Why They’re REALLY at War With Us

[Warrior-Mentor]

Why They’re Really at War With Us
by Thomas Paine
01/21/2010
HUMAN EVENTS

If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

In his recent article, Pat Buchanan purports to define why al Qaeda is at war with us. Instead, he recites enemy propaganda serving only to reinforce their talking points while continuing to convolute the real motivation behind their actions.

Over eight years since 9/11, it is amazing that a prominent conservative would not understand the fundamental motivation and doctrine driving those who have and continue to attack us. This is not rocket science.

Raymond Ibraham’s analysis in his invaluable book, the Al Qaeda Reader, best summarizes it. On page xii he explains that radical Islam’s war with America and the west is not finite and limited to political grievances real or imagined but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in [the Islamic] faith.

Pat mentions only half of al Qaeda’s binary worldview in his article, the dar al-Islam (the land of Islam). By failing to even mention the dar al-Harb (the land of warfare), he fails to acknowledge that Islam, by doctrine (Koran 9:29), views the entire non-Muslim world as a land that must be subdued under Islamic rule (read sharia law). This is explained in the primary text of Islamic Law, Reliance of the Traveler by Ahmad ibn Naquib al-Misri (page 605).

What Buchanan also fails to mention, is taqiyya - the Islamic doctrine of deception, the understanding of which is fundamental to understanding the threat. Muhammad himself said war is deceit. (See “Summarized Sahih Al-Bukhari” by Muhammad Muhsin Khan, p. 614) Here again, Mr. Ibraham has done yeoman’s work analyzing and explaining the doctrine of taqiyya and its impact on jihadist terrorism in his article, “How Taqiyya Alters Islam’s Rules of War.”

As we learn from Reliance of the Traveler, by Islamic law there are things Muslims are required to know and there are other things we, as non-Muslims, are allowed to know. In fact, Islamic law requires lying at times ("it is obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory.") (See pages 8-14, 732 and 745).

As a result of their binary world view, al Qaeda has two main audiences: the Muslim world (the ummah) and the non-Muslim world, consisting of the United States and the rest of the Western world. As such, it uses markedly different approaches to address each group.

When speaking to America and the Western world, al Qaeda turns statements made by what Lenin called the “useful idiots” into popular propaganda. They frequently cite Michael Moore, William Blum and other liberal commentators.

In contrast, when speaking to their constituents -- the Muslim World -- bin Laden and Zawahiri instead use formal Islamic theology and sharia law as levers to enforce Muslim compliance. Those who don’t comply are labeled apostates, who, by sharia, must be killed and will inhabit hell. (See “Reliance of the Traveler,” pp. 595-98 and 848).

Written for Muslim audiences, they [al Qaeda’s Islamic theological treatises] are rarely translated into English or disseminated to a non-Muslim public. This is unfortunate since they reveal much more about al Qaeda’s ideology than the more famous political [propaganda] speeches. In these theological tracts, al Qaeda gives Muslims reasons why they should hate and fight the West that differ from those they give in their political speeches. (“Al Queda Reader,” p. 2)

There’s a difference between reciting the enemy and knowing the enemy. Buchanan confuses the two concepts.Which is why his cry for appeasement is misguided. He implies that if we packed up and came home (from Iraq, Afghanistan and all other Muslim countries), and adopted an isolationist foreign policy, then they would stop attacking us. Wrong.

Not only would this hand them a strategic victory, but they’d simply find another reason to continue to attack us. Islam cannot be appeased. (Koran 9:29). Not to mention the moral bankruptcy of abandoning the Afghan people and leaving them under the repressive rule of the Taliban.

Buchanan writes as if the Taliban were a legitimate government. The Afghanis know we are not the Russians or some other malicious occupier. But they are realists in a hostile land with a legitimate concern about our staying power and what will happen after we leave. Pat’s argument doesn’t help our cause.

Buchanan states that this is their war (the Muslim world’s war) and suggests that if we stayed out of it they would leave us alone. Even if this were true -- and it is not -- it wouldn’t be the right thing to do.

Americans are not being killed, as Buchanan retorts, for the propaganda reasons he repeats, but rather for who we are and what we believe. Not one American died in Iraq in December because the Iraqis finally saw the bankrupt ideology al Qaeda was selling and they helped us eradicate them.

To bin Laden and his ilk, we are the Great Satan. They hate us more than they hate Israel.

As for Hamas and Hizballah -- which Pat paints as if they have benignly left us alone -- they are here in the United States -- actively pursuing a strategy of non-violent jihad that is arguably a more dangerous threat than the challenges in Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen or Somalia.

I can understand his sentiment and aversion to war. As a career soldier, I know too many Gold Star parents to be cavalier about war.

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself. - John Stuart Mill

As a parent, you’ll not hear me utter the unfatherly expression, "Give me peace in my day." Rather, I will always say -- as the real Thomas Paine said in 1776 -- "If there must be trouble, let it be in my day that my child may have peace."

It's time we start to know our enemy.

As for Mr. Buchanan, it’s encouraging that he’s started to learn the enemy’s vocabulary. I hope he’ll stop repeating the enemy’s talking points and blaming us for the enemy simply executing their own offensive, totalitarian doctrine.

It takes many hours to read and study books such as the ones I have mentioned here. But unless more Americans do -- especially opinion leaders such as Mr. Buchanan -- we cannot understand the true nature of the enemy.

SOURCE:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35255

[Warrior-Mentor]

Patrick J. Buchanan
Why Are They at War With Us?
Patrick J. Buchanan
01/12/2010
HUMAN EVENTS

"We are at war. We are at war against al Qaeda, a far-reaching network of violence and hatred that attacked us on 9/11, that killed nearly 3,000 innocent people and that is plotting to strike us again."

Thus did Barack Obama clear the air as to whether we are at war, and with whom and why.

Following his remarks, during a White House briefing by National Security Council aide John Brennan, Helen Thomas asked a follow-up question to which we almost never hear an answer:


Why is al Qaeda at war with us? What is its motivation?

It was Osama bin Laden himself, in his declaration of war in 1998, published in London, who gave al Qaeda's reasons for war:

First, the U.S. military presence on the sacred soil of Saudi Arabia. Second, U.S. sanctions causing terrible suffering among the Iraqi people. Third, U.S. support for Israel's dispossession of the Palestinians. "All these crimes and sins committed by the Americans are a clear declaration of war on God, his Messenger and Muslims," said Osama.

He began his fatwa quoting the Koran: "But when the forbidden months are past, then fight and slay the pagans wherever ye find them, seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem of war."

To Osama, we started the war. Muslims, the ulema, must fight because America, with her "brutal crusade occupation of the (Arabian) Peninsula" and support for "the Jews' petty state" and "occupation of Jerusalem and murder of Muslims there" was waging war upon the Islamic world.

Terrorism, the direct killing of civilians for political ends, is al Qaeda's unconventional tactic, but its war aims are quite conventional.

Al Qaeda is fighting a religious war against apostates and pagans in their midst, a civil war against collaborators of the Crusaders and an anti-colonial war to drive us out of the Dar al-Islam. On Sept. 11, they were over here -- because we are over there.

Nothing justifies the massacre of Sept. 11. But these are the political goals behind the 9/11 attack, and this is why Islamists fare well in elections in the Middle East. Tens of millions of Muslims, who may despise terrorism, identify with the causes for which Osama declared war -- liberation of Muslim peoples from pro-American autocrats and Israeli occupiers.

Americans are being killed for the reasons Osama said we should be killed -- not because of who we are, but because of where we are and what we do.

Consider. America lost 4,000 soldiers in six years in Iraq, with 30,000 wounded. Yet not one American of the 125,000 soldiers in Iraq was killed in December. Why not? Because we no longer conduct raids, patrol streets, kick down doors and pat down suspects. We have ended our combat operations, withdrawn to desert bases and seem anxious to go home. When we stopped fighting and killing them, they stopped fighting and killing us.

Most Americans today appear content to let Shia and Sunni, Arab and Kurd decide the future of Iraq. And if they cannot settle their quarrels without a civil-sectarian war, why should their war be our war?

According to Gen. Barry McCaffrey, we must now prepare for 300 to 500 dead and wounded every month in Afghanistan by summer.

Why are the Taliban killing our soldiers? Because we threw them out of power, took over their country and imposed the Hamid Karzai regime, and our troops, some 100,000 by fall, are the force preventing them from recapturing their country. We will bleed in Afghanistan as long as we are in Afghanistan.

But if, as Obama said, "we are at war with al Qaeda," why are we fighting Taliban when al Qaeda is in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and North Africa?

Hamas has used terrorism, but not against us. Hezbollah has used terrorism, but not against us since the bombing of the Marine barracks, a quarter-century ago. And our Marines were attacked in Lebanon because we were in Lebanon, intervening in their civil-sectarian war. Had the Marines not been sent into the midst of that war, they would not have been targeted.

When Ronald Reagan withdrew them, the attacks stopped.

Like Europe's Thirty Years' War -- among Germans, French, Czechs, Dutch, Danes, Swedes, Scots and English, Catholics and Protestants, kings, princes and emperors -- the Muslim world is roiled by conflicts between pro-Western autocrats and Islamic militants, Sunni and Shia, modernists and obscurantists, nationalities, tribes and clans. The outcome of these wars, the future of their lands -- is that not their business, and not ours?

The Muslims stayed out of our Thirty Years' War. Perhaps we would do well to get out of theirs. But as long as we take sides in their wars, those we fight and kill over there will come to kill us over here.

This is payback for our intervention. This is the price of empire. This is the cost of the long war.

Mr. Buchanan is a nationally syndicated columnist and author of Churchill, Hitler, and "The Unnecessary War": How Britain Lost Its Empire and the West Lost the World, "The Death of the West,", "The Great Betrayal," "A Republic, Not an Empire" and "Where the Right Went Wrong."

SOURCE:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=35158

[Warrior-Mentor]

Pat Buchanan asks why they hate us, gets the wrong answer
Robert Spencer
Jihad Watch
Jan 16, 2010

READ IT HERE:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/01/in...e-they-at.html

[dr. mabuse]

*

[T-Rock]

As we learn from Reliance of the Traveler, by Islamic law there are things Muslims are required to know and there are other things we, as non-Muslims, are allowed to know. In fact, Islamic law requires lying at times ("it is obligatory to lie if the goal is obligatory.") (See pages 8-14, 732 and 745).

As a result of their binary world view, al Qaeda has two main audiences: the Muslim world (the ummah) and the non-Muslim world, consisting of the United States and the rest of the Western world. As such, it uses markedly different approaches to address each group.

When speaking to America and the Western world, al Qaeda turns statements made by what Lenin called the “useful idiots” into popular propaganda. They frequently cite Michael Moore, William Blum and other liberal commentators.

In contrast, when speaking to their constituents -- the Muslim World -- bin Laden and Zawahiri instead use formal Islamic theology and sharia law as levers to enforce Muslim compliance. Those who don’t comply are labeled apostates, who, by sharia, must be killed and will inhabit hell. (See “Reliance of the Traveler,” pp. 595-98 and 848).

Maybe Buchanan, Ron Paul, and their ilk who don’t understand Taqiyya need to examine the speeches of Yasser Arafat for verification of this Qur’anic doctrine.

In his speeches to Arab audiences, Arafat frequently said: “I am not seeking the peace of compromise, but the peace of Salidin.”, the "peace" which he made with the Crusaders before he attacked them with ferocity and drove the Crusaders from the Holy Land.

“Peace for us means the destruction of Israel. We are preparing for an all-out war, a war that will last for generations…We shall not rest until the day…we destroy Israel”
(Yasser Arafat)

In one of his speeches to fellow Muslims, Arafat told them he was launching a "Jihad," a holy war to conquer Jerusalem, and that he was only offering the Jews a peace similar to the peace treaty Mohammed made with his enemy, the powerful Quraysh tribe that controlled Mecca.

The audience understood his meaning because the Qur’an tells of how Mohammed betrayed and destroyed the Quraysh. It was Mohammed himself who laid the foundation for Islam to build a history of making peace with an enemy in order to attack at a more opportune time.

The agreement utilized by Muslims to this very day is a shining example of the Hudaybiyyah agreement - an agreement between Mohammed and the infidels, never lasting more than 10 years, never permanent, whereas Islam is not permitted to stop until Islam reigns supreme…


Fight [q-t-l] against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger (Muhammad) and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians) until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.( 9:29)

It is He Who has sent His Messenger (Muhammad) with guidance and the religion of truth, to make it superior over all religions, though the Mushrikûn (polytheists, pagans, idolaters, disbelievers in the Oneness of Allah) hate (it).(9:33)


The Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom is a very worthwhile read:
http://www.andrewbostom.org/loj/

[Warrior-Mentor]

Great points.

Couple highlights from Ibn Warraq's Foreword:
____________

As Bernard Lewis wrote:

…[We] may , indeed , we must study the history of Atlantic slavery and expose this great shame in the history of the Western world and the Americas north and south , in all its horror. This is a task which falls upon us as Westerners and in which others may and should and do join us. In contrast , however, even to mention -let alone discuss or explore - the existence of slavery in non-Western societies is denounced as evidence of racism and of imperialistic designs. The same applies to other delicate topics as polygamy, autocracy, and the like. The range of taboos is very wide. 5

I should like to remind Bernard Lewis, his students and his admirers of his own words,

"There was a time when scholars and other writers in communist eastern Europe relied on writers and publishers in the free West to speak the truth about their history , their culture , and their predicament. Today it is those who told the truth, not those who concealed or denied it, who are respected and welcomed in these countries.

"Historians in free countries have a moral and professional obligation not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo; not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly , without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently.

"Those who enjoy freedom have a moral obligation to use that freedom for those who do not possess it. We live in a time when great efforts have been made, and continue to be made, to falsify the record of the past and to make history a tool of propaganda; when governments , religious movements, political parties, and sectional groups of every kind are busy rewriting history as they would wish it to have been, as they would like their followers to believe that it was.

"All this is very dangerous indeed , to ourselves and to others , however we may define otherness- dangerous to our common humanity. Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future." 6

Finally there are those who tell me that even though Dr Bostom and many others maybe right in exposing history hitherto repressed or simply denied, this was not the right historical moment to express it, in this hour of a conservative U.S. administration whose members do not hide their Christian allegiances, at this time of a war on terror when we are trying to convince Muslims round the world that we are not at war with them, but those who have a perverted interpretation of the great religion of Islam.

Sir Isaiah Berlin once described an ideologue as somebody who is prepared to suppress what he suspects to be true. Sir Isaiah then concluded that from that disposition to suppress the truth has flowed much of the evil of this and other centuries. The first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. By suppressing the truth, however honorable the motive , we are only engendering an even greater evil.

We are all beholden to Dr Bostom for helping us to see more clearly, and more honestly past events that have such an important bearing on present travails. In the words of Albert Schweitzer,

"Truth has no special time of its own. Its hour is now, always, and indeed then most truly when it seems most unsuitable to actual circumstances." 7
____________

Read the Foreword in it's entirety here:

http://www.andrewbostom.org/loj//content/view/61/1/

GET THE LEGACY OF JIHAD HERE:
http://www.amazon.com/Legacy-Jihad-I...ref=pd_sim_b_1

[T-Rock]

The first duty of the intellectual is to tell the truth. By suppressing the truth, however honorable the motive , we are only engendering an even greater evil.

http://www.andrewbostom.org/loj//content/view/61/1/

It’s particularly of interest to note that in Bostom’s book, he basically exposes the Orientalist professoriate across the United States to be false - the celebrated Islamic false notion of “inner Struggle” - purported by scholars like Esposito, Edward Said, and ones like Harvard Islamic Society professor Zayed Yasin.

He uncovered this “false notion” of “Inner Struggle” by being one of the first to have translated from Arabic, the works of Sufi commentators, thus laying to rest the myth that Sufis always interpreted jihad as an inner moral struggle against one’s lower instincts.

[Warrior-Mentor]

Originally Posted by T-Rock

It’s particularly of interest to note that in Bostom’s book, he basically exposes the Orientalist professoriate across the United States to be false - the celebrated Islamic false notion of “inner Struggle” - purported by scholars like Esposito, Edward Said, and ones like Harvard Islamic Society professor Zayed Yasin.

He uncovered this “false notion” of “Inner Struggle” by being one of the first to have translated from Arabic, the works of Sufi commentators, thus laying to rest the myth that Sufis always interpreted jihad as an inner moral struggle against one’s lower instincts.

True. Or you could look at the massacre of school children in Beslan...

http://www.opinionjournal.com/editor...l?id=110005577

http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&sourc...Fiu06UpUZB5K2A

http://barenakedislam.wordpress.com/...im-terrorists/

http://infidelsunite.typepad.com/cou...-years-on.html

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2007/04/be...im-leader.html