Islam Needs an Intervention

France’s François Hollande and President Obama met Tuesday to come up with a strategy to defeat ISIS (0r ISIL, as Obama, for some coded reason, prefers to call it).

Defeat whom? Well, ISIL, stupid — those bad people who have hijacked a great religion.

But have they? Is that what really happened?  Why haven’t hundreds of thousands of over a billion Muslims whose religion has been hijacked taken to the streets in protest? Or even tens of thousands? Or thousands… or hundreds?

Well, okay, at least 30 Muslims from Bangladesh were protesting in Paris in a city with 224,000 of their faith.  They were chanting “Unite against brutality.” But unite with whom?

Dr. Zuhdi Jasser? Zuhdi, a friend of mine, is a fantastic human being but he seems to be the only “moderate Muslim” we ever see on television. Where are the others?

I’m not being facetious.  Where are they? Surely they exist, but they are curiously camera shy and in every other way. Are they frightened of ostracism… or perhaps they know something we don’t about their own religion? They take seriously its dictums about apostates.  Muslim organizations aren’t helpful either. CAIR spends all its time accusing anyone who criticizes Islam even slightly of “Islamophobia” [sic], when they’re not busy defending Hamas or Hezbollah.

The truth is nobody knows how many moderate Muslims there really are. We do know such things as, according to a recent poll, that about a third of the Syrian refugees do not want ISIS defeated. Twenty-five percent are even open to recruitment by the terror organization.  That’s a lot of people on a global level.

Yet our president and his putative successor Mrs. Clinton refuse to call the Islamic State Islamic or to link the I-word with terrorism, not even with the qualifier “radical.”

Without that we will never address ISIS or ISIL, because even if we snuff them out, their clone will reassert itself within months or even weeks or days under another name — and sooner or later with nuclear weapons. This is an ideology, not an organization, that must be destroyed. And a strategy that does not focus on that is not even the beginnings of a strategy. Failure to name Islam is tantamount to preserving Islamic terrorism in our lives and those of our children and our children’s children into the future.  Clinton and Obama are worse than cowards for not doing it, they are civilizationally suicidal. Obama’s linking the war on ISIS with his forthcoming climate change conference in Paris out-Orwells Orwell. It’s impossible to parody.

So what do we do?  How do we construct an actual strategy?

Think about a family.  When there’s a cousin addicted to crystal meth, what do you do?  Give him money for more or stage an intervention?  The latter obviously.  Only in this case the size of the intervention is huge,  almost incomprehensibly so.  But it is necessary. Otherwise, there is no reason to think it will ever stop.

How do you make an intervention so huge?  Well, obviously, you have to destroy ISIS military and totally.  But that, as I indicated, is only temporary. Beyond that, we have to launch a major ideological war. This will take allies in the Islamic world like Egypt’s al-Sisi, a man who says Islam needs reform but whom, not surprisingly, our president disdains.

Sharia law should be outlawed in the United States and in as many Western countries as possible since it is in direct contradistinction to Western values in its misogyny and homophobia.  Those from the Islamic world who seek to immigrate should be required to take classes explaining our values and why Sharia is unacceptable to us.  Otherwise they should not be admitted.  This may not work, but it is a start.

Above all, we must be honest with Muslims that their religion in its current form is unacceptable.  We cannot exist in a world where religion dominates society to the extent that there are no Jews and hardly any Christians living in the Arab or Persian countries anymore.  American leaders don’t have to threaten violence to make this clear.  They have to state it clearly to the Islamic world, especially to Saudi Arabia and Iran.  Instead of Obama’s approach, which was to apologize to Muslims, we must be honest with them.  They live, for the most part, in intolerant and primitive societies that endanger humanity. We must stop lying. They will not change until we do.