropriately learned the
lessons of dealing with terrorism.”
It
is a lesson that President Obama, the leader of the Western world, will simply
have to learn.
Published in the Jerusalem Post on-line, 7 September 2014:
Published in the Eurasia Review, 6 September 2014:
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