Fighting an unnamed enemy waging an unrecognized war

THE WASHINGTON TIMES The Washington Times - July 23, 2010, 10:40AM

Guest Post by Daniel Mandel

Since arriving in office, the Obama administration has delved deeply into its thesaurus to find ways of speaking about Islamism without mentioning it. In his June 2009 Cairo speech, a not atypical example, President Obama referred repeatedly to ‘extremists,’ ‘violent extremists’ and ‘violent extremism.’ He even referred at one point to anti-Israel terrorism by its Palestinian euphemism – ‘resistance.’

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Add to this the philological ingenuities of his officials: ‘man-caused disasters’ (terrorism) and ‘overseas contingency operations’ (fighting Islamists in Afghanistan), and the omission of any mention of the terrorism and the ideology animating it is virtually uniform in this administration.

However, following last week’s terrorist outrages against Ugandans, Obama has referred now to ‘terrorists’ while also hitting on a new term: ‘racist.’ As an administration official helpfully explained, al Qaeda does not deploy its black African recruits except in their “lower level operations.” Are we then to assume that the administration would be pleased to see a higher proportion of black Africans in al-Qaeda’s operational cadre?

A cynic might argue that this reaction to the terrorist outrages affords hope that this race-preoccupied administration might be about to take Islamists seriously, if only because of al Qaeda’s contempt for inclusiveness and diversity. Unfortunately, any such hope would be frivolous.

Consider, for example, the rationale advanced by the Obama administration for banishing the words ‘Islamism’ and ‘jihad’ from the governmental lexicon.

In May, John O. Brennan, Obama’s chief national security adviser for counterterrorism, contended that to use such terms “would lend credence” to the notion “that the United States is somehow at war against Islam … Nor do we describe our enemy as jihadists or Islamists because jihad is holy struggle, a legitimate tenet of Islam meaning to purify oneself of one’s community.”

Yet, according to all schools of Islamic jurisprudence, jihad has always constituted a struggle by all means, including waging war, to establish and extend Muslim dominion over non-Muslims. Purification is seen to reside in attaining this objective, not in some conception of personal or communal development that Brennan artlessly drapes over it. The United States is not at war with Islam, but Muslims who wage jihad are at war with the United States.

Then consider who else of Brennan’s ilk Obama has appointed – or sought to appoint – to senior posts:

Rashad Hussain, envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the 57-member inter-governmental group of Muslim majority states: A former Justice Department official and White House deputy counsel, Hussain claimed in a 2007 article that restrictions placed on non-immigrant visitors from countries which have produced Islamist terror threats are “racist.” Hussain has also called the prosecution of a Florida professor who was found to have been illegally funding the terrorist group Palestinian Islamic Jihad (presumed politically correct name: Palestinian Extremist Man-Made Disaster-Causers) “politically motivated persecution.”

Dalia Mogahed, adviser, White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships: Executive director of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, Mogahed has been a promoter-apologist of groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) and the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both of which are tied to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Mogahed claims that “misinformation” campaigns have tried to “disenfranchise them.” In fact, CAIR’s founder is on record praising suicide bombers and saying he would like the Quran to be the highest authority in America. Officials of both CAIR and ISNA have been indicted for funneling money to foreign terrorists.

Chas. W. Freeman: A former ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Freeman was nominated last year by Obama to be chairman of the National Intelligence Council before vulnerabilities in his record of close ties to tyrannies like China and Saudi Arabia compelled him to withdraw. Freeman regards Palestinian terrorism as “resistance” and believes that America has shown Hamas, the Palestinian Islamist terrorist group that calls in its Charter for the world-wide murder of Jews, “unreasoning hostility.”

This impossible to satirize line-up suggests that this administration cannot win – itself an objective consciously discarded in Afghanistan by Obama in favor of ‘shoring up security in the country’ – over an unnamed enemy waging an unrecognized war.

Daniel Mandel is a fellow in history at Melbourne University & director of the Zionist Organization of America’s Center for Middle East Policy.