An Islamist threat like the Nazis

Tony Blankley, editorial-page editor of The Washington Times, describes the present danger posed by militant Islam and what must be done to counter it in his new book, "The West′s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (Regnery Publishing)

First of three parts

The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.

We cannot afford to lose Europe. We cannot afford to see Europe transformed into a launching pad for Islamist jihad.

While we in the United States and Europe have vast resources for protecting ourselves, we have thought ourselves into a position of near impotence.

Beyond the growing number of Muslims committed to terrorism is the threat from the Islamic diaspora′s growing cultural and religious assertiveness -- particularly in largely secular Europe, where Muslim cultural assimilation has not occurred.

It is beginning to dawn on Europeans that the combination of a shrinking ethnic-European population and an expanding, culturally assertive Muslim population might lead to the fall of Western civilization in Europe within a century.

This phenomenon, called Eurabia, is viewed with growing fatalism both in Europe and in America. Such fatalism, however, is premature.

Last November, an Islamist terrorist′s butchering of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who had made a movie revealing abuse of Muslim women, aroused deep fears in Holland and across the Continent.

The public anger, which included the burning of mosques in traditionally tolerant Holland, is evidence that the European instinct for survival has not been fully extinguished.

But that survival instinct is threatened by the multiculturalism and political correctness advocated in media and academe -- and institutionalized in national and European Union laws and regulations for half a century.

Europe′s effort at cultural tolerance since World War II slowly morphed into a surprisingly deep self-loathing of Western culture that denied the instinct for cultural and national self-defense.

If Europe doesn′t rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass. Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.

Prepared to murder

What Muslims say and do now is the measure of the political, cultural and military danger facing the West.

Most other religious developments around the world, such as the spread of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, have benign or nonviolent consequences. However, the overwhelming political fact deriving from the ferment in Islam is that, to some degree, some percentage of Muslims are prepared to murder -- and are murdering -- great numbers in what they feel is their religious duty.

Many more Muslims are, to some degree, supportive or protective of these killers. Even more Muslims, while not supportive of such tactics, share many of the terrorists′ religious convictions and perceptions.

Radical currents within Islam drive some Muslims to terrorism and push others at least to a more adversarial view of their relationship to non-Muslim nations and cultures in which they live -- whether in Paris, London, Hamburg, Rotterdam, or any American city.

The resurgence of a militant Islam drove the United States to fight two wars in Muslim countries in two years, disrupted America′s alliance with Europe, caused the largest reorganization of the U.S. government in half a century (with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security), changed election results in Europe and threatened the stability of most governments in the Middle East.

This resurgence of militant Islam also drove America to pressure Saudi Arabia to change the way it teaches religion to its children and others (through madrasses) around the world. It forced America to pressure Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan and Somalia, among others, to change domestic security policies. It prompted America to build a ring of bases in Central Asia across what used to be the Muslim part of the Soviet Union.

And we are only four years removed from the September 11 attacks.

Nazi parallels

Radical Islamists like Osama bin Laden are not traditionalists. The idea of individual jihad -- separating jihadist decisions from the Muslim community -- is a radical departure. But it is important for recruiting potential terrorists.

Over the past 30 years, the Muslim population in Europe expanded rapidly from a few hundred thousand to more than 20 million. Muslims there and in the United States are arguing over their role in Western societies: Should they integrate, seclude themselves, or convert the West to Islam?

Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.

Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the "advantages" the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures. They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents′ passive habits.

Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.

The Islamo-fascist mullahs encourage young Muslims not to turn to their parents for guidance on choosing a wife (or wives). Nor are young Muslims to be guided by parental or community disapproval of making an individual commitment to jihad. They are allowed to drink alcohol, shave their beards and commit what otherwise would be judged immorality in a Muslim -- in order to advance jihad.

Postmodern radicalism

In many ways, these radical Muslim fundamentalists are postmodern, not pre-modern. They are designing a distinctly Western, fascistic version of Islam that is less and less connected to the Islam of their Middle Eastern homeland.

Radical Western Islam brings the combative strength and deep faith of authentic traditions while constantly modifying itself to best attack liberal, secular European and American institutions.

The radical Islamists are able to rationalize concessions to modernity with ancient-sounding mumbo jumbo while still sounding like authentic fundamentalists, the only true voice of Islam.

The Nazis overwhelmed German society with these methods 70 years ago. There is building evidence that the radical Islamists are moving ever more successfully down the same path -- particularly within the younger generations in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the United States.

Many young Muslims in Europe, and some in America, particularly second- and third-generation Muslims, cannot be considered part of a diaspora. They no longer are strongly connected to their family′s country of origin, nor do they intend to return.

Instead, they are forming their own Muslim consciousness from the Internet, books, videotapes and audiotapes.

The Internet offers many radical Islamic "experts" and mullahs who function like Dear Abby. European Muslims pose questions on everything from whether to be polite to infidels to how to prepare for jihad. The immediate answer often is a hodgepodge of Koranic citations, quotes from ancient scholars and personal advice.

Within this constantly morphing digital environment, an increasingly radical Islam is emerging in Europe. Disconnected from their homelands, isolated from their non-Muslim neighbors and fellow workers, alienated from their elders, Europe′s young Muslims find a weird, disembodied, globalized radical Islam appealing.

Struggle for survival

Muslim sections of Paris, Rotterdam and other European cities already are labeled "no-go zones" for ethnic Europeans, including armed policemen.

As the Muslim populations – and their level of cultural and religious assertiveness – expand, European geography will be "reclaimed" for Islam. Europe will become pockmarked with "little Fallujahs" that effectively will be impenetrable by anything much short of a U.S. Marine division.

Not only will Islamic cultural aggression against a seemingly passive and apologetic indigenous population increase, but the zone of safety and support for the actual terrorists will expand as well.

If the current leaders of Europe do not respond to the Islamist threat boldly and effectively, the common European people might decide to defend their culture as vigilantes. In that case, Europe again will become a bloody urban battleground.

This would be a temporary tragedy for liberal principles of governance, but at least would secure Europe from Muslim domination over the next half-century. The harm of a vigilante effort against the radical Islamists can be mitigated, if not avoided, if the governments themselves will lead the struggle for European cultural survival.

It should be a prime objective of American policy to encourage European governments and the European Union to lead their people in this struggle, rather than follow them.

Part II: Needed: Old war spirit in a new war

• Copyright (c) 2005 by Tony Blankley. Published by arrangement with Regnery Publishing Inc.

Needed: Old war spirit in a new war

Tony Blankley, editorial-page editor of The Washington Times, describes the present danger posed by militant Islam and what must be done to counter it in his new book, "The West′s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (Regnery Publishing)

Second of three parts

American writer and social historian Studs Terkel memorably called World War II "the good war."

Terkel interviewed hundreds of GIs and their families many years after the war. They recalled that the struggle lifted them above their personal lives to fight on behalf of something they believed was greater than themselves.

World War II was good, despite the millions of deaths, the limitations on daily lives, the encroachment on peacetime liberties and the arduousness of wartime life. The war was good because the sacrifice was for a noble cause, for the perpetuation of America and the American way of life.

The struggle against Islamist terrorism is an equally good war -- and for the same reasons. We have just as great a responsibility to win our struggle against insurgent Islamist aggression as our parents and grandparents had to win World War II.

There is no other cause so urgent. If we do not pay with our sacrifices now, we (and our children) will pay in greater losses later. We must be prepared to be just as ruthless and rational as the "greatest generation" was in defeating fascism.

Just as their generals and admirals made no compromise to the imperative of total victory on the battlefield, so British and American political leaders, courts and popular opinion let the requirements for victory define the powers of their government on the home front.

Prior to America′s entry into the war, Congress passed laws that,collectively, authorized President Franklin D. Roosevelt to instruct the FBI to investigate suspected subversive activity.

The Foreign Agents Registration Act of 1938, the Smith Act of 1940 and the Voorhis Act of 1941 were the grounds for Roosevelt′s wartime domestic surveillance of American citizens whose political activity might lead them to serve the interests of opposing nations.

Attorney General Robert Jackson described the targets and responsibility of the FBI′s domestic intelligence activities as involving "steady surveillance over individuals and groups within the United States ... which [are] ready to give assistance or encouragement in any form to invading or opposing ideologies." Roosevelt authorized the FBI to use wiretaps (without a warrant), surreptitious entries and "champering" (secretly intercepting and reading private mail without consent).

Between 1941 and 1943, the Justice Department′s Special War Policies Unit took extensive action on the internal security front by interning thousands of enemy aliens, denaturalizing and deporting members of the German-American Bund, an American Nazi organization formed in the 1930s. The government prosecuted individuals for sedition and prohibited the mailing of some publications.

Wartime security

A total of 25,655 noncitizens living in the United States were interned or deported during the war years because of their ethnicity or nationality, rather than their words or conduct. They included 11,229 Japanese, 10,905 Germans, 3,278 Italians, 52 Hungarians, 25 Romanians, five Bulgarians and 161 other foreign nationals.

The Supreme Court later held, in Johnson v. Eisentrager (1950), that "executive power over enemy aliens, undelayed and unhampered by litigation, has been deemed, throughout our history, essential to wartime security." The high court added: "The resident enemy alien is constitutionally subject to summary arrest, internment and deportation whenever a ′declared war′ exists." So the power to intern or deport comes into effect only when war has been declared.

Today, we are under attack not by a nation, but by groups of militant individuals who claim Islam as their faith. Yet for the first time in human history, the destructive power of terrorists can be as great as that of a traditional nation-state that has declared war. We need a mechanism to deal with this change.

During World War II, the country was faced with the prospect of large numbers of people -- again identifiable by ethnicity, not conduct -- who were real or potential enemies.

The logic of the Supreme Court′s opinion is applicable to the situation we face today. The court held that people ethnically connected to the war-makers are more likely to support them than are others -- and our country at war has a right to protect itself from this presumed higher risk of danger.

This is true regardless of the personal innocence of particular individuals. The term we would use today is "ethnic profiling," and 200 years of American law and practice during wartime permits ethnic profiling for the common defense.

The Supreme Court upheld internment of American citizens of Japanese ancestry as well as curfews and other conditions under the principle of military necessity.

The war power "extends to every matter and activity so related to war as substantially to affect its conduct and progress," Chief Justice Harlan Fiske Stone wrote in the majority opinion.

The court specifically rejected the argument that if a curfew were necessary, every American citizen not just those of Japanese ancestry should have to comply. The court responded that it was not necessary to "inflict obviously needless hardship on the many."

Compare that reasoning to the practice in airport searches since September 11, where our government′s policy is precisely to impose obviously needless hardship on the many. Security personnel search 80-year-old grandmothers equally with, or instead of, 23-year-old Arab men.

In essence, the court found that if there was rational support for discriminating on the basis of race, such discrimination was justified under the circumstances of a war menace.

A liberal icon

A decent man makes different judgments in different circumstances.

Members of the Jehovah′s Witnesses were prosecuted during World War II for refusing to let their children recite the Pledge of Allegiance.

Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter, a liberal, wrote the majority opinion in the case. He upheld the school expulsions and parental prosecutions for violating compulsory attendance laws.

Justice Frankfurter observed that "the mere possession of religious convictions which contradict the relevant concerns of a political society does not relieve the citizen from the discharge of political responsibilities."

This is particularly applicable to the situation we face today. Radical Islamists are demanding to be covered by Shariah – laws compiled over a thousand years of Muslim jurisprudence, based on the Koran and its commentaries -- rather than by the laws of the United States, Britain, Germany or the other non-Muslim nations in which the radical Islamists live.

Although Justice Frankfurter is remembered as a great liberal, in the 1940s, liberalism still understood our country′s history and government′s role in unifying our nation.

"We are dealing with an interest inferior to none in the hierarchy of legal values," he wrote. "National unity is the basis of national security."

Today, schoolchildren, senators and elite journalists would giggle at the idea of applying Justice Frankfurter′s lofty words to the defense of the modest little Pledge of Allegiance.

But back then, as now, we were a nation of newly arrived immigrants, threatened from abroad and bombarded with destructive ideologies.

Then, it was communism and fascism. Today, it is multiculturalism, political correctness and, among the Muslim population, radical Islam.

Most basic right

Justice Frankfurter delivered his Pledge opinion on June 3, 1940. On May 10, Germany had invaded France. On May 15, Holland had surrendered to Germany. On May 26, Britons had begun the evacuation of all their troops, and as many French soldiers as they could take, 338,000 troops in all, from the beaches of Dunkirk.

Evil was on the march. It was overwhelmingly powerful,well-organized and pitiless. All around the world, from Singapore to Norway, civilization was being routed by the mass forces of Nazi Germany and its ally Japan, while Soviet Communism was corrupting minds in democracies from France to America to China.

In those days, when Supreme Court justices -- liberal, moderate, and conservative -- sat down to write opinions, they knew their words and findings mattered.

Wrongly decided cases wouldn′t merely expose the justices to rude comments in fashionable newspapers and magazines. Wrongly decided cases might expose the United States to disunity, sabotage, revolution or conquest.

Under such circumstances, the justices were more than prepared to let Congress give the president of the United States broad powers to defend our country. And they were unlikely to interfere with the president carrying out such powers or to second-guess the military′s decisions.

The court would draw lines and preserve the essence of our freedoms. But the justices were practical men.

They understood that the broadest enforcement of every last theoretical right and privilege might well be purchased at the price of losing our most basic right: the right to effectively defend ourselves.

Part III: At war with an enemy of an unspoken name

Tony Blankley, editorial page editor of The Washington Times, calls for a sweeping response to the threat of militant Islam in his book, "The West′s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?" (Regnery Publishing).

When President Bush declared war on terrorism, he did not, legally, put the country on a war footing.

Up until now, we have never accurately named the enemy or the danger. If the government can′t speak the real name and nature of the enemy, it becomes impossible to explain, or even design, a policy for victory.

This is why Mr. Bush -- who has tried to talk around the problem of radical Islam -- has seemed (to his critics) foolish or deceitful, neither of which he is.

What we need is a clear congressional declaration of war, as prescribed by the Constitution. Congress should declare war on the Islamist jihadists.

Naming the formal enemy limits the focus of our war effort to the militant Islamists who have declared jihad against the West. There are many terrorist groups in the world. Many are no threat to the United States. The current danger is the Islamist one.

Naming the threat also expands the scope of our war effort to all the networks of radical Islam, including mosques, schools and radical sites on the Internet. It is not only terrorist acts that we are confronting, but the propaganda and organizations that make them possible.

Some people would argue that we would be declaring a religious war against more than a billion Muslims. But this is not true. We would be declaring war on a particular, violent, political ideology within Islam that threatens the West and the health of Muslim societies themselves.

By declaring war on the Islamist jihadists, we can underline why we stand side by side with peaceful and democratic Muslims and are opposed in Afghanistan and Iraq only by those Muslims who believe in car bombs, terrorism and murder.

Necessary powers

It is also important to declare war on the Islamist jihadists because we are a nation of laws.

When Congress declares war and passes enabling legislation, the president can accept the full authority delegated to him under the Constitution and by Supreme Court precedents that establish presidential powers in wartime.

Some such powers that barely were used by President Franklin D. Roosevelt during World War II, such as the sedition laws, are necessary to fight our war against Islamist terrorism.

Muslim extremists on the Internet and in mosques openly call for jihad against the United States and Europe. In May, Muslim organizations gathered in front of the American Embassy in London to protest against the United States and Britain.

They burned British and American flags and threatened violence, including another September 11 attack. They chanted, "USA, watch your back, Osama is coming back" and "Kill, kill USA, kill, kill George Bush" and "Bomb, bomb New York" and "George Bush, you will pay, with your blood, with your head."

If this protest, with its threats of violence and assassination, had been conducted within our own borders, the protesters would have been ripe subjects for sedition prosecutions -- and rightly so. Sedition laws do not outlaw dissent; they outlaw advocating the violent overthrow of our government and violent opposition to our war effort.

The likely prolonged nature of this war should be a concern to everyone who values civil liberties. As long as we are inventing a new form of war declaration, put a sunset provision on it. Every two years, all exclusively wartime powers would be extinguished and need to be renewed by the next Congress.

Ethnic and religious profiling is a specific war power that must be available to our government.

Transportation Secretary Norman Y. Mineta has declared that any profiling that takes race, religion or nationality into account is forbidden in airport security.

Under current policy, our government cannot take action or make judgments on the basis of ethnicity, religion or nationality. Our government severely fined airlines that barred suspicious-looking young Muslim men from flights.

Back to common sense

Obviously, such policies are not based on reason but on political correctness run amok.

Muslim organizations are quick to hold press conferences and take legal action to intimidate the government. They put pressure on magazines by trying to persuade advertisers to withdraw ads or face charges of subsidizing racism. They try to intimidate authors and publishers.

During World War II, the internment of German, Italian and Japanese aliens (and American citizens of Japanese ancestry) was found to be constitutional by the Supreme Court on the explicit basis that it was reasonable to suspect them of loyalty to a hostile country.

Today, the question is not incarceration, but merely extra attention in sensitive settings, such as boarding an airplane.

Our policy must follow the dictates of common sense and national security.

For example, since September 11, our government has had a critical shortage of Arabic translators. But according to the testimony of Sibel Dinez Edmonds, a former Arabic translator for the FBI, ambiguous loyalties in the FBI translation office compromise our national security.

The FBI should not be intimidated into politically correct behavior that endangers security. But this is the natural outcome of policy that puts political correctness before common sense.

To give extra scrutiny to Muslims in sensitive situations is not bigotry. If America went to war against England, I would fully expect that as a former Englishman (now a naturalized American citizen), I would receive a thorough background check if I applied for government work or if I wanted to buy a gun or board an airplane.

In time of war, no loyal American citizen or peaceful resident should resent precautions taken for the common defense.

Urgent needs

Essentially, senior government officials admit that al Qaeda plans to illegally sneak terrorists across our borders and that we have no plan for dealing with that likelihood.

In World War II, we safely shipped more than 10 million troops through submarine-infested seas, built 100,000 combat planes in a single year and invented and deployed the first atomic bomb.

We are at war again and need to treat border security as a necessity. We need to meet the challenge with the same can-do spirit.

Here is one hard truth: We no longer can afford the luxury of not requiring national identification cards. Without biometric cards for every person living or traveling in the country, even secured borders will be insufficient.

Complacency also rules in the government′s search for reliable translators of Arabic and related languages. The FBI admits to a backlog of 120,000 hours of potentially valuable intercepts. The State Department admits that only one in five of 279 Arabic translators is fluent enough to manage the subtlety of the language. The military has similar problems.

Aside from classified material is a much larger domain of what intelligence officials call open sources -- newspapers, Internet sites, magazine articles, television and radio broadcasts -- that are not even submitted to our translators. And yet Arabic-language Internet sites are the primary medium for spreading Islamist doctrine -- and communicating operational information for terrorists.

What we obviously need are tens of thousands of non-Muslim Arabic translators.

Challenge and strategy

The challenge for America and the West is that we must try to more or less simultaneously shield our nations from the Islamists; strengthen our own cultural vigor, laws and military capacity; and shrewdly intervene in the Islamic world to establish healthy economic and political connections.

These connections include creating a free and self-sufficient Iraq and Afghanistan, and perhaps, if the Israelis and Palestinians establish a lasting peace, pouring capital investment into the West Bank to promote mutual prosperity.

The best strategy to fend off and reverse the Islamist threat is to strengthen the alliance between the United States and Europe.

Of course, Christian Southern Africa (390 million of Africa′s approximately 850 million people), Hindu India, non-Muslim Southeast Asia, Christian Latin America and Russia all have important roles to play in defeating the Islamist jihadists.

But a defense of the West without the birthplace of the West -- Europe -- is almost unthinkable. If Europe becomes Eurabia, it would mean the loss of our cultural and historic first cousins, our closest economic and military allies, and the source of our own civilization. This is a condition Americans should dread and should move mountains to avoid.

It bears repeating: An Islamified Europe would be as great a threat to the United States today as a Nazified Europe would have been in the 1940s.

Even before Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt understood that a Nazi-dominated Europe would be more than a fearsome military and industrial threat. It would be a civilizational threat.

Now we face another such threat in insurgent Islam.