Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the learned analysts’ ongoing fixation with Al-Qaeda:
The refusal to discuss Jihad and the varied instruments that are employed to further Jihad has led to the use of the phrase “war on terror.” This phrase diverts attention from all the other instruments of Jihad — oil revenues, Da’wa unchecked world-wide, demographic conquest within the Lands of the Infidels. It thereby continues to mislead unwary Infidels, whose attention becomes fixed on this “war on terror.”
This error is compounded, from lack of intelligent interest, by the focusing of attention not on the hundreds of terrorist groups whose names are known, but on one particular group: Al-Qaeda. This is foolish. It is foolish given that there are many others who are promoting the worldwide Jihad through their own local expressions of it, with here Hamas, there Hezbollah, over there Laskar Jihad, and even further on Jemaah Islamiya or Jaish-e-Mohammad or Ansar al-Islam or Jaish-e-Toiba or…(fill up the website with another few hundred names).
One example of the resulting confusion is the silly discussion by those in the Bush Administration, and by those attacking the Bush Administration, about whether or not Saddam Hussein’s regime had close, not-so-close, or nonexistent ties with Al Qaeda. The Bush Administration, having started this whole “war on terror” and “Al Qaeda” business, cannot, apparently, tell the truth and answer its critics by asking them: Why does it matter? Was not Saddam Hussein an aggressive Arab and Muslim leader, who despite his well-known falls from Islamic good graces had spent the last decade re-establishing himself as a good Muslim, putting Qur’anic verses on the Iraqi flag, building the largest mosque in the world, using his own blood for a specially-calligraphed Qur’an, and so on and so predictably forth. Did he not contribute to Muslim terrorists by giving $25,000 to the families of each suicide bomber involved in the Lesser Jihad against Israel? Does anyone doubt that the weaponry he might have acquired could have been used against the Infidels, either by his regime or by one that followed it, or by elements in Iraq that might be able to divert such weaponry at some point? The fear of Saddam Hussein’s acquisition of such weaponry can be justified without any reference to Al Qaeda. His country is Muslim; Muslims are taught to expand the territory where Islam will dominate and to permit local Infidels to live, but only if they submit to certain onerous and, for many over the centuries, utterly intolerable conditions.
When you hear someone talk about the “war on terror,” you know that someone is limited. He is simply not very intelligent or has not thought things through. I just received a note from someone, a visitor to this site, who attended a debate last night at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard on the topic of “Should the Americans withdraw from Iraq.” My appalled informant noted the use of that phrase “war on terror” and all that it implies by both William Kristol and John Deutch. Kristol also said that “we are winning” and “we can win,” without explaining what that “winning” would do to promote Infidel interests, as opposed to letting sectarian and ethnic tensions take their natural course. Deutch for a year was head of the CIA. Yet the display he offered yesterday was on the level of another former CIA head, James Woolsey, himself an enthusiast for the Light Unto the Muslim Nations Project, in his failure to understand Islam, or to get beyond Iraq to the worldwide problem, which is most acute in Western Europe.
Kristol is merely one more Bright Young Conservative Careerist. But Deutch is a University Professor at MIT and a former head of the CIA. He has all the time in the world to read widely in the history of Jihad conquest and the subjugation of non-Muslims. He has all the time in the world to read Bat Ye’or and a hundred others — and obviously, judging by the dozen telling snippets from his “debate” interventions, he has not. Not a hint that the best reason for leaving Iraq is to exploit the sectarian and ethnic fissures, to force both Iran and Saudi Arabia to expend men, materiel, and money in backing their side in a proxy war in Iraq, to hope that Shi’a unrest and Sunni counter-pressure develop in Bahrain, Kuwait, Yemen, Lebanon, the Eastern Province of Saudi Arabia — no, that was not even conceivable to either of these “debaters,” who hardly scratched the surface at that grand thing, the Kennedy School of Government.
The Yiddish dismissive reduplicative has entered the language. Dennis Potter titled one of his television plays for the old BBC “Oedipus Shmoedipus,” a phrase alluding to the Jewish mother who, upon being told that someone suffers from an “oedipus complex,” says “Oedipus Shmoedipus, as long as he loves his mother.”
Al-Qaeda, Al-Shmaeda — as long as he hates the Infidels.