The Necessary War. Western leaders shrink from the challenge.

John Galt
World War III has begun, and the enemy is not the one we expected. America and the Western world are facing a danger they have never faced before. Our enemy is not a government or a country. We are fighting enemies who hate us so much that they are willing to kill themselves in order to kill us. This war puts our conventional military forces at a serious disadvantage. There is practically no defense against this kind of warfare. The enemy is Islam, and it is waging this war against our civilization. The Quran teaches its followers:
Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them; and their abode is hell, and evil is their destination. Quran 9:73


And, if history is any guide, religious wars have been the bloodiest in human history. The contention that all wars eventually should end may not be applicable this time. This one is different; with new generations of Islamists willing to kill themselves in order to destroy the infidels, it may take generations, centuries, to end, especially given the high birth rate of the enemy. At this juncture it is impossible to predict how it may end. In previous world wars the winner typically out-produced the loser. During the Second World War Americans were losing, on average six Sherman tanks for every German Tiger tank lost. But at the same time, American industry was manufacturing six Sherman tanks faster than Germans could produce one Tiger. Americans were producing more bombers than Germans were shooting down, and that was true for every other piece of military equipment. The United States, despite heavy losses at Pearl Harbor, not only replaced those losses in short order but also built a greater and more modern fleet than that of the Japanese. Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany were facing the unlimited industrial capabilities of the United States, further multiplied by the unlimited human resources of the Soviet Union. There was not a chance that the Axis powers could possibly win the war; they were out-produced and out-manned. The longer the war went on, the weaker Germany and Japan became. 
In our current world war, the strategic equation may not be in our favor, since the enemies’ weapon of choice is a limitless supply of human bodies. In this “arms” race, Islam will easily out-produce the civilized world, making our industrial and technological advantages inadequate. There is no shortage of Muslim volunteers, here in this country and all over the world, perfectly willing to blow themselves up for the “cause.” Furthermore, the methods employed by the enemy challenge our conventional definition of victory. If in conventional war the army loses if it does not win, in the war on terrorism, terrorism wins if it does not lose. The events unfolding after the demise of Osama bin Laden are evidence that the armies of terrorists are growing and that Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups are spreading through Africa and the Middle East to places they have never been before.
Our president and the Left, living in a politically correct universe, refuse to recognize the magnitude of this danger. They see appeasement as a panacea and insist that acts of terrorism are perpetrated by extremists. Islam, they say, is a peaceful religion, and the majority of Muslims are law-abiding citizens—ignoring the fact that these peaceful citizens celebrated the 9/11 attacks, from the West Bank to Jakarta to Detroit, Michigan, USA. The Left is also ignoring numerous reports of imams inciting crowds of hundreds and thousands of Muslims by calling for the destruction of the United States, Israel, France, Britain, and other Western countries. Since the 9/11 attacks there have been no reports of a single imam condemning terrorism. Not one.
       In keeping with the ideological dogma, the president’s posture amplifies the Left’s delusional position and the common theme of previous presidents’ foreign policy doctrines, that terrorism is un-Islamic. President Clinton, in an address to the nation on August 20, 1998, said:

Islam [is] the faith of hundreds of millions of good, peace-loving people all around the world, including the United States. No religion condones the murder of innocent men, women and children. But our actions were aimed at fanatics and killers who wrap murder in the cloak of righteousness; and in so doing, profane the great religion in whose name they claim to act.
President Bush echoed Clinton in his speech to the Islamic Center of Washington, D.C., September 17, 2001:
The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam. That’s not what Islam is all about. Islam is peace. These terrorists don’t represent peace. They represent evil and war. When we think of Islam we think of a faith that brings comfort to a billion people around the world. Billions of people find comfort and solace and peace. And that’s made brothers and sisters out of every race—out of every race.
But President Obama has outdone them all. He could qualify for the Nobel Prize for Duplicity in addition to his Nobel Peace Prize for his performance. In his near-pathological obsession in defense of Islam, which should come as no surprise given his upbringing, during a speech at Cairo University on June 4, 2009, Obama displayed a bizarre and illusory interpretation of facts and engaged in a deliberate distortion of history. Lecturing the crowd, the president of the United States of America stated
em>that America and Islam share common principles—principles of justice and progress;  tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. …Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. …The U.S. and Islam share common goals of justice and tolerance and the dignity of all human beings. 
In his speech at Mumbai’s St. Xavier’s College on November 7, 2010, he declared that
Islam is one of the world’s great religions. More than a billion people practice Islam and an overwhelming majority views their obligations to a religion that reaffirms peace, fairness and tolerance. I think all of us recognize that this great religion in the hands of a few extremists has been distorted by violence.
These words were being said about a culture in which any member of a family can kill a woman suspected of having an affair. According to Sharia law, it is the duty of a brother to kill his sister if she dishonors the family. These words were being said about a culture that glorifies female mutilation—cutting off a little girl’s clitoris with a dirty razor without anesthesia. These words were being said about a culture that hacks off the heads of “infidels” and relegates females to a status subordinate to farm animals. The president, who has been a strong defender of women’s rights to have an abortion and free contraceptives, has never raised the issue of the horrifying treatment of women in the land of Islam. In his 2009 Cairo speech, Mr. Obama actually declared,
I consider it part of my responsibility as the president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. 
The examples above are not the stereotypes Obama had in mind, they are simply facts; and about them, he is silent. Disregarding rational consistency, intellectual honesty, and adherence to historical facts by proclaiming that the United States of America and Islam “share common goals of justice and tolerance,” the president exhibits signs of political intoxication, kissing Islamic tuchis. There is as much harmony between America and Islam as we had with Nazi Germany or Imperial Japan.
This president’s proclamations should not deflect us from grasping the reality that the world is divided into two types of culture: one where violence is condemned and the other where violence is glorified. One culture is built on the foundation of liberty and the pursuit of happiness; the other worships violence and death. One where success and respect are measured in capital and the other whose virtues are measured in power and violence.
The president and his leftist supporters maintain that all cultures are equal and as such are equally deserving of respect and celebration. That notion may sound noble, but in fact not all cultures are “born equal.” This statement overlooks the fact that the cradle of freedom and democracy was the Western world, not the land of Islam. Western civilization, governed by reason and guided by Judeo-Christian values, discovered science and technology and has subsequently produced a prosperous and relatively harmonious culture that the rest of the world envies and admires. The land of Islam, governed by faith, has contributed almost nothing to the advances of science and culture since its inception. We do not know whether Obama deliberately ignores these important facts in an attempt to appease Islam or whether he feels some inherent sympathy for Islam, or both. In his book The Audacity of Hope he writes: “I will stand with the Muslims should the political winds shift in an ugly direction.” And so he does.
Unlike in the areas of economic and political restructuring of the old USA, where the president is so faithfully following the teachings of his ideological predecessors, in dealing with the issue of terrorism his policies are full of strategic blunders and tactical inconsistencies.
In Egypt, President Obama backed the Muslim Brotherhood and president Mohamed Morsi from the outset. Even after Morsi was ousted, Obama continued efforts to reinstate the Muslim Brotherhood to power. Why? As his argument goes, the Egyptians had an election and the Muslim Brotherhood was democratically elected. Therefore, it is a legitimate government and we must support a democracy. I hate to point out to the constitutional scholar that he is confusing elections with democracy. We should have learned by now that elections do not necessarily result in democratic institutions. Elections are only an instrument of democracy, no more, no less. This instrument of democracy in many instances has malfunctioned and provided legitimacy to oppressive and totalitarian regimes.There are number of examples of where democratic elections failed to produce a democracy: Hamas in the West Bank, Salvador Allende in Chili, Hugo Chávez in Venezuela, and Adolf Hitler in Germany, to name just a few. We see the almost identical development in Syria, where the United States finds itself on the side of terrorists.
To be fair, Obama is not the first president of the United States to actively support terrorists; it would seem that supporting terrorists has been a long-standing policy of the United States government and cuts across party lines.
      President Carter supported Ayatollah Khomeini and called him a “peaceful and holy man.” In August 1982, Ronald Reagan sent Marines to Lebanon to save the Palestine Liberation Organization from complete annihilation when the Israelis cornered terrorists in Beirut. Just think about this utterly obscene picture—American Marines protecting PLO terrorists. America paid a heavy price for the involvement when 241 U.S. Marines died in a terrorist attack on their compound at Beirut International Airport in October 1983. President Clinton turned down at least three offers by foreign governments to help seize Osama bin Laden.
When Jeremiah Alvesta Wright Jr., Obama’s “spiritual mentor,” proclaimed in a sermon that “America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” although it was a reprehensible statement, he may have had a point. Decades of frolicking with terrorists bears a heavy price, and it’s an interesting mental exercise to play “if only.” If only President Carter had not betrayed the Shah of Iran, contemporary Iran would not be run by ayatollahs. If only President Reagan had not sent the Marines to Lebanon, the Israelis would have eliminated the PLO once and for all and thousands of Israelis and 241 brave Marines would still be alive. If only President Clinton had killed Osama bin Laden, 9/11 might never have happened. If only America was more prudent, our leaders more determined. If only…our presidents and the American people had learned from history.
The president, by practicing the politics of appeasement, has a difficult time coming to terms with the teachings of his ideological mentor and the father of modern terrorism, Vladimir Lenin. Lenin, who both perpetrated terrorism and was on the receiving end, taught that “Terror can be conquered only with greater terror.”  
Obama’s failure to call our conflict with Islam a war has resulted in wide-spread confusion. On the one hand, the president never misses a chance to release captured terrorists back into their environment, so they can continue killing. On the other hand, American drones are killing terrorists with deadly precision in Afghanistan, Yemen, and other parts of the world so efficiently that they cannot replace their commanders fast enough. At one point the administration decided to prosecute Al Qaeda leaders including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as civilians in domestic U.S. courts even though there was a good chance that the terrorists would beat the rap on technicalities, just like Bill Ayers (another terrorist who is also Obama’s friend), and walk free. Later, the president approved a raid in Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. It seems Obama is torn between his sympathies for Islam and the realities of war.
Once again, the president appears to be caught in conflicting currents. He insists that acts of terrorism are legal issues and must be dealt with by our legal system. Despite the fact that Obama refuses to call this conflict a war, he is sending drones abroad to kill people (even Americans) without due process. If this is indeed a war, no American civil or criminal law applies, and the president’s actions are fully justified. However, if this is not a war, then how can the president execute people, including Americans, without due process? Although Obama does not call this conflict a war, he nonetheless personally chooses the drone “kill” targets, as recently revealed in the New York Times. Although deciding who lives and who dies may play well into the president’s feeling of eminence; it is neither legal nor does it do much to win a war.
Just as in domestic politics, the president may choose to ignore reality, but he cannot change it. The reality is that we are in a state of war: the Third World War. In order to win a war, we have to understand the enemy and its objectives. Napoleon once said, “If you do not understand your enemy, you have lost.” His words should be taken as a warning, in effect, of worse to come. To say most Muslims are moderates and have nothing to do with the fanatical Islamic terrorists is like saying the Germans were a highly cultured, peaceful people and that the mass murder of Jews was perpetrated by National Socialist extremists. There are many striking similarities between Nazi Germany and today’s Muslim world, all of which this current administration and the Left have chosen to ignore.
The Nazis’ doctrine called for supremacy of the Aryan race and extermination of the Jews. I am sure that the Left (which has many Jewish supporters) would consider those policies “extreme.” However, the Left fails to recognize that, like the Nazis’ doctrine, the Koran segregates the human race into two groups: Muslims and infidels; and just like the Nazis’ doctrine, the Koran calls for the killing of infidels and, more specifically, the killing of Jews. The Muslims’ view of the world is that they alone possess absolute knowledge and the God-given supreme right over the infidels. In both instances we are dealing with a sector of society that claims superiority over the rest of the human race and seeks to have them destroyed or enslaved. Make no mistake: Islam is not just a religion; it is also a political totalitarian movement, just like communism and fascism. The movement embraces a fanatical agenda that includes racial supremacy and a Marxist-type utopian/egalitarian standard of virtue. However, unlike communism and fascism, which were adopted by countries that could be defeated, Islam is represented by unlimited human resources around the globe that cannot be defeated in strictly military terms.
The Muslims of the world are united in the epic struggle to provide moral, financial, and logistical support to those who are on the front line of war with the infidels. That silent but effective network of support allows terrorists to avoid security forces, survive, plan, recruit new members, and provide training.
Working in the Arab world during the last decade, I have met many Muslims who insisted that they had nothing to do with terrorism. The problem is that they remain silent, in fear of the so-called extremists. They do not publicly condemn terror, and they continue to donate money to the mosques and charities and cover organizations that offer moral and financial support to the terrorist movement. They, just like most Germans during the Nazi regime, do not want to know. In any event, we should not be confused by this silent minority regarding the true nature of Islam, just as the world was not confused about the nature of Nazism because of the small anti-fascist movement inside Germany.
I was in a hotel in Tripoli after the fall of Khadafy, watching Arab TV showing gruesome images of beheadings.A few men were on their knees, blindfolded, with hands tied behind their backs. A young man took a butcher knife and start cutting the neck of the first victim. The executioner did not appear to know what to look for in order to cut through the spine quickly; it took him some time. It was horrific beyond belief! Finally, he found the spot, cut through, and severed the head. A huge crowd of bearded men and boys cheered loudly. I was sick to my stomach. That was the moment I realized the contrast between Muslim extremists and moderate Muslims. The extremists carried out the execution, while the moderates cheered, recording the event on their iPhones and enjoying watching it on TV. We should not be apologetic for judging all of them by the behavior of most of them. The Left’s position on the Muslim threat is inconsistent, immoral, and reprehensible. But that should not surprise us: the Left did not consider Hitler extreme at the time, and supported the proposal to nominate him for the Nobel Peace Prize. The Left has always had a natural attraction to totalitarian, bloody regimes. They admired Stalin, Mao, and in more recent times Castro, Che Guevara, and Hugo Chavez.
Americans have been in denial about this danger since the early 1970s when the Palestine Liberation Organization began committing terrorist acts against Israelis, but the world was silent because the victims were Jews and we are not Jews. Adding logs to that proverbial fire, the world endorsed and encouraged the terrorists by awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to PLO chief terrorist Yasser Arafat. Since then terrorists have taken to Europe, but we are not Europeans; and Asia, but we are not Asians. The evolving history of terrorism is captured well by what German Lutheran Pastor Niemoller wrote about the Nazis:

In Germany they first came for the communists
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a communist.
They came for the Jews
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the trade Unionists
and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Catholics
and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me and by that time no one was left to speak up.

Today in the United States, the terrorists are living among us, but the administration still practices appeasement. The president and the former mayor of New York City, with the support of the Left, were perfectly willing to let the Muslims build their Mosque of Triumph in close proximity to the destroyed World Trade Center, just as they built the Al-Aqsa Mosque on the site of the Second Temple in Jerusalem after conquering the city in the seventh century.
In Afghanistan, the administration’s policies are just as confusing as on the domestic front. During an interview with Newsweek, the vice president told the magazine, “Look, the Taliban per se is not our enemy. That’s critical.” If the Taliban is not our enemy, who are our military men and women fighting? And why are they dying in Afghanistan? Can anybody make sense of this? If we do not know who our enemies are, how can we defeat them? As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are going, you might never get there.” And, we are not.
The first order of making sense is to acknowledge that we are in the age-old struggle between freedom and tyranny, and that the value of human life in the world of Islam is dramatically different from ours. Saddam Hussein said it best: “If you kill a man, you are a murderer; if you kill hundreds, you are a hero; but if you kill thousands, you are a conqueror.” This is the mentality of the other society, where terrorism is an instrument of power. Whether it is a war on terrorism or a war in Iraq or Afghanistan, if we are not prepared to kill thousands, we cannot be respected. Conventional thinking embraces the belief that democratic civilizations are based on humanitarian principles, and those principles separate us from the barbarians. About which Henry Kissinger wrote, “While we should never give up our principles, we must also realize that we cannot maintain our principles unless we survive.”
Whether we can do what needs to be done to survive, or we have watered down our genes and become impotent and ineffective, history will be the judge. In the past, civilized society had little hesitation to use all means at its disposal to protect and defend its ideals. Bombing Dresden in 1945 was a clear act of terrorism aimed at German civilians in order to break their resolve. Dropping two nuclear bombs on Japan was hardly a humanitarian act. Our contemporary American challenge is not the military aspect of killing a lot of people; it is the moral issue, regardless of reasoning and justification. The undeniable truth is that terrorism is a weapon of tyrants, and it is the enemy of liberty.  Whether this nation is prepared to conquer terrorists with greater terror is an open question. What is not in question is the imperative for survival of our civilization. How we define and articulate American foreign policy toward the Arab world and how we, as a nation, deal with terrorism are interrelated. Although the purpose of terrorism is to terrorize, a war on terrorism is not just a psychological assault, it is also a military confrontation and a political affair.
Introducing Wilsonian principles in the Arab world, calling for self-determination and democracy, without understanding the fundamentals of tribal societies, has proved disastrous for this country. The goal of building democratic nations in recent U.S. incursions in Iraq and Afghanistan has proved impossible in the face of an Islamic culture that violently rejects Western values. The fallacy that by removing a tyrant and getting in the middle of civil war we could build a nationand create democratic institutions at the same time has driven the U.S. into protracted and costly military conflicts with no end in sight.
It is becoming evident that our country has not learned the lessons of 60^th and has repeated the same mistakes with grave consequences.
“Wilsonianism[1] of the early 60^th had lured us into adventures beyond our capacities and deprived us of criteria to define essential elements of our national purpose.”
Thus wrote Henry Kissinger, the best-known American diplomat of our time, in his memoir,  Years of Renewal. We should have learned from Kissinger that the most important task before our nation in this war on terrorism is to define our interests and shape our commitments—not to allow existing commitments to define our interests. Once we clearly define our interests and commitments, it will be the time for Americans to find out, to paraphrase John F. Kennedy, whether we are free men standing up to our responsibilities, and whether the United States has the will to face up to the enemy.
In the name of the missing Twin Towers and the thousands of victims of this heinous terrorist attack, in the name of the thousands of fallen men and women in the war on terrorism, in the name of the Israelis, who have suffered Islamic terrorism for decades, the United States must have the will to face up to the enemy. The American challenge is to abandon denial, define our enemies, stop appeasement, face the threat, and acquire the will to use all means at our disposal to grant the ultimate wish to those who proclaim that they love death more than we love life.
[1]Wilsonianism refers to the idealistic principles of conducting foreign policy by applying American democratic values, as set forth by Woodrow Wilson. It includes the notion of a new global order based on national self-determination and proliferation of democracy.
Posted by Ted Belman