From “Is America really going to do this?,” by Melanie Phillips in The Spectator, October 24 (thanks to all who sent this in):
Obama assumes that Islamic terrorism is driven by despair, poverty, inflammatory US policy and the American presence on Muslim soil in the Persian Gulf. Thus he adopts the agenda of the Islamists themselves.
It’s true: Obama adopts the jihadists’ grievance-based analysis, which is based on the proposition that the anger toward the U.S. in the Islamic world stems from something the U.S. has done, not from imperatives within the Islamic world itself. This is not just a Leftist point of view: in this Obama has something in common with many on the Right, such as Dinesh D’Souza, who insists that the Left provoked 9/11 by making American pop culture so rotten that when it was exported it aroused the ire of straitlaced moralists like Osama bin Laden.
The problem with all of these analyses, whether from the Obamaite Left or the D’Souzaite Right, is that they completely ignore what underlies the shifting lists of grievances that the jihadists produce — and that is the jihad and Islamic supremacist imperative to subjugate unbelievers under the rule of Islamic law. This imperative that is not based on anything those unbelievers have done or not done, but solely upon their status as unbelievers. This imperative is rooted in the Qur’an (9:29), the Hadith (Sahih Muslim 4294) and Islamic jurisprudence (all the orthodox schools of Islamic law accept the principle that it is a responsibility of the Islamic community to wage war against unbelievers until they convert or submit). The contents of the grievance lists will change, but this will remain constant.
Yet virtually no one in public life dares even to face the fact of its existence.