Government's Jihad on JihadDHS can’t prove Islam is not a big part of the problem any more than President Bush or Secretary Rice can show that it is a religion of peace and love. Instead, the administration enshrines as policy its most fervent hopes, as if hopes were facts. Naysayers are dared to naysay . . . at the risk of ostracism from polite, media-driven society — which on this matter, as on precious few others, is four-square Bushy.
Thus, for example, the guidance asserts: “The fact is that Islam and secular democracy are fully compatible — in fact, they can make each other stronger. Senior officials should emphasize this positive fact.” Well, while saying so may get me dropped from the Christmas — er, Holiday card list, this “positive fact” is not a fact at all. At best, it’s a theory . . . and a dubious one, to say the least.
It is, of course, a foundational error to speak of “Islam” as if it were a monolith. There are many Islams in the sense of doctrinal interpretations. (Last week, for instance, reports from Indonesia confirmed that one sect of the Religion of Peace had stoned and torched a mosque belonging to a different sect, the Ahmadi, because the latter accepts neither Mohammed as the final prophet nor jihad as a divine injunction.) Yet, whether one conceives of a single Islam or many, Islamic culture does not have a secular democratic tradition.
The very concept of secular is foreign to Islam, which aspires to be not just a religious creed but a full-blown cultural, legal and political system, sprung from precepts dictated to Mohammed by Allah Himself. Democratic systems, moreover, are based on notions of liberty and equality; in stark contrast, many Islamic traditions (drawing on bedrock Islamic theology) reject freedom of conscience, freedom to make law that countermands sharia, economic freedom, equality for Muslims and non-Muslims, and equality for men and women, to name just a few key divergences.
But even if none of this were so, mightn’t Occam ’s razor have reared its head by now? After 14 centuries, there is no secular democratic tradition in Islamic society. Given that secular democracy is the best guarantor of liberty and prosperity, is it not self-evident that some precinct of the ummah would have adopted it by now, without any help from us, if Islamic society were innately receptive?
After paying lip-service to the notion that “the terms we use must be accurate and descriptive,” the DHS guidance urges that we drop jihad from our lexicon, despite its being a perfectly accurate description of what al-Qaeda and other Muslim terrorist groups are doing. Why? Because, according to DHS and the “influential Muslim Americans” with whom it consulted, the true meaning of jihad is the subject of honest to goodness dispute. Indeed, DHS, in its best moral equivalence, frames the disputants in this supposed controversy as “polemic[ists]” — rather than, as is actually the case, one group accurately invoking jihad to convey the concept of holy war pitted against another trying, whether out of good intentions or duplicity, to reinvent jihad as the virtuous striving to become a better person.
Columbus Townhall > Forum > Politics > National > Defense / War on Terror (Moderators: Peter, CTH Public Relations)
Topic: Government's Jihad on Jihad
