Today is the 20th anniversary of the World
Trade Center bombing. It also marks three weeks since the attempted
murder of Lars Hedegaard, the intrepid Danish champion of free speech.
These events are not unrelated.
Back in 1993, there was a tireless effort
to limn the WTC bombers as wanton killers. They were, we were to
understand, bereft of any coherent belief system, unrepresentative of
any mainstream construction of Islam. In reality, though, they were
devout Muslim operatives who belonged to a jihadist cell formed in the
New York area by Omar Abdel Rahman — whose notoriety as the shadowy
“Blind Sheikh” obscured the basis of his profound influence over
Islamists across the globe.
Sheikh Abdel Rahman is an internationally
renowned Islamic jurist, having earned a doctorate in the jurisprudence
of sharia — Islam’s societal framework and legal code
— from Egypt’s al-Azhar University, the center of Sunni Islamic
learning for over a millennium. Blind from early youth and plagued by
several other maladies, Abdel Rahman was physically incapable of
building a bomb, hijacking a jetliner, carrying out an assassination —
in short, of performing any blood-soaked activity that would be useful
to a terrorist organization . . . other than leading it.
It was nothing other than Abdel Rahman’s
indisputable mastery of Islamic doctrine, and hence his capacity to give
present-day vitality to a seventh-century summons to holy war, that
vaulted him to the forefront of the jihad.
The World Trade Center bombing was Islamic
supremacism’s declaration of war on the United States. It was a blunt
statement by the savage shock troops of a worldwide movement that
America — “the head of the snake,” as the Blind Sheikh called us — could
be struck at home, right in the beating heart of economic liberty.
Despite serial atrocities, thousands of deaths, and a decade of war, we are today more willfully blind
to the reason we were attacked than we were back in 1993 — back when
our ignorance might have been excused by our homeland’s seeming
invulnerability to the scourge of jihadist terror. Regardless of our
reluctance to see it, mainstream Islam — the dynamic Islam of the Middle
East, unadulterated by incentives to moderate, at least for a time,
while settling in non-Muslim lands — is aggressively hegemonic. As
proclaimed by another iconic supremacist, Muslim Brotherhood founder
Hassan al-Banna, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be
dominated.”
And to dominate for a very specific
reason. Supremacists are not the irrational savages we have been so
desperate for two decades to portray them as. Whether the jihad
terrorizes by explosives, suffocates by the systematic subjugation of
women and persecution of religious minorities in Islamic countries, or
infiltrates by stealthily using liberty to undermine liberty in the
West, the mission is always coherent and always the same: the imposition
of sharia.
The rationale of jihadist terror is to
diminish our resolve to resist the gradual erosion of freedom and the
relentless demands of Islamists — especially, Islamists of the
Brotherhood variety. After the Blind Sheikhs and the bin Ladens have
softened up the target, it is the Brothers who beguile us. Impeccably
well-mannered and wearing neatly tailored suits, they flack for Hamas
and maintain, straight-faced, that free speech is not so much a right to
condemn their totalitarian ideology as a responsibility to suppress
examination of it.
In that ideology, the implementation of
classical sharia is the necessary precondition for Islamizing a society.
Sharia is the architecture for a global caliphate. This is why Egypt’s
president, Mohamed Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood chieftain, promised that
when elected he would birth a new constitution enshrining “the sharia,
then the sharia, and finally the sharia” — a promise on which he has
followed through. This is the utopia of all Islamists, be they
terrorists, or faux moderates who proclaim their willingness to pursue
totalitarian ends by “peaceful political” means, or the Muslim masses
who celebrate 9/11 and vote Brotherhood parties into power.
We did not want to acknowledge the sharia
logic of the terrorists 20 years ago. We were told then that Islam had
nothing to do with attacks on the West incited by Muslim jurists citing
Muslim scripture.
Read it all at National Review Online.
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