The Ground Zero Mosque and Acts of War

I wrote this article during the heated debate over the so-called Ground Zero Mosque back in 2010. The arguments made at that time are still relevant today.

All warfare is based on deception. – Sun Tzu

In the Fall 2010 issue of The Objective Standard, Craig Biddle wrote an article, “The Ground Zero Mosque, the Spread of Islam, and How America Should Deal with Such Efforts,” that compounds several errors held by many Objectivists on this issue. He argues that although America is at war with "Islamists," governmental force to prevent the building of the mosque would violate property rights. However, Biddle does not suffer from any illusions about the nature of Islam or the current struggle. He points out that America “is in a (shamefully) undeclared but nevertheless real military war with Islamists” (10). The enemy includes states that support terrorism, especially Iran and Saudi Arabia. However, the enemy is not limited to nation-states:

This military war is a part of a broader cultural war—a war of ideas, principles, and norms—and our enemies in this broader war include more than those Muslims who enact or call for violence against Americans. Our enemies in this broader war include any Muslims who seek via any means—whether violent or peaceful—to destroy America and establish an Islamic state in its place…The general goal is to saturate America with Muslims, Islamic ideas, Islamic institutions, and Islamic norms such that America gradually and peacefully becomes an Islamic state. (10). [Emphasis in original]

The above is a good summation of the methods and goals of the stealth jihad not only in America but also around the world. In Western Europe today Americans can view their future if the stealth jihadists continue their successful infiltration.

All thoughtful, patriotic Americans—including Objectivists—agree on the seriousness of Islamic aggression upon the West. However, there is much disagreement on how to fight the stealth jihad. Biddle recommends a solution with a strong emphasis on ending jihad supporting regimes starting with Iran and Saudi Arabia. However, he advocates that when dealing with the stealth jihad on American soil the only recourse is debate, boycott and moral suasion.

Besides declaring war upon Iran and—if necessary—Saudi Arabia, Biddle’s three point plan for dealing with the stealth jihad on American soil is for private citizens to “morally condemn Islam in particular and creeds of faith and dogma in general…recognize and uphold the principle that tolerance is not a virtue but a vice…ostracize individuals and boycott businesses” that are involved in building the Ground Zero mosque” (19-20). There are several problems with Biddle’s recommendation, not the least of which is his view that it is the responsibility of private citizens to thwart sedition of this magnitude, which also has a foreign source(s).

To begin with, Biddle mischaracterizes the motives of those who oppose the Ground Zero mosque. Several times in his essay he states that the primary reason for opposing the mosque is its “insulting nature.” This denigrates opposing views as merely emotional. He argues (correctly) that “insults” are not a valid reason for depriving Americans of their property rights. He then launches into several paragraphs on the principles of property rights. His premise being that those who disagree with him (including individuals who have been Objectivists for decades) are not “thinking in principles” (16).

Biddle begins his essay by acknowledging that “some [who oppose the mosque] say that property rights do not apply in this case because the mosque backers are aiding the enemy” (9). He dismisses this argument. The only way the government could legitimately prohibit the mosque’s building is if it were providing “material aid” to the enemy (15). With this position, Biddle’s demonstrates his lack of knowledge on the type of war we are now engaged in, along with a more general ignorance of military history.

The morale of a nation under attack is central to whether that country will survive and emerge victorious. Churchill’s exceptional leadership in the summer of 1940 is a classic example of how one man changed a nation from defeatism to trumpeting that surrender is not option. As Ayn Rand observed,

A country’s morale is crucially important, in wartime. In World War II, the British Lord Haw-Haw was, properly, regarded as a traitor—for the crime of trying to undercut the British soldiers’ morale by broadcasting scare stories about Nazi Germany’s invincible power. [1]

Here, Rand is reiterating Napoleon’s famous maxim of war, “the moral is to the physical as three to one.” And clearly, the purpose of the Ground Zero mosque is to undercut American morale in the continuing, one-sided campaign against the stealth jihad in the West, while emboldening the warriors of Mohammed. Biddle’s strict separation between the physical and psychological factors of warfare is completely invalid and reeks of the mind/body dichotomy. Jihadists are waging psychological and ideological war against the West, which dovetails nicely with their terrorism. There is no safe way to draw a sharp line between the two. Terrorism and the stealth jihad are two halves that form one whole.

The false dichotomy between the material and moral in warfare that Biddle propounds is the result of his not understanding the kind of war the United States, and our Western allies, are engaged in. For example, Biddle claims that if the United States declared war on Iran and then quickly destroyed that regime (without endless handwringing over Iranian civilian deaths), “we would demonstrate the hopelessness of the Islamic cause, deflate their motivation to kill, and effectively collapse their nihilistic movement” (18). He provides absolutely no evidence for this assertion except by noting that such a strategy worked against Germany and Japan during and after World War II. There are obviously vast differences between these cultures. What worked with Germany and a quickly Westernizing Japan may not work with a culture largely based on Islam and its adherence to the Arab tribal mindset.

He states that taking out Iran would eliminate “the main sources of spiritual and financial support for Islamists”—another dubious assertion. Islam has suffered many devastating military set-backs from the sacking of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258 to the slaughter of the Mahdi’s forces at Omdurman in 1898. From the ashes of numerous defeats, Islamic conquest, in its many forms, rebounded once the victors became tired, soft or converted. Biddle seems unaware that it is for this very reason that the Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928. Hassan al-Banna’s purpose was to revitalize Islamic resolve after the overwhelming defeat of the Ottoman Empire during World War I. The Caliphate was dissolved and large sections of the Moslem world were under foreign domination.  This disaster did not “deflate their motivations to kill.” Instead, the Islamists became ever more vicious, as their alliance with Nazi Germany makes clear.

Yet another faulty premise of Biddle’s is his reversing cause and effect on the relationship between domestic and foreign policy. He seems to believe that a more rational foreign policy can precede domestic reform. In other words, how can America in its present state possibly embark on the policy of declaring war upon Iran and other jihad supporting regimes? The short answer is that it cannot. It is bad enough that so many on both the left and the right remain clueless on the threat of jihad in all its forms. Furthermore, a reexamining of American foreign policy is made much more difficult by the government and civilian institutions that have been compromised by stealth jihadists spreading disinformation or worse. I contend that the stealth jihad now occurring on American soil will have to be dealt with before we can expect the government to adopt a rational foreign policy.

Perhaps Biddle’s worst blunder is his belief that warfare is something that can only transpire between nation-states. Of course, nothing can be further from the truth. This is particularly true when dealing with Islam. Moslems self-consciously think of themselves as part of an international community-of-believers called the ummah. Jihadists (of all varieties) operate as members of the ummah, not for any particular government. Their justification for perpetual war against the infidel is located in the Koran, the Hadith and countless fatwas. The ummah is their source of legitimacy to wage war. They function as a worldwide state within numerous territorial states. Eminent military historian John Keegan describes the Islamic view of war:

Islam dissolved the two principles on which war had so often been fought before: territoriality and kinship. There could be no territoriality in Islam, because its destiny was to bring the whole world to submission to the will of God…The Arab armies benefited greatly from the presence in the settled lands they invaded of the musta’riba, Arabs who had given up the desert life but who felt strong cultural bonds with them and proved willing to fight at their side as soon as they heard a doctrine of brotherhood preached in the name of Islam. [2]

This is the enemy the West faces. Thinking in terms of fighting and defeating nation-states ignores the enemy’s nature. Vanquishing such an unprecedented enemy will require much rethinking on the part of Americans. It will also require taking steps that may seem extreme, but are necessary. For example, Robert Spencer is one of our top scholars on Islam and the stealth jihad. In his important work Stealth Jihad, Spencer describes and documents the nature of the stealth jihad and how it operates in America. He reaches the stark conclusion that as “a simple matter of national security” the United States should end further Moslem immigration. He argues that such a policy is inescapable unless and until sharia law supremacy is no longer a part of Islam. [3] Given the facts, history and nature of Islamic supremacy, Spencer’s is a logical conclusion. In contrast, Biddle’s call for boycotts in the face of invasion seems silly and entirely beside the point.

[1] Ayn Rand, “The Wreckage of the Consensus,” in Capitalism: the Unknown Ideal (New York: Signet, 1967), 252.  

[2] John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 194, 196-7.

[3] Robert Spencer, Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs (Washington D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2008), 278.

Eisenhower's Guildhall Speech 12 June 1945

A month after the surrender of Nazi Germany, General Eisenhower gave a speech in London. During his address, he describes a London that is now sadly dead. Hopefully someday this London will reappear.

Yet kinship among nations is not determined in such measurements as proximity, size and age. Rather we should turn to those inner things, call them what you will - I mean those intangibles that are the real treasures free men possess. To preserve his freedom of worship, his equality before the law, his liberty to speak and act as he sees fit, subject only to the provision that we trespass not upon similar rights of others - the Londoner will fight! So will the citizen of Abilene!

Review: Defeating Jihad: The Winnable War by Sebastian Gorka. Washington, DC: Regnery Publishing, 2016

Sebastian Gorka is a well-known academic and foreign policy expert. He has worked for various institutions including the National Defense University, the Hudson Institute and the Joint Special Operations University. He was recently appointed Deputy Assistant for the White House’s Strategic Initiative Group by the Trump Administration. He was an editor for Breitbart News and worked with Stephen Bannon. While not an official statement by the Trump Administration, the author apparently has much influence in the White House.

Gorka begins his book with a biographical introduction. He recounts his father’s travails as an anti-Communist in Hungary in the immediate postwar era. Fortunately, the elder Paul Gorka was able to make his way to England where his son Sebastian was born. He retains connections to Hungary and received his master’s degree from Budapest University of Economic Sciences and Public Administration in 1997. His biography does reflect upon the overall thesis of his book. He advocates the policy of “containment” that won the Cold War against the Soviets:

[George] Kennan’s analysis became the basis not only for America’s later “containment” policy—the plan to protect the West from the threat of communism that President Truman eventually announced to a joint session of Congress in 1947—but also for National Security Council Report NSC-68, the top-secret White House plan to defeat Soviet Russia, a plan that would result, forty years later, in the fall f the Berlin Wall and victory in the Cold War. (p. 22)

He considers these documents of such central importance to his thesis that the full transcripts of Kennan’s famous “long Telegram” and NSC-68 are included as appendixes in the book. However, the author does not discuss the many deviations from containment such as détente and other examples of Western appeasement of the Soviet Union – and Communist China – such as trade and “cultural” exchanges. 

Gorka states that since 9/11 the USA has lacked a threat assessment of the enemy and, therefore, a strategy for victory. One reason he wrote this book is to rectify this notorious evasion of reality and provide a contemporary “Long Telegram” that will guide the nation to victory over its new “totalitarian” enemy.

The first section of the book lays out the failures of the last decades in dealing with the global jihad. He then ably describes the evolution of the modern jihad movement. He argues that 1979 was the key turning point due to three key events: Iran’s Islamic revolution, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the “fundamentalist” takeover of the main mosque in Mecca. The first and second event don’t require much elaboration for informed readers. The last is much more obscure for Westerners. The ruling Saud family was shocked to discover that many of their pet imams supported or were sympathetic to the jihadists. The result was an arrangement where the Saudi regime would fund jihad and subversion around the globe, just so long as their rule was not questioned at home (p. 84). According to Gorka, these events provided jihadists with global ambitions and the resources to carry out their agenda throughout the world.

Another fountainhead of jihad that Gorka discusses is the Muslim Brotherhood. He observes that with the demise of the caliphate after World War One, the Brotherhood developed a doctrine of justifying jihad against infidels and apostates that does not require a caliph’s declaration.

 

His [Sayyid Qutb] ideas on jihad and religious war live on, however. Milestones is found all over the Middle East, in many Islamic “cultural centers” across the United States, and, significantly, in the possession of high-value jihadist targets on the battlefield and of terrorists apprehended here in America. (p. 99)

 

He devotes much more space to the creation, growth and leadership of the Islamic State and Al Shaam (ISIS). However, this is part of the book’s larger problem. He focuses on ISIS as the source of global jihad much as the Bush Administration had earlier declared Al Qaeda as the source of terrorism. It is an overly narrow view that distracts from the much larger picture. Ironically, a larger picture that Gorka had framed in the book’s previous chapters. For example, there are his comments on the recent jihad attack in London on 22 March 2017.  “Nobody should be surprised, this is ISIS’s new method of operation.” Of course, there is nothing new about such attacks, which predate ISIS. But, his penchant for seeing ISIS as the major source of the global jihad skews his policy recommendations.

In the book’s final chapter “What is to be Done? How America wins and the Jihadis lose” three policies are recommended. Frankly, they’re all weak tea and bear little resemblance to a forceful strategy of containment. His three recommendations are: “Deploy the truth: you cannot win a war if you cannot talk honestly about the enemy”; “Take a step back: help other fight their own wars”; “Winning the war at home: education and human intelligence” (pp. 129-132). He elaborates on these points at length. For example, he admits that his last point would require turning the USA into a garrison state: “Every American citizen has a mission to execute if we are to win this war” (p.135). There is not much containment of jihad to be seen here.

The reason for Gorka’s ultimate failure is that he doesn’t heed his own advice about properly identifying the enemy:

 

Today’s threat is hybrid totalitarianism that goes beyond the man-made justification for perfecting society along politically defined lines and instead uses the religion of Islam and Allah to justify mass murder … We are not at war with Islam (pp. 18, 129). (Emphasis in original)

 

This is the core of Gorka’s problem. I’m surprised that he didn’t refer to Islam as a “religion of peace.” Jihadists have no trouble citing the Koran and Hadith to justify their actions. They can do so by simply referring to the actions of Mohammed after the hijra to Medina. The Islamic doctrine of conquest by migration was instituted in 622 A.D. by the religion’s founder. The elephant in the room, that Gorka doesn’t devote a single word to, is the main issue of our time: the current Islamic hijra into Western Europe and America. As an expert on guerrilla war, he must realize that the West’s feckless immigration policies provide the jihadist fish with an ocean of fellow adherents in which to swim. While many Moslems in the West state their opposition to the means of violent jihad, many more support their ends. One question that should be obvious to the author is why doesn’t Hungary suffer from the incessant jihad attacks now common in Western Europe. In the final analysis, Gorka too fails to properly identify the enemy and, therefore, provide a helpful and accurate threat assessment.