Yet terrorism is only one of three levels upon which the threat is attacking us and al-Qaeda is only a piece of the terrorism level. The second level, the “Civilization Jihad,” a term used by the Muslim Brotherhood itself to describe its long term effort to peaceably infiltrate American and Western society at all levels in order to bring it down from the inside through the freedoms that Western Constitutions afford, is well at work and in process today. This has also been called the “Stealth Jihad.”
There is a third level, the “International Institutional Jihad,” upon which organizations such as the UN, along with its 57 Member State bloc the Organization of the Islamic Conference, work to push through those principles of Sharia Law and Islamic doctrine which it Members can agree upon such as the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human Rights which is fully at odds with U.S. Constitutional tenets. Once these principles become international standards, the institutions seek to push them into Western societies through treaties and trade deals over which the Members have leverage.
McDonough’s words, by limiting the threat to Al Qaeda, intentionally ignore the other levels of threat which, for all intents and purposes can be even more dangerous because our Constitution does not afford us easy means to combat. Nor does our desired general sense of morality.
2. By focusing on “reasons” for this terrorist piece of the pie, the Control Factor further sets out the narrative that we can gain control over the problem. By looking for “root causes,” we advance the notion that by eliminating or reducing those elements we can eliminate the symptom-terrorism. This is part of a long-engaged Leftist narrative that has been utilized across a vast array of social problems in order to gain control over funding and policy. Now, it is being used to avoid seeing a problem clearly, much less addressing it intelligently.
It is this administration’s (and also, unfortunately, many members of Bush’s as well) distortion to frame terrorism as a result of victimhood. That is, by establishing the root causes of terrorism as either a response to U.S. policy, to economic conditions, to Israeli occupation, and so on, the Control Factor sells the buried wish that since we cause the conditions, we can fix the symptom without the grueling costs of war and confrontation. When both sides collude in this form of narrative, we allow it to continue and grow. Yet placing the cause of the problem within ourselves is false and strips us of the proper incentive to stand up and fight against a threat that simply seeks our destruction no matter what we do.
3. McDonough fights the enemy’s battle for us in the simple phrase of those “who falsely claim to be fighting in the name of Islam.” Here, the Control Factor refuses to accept what the enemy has repeatedly made clear—there is a Holy War between Islam and the Western world, it has been declared by a significant faction of Muslims and agreed upon by many more either explicitly or through silence and omission, and the war is defined by the enemy itself under the banner of Islam to seek the destruction of Western society as it is and to replace it with a Sharia based global Islamic Ummah. This is what the enemy says itself. The Control Factor tells us that this can not be, that Islam is a “peaceful” and “great” religion that has been “hijacked” by a few “crazies” and that most Muslims worldwide are much like us peace loving Westerners who seek a world based on mutual tolerance. If there is any “war,” it emanates from those of us Westerners who are “racists,” “bigots,” or otherwise and fail to acknowledge the realities of the Muslim peoples. The critical issue here is that the Control Factor, as expressed through McDonough, takes full responsibility for defining Islam and identifying the enemy. The enemy, however, defines itself and needs to identify itself both through its actions, its words, and importantly what it does not do and say.
This “transfer of responsibility” from the enemy to ourselves that McDonough’s words so freely take on is symptomatic of the deep addictive style the West has adopted to avoid hard confrontation. Once again, the Control Factor utilizes Western guilt to define the conflict as resulting from improper acts of its own. It then seeks to redeem itself by accommodating the enemy. This shows up in America’s dealings with Islam as well as the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict;” responsibility for the problem is transferred to the West or Israel in a grand psychological effort to avoid facing the terrors and costs of hard confrontation, terror, or war. And in each example, as with all psychological defenses, the defense creates the very conditions it seeks to avoid. Until the West is fully able to place responsibility back upon the Islamic world for the actions it takes and omits to take, the West will only dig itself deeper into a weaker position. Unfortunately, the game of guilt gives us no guidance as to how it is to end; when enough has been repaid. Instead, it is geared to continue indefinitely.
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