Is a global caliphate coming? 

Since 9/11 the United States and the Western world have been fighting jihad with bombs and bullets, as if armament could win a war of ideas. Certainly a nation must be free to protect itself, but a war that is grounded in ideas and moral (or immoral) vision will only be won with better ideas and a superior vision. In the West today we do not seem to understand that the idea superior to jihad is not moral license, but freedom.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is “a fellow at The Harvard Kennedy School, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations.” She writes,

From 9/11 until now, the dominant Western response to political Islam has been to focus only on “terror” and “violent extremism.” This approach has failed. In focusing only on acts of violence, we have ignored the ideology that justifies, promotes, celebrates, and encourages those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam (or “Islamism”) as an ideology and against those who spread that ideology, we have made a grave error.

Political Islam spreads its ideology through dawa – the mission of Islamists to establish a global caliphate. The goal is to crush Western ideals, with its structures of a free and pluralistic society, and replace all this with Sharia.

Dawa seeks at least five objectives:

• Restore all the lands that were historically part of earlier caliphates.
• Eliminate the state of Israel.
• Expand the caliphate to include the 57 current Islamic states. This is the rallying cry of ISIS!
• Save the world from Western moral and spiritual bankruptcy.
• Finish the mandate with a global caliphate.

The mission is carried out by both violent and non-violent means. As Ali points out, the West has largely fought bullets with bullets. Little thought has been given to Islamist ideology, i.e. the theological foundation that grounds their mission. In fact, many Western elites deny that religious conviction has anything to do with jihad. In their thinking, the jihadists’ fight is rooted in material poverty. It’s past time we begin to focus on the foundational ideas that inform the jihadists’ mission.

The quietly subversive part of the Islamists’ plan is to undermine the West from within by doing several simple things.

1. Exploit the freedoms of the West—especially freedom of speech, religion, assembly and association—to destroy those very freedoms.

2. Use (and abuse) Western immigration. Western nations need workers to build their economies and support their extremely generous social-security programs. They need immigrants to replace their aging and retiring national workforces.

3. Have babies. The average fertility rate for European countries is only about 1.3, a demographic reality that is depopulating European nations by 50% in one generation. Americans in the coastal cities are mimicking the Europeans, while women in the “heartland” and immigrants keep the US fertility rate at 1.9, just below the replacement rate of 2.1.

At 3.1 (babies per woman of child-bearing age) Muslim women have the highest fertility rate of any group in the world. In Europe, Muslim women are giving birth to twice as many children as European women. Mullah Krekar states the reality of these demographic contrasts as well as anyone.

We’re the ones who will change you… Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes … Every western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries are [sic] producing 3.5 children.

Ali writes of  further elements of the strategy of Dawa:

• To have well-organized Islamist groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood claim to speak on behalf of all Muslims, while marginalizing Muslim reformers and dissidents.
• To take ownership of immigration trends to encourage the “Islamization” of Western societies by invoking hijra, the emigration of the prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Medina.
• To reduce women to the status of reproductive machines for the purpose of demographic transformation.
• To take advantage of the focus on “inclusion” by progressive political parties in democratic societies, then to force these parties to accept Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.
• To take advantage of self-consciously progressive movements, effectively co-opting them.
• To increase Islamists’ hold over the educational system, including some charter schools, “faith” schools, and home schooling.

One of the most informative things Ms. Ali writes about is the work going on behind the scenes to effect Western institutional support for the mission of achieving a global caliphate. She writes:

Agents of dawa also systematically lobby private-sector organizations, governments, and international bodies:

• They seek to pressure governments to accede to Islamist demands on the grounds of freedom of religion or status as a religious minority.
• They urge the United Nations and the European Council to combat “Islamophobia” by devising what amounts to censorship guidelines for politicians and journalists and by punishing those who dissent.
• They press institutions such as the Associated Press to distort the language they use to suit Islamist objectives.
• They wage sustained campaigns to discredit critics of radical Islam.

This agenda is moving forward mostly unhindered in Western society. Political Islam has a vision – a global caliphate, and a mission to achieve that vision – dawa. They also have a strategy, with two elements, one violent and one subversive.

Go here to read Ms. Ali’s article in full. Readers of this blog would be wise to inform themselves of the roots, agenda and spread of political Islam.

• Darrow Miller

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