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THE WAR ON TERROR
Michael D. Evans
(An Excerpt from The American Prophecies by Michael D. Evans)
While atheistic communism once posed the greatest potential of a new imperialistic culture, it significantly decreased with the disintegration of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The current struggle that we face in the war on terrorism is no longer just a fight for the supremacy of a political ideology through military might, but a battle for hearts and minds through a twisting of truth that turns our enemies into zealous socio-paths willing to give their lives to murder others. This is not a religion like Christianity, which can transform most cultures to righteousness through love, but a tyrannical system that takes over cultures and governments and dictates truth for its own interests. The repressive Taliban government is perhaps the best example of what bin Laden and the Wahhabists want the world to look like. In a world where Islamism is becoming the force empowering impoverished nations against their economic superiors, the greatest threat to our nation today is a foreign policy that denies truth for the sake of Clintonian-style house-of-cards prosperity and a lack of resolve to win the war on terror.
Many seem to believe that the United States needs TO return to a more isolationistic stance as we had at the beginning of the twentieth century and look after our own, letting the rest of the world take care of itself. I don’t believe this is possible any longer in a world that can send the same television broadcast live all over the world, and where journeys that used to take months now take hours. We have come a long way from Jules Verne’s fantastic idea of going Around the World in Eighty Days to a time when satellites can circle the globe in about ninety minutes. Besides, since most of our consumer products are made abroad today, we are irreversibly tied to the rest of the world as never before.
Because of this, I believe that the areas of foreign policy and national security will dominate debate for elections for the next few decades, as will the question “How do we win the war against terrorism?” As I write this, I see winning the war on terror as one of the greatest ways of securing a peaceful future for our nation. For the first time in history we must fight a war against a deadly religious ideal, Wahhabism, rather than a political ideal, or a madman bent on taking over the world. We can no longer tolerate every belief in the hope that that will lead to us all getting along—some beliefs in the world are indeed damningly deadly.
When Wahhabists such as Osama bin Laden call us “polytheists” and “crusaders,” these are more than just demonizations of our point of view or misunderstandings of who we are. When we hear that pamphlets are circulated that American Christians are polytheists because of our belief in the Trinity, we just shake our heads and want to mark their materials as “irrelevant religious stuff.” However, when Wahhabists call us “polytheists,” they are marking us as targets of jihad, animals for the slaughter. Brutally murdering mushrikun (“polytheists”) is an act of worship and devotion for Wahhabists today, just as it was for the original followers of Muhammad ibn Abd al-Wahhab in the mid 1700s. While we often think of Crusaders as a mistake of the church of the Middle Ages or the mascot of the local Christian school’s basketball team, when Wahhabists speak of crusaders, they think of the forces that wrested Jerusalem and the Noble Sanctuary from them—forrces they saw as gathered to wipe out Islam as a whole in the same way that jihad hopes to extinguish Judaism and Christianity. It also dropped them to a status less than human, as was exemplified by Sallah al-Din’s breaking of his peace treaty with the Crusaders to recapture Jerusalem.; There is no need to keep one’s word to “apes and pigs.”
Though many wars of the past have been across religious lines, bringing those wars to a point of ceasefire never before meant wiping their ideology from the face of the earth. This brings a spiritual dimension to the war on terrorism. A war against people hoping to die—be “martyred”—will have no ceasefires. Such a war cannot be won without a tremendous dedication to truth, and people praying and acting to win this battle for hearts and minds in the spiritual realm. We must support righteousness, not relativity, as the basis for rule of law and our relationships to other nations. The Bible tells us that the “love of money is the root of all evil.” (I Timothy 6:10) This has never been so evident as it is today, when we watch much of what is good and holy in our nation traded away for economic gain. While money is nice to have, we need to realize it is not more valuable than God’s blessings of freedom and security.
We cannot win the war on terrorism, however, by vowing to defeat them on one hand and trying to appease them on the other. You can’t fight them on one front and ignore them on another so that they can push in unhindered. We need to realize that a major front in the war on terrorism is the battle-line drawn through the heart of Jerusalem.
Though liberals in the United States have painted the struggle of the Palestinians as a political revolution for freedom from oppression, no nation before has aimed strictly at civilians in order to overthrow its enemies. The war the terrorists fight is a war on innocence—they don’t care who their victims are as long as it gets them headlines, even if it means killing children or babies in strollers, as has happened all too often. The truth must be recognized: Arafat and those aligned with him are not “freedom fighters,” but terrorists. Israel’s struggle against the PLO, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other such organizations is its own war on terror. How can we ignore an ally’s fight against terrorists—in fact, trying to force them to appease the terrorists—and expect to win our own?
We cannot win the war on terrorism by calling Palestinian terrorists “good terrorists” and bin Laden’s “bad terrorists.” Terrorists are terrorists, and if we hope to win the battle against them, we have to treat them all as criminals, and none of them as diplomats. If a man breaks into your house to steal something or harm your family, you don’t negotiate with him about which rooms in your home he can live in, you have him arrested! We can no longer afford to legitimize terrorism as a negotiating technique to win more concessions from sovereign governments. As we have seen, there will be no appeasing these thugs until they have it all.
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