As NR has documented for decades, the jihad never ceased.
Everything old is new again. That, of course, includes the jihad . . . and National Review’s steadfast opposition to it. Once again, we aim to expose the former’s animating ideology amid a war with the “Death to America” regime and a slew of domestic attacks.
It’s fair to say that President Trump initiated the latest “kinetic” round in our confrontation with Iran. That, however, owes to the half-century of Shia sharia supremacist brutality the regime of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini originally launched with an attack on the U.S. embassy in Tehran and the holding of hostages. This was followed by its Hezbollah militia’s bombings of the U.S. embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut, mass-murdering diplomats, civilian bystanders, and American troops.
As NR has documented for decades, the jihad never ceased. It is not enough to say Iran has remained, all this time, the leading state sponsor of anti-American terrorism, using proxy cells to kill hundreds of U.S. soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan even as it plotted to kill U.S. officials on our own soil. Iran made common cause with rival Sunni jihadists, such as al-Qaeda and Hamas, orchestrating serial atrocities against our nation, our forces, and our allies — including, for example, the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen in 1996.
As we’ve explained throughout the years, our enemies are animated by their anti-Western, anti-American ideology to levy war against us, despite their internal Sunni/Shiite divide. In that regard, this long war is analogous to the Cold War against other totalitarian enemies of liberty. That’s the struggle in which NR was forged by William F. Buckley Jr., the centennial of whose birth we just marked. The struggle continues, and we hope you can support our efforts in it by making a donation of any amount as part of our ongoing webathon.
Radical Islam is not Soviet communism, but this is no cold war, either. It is marked by decades of ferocious jihadist attacks, including one a quarter-century ago that killed nearly 3,000 of our fellow citizens, destroyed Manhattan’s iconic Twin Towers, and struck the Pentagon — a blow more lethal than Pearl Harbor by which our enemies took aim at American financial and military might.
Another way this war is different: In the Cold War, legions of intelligence analysts and geopolitical strategists hewed to the common sense that to understand the Soviets, to anticipate and counter their aggression, it was vital to apprehend what they believed and what they, therefore, were trying to accomplish. In this war, common sense is cast aside.
Not by us, though. At NR, we’ve been steadfast in demonstrating that jihadists are catalyzed by sharia supremacism, a totalitarian political philosophy camouflaged as religious belief — one that draws on an ancient, literalist interpretation of Islamic scripture. Its adherents do not accept the (very Western) concept of a free, self-determining civil society that takes pride in its cultural roots but is not ruled by any doctrinaire authority.
Even all these years after the Khomeini upheaval and the 9/11 attacks, the chattering class dreams of a deal with the ever-elusive “moderate” mullahs, mulishly glossing over why the mullahs fight us. And when, upon the start of this latest round of fighting, our nation was hit within days by jihadist attacks in Texas, New York, Michigan, and Virginia, we were treated yet again to trendy handwringing about the domestic “self-radicalization” of terrorists — and never you mind what incorrigibly anti-Western doctrine was behind this supposedly spontaneous phenomenon.
At NR, we see it plain and call it what it is: radical Islam. More precisely, it is sharia supremacism: the determination to impose a harsh interpretation of Islamic law.
We’ve never believed that to recognize reality is to tar with a jihadist brush the millions of Muslims who reject sharia supremacism — many of them our fellow citizens, serving heroically in our armed forces and security services. Neither, though, will we ever be cowed by the smear of “Islamophobia” — a nonsense term developed by the Muslim Brotherhood to discourage scrutiny of our enemies’ beliefs.
We’ll keep doing what we do, what we have always done. But let’s face it, we need your help to do it. That’s why we must periodically ask you to chip in, as we are doing in our ongoing webathon. We’re a magazine, a website, and a multimedia enterprise; but more than any of those things, NR is a mission. And it’s a community whose members sustain us. That’s why I, as a proud community member in addition to being lucky enough to write and rant around here, contribute every year.
That’s what we’re asking you to do now. We’re hoping you can contribute anything, from $5 to $5,000, to our spring fundraiser.
We’ve been at this for 70 years, fighting totalitarianism, fighting for freedom. Celebrating America. It’s a mission we relish, but to carry it out, we need you. And we never forget how fortunate your generosity makes us. We’re deeply grateful.
