“In a statement to ABC News about Parsley’s comments, McCain’s campaign said the senator ‘obviously strongly rejects such statements.'” — from this article
Senator McCain both “obviously” and “strongly” rejects “such statements”?
Why “obviously”?
And why “strongly”?
If he wishes to object to “such statements,” he should not fall back on the word “obviously,” but tell us what about those statements he objects to. For it is not “obvious” at all what about them is objectionable.
He might distance himself, if distance himself he calculatingly must, in a much more nuanced and milder way. He could let it be known that he thinks the statements “raise issues that we will have to be addressing” about what prompts those who call for Jihad, and what instruments have received undue attention and what other instruments of Jihad need to be examined. Above all, Senator McCain could agree that this is primarily an ideological war, made on non-Muslims by those who claim that Jihad, as a “struggle” to expand the boundaries of what is called Dar al-Islam and to push back the boundaries of what is called Dar al-Harb, is not tangential but central to Islam.
What is clear is that the definition of the “war” being waged against us, and against many others around the world, has been far too narrow. Senator McCain, as someone who has spent a long time in the military, is keenly aware of the need not to see “war” purely in military terms, but to recognize, and prepare to check, instruments of warfare that go far beyond combat or terrorism — which to its practitioners is legitimized as a form of combat, updated for the times and the circumstances.
But to reject “obviously” and “strongly” statements that are mostly true, disturbs. For what Pastor Rod Parsley wrote is, if not entirely true, or not as suavely put as it might be, is, at least far truer than what one routinely reads about Islam in The New Duranty Times or The Bandar Beacon, or hears from the mouths of pontificating members of the political and media elites, who blandly assume that the long-suffering members of the American public will forever take their word for it about Islam without doing a little investigation — we are all Boston Blackies now — of the texts and tenets of Islam. Look at how many who call themselves “conservatives” or Republicans are — just look at some of the comments at Jihad Watch — disgusted with the Bush Administration’s continued empty vaporings about Islam as a “religion of peace.” No, their authority is being questioned, and they are being openly mocked, for the things they would have us believe about Islam.
Question Authority? When it shows itself as idiotic, about Islam, about energy policy, about everything under the sun, as those who presume to instruct and protect us have shown themselves to be, over the past several decades? You bet.
Someone, or some group, must go to McCain, or get to McCain, and that means going around such pollyannish surge-supporters as Frederick Kagan and Max Boot, who fail to identify the Camp of Islam and the Camp of Jihad as the problem. They fail to see why dampening, rather than encouraging or at least doing nothing to discourage, the pre-existing fissures (sectarian and ethnic) in Iraq is the only policy that makes sense, if the goal is not to establish a Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations. And that Light-Unto-the Muslim Nations goal is not attainable.
McCain keeps defending the democracy project in Iraq. He keeps misunderstanding the need to clearly see the war in Iraq as merely one theatre in a much larger war. He continues to ignore the instruments of Jihad that are most effective — Da”wa, the Money Weapon, and demographic conquest. He seems, like so many others in the Republican Party, intent on “supporting the President” or on “avoiding defeat” in Iraq. But the removal of American forces would not necessarily be a defeat. Rather, if executed properly and for the right reasons it could be an intelligent act of ruthless calculation, and would do a great deal to upset jihadists, including those in both Iran and Saudi Arabia — the two most malevolent and powerful Muslim countries who are supporting the Jihad to spread Islam and to ensure its dominance.