Marching Toward Hell: America and Islam After Iraq (No Series) (54 page)

31.
To be fair, some eminent scholars believe Christianity is growing as fast as or perhaps faster than Islam. See for example Philip Jenkins, “The Next Christianity,”
Atlantic Monthly
(October 2002), 68. Perhaps deciding which estimate is precisely correct matters less than Jenkins’ all-too-accurate conclusion. “But the twenty-first century,” he warns, “will almost certainly be regarded by future historians as a century in which religion replaced ideology as the prime animating and destructive force in human affairs, guiding attitudes toward political liberty and obligation, concepts of nationhood, and, of course, conflicts and wars.”

32.
William Dalrymple, “Islamophobia,”
New Statesman
(online version), January 19, 2004.

33.
Ibid.

34.
Abid Mustafa, “Why the West Has Lost the Ideological War Against Muslims,”
Media Monitors Network
(online version), March 11, 2005.

35.
Kenneth S. Stampp,
And the War Came: The North and the Secession Crisis, 1860–1861
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1970), 253.

36.
Don E. Fehrenbacher,
Sectional Crisis and Southern Constitutionalism
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1995), 31.

37.
James F. Simon,
Lincoln and Chief Justice Taney: Slavery, Secession, and the President’s War Powers
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006), 96, 112, 121, 271. In reviewing the cauldron of substantive issues debated in antebellum politics, as well as northern derision of the South, the analogy to contemporary American politics becomes troublingly and perhaps eerily apparent. In the current debate on culture, the genuine substantive issues are apparent: homosexuality, abortion, pornography, evolution-vs.-creationism, and so on. Also noticeable is the often condescending tone of superiority that those individuals who take the pro-side of the issues use toward their opponents. Not only are creationists said to be wrong, for example, but they are described as antimodern, unsophisticated, antiscience, parochial, and misogynist, and their pro-life arguments are ridiculed as quaint, mystical, or fanatically religious. Such rhetoric cannot help but hinder the search for common ground.

38.
Fehrenbacher,
Sectional Crisis
, 31.

39.
Since that speech, two anthologies of bin Laden’s major speeches have been published, but together they only scratch the surface of the corpus of his materials and leave the work of al-Zawahiri and other al-Qaeda leaders untouched. The better, more complete of the two anthologies is Randall Hamud, ed.,
Osama bin Laden: America’s Enemy in His Own Words
(San Diego, Calif.: Nadeem Publishing, 2005). The other useful work is Bruce Lawrence, ed.,
Messages to the World: The Statements of Osama bin Laden
(London: Verso, 2005). Finally, a third anthology—
The Al-Qaeda Reader
, published in 2007—claims to “prove once and for all” that al-Qaeda is waging an offensive vice defensive jihad, and that its true motivation is to destroy western civilization and establish a worldwide caliphate. The selection of documents from the enormous al-Qaeda archive is small and selective; meant to support neoconservative scare-mongering about the caliphate and the rising tide of Islamofascism; and introduced and endorsed by the Neocons’ history-is-what-I-say-it-is spokesman, Victor Davis Hanson. While the neoconservatives have long identified the publication and wide-distribution of al-Qaeda documents in English as tantamount to supporting terrorism, Hanson now endorses their publication in an unscholarly form that will mislead Americans about their enemies’ intentions and motivations. The real tragedy in
The Al-Qaeda Reader
is that its compiler and editor, Raymond Ibrahim, is obviously a talented and knowledgeable man. His endnotes in the volume about the ins and outs of Islamic theology are extensive, clear, and very valuable to the average reader. Unfortunately, Mr. Ibrahim’s status as an admirer and former student of Dr. Hanson has led him to produce a volume that supports his mentor’s view, but does little to accurately inform Americans. See Raymond Ibrahim (ed.),
The Al-Qaeda Reader
(New York: Broadway Books, 2007).

40.
It is impossible to conceive a rationale for why the U.S. government or some major foundation has not already sponsored the translation and publication of the full texts of speeches, letters, books, and interviews by bin Laden and Zawahiri. We learned a horrific lesson from failing to translate and publish Hitler’s
Mein Kampf
in a timely manner, and we rectified it by making the works of Communist leaders accessible to all Americans who were interested. Given the threat that al-Qaeda poses to the United States, the approach we took to the words of Communist leaders seems appropriate for those of bin Laden et al. Although I disagree with the conclusions President George W. Bush draws from reading the words of al-Qaeda’s leaders, his attitude toward them is exactly right. “The world ignored Hitler’s words and paid a terrible price,” Mr. Bush said in September. 2006. “Bin Laden and his allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. The question is: Will we listen? Will we pay attention to what these evil men say?” See Ken Herman, “Bush: Pay Attention to Words of Evil,” www.kentucky.com, September 6, 2006.

Chapter 7. “O enemy of God, I will give thee no respite”: Al-Qaeda and Its Allies Take Stock

1.
“Transcript of Republican Presidential Debate in South Carolina,” www.nytimes.com, May 17, 2007.

2.
Patrick J. Buchanan, “Who Was Right—Ron or Rudy,” www.townhall.com, May 18, 2007.

3.
“The Terrorist Threat to the Homeland: NIE Key Judgments,” www.dni.gov, July 17, 2007.

4.
Woodward,
Bush at War
, 45.

5.
Jonathan Tobin, “That Old Standby—the Scapegoat,” http://jewishworldreview.com, December 16, 2004.

6.
Gabriel Schoenfeld, “What Became of the CIA?”
Commentary
(March 2005), online www.opinionjournal.com.

7.
Morris J. Amitay, “Not Very Funny,” www.washingtonpac.com, April 20, 2006. For my article (to which Mr. Amitay refers) praising the Israeli government’s superb and utterly successful covert political-action campaign to suppress criticism of Israel in the United States, see Michael F. Scheuer, “Does Israel Conduct Covert Action in America? You Bet It Does,” www.antiwar.com, April 8, 2006.

8.
Mearsheimer and Walt, “Israel Lobby.” The article was then developed into the authors’ book,
The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007).

9.
James Carroll, “The Thread of Anti-Semitism,”
Boston Globe,
April 3, 2006; Max Boot, “Attacking the Israeli Lobby,”
Los Angeles Times
, April 3, 2006; “Paper on Israeli Lobby Draws Ire,” United Press International, April 3, 2006; Christopher Hitchens, “Overstating Jewish Power,” www.slate.com, March 27, 2006; David Gergen, “There Is No Israel ‘Lobby.’”
New York Daily News
, March 26, 2006; Victor Davis Hanson, “When Cynicism Meets Fanaticism,” www.nationalreview.com, March 31, 2006; Steven Simon, “Here’s Where the ‘Israel Lobby’ Is Wrong,”
Daily Star,
May 4, 2006; Jonathan Tobin, “View from America: The Paranoid Style of American Anti-Israel Politics,” www.jpost.com, April 3, 2006; and Richard L. Cravatts, “Anti-Semitic Paranoia at Harvard,” http://news.bostonherald.com, April 3, 2006.

10.
Gergen, “No Israel ‘Lobby.’”

11.
In Islam,
takfir
is the process of excommunication: that is, declaring a person or a group of persons non-Muslim.
Takfiris
are those who take it upon themselves to judge whether an individual or group should be excommunicated. While living in the Sudan in the early 1990s, for example, bin Laden was twice attacked by
takfiris
who believed he was not a “good Muslim.” Currently, there are small groups of Sunni Islamists who can legitimately be called
takfiris
, and these groups often take it upon themselves both to excommunicate and then kill those excommunicated. This is a small, unpopular trend within the Islamist militant movement because most Sunnis believe that the
takfiris,
in essence, illegitimately preempt Allah’s final judgment on an individual. Some U.S. writers, like Mary Habeck and Fawaz Gerges, have identified al-Qaeda as a
takfiri
organization, but this is grossly inaccurate. Overall, the Israel-first
takfiris
of U.S. politics are much more dangerous to U.S. interests than are Islamist
takfiris.

12.
Quoted in Melton,
Quotable Founding Fathers
, 101.

13.
Quoted in James MacGregor Burns,
Roosevelt: The Lion and the Fox
(New York: Harcourt, Brace, and World, 1956), 283.

14.
William R. Cook,
Tocqueville and the American Experiment
, 24 lectures (Chantilly, Va.: Teaching Company, 2006).

15.
Ibid., CD 5, lecture 10, and Alexis de Tocqueville,
Democracy in America
, ed. Harvey C. Mansfield and Debra Winthrop (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 227.

16.
McDougall,
Promised Land, Crusader State
, 6.

17.
Tocqueville,
Democracy in America,
243–45.

18.
Bin Laden has repeatedly discussed al-Qaeda’s goal of bankrupting the U.S. economy. See, for example, Taysir Alouni, “Interview with Usama Bin Ladin, 21 October 2001,” www.qoqaz.com, May 23, 2002, and “Statement by al-Qaida leader Osama bin Ladin,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, December 27, 2001. On spreading out U.S. forces, Zawahiri has written: “In this great battle…It is compulsory on the Muslim youth to spread the battle against the crusaders and Jews on the biggest space possible of land, and to threaten their interests in all places, and not to let them rest or find stability.” See Ayman al-Zawahiri, “The Freeing of Humanity and Homelands Under the Banner of the Qur’an,” www.jiahdunspun.com, March 8, 2005.

19.
In the period since July 2006, there have been about thirty messages from bin Laden and al-Zawahiri. The great majority of them have been from the latter.

20.
Osama bin Laden, “Message to the American People,” Al-Jazirah Satellite Television, January 19, 2006, and Azzam al-Amriki, “Legitimate Demands,”
As-Sahab
, May 29, 2007. For the best examination of this American mujahid, see Raffi Khatchadourian, “Azzam the American,”
New Yorker,
January 22, 2007.

21.
Although bin Laden has never publicly compared himself to Saladin, the latter’s heroic legend in the Islamic world makes easy comparisons between him and bin Laden inevitable. Neither was a trained Islamic scholar or jurist; both were soldiers who shared the rigors of their fighters’ lives; each led a defensive jihad against “Crusaders” when the established authorities in the Islamic world refused to do so; both labored successfully to build multiethnic military organizations: both excelled at using the media to build support for jihad among the masses; and each was renowned for his personal bravery, piety, humility, and aversion to opulence and luxury. For a good and concise look at Saladin’s career, see Roy Jackson,
Fifty Key Figures in Islam
(London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 101–106.

22.
“Press Briefing by Scott McClellan,” www.whitehouse.gov, January 19, 2006.

23.
Baker and Hamilton,
Iraq Study Group Report.

24.
The term “the blessed nineteen” is used by al-Qaeda leaders as a collective description of the nineteen fighters who conducted the attacks on Washington and New York on September 11, 2001.