Knowing the Enemy, Understanding the Enemy
By Douglas Farah
One of the greatest weaknesses five years after 9-11 is the striking inability of the political leadership and body politic to define and reach a consensus on who the Islamist enemy is and what the enemy wants. There is a striking lack of intellectual curiosity, or perhaps fear because of concerns about political correctness, that have blocked a serious discussion of what bin Laden and al Qaeda really think, what their real targets and objectives are and how that group fits into the broader Islamist project of converting the world to an Islamic state ruled by _sharia_ law.
Hence we have the absurd ridiculing in Newsweek magazine of President Bush's use of the word "caliphate" in discussing the Islamist project (and the even more absurd CAIR response that talking about the caliphate is anti-Islamic). We have the inability of senior people whose job it is to study and understand the Islamist project unable to identify the two major branches of Islam, never mind how they differ and what such divisions might mean.
The caliphate, from its historical signficance to the dream of its recreation, is perhaps the best way to understand how the different currents of Islamist thought relate to each other, support each other and form a coherent whole that embraces the Muslim Brotherhood to the historic al Qaeda. My full blog is here.
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» A Caliphate Coming To Your Neighborhood? from PAXALLES
Douglas Farah continues his call for better knowledge of the Islamic world in his latest post at the Counterterrorism Blog. Farah says that Newsweek magazine was wrong in ridiculing President Bush's claim that the radical Islamists are seeking to re-es... [Read More]
