The age of modern jihadism began in 1928 with the creation of the Muslim Brotherhood, itself a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Caliphate in 1924.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Eighty years later Osama bin Laden called that event:
[A] catastrophe [and a] humiliation and disgrace.
And why? Because for moslems, the infidel West’s Christianity eclipsing Islam in importance was a disgrace that had already been tolerated much too long.
The purpose of the Muslim Brotherhood was to restore Islam to the global power and dominance of Christendom it had wielded for a millennium; and to return Islam to its divine destiny, which founder Hasan al-Bana wrote:
[Is] to dominate not to be dominated, to impose its laws [Sharia] on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.
Most Westerners did not notice or think about the loss of the Caliphate and the epochal shift in the geopolitical order, especially since their secularist culture had relentlessly been diminishing the role of Christianity in our culture and civilization. By the Thirties, Hilaire Belloc would write:
Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.
Prior to the 9-11 atrocities blamed on Islam, the Iranian Revolution began in 1978. While Western foreign policy mavens spoke of “national self-determination,” “anticolonialism,” “democracy,” and other tenets of the “rules-based international order,” the catalyst of the revolution, the Ayatollah Khomeini:
[E]xplicitly cast the revolution as a jihad waged to institute an Islamic state governed by Sharia law, and to fight against the Western infidels who had usurped Islam’s rightful place as what the Koran calls ‘the best of nations.’
In November of 1979, for example, Khomeini preached:
The Muslims must rise up in this struggle, which is more a struggle between unbelievers and Islam than one between Iran and America: between all unbelievers and the Muslims. The Muslims must rise up and triumph in the struggle—the very definition of jihad.
Yet our foreign policy establishment, with a few exceptions, dismissed Khomeini as a “beard from the fringe,” a religious crank like Jim Jones or David Koresh. And the loss of our critical Cold War ally Iran has turned out to be a geopolitical disaster for the West, one still resonating today.
Iran has fomented throughout the region jihadist violence with its proxies such as Hamas, Hezbollah, Houthi, Iraq, and Syria. They and especially their Iranian sponsor have the blood of thousands of Americans on its hands, most grievously the 241 U.S. military personnel murdered in Beirut in 1983. The mullahs have taken a giant step towards fulfilling Khomeini’s promise that:
We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry ‘There is no god but Allah’ resounds over the whole world, there will be jihad.
What this all means today is that we can no longer afford to reprise yet again the blunders, secularist disdain for religion, feckless foreign policy idealism, and Islamophilic delusions in which we have indulged for nearly half a century. Consider, for example, the plans for the Afghan people codified in the 2002 Bonn Conference, convened to establish the goals for rebuilding Afghanistan:
To freely determine their own political future in accordance with the principles of Islam, democracy, pluralism and social justice.
The dangerously overlooked core principles of Islam and Sharia law are that reconciliation with Christians and Christianity is not possible for devout Muslims. Hence, the West MUST cease, as Andrew McCarthy wrote in National Review:
[To] persist in willful blindness to what remains the most basic, incorrigible fact about the region [is] the predominance of sharia supremacism.
Fundamentalist Islam, which has developed for over a millennium, is not merely a religious creed; it is a comprehensive legal and societal framework that is self-consciously hostile to Western liberalism and, thus, to the principles of the American republic.
The West has for decades indulged such democracy-promotion pipe-dreams about Iran, Iraq, and Afghanistan, yet an Islamic liberal democracy has still not come to pass. That is because moslems have kept:
[T]heir faith alive and intact, and avoided the secularism, metaphysical materialism, programmatic skepticism, relativism, and hedonism that characterize the West.
As Belloc wrote:
In Islam, there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine—or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe.
Further:
Islam is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past.
There are 1.5 billion moslems in the world, and not all of them share what historian Efraim Karsh calls the jihadist’s “imperial dream of world domination.” But this “imperial dream of world domination has remained very much alive in the hearts and minds of many [moslems].”
And as history continues to remind us, jihad never sleeps.
