What Newt Gingrich Understands About the Jihad, and the Administration Does Not

Newt Gingrich wrote a piece this week arguing against the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero. Anyone who doesn’t understand why building a mosque at Ground Zero is a dangerous idea, or anyone who believes that not allowing the construction of a mosque there would be intolerant, needs to read what Gingrich wrote. After describing what the mosque would symbolize, he concludes:

Building this structure on the edge of the battlefield created by radical Islamists is not a celebration of religious pluralism and mutual tolerance; it is a political statement of shocking arrogance and hypocrisy.

We need to have the moral courage to denounce it. It is simply grotesque to erect a mosque at the site of the most visible and powerful symbol of the horrible consequences of radical Islamist ideology. Well-meaning Muslims, with common human sensitivity to the victims’ families, realize they have plenty of other places to gather and worship. But for radical Islamists, the mosque would become an icon of triumph, encouraging them in their challenge to our civilization.

Apologists for radical Islamist hypocrisy are trying to argue that we have to allow the construction of this mosque in order to prove America’s commitment to religious liberty. They say this despite the fact that there are already over 100 mosques in New York City.

In fact, they’re partially correct—this is a test of our commitment to religious liberty. It is a test to see if we have the resolve to face down an ideology that aims to destroy religious liberty in America, and every other freedom we hold dear.

What Gingrich understands is that there is another aspect to the war we are fighting in addition to terrorism:

Some radical Islamists use terrorism as a tactic to impose sharia but others use non-violent methods—a cultural, political, and legal jihad that seeks the same totalitarian goal even while claiming to repudiate violence. Thus, the term “war on terrorism” is far too narrow a framework in which to think about the war in which we are engaged against the radical Islamists.

The “cultural, political, and legal jihad” that Gingrich refers to is known as dawa. This concept is described in detail in Andy McCarthy’s new book The Grand Jihad (which I’ll soon be writing about more). Building a mosque at ground zero is very much part of dawa‘s advancement of Islam. Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi tells us, “Conquest through dawa, that is what we hope for.” (Grand Jihad p.83). It is important that we take the non-violent spread of radical Islam seriously.

The administration doesn’t seem to understand the full scope of the threat, however, as they have exhibited numerous times. At a speech last year, homeland security adviser John Brennan described the administration’s views:

Yes, al-Qaida and other terrorist groups operate in many corners of the world and
continue to launch attacks in different nations, as we saw most recently in Jakarta. And yes, the
United States will confront al-Qaida aggressively wherever it exists so that it enjoys no safe
haven. But describing our efforts as a global war only plays into the warped narrative that al-
Qaida propagates. It plays into the misleading and dangerous notion that the U.S. is somehow in
conflict with the rest of the world.
It risks setting our nation apart from the world, rather than emphasizing the interests we
share. And perhaps more dangerously, portraying this as a global war reinforces the very image
that al-Qaida seeks to project of itself, that it is a highly organized, global entity capable of
replacing sovereign nations with a global caliphate. And nothing could be further from the truth.

Nor does President Obama see this challenge as a fight against jihadists. Describing
terrorists in this way, using the legitimate term “jihad,” which means to purify oneself or to wage
a holy struggle for a moral goal, risks giving these murderers the religious legitimacy they
desperately seek but in no way deserve. Worse, it risks reinforcing the idea that the United
States is somehow at war with Islam itself. And this is why President Obama has confronted this
perception directly and forcefully in its speeches to Muslim audiences, declaring that America is
not and never will be at war with Islam.
Instead, as the president has made clear, we are at war with al-Qaida, which attacked us
on 9/11 and killed 3,000 people. We are at war with its violent extremist allies who seek to carry
on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda. These are the terrorists we will destroy; these are the
extremists we will defeat. Even as the president takes a more focused view of the threat, his
approach includes a third element – a broader, more accurate understanding of the causes and
conditions that help fuel violent extremism, be they in Pakistan and Afghanistan or Somalia and
Yemen.

Few would dispute that we are at war with al-Qaida and “its violent extremist allies who seek to carry on al-Qaida’s murderous agenda.” But who are those “violent extremist allies” and what makes them that way? Even saying that we are at war with violent radical Islamists would overlook the dawa aspect of the jihad. Brennan misses the mark on jihad by calling it a way “to purify oneself or to wage a holy struggle for a moral goal,” as this ignores the way that radical Islamists seek to advance sharia.

Brennan also perpetuates the myth of what causes terrorism:

The president has been very clear on this. Poverty does not cause violence and terrorism.
Lack of education does not cause terrorism. But just as there is no excuse for the wanton
slaughter of innocents, there is no denying that when children have no hope for an education,
when young people have no hope for a job and feel disconnected from the modern world, when
governments fail to provide for the basic needs of their people, then people become more
susceptible to ideologies of violence and death.
Extremist violence and terrorist attacks are therefore, often the final, murderous
manifestations of a long process rooted in helplessness, humiliation and hatred.

This explanation ignores the fact that many of the terrorists are educated and wealthy. It also ignores the efforts by many intelligent Islamists promoting dawa in America, advancing Islam through non-violent means. Perhaps it is the administration’s misunderstanding of terrorism and lack of recognition of the broader efforts to spread sharia that has led to mistakes, such as allowing a mosque to be built at Ground Zero.

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