The illustrious and deservedly beloved Hugh Fitzgerald has sent me this precise,
perceptive, and courageous address by Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Notes Hugh: "Goh Chok Tong has given no indication of being a devout follower of Pat Robertson. Nor is there any record of his changing his name from something reminiscent of Perle or Wolfowitz... He does, however, live between Malaysia and Singapore, and has a lifetime of experience with Islam."
Chris Patten would do well to read this speech carefully. What follows here are some good excerpts, but it is all excellent. Read it all.
The war against terrorism could shape the 21st century in the same way as the Cold War defined the world before the fall of the Berlin Wall. To win, we must first clearly understand what we are up against. Terrorism is a generic term. Terrorist organizations such as the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka or ETA in Spain are only of local concern. The virulent strain of Islamic terrorism is another matter altogether. It is driven by religion. Its ideological vision is global. It is most dangerous. The communists fought to live whereas the jihadi terrorists fight to die, and live in the next world. My perspective is formed by our own experiences in Southeast Asia which post Sept. 11 has emerged as a major theater for terrorist operations. In December 2001, Singapore arrested 15 people belonging to a radical Islamic group called the Jemaah Islamiyah (JI). They were plotting even before Sept. 11 to attack American and other Western interests in Singapore. In August 2002, we arrested another 21 members of this group. Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia and Thailand have also made many arrests of terrorists. The JI regional leadership spanned Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia and the Southern Philippines. Its tentacles even probed into Australia. JI's objective was to create a Daulah Islamiyah, an Islamic state in Southeast Asia. This was to be centered in Indonesia but would include Malaysia, Southern Thailand, Southern Philippines, and, inevitably, Singapore and Brunei. But the most crucial conclusion our investigations revealed was this: the existence of a transregional terrorist brotherhood of disparate Southeast Asian groups linked by a militant Islamic ideology to each other and to Al Qaeda. Whatever their specific goals, these groups were committed to mutual help in the pursuit of their common ideology: they helped each other with funds and support services, in training and in joint operations.In 1999, JI formed a secret caucus called the Rabitatul Mujahidin, meaning Mujahidin Coalition, to bring together various militant Southeast Asian Islamic groups. It was responsible for the bombing attack against the Philippine Ambassador to Indonesia in Jakarta in August 2000. The brain behind the attack was Hambali, the link man between Southeast Asian terrorism and Al Qaeda. Fortunately, he is now under arrest.
But the threat remains. It stems from a religious ideology that is infused with an implacable hostility to all secular governments, especially the West, and in particular the U.S. Their ultimate goal is to bring about a Caliphate linking all Muslim communities. Their means is jihad which they narrowly define as a holy war against all non-Muslims whom they call "infidels."
Likewise, JI's ultimate goal is a Caliphate, by definition not confined to Southeast Asia. The dream of a Caliphate may seem absurd to the secular mind. But it will be a serious mistake to dismiss its appeal to many in the Islamic world, though the majority do not believe in killing and dying for it.
But there are radicals and militants who do. The terrorist brotherhood in Southeast Asia and its links to al Qaeda were first forged through the struggle against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Ibrahim Maidin, the leader of the Singapore JI cell, underwent military training in Afghanistan in the early 1990s. His encounters with the Mujahidden deeply impressed him. Maidin wrote several letters to the Taliban Supreme Leader Mullah Mohammed Omar and to Osama bin Laden. He asked whether Mullah Omar was to be regarded as the Caliph of the Islamic World. After returning to Singapore, Maidin arranged for JI members to visit Afghanistan and to undergo training there.
Islamic militancy is not new to Southeast Asia. But what is new is this type of fanatical global ideology (including the phenomenon of suicide bombers) that has been able to unite different groups and lead Southeast Asian groups to subordinate local interests to the broader struggle.
Ibrahim Maidin has confessed to a senior Singapore intelligence officer that
in retrospect he had made the mistake of moving too quickly and should have
waited for Malaysia, Indonesia, the Southern Philippines and Singapore to
become an Islamic state before acting against U.S. interests. But he still believes that his side would ultimately win.
From our experience in Southeast Asia, I draw three principal conclusions that I believe have a wider relevance.
First, the goals of these terrorists make the struggle a zero-sum game for them. There is no room for compromise except as a tactical expedient. America may be the main enemy but it is not the only one. What Osama bin Laden offered Europe in April was only a "truce" [if it stopped "attacking Muslims or interfering in their affairs including [participating] in the American conspiracy"], not a lasting peace. The war against terrorism today is a war against a specific strain of militant Islamic terrorism that wants, in effect, a "clash of civilizations."
The JI has tried to create the conditions for Christians and Muslims in Southeast Asia to set against one another. In December 2000, it attacked churches in Indonesia, including one church in an Indonesian island off Singapore. It has sent its members to fight and stir up trouble in Ambon against Christians.
One of those we detained in Singapore was a service engineer with an American company. He confessed that he actually liked his American friends
and bosses. He was nevertheless involved in targeting American interests. We
have a sense that he had struggled with this. He eventually decided to testify against the spiritual leader of JI, Abu Bakar Bashir, but only because he felt betrayed by Bashir's denial of the very existence of the JI organisation which Bashir headed and to whom he and other members had sworn allegiance.
And just as Osama bin Laden is trying to drive a wedge between Europe and America, in Southeast Asia, JI was plotting to do the same thing by blowing up the pipelines that supply water from Malaysia to Singapore. The JI knew that water from Malaysia is a matter of life and death for Singapore. They knew that race and religion have historically been the major fault lines within and between both countries. The JI's intention was to provoke a conflict between Singapore and Malaysia and portray a "Chinese Singapore" as threatening a "Muslim Malaysia," and use the ensuing confusion to try and overthrow the Malaysian government and establish an Islamic state in Malaysia.
That particular plot failed. The governments of Singapore and Malaysia could not have allowed it to succeed. We know only too well what is at stake.My second conclusion is that it is only through absolute and unsentimental clarity about the threat we face that we can define, differentiate and therefore, isolate militant Islamic terrorism from mainstream Islam. It is not sufficient to repeat, mantra like, that the majority of Muslims are peaceful and do not believe in violence. Unfortunately, we too often sacrifice clarity to be politically correct.
This brings me to my third and perhaps most important conclusion. Just as the Cold War was an ideological as well as a geopolitical struggle, the war against terrorism must be fought with ideas as well as with armies; with religious and community leaders as well as police forces and intelligence services. This ideological struggle is already upon us. Unless we win the battle of ideas, there will be no dearth of willing foot soldiers ready to martyr themselves for their cause.
We know that we should work with the moderates and isolate the extremists. But as we seek to separate the wheat from the chaff, we need to recognise that both come from the same plant. How we seek to engage and encourage the Muslim world to fight the ideological battle against the extremists must reflect this sensitivity and awareness.
This is complicated but not impossible. In Malaysia, Prime Minister Abdullah Badawi fought the Islamic party, PAS, on the issue of the kind of Islamic state that Malaysia should be. He won a resounding victory in the general elections. He checked PAS' advance towards an austere Muslim state with Sharia laws with his vision of an Islamic state that is Islam Hadahri or "Progressive Islam." He has joined issue not on whether Malaysia should be an Islamic state but on the nature of such a state; and the struggle to define Malaysia's Islamic state will continue for a long time. In Indonesia, Islamic based parties generally did not do as well as parties that do not campaign under the banner of Islam in the recent parliamentary elections. But the Islamic parties will remain a crucial swing factor in the presidential elections later this year.
Let me conclude with a few words about the role of the U.S. Only the U.S. has the capacity to lead the geopolitical battle against the Islamic terrorists. Iraq has become the key battleground. Before he was killed in Saudi Arabia, Yousef Al Aiyyeri, author of the al Qaeda Blueprint for fighting in Iraq, said: if democracy succeeds in Iraq, that would be the death of Islam. That is why Osama bin Laden and others have put so much effort to try and break the coalition and America's resolve to stay the course to build a modern Iraq that Muslims will be proud of. Those who do not understand this, play into their hands. The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail. If that is destroyed, Islamic extremists everywhere will be emboldened. We will all be at greater risk.
If we are to win the war against terrorism, we must, as Sun Tze in "The Art of War" says, understand the enemy. And we must, all of us, Muslims and non-Muslims, Americans, Europeans, Arabs and Asians, unite against it. But we must create the conditions that will make this essential unity possible.
Wow! This article is just awesome. I keep telling you guys that the Singaporeans "really", "really" "GET IT".
Keep watching Singapore. They are going to be leaders in the fight against radical Islam.
Ex Oriente lux. Or so one would have wholeheartedly commented, had the last four paragraphs not descended into a plea for working with "moderate" Muslims -- rather than suggesting that the best way to obtain the cooperation of that ever-elusive, ever-fluid, and at times downright chimerical category, is to constantly repeat the tenets of Islam, as set out in Qur'an and hadith, to never let up about the historical record of Muslim treatment of non-Muslims, until "moderates" themselves stop engaging in either taqiyya or silence or deflection onto irrelevancies (and for some "moderates" the full truth about Islam will come as a surprise -- some of them are simply ignorant, or have accepted a Bowdlerized version not only of Muslim teachings, but of Muslim treatment of non-Muslims -- even Kanan Makiya, confronted with one of Bat Ye'or's books, could not bring himself to read it; even the most skeptical and freethinking Muslims find it difficult to accept the truth about Islam, for it would require either denial, or to realize that so much of what that person regards as his heritage, and that of his ancestors, was a history of cruelty, murder, inflicted humiliation and degradation (even the most liberal Iranian exile can have trouble confronting the way in which Jews, for example, were ritualistically mocked, tormented, even killed for such crimies as going out in the rain, in Shi'a Iran before the modern Pahlevis -- they simply do not wish to hear of it).
Nor can one endorse Go Chok Tong's expressed belief that the current sisyphean undertaking in Iraq (as opposed to the essential disarming of Iraq, which also had the unintended consequence of getting Libya to yield up its secrets, and most -- not all -- of its weapons), is as important as he makes it out to be. It is not self-evident that any further stay in Iraq is the best allocation of men, materiel, money, and attention. Perhaps he was being a gracious guest in Washington. Perhaps he allows himself to believe that the problem of the Muslim countries is lack of democracy, without further inquiring if there is something in the nature of Islam itself that makes democracy untenable for long. Could it be that the problem of the Muslim coutnries is -- Islam?
And in any case, as the example of Turkey shows, even quasi-democracy requires several decades of preparatory secularisation. Ataturk was a semi-enlightened despot, who tackled Islam and the ulema head on, and everything he did was intended to constrain and limit the practice of Islam, from the Hat Act to replacing Arabic with Latin script, to supporting female suffrage, to discriminating against those who had received Muslim schooling from rising in the army or in government service. That could only be done from within Turkey, by an enlightened despot sure of himself, and with the aura of military hero to protect and sustain him. Had British troops tried to do what Ataturk did, it would never have worked.
Surely Go Chok Tong knows that the most important thing now is to bomb Iranian nuclear installations. It would be both stupid and cruel to wait for Israel to do it; how much more must Israel be expected to do for the Infidel world, given the way that Infidel world treats it? This is a task for the United States. And that can be done with much greater ease if Iraq does not continue to soak up all of our attention, our soldiers, our tanks and Humvees and helicopters, our money.
A great deed has been done for the Iraqis. Perhaps, as they founder, some of them will realize, with a pang, just what America did for them. The removal of Saddam Hussein should, and in any non-Muslim context would, have earned undying gratitude. But we are Infidels, and not only is there no gratitude for that, but all the rest of what we have done -- the 4.5 million Iraqis who now have potable water, the thousands of schools repaired, hosptials equipped, roads and bridges and electricity grids built and re-built, repaired and re-repaired,the vast sums of American taxpayers' money being distributed madly all over the country -- for what? No, Go Chok Tong begins well, but he does not dare to see the problem as one of Islam itself. How could he -- he lives squeezed between Malaysia and Indonesia. He has to believe -- though reading between his lines one can see what he thinks -- that somehow Infidels can work with "moderate" Muslims whom, he nonetheless recognizes, share the same ideological roots as the "extremists." He still does not allow himself to come to the unavoidable conclusion: If Islam itself is the problem, and one never knows when "moderate" Muslims may metamorphose into the other kind (as they remain outwardly the same), far more drastic measures are needed.
Muslim countries should not be kept any longer on the life-support system of Western aid, disguised jizya (as in Malaysia, a country whose Bumiputra policy, by which non-Muslims must subsidize all Muslims, is well-known to Go Chok Tong), or that greatest transfer of wealth in human history-- the oligopoly rents taken in by OPEC. Foreign aid can be ended, and should be, to Egypt, to Jordan, and of course to the Palestinian Authority (there is still too much money available to buy weapons, propaganda, and so on; if 80% of the population favors, as it does, suicide bombings, then that population has transformed itself into a menace for the entire Infidel world, and nothing must be done to support it; the "Palestinian" Arabs still have too much free time on their hands, given the support from the EU and even American government aid; subsistence living should divert time and attention from suicide-bombing, rocket-launching, and similar hobbies.
Go Chok Tong does not note that the West has always had the power to recapture through taxation, beginnning in 1973, OPEC oligopoly rents. That it did not do so is a tribute to Saudi cunning, and the use of a small army of American and other Western hirelings (no need to pay the antisemites, of course -- they work for free), who managed to create an atmosphere of fog and confusion, and convinced successive administrations that Saudi Arabia was "our friend" and in any case, there was nothing to be done about OPEC prices. It was nonsense, easily demonstrated to be nonsense. One did not have to be a specialist in oil economics, Eliyahu Kanovsky or Morris Adelman, to see that ever-increasing taxes at the pump, and taxes on oil imports, could have captured most of what the Saudis and their brethren took in. That money paid for madrasas and mosques, and huge stockpiles of armaments. It now provides the wherewithal for the Jihad, a doctrine always in posse, ready to rock and roll whenever and wherever it becomes possible. What transformed the doctrine, and duty, of Jihad into its current, in-esse state, was that OPEC money. But the Arab lobby, with all those ex-ambassadors, ex-CIA agents (such names as Raymond Close, Andrew Kilgore, Eugene and Mrs. Bird, James Akins, John C. West come swimmingly to mind) and other figures of influence, throughout the West, are responsible, in their promotion of the idea that the Arabs, especially the Saudis, are our "friends" and wish us well,and can always be persuaded to do good things for us in OPEC, and that the only thing standing in the way of our "friendship" is that annoying little business of Israel. These people, in the United States and in Western Europe, have over three decades prevented any clear understanding of how OPEC's oligipoly rents could be recaptured by the Western consumers themselves.
Those agents of influence have cost us hundreds of billions of dollars that might never have left American shores, might never have been available to fund tens of thousands of madrasas and mosques all over the world. Without OPEC money, the economic and political failure of Islam might have become more apparent to Muslims themselves. Congressional committees, investigative journalists, even business schools, should be studying, researching, writing about how the West was suckered, over so long, and who helped to do the suckering, and and how cheaply, relative to what the Saudis took in, these Western agents were bought. It is an extraordinary story, one of the most amazing in the world.
In the part of the world in which he lives, Go Chok Tong cannot be completely candid. But he, like Lee Kuwan Yew, comes far closer to telling home truths about Islam than any leaders in Europe. Even if one quarrels with his proferred remedies (and one suspects that there is a good deal more he could say, and would say, but not in public), one should be grateful for this speech. How would Chris Patten explain it away?
Goh Chok Tong for president!
Oh--wait. Yeah. There is that. . . Bummer.
His understanding of the issue is a WONDERFUL breath of fresh air! Is it possible that we are beginning to get together a "Coalition of the Knowledgeable," and that we can get together in some meaningful way to stop the Hoards again? Maybe we can even make them disappear by educating the next generation. . .
Hey, wait a minute! We don't have to leave home for a candidate! Robert Spencer for president! Hugh for veep! No. Hugh for Secretary of Defense!
Sigh. I got so excited that I didn't get to the very end of the article. Just the same, Goh's piece comes close enough to be encouraging.
Robert for President! Hugh for Secretary of Defense!
Goh's remarks are very perceptive. But I note that Singapore got kicked out of Malaysia in the early 1960's because a Muslim majority could not bear the possibility of an non-Muslim Nanyang Chinese holding the rotating premiership.