Ramesh makes excellent points regarding Hillary Clinton’s tendentious blather about how she prefers the term “radical jihadist ideology” to “radical Islamic terrorism” because the latter supposedly gives “these criminals, these murderers more standing than they deserve.”
As Ramesh observes, Clinton’s preferred label is vulnerable to the same criticism. It runs afoul of the progressive delusion that jihad is not really a military term, that it is, as John Brennan claims, an internal battle “to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal.”
Brennan’s smiley-face jihad is nonsense for two reasons.
The first is reiterated in a column I’ve just posted on the home page regarding the disgraceful remarks by Clinton’s successor, Secretary of State John Kerry, regarding the purported differences in the “legitimacy” or “rationale” between the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the more recent Paris attack of November 13.
Kerry claimed the latter terrorist strike was “absolutely indiscriminate.” As I outline, relying on an authoritative sharia manual, neither attack in Paris was indiscriminate; both were straightforward applications of the Islamic military principle of jihad: divinely ordained “war against non-Muslims … to establish the religion.” (The word jihad is derived from mujahada, which pertains to warfare.) So Clinton’s theory that Islam should be distinguished from violent jihad, as if the latter were not incontestably part of the former, is specious. In fact, in the speech from which Ramesh quotes, even as Brennan misrepresents jihad, he correctly insists that jihad is “a legitimate tenet of Islam.” (When I say he is “correct” in this, I mean jihad is “legitimate” in the sense that it truly is part of Islamic doctrine; of course, I am not saying that mass-murder under the guise of “holy war” is legit.)
At the time Brennan gave this speech, I explained – in a column called, “An Islam of Their Very Own” – the other reason why Brennan’s benign construction of jihad is a fantasy.
There is a secondary sense of jihad in Islamic doctrine: this notion of an internal personal struggle to purify oneself or one’s community to which Brennan refers. But this jihad most certainly does not mean, as Brennan intimated, purification in some universally understood sense of being a better person or of improving one’s community. It is, instead, purification in the sense of being a better Muslim, meaning a more sharia-compliant Muslim; it means improvement of the community only in the sense of ridding one’s community of non-Islamic influences.
Mrs. Clinton complains about an “obsession in some quarters with a clash of civilizations.” It is not, however, an obsession so much as a simple statement of the obvious. As I explain in the column about Kerry’s remarks, Clinton spent much of her time as secretary of state trying to restrict the First Amendment in order to accommodate Islamic blasphemy standards – i.e., sharia’s prohibition of any speech or expression, regardless of its truth, that is negatively critical of Islam. For Islam’s rule to prevail, the Constitution’s rule must be repealed; the two cannot co-exist. Indeed, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (a 57-government Islamic bloc) issued the so-called Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam because member states could not abide the purportedly “Universal” Declaration of Human Rights adopted by the U.N. in 1948.
Western civilization is a liberty culture in which people govern themselves; Islamic civilization is an authoritarian culture in which people submit to immutable Islamic law. That is a fact, irrespective of whether stating antagonizes the “partners” Clinton says “we need by our side” – presumably the regime in Turkey that funds Hamas and Hezbollah, the regime in Saudi Arabia that propagates Islamic supremacism throughout the world, and now our new “friends” in Iran, the death-to-America regime that has been promoted “radical jihadist ideology” for over 30 years.
Jihad is an Islamic supremacist concept of (a) waging war against non-Muslims until they submit to sharia, and (b) becoming more sharia-compliant personally and socially. I’d say it is undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture … except that people like Clinton, Brennan and most of Washington are in incorrigible denial. That state of willful blindness has undermined our national security for a generation. Mrs. Clinton promises to continue it.