A one-sided war?
In his piece lambasting Tom Tancredo, Hugh Hewitt says this:
No responsible American can endorse the idea that the U.S. is in a war with Islam.
This is certainly true. However, it is also fair to note that our enemy specifically claims to be acting in the name of Islam, as Amir Taheri has outlined. The head of the London Center for Islamic history specifically invoked religious doctrine to justify the subway bombings: “The term ‘civilians’ does not exist in Islamic religious law.” In Saudi Arabia, mainstream mosques of Wahabbism call Jews and Christians the sons of dogs and pigs, and the government funds madrassas that preach separatism and jihad. “Jihad,” we remind you, is the Arabic word for Muslim Holy War. As Mark Steyn noted:
One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called “extremists” and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a “trainee journalist” a member of Hizb ut Tahir, “Britain’s most radical Islamic group” (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be “shocked” at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: “Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don’t-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We’re much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks” – or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he’d died for the cause of Muslim “sassiness”.
Imagine the following set of circumstances: A rich and devout Saudi oil sheikh who lives in a certain holy city arranges for the purchase of two USSR-era suitcase nukes on the Russian black market. He spends millions of dollars to smuggle them to his sleeper cells in New York and Washington, where they are detonated, killing 500,000 people.
Tell us precisely what kind of retaliation is and is not on the table.
There is a profound moral reason we are fighting a pre-emptive war against our enemy, who claims to represent true Islam — and, as Mark Steyn said, often appears to be kissing cousins to regular old Islam. That reason is this: should the unimaginable happen to us, the unimaginable will happen to others. Fighting an aggressive, pre-emptive war is the moral thing to do to prevent such horror.
It would be quite helpful in maintaining the semantic distinction between “Islam” and “those who claim to represent Islam” if the Islamic establishment described by Steyn helped more in that effort; one possible explanation for their reticence may be found here.