Opinion Of Course It Is Islam

Rich Lowry is editor of National Review.

It is settled: The Paris terror attacks had almost nothing to do with Islam.

If there is any doubt about this, consider that on the one hand, you have the chilling new tape of the Charlie Hebdo attackers declaring, “We have avenged the Prophet Muhammad,” and on the other, you have the tortured reassurances of White House spokesman Josh Earnest.


Which are you going to believe?

The Obama administration’s mind-bogglingly determined refusal to say that we are at war with “radical Islam,” together with the left’s evasions about Islamic terrorism, means that there has been a haze of euphemism and cowardice around what should be a galvanizing event in the West’s fight against terror.

In the immediate aftermath of the attack, Howard Dean opined on “Morning Joe” that the Muslims who had killed the staff of Charlie Hebdo aren’t Muslims. Not usually known as a leading Orientalist, the former Vermont governor shared his interpretation of one of the world’s leading Islamic terror groups, “I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult.”

Dean didn’t specify what kind of cult ISIS is, if not Islamic. Or what otherwise accounts for its strange obsession with taking over territory in Syria and Iraq to establish a caliphate and to impose a harsh version of Islamic law.

Obviously, not all Muslims, or even a majority of them, support terrorism. We don’t want to be needlessly insulting to Muslims or alienate allies in the Muslim world. But it is possible to avoid those pitfalls and still be truthful about the threat that emanates from within Islam, which serves the cause of intellectual clarity.

Forget clarity—the administration has lapsed into unselfconscious ridiculousness. Asked why the administration won’t say we are at war with radical Islam, Earnest on Tuesday explained the administration’s first concern “is accuracy. We want to describe exactly what happened. These are individuals who carried out an act of terrorism, and they later tried to justify that act of terrorism by invoking the religion of Islam and their own deviant view of it” (emphasis added).

This makes it sound as if the Charlie Hebdo terrorists set out to commit a random act of violent extremism and only subsequently, when they realized that they needed some justification, did they reach for Islam.

The day before, Earnest had conceded that there are lists of recent “examples of individuals who have cited Islam as they’ve carried out acts of violence.” Cited Islam? According to the Earnest theory—if this formulation is to be taken seriously—purposeless violent extremists rummage through the scriptures of great faiths, looking for some verses to cite to support their mayhem and often happen to settle on the holy texts of Islam.

It was in this spirit that State Department deputy spokesperson Marie Harf said on Fox News that the militants of Boko Haram “ claim to be active in the name of Islam” (emphasis added). So add alleged insincerity to the list of offenses that can be attributed to the hideous group formally known as People Committed to the Propagation of the Prophet’s Teachings and Jihad.

The problem with all this dancing around the obvious is that it makes it impossible to take Islamic terrorists seriously on their own terms. Both Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin were “violent extremists,” but it is impossible to understand either without acknowledging their ideological motivations—and calling them by their proper names.

Perhaps the administration’s highest-profile initiative in response to Paris is a Summit on (what else?) Countering Violent Extremists. It seeks “to prevent violent extremists and their supporters from radicalizing, recruiting, or inspiring groups in the United States and abroad to commit acts of violence.”

Who are these violent extremists with such magnetic pull and global reach? They could be anybody, to believe the administration. It is certainly true that you will always have random haters and nuts, including Christian nuts like the evil Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. And it is certainly true that there are a few non-Islamic groups on the State Department terrorism list.

But they aren’t top of mind, and for good reason. The Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo isn’t launching many attacks on the West. Basque terrorists aren’t recruiting would-be operatives around the world to come back to Spain and learn how to make bombs for spectacular attacks overseas (in fact, the ETA has declared a cease-fire).

In a piece at the Daily Beast arguing that the threat of Islamic terrorism is exaggerated by the media, Dean Obeidallah cites all the separatist groups in Europe committing terror attacks, including the FLNC, which agitates for Corsican independence. Perhaps when the FLNC knocks down its first skyscraper in the United States or shoots down its first newsroom full of Western journalists, it will get the dire media attention that Obeidallah thinks it deserves. (Surely, somewhere in Corsica the equivalent of MSNBC is arguing that the FLNC isn’t truly Corsican.)

One of the differences between random killers and Islamic terrorists is that the latter have a significant physical and ideological infrastructure behind them, including terror groups that hold territory and Islamic authorities who justify jihad.

The Ayotollah Khomeini didn’t think Islam is what we would understand as a religion of peace. Was Khomeini, despite his lecturing for decades at centers of Islamic learning, and notwithstanding his leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran, not a Muslim?

Saudi Arabia, the Sunni counterpart of Shia Iran that also imagines itself the keeper of the faith, promotes a harsh version of Islam that has proved a potent breeding ground for terrorism. Are the Saudis not Muslim, either?

On the ground, Muslim popular sentiment often is, at the very least, inconsistent with modernity. According to the Pew Research Center’s Religion & Public Life Project, 74 percent of Egyptians support making Sharia the law of the land, and of those, 70 percent favor corporal punishment for crimes such as theft, 81 percent favor stoning for adultery and 86 percent support the death penalty for converts from Islam.

It is possible to support all those things and still be appalled by the Charlie Hedbo attack (about 20 percent of Egyptians have a favorable view of Al Qaeda, according to Pew), but the point is that there is a broad war of ideas within Islam between the forces of reaction and violence and the forces of moderation and modernity.

The threat of radical Islam won’t diminish until that war is won, no matter how much the U.S. government wants to obscure it with its verbal fog machine.