Battle for our minds: Western elites and the terror threat

 

Arab-Islamic terrorists had been attacking the West for years but the reports were dismissed as the work of “madmen” and, in fact, all the while recruiters and fund-raisers for Arab-Islamic terror were receiving academic and economic sanctuary in some of America’s most esteemed institutions.

 

Had Osama bin Laden been held accountable in 1992, 1996, and 1998, and had his followers been called out, his Al-Qaeda network wouldn’t have become a clarion call for anti-Western terror. Now as new attacks, aborted and otherwise, are carried out from London to Mumbai to New York’s Times Square, Western elites—academia, the media, and government officials—have once again been fueling that same dangerous complacency that is leaving us as vulnerable as before.

In Battle for Our Minds, Michael Widlanski delivers a powerful and sound argument for turning around this willful ignorance, and explains exactly how it can be done: by facing and genuinely understanding the precise motives and mind games behind those who want to destroy us. He names the officials, media pundits, and academics who have hindered the battle against Islamic terror, in turn obstructing a logical fight to stop it. Clearly, a lack of factual accuracy is sabotaging the Western mind, and Widlanski’s anger is justified: Why has an all-out “holy war” been softened into the more liberally acceptable “spiritual struggle”?

 

Why, pre-9/11, were the terrorist threats made in New York City mosques ignored? Why did we go out of our way to give bin Laden a proper burial out of respect to an ideology that erased the World Trade Center? Why is President Barack Obama so hesitant to offend the enemy by calling it what it is: Islamic Extremist Terror? How can we stop it if, out of a weak and outrageous political correctness, we refuse to even recognize it?

Dr. Widlanski lays out a commonsense, no-holds-barred solution to an imperative and increasingly dangerous global dilemma. This is not a witch hunt, nor a temporary Band-Aid, but a comprehensive strategy built around a hard-hitting truth carefully omitted from every liberal media outlet, and downplayed, overlooked, and incorrectly assessed by the FBI, CIA, and the State Department: terrorist “martyrs” want to change the course of history. By convincing them that their acts are futile, the tide turns and we can prevent further acts—and win the battle for our minds.

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IGNORING OR BELITTLING THE EXTREMIST IDEOLOGIES SPARKING TERRORISM IS ITSELF AN IDEOLOGY— THE WESTERN IDEOLOGY OF POLITICAL CORRECTNESS. THIS IDEOLOGY HAS ALREADY COST MANY LIVES.

Several European leaders have recently shown that they are moving away from the politically correct path that avoids criticizing Islamic extremism and instead has enshrined it as part of multiculturalism. German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nikolas Sarkozy, and British prime minister David Cameron, all of whom have large Muslim minorities in their countries, have now said that that path is a dead end.

After the London bombings then–prime minister Tony Blair said the war with Arab-Islamic terror was a battle whose roots were ideological: “This is the battle that must be won, a battle not just about the terrorist methods but their views. Not just their barbaric acts, but their barbaric ideas. Not only what they do but what they think and the thinking they would impose on others.”

Fortunately, a growing number of Western leaders is starting to recognize ideology as a key to Arab-Islamic terror. To fight terror we need also to combat these ideological motivators directly in what has sometimes been called “the battle of ideas.”

 

Several European leaders have recently shown that they are moving away from the politically correct path that avoids criticizing Islamic extremism and instead has enshrined it as part of multiculturalism. German chancellor Angela Merkel, French president Nikolas Sarkozy, and British prime minister David Cameron, all of whom have large Muslim minorities in their countries, have now said that that path is a dead end.

After the London bombings then–prime minister Tony Blair said the war with Arab-Islamic terror was a battle whose roots were ideological: “This is the battle that must be won, a battle not just about the terrorist methods but their views. Not just their barbaric acts, but their barbaric ideas. Not only what they do but what they think and the thinking they would impose on others.”

Fortunately, a growing number of Western leaders is starting to recognize ideology as a key to Arab-Islamic terror. To fight terror we need also to combat these ideological motivators directly in what has sometimes been called “the battle of ideas.”