January 8, 2015 | Forbes

Terrorist Attack In Paris Proves We Must Defeat The Islamist Jihadists

Ever since 9/11, Western leaders have scrambled to convince the public of two things: that terrorist acts are not driven by religious beliefs, and that Islam is a “religion of peace.” The Paris massacre should put to rest those dangerously misleading nostrums.

Back when the Clinton White House was preparing to welcome Yitzhak Rabin and Yassir Arafat for their historic handshake, a Clinton speechwriter called Professor Bernard Lewis, the great scholar of Islam.

“We need a quotation from the Koran about peace,” he asked. Lewis instantly provided one.

“Thanks, but the president has already used that one,” the speechwriter said. “We need a different one.”

Lewis replied that, so far as he knew, that was the only one.

Therein lies a big problem. Islamic doctrine has a lot to say about war, especially about holy war against non-Muslims—jihad—but not so much about peace (even though most Muslims certainly prefer peace, and are not actively engaged in war against infidels).

Of the dozens of comments I’ve read about the Paris massacre in the offices of Charlie Hebdo, George Packer has put it best in the New Yorker:

A religion is not just a set of texts but the living beliefs and practices of its adherents. Islam today includes a substantial minority of believers who countenance, if they don’t actually carry out, a degree of violence in the application of their convictions… For some believers, the violence serves a will to absolute power in the name of God, which is a form of totalitarianism called Islamism—politics as religion, religion as politics. “Allahu Akbar!” the killers shouted in the street outsideCharlie Hebdo. They, at any rate, know what they’re about.


Just so. We are at war with a large army of Islamist jihadists who intend to dominate or destroy Western civilization. They constitute a messianic religious mass movement, just as the Communists, fascists and Nazis did in the last century. And just as we were quite prepared to tolerate totalitarian Communists, fascists and Nazis, both abroad and in our own society, until their direct attacks against us became too perilous to ignore, so today we refuse to condemn the jihadis for what they are. We prefer to appease them than to fight them—even though there is no escape from the fight. They will not stop until we have either won or lost.

What is to be done? It is all fine and dandy to insist on upholding our freedoms, and to call for an end to the appeasement of the Islamists, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali has, but the most explicit call to effective action has come, surprisingly, from President Sisi of Egypt: He called on his country’s Muslim leaders to undertake a religious revolution. Crucially, he did it in the context of waging war against the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood—a real war, not a virtual one. He knows that unless he destroys the Brothers, they will do to him what they did to Anwar Sadat, a Muslim man of peace.

So while I’m all in favor of publishing Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons as an act of intellectual and political solidarity, it’s not going to be good enough. The Islamists have to be defeated, and their followers will thereby see that the jihadist doctrines are ruinous. This means that the West must find the will—we certainly have the political, economic and military forces—to destroy the armed legions of jihad, from ISIS and Al Qaeda to Islamic Jihad, Hezbollah and the Iranian Quds Forces.

I don’t see how we can win a durable victory so long as the Iranian regime remains in power. A free Iran would be a force for a revolution within Islam and an ally in the religious war we are engaged in. Moreover, a free Iran can best be accomplished by political, not military means: supporting the millions of Iranians who have so often demonstrated their desire to be free of the murderous theocrats that oppress them, and have sent their husbands and sons to fight and die in Iraq and Syria.

Iran has long been the leading sponsor of terror. A free Iran ends its support for jihad—and could decisively change the course of events. Unless we take real action, and unless we discard our foolish illusions, we’re doomed to see replays of Charlie Hebdo—and far worse—over and over again.