Don't airbrush Islamist threat

The remarks by Prime Minister Stephen Harper in a CBC interview that "the major threat is still Islamicism," generated predictable controversy by the usual suspects on the left.

On the contrary, the PM needs to be applauded for stating without any ambivalence what most Canadians and people increasingly in the West see for themselves.

This is the level of indiscriminate violence perpetrated by Islamists, or the jihadist segment of the Arab-Muslim population, against those who disagree with them, and the organized efforts of Islamists with their apologists in the West to subvert liberal democracy.

Indeed, it is most refreshing to hear Harper, leader of a G8 country, speak candidly and in sharp contrast to previous prime ministers on matters vital to the national interest and security of Canada.

But the contrast between Harper's candour and the obsequiousness of President Obama when it comes to speaking about Islamism -- former prime minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain very rightly described it as Bolshevism in our day and age -- is even starker and bleak.

The Obama administration has ruled out any use of the "M"-word (for Muslims) and the two "I"-words (for Islamist and Islamism) by those in American officialdom in discussing the bigotry and violence emanating from the Arab-Muslim world.

It is insulting to watch Obama and the senior members of his administration airbrush away any mention of the perpetrators of the worst mass casualty attack on U.S. soil.

Moreover, it was grotesque that Obama in commemorating the dead on the 10th anniversary of 9/11 deliberately omitted any reference to the 19 Arab-Muslim men who brought about their murder in an act of war.

Imagine, if possible, an American president, in commemorating the dead in the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, refusing to make any reference to the Japanese imperial navy responsible for the surprise attack.

Strike force

Those 19 Arab-Muslim men on the morning of 9/11 were the strike force of the Islamists who have declared their war against the infidels of the West, and those who oppose them within the Arab-Muslim world.

In refusing to discuss Islamism and identify Islamists, Obama and those leaders who follow him make the West more vulnerable to their insidious subversion of the western values of freedom, democracy and the rule of law.

And it is even worse. This appeasement of Islamists abandons those Muslims and other religious minorities inside the Arab-Muslim world opposed to Islamism to unremitting violence by Islamist thugs and their enablers, as we are witnessing in what goes by the misnomer of the "Arab spring."

Then it gives a pass to Muslims in Europe and North America who, in failing to publicly denounce Islamism and Islamists, are by their silence complicit or in collusion with this latest version of Bolsheviks at war with the West.

The necessary and just war against Islamists -- irrespective of how the meaning of war is sanitized for political correctness -- is now a decade old.

It will not be over soon, and the West needs leaders who are forthright and strong to wage it.

In Canada we are fortunate to have in Stephen Harper such a leader.

Related Topics: Canadian Muslims, Terrorism receive the latest by email: subscribe to the free center for islamic pluralism mailing list