New York Times Plays Down Threat Of Al Qaeda Goals
Sigh...
World domination, the re-establishment of the caliphate and the west's submission to Islamic rule. These are all goals that have been explicitly named by bin Laden and the rest of the extreme Islamic hordes. To take these goals lightly is foolhardy and naive.
Does al Qaeda have the manpower to effect a takeover of America? Of course not. That's silly. But do they have the power to make America and other countries not want to fight against the spread of their deadly ideology through terrorism and intifada? Absolutely. In fact, I'd say that there are a number of people on the political left in this country (starting with Howard "We Can't Win" Dean at the top) who this has worked on.
We also need to remember that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are not the sum total of the threat the free world faces from extremist Islam. Fundamentalist Muslims living among us in our communities are already trying to insinuate their doctrine into our societies. Look at Great Britain, for instance, where banks are outlawing the traditional "piggy banks" and schools are avoiding stories about pigs, all to appease Muslims.
Why is this happening? Probably because some Britons are afraid of what will happen if they don't pander to Muslim sensibilities. But that is not how free societies work.
What is amazing about this article is that it not only understates the threat we face from extreme Islam it also plays down the threat we faced from communism a few decades back. The Soviet Union, and the socialist nations sponsored by it, were a real threat to the security of the world. The spread of their flavor of totalitarianism was very much a goal for them and that threat was only neutralized through the determined resolve of more than one American President.
And there is a difference between the threats we faced then and the threats we face now. The Cold War problems were serious, but palpable. We could all watch on television as the Soviets paraded their missiles through Red Square. The communists had a country, and their soldiers wore uniforms.
We have no such luxury in our fight against Islamo-fascism. The proponents of that hateful ideology live among us. They manipulate politically correct, "multicultural" sensibilities to attain their goals. They hide behind the rights to free speech and religion when advocating their hatred and when they attack us they use cowardly sneak attacks that target our civilians. Their ideology is ever bit the threat communism was, but fighting them is a different proposition altogether.
One way to do that is for the citizens of the world's free societies to remain vigilant, but that's hard to do when we have media outlets like the Times going out of their way to downplay the threats we face.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said it in a speech last Monday in Washington and again on Thursday on PBS. Eric S. Edelman, the under secretary of defense for policy, said it the week before in a round table at the Council on Foreign Relations. Stephen J. Hadley, the national security adviser, said it in October in speeches in New York and Los Angeles. Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, said it in September in hearings on Capitol Hill. Vice President Dick Cheney was one of the first members of the Bush administration to say it, at a campaign stop in Lake Elmo, Minn., in September 2004. The word getting the workout from the nation's top guns these days is "caliphate" - the term for the seventh-century Islamic empire that spanned the Middle East, spread to Southwest Asia, North Africa and Spain, then ended with the Mongol sack of Baghdad in 1258. The term can also refer to other caliphates, including the one declared by the Ottoman Turks that ended in 1924.
Specialists on Islam say the word is a mysterious and ominous one for many Americans, and that the administration knows it. "They recognize that there's a lot of resonance when they use the term 'caliphate,' " said Kenneth M. Pollack, a former Central Intelligence Agency analyst and now a scholar at the Saban Center at the Brookings Institution. Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Jimmy Carter's national security adviser, said that the word had an "almost instinctive fearful impact."
So now, Mr. Cheney and others warn, Al Qaeda's ultimate goal is the re-establishment of the caliphate, with calamitous consequences for the United States. As Mr. Cheney put it in Lake Elmo, referring to Osama bin Laden and his followers: "They talk about wanting to re-establish what you could refer to as the seventh-century caliphate" to be "governed by Sharia law, the most rigid interpretation of the Koran." Or as Mr. Rumsfeld put it on Monday: "Iraq would serve as the base of a new Islamic caliphate to extend throughout the Middle East, and which would threaten legitimate governments in Europe, Africa and Asia." General Abizaid was dire, too. "They will try to re-establish a caliphate throughout the entire Muslim world," he told the House Armed Services Committee in September, adding that the caliphate's goals would include the destruction of Israel. "Just as we had the opportunity to learn what the Nazis were going to do, from Hitler's world in 'Mein Kampf,' " General Abizaid said, "we need to learn what these people intend to do from their own words."
A number of scholars and former government officials take strong issue with the administration's warning about a new caliphate, and compare it to the fear of communism spread during the Cold War. They say that although Al Qaeda's statements do indeed describe a caliphate as a goal, the administration is exaggerating the magnitude of the threat as it seeks to gain support for its policies in Iraq.
In the view of John L. Esposito, an Islamic studies professor at Georgetown University, there is a difference between the ability of small bands of terrorists to commit attacks across the world and achieving global conquest. "It is certainly correct to say that these people have a global design, but the administration ought to frame it realistically," said Mr. Esposito, the founding director of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown. "Otherwise they can actually be playing into the hands of the Osama bin Ladens of the world because they raise this to a threat that is exponentially beyond anything that Osama bin Laden can deliver."
World domination, the re-establishment of the caliphate and the west's submission to Islamic rule. These are all goals that have been explicitly named by bin Laden and the rest of the extreme Islamic hordes. To take these goals lightly is foolhardy and naive.
Does al Qaeda have the manpower to effect a takeover of America? Of course not. That's silly. But do they have the power to make America and other countries not want to fight against the spread of their deadly ideology through terrorism and intifada? Absolutely. In fact, I'd say that there are a number of people on the political left in this country (starting with Howard "We Can't Win" Dean at the top) who this has worked on.
We also need to remember that Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda are not the sum total of the threat the free world faces from extremist Islam. Fundamentalist Muslims living among us in our communities are already trying to insinuate their doctrine into our societies. Look at Great Britain, for instance, where banks are outlawing the traditional "piggy banks" and schools are avoiding stories about pigs, all to appease Muslims.
Why is this happening? Probably because some Britons are afraid of what will happen if they don't pander to Muslim sensibilities. But that is not how free societies work.
What is amazing about this article is that it not only understates the threat we face from extreme Islam it also plays down the threat we faced from communism a few decades back. The Soviet Union, and the socialist nations sponsored by it, were a real threat to the security of the world. The spread of their flavor of totalitarianism was very much a goal for them and that threat was only neutralized through the determined resolve of more than one American President.
And there is a difference between the threats we faced then and the threats we face now. The Cold War problems were serious, but palpable. We could all watch on television as the Soviets paraded their missiles through Red Square. The communists had a country, and their soldiers wore uniforms.
We have no such luxury in our fight against Islamo-fascism. The proponents of that hateful ideology live among us. They manipulate politically correct, "multicultural" sensibilities to attain their goals. They hide behind the rights to free speech and religion when advocating their hatred and when they attack us they use cowardly sneak attacks that target our civilians. Their ideology is ever bit the threat communism was, but fighting them is a different proposition altogether.
One way to do that is for the citizens of the world's free societies to remain vigilant, but that's hard to do when we have media outlets like the Times going out of their way to downplay the threats we face.
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