WarSclerotic

Jihadism and ‘the language of good and evil’‎, Israel Hayom, Clifford D. May, August 27, 2014

“The battle of Waterloo,” the Duke of Wellington is supposed to have said, “was won on ‎the playing fields of Eton.” The battle against the Islamic State could be lost on the ‎campuses of American universities.‎

Among the reasons: The dominant ideology in academia is multiculturalism. To a ‎multiculturalist, being judgmental is a cardinal sin — not least when it comes to those ‎whose goal is to defeat and destroy the United States and its allies. It therefore should ‎come as no surprise to see The New York Times giving space for an op-ed by Michael J. ‎Boyle, an associate professor of political science at La Salle University. His theme: the ‎‎”disturbing return of the moralistic language once used to describe al-Qaida in the ‎panicked days after the 9/11 attacks.”‎

Professor Boyle is particularly exercised by U.S. President Barack Obama’s reference to the Islamic State ‎as “a ‘cancer’ spreading across the Middle East.” He hears in that “an eerie echo of ‎President George W. Bush’s description of the global war on terrorism as a campaign ‎against ‘evildoers.'”‎

Why is that a problem? It led to “foreign wars begun in the name of stamping out ‎‎’evildoers'” — wars that incurred “huge costs and reputational damage.” So the preferable ‎option would have been to do what — refer Osama bin Laden to the U.N. Human Rights ‎Council?‎

In any case, Boyle doesn’t think the Islamic State (also known as the Islamic ‎State in Iraq and the Levant, abbreviated “ISIS” or “ISIL”) is as malevolent as charged. In his considered opinion, it ‎‎”operates less like a revolutionary terrorist movement that wants to overturn the entire ‎political order in the Middle East than a successful insurgent group that wants a seat at ‎that table.”‎

And how could anyone be so moralistic as to deny the Islamic State a place to sit — just ‎because its warriors mass-murder minorities, enslave women and sever journalists’ heads?‎

The professor adds: “The language of good and evil may provide a comforting sense of ‎moral clarity, but it rarely, if ever, produces good policy.”‎

Hmmm. One wonders whether Boyle has ever taught — or even taken — a course on ‎World War II. During that conflict, Winston Churchill frequently employed the “language of good ‎and evil,” for example referring to Hitler as a “monster of wickedness, insatiable in his ‎lust for blood and plunder.”‎

Would Churchill’s policies have been improved had he toned the rhetoric down and ‎offered the fuehrer a “seat at the table”? To the contrary: Churchill’s moral clarity ‎contributed to his strategic clarity, leading him to oppose appeasement and insist on ‎unconditional surrender and the delegitimization of Nazi ideology.‎

With that as context, I was encouraged to hear Obama unequivocally condemn ‎those wreaking havoc in what used to be Iraq and Syria. What did not ring true was his ‎assertion that the “entire world is appalled by the brutal murder of Jim Foley,” adding for ‎emphasis that this crime “shocks the conscience of the entire world.”‎

Actually, I’m pretty certain that at this moment a significant number of individuals — ‎Europeans and Americans among them — are watching the video of Foley’s ‎beheading and feeling inspired to volunteer to serve Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-‎proclaimed caliph (the term implies a successor to the Prophet Muhammad) of the Islamic ‎State.‎

Some such people may be sociopaths. Some may be lost boys, desperate for meaning and ‎a transcendent cause. But not all.‎

According to a biography posted on jihadi forums, the new ruler has a doctorate in ‎Islamic studies from the University of Baghdad. We can deduce that Dr. Baghdadi is ‎among those who believe that the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the Islamic ‎caliphate following World War I was a terrible injustice; that Christians, Jews, Hindus ‎and insufficiently militant Muslims are “enemies of God”; that Americans don’t deserve ‎the power they wield; that Muslims are obligated to restore Islamic domination of the ‎world; and that nothing that helps achieve that goal — however barbaric and diabolical in ‎infidel eyes — is impermissible.‎

Which brings us to another statement by Obama last week: “One thing we can all ‎agree on is that a group like ISIL has no place in the 21st century.” In fact, we don’t all ‎even agree that this is the 21st century. According to the Islamic calendar, 1435 is the ‎date you should be writing on your checks. And if you’re a jihadist, the 21st century is no ‎improvement over the seventh century, the era when Islamic armies began to create one of ‎history’s greatest empires.‎

The president concluded by predicting that the Islamic State would “ultimately fail … ‎because the future is won by those who build and not destroy and the world is shaped by ‎people like Jim Foley.”‎

Once upon a time, Western leaders knew better. Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt understood that ‎the course of history is not predetermined and that enormous sacrifices would be required ‎to defeat the forces fighting for German domination. Their job was to explain why those ‎sacrifices were necessary.‎

Let me end with a word of praise for Obama: In recent days, he has deployed air ‎power and Special Forces to prevent Baghdadi’s forces from butchering as many ‎Yazidis, Christians, Kurds and disobedient Muslims as they intended, and expanding ‎their territories as much as they planned. That’s by no means all that needs to be done — ‎but it could represent a good, if belated, start.‎

Boyles disagrees. He writes that what began as a response to a humanitarian crisis ‎has “morphed into an effort to roll back, or even defeat” the Islamic State. And how ‎could any postmodern, multicultural professor on an American campus possibly support ‎that?‎

This entry was posted on August 27, 2014 at 6:41 PM and is filed under Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.