Let's Review, Once Again, The Perils of Extremists

If one wants to truly understand the War on Terror, study the Holy Crusades. The capture of hostages,the torture of hostages, even the beheadings of hostages make the connection to the Holy Crusades all too obvious. This in no way belittles or lessens the horrors of such atrocities, but these events should make it evidently clear to all people that it isn't just Americans who are the targets.

Every person is a potential target of these fundamentalist extremists. Their targets are in the millions and their goals can be reduced to a few: eliminate the infidels and exterminate the non-believers. Their ultimate goal is to purge the world of all but their version of Islam.1

Infidels is an English word for the Arabic kufr, which means an unbeliever. Islam was founded on the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad who issued the first jihad against Jews… which he called infidels.

Al Qaeda is a radical, extremist Wahhabis fundamentalist Muslim group that has one goal: a world filled only with their followers. It doesn't matter if someone is American, Korean, Spanish, Indian, Lebanese, British, or even French. If you are a non-believer of the Wahhabis brand of Islam, you are an infidel.

Islamic fundamentalism has been growing rapidly since the 1970s. Perhaps the West's first clue of potential problems was the oil embargo in 1974. One only has to re-examine the fall of the Shah of Iran, the Ayottollah Khomeini's Revolution in Iran, and the capture of the 52 American hostages in 1979 to sense we were confronting a serious threat. Jimmy Carter's feeble pacification and willingness to placate this terrorist situation only worsened the American fate. The reaction of Carter to the crisis in the Middle East encouraged the growth of a hatred and disdain for the Western Great Satan. In the mid 1980s the fundamentalist had developed a strategy: manipulate the Palestinian situation and create a disturbance with Israel. Thus, the intifadah was born. Unbeknownst to the Palestinians, the leaders of the Islamic movement really did not give a hoot about the plight of the Palestinians. They did, however, relish using these poor souls plight to further their major goal: divide the Western world.

Emerging as the leader of this movement was a Saudi by the name of Usama bin Laden. By 1998, bin Laden had recruited operatives in a global network with a single mission: the planned destruction and indiscriminate slaughter against the infidels. In 1998 he declared a jihad in the name of the World Islamic Front. According to Middle Eastern expert Bernard Lewis,bin Laden made it clear in his jihad declaration that he was not focusing on a jihad in a moral sense, but "in the classical and traditional sense of a holy war against apostates and infidels---apostates, of course, are the existing rulers of most of the Islamic countries, seen as renegades from Islam and puppets of their infidel patrons and sponsors." Bin Laden's message is a frightening one.

If you, as President of the United States in 1998, had received this message, how would you have responded? Bin Laden told his followers "to kill Americans and their allies, both civil and military….By God's leave, we call on every Muslim who believes in god and hopes for reward to obey God's command to kill Americans and plunder their possessions wherever he finds them and whenever he can. Likewise we call on the Muslim ulema and leaders and youth and soldiers to launch attacks against the armies of the American devils and against those who are allied with them from among the helpers of Satan".

As the leader of the free world, as the Commander in Chief, and as the Chief Executive, would you have paid heed to this warning? When the Sudan offered you the opportunity to arrest bin Laden would you have jumped at it or ignored it? When bin Laden took responsibility for blowing up two American embassies in Africa, would you have responded by launching a Cruise Missile into an aspirin factory?

There is a consistent pattern which the politicos on the left are missing: "It was discernible in the Riyadh massacres of November 8, 2003, when the target was Lebanese Christians at Khobar, the terrorists spared one American because he was Muslim. The Al Qaeda operatives have happily killed Filippino, Swedish, British, Italian, South Africans, and Indians. Muslims who do not share the extremists' vision asophisticated."2 The sophisticated, well armed Hezbollah is as dangerous as Al Qaeda. It is Hezbollah which has struck Israel and the United States with impunity, and the hapless, pathetic farce of an international body known as the UN acquiesces while running in retreat from terrorist organizations.

"These killings are not about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal or American actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, though those are grievances. These are not about Israel, though that is another grievance. In fact, most of the Islamist terrorists victims worldwide are not Americans or even Westerners, but Asian and Middle Eastern Christians, Muslims, and Hindus. For the extremists, the justification for the slaughter is not current foreign policy but rather as an apocalyptic war to purge the world of all but their version of Islam."3

"Spaniards will not be spared because Spanish troops are gone from Iraq. Europe cannot make its way into the terrorists good graces by distancing itself from America, any more than the United States can mollify the Islamists by acting through the United Nations or wooing world opinion. These are fantasies."4

Think about it briefly. Does Al Qaeda's leadership really care about the lives of the young Muslims who are willing to die as martyrs for their cause? No. Life is dispensable, it is worthless. If life were valuable or meaningful to the Al Qaeda leadership, they wouldn't be so willing to have suicide bombers. The leadership of Al Qaeda is much like Hitler and the Nazi leaders and like the Japanese leaders of WWII. Everything is done for the glorification of their goal: global domination based on cruelty, torture, and dehumanizing behavior. If their cause is so noble, then why are the Al Qaeda leaders and operatives not leading the suicide missions themselves? No, it's all about domination and power.

The sad truth is that a whole group of people has become the pawns of the Islamic fundamentalist movement. The Palestinians are used as the whipping boy, the rallying cry, and the focal point to draw attention away from the real mission of the Wahhabis movement. Unfortunately, the imams, caliphs, and sheiks have become blinded by this fatalistic religious movement. Their schools, houses of worship, and books are filled with hatred for the Infidel, the non-believer. This radical hatred is accomplishing what the Wahhabis want: dissension among the non-believers as to what to do about the war on terror.

Al Qaeda's enemy is anyone who opposes its program for the restoration of a unified Muslim ummah, ruled by a new Caliphate, governed by reaction Islamic sharia law, and organized to wage jihad on the rest of the world. The lesson of Riyadh and Khobar is that we can resist this program, in which case, tragically, we may see more videos of beheadings. Or we can acquiesce to this program and see a great many more hostages captured, tortured, and beheaded. These are the choices. We are in a war we must win. Everything else is wishful thinking.5

Sometimes the grievances and issues involved in the conflict between Muslims and non-Muslims are ethnic, territorial, social, economic, but the real struggle is religion. Religion is the major, defining struggle in these areas: Bosnia, Kosovo, Chechnya, Kashmir, Sinkiang, Philippines, Palestine, Timor, West Africa, and Sudan.

Only the uninformed would argue that these conflicts are something other than manifestations of Western dominance over the Islamic world. This conflict has been growing since the end of the Holy Crusades and the Treaty of Carlowitz resulting in the defeat of the Ottoman Empire at the hands of the Christian world. Ever since the Holy Crusades the Muslim world views all problems as ultimately religious, and all the final answers are naturally religious. For the present leaders of the fundamentalist sect of Islam, the goal is elimination of Western powers and the extermination of infidels.

Bernard Lewis raises the pertinent question, which some people fail to see just as some, failed to see it with the rise of Hitler. "Will the cause of freedom triumph over terror as it did over the Nazis and Communism?"