Bennett: We're in for The Fight of Our Lives

[Editor’s Note: The following are excerpts from The Fight of Our Lives: Knowing the Enemy, Speaking the Truth, and Choosing to Win the War Against Radical Islam by Bill Bennett and Seth Liebsohn.]

As we were working on final edits, the news broke that terrorists from al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula had attempted to place bombs on cargo airliners headed to the United States. The day before, the news from the war front was in Washington, D.C., where it was revealed that one Farooque Ahmed (who lived in Ashburn, Virginia) was arrested for plotting to blow up Metro stations in the Washington area. Just the week before that, the nation was in an uproar over NPR’s firing of contributor Juan Williams for his statement made on Fox News: “[W]hen I get on the plane, I got to tell you, if I see people who are in Muslim garb and I think, you know, they are identifying themselves first and foremost as Muslims, I get worried. I get nervous.”

Williams said his fears stemmed in part from the statement delivered in federal court by Faisal Shahzad (the Times Square bomber), during his sentencing hearing in early October. It was in open court in New York City that Shahzad told the judge and the world, “In the name of Allah, the most gracious, the most merciful, this is but one life. If I am given a thousand lives, I will sacrifice them all for the sake of Allah fighting this cause, defending our lands, making the word of Allah supreme over any religion or system.” He continued:

[B]race yourselves, because the war with Muslims has just begun. Consider me only a first droplet of the flood that will follow me. And only this time it’s not imperial Japan or Germany, Vietnam or Russian communism. This time it’s the war against people who believe in the book of Allah and follow the commandments, so this is a war against Allah. So let’s see how you can defeat your Creator, which you can never do. Therefore, the defeat of U.S. is imminent and will happen in the near future, inshallah [“Allah willing”], which will only give rise to much awaited Muslim caliphate, which is the only true world order.1

Just prior to this event, ABC News’s Christiane Amanpour hosted a special forum attempting to resolve the question “Should Americans Fear Islam?” The show would have been nearly unremarkable and forgettable save for one of Amanpour’s panelists, the British-born former president of the Society of Muslim Lawyers, Anjem Choudary. There, Choudary stated to the world: “[T]his idea that you have moderate Muslims and you have radical Muslims, you know, it’s complete nonsense. A Muslim is the one who submits to the command of the creator. If he submits, he is a practicing Muslim. If he is not, then he should be practicing.” He continued on, to state his view of what Islam–and he–stands for when asked by Amanpour if Americans should fear Islam: “We do believe, as Muslims, the East and the West will one day be governed by the Sharia. Indeed, we believe that one day, the flag of Islam will fly over the White House.”

Just prior to this episode, in September 2010, Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad addressed the United Nations in New York City, saying, among other things, that the notion that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11 was merely a theory and it was equiprobable that “some segments within the U.S. government orchestrated the attack to reverse the declining American economy and its grips on the Middle East in order to save the Zionist regime . . . The majority of the American people as well as most nations and politicians around the world agree with this view.”

And even since all of this, as this book was going to typesetting, a series of other incidents unfolded: The first Obama-ordered terrorist trial of a Guantánamo detainee who was moved into our civilian court system, a test case if you will, was found not guilty on all but one of almost three hundred criminal charges based on his complicity in the 1998 African embassy bombings; a nineteen-year old Muslim immigrant in Oregon was arrested after attempting to detonate a bomb at a Portland, Oregon Christmas tree ceremony; a U.S.-born convert to Islam was arrested for attempting to set off a bomb at a military recruitment center near Baltimore; Sweden was targeted by a terrorist bombing attack aimed at Christmas shoppers in Stockholm; and nine Muslims were charged in Great Britain in a plot to blow up the U.S. Embassy there (all of this, after the end of combat operations in Iraq had been announced and a great number of troops had been withdrawn from there).

From just this recent period, we can see how hard it is to keep up with events in a book that takes several months of lead time to publish and distribute. But perhaps one thing is clear from the above chronology: whatever hope and promise the Obama administration thought it could employ to soften the resolve of our enemies by, among other things, apologizing for our country’s past behavior, stating we had engaged in the torture of our enemies and that we no longer would do so, trying to open more dialogue with Iran, promising to close Guantánamo Bay, pledging to move Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial from a military tribunal to a civilian court, and refraining from using such words as terrorism in the context of Islam, they had failed. None of those policies, none of that attitude, would appease an enemy sworn to our destruction. Radical Islam did not care about Guantánamo or enhanced interrogation. It cared that the United States of America existed and was simply in its way.

On Iran:

How a regime treats its children in war–does it protect them, or use them?–is a good test for the regime’s legitimacy and designs. During Iran’s war against Iraq in the 1980s, the mullocracy showed us its view of life, children’s life, by sending out preteens and teenagers to sweep minefields in advance of the Revolutionary Guard. They had no particular training or military equipment. The mines would be discovered as bits of the child scattered to the four winds. Sensitive to the likelihood of death, the mullahs provided each child with little plastic toy keys that promised to unlock paradise after the bombs detonated. Waves of children were so employed, marching into enemy fire while mines blew beneath their feet. Khomeini ordered half a million of the keys to supply the little martyrs.

These child minesweepers were part of, were members of, the Basiji movement. This is the Iranian movement that President Ahmadinejad praises and whose official scarf he wears in public.

At this point, it is worth considering what Iran analyst Michael Ledeen has observed: “If you want to know what they will do to us, look at what they do to their own people.”

Iran abroad is no better than Iran at home. It has been and is a financier of terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and Hezbollah–the same Hezbollah that has been targeting Americans and America’s allies since 1983, in bombings, hijackings, and shoot- ings everywhere from Beirut to Saudi Arabia to Argentina. And, there are now serious concerns that Hezbollah is operating in Venezuela.

Iran has also entered the battlefield against us in Iraq. Members of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard have invaded Iraq to fight us and our allies there, and military leaders have shown displays of recovered rocket-propelled grenades and one of “the most feared weapons faced by American and Iraqi troops” (a “canister designed to explode and spit out a molten ball of copper that cuts through armor”) made in and smuggled from Iran.

And we have yet to discuss Iran’s nuclear ambitions…

When President Ronald Reagan spoke of the Soviet Union as the evil empire and was criticized by the international foreign policy establishment for saying such words, two big and important things happened: (1) the Soviet Union became no more aggressive than it already had been, and (2) the dissidents in the Soviet Union were, for the first time in years, emboldened and given hope.

Here is how former-Soviet prisoner Natan Sharansky put it in an interview some years later when asked what it meant to him and his fellow prisoners when President Reagan so labeled the Soviet Union:

There was a long list of all the Western leaders who had lined up to condemn the evil Reagan for daring to call the great Soviet Union an evil empire right next to the front-page story about this dangerous, terrible man who wanted to take the world back to the dark days of the Cold War. This was the moment. It was the brightest, most glorious day. Finally a spade had been called a spade. Finally, Orwell’s Newspeak was dead. President Reagan had from that moment made it impossible for anyone in the West to continue closing their eyes to the real nature of the Soviet Union. It was one of the most important, freedom-affirming declarations, and we all instantly knew it. For us, that was the moment that really marked the end for them, and the beginning for us. The lie had been exposed and could never, ever be untold now.

A far cry different from putting the prisoners and the leadership in the same moral position as President Obama had done in 2009 with his New Year wishes to the leadership and people of Iran, a far cry different from speaking of the Soviet leaders and the Americans’ shared commitment to humanity, which President Obama had done with the Iranians.

“Confusion,” wrote Nobel Laureate Elie Wiesel, is “when good and evil are put on the same plane and the wicked receive the countenance of the just.”

On the American Agreement:

There is a basic thirst in America to treat all religions with respect and, at the same time, an ingrained distaste for openly discussing various religious theologies critically in polite society. This thirst and attendant distaste comes from our very beginnings and is enshrined in our Bill of Rights. There is no greater explication of the notion of religious freedom than that provided by our first president, George Washington, in his letter to the Touro Synagogue in Rhode Island in 1790. Washington penned:

All possess alike liberty of conscience and immunities of citizenship. It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights. For happily the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection, should demean themselves as good citizens, in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

President Washington concluded his letter, quoting from the fourth chapter of the book of the prophet Micah:

“May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other inhabitants; while every one shall sit under his own vine and fig tree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.”

The terms of this implied religious freedom contract were clear: Those who wished to practice their religion here were welcome and free, provided they also followed the laws of the land, remained peaceful, and gave “effectual support” to their country.

In our nonjudgmental modern temperament, we have nurtured the vine and fig trees, we have protected them, and we have built rhetorical and legal fences around them. But we have forgotten and deemphasized and cut down the obligations owed by the other party to this agreement–the expectation that those dwelling under those trees, that those who desire to live under our protection, would obey the laws and give this country their effectual support. That side of the contract is today unattended, if not altogether forgotten.

We should not be embarrassed or reticent to point out that no country has historically or presently granted more rights and freedoms to more religions and differing kinds of religious believers than the United States of America; the few historical caveats to religious practice here only serve to further illustrate this point (note, for example, the refusal to tolerate Mormon polygamy). Once such a religious community brought itself into compliance with neutral laws of general applicability here, once it reformed itself, it was simply left alone, with none to make it afraid.

Given its history it has become jarring, if not offensive, to constantly be told–lectured at–that Islam is a religion of peace. Have Americans treated Muslims in a way that requires such a lecture? Have there been outbreaks of violence against American Muslims beyond the odd nut-job perpetrator? Have we as a country, under both Republican and Democratic Party administrations, not shown a wide berth of tolerance and civil liberty that, for example, might be contradistinguished with how Franklin Roosevelt’s administration and the American people treated Japanese Americans in World War II? It is not America nor the American people that require introspection….