Editor and Researcher Elisa Vandernoot

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THE WEEK AT A GLANCE   

COMBATING TERRORISM
By Avi Davis

Do you think you have the solution to the world’s plague of Islamic terrorism? Sir Hugh Orde apparently does. The head of the Police Service of Northern Ireland and front runner for Commissioner of London’s Metropolitan Police, stated in an interview with The Guardian this week, that he could not think of a single terrorism campaign in history that ended without open dialogue between the adversaries. “ Is that a naive statement?" he asked. “ I don’t think it is ... it is the reality of what we face.”

Sir Hugh has much in common with other law enforcement chiefs in Britain and throughout the West who are beholden to the idea of dialogue, discussion and sensitivity to minority opinion. They take their inspiration straight out of the Jimmy Carter Hand Book on Counter-Terrorism - a work in progress - which is unequivocal in its insistence on face to face negotiations between victims and their victimizers. Carter’s post-presidential career has, in fact, been a long attempt to propagate the notion that one needs to internalize the grievances of one’s enemies in order to ensure world peace. Negotiation, even where one party remains unflinchingly committed to the other’s annihilation, is the only method to facilitate co-existence.

Such thinking, 70 years ago, almost brought about the end of the West. Neville Chamberlain and the Conservative Party of Britain convinced themselves, against all prudent examination of the facts, that diplomacy could be used to address German expansionary demands. Such thinking was revolutionary at the time. For centuries, aggression by a European power had been met with a display of force and the construction of alliances. Chamberlain, who contrary to post-war characterizations was no shrinking violet, believed that such an outcome could be reversed through direct negotiation and, if necessary, accession to German demands. The philosophy under pinning his policy was that Germany was leery of military conflict and, much like the democracies, unwilling to countenance the thought of a new conflagration on the scale of the First World War. In a perverse recalibration of Western knowledge and experience, he and his ministers invested their entire political capital in the notion that countries do not threaten war for other than just causes. If the Germans had a grievance, then that grievance had to be legitimate.

Many other factors played into the construction of the policy of appeasement, including Western guilt for the reparations forced upon a defeated Germany in 1919 and the ineradicable scars of war seared into consciousness of a generation of European leaders. But the failure to appreciate Adolf Hitler’s insistence, repeated time and again in his own language, that only armed conflict and total victory would reverse the humiliations of 1919, doomed the West to a terrible war. Yet so thoroughly embedded was the ideology of appeasement that deep into that war – even while London was being bombed into splinters - many of the same appeasers remained unwavering in their belief that Germany just wanted peace.

In the early 21st Century, the West is once again faced with a threat as intractable and as relentless as the one presented by Nazi expansionism in the 1930s. The menace of Islamic fundamentalism mirrors the Nazi peril in three fundamental ways: It is ideologically opposed to Western liberalism; it is committed to the ultimate domination of Western society; and it is acutely conscious of weaknesses amongst Western leaders and their reluctance to take any measure that will ruffle minority sensitivities.

But it also differs from Nazism in one very significant and far more dangerous way: this time the threat is not only external, emanating from such terrorist organizations as al Qaeda and Hizbullah - but is embedded in our own societies.

Much like their predecessors in the 1930s, many Western political leaders, intelligence personnel and enforcement agency officers, seem unable to grasp the fact that this growing menace cannot be successfully engaged by open dialogue and discussion. Social concessions (such as giving Muslims local autonomy), interfaith dialogue, sensitivity training and incitement legislation (designed to proscribe anti-Islamic hate speech) should be viewed as nothing less than modern day policies of appeasement. They are not going to deter Muslim leaders from inciting their communities to a rejection of Western values; they are not going to prevent hundreds of thousands of young British Muslims’commitment to the destruction of the societies in which they live; nor are they going to effectively confront an ideology which swells with confidence each time it witnesses another collapse of resolve by Western leaders in the defense of the core values upon which society is built.

Negotiation may well have worked to stem violence from terrorist groups in Ireland, but Ireland is part of modern day Western society and its people share the same values and identify with its concept of rapprochement. But Sir Hugh Orde is wrong if he believes al Qaeda or Britain’s militant imams can be negotiated into a truce. Once we appreciate that fundamentalist Islam, like Nazism, can never be appeased or be expected to co-exist alongside Western society, our policies should be clear: the crushing of the terrorist networks; the jailing of Islamic leaders who incite hatred and rejection of Western civilization and the demand that Muslims living in the West either abide by our values, laws and social norms or are else asked to leave the country.

Jimmy Carter, on the other hand, should know much better. In 1979, as President of the United States, he stood idly by as the Ayatollahs took control of Iran. His statement that he could "work" with the Ayatollahs was brutally dispatched soon after when the new Iranian republic acquiesced in the kidnapping of American hostages in Teheran. Strenuous negotiations resulted in the release of the hostages 15 months later. But if he had at first stood up to the Islamists, refused to recognize their regime, withdrawn diplomatic recognition and threatened military support for the Shah - a key Middle East ally, the world might indeed have been a very different place today. As everyone should realize now," internalizing the grievances" of the ayatollahs, as Carter would have us do, would only result in a loathing for our own civilization.

Only with recognition that we are not alike and that the conflict between ourselves and the fundamentalist Muslim world is not a mere difference of opinion but a struggle of civilizations, is the West likely to ensure its own survival.

Perhaps that is the reality that Sir Hugh Orde, Jimmy Carter and all others like them, should face.

Avi Davis is the Executive Director and Senior Fellow of the American Freedom Alliance.

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