By Dan O’Shea
Special to The Tampa Tribune
We need to stop fueling a false narrative about the enemy we face. The elephant in the room that no one is willing to talk about is the fact that the Islamic State and al-Qaida represent fundamental Islam to millions who follow the faith.
The White House and current leadership of the Democratic Party can’t even bring themselves to say the word “Islamic extremist” or “radical Muslim jihadist.”
In many regions, especially the Middle East, living according to strict Sharia (Islamic) law is widely accepted and supported. Traditional Islamic law is derived from the Quran and the Hadiths, the words and example set by the Prophet Muhammad. The world’s first Shia theocracy was established in Iran in 1979 after the overthrow of the Western-leaning Shah Reza Pahlavi. Article IV of its post-“revolution-” adopted constitution mandates “all civil, penal, financial, economic, administrative, cultural, military, political, and other laws and regulations must be based on Islamic criteria.”
Women are considered unequal to men under Iran’s legal code. In predominately Sunni Saudi Arabia, the birthplace of the religion and IS, it is not considered “extreme” or “radical” that women shouldn’t drive cars or open a bank account. Infidelity, drug trafficking and homosexuality are grounds for stoning, whipping, hanging (or being thrown off five-story buildings). Beheading is the sentence for apostasy — the death penalty for those who leave Islam.
Sadly, the two countries with the highest vote tally for “Making Sharia the Law of the Land” include Iraq at 91 percent and Afghanistan at 99 percent. These are the two countries where the United States has invested trillions of dollars and deployed hundreds of thousands of U.S. troops, diplomats and USAID aide workers — all to little avail and at tremendous cost and loss of life to the 1 percent of us who served trying to build representative governments.
Why? Basic democratic institutions — free will, free speech and free thought — are incompatible with the core tenets of Islam, which means submit to the will of Allah (God). The root word for Islam — “al-Slim” — means “surrender” or “submission” — there is no debate about this among Arabic or Islamic scholars.
Yes, overwhelmingly, most Muslims are good people, but only ones who hold moderate or secular views will fully embrace the individual freedoms the West offers rather than simply welfare and “Halal” (Arabic for permissible) food they will demand as refugees.
Do all Muslims embrace the 109 verses in the Quran that call for Muslims to go to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule? Of course not, but many do. Many commandments are quite graphic, with orders to chop off heads, fingers and to kill infidels wherever they are found.
Muslims who do not join the fight are considered hypocrites and apostates — Allah will send them to hell if they do not join in the slaughter.
We need to stop lying to ourselves that IS, AQ, Hamas, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood have nothing to do with Islam. According to them all, they are Islam, and quote from the Quran justifying their acts of terrorism.
If we are not willing to admit who and what inspires, educates and drives our enemy, we will never have a strategy that can defeat them. We are not at war with Islam, but elements within Islam are certainly at war with us. Until we accept these facts and not the fiction about with us. Until we accept these facts and not the fiction about a “religion of peace,” we will see another Paris 2015, Nairobi 2013, Mumbai 2008, London 2007, Madrid 2004 and 9/11 …
“If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles. If you know yourself but not the enemy, for every victory gained you will also suffer a defeat. If you know neither the enemy nor yourself, you will succumb in every battle.”
— Sun Tzu, The Art of War
Dan O’Shea is a former Navy SEAL commander who deployed frequently to the Middle East and Africa over the past two decades. He was the coordinator for the Hostage Working Group at the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad from 2004–06 and served as a counter-insurgency adviser for the commander of International Security Forces–Afghanistan from 2011-2012.1