Professor Shapes Bush Rhetoric
White House Taps Ohio Scholar's Writings on Radical Islam
washingtonpost.com
By Dana Milbank
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, September 26, 2001; Page A06
In the first days after the Sept. 11 attacks, the writings of an obscure law professor from Cleveland named David F. Forte landed on desks in the White House and throughout the national security apparatus. Those words would form the moral and rhetorical basis of the U.S. war effort.
"Their enmity is not just directed against us," Forte wrote of Osama bin Laden and his radical Islamic associates. "They also mean to hijack Islam itself."
"What they represent is a tradition that Islam early on rejected as a perversion of the universal message of its prophet," he continued.
"They are not religious," Forte argued. "They are a new form of fascist tyranny."
When President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress on Thursday, his words bore a striking resemblance to Forte's.
"The terrorists are traitors to their own faith, trying, in effect, to hijack Islam itself," Bush said.
"The terrorists practice a fringe form of Islamic extremism that has been rejected by Muslim scholars and the vast majority of Muslim clerics, a fringe movement that perverts the peaceful teaching of Islam," the president told Congress.
"We're not deceived by their pretenses to piety," he intoned. "They follow in the path of fascism, Nazism and totalitarianism."
The wording was no coincidence. Though White House speechwriters have been forbidden from speaking publicly, they acknowledge the scholar's influence, saying Bush's speech was "Forte-ed."
Following the attacks on the Pentagon and World Trade Center that left more than 6,500 missing or dead, the Bush administration needed a way to channel the nation's anger, a way to turn a thirst for revenge against a faceless terrorist into an enduring national cause.
The writings of Forte, a devout Catholic who has fought against persecution of Christians around the world, offered the philosophical grounding for such a cause. The war would not be a Judeo-Christian "crusade" -- a word Bush and aides unwisely used at first -- against the Muslim world. It would be a battle of civilization -- Jewish, Christian, Muslim and others -- against godless barbarians and fascists. This kept the American cause on the moral high ground, while giving moderate Arab states a rationale to join the fight.
"The legitimization of radical Islam has gone too far, and we've let it go too far," said Forte in an interview from his office at Cleveland State University. "This reaction is bringing to the fore what most Muslims believe: That's not us. The point has to be that these people are a threat to all of mankind."
Undoubtedly, such words help to focus American anger away from a general hatred of Muslims and Arabs and toward an ideological hatred of radical regimes. Whether such an argument will be understood among average Muslims and moderate Arab leaders abroad is unclear. Forte, after all, speaks as a Christian who has studied Islamic law but does not live under it. "We can't say what true Islam is," he acknowledged.
Complicating the task is the lack of American Muslim leaders making the case themselves. Saudi Arabia yesterday declared that the Taliban is "damaging the good name of Muslims all around the world." But the Washington-based Council on American-Islamic Relations declines to take a position. "Obviously, people who crash a plane into a building are not following Islamic beliefs," spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said. "But as far as governments, we don't get into these issues. That's just not our mandate from our community."
Bin Laden is trying to cast the battle as Islam versus the West. A statement purported to be issued by bin Laden this week praised "martyrs in Islam's battle in this era against the new Christian-Jewish crusade led by the big crusader Bush under the flag of the Cross."
Hudson Institute scholar Michael J. Horowitz, a former Reagan administration official, began on Sept. 12 sending Forte's writing to White House speechwriter David Frum, State Department official John Bolton, Defense Department official Douglas J. Feith and National Security Council staffer Elliott Abrams. Horowitz had been impressed by Forte's 1996 testimony on international religious persecution to the House Committee on International Relations.
"The president needs to know that he is on the side of Islam when he takes on radical Islamist thugs, and Forte is the man who can best arm the administration with the intellectual tools it needs to achieve its coming missions," Horowitz wrote to the White House aides.
Forte, who has a law degree from Columbia University, was chief counsel to Jeane Kirkpatrick when she was U.S. representative to the United Nations. Though his specialty is constitutional law, he has been a regular at government hearings on religious persecution. His argument: Bin Laden and other radicals are from the tradition of the Kharajites, a faction that violently opposed all other adherents of Islam as impure. Though the Kharajites were defeated centuries ago, Forte says, their beliefs have been revived by bin Laden and others.
"Partly because of the timidity of the West, these radicals have gained influence," Forte has argued. Because the West has "patronizingly assumed that radical violence was an essential part of the Islamic faith," Western leaders have helped to legitimize "those whom Islam fought so earnestly to rid itself of at its beginning."
The argument may be useful both in convincing Americans of the righteousness of their cause and in giving moderate Muslim countries reason to oppose the terrorists. But without more Muslim support for the argument, the conflict risks descending into what bin Laden has called it: a crusade of Judeo-Christian civilization against Islamic civilization. Asked whether it would be more convincing to have Muslims rather than a Cleveland Catholic making the case against the radicals, Horowitz replied ruefully: "It sure would."
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