Prince of Bahrain: Real Islamist Threat is Not Terrorism, But ‘Ideology’ and ‘Evil Theocracy’

This article originally appeared in the Washington Times:

In a remarkable but thus-far unnoticed address on Dec. 5, Salman bin Hamad Al-Khalifa, the crown prince of Bahrain (an island kingdom in the Persian Gulf and home to the U.S. Navy’s Fifth Fleet), candidly analyzed the Islamist enemy and suggested important ways to fight it.

He has much to teach Westerners (starting with his hapless UK counterpart, Crown Prince Charles), if only we would listen. Yes, some Western leaders speak about confronting the Islamist ideology, but the majority avoids this issue by resorting to euphemism, obfuscation, and cowardice. Most frustrating are those leaders (like Tony Blair) who deliver powerful speeches without follow-through.

Prince Salman, 45 and widely acknowledged to be the Bahraini royal family’s principal reformer, opens his remarks by addressing the inaccuracy of the phrase, “War on Terror.” The time has come, he says “for us to get rid of” a term that dates back to 9/11. “It is a bit misleading, it is not the entirety and the totality of our conflict” but merely a “tool” and a tactic.

He goes on in flawless English to place the current conflict in historical context: “If I think back in the last century, we faced a very different foe. We faced communism and we faced it together. But when we faced communism we understood it as an ideology. Terrorism is not an ideology.”

He notes that “we are not only fighting terrorists, we are fighting theocrats.” As Salman uses this term, theocrats are men “placed at the top of a religious ideology who [have] the power by religious edict to strip someone … of their hereafter – and use [religious power] for political gains.” They are also tyrants, isolationists, and misogynists who will need to be fought “for a very long time.” He scorns them for being “very much like the seventeenth century” and having “no place in our modern twenty-first” century.

He urges us “to discard the term ‘War on Terror’ and focus instead on the real threat, which is the rise of these evil theocracies”; to this end, he proposes to replace “War on Terror” with his formulation: a “War on Theocrats.” This concept, he hopes, will make it possible to “start to put together the military, social, and political – and maybe even economic – policies in a holistic manner to counter this, as we did with communism.” In perhaps the outstanding line of the speech, he states that “it is the ideology itself that must be combatted. It must be named, it must be shamed, it must be contained, and eventually it must be defeated.”

Read the full story at the Washington Times.