Radical Islam – the invisible enemy - Caroline Glick
The West’s whack a mole war against radical Islam at home and abroad has meant that even as one group – like core al Qaeda – is cut down, it is swiftly replaced by other groups, like Islamic State. And if IS is eventually cut down, it too will be replaced by another group, and then reconstitute itself as IS when the West’s attention is taken up by the next major group.
Obama has enabled this state affairs by defining the enemy as narrowly as possible, reducing the whole sphere of radical Islam to a few secrete groups – like al Qaeda and IS – that he seeks to defeat or contain.
It is not simply that the whack a mole strategy doesn’t work. It is self-defeating. Since the radical Islamic trigger pullers in the West are usually no more than a few people who get together to murder people, insisting that someone has to be a card carrying member of a recognized terror group before authorities will go after him makes it almost impossible to find operatives and prevent attacks.
While
Friday’s killers may have given their allegiance to IS, they were operationally
and ideologically all but indistinguishable from their predecessors in the
London subways in 2005 and the Madrid commuter rails in 2004 who hailed from al
Qaeda. Likewise, while the US may have seriously degraded core al Qaeda in the
Middle East over the past seven years, IS in Iraq, Syria, Egypt and Libya is an
organic extension of al Qaeda.
To defeat these
groups, the US and its allies need to adopt a strategy that is rooted in an
acknowledgment of the nature of our true enemy: radical Islam. Armed with this recognition, the nations of the free world can determine operational guidelines for combatting not only specific, secrete groupings of adherents to this ideology, they can develop overall strategies for combatting it at home and in the Middle East.
At home, such
strategies require Western governments to penetrate, disrupt and destroy
radical Islamic networks on the ground in a sustained, concentrated manner. In
the Middle East, they require the free world to stop seeking to appease
leaders, regimes and militias that support and ascribe to radical Islam.
[Jerusalem Post]
UPDATE:
60% of Americans Say U.S. at War with Radical Islam
A survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters conducted on Nov. 17-18 finds that 60% believe the U.S. is at war with radical Islamic terrorism. Just 24% disagree.
56% of Democrats believe America is at war with radical Islamic terrorism, a view shared by 70% of Republicans and 54% of unaffiliated voters.
92% of all voters now regard radical Islamic terrorism as a serious threat to the U.S. This includes 73% who say it is a "very serious" one, up from 50% in Oct. 2014.
(Rasmussen Reports)
[Jerusalem Post]
UPDATE:
60% of Americans Say U.S. at War with Radical Islam
A survey of 1,000 likely U.S. voters conducted on Nov. 17-18 finds that 60% believe the U.S. is at war with radical Islamic terrorism. Just 24% disagree.
56% of Democrats believe America is at war with radical Islamic terrorism, a view shared by 70% of Republicans and 54% of unaffiliated voters.
92% of all voters now regard radical Islamic terrorism as a serious threat to the U.S. This includes 73% who say it is a "very serious" one, up from 50% in Oct. 2014.
(Rasmussen Reports)
3 comments:
This is a simplistic, inaccurate (and in the few cases where it is accurate), it states what is already being done. This isn't surprising as I find Glick off the mark most of the time. Primarily, since 9/11, Western governments and especially the U.S. have done an excellent job of uncovering terrorist plots and stopping them. No, things haven't been perfect and any lapse is sadly unacceptable, but lapses will happen unless we want a big brother complete surveillance police state. Truthfully, I do not have the knee-jerk abhorrence to the current surveillance practices as they were data gathering and there seemed no impetus or risk that people's private conversations were ever going to be used against them---unless they were terrorists, anyway. Even then, it is hard to cover everything 100%, especially when some terrorists will work alone with their own ideas, following an ideology but not any orders or actual guidance. It's a dangerous world and we need to address the things we've done that increase terrorist recruitment and try to adjust our actions so they match how other people actually react instead of how we believe they'll react. There are plenty of people who know how these things work, but too often in our recent past we had politicians who refused to listen. Our government totally misunderstood the repercussions of our invasion of Iraq. However, plenty of diplomats and academicians called it very accurately.
I meant to include this in my previous comment as an example of why Glick is speaking out of her, um, misunderstanding of the situation. "...insisting that someone has to be a card carrying member of a recognized terror group before authorities will go after him makes it almost impossible to find operatives and prevent attacks..."
This doesn't happen. That's what the mass data farming was meant for, to search out patterns, because no one is looking or waiting for proven affiliations.
Hi LHwrites,
As a solidly anti-jihadist, I certainly support the mass data farming that Snowden and his ilk have attacked. When weighing potential civil liberty breaches with my family's personal safety, I'll go with the breaches. On that we agree.
As you probably deduced, we disagree on Glick. If you read the full piece [it's long] you'd like it even less. She goes after Hillary Clinton's recent remarks. In any case, the most important point she makes is that referencing "radical Islam" or "Islamism" or "political Islam" is important in this fight. On that point she and I agree. Making that distinction is important because without our doing so, we disempower moderate Muslims who have a difficult struggle with their brethren.
Respectfully,
Bruce :}
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