While America continues to face an expanding national security threat, President Obama has great difficulty in identifying the enemy that has been at war with the United States for over 35 years.
Using terms such as “violent extremism” and “workplace violence” does an enormous injustice to our military forces, as well as to all law enforcement agencies that must be prepared to confront the Islamic jihadis on a daily basis. For example, the Obama administration directed all of our training manuals, that accurately portrayed the Islamic threat, to be purged by removing anything that didn’t portray Islam as a religion of peace.
Probably, the worst six words President George W. Bush ever uttered were “Islam is a religion of peace.” He most likely was urged to make such a statement by his Muslim Brotherhood advisors who had already penetrated our government agencies during the Clinton administration. Regrettably, those words are repeated by a number of Western leaders under the guise of political correctness and should be discarded. Furthermore, the Obama administration’s embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood must cease. They must be removed from all government agencies and those front groups, e.g., CAIR and ISNA, shut down.
The leading state sponsor of terrorism, Iran, has been at war with the United States since the November 1979 takeover of our Tehran U.S. embassy. Since then, Iran has directed numerous “acts of war” against us, either using proxies (Hezbollah), or their own forces – acts of war that every administration, Republican and Democrat, has failed to find the political courage to respond. Consequently, the surge of Islamic Fundamentalism, as espoused by the Ayatollah Khomeini’s evil regime, has continued to expand.
Iran has encouraged Islamic supremacists, both Shi’ite and Sunni, to take ever bolder action– as evidenced by the atrocities being committed by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria today, the recent Islamic terrorist attacks in Paris, Canada, and Australia as well as the incessant HAMAS and Hezbollah attacks against Israel. While President Obama tries to make the case that these atrocities are not part of the Islamic religion, Chapter 2 verse 106 (on abrogation) of the Quran makes it very clear that the later, violent verses take precedence over the early, less violent verses.
The most dramatic action by the Islamic supremacists was the 9/11 hi-jacker terrorist attack, which was the most serious attack on the United States since the 7 December, 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor. It resulted in the loss of almost 3,000 innocent American lives who were doing nothing more than going to work. It should never be forgotten that this attack could not have been successfully carried out without the material and training support of the evil Iranian regime that succeeded its founder Ayatollah Khomeini.
To understand the threat we face today, we must be clear in the terms we use. It is not violent extremism or even radical Islam: it is Islam itself, which has remained unchanged for over 1,300 years. The former Turkish Prime Minister and current President Recep Tayyip Erdogan stated it best when he declared “Islam is Islam. There are no modifiers,” e.g., Islamic Extremism.
Clearly, any thinking individual understands that Islam is a totalitarian ideology that is bent on world domination under one religion and ruled by the draconian Shariah. It is totally incompatible with the Western world’s concept of freedom and democracy, and our Constitution. Furthermore, until it is understood that Islam is a political movement (similar to communism) masquerading as a religion, we will not be successful in combating the enemy.
As the Dutch politician Geert Wilders stated, the more Islam penetrates your society, the less freedom you have. Therefore, our current unregulated Muslim immigration and asylum policies make no sense. They must be revised along with effective measures to secure our open borders.
The real question is, can Islam be reformed to co-exist peacefully in the 21st century? The problem is how to modify Shariah, which has not been done in over 1,300 years. Clearly, it would have to be done cautiously, and by Sunni clerics as well as Shi’a. Recently, President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, in a New Year’s Day speech to the leading Sunni clerics, challenged them to reform Islam. The atrocities being committed in the cause of advancing Islam are, in his view, giving Islam a bad image. More importantly, such an initiative would be consistent with Egyptians reclaiming their rich heritage by thinking of themselves first as being Egyptians.
We should encourage President al-Sisi to follow up his challenge to the leading Sunni clerics by proposing that they form an Islamic Forum of leading Sunni clerics to address the reformation of Islam for the 21st century. Unless such an effort is made, the alternative will be a consistent state of war (Dar al-Harb) against the infidels as mandated in the Quran.
James A. Lyons, U.S. Navy retired Admiral, was commander-in-chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and senior U.S. military representative to the United Nations.