Their Goal: Replacing the Constitution with Shari'a

[Adam's Apple]

Bush Declares War on Radical Islam
by Daniel Pipes, New York Sun
October 11, 2005

A courageous speech by George W. Bush last week began a new era in what he calls the "war on terror." To comprehend its full significance requires some background. Islamists (supporters of radical Islam) began their war on the United States in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini took power in Iran and later that year his supporters seized the American embassy in Tehran.

For the next 22 years, however, Americans thought they faced merely a criminal problem and failed to see that war had been declared on them. For example, in 1998, when Islamists attacked two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Washington responded by unleashing detectives, arresting the perpetrators, taking them to New York, assigning them defense lawyers, then convicting and jailing them.

The second era began on September 11, 2001. That evening, Mr. Bush declared a "war against terrorism" and the U.S. government promptly went into war mode, for example, by passing the USA Patriot Act. Though welcoming this shift, I during four years criticized the notion of making war on a military tactic, finding this euphemistic, inaccurate, and obstructive. Instead, I repeatedly called on the president to start a third era by acknowledging that the war is against radical Islam.

Bush did occasionally mention radical Islam – in fact, as early as nine days after 9/11 – but not with enough frequency or detail to change perceptions. The British prime minister, Tony Blair also advanced the discussion in July, when, after the London transport bombings, he focused on "a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam."

But the third era truly began on October 6 with Mr. Bush's speech to the National Endowment for Democracy. He not only gave several names to the force behind terrorism ("Some call this evil Islamic radicalism; others, militant Jihadism; still others, Islamo-fascism"), but he provided ample details. In particular, he:

for full article
www.danielpipes.org/article/3026

 

[Annie]

Excellent Adam's. I agree that was probably the most important part of the speech, I just wish he had identified this problem in clear terms, 3 1/2 years ago. Nevertheless, it was important that he did so now.

 

[CSM]

May be a case of too little too late ... I expect that Muslim leaders will shortly declare Bush an evil being (again); the terrorists will use this as an example of American hatred (supposed) for anything Islamic and loudly skew it so it fits into the propaganda machine; and the US PC crowd (as well as liberals) will soon be braying loudly about how this will create more terrorists. Not to mention the MSM will barrage us with examples of right wing evangelical extremists among the Christian religions. I wouldn't be surprised if the EU, ACLU, and DNC condemn the speech all together.