It’s never a surprise when a political act turns out to be a bitter mockery of the humanitarian values it’s supposed to serve.

So the news that civilians in Libya are being bombed by NATO, which intervened in the Libyan civil war to protect civilians, elicits little more than a world-weary sigh from our Roving Eye War Reporter.

REWR, having sent the news but no detailed dispatch home, refers readers to two posts of ours (find them through the research slot):  The danger of R2P, March 23, 2011, in which it is explained that R2P stands for Responsibility to Protect, a UN declaration which provided NATO’s pretext; and A siren song from hell, April 1, 2011. They trace the idea of invoking that piece of lethal self-righteousness to three women in the Obama administration:

• Samantha Power, Senior Director of Multicultural Affairs at the National Security Council
• Susan Rice, US Ambassador to the United Nations
• Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State

To show just how NATO action in Libya is making a mockery of the R2P, we quote from a report by Mike McNally at PajamasMedia:

The fighters of Libya’s National Transitional Council, the rebel movement turned temporary government, have launched what they say is a “final assault” on Sirte — hometown of ousted dictator Colonel Gaddafi and one of the last redoubts of his supporters. 

Thousands of civilians have fled the town, but thousands more are trapped inside, unable or unwilling to leave. The Red Cross reports that conditions inside Sirte are deteriorating, with people dying in the main hospital due to shortages of medical supplies, fuel, and water; food is also said to be in short supply.

There are no reliable casualty figures, although pro-Gaddafi forces — not surprisingly — are reporting hundreds of civilian deaths caused by both NTC fighters and NATO airstrikes. …

Even if rebel forces aren’t intentionally targeting civilians, the ramshackle nature of the rebel forces and much of their equipment suggests that much of the shelling and rocketing is indiscriminate. Red Cross workers have reported rockets landing among the hospital buildings. …

You could be forgiven for wondering what the NATO forces who are still engaged in Libya plan to do about the situation in Sirte, given that UN Resolution 1973, under which they’re operating, authorizes them to take “all necessary measures” to protect “civilians and civilian populated areas under threat of attack”.  …

But far from defending the civilian population of Sirte, NATO warplanes were as recently as Sunday still conducting airstrikes in and around the town in support of the rebels. “Why is NATO bombing us?” asked one man who had fled with his family. It’s a fair question.

NATO had already put a highly elastic interpretation on its mandate under 1973, transitioning swiftly from protecting anti-Gaddafi protesters to flying close air support missions for the rebels.

And adding effective contingents of NATO soldiers to the feeble rag-tag rebel militia for the assault on Tripoli – a fact that NATO has tried to keep under wraps. (See our post Letting Arabs lie, August 24, 2011.)

But even if one takes the view that NATO’s actions from the start of its involvement up to the fall of Tripoli were legally and morally justified, it’s hard to argue that the Gaddafi loyalists besieged in Sirte and elsewhere present an imminent threat to the civilian population in areas now under NTC control. Far from protecting civilians, NATO now finds itself in the position of abetting a humanitarian crisis. Civilians in Sirte face a choice between enduring the shelling and the all-out assault on the town that’s likely within the next few days, and fleeing the city if they’re able. The Red Cross estimates that some 10,000 have fled, but that up to 30,000 more may still be trapped.

So why are NATO and the American, British, and French governments that were so eager to take charge of the “humanitarian” intervention, not doing more to ensure their safety? And where’s the media outcry, along the lines of the reporting which helped to persuade the West to get involved in Libya in the first place? …

At the very least NATO … could arrange the delivery of food, water, and medical supplies …

This is a civil war, and the only crime most of the civilians trapped in Sirte have committed is being on the losing side. Are they now to be denied the protection of the “international community” which a few months ago proclaimed itself so concerned at the loss of innocent life in the country? What happened to the UN’s much-vaunted “Responsibility to Protect”?

Commentators on both left and right raised doubts over NATO’s Libya mission, myself included. The removal of Gaddafi is of course to be welcomed, but while a stable and democratic regime that poses no threat to Western interests may yet emerge, recent events have suggested that outcome is still in doubt.

In doubt? A stable democratic regime in Libya? As in any other Arab country, it’s one of the most unlikely things in the world.

Today the estimable Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, commenting on the just assassination in Yemen of the American-born al-Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki, said on Fox News that “we are winning” the “War on Terror”.

Great news, if it were true. But the US, the West, the non-Islamic world are not winning.

For one thing, it is not, and never was, a “war on terror”. It is a war of defense against Islam. And Islam is winning. Terrorism is winning. The West is allowing it to win.

Islam’s terrorist tactic is proving hugely powerful and has gained victories that would have been unimaginable a few years ago. It has cowed all the governments of western Europe, and innumerable authorities at all levels in the US. Islam is advancing day by day. Its terrorism is not practiced continually in all target countries, but the threat of it, and the memories of what has been done and could be done again at any moment, are always there. Because authorities are afraid, Islam creeps on.

Day by day, in Western countries into which Muslims migrate in ever-growing numbers, Islam gains its concessions, its privileges: here a mosque; there a partition of a public swimming pool for Muslim women; here a prayer room in a government building; there the removal from a public library of famous children’s books with pictures of pigs in them; here (in Britain for instance) the allowing of sharia courts and the upholding of their rulings by the state; there entitlements tamely paid to multiple Muslim wives by a welfare state with laws against polygamy; and here and here and here the establishment of faculties of Islamic studies, or even whole colleges, with immense grants of money from the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia. Chunks of history, such as the Holocaust, are omitted from school courses because they might offend Muslim students – let truth be damned. Defense contracting companies in the US fall under the ownership of Muslims, who divert a part of the profits – and what defense secrets? – to the Muslim Brotherhood. In places of hot battle, Iraq is plagued with terrorist attacks day after day; and in Afghanistan the Taliban is undefeated and undefeatable, and ready to re-assume its despotic rule when the coalition soldiers have departed. In Libya an al-Qaeda leader has seized a position of power. And all the while, the mullahs of Iran are preparing to attack the West with nuclear weapons.

True, there have not been any more planes flown into buildings in America, but smaller plots of destruction and mass murder are constantly being laid. True, some of them are foiled, but some are attempted (such as an underwear bomb in a plane over Detroit) and some carried out (such as the massacre at Fort Hood), and the motive behind all of them remains: jihad, the holy war of Islam, perpetually waged one way and another for the conquest of the world by successive generations of Muslims, and coming closer to success now than ever before in history.

If the West does not capitulate totally and abjectly – which it might – the fiercest battles are still to come.

Jillian Becker   September 30, 2011

Joshua Fattal and Shane Bauer, the Americans held in an Iranian prison for two years for entering the country illegally, were ransomed and released five days ago (September 21). The ransom will ensure that more Americans will be grabbed and held whenever possible, of course.

But that is not the only reason why they should not have been ransomed.

They each made  a speech when they landed in Oman. Fattal said that he and his companions (including Sarah Shourd who was released a year ago for a lower ransom) were innocent of any intention to enter Iran illegally, and Bauer said that they were sympathetic to Iran’s cause [“The irony is Sarah, Josh and I oppose U.S. policies towards Iran which perpetuate this hostility”], as if this were additional reason why they should not have been arrested and imprisoned. What they did not say was whether their sympathies still lie with Iran rather than their own country. Iran is unjust, it subjugates women, it stones apostates to death, it threatens the annihilation of Israel, it hangs homosexuals, it  is building a nuclear arsenal that endangers the world, but these three citizens of the free and tolerant United States were sympathetic to Iran.

They should have been left to whatever fate Iranian justice would have condemned them to. Then they might have served the useful purpose of providing an object lesson to their like-thinkers back home.

Debra J. Saunders reveals more about them. She writes at Townhall:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad engineered the release last week of two American hikers serving eight-year prison terms on trumped-up espionage charges. He may have thought the release would make him seem more humane, but the $1 million bail-for-freedom deal makes Tehran look like Somali pirates, grabbing innocent tourists, holding them hostage and then releasing them for ransom.

So why did released hiker Shane Bauer say the following upon his release? “Two years in prison is too long, and we sincerely hope for the freedom of other political prisoners and other unjustly imprisoned people in America (emphasis added) and Iran.”

The moral-equivalent rhetoric may have worked when Bauer was a peace and conflict studies major at the University of California, Berkeley, but one country ginned up phony espionage charges to use him and his companions as political pawns — that’s Iran — and the other country doesn’t imprison critics because of what they say or use violence to quell dissent.

The nightmare began in July 2009 when Bauer, friend Josh Fattal and Bauer’s girlfriend, Sarah Shourd, were hiking in Iraqi Kurdistan.

Hiking in Iraq in 2009? And near the Iranian border? How much tourism has there been in Iraq while war has been raging there?  How did they get there, and why?

Many Americans have wondered how they could be so foolhardy that they mistakenly crossed into Iran. Shourd, a self-described “teacher-activist-writer,” says that there were no signs indicating the Iraq-Iran border near a popular waterfall and that the hikers crossed into Iran after an armed soldier summoned them to walk toward him. …

At the time of their arrest, Bauer and Shourd were living in Damascus, in the bosom of Bashar Assad’s Syria. They have shared a professed love of Middle Eastern culture.

That is to say, Arab culture – the morally lowest in the world.

They also shared some blind spots. Shourd, for example, wrote that in Yemen, interaction between the sexes is minimal, absent marriage, and 99 percent of women never leave the house unveiled. But: “The separation of sexes is widely understood as an attempt to protect women, and I have to admit, the streets do feel safe. Men leave you alone as long as you are covered; in a bizarre way it is less of a hassle being a woman here than anywhere I’ve ever been.”

Newsweek lists Yemen as one of nine countries that are “the worst places to be a woman,” because domestic violence is not illegal and there is no legal recognition of spousal rape.

A year before Shourd wrote about how safe she felt in Yemen, 10-year-old Nujood Ali went to a Sanaa courtroom to ask a judge to release her from an arranged marriage to an older man who beat her. Other girl brides came forward with their horror stories. A Sanaa University study found that more than half of Yemeni girls are married before they turn 18.

Shourd never quite comes out and says that she thinks that as Iraq War-opposing liberals, she and her friends should be treated differently than other people in the Middle East. But surely, she noticed that she was an unmarried 31-year-old woman and traveling with her 27-year-old boyfriend throughout the Arabian Peninsula, among people who would not tolerate the same behavior from their own.

Unjust imprisonment? Bauer should talk to a 10-year-old bride. …

Bauer and Shourd “lived in Syria, enjoying privileged lives,” different from the lives of ordinary Damascenes. Yet instead of criticizing Syria’s brutal dictator, Bauer wrote articles hitting America, and Shourd wrote a piece that criticized not Assad, but Israel.

Diana West says it is her “sincere wish that Bauer, Fattal and Shourd return to the United States and realize what a great country America is. Iran arrested them. Iran framed them. Iran jailed them.”

The United States, in contrast, gave them a university education that trained them to blame America first. Or, after serving time in prison … coequally with Iran.

We are not concerned about their possible enlightenment. We think they have been treated too well by America (the real source of their ransom, whatever lies are told or implied about the obsequiously-thanked Sultan of Oman paying it), and – obviously – not badly enough by Iran.

In our post When innocence is a vice (September 24, 2010), on Sarah Shourd and her ransomed release, we quoted this insightful passage from a short story called The Informer by Joseph Conrad, and it bears repeating here:

She went to a great length. She had acquired all the appropriate gestures of revolutionary convictions – the gestures of pity, of anger, of indignation against the anti-humanitarian vices of the social classes to which she belonged herself. … She was displaying very strikingly the usual signs of severe enthusiasm, and had already written many sentimental articles with ferocious conclusions. … For all their assumption of independence, girls of that class are used to the feeling of being specially protected, as, in fact, they are. This feeling accounts for nine tenths of their audacious gestures.

Boys of that class too, of course.

We hope to hear of Shourd’s and Bauer’s early return to their residences in Bashar Assad’s chaotic flaming blood-soaked Syria, and of Fattal’s joining them there.

American soldiers are suffering horrific life-ruining injuries in Afghanistan because of a stupid directive issued by General Petraeus, who dreams ridiculously that their obedience to it will transform Afghanistan into Martha’s Vineyard (so to speak).

This is from Townhall by Diana West:

Only the U.S. military could build a defensive wall of words — “dismounted complex blast injury” (DCBI) — around the bare fact that single, double, triple, even quadruple amputations are up sharply among U.S. forces on foot patrol in Afghanistan. So are associated pelvic, abdominal and genital injuries according to a newly released report.

Even the antiseptic language of the report is excruciating, as when it calls for “further refinement” of “aggressive pain management at the POI (point of injury),” or highlights the need to train more military urologists in “phallic reconstruction surgery.” …

These grievous injuries have increased because more U.S. forces are on foot patrol in Afghanistan. More Americans are on foot patrol in Afghanistan because counterinsurgency strategy puts them there. … The Associated Press account is typical: “The counterinsurgency tactic that is sending U.S. soldiers out on foot patrols among the Afghan people, rather than riding in armored vehicles, has contributed to a dramatic increase in arm and leg amputations, genital injuries and the loss of multiple limbs following blast injuries.”

But what exactly this counterinsurgency (COIN) tactic is designed to accomplish remains off the radar. The fact is, Uncle Sam is asking young Americans to risk limbs, urinary function and testicles to win something not only intangible but also fantastical. They walk the bomb-packed byways of Afghanistan to win — to “earn” — “the trust of the Afghan people.” This is the mythological, see-no-Islam quest that drives U.S. COIN strategy. …

Once we stop trying to remake Afghanistan in something akin to our own image, once we start preventing Islam from remaking the West into a Shariah-compliant zone  … these shattering body blasts to young Americans on the other side of the world will cease.

Meanwhile, “the trust of the Afghan people” is the holy grail of the Washington establishment, and, even after retiring from the military, Gen. David Petraeus, now director of the CIA, remains chief myth-maker. “Earn the people’s trust,” Petraeus wrote in a signal “Counterinsurgency Guidance” issued Aug. 1, 2010. From his list of how-tos — which range from dispense payola (“COIN-contracting”), to “help them develop checks and balances to prevent abuses” (good luck with that), to “drink lots of tea” — one order stands out, particularly in light of this week’s report on amputations resulting from foot patrols. Petraeus wrote: “Walk. Stop by, don’t drive by. Patrol on foot whenever possible and engage the population.”

One year later, the Army is reckoning with the carnage and after-care requirements that are consequences of this key tactic of COIN strategy. It is high time for the rest of us to reckon with them, too. Is COIN working? Is the burden of suffering that the nation is placing on the military worth the return? Frankly, when it comes to winning “the trust of the Afghan people,” is there any return?

None.

And why should Americans care whether untrustworthy Afghans trust them or not? Leave the Afghans to their poor, nasty, brutish lives. Even if the Afghan nation could be saved from its chosen primitivism, perpetual inter-tribal strife, and traditional misery, its salvation would not be worth the loss of one joint of one finger or toe of a single American soldier.

A car bomb exploded in the Turkish capital Ankara today. Three people have been reported killed and fifteen injured.

The Kurdish terrorist organization PKK – the Kurdish Workers’ Party – has denied responsibility for it.

Turkey is retaliating by bombing Kurdish villages in northern Iraq. We don’t yet know the number of dead and injured among the Kurds.

We held our breath waiting for foreign ministers of Europe, the Secretary-General of the UN, and Palestinian spokesmen to declare the Turkish retaliation “disproportionate” (as they always say of Israel’s retaliations), but have had to give up in bewildered disappointment.

And not one of them has spoken the words “cycle of violence” either, even though the PKK has been pursuing its “armed struggle” and Turkey has been opposing it with force since 1984.

Funny, that.

We enjoy Andrew Klavan’s writing. We like the way he thinks, we like his humor.

How does a man of such engaging intelligence bring himself to believe in a god, and (adding a riddle to a nonsense) that “God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit”, we wonder.

Here are parts of a column of his at PajamasMedia, in which he argues that the present war is a Holy War, between Islam and other religions, chiefly Christianity:

What has been fatuously called “The War on Terror,” this ongoing struggle between Islamism and the rest of the world (including some of the Islamic world) is, in fact, a holy war: a violent argument over the nature of our Creator.

Americans right and left hate this fact. Many can barely face it. Almost no one in authority or the media ever dares mention it at all…  In principle, through tradition, by law and nature, most of us are repelled by the idea of killing over religion. Freedom in these matters is our watchword. I say Jesus; you say Allah; let’s call the whole thing God.

This is not to indulge in any mealy-mouthed moral equivalence or dribble out some balderdash about how all religions are one and faith is a mountain that can be climbed from any side. Not likely. If there is a God — whether or not there is, in fact — there will be things you can say about Him that are true [how will you know they are? – JB] and things that are not true and some religions will surely contain more of the truth than others. …

None will. But on we go:

Over hard history, we have learned that there are some struggles in which the evil of the fight itself supersedes the good of any potential victory. Faith is not knowledge …

Right, Klavan!

We should approach the super-natural with humility in our beliefs and forbearance towards the beliefs of others. And anyway, many cherished doctrines, no matter how deep or meaningful, don’t have much immediate effect on our lives. I believe that God is three persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit — but if it turns out He’s five guys named Moe, I’m not going to change my weekend plans.

That’s quite funny. He goes on:

So we hate the idea of fighting a holy war. But we have no choice.

We have no choice but to fight the war, and certainly the other side believes it is a holy war (that’s what “jihad” means), but is it? He hasn’t established that yet.

No matter what moral knots some self-loathing westerners tie the facts into, the truth remains, the other bastards started it and now it’s on. Doesn’t matter how tolerant you think you are. Doesn’t matter how many “Coexist” bumper stickers you own. If a man with a gun kicks your door down and starts telling you how to pray, there are only two possible outcomes: victory or surrender.

In order to secure victory in a holy war [or any war – JB], however, you have to know what you’re fighting for. It’s not enough to kill the jihadis who want to kill us, or to dismantle the no-go Sharia enclaves being purposely created in cities throughout the west. A holy war is a violent argument about the nature of our Creator …

This one isn’t. And a war is instead of an argument. But yes, we do need, in the long run, to win our argument against Islam. How? By opposing one irrationality with another irrationality? That is Klavan’s belief:

So in order to win, we have to know what Creator we’re trying to defend.

He recognizes a difference between Islam’s allah and the Christian three-in-one godhead. But if either of those absurd fictions were to “win”, war would be just beginning for us. Fortunately –

This isn’t easy in a nation committed to religious liberty — a commitment that could not survive a kill-or-be-killed smackdown between your prophet and mine.

There are those, of course, who believe the problem is religion itself: remove the subject of the argument, they say, and the argument would end.

Right, right.

But he then goes on ridiculously as the gullible-of-the-gods often do:

The murder and oppression that defined the atheist empires in communist Russia and China – not to mention the slow, insidious death currently claiming “post-Christian” Europe — strongly suggest otherwise. Culturally, atheism is a disaster— although atheists are entitled to express their opinion right up until the moment the Islamists [or any sole-possessor of religious “truth”] kill them.

It wasn’t the atheism of the Communists that made them murder and oppress: it was their Communism. It isn’t their atheism that is making European nations commit suicide, its their Socialism.

For the rest of us — including those atheists who have the wherewithal to think it through …

Nice being patronized by a Christian, isn’t it?

… we must be willing to stand in open argument…

Agreed!

… and, if it’s our calling, in bloody battle for the God our founding principles, in fact, imply. …

So he plants his riddle-of-a-God more firmly in the Constitution than the Founders themselves cared to.

Sure, if we had to choose between living under modern Christianity, it being a flaccid religion except among the very few who will kill for it, or under  intensely oppressive and cruel Islam, for which all Muslims are instructed by their holy writ to kill, we’d have to choose the former.

But we don’t have to choose between them. The fight – or, as the man says, the argument –  is not between the Cross and the Crescent. It is not between God and Allah. It is between Western civilization and Islam. Reason is on one side only (impeded somewhat by the religious with their unreasonable declamations), and that’s why guns and drones and bombers are in operation.

Reason will win eventually. The little grey cells are mightier than the  sword and the scimitar, the drone and the suicide bomber. But it might take a weary long time.

From The Religion of Peace

Picture of the Week The progeny of Muslim asylum seekers mar a moment of silence at a London memorial for 9/11 victims by burning an American flag. Most of the men in this photo actually live on public benefits.

From the transcript of President Obama’s speech on the 10th. anniversary of 9/11 we quote only one sentence:

I’ve made it clear that the United States is not and never will be at war with Islam. 

That is a lie. Islam is waging war on America, and on the whole of the non-Muslim world. In Afghanistan and Iraq, the US military is engaging the enemy. In the US itself, security forces have foiled Muslim terrorist plots. American civilians have saved lives by averting Muslim terrorist strikes on aircraft. The enemy is not just a single terrorist organization called al-Qaeda, as the president pretended in his appalling speech on the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attack on the United States by Muslim jihadis, but Islam itself.

It should outrage the entire nation that the president of the United States, Barack Obama, made a speech on 9/11 exonerating Islam.

The attack by Muslims on the United States on September 9, 2001, was an act of war. It was an act carried out by the RELIGION OF WAR, which is Islam.

Yesterday we claimed that in the very long run we atheists will win the war with Islam, because in the very long run mankind will outgrow religion.

We have to concede that at present Islam is winning most of the battles.

Diana West explains this well. She writes:

It is something to have gone 10 years without an Islamic attack of similarly gigantic proportions to those of Sept. 11, 2001, but it is not enough. That’s because the decade we look back on is marked by a specifically Islamic brand of security from jihad. It was a security bought by the Bush and Obama administrations’ policies of appeasement based in apology for, and irrational denial of, Islam’s war doctrine, its anti-liberty laws and its non-Western customs. As a result of this policy of appeasement — submission — we now stand poised on the brink of a golden age.

Tragically for freedom of speech, conscience and equality before the law, however, it is an Islamic golden age. It’s not just the post-9/11 rush into Western society of Islamic tenets and traditions on everything from law to finance to diet that has heralded this golden age, although that’s part of it. More important is the fact that our central institutions have actively primed themselves for it, having absorbed and implemented the central codes of Islam in the years since the 9/11 attacks, exactly as the jihadists hoped and schemed.

Take the U.S. military, symbol plus enforcer of American security.

In Afghanistan, our forces are now “trained on the sanctity of the holy book (the Quran) and go to significant steps to protect it,” as the official International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) website reported last year.

Are they similarly trained to take “significant steps” to “protect” other books? Hardly. It’s reckless and irresponsible to demand that troops make the protection of any book a priority in a war zone. But it’s not merely the case that U.S. troops have become protectors of the Quran in the decade following 9/11. “Never talk badly about the Qu’ran or its contents,” ISAF ordered troops earlier this year. Did the Pentagon restrict language about “Mein Kampf” or the “Communist Manifesto”? They, too, were blueprints for world conquest that the United States opposed. Of course not. But the Quran is different. It is protected by Islamic law, and that’s enough for the Pentagon. Not incidentally, ISAF further cautioned troops to direct suspects to remove any Qurans from the vicinity before troops conduct a search — no doubt for the unstated fear that infidel troops might defile the protected book. None may “touch the Qu’ran except in the state of ritual purity,” the Islamic law book Reliance of the Traveller declares. …

Since when did Uncle Sam incorporate Islamic law into military protocols?

Since 9/11.

Now take the State Department, symbol and nerve center of U.S. action on the world stage.

In July, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announced a collaborative effort between the United States and the OIC, newly repackaged as Organization of the Islamic Cooperation. (It used to be “C” for Conference.) The get-together planned for Washington, D.C., is supposed to implement a non-binding resolution against religious “stereotyping” (read: Islamic “stereotyping”) that passed last March at the U.N. Human Rights Council. Such “stereotyping,” of course, includes everything from honest assessments of the links between Islamic doctrine and Islamic terrorism to political cartoons. This makes this U.S.-led international effort nothing short of a sinister attempt to snuff free speech about Islam. And that sure sounds like a U.S.-co-chaired assault on the First Amendment. Not only is this treachery on the part of the U.S. government, it also happens to be part and parcel of the OIC’s official 10-year-plan.

Since when did Uncle Sam get in the business of doing the bidding of the OIC?

Since 9/11.

This is just a snapshot of what the rush toward Islamization as a goal of national policy looks like, 10 years since the Twin Towers collapsed in a colossal cloud of dust and fire. The air has cleared, but the appeasement and the Islamization go on. Thus, a golden age begins, but unless we throw off this mental yoke of submission, it cannot be our own.

*

Palestinians handed out candy to celebrate the Islamic victory of 9/11.

Conservatives are saying, with a touch of restrained triumphalism, that the (badly named) “War on Terror”  is over, and America has won it.  (See for instance here and here.) The idea is that because of the security measures and military actions President Bush initiated and President Obama (however much against his will) has had to continue, there have been no repeat assaults on America on the scale of 9/11. That is true, and it is an important achievement. But it doesn’t mean that the war is over, and certainly not that the war is won. Plots have been laid by would-be terrorists that have been found out and foiled. Individual Muslims have carried out, or almost carried out, mass murder. And in the world at large, there have been to date over 17,700 murderous attacks by Islamic terrorists since September 2001. Some yesterday. Some today. And there will be more tomorrow.

And there are conservative thinkers who understand this. Frank Gaffney writes at Townhall:

So, where are we ten years after 9/11? It is comforting that we have been blessed with a near-unbroken decade without further mass-casualty attacks since those that killed nearly 3,000 Americans on September 11, 2001. Unfortunately, our government is pursuing policies that can only encourage those who aspire to do us harm to redouble their efforts.

Such an assessment was implicit in a critique of President Obama’s new counter-terrorism”strategy” delivered last week by Senate Homeland Security Committee Chairman Joseph Lieberman. The Democrat-turned-Independent from Connecticut described the President’s so-called “Empowering Local Partners to Prevent Violent Extremism in the United States” white paper as “ultimately a big disappointment”:

“The administration’s plan… suffers from several significant weaknesses. The first is that the administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name, violent Islamist extremism. We can find names that are comparable to that, but not the one that the administration continues to use which [is] ‘violent extremism.’ It is not just violent extremism. There are many forms of violent extremism. There’s white racist extremism, there’s been some eco-extremism, there’s been animal rights extremism. You can go on and on and on. There’s skinhead extremism, but we’re not in a global war with those. … We’re in a global war that affects our homeland security with Islamist extremists. To call our enemy violent extremism [or “terror” – JB] is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is ‘Al-Qaeda and its allies.’ Now, that’s better, but it still is too narrow. … It is vital to understand that we’re not just fighting an organization Al-Qaida, but we are up against a broader ideology, a politicized theology, quite separate from the religion of Islam that has fueled this war. Success in the war will come consequently not when a single terrorist group or its affiliates are eliminated, but when broader set of ideas associated with it are rejected and discarded. The reluctance to identify our enemy as violent Islamist extremism makes it harder to mobilize effectively to fight this war of ideas.

As it happens, Sen. Lieberman is … right up to a point. If we are properly to recognize the enemy we face, however, we must appreciate two facts the Senator misses, as well: 1) The threat from adherents to the “politicized ideology that has fueled this war” are also using non-violent … techniques to wage it against us. And 2) that ideology is actually not “separate from the religion of Islam.” Rather, this politico-military-legal doctrine known as shariah is derived from the sacred texts, interpretations, rulings and scholarly consensuses of Islam. The reality that many Muslims around the world practice their faith without following the dictates of shariah simply means that some believe this code is separable from Islam. But, it is surely not “separate” from it. …

One the most important dimensions of their cognitive war is to get infidels, even without being conquered, to behave according to the restrictions of Islam. Among the most important impositions we have seen of this phenomenon…is the absolute prohibition on criticizing Allah or his prophet [known as “shariah blasphemy” laws]. …

What the Muslim Brotherhood calls “civilization jihad,” is about creating the conditions under which so-called “non-violent” Islamists can achieve their ultimate objective – which is precisely the same as the one pursued by their violent co-religionists: imposing shariah worldwide and a Caliph to rule according to it.

So where are we ten years after shariah-adherent Islamists sought to destroy the centers of American economic, military and government power? We remain dangerously exposed to similar sorts of violence from an enemy the President declines to name. Worse yet, to the extent we fail to perceive the cognitive war being waged against us against by al-Qaeda’s partners in the Muslim Brotherhood and the Organization of Islamic Cooperation – to say nothing of persisting in the Obama administration’s willingness to give ground in that war, notably by submitting our freedom of speech to shariah blasphemy laws – our Islamist foes will only be emboldened.

The war will be won when the ideology of Islam – or if you will, of sharia – is as universally discredited as is Nazism and Communism. Sure there are still Nazis lurking about, but there’s no significant movement that openly calls itself by that name. And there are still all too many Communists in the West, mainly in the Universities and the Obama administration, but they don’t like being called Communists.

The ideology that commands death for homosexuals and apostates, the stoning of adulterers, the subjugation and beating of women, the amputation of hands and feet as a punishment for petty crime (to give just a few examples), and commands its followers to be at war with the rest of the world until it brings the entire human race into its house, can only ultimately be defeated by words. It must be so shamed by accusation that it cannot hold its head up. And it can be. The Organization of Islamic Co-Operation knows and fears this, which of course is why it is trying to criminalize criticism of Islam.

Let’s assume that this ideology goes the way of Nazism and Communism and is brought to being ashamed of itself. Will it mean that the billion-plus-millions of Muslims in the world or most of them therefore give up their belief in and practice of their religion? Probably not. Terrorism and aggressive proselytizing may be suspended, but as  long as the teachings of Muhammad are believed and followed by many, the danger remains that the war will be resumed.

It must not be forgotten that 9/11 was a profoundly religious act. 

The best hope for the human race to be freed from the threat of Islam lies with the hope of its being freed from religion. It is not a vain hope. With every generation religious belief among the literate and well-informed is fading. As it becomes easier and cheaper for individuals to communicate personally across and within the borders of countries and continents, as ideas and knowledge spread further and faster, institutionalized superstition will come to be despised and the psychological darkness which preserves it dissipated.

See how far the religious have already had to retreat. The philosophers of religion are clinging to a last spar: “Intelligent Design”. They are claiming that the Big Bang proves the universe came into being just the way the Book of Genesis says it did. They have some frail arguments for those positions. But you don’t hear them going on much about a personal god who answers prayers, or insisting that a Jewish virgin gave birth to baby God in the reign of the Emperor Augustus. They know what’s indefensible, or at least beyond their best powers of debate.

We atheists are winning. Quite soon – in say two or three generations from now – we ourselves may have cause to express some restrained triumphalism.