Kamala Harris Calls for ‘Courage to Object’ to Term ‘Radical Islamic Terrorism’

Robert Spencer | July 27, 2024

Now that the Party of Democracy has done away with all that cumbersome “voting” business and anointed Kamala Harris as its presidential candidate, Harris is busy demonstrating that she holds all of her party’s deeply held principles. This reassures the Democrat base, in case anyone was worried, that she is a bona fide far-left ideologue of the kind they favor these days and can be trusted to implement the party program.

And so Harris has been paying obeisance to all the left’s gods. This has meant a call for a ceasefire in Gaza that would allow Hamas to survive and murder more Israeli civilians in the future, as it has vowed to do. Harris also made an appearance on “RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars,” as if to emphasize that she fully intends as president to perpetuate the left’s wholehearted embrace of sexual perversion, gender delusion, and overall insanity. And in a video that surfaced on X Thursday, Harris told an appreciative audience at the Islamic Center of Southern California, “We must have the courage to object when they use that term, ‘radical Islamic terrorism.’”

Courage? That’s like saying that we must have the courage to be a total conformist lemming who says exactly what everyone else is saying. If Kamala Harris really wants to demonstrate her courage, she should try bucking the prevailing winds and stating the readily demonstrable fact that core texts of the religion of Islam teach that Muslims should wage war against and subjugate unbelievers. She will, of course, never do such a thing, primarily because she isn’t aware of that fact, but also because she likely knows that if she said such a thing, she fairly quickly would be the former Democrat candidate for president.

Hillary Clinton summed up the predominant view, at least among leftist politicians, when she declared in Nov. 2015, “Let’s be clear: Islam is not our adversary. Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Virtually every politician on the left and many on the right have said much the same thing, although usually, they didn’t go as all-out as Hillary did on the sweeping generalizations. In 2011, working from the same set of assumptions, the Obama administration removed all mention of Islam and Muslims from its entire counterterrorism program. The program has not been reformed since then; the same willful ignorance prevails to this day. 

Harris’ statement at the Islamic Center of Southern California is just a variant of the same theme, as is her subsequent explanation that to speak of “radical Islamic terrorism” supposedly ignored the fact that Muslims have been “the greatest victims of terror.” Harris apparently assumes that someone who attacks a Muslim could not possibly be a Muslim himself. In making that assumption, however, she is herself ignoring the fact that Islamic law mandates death for heresy and apostasy. Throughout Islamic history, this has led to violence between Islamic sects and factions. If a Muslim kills another Muslim, the killing doesn’t necessarily signify that the killer is violating Islamic principles; abundant justification can be found within Islamic law for such behavior.

If there is any actual problem with the phrase “radical Islamic terrorism,” it is with the word “radical.” Violence against unbelievers is unfortunately mainstream in Islamic theology. Iraqi scholar Majid Khadduri, in his magisterial book “War and Peace in the Law of Islam,” says that the function of the Islamic state in Islamic theology and law is to “establish Islam as the dominant reigning ideology over the entire world… The jihad was therefore employed as an instrument for both the universalization of religion and the establishment of an imperial world state.” That’s the ultimate goal of Islamic terrorism: to weaken and ultimately destroy governments that aren’t based on Islamic law so that they can be replaced with Islamic ones.

This has been a consistent imperative throughout Islamic history. A Pakistani professor of Islamic law, Imran Ahsan Khan Nyazee, quotes the 12th-century Islamic jurist Ibn Rushd: “Muslim jurists agreed that the purpose of fighting with the People of the Book [that is, Jews and Christians]…is one of two things: it is either their conversion to Islam or the payment of jizyah,” a tax on non-Muslims specified in the Qur’an (9:29). Nyazee concludes, “This leaves no doubt that the primary goal of the Muslim community, in the eyes of its jurists, is to spread the word of Allah through jihad, and the option of poll-tax [jizya] is to be exercised only after subjugation” of non-Muslims.

The problem with Harris’ call for “courage” is that it not only ignores the unpleasant reality of Islamic jihad violence, but it also perpetuates the longtime leftist strategy of shaming and silencing those who tell the truth about such violence. The ultimate beneficiaries of this willful ignorance are the Islamic jihadis themselves; if Harris and her ilk have their way and silence all those whom they smear as “racists” and “bigots” for speaking honestly about jihad, the jihadis will be able to go about their work unopposed and unhindered. Is that what she wants? If she doesn’t, what is she doing to stop them?