After a Danish movie director at a seminar on “Art, Blasphemy and Freedom of Expression” and a Danish Jew guarding a synagogue were shot dead in Copenhagen, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, the prime minister of Denmark, uttered a familiar trope:
“We are not in the middle of a battle between Islam and the West. It’s not a battle between Muslims and non-Muslims. It’s a battle between values based on the freedom of the individual and a dark ideology.”
This statement — with its echoes of President Obama’s vague references to “violent extremists” uncoupled from the fundamentalist Islam to which said throat-cutting extremists pledge allegiance — scarcely stands up to scrutiny. It is empty talk.
Across a wide swath of territory, in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Yemen, the West has been or is at war, or near-war, with the Muslim world, in a failed bid to eradicate a metastasizing Islamist movement of murderous hatred toward Western civilization.
To call this movement, whose most potent recent manifestation is the Islamic State, a “dark ideology” is like calling Nazism a reaction to German humiliation in World War I: true but wholly inadequate. There is little point in Western politicians rehearsing lines about there being no battle between Islam and the West, when in all the above-mentioned countries tens of millions of Muslims, with much carnage as evidence, believe the contrary.
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The Islamists’ war is against freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, freedom of the press, freedom of blasphemy, sexual freedom — in short, core characteristics of democracies seen by the would-be rebuilders of the Caliphate as signs of Western debasement.
Do not provoke them with cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, some say, show respect for Islam, the peaceful faith of some 1.6 billion people. But what, pray, was the “provocation” of Dan Uzan, the Jewish security guard outside the Copenhagen synagogue?
Islam is a religion that has spawned multifaceted political movements whose goal is power. Islam, as such, is fair game for commentators, caricaturists and cartoonists, whose inclination to mock the depredations of theocracy and political Islam’s cynical uses of the Prophet cannot be cowed by fear.
Over the more than 13 years since Al Qaeda attacked America on 9/11, we have seen trains blown up in Madrid, the Tube and a bus bombed in London, Western journalists beheaded, the staff of Charlie Hebdo slaughtered, Jews killed in France and Belgium and now Denmark. This is not the work of a “dark ideology” but of jihadi terror.
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To speak of a nonspecific “dark ideology,” to dismiss the reality of conflict between the West and Islam, is also to undermine the anti-Islamist struggle of brave Muslims like [Chokri] Belaid — and these Muslims are the only people, ultimately, who can defeat the black-flagged jihadi death merchants.
In my view Brother Cohen runs off the rails there after being on the right track so long. He writes of Islam as a singular, which is the right track. It is a war. Islam "as it is practiced and preached today" (my phrase since 9/11/01) is a political ideology no different than other ideologies, subject, as Cohen says, to the same political attacks, mockery and caricature, and a political ideology with similarities to the Nazi ideology that are hard to miss if you don't have your head buried in the sand.
We defeated the Nazis in war. Thereafter we prohibited Nazism. Cohen says the West has "failed" in its "war" with Islam. The West has failed sure enough, but it has not fought a "war" with Islam as it did the Nazis. The West could make all of Islam and all Muslims disappear in a mushroom cloud in a war. That is self-evident, non-debatable. The war the West has waged and lost as been "for the hearts and minds" of Muslims.
"War," that war, having been waged and lost Cohen therefore says "Muslims are the only people" who can defeat political Islam, who can win the hearts and minds war. Perversely, he offers the example of Chokri Belaid. Perversely because Belaid was murdered by those Muslims he would have reformed. That is impotent, cowardly gibberish. Should we have fought a war for the hearts and minds of "reform" Nazis to save Nazism?
Cohen and the vast majority of people in the West don't have the stomach for nuclear attacks on
Islam. I have gone woolly in the knees there as well. My last iteration on this I believe was that we should constantly attack Islam, conventionally, and provoke Islam in every way so as to bring about
more war and more war and more war, constant war, ever expanding war, from individuals to groups to cities and then to states, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia foremost. That kind of continually escalating conventional war would "provoke," my word years ago, Islam into making the misstep, whatever it would be, that would then soothe the queasy stomachs and steady the quaking knees and bring the nuclear fireball to Mecca, Riyadh and Islamabad. That is war. What the West has been doing for thirteen years has not been war. Do not call it war.
Cohen wants an Islamic Reformation; I want an Islamic Reformation; President Sissi of Egypt wants an Islamic Reformation. That can happen; there is a schism within Islam between Shi'ites and Sunnis. If an Islamic Reformation is to happen it must come from within Islam but it cannot come "only" from within. Islam must be pressured, attacked, threatened with literal extinction from without. The Sunnis kill the moderate Shi'ites. Saudi Wahhabism even more violent. Pakistan is "the global center for political Islam" and inculcates Muslim children in hatred in the madrassas. Does Roger Cohen think Pakistan's Sunnis, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis can be reformed from within? Reformed at all? They cannot be. They cannot be. They must be destroyed.
In my view Brother Cohen runs off the rails there after being on the right track so long. He writes of Islam as a singular, which is the right track. It is a war. Islam "as it is practiced and preached today" (my phrase since 9/11/01) is a political ideology no different than other ideologies, subject, as Cohen says, to the same political attacks, mockery and caricature, and a political ideology with similarities to the Nazi ideology that are hard to miss if you don't have your head buried in the sand.
We defeated the Nazis in war. Thereafter we prohibited Nazism. Cohen says the West has "failed" in its "war" with Islam. The West has failed sure enough, but it has not fought a "war" with Islam as it did the Nazis. The West could make all of Islam and all Muslims disappear in a mushroom cloud in a war. That is self-evident, non-debatable. The war the West has waged and lost as been "for the hearts and minds" of Muslims.
"War," that war, having been waged and lost Cohen therefore says "Muslims are the only people" who can defeat political Islam, who can win the hearts and minds war. Perversely, he offers the example of Chokri Belaid. Perversely because Belaid was murdered by those Muslims he would have reformed. That is impotent, cowardly gibberish. Should we have fought a war for the hearts and minds of "reform" Nazis to save Nazism?
Cohen and the vast majority of people in the West don't have the stomach for nuclear attacks on
Islam. I have gone woolly in the knees there as well. My last iteration on this I believe was that we should constantly attack Islam, conventionally, and provoke Islam in every way so as to bring about
more war and more war and more war, constant war, ever expanding war, from individuals to groups to cities and then to states, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia foremost. That kind of continually escalating conventional war would "provoke," my word years ago, Islam into making the misstep, whatever it would be, that would then soothe the queasy stomachs and steady the quaking knees and bring the nuclear fireball to Mecca, Riyadh and Islamabad. That is war. What the West has been doing for thirteen years has not been war. Do not call it war.
Cohen wants an Islamic Reformation; I want an Islamic Reformation; President Sissi of Egypt wants an Islamic Reformation. That can happen; there is a schism within Islam between Shi'ites and Sunnis. If an Islamic Reformation is to happen it must come from within Islam but it cannot come "only" from within. Islam must be pressured, attacked, threatened with literal extinction from without. The Sunnis kill the moderate Shi'ites. Saudi Wahhabism even more violent. Pakistan is "the global center for political Islam" and inculcates Muslim children in hatred in the madrassas. Does Roger Cohen think Pakistan's Sunnis, Saudi Arabia's Wahhabis can be reformed from within? Reformed at all? They cannot be. They cannot be. They must be destroyed.
