Having spent some years living in Muslim countries and fighting terrorism, I always cock an eyebrow when I hear someone like Secretary of State John Kerry speak in the wake of the Paris attacks and say, "This is not about a clash of civilizations..." Secretary Kerry’s statements tracked closely with the administration’s oft-repeated narrative that this has nothing to do with religion, nothing to do with Islam. President Obama condemned the recent attacks in Paris noting that they were against, "... the universal values that we share..."
What universal values? Al Qaeda, the Islamic State, and other swaths of the Muslim world fundamentally do not believe in the same values as most Americans. They fundamentally don't believe in freedom of religion, democracy, equal protection under the law, freedom of the press, equal rights, or social justice. They oppress women and despise diversity and liberal thinking; they are against modernity; and they destroy historical artifacts and museums. They fundamentally don’t believe in the things we hold most dear.
Of course this isn't a war on Islam. Like all the great world religions, to include Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and others, Islam is about tolerance and peace—not violence. I’m sure the President does not want to fall into the trap of using the vernacular that ISIS and Al Qaeda want. But, we need to face the music and recognize we have a real problem with radicals who have hijacked the Muslim religion. ISIS now controls and holds vast territory, and they rule over 10 million people. No, they don't speak for all Muslims, but they do speak for quite a few.
Muslim extremists are using religion to justify everything from killing non-believers, to raping young Yazidi girls, to killing innocents on the streets in Paris. The administration keeps saying that this has nothing to do with Islam or religion, and yet the perpetrators of all of these attacks say it has everything to do with Islam and religion. This doesn’t make them right, but it does make it a fact that we are being repeatedly attacked by people in the name of religion, and in many parts of the Muslim world, things are moving in the wrong direction.
We live in a country that has taken great strides over the last 50 years in everything from civil rights, to women’s rights, to LGBT rights. We believe in the separation of church and state. We believe strongly in freedom of religion. In the Muslim world, I see millions of people going in exactly the opposite direction: less tolerance, less freedom, less liberty, more fundamentalism, less freedom of religion.
Yes, these people are usually the vocal minority in most places, but in many places, they have been able to hijack the local religion, take over regions, and then sometimes, even governments. They are clear in their statements that they are trying to create a Muslim caliphate that will rule not only the Muslim world but the entire world. While we sit back and parse words and say repeatedly that we are not at war with them, and that this is not a clash of civilizations, they say quite clearly that they are at war with us, and it is a clash of civilizations.
It would seem we are headed for a collision. The Western world is more open and liberal and progressive every year, but more and more, we see parts of the Muslim world rejecting modernity, diversity, and equal rights. In Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Egypt, and even in Turkey, we see countries that are less tolerant and progressive today than they were 10, 20, even 50 years ago. In the early sixties in Egypt, women used to copy Jackie Kennedy fashions and hem lines. In Afghanistan in the sixties, American hippies used to travel the country without a care and drink tea in outdoor cafes. An American friend told me the other day how he hitchhiked across Afghanistan in 1967. An old Afghan friend of mine was showing me family photos the other day, and he apologized for his mother’s attire in the photos (she was in shorts), noting that you certainly wouldn’t see something like that in Afghanistan today. In Pakistan, you used to be able to order a beer in a restaurant, and you certainly didn’t worry about someone throwing acid on your daughter because she was walking down the street in a dress.
Universal values? About the only place where we seem to find common ground with salafist Muslims is with our Second Amendment—the right to bear arms.
In the intelligence community, we analyze events in an attempt to both understand what is going on and secondly, to hopefully glean insights that will allow us to take countermeasures to prevent future terrorist attacks. We always talk about trying to “connect the dots,” and we lamented our inability to “connect the dots” well enough prior to 9/11 to have been able to stop the attacks. Looking at the “dots,” one always sees a bunch of information, and the challenge is to figure out when and where those data points become trend lines. Sometimes, you have one-off occurrences that don't really mean anything. But data points become trend lines when the dots form in a way that you can see patterns.
In today’s world, you don’t exactly have to be Nostradamus to recognize that the western world is under a vicious and escalating attack that is being directed by terrorists who are radical Muslim fundamentalists. ISIS, the “JV Team” as the President described them, is on the move, and the trend lines seem to suggest it is more dangerous than ever and is getting stronger, not weaker.
Like the 12-step recovery programs for alcoholism or drug addiction, where the first step is to acknowledge you have a problem, we might be better able to tackle this reality if we were at least honest about it. But with the President and his administration in complete denial about the reality of the threat posed by radical Muslim fundamentalism, it would appear any movement toward a solution is a long ways off.
