Bush Declares War on Radical Islam   
By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com | October 11, 2005

A courageous speech by George W. Bush last week began a new era in
what he calls the "war on terror."

To comprehend its full significance requires some background.
Islamists (supporters of radical Islam) began their war on the United
States in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran and later
that year his supporters seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran.

For the next twenty-two years, however, Americans thought they faced
merely a criminal problem and failed to see that war had been declared
on them. For example, in 1998, when Islamists attacked two U.S.
embassies in East Africa, Washington responded by unleashing
detectives, arresting the perpetrators, taking them to New York,
assigning them defense lawyers, then convicting and jailing them.

The second era began on September 11, 2001. That evening, President
Bush declared a "war against terrorism" and the U.S. government
promptly went into war mode, for example, by passing the USA Patriot
Act. Though welcoming this shift, I during four years criticized the
notion of making war on a military tactic, finding this euphemistic,
inaccurate, and obstructive. Instead, I repeatedly called on the
president to start a third era by acknowledging that the war is
against radical Islam.

Bush did occasionally mention radical Islam - in fact, as early as
nine days after 9/11 - but not with enough frequency or detail to
change perceptions. British prime minister Tony Blair also advanced
the discussion in July, when, after the London transport bombings, 
he focused on "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide
religion of Islam."

But the third era truly began on Oct. 6 with Bush's speech to the
National Endowment for Democracy. He not only gave several names to
the force behind terrorism ("Some call this evil Islamic radicalism;
others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism"), but he
provided ample details. In particular, he:

# Presented this "murderous ideology" of Islamic radicals "the great
challenge of our new century."

# Distinguished it from the religion of Islam.

# Drew parallels between radical Islam and communism (both are
elitist, cold-blooded, totalitarian, disdainful of free peoples, and
fatefully contradictory), then noted in how many ways the U.S. war on
radical Islam, "resembles the struggle against communism in the last
century."

# Pointed out the three-step Islamist drive to power: ending Western
influence in the Muslim world, gaining control of Muslim governments,
and establishing "a radical Islamic empire that spans from Spain to
Indonesia."

# Explained the "violent, political vision" of radical Islam as
comprising an agenda "to develop weapons of mass destruction, to
destroy Israel, to intimidate Europe, to assault the American people,
and to blackmail our government into isolation."

# Defined its ultimate goal: "to enslave whole nations and intimidate
the world."

# Observed that Muslims themselves have the burden of doing the "most
vital work" to fight Islamism.

# Called on "all responsible Islamic leaders to join in denouncing"
this ideology and taking steps against it.

The detailed texture of Bush's speech transforms the official American
understanding of who the enemy is, moving it from the superficial and
inadequate notion of "terrorism" to the far deeper concept of "Islamic
radicalism." This change has potentially enduring importance if
finally, 26 years later, it convinces polite society to name the
enemy.

[...]

Most serious, though, is his limiting the "radical Islamic empire" 
(or caliphate) to just the Spain-to-Indonesia region, for Islamists 
have a global vision that requires control over non-Muslim countries 
too - and specifically the United States. Their universal ambitions
certainly can be stopped, but first they must be understood and
resisted. Only when Americans realize that the Islamists intend 
to replace the U.S. Constitution with Shari'a will they enter the 
fourth and final era of this war.

Source: "Front Page Magazine"
http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=19791


Cheers, Steve..

---