Raw Feed: Skewering Fareed Zakaria’s Rationale

Posted by johnhouk on Mar 19, 2009
 Here are some rough notes from Gary H. Johnson, Jr. pertaining to an article that appeared in Newsweek written by Fareed Zakaria. I say “rough notes” because Mr. Johnson intends to polish his insight into an essay or three.

Johnson brilliantly lays waste to Zakaria’s assertion the West should pony up and just accept Islamism because it is more a local cultural phenomenon than a global phenomenon.

I can say in a very unscholarly way that Zakaria’s assertion is WACK.

Read Johnson’s rough notes and see why.

JRH 3/19/09
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Raw Feed: Skewering Fareed Zakaria’s Rationale

Gary H. Johnson, Jr.
March 18, 2009
United Against Islamic Supremacism

The following notes were written between March 7th and March 9th. Due to medical reasons, my right hand was immobilized and I wrote the piece over 3 days with three 4 hour spirts, so it would not be a stretch to say that it is possible that I destroyed the rationale of Fareed Zakaria with one hand tied behind my back. I think it possible to draw three articles from the notes…but I think it important for everyone to see the raw notes and think on the fact that Zakaria’s premise and the Obama administration’s course are both…Dangerous Rationales in the cause of Freedom in our age.

If you haven’t yet read it…here is a link to Zakaria’s madness - http://www.newsweek.com/id/187093

Take a look at Zakaria’s doublespeak and then take a moment and consider the following reasoned response.

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Exposing and Disproving Zakaria’s Intellectual Attack on Liberty

by Gary H. Johnson, Jr.
3/9/09

Accepting Radical Islam as a phenomenon which must be lived with is the surrender to the concept that Shariah Law is a benefit to humanity. Zakaria’s intellectual assault on reason knows no bounds in his Newsweek cover story entitled “Learning to Live with Radical Islam”. The article’s faulty assessment of the Taliban and unconscionable analysis of Jihadism is the result of a complete failure to understand the morality of Islamic Supremacism inherent in the Institution of the Hisba. In fact, so many things are wrong with Zakaria’s conflicted mentality and cryptic logic when discussing the local extremist versus global jihadist breakdown of Islamism and the Taliban that the value of Newsweek as a media outlet with any sense of editorial or journalistic integrity is brought into question. Indeed, the comments of President Obama aboard Airforce One on Friday to the New York Times lead one to believe that the Zakaria article was an orchestration of the White House press department.

First, in the opening of Zakaria’s article, the Swat valley is quiet once again. Wrong. The Swat Taliban estremist jihadis are still fighting. One need only follow Bill Roggio’s Long War Journal to realize this obvious reality. Every single day, the truce is broken…just as in Gaza, every single day rockets fly into Israel in genocidal fashion in complete abandon from the ceasefire there. Zakaria describes the ceasefire with the Talibani fighters in which the Pakistani government agreed to the militants’ key demands, chiefly that Islamic courts be established in the region without even questioning the wisdom of the Pakistani government’s negotiations with the jihadist insurgents or describing the failure of the history of these negotiations by the Pakistani government with Radical Islamists to the detriment of the sovereignty of the Pakistani state. Zakaria doesn’t deem it worth mentioning that 6 million tax payer dollars were paid to the militants as a stroke of American Diplomacy, giving his audience zero chance to consider the complete lack of wisdom in the diplomatic corps’ us of taxpayer dollars in which 3.8 billion dollars out of 5 billion dollars has vanished without a trace of oversight. Moreover, he does not mention the fact that the establishment of harsh Shariah Courts in the region represent a complete defeat of Liberty on every imaginable moral level.

Zakaria hedges over fears that women’s schools may be destroyed, that movies might be banned, and that public beheadings might become a regular occurrence in the region. He does not mention the fact that in the last two years over 400 girls’ schools have already been leveled in the guerilla attacks of these Taliban Jihadists , giving the reader no chance to even question how many young ladies have fallen to the bullets and rpgs of this ravenous band of tribal outlaws. Zakaria doesn’t mention the fact that these Swat Islamists recently took over 50 lawmakers, judges, and officials hostage and tried them in the Shariah way for their crimes against Allah’s supremacy. Instead, Zakaria opines that militants are “bad”, refusing to call them Jihadists, and questions the wisdom of the American and Pakistani Army decisions to militarily confront the threat. In this whitewash effort and attempt at reframing moral clarity, Zakaria asks a question which he sees as central: “How exactly should we oppose them?”

The article proceeds with Zakaria’s intellectual assessment of the threat we, in the West, find ourselves squaring off against in the Afghan and Pakistini sphere of our once War on Terror. In summation, Zakaria’s suggestion is to stop treating all Islamists as potential terrorists. This suggestion, is the moral response of a tortured multicultural political correctness run amock. It is the addition of the apologist mantra “Islam is not a monolith” and the “Profiling is Racism” formulas of the media, which have robbed America and the Western world of moral clarity on the issues of Islamic Supremacism’s advance for far too long. The sum is nothing less than Moral Cowardice. This moral cowardice, in the intellectual realm, is a deceptive dance of persuasion and selective history mixed with the hope of understanding by “taking a step back” and exploring the phenomenon and divining a way forward by blinding reason to fact.

Zakaria notes that “Reports from Nigeria to Bosnia to Indonesia show that Islamic Fundamentalists are finding support within the communities for their agenda, which usually involves the introduction of some form of Shariah - Islamic law - reflecting a puritanical interpretation of Islam. No music, no smoking, no female emancipation.” He does not waste his precious 3,000 word count on a moral reckoning on the issue of female emancipation; rather, Zakaria simply states that these groups are “ugly, reactionary forces” that “stunt their countries and dishonor their religion.” Stop! Wait! Hold on a second! The headlines of the internet and the media world fly by constantly with zero moral indignation or judgment from the West. Zakaria assumes the momentum of history will not stop his magical weave through the minefields of distraction. But men and women of reason need to take a hard look at what he is saying. In the Muslim lands of Africa, Central and Eastern Asia, Islamist communities are supporting Fundamental Islam — which does not allow women to be Free! Look at it! Stare at it! Pass judgment on it!

It is this fundamentalist reading of Islam, which is enshrined by the communities of the Muslim world, which dishonors the very religion it enforces. Really? Has it ever been said that the enforcement of the US Constitution dishonors the patriot of America? Zakaria refuses to stop and ask the obvious question: “Why would Islamist communities which harbor faith in a god named Allah and a prophet named Muhammad support female slavery (or segregation)?” The reason the question is not asked is simple; if Zakaria’s arguments are to hold, he cannot face the fact that Shariah Law dictates the rejection of Liberty at its moral core in these communities as a matter of dogmatic faith in the Koran as the Celestial Word of Allah. The refusal to ask this question is due to his dedication to his thesis and title which state that Radical Islam must be lived with and this academic intellectual play is a shirk of moral responsibility, and Zakaria is guilty of it every time his pen swirls on the topic of Radical Islam. He says he is going to take a step back to examine the situation and then in the same breath leaps forward without even considering Reason’s demands that he question the morality of Shariah Law’s fundamentalist reading by the various tribes throughout the communities of the Muslim faith. It is a sickness unto death, and the only remedy is a sharp rebuke on all fronts by the community of reason.

Zakaria concludes his step back and somehow deep reading and foray into understanding and exploration of the faith’s adherents and Islamism’s historic interpretation by remarking that “so far, no Afghan Taliban has participated at any significant level in a global terrorist attack over the past ten years, including 9/11.” Outrage! He quickly opines that not all Islamists advocate global jihad, host terrorists or launch operations against the outside world.” He is wrong on so many levels that he must be shouted down. Now, while Zakaria may be right that the Taliban is a difficult example to understand, he is flat lying on all other levels. He assumes that because some dissention exists in the rank and file mujahideen of the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, because some elements reject Al Qaeda, and others push for a purified Talibanistic court rather than global jihadist aims, that somehow this means that Islamists should not all be painted with the same terrorist brush…that the West should hold a more nuanced interpretation of their aims and efforts and differences in a cultural and local contextual setting. But this thesis of extremists versus jihadists and the aim of Zakaria’s intellectualism completely dismisses reality.

Hundreds of American and international NATO soldiers have been slaughtered by the Taliban tribes in their 8 year effort to establish a functioning state in Afghanistan since 9/11 - every single death of a Western Soldier was a significant event of global terror and jihad waged on the kufar, on the infidel. The arrogance of Zakaria’s elitism dismisses without so much as even a mention the significant losses of the families of those fallen fighters who died for the liberty of those who would be free of Shariah’s shackles.

Dissent in the Islamist intertribal bickerings also does not change the fact that the segregation and enslavement of women by the different, nuanced, local Taliban Murderers is an attack on the entire world of women - the entire world of Liberty! Zakaria, and now Obama, seem to have forgotten to ask themselves how many women could have offered advances in medicine, education, physics and economics, art and love the world over if it had not been for the Tribalistic, Totalitarian application of the Shariah Law imposed upon them by the Afghan and Pakistani varieties of the Taliban Islamists? To sluff off this wholesale affront to Reason and Justice, to reject the Freedom of Women as no significant terrorist attack on the global sphere is a Lie of the highest moral cowardice and displays a lack of reasoned integrity so vast as to be nothing short of a rejection of the value of women in western society by Zakaria. And for Obama to follow suit and declare his intent to engage with and reconcile with regionalized and localized elements of the Taliban is an indictment of his own arrogant chauvenistic inability to lead the Free World.

How many women are there in Afghanistan? In Pakistan? Let’s call it 75 million, shall we? Since when did it become reasonable and justifiable to enslave 75 million People? There are 1.5 Billion Muslims. Does the enslavement and segregation of the inviolable individual natural rights of 750 million women in the Muslim World not qualify as a significant global jihadist terrorist affront to the Reason of Man? Did we learn nothing whatsoever from the life and death of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Abraham Lincoln and our valient freedom fighters throughout our entire American Heritage at the end of the day on the evils of segregation and slavery and contempt? Apparently, Zakaria, on this score, has submitted to accepting Shariah Law as a force for good without critically evaluating the moral war against slavery that America has fought since its very inception. Make no mistake, the rights of women and the enslavement of women is not, and never will be, an insignificant thing, regardless of the intellectual striving for engagement and reconciliation with Islamic Supremacism found in the playbook of the current administration in the White House or in the halls of Newsweek. And for Zakaria to make this leap is not only unconscionable - it is anti-man, as has been the supremacist Islamic values found in the fundamentalist Islamic world since the very birth of Islam.

Jihadism is not bin Ladenism as Fareed Zakaria, Marc Reuel Gerecht, and Barack Hussein Obama would have everyone accept. Jihadism is the violent murder of reason, the violent murder of Liberty, in the name of Allah’s Supremacy as a matter of Law and measure of Value. Shariah Law is a reaction to the natural rights of mankind - the natural, inalienable, inviolable right of each individual the world over to determine his OR her own path by the volitional choices of his OR her own reasoning mind.

Shariah Law is the establishment of a Totalitatarian system of entitlements in which the umma, or the Community of Muslim Faith, has the right to kill or forcibly tax and humiliate anyone who seeks to live a life beyond Allah’s Rule. Bin Ladenism is just a variant of this terrorism, a visible variant; however, it is the disregarded and dismissed significance of the establishment of Supremacist Faith and Righteous Force as a measure of Good that threatens America and the West more assuredly than the takfiri methodology of bin Laden ever could. So, when Zakaria, in his intellectual ivory tower states that “Most Taliban want Islamic rule locally, not violent jihad globally” in a sweeping enlightened manner to his mental effort to wrap his mind around the phenomenon of what he and the multicultural and politically correct elite are calling “Islamist Extremism”, is the refusal of reason to accept the moral responsibility of judgment.

To prove this point - would Zakaria think it OK if Hitler had kept his extermination of Jewry limited to the localized borders of Germany? Was the enslavement of blacks in America a local affair with zero global significance? Would the slave trade have been morally upright so long as the berbers had not created a mercantile transport to the new world and localized the practice to Northern Africa? To consider these is to consider the absurd. Yet, Zakaria’s intellectual desire to engage and reconcile with radical islam without measuring the values of the Shariah by the standard of universal human rights or the rights found in the US Constitution has forced the suspension of his reason and his moral judgment on behalf of Islam to such an extent that the absurdity of the victim apologizing to his slaver and murderer becomes apparent, glaring, and paralyzing in the ink of his wide-eyed panting and groveling in the dirt. This sickness, this moral cowardice in the intellectual vanguard of the Free World, is the ultimate victory of Islamic Supremacism. The victory need not be through terror, terror is but one vehicle. Jihadism’s victory is the violent division of mankind from its faculty of reason - the victory of Islamism is the sacrifice of individual liberty across the world to the idol god of supremacy that is Allah’s Rights as demanded in the Koran. The moral core of Shariah Law is violent in and of itself - terroristic, in and of itself. And whether Jihadism or Islamism be advanced locally, regionally, or globally is no matter - for as a point of reasoned integrity, Islamic law is the complete annihilation of individual liberty at the altar of faith in Allah.

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To prove that Zakaria is walking into the victim apology of the offender, Zakaria immediately moves to describe the Chief Justice of the Afghani Supreme Court, who presided over Karzai’s inauguration, noting that he upheld the death penalty for two journalists, convicting and sentencing them for the crime of blasphemy, because they stated in print that the Afghani turn toward Islam was a “reactionary” one. Two men, who stood up for individual liberty in the face of a totalitarian mode of rule were murdered by this justice. Is that a Justice of the Peace? Would Zakaria have Geert Wilders head on a platter? Would he prefer the Canadian courts hang Mark Steyn? Is everyone who has ever called Islam “Fascist” to be executed? Did Zakaria ever stop to consider that this “not so militant” variety of extremism which espouses Islamic Law is cause for Western Moral Condemnation as a matter of Reasoned Integrity? Zakaria, then, fantastically asserts that if the Chief Justice had not held to this ruling, which literally sentences Reason to Death, he would have lost credibility in the eyes of the moderate Talibani communities of Afghanistan. Is it safe to say, then, that Zakaria will uphold his own tribunal of death when Shariah Law finds him guilty of talking about Islam at all as an infidel in the Dar al Harb?

Interestingly, Zakaria states that Radical Islam has gained a powerful foothold in the Muslim imagination due chiefly to the failure of Muslim countries to develop politically and economically. His assertion is patently wrong on every ethical level. Radical Islam has gained nothing in the imaginations of anyone. The Moral Supremacy of Islam entrenches itself unto the psyche of every Muslim - and this psychological, ethical, acceptance of the Ultimate Lie is what has guaranteed no political or economic advances in the countries and communities in which Shariah Law is held as the absolute code of values. And this aberation of cult faith is the essence of why the framers of the US Constitution held absolute the establishment clause, which holds that “Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of a religion.” This was the Moral Triumph of the US founding fathers over Shariah Law in this experiment of liberty that is the American Capitalist Republic. So, in retrospect, when considering the values of the founding fathers of America, the failure of George Bush in Iraq had nothing whatsoever to do with weapons of Mass Destruction - the chief failure of the United States in every liberation effort in the Middle East is the submission to cultural norms as superceding the rights of the citizens of the lands it has liberated. No more glaring example of this reality exists than Iraq, whose “democratic” Constitution’s second article establishes the supremacy of Allah and Shariah as the measure of its values as a nation. How many women are there in Iraq? Does the establishment of their slavery by a violent democratic ethic of Islamic Law by an Iraqi majority change the fact that slavery is the methodology of the day?

Zakaria’s assessment of Pakistan and Afghanistan’s “extremist” and “violent extremist” pantheon of tribal mujahideen necessarily skips and omits facts that are crucial in the determination of the terrain’s variables as he attempts to justify the push to isolate jihadism from the other manageable extremist elements, who are fighting about local and cultural contextual issues. But his historic framework skips three key elements of the battle in the region. The historic rise of Wahhabi Islam in the Deoband of the region, the pashtunwala of the pashtun tribes of the region, and the dismissal of the Talibani culture from the end of the cold war through 1999. No mention at all was made of Maududi, whose jihadism was derived from the Wahhab and Taymiya strains of Muslim Brotherhood styled international Islam, and whose influential economic reading of the Hisba can be found in a modern Santa Clara business called Ameen Housing, whose Shariah Compliant Financial structures claim moral backing of the ethical alternative to Capitalism in Maududi’s declaration of war on interest bearing loan makers and takers as a derived and interpreted from the Hadith and Koran. Nor is the sudden spike in Madrassas from 1973 in the Talibani sphere due to the Saudi Arabian exporting of Wahhadist literature, whose tentacles can be seen plainly in the radical Islam of Britain and even in the Fairfax, Virginia Madrassa whose supposedly moderate Wahhab education spawned an assassination attempt on President Bush’s life through one of its valedictorians. No, zero mention is made of these uncomfortable things. No mention is made of the Pashtun Honor code, pashtunwali, whose multiple cultural tribal readings can be seen in the honor killings and genital mutilations of women throughout the world, and whose harboring of terrorists such as Al Qaeda is a cultural norm. No, to mention this would possibly make the reader think that living with Radical Islam might not be an option if we are to remain free. But most of all - no mention was made by Zakaria of the Taliban’s confrontation with the UN and NGOs who sought to advance the health and educational well being of the less fortunate in the Pakistani and Afghani region throughout the 1990s. Indeed, the UN interaction with the Taliban in the late nineties epitomizes the cultural course he is suggesting in his “How to Live with Radical Islam” treatise of deceit and moral cowardice.

Ahmed Rashid, in his pre-9/11 release Taliban explains this reality of the Western interaction with the Taliban of Afghanistan via the NGO and UN world, which Zakaria must hedge out of intellectual self-preservation. In his chapter entitled “A Vanished Gender” Rashid notes that Taliban leaders told him that “if they gave women greater freedom or a chance to go to school, they would lose the support of their rank and file, who would be disillusioned by a leadership that compromised principles under pressure…. The gender issue became the main platform of the Taliban’s resistance to UN and Western governments’ attempts to make them compromise and moderate their policies.” Rashid notes that defiance of the West on social norms and the emancipation of women was a signal of victory., and that they “isnsisted that it was up to the West to moderate their position and accomodate the Taliban, rather than that the Taliban recognize universal human rights.” The supremacist nature of the faith is articulated in the assertion “Anybody who talks to us should do so within Islam’s framework. The Holy Koran cannot adjust itself to other people’s requirements, people should adjust themselves to the requirements of the Holy Koran.” So, while Zakaria mentions the Chief Justice, he seems to disregard the Attorney General Maulvi Jalilullah Maulvizada’s assertion that the world bow to the Supremacy of Islam. Rashid goes on to relate that on October 17, 1996, 100 women protested over the Taliban closure of bathhouses for women and that these women were beaten by the Religious police, who then went from home to home to make sure the men kept their women indoors, effectively imprisoning half the population from making any contribution to the advancement of their society out of an Islamic Duty to uphold Shariah Law’s inherent subjugation of individual rights.

Perhaps in Zakaria’s investigations, he just overlooked Rashid’s assertion that the world “woke up to the Taliban’s gender policies after they captured Kabul in 1996.” Perhaps he conveniently forgot that the protests from the UN, UNICEF, UNESCO, and UNHCR and the European Commissioner for Human Rights all met with no response from the Taliban. “Until Kabul,” Rashid continues, “the UN’s disastrous lack of a policy had been ignored,” and finally in a combined policy of the UN agencies a statement was released which spoke of “maintaining and promoting the inherent equality and dignity of all people and not discriminating between the sexes, races, ethnic groups or religions.” Rashid then recognizes that the same UN document that upheld universal rights then bowed to the Taliban, stating that international agencies hold local customs and cultures in high respect. This multicultural hedge of morality eventually led to the suspension of eight income-generating projects for women in Kabul because women weren’t allowed to work. Over the course of 18 months, Rashid recounts that the Taliban forced the UN and NGOs to leave Kabul as the Department of the Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice tightened the religious police screws upon the population of women in the surrounding regions. This utter lack of moral clarity by the UN is the exact same tactic that Zakaria is proposing the Western World must take if it is to advance its nuanced and enlightened, intellectual coexistance with Radical Islam. Absurd! Repeating the mistakes of the past, thinking they will yield different results is the popularly accepted definition of Insanity! Zakaria’s proposal is a monstrosity of Insanity!

So conflicted is Zakaria’s take on the nature of extremism in the Taliban regions of Afghanistan and Pakistan, that he appeals for the West to isolate jihadism and then in the same breath derides the use of predator strikes whose aim is to battle extremism. While somehow supposedly clarifying that force is the only answer when dealing with Al Qaeda, who is deeply imbedded in their Pashtun harborers, Zakaria questions the tactic because it causes public support for the battle against extremists to drop in the vital Pashtun areas of Pakistan, never bothering to explain why it is vital that a culture which destroys women as a matter of daily activity is so important to concede to in our affairs of national sovereignty. Yet, for some reason, in his admirable lesson in double speak, Zakaria makes no mention of Senator Feinstein’s traitorous revalation that the Pakistani government has secretly allowed the creation of a predator base in its Baluchistan region, which placed our soldiers on the ground in eminent danger, when at the same time Pakistan’s politicians had made face time in the Western Media calling for an end to the death of civilians due to US predator strikes - strikes which their government was a party to. Indeed, Zakaria makes no mention of the fact that whenever insurgents are killed in Pakistan, the media refers to the act as a NATO or Pakistani led offensive, but that whenever civilians are killed, the act is framed as so much US bungling in a region without a clear understanding of the realities on the ground.

No, to tackle this double standard of the reported fight against jihadism in the Taliban world might force Zakaria to actually come to the conclusion that the Media and Democrat Congressional members are fueling the anti-American rhetoric which is spewed forth from the Muslim Pulpits and propagates the belief that America is the great Satan every single Friday across the entirety of the Islamic World. Moreover, if Zakaria were to tackle this element of the battle, he might be forced to recognize that a “War on Extremism” espoused by Obama and Biden is just as, if not more so, a lack of a definitive enemy than the “War on Terror”. So, what does he do…he sprints away from Pakistan to Africa to tackle the subject of the Hisba, forgetting to note that Hisba is what drives Talibanization at its ethical root. Without Hisba, the Department of the promotion of virtue and prevention of vice would not exist! Zakaria conveniently forgets this fact as he forges headlong far beyond his intellectual depths in his proposal that we live with Radical Islam, attempting to characterize Hisba as a cultural custom that is easily gelded, when he sites Lydia Polgreen’s left wing New York Times assertion that “The Hisbah [in Nigeria] had become little more than glorified crossing guards and were largely confined to their barracks and assigned anodyne tasks like directing traffic and helping fans to their seats at soccer games” and “the government had helped push Sharia in a tamer direction by outlawing religious militias.” What did the Hisbah look like before its militias were forced into menial tasks by a strong central government? Did Zakaria see any need to advise Pakistan and Taliban to outlaw religious militias? No, because Zakaria’s purpose is to push for a more nuanced approach to the Taliban in Western engagement and reconciliation with Radical Islam. It does his thesis absolutely no good to identify religion as the inciter of extremism via the Hisba, because that would knock him right off the fence he is trying to walk. Moreover, he notes that religious proponents of Shariah were under investigation for embezzling millions in Nigeria, but made no attempt whatsoever to bridge the institution of the Hisba and the economic realm of Shariah Law in a totalitarian system of governance set forth by the Islamic Faith. Why? Because the entirety of the civilized Western World might wake up to the fact that Shariah Compliant Finance is the systematic embezzlement of funds from the marketplace by the religious police in a world domineered by Shariah Law, or that Shariah Compliant Finance is the direct result of the ethical justification for the dhimmitude and enslavement of the non-Muslim world to a life of Sharecropping fiefdoms, controlled by the dictates of the Totalitarian Ulema and offices of the Muhtasib. It is undeniable, by this point in Zakaria’s revery that he is an agenda driven ideologue, touting the Obama line.

His immediate shift to public policy and analysis of the first and second terms of Bush’s approach to the war against Radical Islam in Iraq as shifting from a theoretical conversation about the evils of radical Islam to a more nuanced complex approach as he grappled for the hearts and minds of Muslims on the ground, Zakaria notes that it is “instructive that Bush ended up pursuing a most sophisticated and nuanced policy toward political Islam in…Iraq.” He immediately steps in rhythm with General Patreaus’ use of Sunni Islamists to fight radical insurgents of AQI as the source of the success of the Iraq war, offering no weight to the surge in partisan fashion. But most telling, is his quote of Reuel Marc Gerecht, who states that “It’s hard to hand over authority to people who are illiberal. What you have to realize is that the objective is to defeat bin Ladenism, and you have to start the evolution. Moderate Muslims are not the answer. Shiited Clerics and Sunni Fundamentalists are our salvation from future 9/11s.”

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Zakaria noted that “Many Islamists are bigots, reactionaries and extremists (others are charlatans or opportunists).” This holds true for intellectuals in the arena of Western policy in the Middle East. Both Zakaria and Gerecht are nothing but charlatans. Gerecht, who poses as a conservative thinker, a former AEI fellow, is loyal to Islamic Radicalism’s promise. Gerecht’s brand of loyalty is derived from a fanatical adherence to Democracy as a way forward in the Middle East. Zakaria’s resort to Gerecht is his method of reaching into the Conservative camp and finding intellectual backing. However, Gerecht has no understanding of what Democracy is, thinking it nothing more than majority rule. This understanding of Democracy is the understanding of Democracy that all liberals share. Unfortunately, though, this view of Democracy is patently wrong - majority rule, in and of itself, as a manifestation of popular will - is populism. Populism is the establishment of the Will of the Majority as the source of law in complete disregard for constitutions or borders or reason. It is no mistake that Zakaria chose to quote Gerecht.

The point of Democracy is to establish the inviolable nature of human rights, equality and individual liberty under the laws of governance. The point of Shariah law is to establish Allah’s Rights as supreme. Therefore, Gerecht’s assertion in his article “God, Man, and the Ballot Box” found in The American magazine last December that “Any legitimate form of government in the Muslim Middle East must be viewed as complimentary to the Prophet Muhammad’s legacy and the Holy Law” is a stunning declaration of Why George W. Bush’s push for Democratization in the Middle East was decidedly flawed. In seeking Freedom via Democracy, the Bush push promises to deliver the Muslim World from the dictates of Monarchy into the chains of Allah’s Ulema. This does not advance freedom by any measure; rather, it advances Islamic Supremacism - for a separation of Church and State will not be considered legitimate in the Muslim Middle East. Gerecht’s explanation of why George W. Bush was right about Democratization in the Middle East plays to the heartstrings of AEI’s Editors at The American’s on the sore topic of America’s entry into Iraq and then presents a fallacious assertion: “The more one studies Islam’s historic peoples - the Arabs, Iranians, and Turks - the more convinced he becomes that democracy is the only serious, legitimate political ideal on the Muslim horizon, as fundamentalists and Middle Estern autocrats alike are realizing.” The fact of the matter is that the more one studies Islam, its history and its peoples, the more convinced he becomes of the reality that the only serious, legitimate political ideal on the Muslim horizon is the Islamic State whose Shariah is laid down in stone in the Koran, the Hadith, the Sira, and the ijma consensus of jurists, and ijtihad by the likes of Muslim thinkers such as ibn Taymiya.

All in all, the intellectual scholarship of Zakaria and Gerecht hail from the same land of selective history, where values have nothing to do with reason and everything to do with hope and wish and chimeras of distraction. Boldly, Gerecht proclaimed that in the Middle East, “any secular political system that makes a frontal assault on the clergy, the guardians of Islamic traditions, has virtually no chance of gaining sufficient popular support to be deemed legitimate.” One can only wonder if Gerecht’s assertion in The American about Middle Eastern political legitimacy will hold true in Taliban dominated regions as Zakaria rushes to apply the lessons of Petraeus’s nuanced counterinsurgency strategy to the varied extremisms of the political milieu in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Bin Ladenism is Gerecht’s term for global jihadists. The attempt to isolate global jihadists and negotiate with the other 90% of Islamists is derived from the assumption that bin Laden was lying every time he asserts that all Islamists are part of the same global movement. Zakaria’s assertion that we should not play into bin Laden’s hands, “and emphasize instead that many of these forces are local, have specific grievances and don’t have much in common” is a lesson in justifying insanity. First off, these Islamists have everything in common - Muhammad, Allah, the Koran, the ijma, the 5 pillars of Islam, and the sixth pillar, Jihad. Second, their specific grievances are the fact that Infidels exist, that women are allowed to have freedom in some parts of the world, and that Shariah Law is not forcing the complete subjugation of the kufar the world over.

The closing paragraphs of Zakaria’s article are the most troubling sentiments of all. He opens with stating that not playing into bin Laden’s hands “does not mean that we should accept the burning of girls’ schools, or the stoning of criminals.” This statement, though seemingly forward moving, is the complete acceptance of Shariah Law as the dictator of value and judge on who is a criminal. This acceptance is not changed by stating that “recognizing the reality of radical Islam is entirely different from accepting its ideas. We should mount a spirited defense of our values. We should pursue aggressively policies that will make these values succeed.” To accept the definition of criminals in Shariah Law is to reject the individual rights found in the US Constitution…is to reject our Western traditions of Liberty. What spirit is there in Zakaria’s assessment that the effort will take time if we are to provide secular education and reduce corruption, if the societies we are attempting to engage consider this type of activity the criminal hand of Satan and consider any local government that attempts to work with our society an illegitimate leadership? Zakaria’s muddled thought process on the bombing of Al Qaeda imbedded insurgents in the Talibani culture leads him to the fairy tale wishworld of “changing the atmosphere” should the US involvement in the region steers onto these misguided, unappreciated, and by his own admission, rejected rails of thought.

Zakaria’s assertion that “the veil is not the same as the suicide belt” is completely wrong. The veil and the suicide belt are one and the same. The veil demands complete loyalty to Islam and complete enmity aimed toward the infidel world, else the veil would hold no moral value in the supremacist culture of the Taliban. The concept of self-sacrifice for the Umma is the embodiment of the veil, else the women would not have to consider its material as holding any weight whatsoever in their cultural makeup as the Taliban bans Western make-up to all but the boys their leadership buggers for sport. And while the sentiment holds some semblance of hope, it is a misguided hope that, by Zakaria’s multiple admission is not tenable. But it was a necessary lead up to the ultimate lies his intellectual pursuit of peace demands he spew forth onto the Newsweek page. He continues “We can better pursue our values if we recognize the local and cultural context, and appreciate that people want to find their own balance between freedom and order, liberty and license.” Wrong! Our values dictate that there is no eqivocation on Freedom and Liberty in the face of tyranny. If our values dictated this, America would have never broken with the Crown of England. The Natural Rights of the Individual supercede the cultural norms of a tyrannical ideology of slavery throughout the world if we hold our values to be the measure of reasoned justice.

Zakaria’s appeal to context is the same appeal the Muslim NGOs like CAIR and MPAC and MSA have used for the last eight years on Television and Radio as they defended their Koran, and demanded that the Western World recognize Islam as a religion of peace and understand the context of the militant verses found within it. It is impossible to count how many times “Islam is a religion of peace” was rammed down the American throat from 2004 to 2008 on National Media, but the effects of such a campaign of perception has completely twisted all conversations on the topic to the point where reasoning people in the West resort to silence on the topic as a matter of politely agreeing to disagree and refusing to talk on the subject of religion and politics over dinner as a matter of traditional enlightenment. Now I ask, Zakaria…in what context can you frame “Convert, pay the jizya tax, or die” that will allow it to be a blessing of peace rather than a prescription for war? It is this inability to generate context that has led to Geert Wilders looming prosecution for hate crimes in the Netherlands, because the Dutch Courts have submitted to the mantra that the Western reader submit to the context of the Koran before speaking out against the inherent evils it binds all Muslim psyches to across the world. Context and Culture, these things are found in the Public Duties of Islam as prescribed by the Institution of the Hisbah and bind the entirety of the Muslim faithful.

But the intellectual elite of the Western world refuses to examine critically the code of morality found in the Koranic injunction “Enjoin good and forbid evil” to which every Muslim, regardless of sect adheres. Hisbah is the establishment of a morality police in Pakistan, in Egypt, in Indonesia, in Saudi Arabia, in Afghanistan, in Nigeria… Hisbah is the ethical and economic root of Terror. Hisbah is the only contextual reading of Islam that allows any rationale which can be upheld to the definition fo Islam as a religion of peace. Ibn Taymiya, the Shaykh of Islam, to whom all schools pay homage in the Muslim world, himself, declared Jihad to be, merely, the “completion of but one aspect of the Hisbah” in his treatise Public Duties in Islam, which was not even translated into English until 1985.

For Zakaria to claim that Bin Ladenism has lost ground in virtually every Muslim State and declare Radical Islam will follow the same path is to completely dismiss the reality that every Muslim State has issues maintaining order precisely because the educated elite in those lands, who have absorbed the complete Koran into their minds, demand that the Hisbah be adhered to, without moral equivocation to the secular educations and invitations of the Western world, which are seen as temptations to step away from the Sunnah Tribal Traditions of Muhammad and the Salafi themselves. Where does revivalistic fundamentalist jihadist terror spawn from? From the ethical reality of the institution of the Hisbah. People have not wearied of Radical Islam’s charms, as Zakaria asserts in Pakistan and Nigeria and every where it is attempted and they never will. Muslim leaders, if they are to be considered legitimate and charasmatic leaders sent by Allah, must demand that the policing elements of Islamic States “Command and Demand the Good and forbid the evil from a position of Authority.”

The word “enjoin” found in English translations of the Koran means “To Command or demand from a position of authority.” The phrase “Enjoin good and forbid evil” holds no moral equivolence to the Christian invective to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. The morality police of Hisbah is ordained by Allah. The departments of the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice found throughout the Muslim states which adhere to Shariah Law, in various dress and bureaucratic agencies, is the direct result of Allah’s demand that all shall Pray! You see, in the Koran, Allah created men and djinn solely to worhip Him. Virtue, justice, valor, heroism, freedom, all of these things flow forth from this Koranic celebration of Allah’s demystifications of man’s purpose.

So, when Zakaria states that “The truth is that all Islamists, violent or not, lack answers to the problems of the modern world…that can satisfy the aspirations of modern men and women,” that “We do” and that is the most powerful weapon of all, he announces to the entirety of the Muslim educated elite that he has exactly zero understanding of the Hisbah’s power and draw in the Muslim World. The truth of the matter is that all Islamists embody the Hisbah to varying degrees of ethical integrity and the Muslim ethos holds that the knowledge handed down in the Koran is the straight path which the modern world’s infidels have spoiled and laid in disorder by their forbidden acts of blasphomy and idolatry. In fact, in truth, the aspirations of Muslims and the inspirations of men and women who hold to Western values are diametrically opposed, and 180 degrees removed from one another as a matter of reality.

Authority is the tinker.

Muslims hold Authority as the right and property of Allah, alone. Infidels, they claim, have sought to undermine Allah’s authority by creating fanciful things like liberty and constitutions by the imaginings and ruminations of their imperfect minds. In the end, all Western Law must submit to Islamic Law if Radical Islam is to tame itself to the local affairs of stoning women for being gang raped and forcing everyone to pray five times a day or pay a mafia extortion tax for the right to live as a humiliated weakling. This is the truth of the matter that Zakaria is loath and perhaps intellectually unable to admit to himself or to the world. This is the Truth that all Western Magazines would have whitewashed from reality, for it forces the issue into the camp of war and war alone, war on the highest to the reactionary elements of Western Society who would not live under the yoke of such a deceit filled life for their children. Western Love for Liberty and its selfish love for the liberty of its future generations, demands a complete moral war with the dictates of Shariah Law. Zakaria’s call is for America to take a lead role in a cage, when the only way to properly meet the advance of Islamic Supremacism’s contemporary jihadists is to take a walk on part in the war. The communities of reason must rise in this regard, and they must abandon all hope for peace if they choose to remain idle in this ever darkening age of the bully as the Zakarias of the world usher in the oblivion with open arms.

Zakaria asked a question: “How are we to oppose them?” Allow me to answer it. The battle of ideas consists not of opposing, but of exposing. The battle of ideas consists not of denouncing, but of disproving. The battle of ideas consists not of evading, but of boldly proclaiming a full, consistent and radical alternative. The war of perception that we find ourselves in, squaring off against the ethical advance of Islamic Supremacism must be met with a vigilant resolve to expose and disprove the charlatans of reason, such as Zakaria and Gerecht, whose Chamberlain forefathers have attempted to breed out the impulse to reject evil ideologies found in Hitlers and Stalins and Mussolinis and Pol Pots and Hugo Chavezes and Kim Jong Ils and Ahmadinejads and Muhammads since the fight for Liberty began with the recognition that slavery and forced submission is not an activity that holds true to the moral center of mankind’s peaceful advance.

The war of perception must be met with a vigilant public voice of dissenting disproof as our leaders Obama and Biden and Clinton take the path of submission as though it were a multicultural strive forward toward the ideal world of peace and harmony, proving that the path is wrought with the devastating reality of slavery and death and contempt for us and our children precisely because we value life more than Muslims harbor the joys and ecstasy of a death in the path of Allah’s supremacy. The war of perception must be waged with a full, consistent and radical alternative to Allah’s supremacy, and the only weapon that has stood the test of time in that regard is the US Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the Declaration of Independence.

When will it be demanded by the media that Radical Islam bow to the enlightened reason of the founding fathers of the United States of America? When will it be demanded that the mujahideen free their enslaved women? When will it be chorused from the pulpits of this great land with full voice and complete conviction that the rights of the individual supercede the supremacy of Allah? When will the beauty of Capitalism be upheld as the road to prosperity and a radical alternative to the IslamoMercantilism and Piracy of Muhammad’s soldiers of booty? When will it be demanded that the Arab world respect and accept Israel’s right to exist? The human heart found in the land of the United States of America is a fragile thing, yet it is at the same time made of the strongest tempering mankind has ever witnessed. And Jihad’s advance and aspirations can only be destroyed by the individual responses of the inspired and reasoned capitalists of the West who recognize that History is a study and lesson in ethical movements.

The battle is being waged by the likes of Brigitte Gabriel of Act for America, who have sought a grassroots political movement to raise awareness of the ideology of hate that is Islamic Supremacism. The battle is already being waged by individuals in the West, like Jeffrey Imm, whose R.E.A.L. just held a rally by the reflecting pool in Washington D.C. to “Save Women Now” from the clutches of Radical Islam’s supremacist dictates. The battle is already being waged by the Christian Action Network, whose explosive documentary exposing Sheikh Gilani’s Jamaat ul Fuqra’s terror training camps under the umbrella of Muslims of America. The battle is already being waged by Geert Wilders and Melanie Phillips, and Caroline Glick, and Walid Phares, and Ali Sina. The battle is beginning in the halls of Congress as Sue Myrick and Frank Wolfe stand united against islamic supremacism. I consider it an honor to fight alongside these freedom fighters in any way that I can. Reason cannot be an Islamophobe. Resolve, then, in the war against Islamic Supremacism is found in the reasoned ethical morality found in the birth of the American Dream. Wherever rationales such as those espoused by Zakaria hold sway over reasoning minds, Islamic Supremacism is not long in coming. Recognizing the enormity of the fight and owning it is the first step. Winning is found in defying Islamic Supremacism. Winning is found in exposing Islamic Supremacism. Winning is found in disproving Islamic Supremacism. Winning is found within the individual reason, Islamic Supremacism attempts to murder in its seemless, steady advance in the economic, political, ethical, cultural and media battles of today and tomorrow. Defeating such an enemy is only possible if the world of reason unites against Islamic Supremacism’s moral threat found in the Muslim collectivist ethos and the premise of humiliation and slavery inherent in the institution of the Hisba. Allah’s entitlement to authority ends at the mosque door, to allow it to sweep into the world of economics, politics, and law is to allow the death of all that America’s founders earned as they built their city on a hill. In the end, justice has nothing whatsoever to do with the righteousness of physical combat…rather, justice is only possible with the right frame of reference as to the ethical underpinnings of the jihad pillar.
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 United Against Islamic Supremacism

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