• Throughout a bombing-and-murder campaign lasting three decades, the BBC never referred to the Irish Republican Army (IRA) as the “so-called IRA.” If you flatten ISIS’s military, the strong-horse appeal of ISIS would simply go away. If there is nothing to join, no one can join it.

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• Cameron’s and Obama’s tactic is to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam — the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.

  • A few days after the massacre of 30 British subjects on a Tunisian beach, the UK Prime Minister, David Cameron, used an interview on the BBC to berate the broadcaster and others for using the term “Islamic State.” Mr. Cameron’s suggestion was that the broadcaster should either refer to the “so-called Islamic State,” use the acronym “ISIL,” or adopt the Arabic term, “Daesh.”

    None of these suggestions is workable. The Irish Republican Army (IRA) was never the “army” of the Irish Republic. It was instead a group of sectarian terrorists who claimed to fight for a community that was largely disgusted by their actions. Yet throughout a bombing and murder campaign lasting three decades, the BBC never referred to the IRA as the “so-called IRA.” The group called itself the IRA, and so broadcasters and others referred to it as such. One might wish to call such groups all sorts of things, but calling by the name its leaders adopt is the easiest option of presenting the facts and not getting bogged down in nomenclature.

    The Prime Minister’s other suggestions — that the Islamic State should either be called “ISIL” or “Daesh” — are equally doomed to failure. For ISIL of course simply means “Islamic State of Iraq and Levant,” while “Daesh” is effectively an Arabic acronym of the same. If the aim of all this wordplay is that the general public dissociate “Islamic State” from Islam, there seems little hope that this will much help to break the connection. After all, what if someone — anyone — asks what ISIL or Daesh stand for? What should people then say in response?

    Of course, the problem that the Prime Minister got into on this occasion is the same problem he and all other world leaders get into whenever they adopt the “Islam is a religion of peace” line. What they are perfectly understandably trying to do is to disentangle more than a billion Muslims worldwide (and specifically the tens of millions of Muslims in Western democracies) from the violent jihadists in their religion. At the same time, they — again understandably — hope to give the message to their non-Muslim publics that they should not blame Muslims everywhere for the actions of this violent minority.

    This is a laudable aim, but it is doomed to failure because members of the public no longer rely on either politicians or the mainstream media as their only sources of information or news. They can perfectly well get on the internet and find things out for themselves, and it is in this growing gulf between what politicians say and what the general public can perfectly easily find out for itself that a real long-term danger could emerge.

    Why won’t the public believe them when they explain that the “so-called Islamic State” has nothing to do with Islam? Pictured left, UK Prime Minister David Cameron. At right, US President Barack Obama.

    All this is really a reminder that if we are in a war with ISIS, it is one in which we are performing very badly. Consider something said by Mr. Cameron’s American counterpart a week after Cameron’s statement. President Barack Obama gave a press conference at the Pentagon in which he, too, discussed the group that must not be named. On this occasion, the President said that the fight against ISIS was “not simply a military effort,” and went on to say, “Ideologies are not defeated with guns, they are defeated by better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision.”

    Of course suggesting that there are many people who think a military solution alone can solve the ISIS problem is to create a straw man argument. But it is surely almost undeniable that the best thing on ISIS’s side at the moment (and the cause of their current recruitment drive) is that they are seen to be not only on the offensive but on the way up — gaining ground both figuratively and literally. When they take over whole cities in what used to be Syria or Iraq, radicalized young men and women from across the world, who might have been vacillating on whether or not to jump on board with the group, get galvanized in its direction. But if you flatten ISIS’s military, the strong-horse appeal of ISIS would simply go away. If there is nothing to join, no one can join it.

    President Obama is right to say that no ideology can be destroyed on the battlefield alone. The destruction of Nazi fascism in the 1940s was completed not only by its wholesale military defeat but by the world’s awareness of the evil of the Nazi ideology and its wholesale moral and ethical failure. If the destruction of ISIS’s ideology is to be complete, this too will have to be understood. But the U.S. and its allies ought to be wondering what is going wrong here. Although the numbers of citizens we are losing to ISIS constitute only tiny pockets of our own societies (if larger numbers across the Middle East and North Africa), we ought to consider how we are even losing people in ones and twos in a public relations war with this group.

    While the Nazis tried to hide their worst crimes from the world, the followers of ISIS repeatedly record and distribute video footage of theirs. Between free and open democratic societies, and a society which beheads women for witchcraft, throws suspected gays off buildings, beheads other Muslims and Christians, burns people alive, and does us the favour of video-recording these atrocities and sending them round the globe for us, you would have thought that there would be no moral competition. But there is. And that is not because ISIS has “better ideas, a more attractive and more compelling vision,” but because its appeal comes from a specific ideological-religious worldview that we cannot hope to defeat if we refuse to understand it.

    That is why David Cameron’s interjection was so important. The strategy Barack Obama and he seem to be hoping will work in persuading the general public that ISIS has nothing to do with Islam is the same tactic they are adopting in the hope of persuading young Muslims not to join ISIS. Their tactic is to try to deny something that Muslims and non-Muslims can easily see and find out for themselves: that ISIS has a lot to do with Islam — the worst possible version, obviously, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, but a version of Islam nevertheless.

    ISIS can destroy its own credibility among advocates of human rights and liberal democracy. The question is how you destroy its credibility among people who want to be very Islamic, and think ISIS is their way of being so. Understand their claims and their appeal, and work out a way to undermine those, and ISIS will prove defeatable not only on the battlefield but in the field of ideas as well. But refuse to acknowledge what drives them, or from where they claim to get their legitimacy, and the problem will only have just started.

We failed to prevent North Korea from developing nuclear weapons. As a result, our options to stop them from developing a delivery system capable of reaching our shores are severely limited.

The hard lesson from our failure to stop North Korea before they became a nuclear power is that we MUST stop Iran from ever developing or acquiring a nuclear arsenal. A nuclear Iran would be far more dangerous to American interests than a nuclear North Korea. Iran already has missiles capable of reaching numerous American allies. They are in the process of upgrading them and making them capable of delivering a nuclear payload to our shores. Its fundamentalist religious leaders would be willing to sacrifice millions of Iranians to destroy the “Big Satan” (United States) or the “Little Satan” (Israel).

The late “moderate” leader Hashemi Rafsanjani once told an American journalist that if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons, they “would kill as many as five million Jews,” and that if Israel retaliated, they would kill fifteen million Iranians, which would be “a small sacrifice from among the billion Muslims in the world.” He concluded that “it is not irrational to contemplate such an eventuality.” Recall that the Iranian mullahs were willing to sacrifice thousands of “child-soldiers” in their futile war with Iraq. There is nothing more dangerous than a “suicide regime” armed with nuclear weapons.

The deal signed by Iran in 2015 postpones Iran’s quest for a nuclear arsenal, but it doesn’t prevent it, despite Iran’s unequivocal statement in the preamble to the agreement that “Iran reaffirms that under no circumstances will Iran ever seek, develop or acquire nuclear weapons.” (Emphasis added). Recall that North Korea provided similar assurances to the Clinton Administration back in 1994, only to break them several years later — with no real consequences. The Iranian mullahs apparently regard their reaffirmation as merely hortatory and not legally binding. The body of the agreement itself — the portion Iran believes is legally binding — does not preclude Iran from developing nuclear weapons after a certain time, variously estimated as between 10 to 15 years from the signing of the agreement. Nor does it prevent Iran from perfecting its delivery systems, including nuclear tipped inter-continental ballistic missiles capable of reaching the United States.

If we are not to make the same mistake with Iran that we made with North Korea, we must do something now – before Iran secures a weapon – to deter the mullahs from becoming a nuclear power, over which we would have little or no leverage.

Congress should now enact legislation declaring that Iran’s reaffirmation that it will never “develop or acquire nuclear weapons” is an integral part of the agreement and represents the policy of the United States. It is too late to change the words of the deal, but it is not too late for Congress to insist that Iran comply fully with all of its provisions, even those in the preamble.

In order to ensure that the entirety of the agreement is carried out, including that reaffirmation, Congress should adopt the proposal made by Thomas L. Friedman on 22 July 2015 and by myself on 5 September 2013. To quote Friedman:

“Congress should pass a resolution authorizing this and future presidents to use force to prevent Iran from ever becoming a nuclear weapons state … Iran must know now that the U.S. president is authorized to destroy – without warning or negotiation – any attempt by Tehran to build a bomb.”

I put it similarly: Congress should authorize the President “to take military action against Iran’s nuclear weapon’s program if it were to cross the red lines….”

The benefits of enacting such legislation are clear: the law would underline the centrality to the deal of Iran’s reaffirmation never to acquire nuclear weapons, and would provide both a deterrent against Iran violating its reaffirmation and an enforcement authorization in the event it does.

A law based on these two elements — adopting Iran’s reaffirmation as the official American policy and authorizing a preventive military strike if Iran tried to obtain nuclear weapons — may be an alternative we can live with. But without such an alternative, the deal as currently interpreted by Iran will not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons. In all probability, it would merely postpone that catastrophe for about a decade while legitimating its occurrence. This is not an outcome we can live with, as evidenced by the crisis we are now confronting with North Korea. So let us learn from our mistake and not repeat it with Iran.

Alan M. Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School and author of Taking the Stand: My Life in the Law and Electile Dysfunction: A Guide for the Unaroused Voter.

The Muslim Brotherhood classifies as one of their great intellectual leaders Imam Mohammed al-Ghazali (1917-1996). He famously decreed that the assassination of the Egyptian Muslim thinker, Farag Foda, was acceptable. In the views of al-Ghazali, Farag Foda was an apostate for defending secular values and human rights. Moreover, al-Ghazali went into an Egyptian court and defended the assassins: “Anyone who openly resisted the full imposition of Islamic law,” he said, “was an apostate who should be killed either by the government or by devout individuals.” He added: “There is no penalty in Islam to kill the apostate by yourself when the government fails to do so.”

In public libraries across Canada (and elsewhere), the books of Imam al-Ghazali are available, along with others that incite hatred, violence and terror, by authors such as Yusuf al-Qaradawi and Imam Nawawi. There is not a single Arabic language book in a library that I have visited in Ottawa that attacks or criticizes terrorism and violence and hatred.

A copy of One Hundred Questions in Islam by Dr. Muhammad al-Ghazali, found in the Ottawa Public Library. The image at right shows the inside cover of the book, with the Ottawa Public Library Stamp.

The Significance

The Ottawa Public Library apparently prefers Arabic-language books of this extremist nature and rejects those that advocate resistance to extremism or advocates in favour of a modernist Islam.

As an experiment, I donated two books to the Ottawa Public Library. One book was titled The Demise of the State of Brotherhood, released in Egypt in January 2013. At that time, the Muslim Brotherhood was the ruling party (FJP) in Egypt. This book addresses the seriousness of the political and religious project of the Muslim Brotherhood and how it worked to establish a religious and theocratic authoritarian state. This government in Egypt was, for the Muslim Brotherhood, a part of the larger effort to restore the Islamic caliphate project around the world.

The second book was entitled, The Sins of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. It was released in 2010 and documented a dialogue conducted by the author with the former Muslim Brotherhood General Guide Mohammed Mahdi Akef (2006). It was in this dialogue that General Guide Akef made his famous statement “I don’t give a damn about Egypt and these people in Egypt.” Akef made it clear that his views on the Muslim Brotherhood and its project of recreating a caliphate took precedence over the needs and views of the people of Egypt. The book was threatened with legal action.

Several months after donating the two books to the Ottawa Public Library, there was no response. After inquiring further, they then told me that the books were not acceptable as they did not meet their “selection criteria.” The exact statement from library employee was:

“I have contacted my colleagues at the acquisitions department about the books you donated to the library in the past. They no longer have them, which means that when they received them they didn’t pass our selection criteria.”

How is it possible that books that advocate violence and extremism meet the selection criteria of the Ottawa Public Library, but those that speak out against violence and extremism do not? Those who donated the other books appear to have been Islamists: they donated books that advocate the terrorist discourse. Yet the library selection committee approves of them.

Can Such Books Create Extremism and Terrorism?

The answer in the Islamist case is: Yes. Many books are available in bookstores and libraries which incite violence, such as Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler, or books that promote the colonial period of the West. There are also non-Islamic religious books that incite hatred, but these no longer seem to lead others to kill.

Many governments and individuals have apologized for these past crimes. Germany, for example has apologized for the crimes of the Holocaust against the Jews (but not Austria, Hitler’s birthplace); the Spanish government has apologized for the expulsion of Muslims from Andalusia, even though they are the descendants of the invading Arabs. (N.B. The Ottawa Public Library does have copies of Mein Kampf available, but it also has books on the Holocaust and a variety of history books on Word War Two.)

With modern extremist Islam, the situation is different. Its past, along with its ideas and bloody history, remain active today and act as an engine to drive reality. The prevailing Islamist culture has not gotten beyond its past: it does not spread a humanist interpretation of Islam or of the texts that are often used to spread hatred, extremism and terrorism. Today’s Islamist Muslims have not apologized for the crimes their ancestors, committed when they invaded much of the rest of the world and formed colonial empires. The opposite is true: they seem very proud of this colonial era and frequently refer to the high-water marks of the empires as the “Golden Age of Islam.“

ISIS, for example, wants directly to apply what is in the ancient texts and religious history: to restore the face of Islamist colonial empire. They literally apply the texts that incite violence, directly, without any modern re-interpretation. ISIS is the daughter of the traditional Islamic culture that is now found across the Sunni world.

The presence of these Islamic books, and these books alone, in Canada’s public libraries, without any others to contradict them, gives them legitimacy. They are seen to represent a certain form of Islam that the government of Canada and the City of Ottawa recognize.

This indicates that there is official support for the extremist and terrorist version of Islam, and at the same time no support for a humanist interpretation of Islam.

Unfortunately, it seems that Canada and the West fight “terrorism” everywhere, but they do not close the factories of extremism and terrorism in their own countries. This view seems to exist not only in public libraries but also in the libraries of many of the mosques, the speeches of many imams, many Islamic schools and in other institutions controlled by the Islamists.[1]

Do the Ghazali Books Support Terrorism?

The Ottawa Public Library has, as noted above, many books by Muhammad al-Ghazali. His ideas are close to those of the Muslim Brotherhood and a lesson in how Muslim extremist and terrorist beliefs are created. Ghazaii, for instance, argues that a place can be considered a “home of peace” [Dar al Islam] when it is ruled by Muslims and the law of Allah and his messenger are applied to all. A place can be considered a “home of war” [Dar al Harb] if the place is inhabited by unbelievers of Islam or those who object to it.[2]

Ghazali also cites the Qur’an specifically saying:

“Let those fight in the cause of God who sell the life of this world for the hereafter. To him who fights in the cause of God, whether he is slain or victorious, soon we shall give him a great reward.” — Surah 4:74

This surah means that those who kill infidels, whether victorious or not, will get a great reward in Jana (paradise). This surah also indicates that if you are a Muslim living in a non-Muslim country, then you are in a state of war against your host country. If you are a Muslim living in a non-Muslim country, then you are living with the enemy.

Hatred of Canada and the West

Ghazali — apparently forgetting that the Muslims invaded Persia, the Christian Byzantine Empire in Turkey, all of North Africa and the Middle East, Greece, Spain and most of eastern Europe — claims that global colonization (by the West) is rooted on an ongoing deep hatred of Islam, and an enormous desire to destroy it. After weakening the Ottoman Turkish caliphate and having carved up its territory, the West gave it a fatal blow in the wake of the First World War, and wiped out the official presence of Islam in the international field. Ghazali writes on page 221 of One Hundred Questions About Islam that the laws that came out of Western colonialism were created to dominate the Islamic nation militarily and defeat it politically. He characterizes these laws as distorting the face of Islam, and having the goal of destroying the foundations of Islam.

So, a Muslim living in Canada who is exposed to these teachings is led to believe that he or she should hate their new home country. They are led to believe that they belong to another entity (an Islamist caliphate) and that it is their duty to build this caliphate on the ruins of Western civilization.

Most of the Arabic-language books on Islam in the West incite extremism and terrorism. If we are to reject this danger, it is important that libraries and other institutions have books that reject these Islamist views and confront their hatred, extremism and violence.

Saied Shoaaib is a Muslim scholar based in Canada. He can be reached at: saiedshoaaib@gmail.com