Mark Steyn on the importance of defining the enemy:
...George W. Bush is relentlessly on message: as he told Islamic bigwigs at the White House the other day, "Our nation is waging a war on a radical network of terrorists, not on a religion and not on a civilization."
Not true. The world is at war not with a Blofeldian "network" of crack evildoers, but with an ideology. Indeed, the evidence from Afghanistan, Chechnya, Bali and North London suggests that it's now the ideology of choice for the world's troublemakers, as Communism once was. In 1989, with the Soviet Union crumbling into irrelevance, poor old Mikhail Gorbachev even received a helpful bit of advice from the cocky young upstart on the block, the Ayatollah Khomeini: "I strongly urge that in breaking down the walls of Marxist fantasies you do not fall into the prison of the West and the Great Satan," wrote the prototype Islamist nutcake. "I openly announce that the Islamic Republic of Iran, as the greatest and most powerful base of the Islamic world, can easily help fill up the ideological vacuum of your system." Yes, indeed, folks. We're the one-stop shop for all your ideological needs: Call today for a free quotation ("Death to the Great Satan!"). The Ayatollah found no takers in the Kremlin, but there's been no shortage of customers elsewhere in the world.
Daniel Pipes and others have argued that this is the Islamists' great innovation -- an essentially political project piggybacking on an ancient religion. In the last year, we've seen the advantages of such a strategy: You can't even identify your enemy without being accused of bigotry and intolerance. What we still can only guess at is the overlap between the ideology and the religion. It seems unlikely that many Muslims in, say, Newark or Calgary or Singapore would wish to be suicide bombers themselves, but what seems clear is that in these and other places there is -- to put it at its most delicate -- a widespread lack of revulsion at the things done in Islam's name. On the one hand, Muslims deny it's anything to do with them: A year ago, in The Ottawa Citizen's coast-to-coast survey of Canadian imams, all but two refused to accept Muslims had been involved in the September 11th attacks. On the other hand, even though it's nothing to do with them, they party: In Copenhagen as in Ramallah, Muslims cheered 9/11; in Keighley, Yorkshire, you couldn't get a taxi that night because the drivers were whooping it up.
This is the real war aim -- or it should be, if we're to have any chance of winning this thing: We have to change the hearts and minds of millions of Muslims, too many of whom are at best indifferent to great evil. "Changing" isn't the same as "winning the hearts and minds," which is multiculti codespeak for pre-emptively surrendering and agreeing not to disagree with them. For over a year now, nothing has been asked of Muslims, at home or abroad: you can be equivocal about bin Laden and an apologist for suicide bombers, and still get a photo-op with Dubya; you can be a member of a regime whose state TV stations and government-owned newspapers call for Muslims to kill all Jews and Christians, and you'll still get to kick your shoes off with George and Laura at the Crawford ranch.
This is not just wrong but self-defeating. As long as Dubya and Colin Powell and the rest are willing to prance around doing a month-long Islamic minstrel-show routine for the amusement of the A-list Arabs, Muslims will rightly see it for what it is: a sign of profound cultural weakness. Healthy relationships require at least some token reciprocity -- I said as much during the Monica business, and it never occurred to me the same problem would rear its ugly head during this Administration.
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