What we fight for

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

The third anniversary of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq has been marked by antiwar demonstrations, polls suggesting evaporating public support for the effort to consolidate that country's liberation and paroxysms of doubt by America's finger-in-the-wind politicians. It seems like a good time to reflect anew on the true nature of the conflict and why we have no choice but to wage it with tenacity to a successful conclusion.

Fortunately, we are greatly aided in that task by the timely arrival of an extraordinary film: "Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West." Viewing this documentary should hereafter be considered a prerequisite for participating in the debate about the national security challenges we face, and what must be done to address them.

"Obsession" is an unblinking, and deeply disturbing, portrait of our most immediate and dangerous enemy, in Iraq and elsewhere -- the ideology best described as Islamofascism.

The film's conclusion is as inescapable as it is well documented: Adherents to this totalitarian political movement are determined to destroy the Free World, whose nations, values and institutions are seen as impediments to the global triumph of the Islamists' preferred, Taliban-style religious rule. For our enemies, Iraq represents but one front in a world war. And we, too, must recognize it as such.

The full dimensions of that War for the Free World are laid bare in "Obsession" from an extraordinary array of sources. For example, penetrating analyses are provided by internationally renowned Western experts like Sir Martin Gilbert, Alan Dershowitz, Daniel Pipes, Caroline Glick, Steven Emerson, Robert Wistrich and Itamar Marcus.

The insights of a number of courageous anti-Islamist Muslims (in some cases, former Muslims) are, if anything, even more compelling. These include observations of the daughter of a terrorist, Nonie Darwish; a former Palestinian terrorist, Walid Shoebat; an Israeli-Arab journalist, Khaled Abu-Toameth; an American imam, Khaleel Mohammed; and two prominent expatriate writers, Salim Mansur and Tashbih Sayyed. They describe with authority our common foes' determination and ruthlessness.

Lest there be any doubt, however, about the magnitude of the challenge freedom-loving peoples face, the footage in "Obsession" drawn from Islamist sources themselves (notably, their various state-owned and terrorist-sponsored television outlets) is dispositive. It features imams calling for death to America; officials of Mideast governments making plain the destruction of the United States is God's will; even tiny children regurgitating their desire for death while killing Israelis, Americans and other infidels.

The impact of the images of Muslim kids brandishing weapons, marching in goose step and giving stiff-armed salutes in mass demonstrations underscores a point made in the film by the late Alfons Heck, a former Hitler Youth Group leader in Nazi Germany: Islamofascism is really just the latest in a series of totalitarian ideologies bent on destroying the Free World.

"Obsession" makes clear that, like the Fuehrer, the Islamists will not be content with denying the people of Iraq accountable, representative government. Neither would their appetites be sated by destroying the State of Israel.

In fact, even seemingly less momentous forms of appeasement -- such as negotiating with the Islamofascist Iranian regime -- will simply confirm our avowed enemies' contempt for us, and their confidence in the ultimate victory of their cause.