Study Jihadists, take advantage of DOD foreign culture, language programs, Guardmembers urged

NCHORAGE, Alaska (11/20/2007) - Understanding the Jihadist challenge to the West is crucial for National Guard members who defend the homeland and wage the warfight abroad.

So says Dr. John Finney, the international security affairs advisor to LTG H Steven Blum, the chief of the National Guard Bureau.

Finney encouraged Citizen-Soldiers and –Airmen to study Islamic history, cultures, societies and languages.

Guardmembers must clearly distinguish between radical, violent Jihadists and the vast majority of Muslims, Finney said, citing an observation by Bernard Lewis, eminent Princeton University historian of the Islamic world:

“Most Muslims are not fundamentalists,” Lewis wrote in his 2004 book “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror,” and “most fundamentalists are not terrorists but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.”

George Tenet, former CIA director, wrote in his 2007 book “Life at the Center of the Storm: My Life at the CIA” that the terrorist threat will confront Americans for the foreseeable future.

“The campaign against terrorism will consume the next generation … the way the Cold War dominated the lives of their parents and grandparents,” Tenet wrote. According to Finney:

Jihadists are a very small, fanatical Muslim minority who seek to violently overthrow the international system and replace it with an Islamic state. In their view, the word “jihad” means fighting as in warfare; other Muslims define the term as an internal struggle to please God. Jihadists believe they must fight not only non-Muslims but also the Muslim majority, which they view as apostate, to impose their extremist vision on the world. Among Jihadist beliefs:

Islam is the one, true faith and will dominate the world; Muslims are in conflict with unbelievers. Only God can make laws, not man. Government must be by strict interpretation of Islamic law called Shari’a. The Quran and traditions about Mohammed’s life called the hadith contain the whole truth for determining a proper life for individuals and society at large. Jihadist ideologues from Sayyid Qutb to Osama Bin Laden have framed the West as Islam’s mortal enemy, call democracy a false religion and advocate expelling U.S. influence from the Arabian Peninsula and Mid East, removing secular governments, eliminating Israel, purging Jewish and Christian influence and establishing a new Caliphate or Muslim empire.

The key to countering the Jihadists lies is directly confronting and defeating their ideology, Finney said. This means understanding the basis of the Jihadist worldview and developing an effective response that demonstrates the falseness of the Jihadist message of exclusivity, hatred and violence.

A democratic form of government, culturally Islamic and built from within Islamic societies, is the most effective antidote to the Jihadist argument, he stated. Thus, Guardmembers should have at least a basic familiarity with Jihadism and a good grasp of how democratic institutions and values, adjusted to incorporate Islamic practices and beliefs, are the most effective counterpoint to Jihadist ideology, Finney indicated.

While militant Islamism isn’t new – clashes with the modernizing West date back at least to the 18th century. Jihadism is a particularly serious challenge because of its cult of suicide bombers, extensive financing, skilled manipulation of the media and the Internet and potential access to weapons of mass destruction.

In the long term, the war of ideas – the ideological and information battlefields – is the real center of gravity, Finney stressed. It is more important than the military aspect of the conflict, as essential as that is, he said.

“We will never get ahead of the problem unless we penetrate the terrorist breeding grounds and do something about honest government, free trade, economic development, educational reform, political freedom and religious moderation,” Tenet wrote.

Among essential short-term and long-term Western strategies in confronting the Jihadist challenge that Finney outlined:

Using the military and law enforcement to prevent a repeat of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Challenge extremist preaching and recruitment. Address Jihadist claims with specific counterpoints. Seek resolution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Reduce the corruption, economic backwardness and tyranny that Jihadists exploit. Encourage democratic governance while understanding that a Muslim form of democracy might not look exactly like Western models; Islamic practices and beliefs can coexist with democracy. Finney quoted Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national security advisor, writing in his 2007 book “Second Chance:”

“America needs to identify with the quest for universal human dignity, a dignity that embodies both freedom and democracy but also implies respect for cultural diversity,” Brzezinski wrote.

The National Guard is on the frontlines in confronting the Jihadist challenge in Afghanistan and Iraq and protecting the American homeland from attack, Finney said. The Department of Defense is allocating substantially increased resources now to preparing the American military to operate more effectively in the cultural and linguistic environments of the Muslim world, especially in combating a deadly and determined foe that embeds itself in the civilian population.

National Guard members and commanders should take advantage of these new programs, which include cultural and language training and assignment of anthropologists, social scientists and linguists to Brigade Combat Teams, Finney said.

"In order to be truly successful, Guardmembers need to analyze the threat that we are facing in all its dimensions, including the ideological, cultural and historical aspects of what promises to be a decades-long struggle,” he said.

This also should be read and learned.

Unholy Alliance
by David Horowitz
Regnery Publishing, Inc.; ISBN: 089526076X
Hardcover - 256 pages (September 2004)

In this tour de force on the most important issue of our time, David Horowitz, confronts the paradox of how so many Americans, including the leadership of the Democratic Party, could turn against the War on Terror. He finds an answer in a political Left that shares a view of America as the “Great Satan” with America’s radical Islamic enemies. This Left, which once made common cause with Communists, has now joined forces with radical Islam in attacking America’s defenses at home and its policies abroad. From their positions of influence in the university and media culture, leftists have defined America as the “root cause” of the attacks against it. In a remarkable exploration of the “Mind of the Left,” Horowitz traces the evolution of American radicalism from its Communist past to its “anti-war” present. He then shows how this Left was able to turn the Democratic Party presidential campaign around and reshape its views on the War on Terror.

Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance, writes John Haynes, the noted historian of American Communism, “is an insightful, brilliant examination of the mental world of the radical left. Horowitz shows how today’s radicals, unwilling to reflect on the internal flaws that destroyed Marxism-Leninism from within, have embraced an all-consuming nihilism in its place. This has led them to a hatred of American institutions and a solidarity with Islamic terrorists that makes the radical left more properly regarded as dangerous than loony.”

Unholy Alliance is an eye-opening book that should unsettle conventional assumptions and reveals why intellectuals and political leaders who applaud Michael Moore are no laughing matter. As Harvey Klehr, author of Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, writes, “The world Communist movement may be moribund, but its habits of mind and ideological fantasies have not disappeared. This is a fascinating and depressing account.”

In all of history, jihad, as a central institutional means of forcibly advancing Islam (Islam never advances without the point of a sword or newer technology), meaning Political Islam, has never been moderated in any way except by decisive military defeat. For this article and its proposed policy to be expected to reap anything but failure of Western Civilization to ‘moderate’ Islam to function in a democratic way compatible with western commerce desires with absence of jihad war is wishful thinking. The article can be conceived of almost suggesting the West adopt the ‘peaceful’ aspects of Islam itself in the attempt to modify the rest of Islam..the West will allow itself to be swallowed by Islam. Europe invited Islam into its culture deliberately, and, now is almost gone with little clear thinking left to realize its current position. Bernard Lewis alerted the European public to the history and danger it is in only a couple of years ago by accident during a conference question and answer sessionl. If Islam were merely patient, it would wait 30 years for demography to work its magic numbers, and then merely vote itself in democratically with all its political aspects...Islam is IMPATIENT...it wants Europe now. Consequences for US are huge with the prospect of an Islamic EU. We flirt with Islam nowm here in our country at great peril.

“Most Muslims are not fundamentalists,” Lewis wrote in his 2004 book “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror,”

But their allegiance is to Islam first and foremost and not to the country of citizenship. That’s the reason that European muslims are willing to perpetrate acts of terrorism both in Europe and America and American muslims willing to fight American servicemen in Iraq and Afghanistan. It also means that any future acts of terrorism in our country are most likely committed by “fellow-citizens”.

“While militant Islamism isn’t new – clashes with the modernizing West date back at least to the 18th century.”

Earlier than that. Trying to avoid Muslim thieves and murderers was the main reason European explorers wanted an ocean path to the Far East. Western Civilization has been trying to circumvent murdering Muslims for hundreds of years. We’d been quite successful until they brought their terrorizing religion home to us on 9/11.

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