The Reality of Islamic Jihadists and The Size of Their Support in Isla

[BluffTHIS!]

Excerpts from this Chicago Sun Times article:

Don't deny that some Muslims are hot for jihad

April 2, 2006

BY MARK STEYN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

But my point is there's no mass anti-war movement. Some commentators claimed to be puzzled by the low turnout at a time when the polls show Iraq increasingly unpopular. But there are two kinds of persons objecting to the war: There's a shriveled Sheehan-Sheen left that's in effect urging on American failure in Iraq, and there's a potentially far larger group to their right that's increasingly wary of the official conception of the war. The latter don't want America to lose, they want to win -- decisively. And on the day's headlines -- on everything from the Danish cartoon jihad to the Afghan facing death for apostasy -- the fainthearted response of "public diplomacy" is in danger of sounding only marginally less nutty than Charlie Sheen.

The line here is "respect." Everybody's busy professing their "respect": We all "respect" Islam . . .

Jack Straw, the British foreign secretary, gave a typical Western government official's speech the other day explaining that "a large number of Muslims in this country were -- understandably -- upset by those cartoons being reprinted across Europe and at their deeply held beliefs being insulted. They expressed their hurt and outrage but did so in a way which epitomized the learned, peaceful religion of Islam."

"The learned, peaceful religion of Islam"? And that would be the guys marching through London with placards reading "BEHEAD THE ENEMIES OF ISLAM" and "FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS WESTERN TERRORISM" and promising to rain down a new Holocaust on Europe? This is geopolitics as the Aretha Franklin Doctrine: The more the world professes its R-E-S-P-E-C-T, the more the Islamists sock it to us.

At a basic level the foreign secretary's rhetoric does not match reality. Government leaders are essentially telling their citizens: Who ya gonna believe -- my platitudinous speechwriters or your lyin' eyes?

To win a war, you don't spin a war. Millions of ordinary citizens are not going to stick with a "long war" (as the administration now calls it) if they feel they're being dissembled to about its nature. One reason we regard Churchill as a great man is that his speeches about the nature of the enemy don't require unspinning or detriangulating.

If I had to propose a model for Western rhetoric, it would be the Australians. In the days after Sept. 11, the French got all the attention for that Le Monde headline -- "Nous sommes tous Americains" -- "We are all Americans," though they didn't mean it, even then. But John Howard, the Aussie prime minister, put it better and kept his word: "This is no time to be an 80 percent ally."

Marvelous. More recently, the prime minister offered some thoughts on the difference between Muslims and other immigrant groups. "You can't find any equivalent in Italian or Greek or Lebanese or Chinese or Baltic immigration to Australia. There is no equivalent of raving on about jihad," he said, stating the obvious in a way most political leaders can't quite bring themselves to do. "There is really not much point in pretending it doesn't exist."

Unfortunately, too many of his counterparts insist on pretending (at least to their citizenry) that it doesn't exist. What proportion of Western Muslims is hot for jihad? Five percent? Ten, 12 percent? Given that understanding this Pan-Islamist identity is critical to defeating it, why can't we acknowledge it honestly? "Raving on about jihad" is a line that meets what the law used to regard as the reasonable-man test: If you're watching news footage of a Muslim march promising to bring on the new Holocaust, John Howard's line fits.


My worry is that the official platitudes in this new war are the equivalent of the Cold War chit-chat in its 1970s detente phase --when Willy Brandt and Pierre Trudeau and Jimmy Carter pretended the enemy was not what it was. Then came Ronald Reagan: It wasn't just the evil-empire stuff, his jokes were on the money, too. In their own depraved way, the Islamists are a lot goofier than the commies and a few gags wouldn't come amiss. If this is a "long war," it needs a rhetoric that can go the distance. And the present line fails that test.


I think this article, which if you read it in its entireity you will see is very critical of the democrat response to the Islamic threat, sums up some important points which are:

1) Assertions of those who assume the vast majority of Moslems are peaceful and have no wish to impose their religion on others is given the lie by what you see every day in the news. Although the writer does not attempt to state what portion of Moslems support triumphalist religious intolerance and extremism, he rightly says that it is not an insignificant portion of the whole, and that that those Moslems who don't hold those views are not doing much to fight them in their own religious communities worldwide.

2) If there is a failure on the part of the administration in the war, and on the part of the president himself, it is in not clearly focusing the american people on the overall Islamic terrorist and Shari'a movement threat and sticking to that focus in everything he says and refusing to allow critics to try to sidestep the threat with PC hogwash based on their own assumptions of how reasonable persons would act, when the potential threat comes from unreasonable persons.

3) No other immigrant group in western nations holds the attitudes and poses the threat that Moslem immigrants do.

4) Australia, like the UK is an awesome ally of the US that has no problem seeing and naming the threat for what it is (even though the writer was critical of some of the UK foreign minister's statments).

[New001]

What exactly is the "Islamic threat?"

[sam h]

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Assertions of those who assume the vast majority of Moslems are peaceful and have no wish to impose their religion on others is given the lie by what you see every day in the news.

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This is just flat out contradicted by the article. The writer has no real evidence to speculate on the size of the pro-jihad contingent, but even his random guesses would characterize the "vast majority" of Moslems as peaceful.


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He rightly says that it is not an insignificant portion of the whole, and that that those Moslems who don't hold those views are not doing much to fight them in their own religious communities worldwide.

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I don't think anybody believes that the pro-jihad faction is insignificant. A miniscule number of pro-jihad actors could end up being significant.

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If there is a failure on the part of the administration in the war, and on the part of the president himself, it is in not clearly focusing the american people on the overall Islamic terrorist and Shari'a movement threat and sticking to that focus in everything he says and refusing to allow critics to try to sidestep the threat with PC hogwash based on their own assumptions of how reasonable persons would act, when the potential threat comes from unreasonable persons.

[/ QUOTE ]

How about this for a failure? On September 11th, 2001, there were only a small number of terrorist sympathizing Muslims, the most active of which were largely confined to places like Afghanistan and Chechnya. Four and half years later, we are dealing with a rapidly expanding cross-national movement that has by all accounts - including candid statements from people in the Bush administration - grown by tremendous proportions. The primary impetus to this vast growth in the pro-jihad population has been the war in Iraq, which itself has turned into a tremendous catastrophe on many other dimensions as well. Bush was handed the problem of dealing with a small-scale terrorist movement and, through incompetent foreign policy, played a major role in fostering a clash of civilizations. So what was the major mistake again?

[morphball]

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On September 11th, 2001, there were only a small number of terrorist sympathizing Muslims, the most active of which were largely confined to places like Afghanistan and Chechnya. Four and half years later, we are dealing with a rapidly expanding cross-national movement that has by all accounts - including candid statements from people in the Bush administration - grown by tremendous proportions.

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This is quite false. On September 11, 2001, millions of muslims took to streets in praise of the attacks in muslim countries world-wide. As there are over one billion muslims, I don't know the %'s, but the administration's response did not create terrorists and their supporters. They were already there.

[sam h]

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On September 11th, 2001, there were only a small number of terrorist sympathizing Muslims, the most active of which were largely confined to places like Afghanistan and Chechnya. Four and half years later, we are dealing with a rapidly expanding cross-national movement that has by all accounts - including candid statements from people in the Bush administration - grown by tremendous proportions.

[/ QUOTE ]

This is quite false. On September 11, 2001, millions of muslims took to streets in praise of the attacks in muslim countries world-wide. As there are over one billion muslims, I don't know the %'s, but the administration's response did not create terrorists and their supporters. They were already there.

[/ QUOTE ]

There were indeed many supporters of the attacks, but as you say there are a huge number of Muslims worldwide. Nobody will ever get accurate data on the proportion of terrorist sympathizers then and now, but anybody who knows anything about the Middle East seems to agree that the number of terrorist sympathizers has risen dramatically over the last five years as has the number of people actually involved with terrorist groups. This opinion has also been echoed by senior Bush administration officials in their more candid moments.

[Rockatansky]

[FlFishOn]

"What exactly is the "Islamic threat?" "

It's comfortable liberal schmucks like yourself, monkeywrenching the GWOT, dismissing it as unneeded, imperialistic, etc. That is the threat.

[FlFishOn]

Steyn has taken a place as one of my most favorite columnists. He gets 12 minutes on Hugh Hewitt's radio program weekly during the first hour but I don't remember which day.

[DVaut1]

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"What exactly is the "Islamic threat?" "

It's comfortable liberal schmucks like yourself, monkeywrenching the GWOT, dismissing it as unneeded, imperialistic, etc. That is the threat.

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So, the "Islamic" threat is actually a threat......from liberals...who "monkeywrench the War on Terrorism"...which is a war against the "Islamic" threat?

[Hopey]

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Whenever I've tried to imagine what BluffTHIS! looks like IRL, I've always pictured something similar to that guy.