The American Perception Of Islam Is What Is Defeating Us
Col. Tom Snodgrass (Ret.), Right Side News
Islamic Jihadist History
The current Islamic attack on Western Civilization is the third major wave of jihad by Muslims with their religion-mandated objective of conquering the non-Muslim world.
The first Arab-led jihad occurred between approximately 632 AD to 750 AD and conquered territory in a continuous swath from southern France through North Africa and the Middle East to northern India.
The second major wave of Turk-led jihad took place roughly from 1071 to 1683. The Turks focused their jihad on the eastern end of the Mediterranean striking north into Europe as far as Austria and northeast into present day Kazakhstan, as well as pushing southeast and expanding Muslim territory all the way into far south India. Although Islamic aggression has continued unabated against the non-Muslim world since 632 to the present, the 750 and 1683 dates signify the high water marks in terms of terrain conquered and subjected to Muslim domination.
The distinguishing characteristic of the success of these historic waves of Islamic jihadist aggression was the force of arms of their conventional military armies. Today’s wave of Islamic jihad can be said to have been launched beginning with triumph of the Iranian Islamic Revolution in 1979 over the Shah. However, in contrast to the preceding tides of jihad, the distinguishing characteristic of success has been the offensive combination of small unit insurgency and/or terrorism coupled with stealth jihad conducted through subterfuge and psychological-warfare. This significant change of strategy for the jihadists was wisely chosen after non-Muslim military powers like the United States and Israel established the West’s clear conventional military superiority over Islamic armies in the 1991 Desert Storm campaign and Israel’s decisive military victories of 1967 and 1973.
The New 21st Century Islamic Jihad
The significant change of jihadist strategy has caught the non-Muslim world totally off-guard and without a strategy to deal with this new, 21st century jihad. The primary reasons for the West’s strategic paralysis in the face of this unconventional warfare approach are the same failings that have brought down other extremely successful societies like the Roman Empire. Primarily these debilitating societal factors are the decline in communal morals and values and demoralizing political corruption. When morals, values, and public trust are lost, a society loses its sense of purpose and the will to defend itself.
The loss of purpose and will in US society can be easily seen and verified by recalling the very different patriotic, aggressive responses of the national political leadership and the general US public to the Confederate session from the Union in the defense of the morally objectionable institution of slavery in 1861 and the equally morally objectionable aggression and atrocities of the German and Japanese totalitarian governments in 1941. In both cases, in 1861 and eighty years later in 1941, the national moral conscience was violated and the nation’s existential sense of purpose was challenged. In these historical cases the national leadership and US body politic’s righteous indignation was so outraged that the US societies in two different centuries had the will to endure conflict casualties of approximately four hundred thousand dead for the Union in the Civil War as well as a similar casualty count for the nation in World War II.
Now, compare these fearlessly determined historical US counteractions to the comparatively milquetoast responses of our national leaders and US public to the Islamic existential religious jihad against America since 9/11. Not only did President George W. Bush falsely declare our avowed enemy to represent “peace” immediately after the horrendous Islamic jihadist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, in an even greater flight from reality President Barack H. Obama actually refuses to even associate Islam with the daily death and destruction worldwide, in spite of the fact that the Islamic jihadist perpetrators always proclaim that their atrocities are committed in the name of their god, Allah, through their bloodcurdling scream, Allahu Akbar!
Obviously the president sets the tone and parameters in responding to any attacks on the country, and the president must also mobilize public support for war against the attacking enemy. But in addition the misguided ignorance of Islam on the part of two presidents, leadership and public ignorance of Islam is the first enemy the US must conquer before we can even begin to make progress in stopping the jihadist attacks against this country domestically and overseas.
But overcoming this first enemy that is, ignorance is an even more formidable task than merely educating people about the world conquest mandates in Islamic scripture – the Quran, Sira, Haditha, and the Islamic Sharia jurisprudence, which derives its basis from these three foregoing “sacred” sources – in the end it hinges on disproving Muslim-spread disinformation. The current misconceptions about Islam’s peaceful nature and intentions, so commonly held in the US and in the wider Western world, are not only due to a dearth of information; rather they are primarily due to an effective, multifaceted Islamic psychological-warfare campaign.
The operative principle of this calculated psychological-warfare campaign is that morals-less, values-less, purpose-less, post-Christianity, non-Muslim Westerners will accede to Islam’s Sharia-originated demand that analysis and criticism of Islam is not permitted and that non-Muslim Westerners must confine their participation in intercultural and interfaith dialogues to examination and criticism of only their own religions and culture. It is explained as self-censorship to avoid “Islamophobia.” Because of the degraded state of secular Western culture, the “Islamophobia ploy” has succeeded brilliantly.
Conclusion
The very fundamental action that is required to defeat our first enemy, ignorance of Islam, is that our governmental, media, academic, and religious leaders must educate themselves about Islam, that is, consent to become educated, and then the second fundamental action is that they must begin to represent the truth about the world-conquering jihadist mandate of Islam.
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.” ~ Sun Tzu
At that point it will be up to the American people to break out of the psychological-warfare, Muslim-manipulated ignorance of Islam and its world-imperialist-jihadist mandate, but it takes moral courage to accept the once rejected truth and to renounce widely-believed deceit. We have placed ourselves in this position to be easily manipulated by the rejection of the lessons of our own history. But do we have the moral courage to admit our mistakes and to regain the will to defend Western culture and defeat this existential enemy?