Rep. Tom Cotton (R-AR) at CPAC: U.S. fighting against "radical Islamic jihad"

The State abbreviation for Arkansas is "AR," not "AK." -your Arkansan friend

Maybe Congressman Tom Cotton gets Brigitte Gabriel's 'Act For America' newsletters like I do. She's a fine warrior though I think her "radical Islam" nomenclature could prove to be a costly mistake. It is often very confusing.

'Jihad' is a supremacist war against freedom.

'Jihad', in a word, is the problem with Islam.

'Jihad' is the enemy of all freedom.

Send him some further information, in bite-sized easily assimilable chunks.

Send him Jacques Ellul on Jihad (foreword to 'The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam').

http://www.dhimmi.org/Foreword.html

(The item at the above link is printer-friendly).

Send him Conor Cruise O'Brien, on Jihad (1995).

http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/the-lesson-of-algeria-islam-is-indivisible-1566770.html

CONOR CRUISE O'BRIEN
Friday 6 January 1995
The lesson of Algeria: Islam is indivisible

How that O'Brien essay (it's very brief and to the point) opens, just to give an idea of the flavour:

“Fundamentalist Islam" is a misnomer which dulls our perceptions in a dangerous way.

'It does so by implying that there is some other kind of Islam, which is well disposed to those who reject the Koran.

'There isn't.
'Islam is a universalist, triumphalist and political religion. It claims de jure dominion over all humanity; that is God's will.

'The actual state of affairs, with unbelievers of various sorts dominating most of the world, is a suspension of God's will anda scandal to the faithful.

'The world is divided between the House of Islam and the House of War, meaning the rest of us.

'For more than two centuries now, the House of War has been in the ascendant, and the House of Islam has been abased.

'The remedy for this unnatural and intolerable state of affairs is jihad.
'Jihad is defined as "the religious duty imposed on all Muslims to wage war upon those who do not accept the doctrines of Islam". The Prophet Mohamed himself not merely preached but waged jihad. God's word, dictated to the Prophet and preached by him, is binding on all Muslims, and his example is their inspiration...

'What is going on today in the Muslim world is not the advent of some aberrant thing called Islamic fundamentalism but a revival of Islam itself - the real thing - which Western ascendancy and Westernised post-Muslim elites no longer have the capacity to muffle and control.
'The jihad is back..".

And send Rep Tom Cotton a copy of Patrick L Moore, on Jihad (1994).

As introduced by 'Hugh Fitzgerald' (formerly prolific and erudite contributor at this forum), here:

http://www.newenglishreview.org/blog_direct_link.cfm/blog_id/26087

Monday, 22 February 2010
From The Annals Of Serendip: Patrick L. Moore

and in a nice printer-friendly version, here:

http://www.ewtn.com/library/ISSUES/GUERRA.HTM

FROM "COLD WAR" TO GUERRA FRIA?
Patrick L. Moore

re that term 'guerra fria', which is Spanish for 'cold war', here is what Moore says, in that essay:

"Few chroniclers of recent history have noted that Spanish Christians had a distinctive name for the continuing low-intensity warfare separating the periods of active, full-scale operations which punctuated the eight hundred year Reconquista, or reconquest of the Iberian peninsula.

"They called their continuing struggle to push back Islam the Guerra Fria—or as we would say it, the "Cold War.""

Moore, like Conor Cruise O'Brien, has no illusions about Jihad and its centrality to classical, orthodox, mainline Islam:

"There are five especially critical aspects about Islam's doctrine of jihad which must be brought out to properly understand the significance of Islam as it relates to the United States and the West.

" In summary, the meaning of jihad in its primary sense is military and coercive;

"it is central to the universalist doctrine of the Islamic belief system;

"its operational aim is political domination of non-Islamic territories (i.e. rather than forced conversion);

"it is offensive or aggressive in nature in the first instance (and not merely "defensive");

"and, finally, jihad is continuous in character (i.e. pending the ultimate victory of the forces of Islam)...".

(He then proceeds to 'unpack', in masterly fashion, and with complete and ruthless accuracy, fully-referenced - the footnotes are a compendium of all the best and least deluded classic Western scholarship re. Islam - each of these five aspects).

"“We’re fighting one war and it’s a war against radical Islamic jihad,” Cotton said at the Conservative Political Action Conference."

Cottony soft, with extra cushion to protect Islam.

"Question 2: Did Grover Norquist and Suhail Khan usher Cotton out the door as soon as he made this speech?"

Why would they, when his term "radical Islamic jihadists" -- and his delimitation of their danger as occurring only on battlefields in Iraq and Afghanistan, or in hot spots like Yemen, Mali and Libya, or in specific terror attacks like Fort Hood, the shoe bomber, the Times Square bomber -- rather clearly brackets out and therefore protects the kind of stealth jihad which Norquist and Khan are pursuing and which the very same CPAC audience members addressed by Cotton are enabling?

If anything, a speech like Cotton's -- at least, to anyone who cottons to it -- lends the halo of counter-jihad bonafides to CPAC and by extenstion to Norquist and Khan.

This is good. Perfect or not at least we started talking about JIHAD. I don't care if they use that stupid term RADICAL jihad or not. We know Jihad is Jihad against infidels. We are talkng about it in CPAC. Great. When somebody opens a conversation against Jihad I am all for it. Thanks Mr. Cotton.

While he rightly notes that terror/terrorism is a technique, a tactic, he fails to grasp that offensive jihad is a tactic, too; and that each has a goal.

Terrorism's goal is coercion. Offensive jihad's goal is to subjugate the world under Islamic law.

As we are not at war with terror, neither are we at war with jihad; violent or otherwise.

It should be obvious to him that we are not, and cannot be at war with concepts and ideologies, but rather with the actual Muslims xecuting those concepts and ideologies.

The non-Muslim world is, or shoud be, engaged in defending ourselves from specific, individual Muslims and groups.

Rep. Cotton is absolutely correct with the one exception of the use of the term "radical". What the Jihadist or Islamists are doing is literally following the teachings of Mohamed through the Islamic trilogy, the Koran,Hadiths, and syrah.

To Muslims the words in the Koran are considered pure for all time and can never be abrogated, to do so invites the charge of blasphemy which can bring the sentence of death. Another words this archaic religion has not been allowed to change for nearly 1,400 years.