Andrew C. McCarthy's Blog, page 65

Libya Commentary

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

In this morning's column, I argue against intervention in Libya's internal strife -- a battle proponents of intervention portray as the incorrigibly terrorist anti-American Qaddafi regime (known up until about 10 minutes ago as a staunch U.S. anti-terror ally) versus the "rebels" (the term used to obscure the fact that Qaddafi's opposition includes the Muslim Brotherhood and other anti-American Islamists). I've been following the commentary with interest, including NRO's excellent symposium this morning and the characteristically thoughtful commentary of folks like Daniel Pipes, Bill Kristol, Pete Wehner, Richard Perle, and Bret Stephens -- all of whom appear to favor intervention, some more tepidly than others. Three points about some of the main pro-intervention arguments:

1. Proponents point repeatedly to what Michael Rubin describes as "President Bush's 1991 decision to stand idle as Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein crushed the Shiite revolt," a decision that Michael -- like Bret Stephens and Josh Muravchik, to cite just two -- argues that we are still paying for. I don't see Libya as comparable to Iraq in 1991.

The shameful aspect of the latter was that the Bush 41 administration actively encouraged the Iraqi people to rise up and overthrow a dictator who was then a clear enemy of the U.S. (indeed, one we had just driven out of Kuwait). By contrast, we haven't done anything whatsoever to urge Libyans to overthrow Qaddafi. There is no similar implied moral obligation. If anything, we have spent the last several years discouraging Qaddafi's opposition by reinventing him as a statesman, providing him with a modest amount of foreign aid, contributing to charities controlled by his family, and encouraging U.S. businesses to "partner" with his regime. Those were all stupid things to do, to be sure. But the relevant point is that, from the perspective of what the "rebels" could fairly infer from U.S. conduct, Qaddafi 2011 is not Saddam 1991. We haven't done anything to incite a Libyan revolt; Libyans decided to do that themselves, and we don't owe them any help. How much, if any, effort and sacrifice we ought to make on their behalf depends strictly on how American interests are affected. 

2. Another increasingly popular contention is that because President Obama has made a public declaration that Qaddafi must go, we must make good on this pronouncement for the sake of American credibility -- a point stressed by John Hannah, Jamie Fly, and Elliott Abrams, among others. But Obama and his administration make a lot of fitful, incoherent, contradictory, and empty pronouncements (on which, see Michael Ledeen today at Pajamas). By the logic of their argument, Messers. Hannah, Fly, and Abrams should have rallied behind the teetering Egyptian regime, since the administration wagered America's credibility on propping up Mubarak before the president jabbed a moistened finger in the breeze and finally decided the dictator had to go. And Mr. Obama clearly decided that Iranians did not rate our support against their monstrous regime because that would have disturbed the strategy of negotiations and "mutual respect" behind which the president decided to stack American credibility -- should we support that one, too?

It is very unfortunate to have a president who, when not careening from one position to the next, is apologizing for America's alleged sins rather than pursuing America's interests. That, however, is an argument for electing a new president, not for rallying to his side when, like the proverbial broken clock, he inevitably says something that pleases you. Being militarily proactive in Qaddafi's ouster is either a good or a bad idea on its own merits; the case is not advanced by an American credibility argument rooted in what President Obama happens to be saying today -- he's apt to be saying something very different tomorrow.

3. The suggestion that the "rebels" must be armed so they can at least have a fair fight with Qaddafi's forces is also popping up with increasing frequency -- including in the symposium from Messrs. Abrams, Fly, Hannah, Muravchik, and Benjamin Weinthal; and while David Pryce-Jones thinks the anti-Qaddafi forces are "doomed" because of the "West's inertia," he argues that we should have armed them "if they so demanded" while it still mattered. I must respectfully disagree. The United States has a checkered history of arming murkily described Muslim "rebels" who turn out to be Islamists. We need to know exactly who we're helping before we plunge ahead.

It is fair enough to contend that the upside of bleeding the Soviets was worth the price in Afghanistan -- even though we are still dealing with the fallout, which includes having reinforced the ties between Pakistani intelligence and Qaeda-tied jihadists, both of which still menace us. But Clinton's gambit in the former Yugoslavia included looking the other way while Iran armed the Bosnian Muslims, set up a jihadist network on the doorstep of Western Europe, and set in motion the chain of events that led to the U.S.-supported creation of a Muslim state, Kosovo -- one of whose nationals last week killed two American airmen and wounded two others in Germany while screaming Allahu Akbar. (For more on Kosovo and the jihad, see Caroline Glick and Melanie Phillips.) How much goodwill did we buy from the ummah by coming down so decisively against their Serbian tormentors?

I appreciate and respect the desire to strike against Qaddafi. As Ray Ibrahim says, that he "is an anti-American and tyrannical thug, there is no doubt." But the Taliban and Saddam Hussein were collaborating against us with Islamist terrorists when we acted to remove them, and Iran has empowered those same terrorists and killed many Americans while we have opted to give the mullahs a pass. At the moment we are not threatened by Libya, Qaddafi's successors could end up being just as bad or worse for us, and there is no empirical reason to believe aiding beleaguered Muslims earns us any gratitude from Muslims or security from Muslim terrorists. There is nothing for us in Libya.

No Intervention in Libya

In the absence of compelling national-security interests, we should stay out.

I am against intervention in Libya. In explaining why, four things about the ongoing commentary and handwringing over no-fly zones and other potential U.S. intrusions seem noteworthy.

First are the sudden torrents of disdain for Muammar Qaddafi by commentators who spent the Bush years saying this very same terrorist --- who even then was repressing the very same opposition he is fighting now --- was a great ally of the United States against terrorism. I carry no brief for Qaddafi; I thought it was reprehensible for our government to try to launder him into a statesman, much like Clinton did with Arafat. But given that this strategy only tightened Qaddafi’s grip on power, it’s a bit much for us suddenly to be told that we are now under a moral obligation to oust him. Some proponents of intervention add, “He must answer for Flight 103.” Why didn’t he need to be removed and answer for Flight 103 some time between 2003 and 2008?

#ad#Second is the studied effort to avoid addressing who the Libyan opposition is. As in Egypt, the main opposition is the Muslim Brotherhood --- avowed enemies of the West whose goal is the establishment of sharia states. The National Front for the Salvation of Libya is also a largely Islamist opposition group --- one that was stronger until many of its Islamist members split off because they objected to the group’s acceptance of U.S. support in the 1980s. There are other Islamist and leftist groups, including violent jihadists. Moreover, Libya is virulently anti-Israeli, and a disturbing anti-Semitism courses through the opposition. (See this Pajamas report, as well as this post by Andrew Bostom on the history of anti-Semitism in Libya.) Whatever regime comes after Qaddafi is likely to be anti-Western, anti-American, and anti-Israeli. That doesn’t mean such a regime might not be marginally better than Qaddafi, but it does affect how much we ought to care and how much effort we ought to expend to hasten the post-Qaddafi era.

Third, reading my friend Pete Wehner’s post on Contentions today, I have to say that proponents of the “Freedom Agenda” continue to misstate the position of their critics. Pete quotes George Will’s observation --- now apparently reconsidered --- that Condi Rice was “quite right” in condemning the “enormous condescension in saying that somehow the Arab world is just not up to democracy.” She is actually quite wrong. No serious person I know is saying Muslims aren’t up to democracy (and what we’re talking about here is a Muslim issue more than an Arab issue). This is not a question of ignorance or incompetence. They understand the principles of our democracy. They just don’t want them. Any democracy worth promoting is a democracy that runs afoul of key sharia-law principles. Muslims don’t want our democracy because they believe their civilization --- including its law and desired political structure --- is superior. I think they are terribly wrong about that, but it’s a considered choice and one that is theirs to make. What’s condescending is to insist that we know better than they do what’s good for them.

Fourth, along related lines, one would have hoped we’d grasp by now that a big part of our problem in Iraq and Afghanistan is that much of Islam regards Western invaders as occupiers against whom jihad has to be waged until they are driven out of Muslim countries. That is not merely an al-Qaeda position. It is a mainstream Muslim position. These Islamic principles counsel Muslims not to side with non-Muslims against other Muslims. They are virulently opposed to efforts to plant Western ideas and institutions in Islamic countries. It doesn’t matter to these millions of Muslims that we think we are doing humanitarian work and helping to improve Muslim lives. It is astonishing, after all that has been said and suffered the last ten years, that these very basic points continue to be missed --- particularly by people who purport to be so worried that terrorist recruitment swells because of policies like indefinite detention and military commissions. What really increases terrorist recruitment is invading Muslim countries, killing Muslims there, and staying to try to build Western democracies.

We should be having as little to do with Islamic countries as practicality allows, not getting ourselves ever more entangled --- at least absent compelling national-security reasons. Such reasons are not evident in Libya.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Jonah v. Dr. K on Gitmo

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

I just watched the clip of the discussion between Jonah and Charles Krauthammer on Bret Baier's Fox panel last night. I come away unpersuaded by Charles's argument.

Jonah says he "smells a rat" in the Obama administration's announcement that military commission trials will continue but that the president remains committed to his 2008 campaign promises to try terrorist detainees in civilian court and to shutter Gitmo. Charles counters that the announcement is actually a "complete capitulation." Since, on its face, the announcement clearly is not a complete capitulation, Charles might as well have said he "smells a rat," too -- like Jonah (and the 9/11 families, and me, for that matter) he doesn't believe the administration means what it says. 

So the narrow disagreement is over what Obama is lying about. Charles says the lie is obvious: the nod to Obama's 2008 promises is just a "cover" -- a case of "saying what they have to say" -- in order to avoid further embarrassing themselves with a straightforward concession that Gitmo will not close and any further legal proceedings will be under military, rather than civilian, justice. It is all over, says Charles, who expresses confidence that 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed will die at Gitmo.

That, however, dodges Jonah's main point. Like Jonah, I think the administration remains committed to doing civilian trials, including for KSM and his 9/11 accomplices. But it realizes that the politics are very much against this right now -- trying to do it would wound Obama's reelection hopes, perhaps fatally. Even in blue, blue Manhattan, the public rose up against the notion of a civilian trial for the 9/11 jihadists. And remember that when Scott Brown won Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in blue, blue Massachusetts, his campaign marveled at how much traction he got from arguing that terrorists should be treated like military enemies rather than defendants.

So what best suits Obama now is a holding pattern, in which -- without any apparent shame -- he takes advantage of yet another Bush counterterrorism tactic he once decried: indefinite detention of enemy combatants under the laws of war. The fact is, the administration does not have to do anything with the most notorious detainees. As a strict legal matter, the war (in particular, the congressional authorization to use military force) is not going to end before November 2012, so the administration can continue detaining the terrorists. There is, moreover, no political support for Obama's desire to close Gitmo and bring the detainees into U.S. prisons. That's not going to change before election time either, so that point won't be pressed.

The president might be vulnerable if there is a sense that he is completely ignoring the detainees. The 9/11 families, for one, will keep that issue on the radar. So the administration is taking the next step that follows logically from its previous sleight of hand. Recall that though Obama campaigned against military commissions and suspended them upon taking office, he did not forswear them -- he said he would "study" them. He then signed 2009 legislation purporting to improve them. That is, he preserved the option of commissions as a gesture to the Right -- an empty gesture, as it predictably turned out, even though some were claiming capitulation then just as Charles is now. For the Left, Obama tweaked the process a bit -- nothing of substance but a few cosmetic changes so he could pretend they were no longer those bad Bush commissions. More significantly from the Left's perspective, Obama didn't use these "new" commissions, so he could claim he hadn't really sold out.

There was an exception: Omar Khadr, the now 24-year-old who was 15 when he murdered one American soldier and maimed another. But that was an exception the Left could only love -- and let's not forget that, during the Bush years, Jennifer Daskal, now an Obama Justice Department official who works on detainee issues, was among Khadr's biggest advocates (while she was working at Human Rights Watch). Khadr was permitted to plead guilty in a military commission sweetheart deal in which he ostensibly got a mere eight-year sentence that is likely to become a two-year sentence once he is repatriated to Canada in the next few months.

That is, the Obama administration has learned that keeping the commission system isn't so bad. It can use the system to strike plea deals that will allow it to say, with a straight face, that it used military justice to prosecute terrorists. Yet, the bottom line of those prosecutions will be to hasten the repatriation of those terrorists to other countries -- thinning out the Gitmo population -- even if past experience tells us that released detainees return to the jihad at alarming rates.

What the Obama administration won't do is try the most notorious detainees by military commission. If, as Charles suggests, the administration's announcement is a complete capitulation, what should happen next, as Jonah said, is very clear. Right now, today, the administration should reinstate the commission against KSM and the other 9/11 plotters. Recall, in January 2009, these guys were ready to plead guilty. The only thing that hadn't happened was the commission trial -- there had been three years of hard work, involving the dissemination of thousands of pages of discovery and full briefing on about a hundred motions for the military court to decide. It would be a very simple matter to get that commission back on track and bring it to a swift conclusion.

Don't hold your breath. The Obama dream of trying KSM in civilian court may never be realized -- if I had to bet, I'd bet against it. But I wouldn't bet the ranch. There are people in the Obama administration -- including the president himself, the attorney general, many top DOJ officials, top State Department officials, and others -- for whom trying the 9/11 case in civilian court is an imperative. No, they are not going to wreck the 2012 campaign over it, but neither are they surrendering. They are biding their time, hoping that if the president is reelected there might be a window of opportunity -- when everyone is exhausted from the bruising campaign and both parties are doing the familiar "new era of good bipartisan feeling" dance -- to move the detainees into civilian court, and maybe even to close Gitmo and transfer the detainees to U.S. jails.

If Obama were completely capitulating, it would have been easy to satisfy the 9/11 families in Monday's White House briefing. The administration could have told them that a military commission against KSM would proceed quickly. Instead, White House briefers dodged the questions -- and pointedly reaffirmed their commitment to civilian trials.

Moreover, though nothing makes our thin-skinned president bristle more than comparisons to President Bush, Mr. Obama invited just such a comparison when he issued a Bushian signing statement upon endorsing the defense appropriations bill. He held himself up to this ridicule because he reckoned it a price worth paying to convey the message that he remains adamant about closing Gitmo, transferring the detainees into the U.S., and giving them civilian trials. And even when embassy bomber Ahmed Ghailani was recently acquitted on 284 of 285 counts, the administration went into overdrive to spin the civilian trial as a great success (the terrorist having been given a life sentence on the single count of conviction). All of these signs point in one direction: Even though they realize the political stars may not align for civilian prosecutions, the Obama administration is not going away without a fight. They are not capitulating on this any more than Scott Brown's victory made them capitulate on Obamacare though Obamacare was about as unpopular as the prospect of a KSM civilian trial is.  

This is where I think Charles evaded Jonah's main point. Dr. K says KSM will die in Gitmo. I think that's probably right. But that doesn't mean he will die because he was convicted and executed (or sentenced to life-imprisonment) after a military commission trial authorized by President Obama.

The more likely scenario is that Obama keeps KSM & Co. on ice at Gitmo -- indefinite detention under the laws of war -- through November 2012. At that point, either the new Republican president will finally authorize a commission trial or the reelected President Obama, no longer concerned about the political fall-out, will take another run at closing Gitmo and trying any remaining detainees in civilian court. Obama probably would not succeed: Chances are the GOP will be in control of both houses of Congress and even more firmly committed to blocking the transfer of detainees into the U.S. But that still wouldn't mean Obama would say "uncle." More likely, he would continue detaining KSM & Co. without trial through 2016, at which point it would be some other president's problem.

Does Charles really think this week's announcement was such a complete capitulation that we are going to be seeing a raft of military commission trials for the most atrocious detainees, including KSM? I'd be surprised if he does.

Obama Subterfuge on Military Commissions Angers 9/11 Families

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

At 9/11 Families for a Safe & Strong America, Tim Sumner has the low-down on yesterday's hastily arranged dog-and-pony show during which White House briefers told the 9/11 families that military commissions would be re-started ... but not against the 9/11 plotters. Basically, the plan is to do nothing (except, I reckon, take a few guilty pleas from some of the less notorious detainees, which will facilitate their extradition to some gateway back to the jihad). Otherwise, the administration will continue blaming Congress for a stalemate -- lawmakers having taken the position, overwhelmingly supported by the public, that enemy combatant terrorists should not be brought into the U.S. and given all the rights of American citizens in civilian trials. It is, as I said yesterday, a cynical strategy to create the illusion of movement while making the issue disappear for purposes of the 2012 election. It could work, but I doubt it -- there's a lot of time between now and then, and it's foolish to think events won't supersede these calculations.

Re: Good News about Gitmo ...?

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Dan, I understand it is bad news about Gitmo, masquerading as good news. The administration apparently not only dodged questions about trying KSM and his fellow 9/11 plotters; the White House briefers stressed that the president is still committed to using civilian courts for the trials of enemy combatants, and to pressing Congress to end restrictions on bringing the enemy combatants here for trial.

This is just a song-and-dance to try to skirt the issue until the 2012 elections are over. We are given the illusion of movement on commissions, but nothing really happens so the Lefties are happy.

Re: re: Okay, One More Thing

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Dan, I think the fact that about 40 of those 50 years were spent seeking an end to a particular totalitarian regime skews the figures on Kevin Smart's claim (and I'd note that he wrote it in mid-2002, before the invasion of Iraq and while the Afghan mission was still principally about hunting down al-Qaeda and its Taliban enablers). Given the Cold War, and the fact that the totalitarian Soviet regime spawned various Soviet totalitarian satellites that we were also trying to defeat, how could anyone deny that during the half-century prior to mid-2002, conservatives had generally favored a foreign policy of seeking to end totalitarian regimes?

Still, acknowledging this to be true, and agreeing that we should both oppose totalitarianism and promote real Western liberalism, are a good distance from saying we should seek to end totalitarian regimes by militarily invading and occupying countries until they form something we think (or at least some think) approximates democracy. Supporting those countries in establishing constitutions that establish Islam as the state religion and install sharia as a principal source of law is not a prescription for ending totalitarianism; it is instead the substitution of one form of totalitarianism with another that we hope will be less draconian.

Moreover, the prohibitive cost in blood and treasure of these exercises, coupled with the small (or non-existent) return in increased U.S. security, makes it less likely that we will deploy our military when we really should. That is, if nation-building is now to be understood as part of the price-tag for military interventions, the inevitable result will be that we refrain from intervening in some instances when we should intervene. That is a boon for totalitarianism, not a way of ending totalitarianism.

Re: Con-Fusion

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Dan, I don't want to wade into a debate over the meaning of "fusion" since I couldn't add anything to what Derb and Jonah have said. On point 2 of your revise-and-extend post, however, I would contend that there is a big difference between, on the one hand, favoring vigorous prosecution of the "War on Terror and its adjunct in Iraq," and, on the other hand, favoring what you call "the fusionist position (as advocated in the pages of National Review) that the success of liberty at home depends, to a certain extent, on the success of liberty abroad."

I believe that our national security calls for eradicating jihadist cells wherever they target the U.S. (i.e., regardless of what country they operate in) and that we should also treat terror-sponsoring regimes as enemies, working for their removal by whatever means best suits our interests. That, to me, would be the correct prosecution of the Bush Doctrine as it was announced right after 9/11. I most certainly do not believe that the success of liberty at home depends on the success of liberty abroad.

The "freedom at home depends on freedom abroad" claim is an unproven and counterfactual theory that the Bush Doctrine unfortunately evolved into for reasons I've been discussing here for a number of years. I appreciate that some of my NR colleagues (and many of my fellow conservatives) are more sympathetic to the Bush "freedom agenda" than I am, but I've never understood the freedom theory to state NR's editorial position. If, as you say, it states some sort of fusionist position, then consider me an anti-fusionist. I'm all for promoting our principles as an example to other countries, but it is not in our national interests to try to sow them into other countries through large-scale, resource-intensive nation-building efforts -- especially in a culture which regards such efforts as hostile acts of occupation and civilizational war, even if we don't mean them that way. 

I do not think, in any event, that this freedom theory states a position that is generally regarded as conservative. The argument that we should strongly defend ourselves against alien enemies who want to kill Americans is certainly a conventional conservative position. The argument that this defense should be accomplished by attempting to spread democracy throughout the Muslim world is not a conservative claim, though it is made by a number of people who surely are conservatives on many issues. 

Jean-Jacques Jihad

There is a reason leftists and Islamists collaborate: totalitarianism.

The one thing that absolutely could not be tolerated was true freedom, the liberty of the individual. For Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the “social compact” would otherwise be “an empty formula.” The irreducible core of the utopia he envisioned, the “undertaking which alone can give force to the rest,” was quite simply this: “Whoever refuses to obey the general will shall be compelled to do so by the whole body.”

Ah, yes, the “general will.” For this, every modern totalitarian movement is indebted to the 18th-century Genevan philosopher who claimed, in The Social Contract, that a man’s compulsory servitude to the state -- the embodiment of this general will -- “means nothing less than that he will be forced to be free.” Rousseau was what we today call “Orwellian” long before there was an Orwell. “Freedom” was nothing more than submission.

That is why Rousseau so admired Islam.

#ad#The history of Islam and the modern Left is one of cooperation when there is some obstacle to their divergent concepts of “social justice” and the perfect society. These are always marriages of convenience, enduring no longer than the enemy that drives them into each other’s arms. But, reliably, it is they -- the Islamists and the leftists -- who come together when there is a third party in the mix. Rarely will one collude with a common enemy against the other. Today, the common enemy of Islamists and leftists is individual liberty, especially the social, economic, and political freedom guaranteed by the American Constitution, as conceived by the Framers. Conceived, that is, by men who saw government as a necessary evil to be rigorously limited lest it devour true freedom -- not as an essential good to be empowered for the very purpose of enforcing servitude.

Collaborations between Islamists and leftists -- past examples and those happening right before our eyes -- are numerous, so much so that I admit to being dumbfounded by the frequency of the question of whether they really happen. That there is collusion is undeniable.

That collusion is a major theme of my book The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America -- “grand jihad” and “sabotage” being the Islamists’ own terms for what they describe as their plan to “destroy Western civilization.” By the time the book was published last spring, the Center for Constitutional Rights, a New Left flagship created by radical lawyer William Kunstler in the 1960s, had spent nearly a decade spearheading the representation of jihadists captured making war against the United States. The Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) -- whose founders were ardent admirers of Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood, and whose current executive director said, right after the 9/11 attacks, that “we should put the State of Israel on the suspect list” -- was at the forefront of Islamist organizations then campaigning for the enactment of Obamacare, when MPAC wasn’t otherwise occupied by the numerous executive-branch agencies that regularly seek its input on any number of issues.

This should have been no surprise, for history is littered with Islamist/leftist confederations -- e.g., the Muslim Brotherhood’s support of the military coup led by Soviet puppet Gamal Abdel Nasser to overthrow the British-backed Egyptian monarchy; the avowed “Islamic socialism” of the Pakistan People’s Party; the blend of Islamists and leftists that has always composed the Palestine Liberation Organization. Let’s say that this hadn’t been the case, though. Let’s pretend that the last 30 years hadn’t seen everything from Iranian Communists rallying to support Khomeini’s revolution to last summer’s “peace flotilla,” a joint effort by Islamist operatives and avowed Communists such as Bill Ayers to break Israel’s blockade of Hamas-controlled Gaza. The everyday cooperation between Islamists and leftists right under our noses would still be manifest.

The interesting question is not whether it occurs, but why. To anyone who studies the matter, as the liberty-loving Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser has, the Islamist enthusiasm for statist schemes like Obamacare is easy to decode. Islamist organizations are collectivist groups, Dr. Jasser explains. They fall squarely in line with the socialist platform of the Muslim Brotherhood, which is, as Dr. Jasser puts it, to “increase the power of government through entitlement programs, increased taxation, and restricting free markets whenever and wherever possible.” That platform is the legacy of Brotherhood founder Hassan al-Banna and of Sayyid Qutb, the Brotherhood’s most formidable theoretician. Decades after their deaths, both these men remain required reading for budding Islamist activists in Brotherhood-inspired redoubts like the Muslim Student Association, the Islamic Society of North America, and the International Institute of Islamic Thought.

An animating goal of these organizations is to have Islamic principles recognized by government and enforced through the state’s coercive power. These principles needn’t be known as “Islamic” any more than leftist pieties are advertised as “leftist.” They need only reflect what Islamists, like leftists, call “social justice.”

#page#This is perhaps most clearly illustrated in Qutb’s tract, Social Justice in Islam. The book teaches that Islam is about the collective, and that those who resist the Muslim ummah must, as Rousseau would have said, be “forced to be free.” According to Qutb, “integrating” humanity in “an essential unity” under sharia is “a prerequisite for true and complete human life, even justifying the use of force against those who deviate from it, so that those who wander from the true path may be brought back to it.” The overarching principle is the “interdependence and solidarity of mankind,” with the individual’s well-being achieved by his submission to the Islamic state. And “whoever has lost sight of this principle must be brought back to it by any means.” Thus, Qutb elaborates, sharia makes “unbelief” a “crime” that is “reckoned as equal in punishment” to the “crime of murder.” Forms of treason such as apostasy and fomenting discord in the ummah are capital offenses. As in all totalitarian systems, freedom is an illusion: security through enslavement.

#ad#Thus is Islam virulently opposed to capitalism, true freedom’s economic form. Qutb expounds on Islamic economic tenets: Human life is demeaned by great agglomerations of personal wealth and by the enrichment financiers attain by collecting interest on loans (which sharia forbids). These arrangements are said to enslave debtors and the working classes, making men the gods of other men. To be sure, Islam endorses private property -- nominally -- and it is less indifferent than the Left about incentivizing human achievement. But this is only because individual achievement is ultimately a corporate asset, increasing the dominance of the ummah. The property “owner” is merely a custodian; his wealth belongs to Allah. It is subject to confiscation by Allah’s agent on earth, the Islamic state, for what is deemed to be the collective good of the Muslim Nation.

This is Islam’s version of the general will: sharia’s enforcement of the central conceit that there is no God but Allah. Freedom, for Qutb, was a release from the servitude of men to men. Not, however, a release from all servitude. Freedom was “submission” to Allah -- and not just spiritual submission, but total submission. Authority in Islam is unitary and indivisible. It recognizes no distinctions between the sacred and the secular. Sharia is not simply a set of spiritual principles. Islam is a comprehensive political, economic, social, and military program with its own legal code, governing every aspect of life.

There can be no compartmentalizing or narrowing. To narrow the breadth of sharia -- as Qutb put it, “to confine Islam to the emotions and ritual cycles, and to bar it from participating in the activity of life, and to check its complete dominance over every human secular activity” -- would reduce it to something other than the divine law. It would no longer be Islam. Therefore, mankind is not at liberty to constrict Allah’s law, much less to enact provisions that contradict it. Legislatures in the Islamic state are not democratic in the Western sense, even if they have been elected by the community. In a sharia state, as Brotherhood guide Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi has observed, legislators don’t really legislate; they are merely vessels of the divine law, which has substantially been set in stone for more than a millennium.

In Islam, it is Allah’s sharia that fills the role of Rousseau’s general will. Thus did Qutb observe of Rousseau’s great upheaval, the French Revolution, that what it “theoretically established by human laws . . . was established as a matter of practice by Islam in a profound and elevated form more than fourteen centuries earlier.”

Such symmetry had not been lost on Rousseau, for whom statism would be the “religion of the citizen.” Above all, it would merge the sacred and the secular under a single authority. As in the pagan states of antiquity, Rousseau’s vision of the ideal regime included

its gods, its own tutelary patrons; it has its dogmas, its rites, and its external cult prescribed by law; outside the single nation that follows it, all the world is in its sight infidel, foreign and barbarous; the duties and rights of man extend for it only as far as its own altars.

The similarity to Qutb’s Islam is striking. For the Islamist, all the world is divided into irreconcilable spheres: the perfect social justice of Dar al-Islam, the realm of the Muslims, and the unenlightened darkness so tellingly called Dar al-Harb, “the realm of war” -- infidel, foreign, and barbarous.

Small wonder, then, that Rousseau lavished praise on Islam. But not just any Islam; his accolades were reserved for the early Muslims, Islam’s first generations. “Mahomet held very sane views,” Rousseau opined in The Social Contract. The prophet “linked his political system well together,” the civil and the spiritual as one. “As long as the form of his government continued under the caliphs who succeeded him, that government was indeed one, and so far good.” It was only when “the Arabs” departed from this model -- when, “having grown prosperous, lettered, civilised, slack and cowardly,” they were “conquered by barbarians” -- that Islam fell victim to what Rousseau (and Qutb) saw as the Christian dystopia: “the division between the two powers” of religion and the state.

The Muslim Brotherhood, it bears remembering, preaches a Salafist ideology: a retrenchment to the principles of the salafia, the “rightly guided caliphs” who were Mohammed’s immediate successors. The reform of Islam urged by Banna and Qutb was a purge of the same barbaric influences -- particularly Western, Judeo-Christian influences -- that Rousseau had seen as so corrupting.

Islamists and leftists have several significant differences. Qutb saw communism as far preferable to capitalism but too obsessed with an economic determinism that discounted the spiritual. The two camps part company on the equality of women and of non-Muslims, on matters of sexual liberty, and on abortion. If the world were populated only by Islamists and leftists, they could not coexist. Their marriages of convenience can have savagely unhappy endings once the common enemy that has drawn them together has been overcome. In Egypt, the Islamists were brutally persecuted by Nasser; in Iran, the secular leftists were routed by Khomeini.

Nevertheless, for all their differences, what unites Islamists and leftists is stronger than what presently divides them. They both support totalitarian systems. They would both attempt to recreate mankind, intending to perfect us by indenturing us to their utopian schemes. Their general will cannot abide free will. They both abhor individual liberty, unfettered reason, freedom of conscience, equality of opportunity rather than result, and bourgeois values that inculcate a devotion to bedrock Western principles and traditions.

That is why Islamists and leftists work together. It is why they will continue working together as long as there is resistance.

—  Andrew C. McCarthy, a senior fellow at the National Review Institute, is the author, most recently, of The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America.

Andrew C. McCarthy

Last stray Loughner indictment thought

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

Section 245 of Title 18, U.S. Code, is the civil rights provision that the Justice Department relies on for its extravagant theory that state crimes can be turned into federal crimes by declaring that some protected federal activity is ongoing. I can't help but notice that it is the same statute that protects voters and poll-watchers from intimidation by the likes of the New Black Panther Party. 

Why is the Justice Department using a statute so dubiously to invent new federal crimes while ignoring an obvious violation of the very same statute?

Need I ask?

A not so simple declarative sentence

Author: 
Andrew C. McCarthy

If I can wade for a second into the discussion Jonah and Mike are having about Snyder v. Phelps, Mike's allusion to the simple declarative sentence that "Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech" reminded me that it's never been quite so simple, and it has always had several well worn exceptions.

Having convicted people of soliciting acts of violence, urged that terrorist incitement ought to be vigorously prosecuted, called for action against people (including journalists) who leak classified information, and poked fun at the Supreme Court's absurd fear (in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition (2002)) that prohibiting kiddie porn might mean Romeo and Juliet couldn't be presented anymore, I've spent more time than I'd like to remember on the complexities of free expression. But grappling with where the lines are also makes it easier to appreciate how noxious are things like the foreign persecutions of Geert Wilders, Mark Steyn, Oriana Fallaci and others who have been put on trial for speaking forcefully and in good faith about vital public issues only to be deprived of truth as a defense; similarly execrable are the "libel tourism" effort to extort journalists into silence about Saudi ties to terrorism, the Organization of the Islamic Conference's attempts to ban critical examination of Islam, and the Obama administration's co-sponsoring (with Egypt) of a UN resolution to criminalize speech that could provoke hostility against religion 

In any event, we went around on these questions a few months back when the Wikileaks story broke. With some guidance from Ed Whelan and Judge Bork, I posted the following, and I think it's relevant:

 I’ve always taken the language of the First Amendment’s free speech clause — “Congress shall make no law … abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press” — to be more sweeping than the freedom it was understood to convey. That’s why I said, probably too off-handedly [in an earlier post], that “the First Amendment has never been understood to mean what it says.” I don’t agree with [University of Chicago] Prof. [Geoffrey] Stone’s argument that it was an aspirational provision meant to evolve with the times. But I also don’t think limitations on speech that were well known in the late 18th Century (e.g., obscenity, profanity, libel, ”fighting words”) were well conveyed by the free speech clause.

As usual, Ed Whelan to the rescue. Ed points out to me that the clause does not forbid Congress from abridging freedom of speech generally — as if there were no conceivable restrictions. The framers took pains to insert the definite article the — barring Congress from “abridging the freedom of speech.” It seems like a small difference, but it is not. As Ed puts it, “the freedom of speech” was an “understood set of rights” at the time of the First Amendment’s adoption. In other words, the text of the First Amendment does not prohibit all restrictions on speech. It merely prohibits abridgment of “the freedom of speech.”  The question with respect to any speech restriction, therefore, is whether what it restricts is part of “the freedom of speech.” 

Ed’s point is consistent with Judge Bork’s argument in Slouching Towards Gomorrah. Excerpting from the Supreme Court’s 1942 decision in Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, Judge Bork points out that

[t]here are certain well-defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or “fighting” words — those which by their very utterance inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

As always, I am indebted to Ed and to Judge Bork, not only for the lesson in originalism but for the happy reminder that, as late as 1942, the Supreme Court assumed the existence of both truth and a social interest in order and morality!