It's Not Just About Al-Qaeda

Mike L.

Barack Obama tells the world that al-Qaeda is the enemy of the United States, but that his administration killed Osama bin Laden and now has Qaeda on the ropes.  The good guys are winning, Obama would have us believe, and this is mainly due to his vigilance in protecting American lives.

The only problem with such assertions is that they represent complete and utter nonsense.  The enemy, to the extent that the US has enemies, is not merely Osama bin Laden's little band of cave dwellers, but political Islam, more generally.  Throughout the Arab and Muslim worlds it is the rise of political Islam that is the problem, not merely one small Islamist organization like al-Qaeda.

Political Islam is a fascistic movement that seeks to impose Sharia on local governments for the purpose of eventually installing a worldwide Islamic caliphate.  Under Sharia women are the property of men, Gay people are murdered outright, and Jews represent some sort-of transcendent, cosmic evil that must be either obliterated or subdued under the system of dhimmitude.  Some Islamists are "extreme" in the sense that they either advocate violence in the name of Islam or actually commit violence in the name of Islam.   These people represent a minority among Islamists.  The majority of Islamists would never dream of harming a lock of Jewish hair, but merely provide moral and intellectual and financial support to those who think that returning to 7th century standards of morality is just dandy and the Jews have it coming, anyway.

Political Islam, in its contemporary form, was born out of hostility toward modernity and western imperialism in 1920s Cairo.  It was then that the Muslim Brotherhood rose to power and the Brotherhood is the big daddy of most other Islamist groups.  Al-Qaeda was born from the Brotherhood, as was the Little Brotherhood in Gaza, i.e., Hamas.

Prior to the Obama administration political Islam was basically limited to the theocratic regime in Tehran and groups that harass Jews such as Hezbollah, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad.  Now, as a result of the misnamed "Arab Spring," political Islam is taking over country after country throughout the Middle East including, with direct assistance of the Obama administration, Egypt.

It is because Barack Obama, along with the rest of the progressive-left, refuses to acknowledge that political Islam is the enemy of the west, that Ambassador Stevens and his people were killed in Benghazi.  The real problem was not some youtube video, but Obama's disinclination to understand that Islamists are not, nor should be, partners with the United States.  The real problem is that because Obama does not understand this he turned US security in Benghazi over to our enemies.  That was the real problem, the real misperception, and it led directly to those murders.

What exactly did Obama think was going to happen if we turned over American security in Libya to precisely those people who have been telling us for a nearly a century that they want nothing so much as to see us dead?  In Iraq the US diplomatic corps is protected by the marines.  In Libya the US diplomatic corps was protected by the ideological brethren of Osama bin Laden.

And that's why Ambassador Stevens is dead.  He and his people were killed by Barack Obama's ideological incoherence.  One cannot oppose al-Qaeda while supporting Qaeda's parent organization, the Brotherhood.  One cannot oppose al-Qaeda yet refuse to acknowledge that Qaeda is just one small group among many ideologically related organizations throughout the Muslim and Arab world.

The problem is not merely al-Qaeda.

The problem is political Islam and this precisely what neither the Obama administration, nor the political left, can bring themselves to face.

{In truth, it could hardly be more obvious.}