The US’s misreading of Islamic terror

By Yoram Ettinger, ISRAEL HAYOM

According to U.S. President Barack Obama’s worldview, the Palestinian issue is a principal Muslim concern and a major source of Muslim animation and frustration, which has fueled regional violence and intensified Islamic terrorism.

However, irrespective of Obama’s far-reaching gestures toward the Palestinian Authority, the number of Muslim terrorist cells in the U.S. has increased, as have Islamic terrorist attacks on the U.S. mainland, such as in San Bernardino, California (2015), Boston, Massachusetts (2013), Times Square (2010), Fort Hood, Texas (2009), Little Rock, Arkansas (2009), Dallas, Texas (2009), etc.

Moreover, in 1983, while then-President Ronald Reagan brutally pressured Israel to end its offensive against the Palestine Liberation Organization in Lebanon and withdraw to the international border, Islamic car bombs blew up the U.S. Embassy and the Marine headquarters in Beirut, killing 368 people — among them, 241 U.S. Marines. In 1998 and 2000, while then-President Bill Clinton pressured Israel to make dramatic concessions to the Palestinians, and made PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat a frequent guest at the White House, Islamic car bombs hit the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, murdering 224, and Islamic terrorists hit the USS Cole at the port of Aden, killing 17 U.S. sailors.

Furthermore, the devastating Sept. 11 attacks were planned while Clinton pressured Israel to repartition Jerusalem, retreat to the pre-1967 lines and accept a limited version of the Palestinian “claim of return” to the pre-1967 area of Israel.

Obama was right to declare at Cairo University in June, 2009 that “Islam has always been part of America’s story.” Indeed, Islamic (Barbary) terrorism targeted U.S. ships between 1776 and the beginning of the 19th century. John Quincy Adams, the sixth U.S. president (1825-1929), researched the causes of anti-U.S. Islamic terrorism, concluding that the core cause was Islam’s endemic hostility toward the “infidel” as expressed in the Quran.

The U.S. is the role-model of democracy and civil liberties, and therefore, it is perceived as a lethal threat by repressive, rogue, anti-democratic Muslim regimes, which have terrorized their own people and other Muslim communities since the seventh century. They, also, consider the U.S. to be the most effective obstacle standing in their path toward regional and global domination. U.S. prominence has made America the chief scapegoat, blamed by rogue Muslim regimes for their own social, economic and moral failures.

Islamic terrorists believe that their victory over the Soviets in Afghanistan caused the disintegration of the Soviet Union. They are convinced that defeating the U.S. should be easier, in view of U.S. retreats from Vietnam (1973), Iran (1979), Lebanon (1983), Somalia (1993) and Libya (2012), and the expected evacuation of Iraq and Afghanistan. Islamic terrorists assume that American policy-makers and the American public tend to cave under intensified terrorism — increasingly on the U.S. mainland — thereby triggering further U.S. retreats.

Islamic terrorists have been emboldened by the claims of Obama CIA Director John Brennan — in defiance of 1,400-year-old Islamic terrorism, Islamic tyranny and the absence of intra-Muslim peaceful coexistence — that there is no Islamic terrorism, since Islam promotes peace; that there is no jihadist terrorism, since jihad purifies the soul; that the U.S. should engage rogue regimes diplomatically rather than militarily; that the Muslim Brotherhood (the largest transnational Islamic terrorist organization) is not a terrorist organization; that there is no military solution to terrorism; that terrorism should be contained rather than defeated; and that terrorist acts may be defined as “workplace violence,” etc. Thus, misplaced U.S. assumptions have produced wrong U.S. policies and failed battle tactics.

According to the late Professor Fouad Ajami, one of the leading Middle East political scientists in recent years: “The sad truth is that the terror will continue — and continue to test the patience of an America that insists on its innocence and its distance from the feuds and passions of the Middle East. … A terrible wind was now blowing throughout the realm of Islam. Americans were caught there at a time when a large fight was breaking out — a fight for the soul and historic direction of that society. … Caught between the frightened privilege, on the one side, and the militant wrath, on the other. And, America was inevitably on the side of the privilege.
… The distant superpower was turned into a demon. … Decades of oil wealth and promise in the Muslim world was ending in failure and defeat. When the inevitable scapegoating came, America was the best kind of scapegoat. … This amorphous world took America on the only way it could — with terror. … In reality, to talk of a peace process that would end this wave of terror is naive. If Americans can be sure of anything, they can be sure of this: Nothing would inflame the passions of extremists more than a major American diplomatic initiative. … No U.S. diplomatic scheme would spare America the fury of those bent upon eradicating its presence in the Middle East. It is a false reading of Islam to say that terror springs from the impasse between Israelis and Palestinians. … It does not advance Israeli-Palestinian peace to pretend that it would solve a problem larger than their conflict.”

Is it realistic to assume that rogue Muslim regimes that have employed terrorism — systematically and deliberately — since the seventh century to settle intra-Muslim conflicts with fellow “believers,” would not employ terrorism to settle their conflicts with the U.S., “the big, arrogant, infidel Satan”?!

Islamic terrorism constitutes a clear and present danger to the U.S. and to the free world, irrespective of the Arab-Israeli conflict, independent of the Palestinian issue and regardless of Israel’s policies or the very existence of the Jewish state, which is only “the little Satan” as far as Muslim rogue regimes and terrorists are concerned.