Posted on 10/28/2012 6:36:01 AM PDT by Servant of the Cross
Last week, Doug Feith and Seth Cropsey co-authored a very interesting and important op-ed in the Wall Street Journal, A Foreign Policy Failure to Acknowledge the Obvious. It is about President Obamas denial of the Islamist threat. In it, they zero in on two strategic misjudgments the administration has made:
This is largely right. If it were internalized by a Romney administration, it would be a step in the right direction. Still, the essay goes awry in significant ways.
Lets start with the authors intimation that religious fanaticism causes terrorism. To be sure, thats a better explanation than the Lefts blame America first approach. Yet, it still misses the mark. The real cause is ideology, not religion. The distinction is worth drawing because, for the most part, Islamist terror is not fueled by Muslim zealousness for Islams religious tenets for instance, the oneness of Allah. We Westerners recognize such beliefs as belonging to the realm of religion or spirituality. To the contrary, Islamist terror is driven by the supremacism and totalitarianism of Middle Eastern Islam i.e., by the perception of believers that they are under a divine injunction to impose all of Islams tenets.
(Excerpt) Read more at nationalreview.com ...
This is a distinction without a difference and one probably not worth quibbling about. For a Muslim, there isn't any real distinction to be made between Islam's "religious" tenets and it's "political" ones, or for that matter with its "hygienic" ones.
For a Muslim, the Five Pillars, the injunction to wage Jihad, and the instruction to shave the body between knee and navel, front and back, but not to shave facial hair are all requirements having the same primal source: they are the commands of God.
I suppose that it is true that some Muslims are more fanatic or less fanatic about one part or another of the spectrum of insanity that comprises their faith, but it is folly to think that it is possible for a non-Muslim to drive a wedge between one command of the Muslim almighty and another. That will always and only depend on the peculiar pathology of the individual Muslim adherent.
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