President Trump, when it comes to radical Islam, don't 'build that wall!'
... In his ambitious inaugural address, President Trump vowed that the United States would “eradicate radical Islamic terrorism from the face of the earth.” That is ambitious, to say the least. What we call “radical Islam” is not so radical on much of the earth. What makes it “radical” here in the West is the subject of dispute. According to Washington, it is the practice of violent jihadism. For those with eyes willing to see, though, it is the ideology that animates the jihad: the belief in a divine mission to implement sharia — Allah’s law and blueprint for how life is to be lived, as classically understood for more than a millennium.
A bedrock of that ancient law is “oneness.” From a theological standpoint, the oneness and indivisibility of God. From a philosophical standpoint, the oneness of and indivisibility of life — the rejection of the Western principle of separate political and spiritual spheres. And from a strategic standpoint, the oneness and indivisibility of the mission: jihadists, jurisprudents, imams, and activists all working toward the single aim of governance by sharia norms.
The mission does not accept such Westphalian impediments as national boundaries. It seeks a global caliphate. It grasps that tactics must vary from place to place — in Islamic societies, an iron fist works best; in the West, stealth attacks and exploitation of civil liberties to advance sharia’s anti-liberty agenda, each reinforcing the other. But the objective never changes.
It is crucial to understand this because a unitary enemy is not effectively fought, let alone eradicated, by a compartmentalized response. Yet that’s what we’ve tried: A counterterrorism that walls the jihad off from its sharia-supremacist inspiration. A counterterrorism that for too long walled intelligence agents off from criminal investigators, ensuring that neither side saw the full scope of the threat. A counterterrorism that must be dragged kicking and screaming to the term “radical Islam,” and to this day cannot agree on what it means or to whom it applies.
Rest assured, the enemy labors under no such self-imposed confusions...
Related
Why Barack Obama is the worst President in U.S. history, Robert Spencer, published by Pamela Gellar, January 22, 2017.
CAIRCO Research