Is the West at Fault for Terrorism?

CDN, by Bob Taylor

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 9, 2016 – When it comes to understanding Islamic extremism, jihad and Muslim thinking, you can count on Middle East analyst Raymond Ibrahim to have an interesting take on the subject.

Ibrahim says he never writes about the latest terrorist attacks anywhere in the world because there is no need. “What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than ‘told you so’?” he asks.

As Ibrahim sees it, the Islamic world is weak when it comes to mounting a credible threat against the West. He believes that Islamic terror could easily be halted if the West were not so “scared” to respond adequately.

“For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars —but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under,” writes Ibrahim.

Thus what we are witnessing today is nothing new. It has been around as long as Islam.

With that in mind, Ibrahim claims the Islamists gain their strength from Western thinking when we fail to recognize what is staring us directly in the face. Key among the apologists is President Barack Obama because he is the leader of the free world. Add in Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel and David Cameron, and you have a powerful consortium of Western thinking that gives Islamic jihad free rein to operate throughout the world.

Ibrahim says the West “stifles… examination of Muslim doctrine and history; welcome(s) hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operative and many are simply ‘radical’; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom,’ only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were ‘liberated’ in Iraq, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies.)”

It has been proven time and again that terrorism is incapable of dealing with a response through strength. There is no better example than when the Ottoman Turks were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

The victory was so important that Osama bin Laden used the Sept. 11 anniversary as a “symbolic” reminder to the West when the twin towers crumbled to the ground in 2001.

The fact that Islamic extremism was “relatively quiet” for more than 300 years afterwards should be enough of a message to Western leaders that Islamic bluster can be defeated through strength.

That does not mean it will be easy or without sacrifice, but it does mean it is better than allowing terrorism free access to the world in our current approach to the situation.

Ibrahim reminds us that the Western leaders mentioned above “insist that Islam is innocent of violence and push for Muslim immigration – because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.”

It is here that Ibrahim makes his knockout punch when he reminds us, and Barack Obama, that he “did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in – twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.”

Ibrahim reminds us that Obama told his own constituents to “get off their high horse” about Islamism. He then dredged up age-old references to the Crusades and the Inquisition, both of which have been distorted by liberal thinking and political correctness, which play directly into the hands of Islamic “victimization.”

Sadly, Barack Obama succeeds in the fact that many, if not most, Americans have little interest in understanding the misrepresentations of Christian, Jewish and Islamic history.

Ibrahim’s solution is revolution, an all-out uprising against Islamic jihad that he says will easily sweep extremism back into the dustbin of history. “For the fact remains: Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.”

Not only is Raymond Ibrahim accurate in his assessment regarding Islam, he is also explaining the sidebar phenomenon of the political environment in our current presidential campaign.