Years have passed since there was genuine excitement at a State of the Union speech by President Bush, and Monday night’s effusion was a long yawn. His focus has changed, by the eddying of events, from the grand foreign policy issues forced upon him at the beginning of his first term, to the desperate business of resisting an economic downturn towards the end of his second. That, he proposes to do by throwing $150 billion of tax money at the problem. There are very few politicians who will not act in this Pavlovian way, even among those with no elections left to lose.
American domestic policy is none of my business: I am interested in the survival of the free world. Yet I cannot ignore U.S. domestic politics, which have the power to enfeeble any policy initiative on the world stage. Mr. Bush’s achievements on both fronts, home and abroad, are mostly invisible: the tax cut, the success in preventing any major terror attack on U.S. soil after 9/11, progress in co-ordinating the response of western governments to domestic Islamist threats, and what currently looks like victory in Iraq. Over against this: profligate and essentially “liberal” domestic policies that have disheartened the Republican base, and squandered the remaining “conservative” momentum from the Reagan revolution. And now, backsliding and retreat in foreign policy.
We (the U.S. and allies) are winning in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and losing everywhere else. The Syrians are now murdering independent Lebanese politicians with impunity. The pressure on Iran has been relieved. Pakistan is teetering towards a civil and military collapse from which only the Islamists can gain. Islamist demands for the imposition of Shariah, and for the legal persecution of religious minorities, have entered the mainstream of political life in countries that were once free of religious zealotry—Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Islamist terrorists are winning effective control over the remoter Muslim-settled regions in many countries of Asia and Africa, creating streams of Christian refugees from the southern Philippines, of Buddhist refugees from southern Thailand, of Christians and Animists fleeing south across the breadth of Africa.
Saudi-sponsored Wahabi Islam is consolidating its hold over the mosques of the West, and radicalizing the huge Muslim immigrant communities that have congregated in almost every major European city. Across Europe, and increasingly in North America (and as we’ve seen in Canada in the obscene “human rights” trials of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant), the most radical Muslims exploit state multiculturalism to score victories over free speech and win pathetic apologies from anyone accused of the thought crime of “Islamophobia.”
Islam is a broad and ancient religion – we are not discussing that, today. We are discussing instead the contemporary reality. For internationally, Islam has been morphing into a violent and puritanical cult. Yet this very large and very hard fact is being rendered undiscussable, in historical or any other terms.
While President Bush was throwing money into a recession in Washington, unprecedented Islamist demonstrations were erupting across Egypt, almost unreported in our media. As I was beginning to explain in my Saturday column, it is not generally appreciated that Hamas, which controls Gaza, is of Egyptian descent. It is an invention of the Muslim Brotherhood, whose own origins were Cairene. In effect, the Muslim Brotherhood have established their own sovereign beachhead in Gaza. And by the brilliant stroke of blowing down the wall at the Egyptian border, they have now invaded Egypt proper.
Among the slogans being shouted in Egypt’s streets: “Arm us, train us, send us to Gaza!” And, “O rulers of Muslims! Where is your honour, where is your religion?” And, “We will take to the streets, even if we are all tried in military courts!”
The rhetorical target is Israel. The actual target is the “moderate” Egyptian government, and the response to these rallies, from the authorities, and from Egypt’s formerly-articulate “middle class,” is panic. The great majority of Egyptians may well want nothing to do with the conversion of their country into another Iran, but dare I say, they will not be consulted. In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.
The Bush administration’s lame duck strategy for dealing with this, is to refer back to the “roadmap to peace,” and increase pressure on Israel to surrender “occupied territory.”
The formerly “occupied territory” of Gaza has already been fully surrendered, to Hamas. What was gained?
Whatever is surrendered to these people increases their power. There is one and only one possible strategy for resisting the advance of radical Islam – and I mean, “Islamism,” not conventional Islam. And that is to confront it, and destroy it, wherever it appears. The most disastrous possible policy is to appease it.
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