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January 26, 2010

The Pentagon's Willful Blindness

By Andrew G. Bostom
The Pentagon's bowdlerized "analysis" of the jihad-inspired mass murder committed by a pious Muslim officer at Fort Hood is a disgrace. The willful blindness toward the essence of jihad will harm our troops.

I recently attended a briefing (an early iteration of the discussion contents are available here, entitled "To Our Great Detriment") which elucidated in irrefragable detail the Pentagon's willful capitulation to the dictates of Islamically-correct interpretations of jihad by various Muslim Brotherhood "consultants" to the Department of Defense (DOD). While the DOD adopts the absurdly apologetic interpretation of jihad at its most "aggressive" as a bloodless missionary "striving" to promote the Religion of Peace -- negating the living legacy of jihad as a genocidal war doctrine, in practice as well as in theory -- the Pentagon's Muslim Brotherhood advisers, true to the authentic doctrines of jihad as an endless war of propaganda and deceit, continue to espouse jihad war to their Muslim constituencies.

The result of this stunningly corrosive process has been the willful subversion of U.S. DOD policy to the ultimate goals of both cultural and violent jihad: Islamization. More immediately, the warped, criminally negligent "rules of engagement" this DOD subversion has engendered are imposed upon our troops actually battling armed jihadism. This puts their lives in danger unnecessarily and for precisely the wrong "cause" -- alternative forms of Islamization, such as supporting Sharia-compliant regimes irrevocably hostile to Western ideals and goals in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The dangerous absurdity of DOD subversion -- and its cruel, destructive impact on our troops -- is self-evident in this report and accompanying commentary by Diana West:
This wasn't supposed to happen there. According to a ‘counterinsurgency' plan (COIN), anti-US, anti-infidel violence just wasn't supposed to erupt in Garmsir, Afghanistan, of all places. But it did. And at least eight Afghans died in this Helmand Province district in rioting this week inspired by rumors that U.S. troops had roughed up a Koran.  Somewhere between ‘one thousand' (UPI) and ‘several thousand' (The New York Times) Afghans converged on the central bazaar in response to these rumors. ‘The Taliban were provoking the people,' an Afghan police official told the Times. ‘The Taliban were telling the people, ‘This is jihad; you should sacrifice yourselves.'

Jihad? What's jihad? Among see-no-Islam Western policymakers, Islamic war doctrine is a cipher, a taboo, so policy is made in ignorance. But thousands of uneducated Afghans knew exactly what the Taliban meant. And what's more, they acted on it.  It was ‘like watching the movie Blackhawk Down,' a Marine master sergeant told UPI, except ‘I was in it. My gunner kept yelling he had definite targets, people shooting at us but he couldn't fire back because there were unarmed people around them.'

The contemporary willful ignorance -- and subversion -- of our DOD contrasts starkly with the studious and intellectually honest approach to jihad taken by C. Snouck Hurgronje. A professor and Dutch colonial official, Snouck Hurgronje was also a pioneering and prolific Western scholar of Islam.

He visited Arabia (1884-85), including a stop at Mecca, while serving as a lecturer at the University of Leiden (1880-89). Hurgronje's two-volume classic work Mekka (1888-89) describes the history of the city and expounds upon Islam's origins and the traditions and rituals of the earliest Islamic communities. Translated into English as Mekka in the Latter Part of the 19th Century (1931), the second volume includes many details of daily life in an Islamic culture and also discusses the Indonesian Muslim colony at Mecca.

From 1890 to 1906, Snouck Hurgronje was professor of Arabic at Batavia, Java. He also served as an adviser to the Dutch Colonial Government for Arabian Affairs, and in 1891 he was sent for a year to Sumatra to study the Acheh uprising -- the subject of his two-volume De Atjèhers (1893-94; published in English translation in 1906 as The Achehnese), his ethnographic account of the people of northern Sumatra and a standard reference work.

Snouck Hurgronje remained a colonial adviser until 1933, but he returned in 1906 to the Netherlands, where he was professor of Arabic and Islamic institutions at the University of Leiden until his death in 1936. An explorer, scholar, politician, and jurist, Hurgronje wrote extensively on a range of Islamic topics and also served as a visiting professor in Egypt (1911) and the United States (1914).

Although deeply respectful of Islamic religious life, as an authoritative scholar of Islamic doctrine and history and a Dutch colonial official, Hurgronje vigorously opposed Islamic jihadism. He stated plainly that all teaching with regard to the orthodox, mainstream Islamic institution of jihad war and the establishment of a caliphate should be prohibited in Muslim schools. But perhaps most importantly, Hurgronje's "prescription" was based on a meticulously researched, clear-eyed, and unfettered understanding of Islamic doctrine, history, and culture.

The travesty of today's subverted DOD policies toward jihad -- embraced and embodied by General Stanley McChrystal -- are highlighted by the comparing of McChrystal's and Hurgronje's words.

Sounding eerily like an erstwhile "Commander of the Faithful," McChrystal's uninformed, jihad-abetting dawah maintains that "flagrant contravention of the principles of the Koran" includes, for example, "The Taliban tell them [Afghan Muslims] the Koran says they have to fight the Crusaders and they [Afghan Muslims] believe them."

Contrast McChrystal's bizarre, distressingly apologetic notions with Hurgronje's insights gleaned from decades of studying Islam, including years of fieldwork in Indonesia researching and writing his seminal, The Acehnese, an analysis of a jihad-inspired Muslim "insurgency." Hurgronje made these general observations regarding the doctrine of jihad war from his Mohammedanism (New York, 1916, p. 59):

...yet another duty was most emphatically impressed on the Faithful; jihad, i.e., readiness to sacrifice life and possessions for the defense of Islam, understood, since the conquest of Mecca in 630, as the extension by force of arms of the authority of the Muslim state, first over the whole of Arabia, and soon after Muhammad's death over the whole world, so far as Allah granted His hosts for the victory.

In The Acehnese, Hurgronje concluded,

...most Muslims are absolutely ignorant of the details of the doctrine of jihad.  But so long as not one single Muslim teacher of consideration dreams of regarding these laws of the middle ages as abrogated, while a great proportion of the people exhibit the strongest inclination to restore the conditions which prevailed some centuries ago, so long does it remain impossible, however anxious we may be to do so, to omit the jihad from our calculations when forming a judgment on the relation of Islam to other religions.

...rules of Mohammedan [Islamic] law which control the relations of the ‘faithful' to the ‘unbelievers' can only be characterized as humane...if we start on the supposition... that kafirs [non-Muslims infidels] are the inferiors of Muslims in this world. That law declares it to be permissible in some cases, in others commendable and even obligatory, to slay infidels, or to kidnap or enslave them. Many ways are left open to the Muslim of cheating individual kafirs or an infidel government without sinning against God. Under the Mohammedan law religious liberty is intolerable as involving the coexistence of truth with falsehood, and of the service of the true God with paganism.

Our military leadership -- epitomized by gullible, triumphantly ignorant men such as McChrystal -- must abandon its self-destructive, Muslim Brotherhood-nurtured "understanding" of Islam and rediscover the wisdom and experiences of honest Western scholars such as C. Snouck Hurgronje.
on "The Pentagon's Willful Blindness"