Order Jamie Glazov’s new book, ‘United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny, Terror, and Hamas’: HERE.
Donald Trump’s greatest triumph arguably has been his handling of long-standing foreign policy problems previous presidents were unable or unwilling to solve. In the Wall Street Journal recently, Walter Russell Mead noted that Trump recently defanged the long-term global miscreant Venezuela president Nicolás Maduro, who is now awaiting trial in a Yankee jail for his assaults on our national interests and security.
That was just Venezuela’s latest aggression against the U.S. As Mead adds, “Caracas had been a headache for American presidents ever since Hugo Chávez put Venezuela on the road to ruin back in 1999 . . . Even as economic decline drove floods of refugees across its frontiers and the marriage of its government with drug cartels worsened the drug crisis, Venezuela subsidized late-socialist Cuba and became a haven for Russian and Iranian enemies of the U.S.”
“To these problems,” Mead points out, “Presidents Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden had no effective response.” In contrast, Trump’s current actions to hold Iran accountable for its bloody assaults against our citizens is much more vigorous and consequential than that of his predecessors.
Since the overthrow of the Shah by Shia jihadists, Western leaders––including Americans––have not made any real efforts to hold Iran accountable for its crimes. The UN only made flabby diplomatic gestures and procedural pantomimes, while its European members curried favor with the oil-rich Muslim nations by demonizing Israel––“that shitty little country,” as one French diplomat put it, one of numerous antisemitic slurs and actions indulged by the self-proclaimed champions of peace and justice. Donald Trump in both of his terms refused to indulge these pusillanimous blowhards.
President Trump, in stark contrast, stood behind Israel during the 10/7 slaughter, rape, and mutilation of Israeli civilians by Hamas and other terrorist Iranian proxies; thus, countering the UN and Europeans who indulged their usual double-standards, and serially stabbed Israel in the back––straining out the Israeli gnat while swallowing whole herds of jihadist camels.
An even bolder President Trump instead demolished the ayatollahs’ nuclear weapons industry––another move that none of his recent White House predecessors, also called “world leaders,” had either the stones or the moxie to attempt. Instead, these leaders of the “free world” camouflaged their political fear and self-interests by embracing the “rules-based order” fetish of “multinational diplomatic engagement”––especially the short-sighted Obama, who supplied the mullahs with millions of dollars and the “nuclear deal” whose terms the ayatollahs blatantly violated with impunity. The Biden Administration rejoined that deal despite copious documented evidence of Iran’s serial violations.
Trump pulled the U.S. out of the “deal” in both his terms, but Western nations continued trying to counter Iran’s serial assault against the West with “diplomatic engagement” and negotiated agreements that reflected a massive ignorance of Muslim history and doctrines.
The doctrines of Islam and its principles were previously known by our ancestors’ bloody experience, but now are misunderstood or ignored due to the decline of faith, and its replacement by the elevation of science and reason as the master narratives, along with an imperialist secularism that dominates the West.
Today, the West sees only a thin or bowdlerized version of Islam, especially jihadism, now asserted to be merely a means for “striving in the path of Allah.” Or, as the New York Times continued this deception by claiming in 2008––only a few years after 9/11––that jihad is a “quest to find one’s faith or an external fight for justice.” That bromide, of course, begs the question what “justice” the jihadists have in mind.
This ignorance or indifference cost us dearly during Iran’s Islamic Revolution. Its architect and leader, the Ayatollah Khomeini, while in exile in France, had written two books that expounded on the details and Islami principles of his Islamic revolution, and shrewdly exploited the self-loathing of the secular Marxist West, incorporating the anti-colonialism of Frantz Fanon.
But our foreign policy analysts did not bother reading those books. In fact, when three journalists published excerpts from Khomeini’s sermons, Michael Ledeen reported, “They were subjected to heated criticism from government and academic experts who either denied the existence of the books, or denied that they said what the journalists had published. The CIA concurred with the criticism, telling Senator Henry Jackson that the books were not written by Khomeini and had possibly been forged by the Israelis [sic!].”
Later, Khomeini himself confirmed his description of Islamic doctrine: “Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.”
Khomeini moreover explicitly identifies this process as a violent one: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you! Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!”
But presidents of both parties still have indulged such jihad-denial canards and preposterous “religion of peace” claims. Such fictions are remarkable omissions of earlier traditional theorists of jihad such as Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn al-Qayyim, both active during the 13th century. Nor do such fantasies square with the lecture delivered by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, the representative of the pasha of Tripoli sent in 1785 to negotiate with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson over the ransom for Americans kidnapped by Barbary corsairs: It was “…written in the Koran,” al-Rahman explained, “that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find.”
This bellicose nature of Islam was well known among our ancestors, who experienced the lethal threat of militant Islam. But in our times, armed with the deadliest weapons in history, our leaders have serially confirmed our jihadist enemies’ contempt for Western civilization. Jimmy Carter did so when he allowed the pygmy state of Iran to kidnap our embassy staff with impunity in 1977-78.
Less than two decades later, during Ronald Reagan’s watch, Iranian proxies including Hezbollah murdered 220 Marines and 18 sailors. While France and Israel attacked and bombed the Iranian training camps in the Bekaa Valley––known as “little Tehran” for the numerous terrorists trained there––Reagan’s team for still-disputed reasons retreated our forces to their battleship.
Then there was Bill Clinton, who treated al Qaeda’s multiple murders of our citizens and soldiers like a problem for the police to handle, rather than an act of war that required punishing retaliation. And let’s not forget Barack Obama’s joining the toothless, multinational “Plan of Action” for the “Iran nuclear deal”–– replete with bouts of pointless chin-wagging, pallets of cash, and serial violations of terms whose only function was to give Iran a glide-path to possessing nuclear weapons.
All were feeble Western approaches to a conflict that ignores the venerable Islamic doctrines which legitimize violence and lies when dealing with infidels, along with brutal practices that are completely incompatible with, and inimical to, the West. Also misunderstood is Islam’s intense, all-encompassing religiosity––a religious fervor scarcely found in the secularized West.
Finally, in harmony with Mohammed’s dictum “war is deception,” Islam sanctions four kinds of lies, the most familiar being taqiyya, used during conflicts and negotiations with an infidel. As the website Religion of Peace writes, “Though not called taqiyya by name, Muhammad clearly used deception when he signed a 10-year treaty with the Meccans (known as Hudaibiya) which allowed him access to their city while he secretly prepared his own forces for a takeover. The unsuspecting residents were easily conquered when he broke the treaty two years later. Some of the people in the city who had trusted him at his word were executed.”
Treaties, agreements, and cease-fires that characterize the Western way of interacting with an enemy, all are mere tactics in Islam to buy time for replenishing weapons and warriors. All nations and peoples have used such deceptions, but in the modern West, such tactics violate international law and can be sanctioned by international courts.
The point is not to indulge “Islamophobia,” that cant term for telling the truth about Islam, but rather to alert our leaders and “experts” who endorse the rules-based international order that prizes non-lethal diplomacy and gab fests which Muslims manipulate in to achieve their traditional aim “to kill the infidel wherever you find them,” as sanctioned by Allah for Muslims, the “best of nations” as the Koran says.
Donald Trump, however, is devastating Iran and its bloody regime by fighting as our ancestors fought fascism, Nazism, and Japanese imperialism––not by idealism, but by the realism expressed by Nathan Bedford Forrest: “War means fighting, and fighting means killing.” Only this way can the West recover the martial spirit that made it great.
