[Below is Richard Perle's foreword to Jamie Glazov's just released new book, Showdown With Evil: Our Struggle With Tyranny and Terror.]

In this extraordinary collection of interviews, Jamie Glazov demonstrates that consistent, searching questions can both enrich and impart coherence to disparate answers: for what emerges from 29 interviews conducted over eight years is an illuminating  and important commentary on the largest issues facing America and the West.

It is a commentary whose preoccupation reflects history—Jamie’s Glazov’s history, rich in the issues of identity, freedom, truth telling and courage.  Jamie, it may be said, has had rather more history than he needed—as a man whose parents were dissidents in the Soviet Union and who was taught the values of freedom and the courage to fight for it from the beginning.  It is no wonder that he is so wholly absorbed in understanding and opposing, radical, political Islam and its apologists.  Today’s “useful idiots,” like those who preceded them, are drawn almost entirely from the Left.  Indeed, many of the individuals are the same, as is the intellectual foundation of their obsessive disdain for the liberal values of an open society.  In one way or another nearly all the interviews in this book touch on the readiness of the Left, in an often ludicrous pursuit of political correctness, to accept, and even to advance, the Islamist agenda that has replaced communism as the principal threat to western values and civilization.

Part I, “Obama’s Destructive Path,” certainly deals with the destructive qualities of a number of policies—but, sadly, support for these policies goes well beyond Obama and his administration.  The refusal to recognize that we are gravely threatened by Islamist terror—by deeply ideological extremists who are prepared, even eager, to die in the act of killing infidels (that is, all of us including “moderate Muslims”)—is neither original with President Obama nor limited to his administration.  Ranging along a spectrum from myopic to willfully blind, the community of academics, journalists, politicians, clerics, establishment lawyers, non-governmental organizations and others who believe we are confronted only by a small number of  miscreants who can be effectively dealt with by our criminal justice system (after being Mirandized, of course) is alarmingly large.  The idea that those who hate and wish to kill us have been given reason and cause by failures of our own making—aggression against Saddam’s murderous regime or the Taliban or support for democratic Israel or the failure to censor blasphemous words or drawings or the use of harsh methods of interrogation, and the like—goes well beyond the current administration (and is likely to outlast it).

Like Bush before him, Obama has done nothing to recognize publicly the Islamist nature of the terrorist threat.  But, unlike Bush, his apologetic tone when addressing the Muslim world implies that we are somehow responsible for Islamist extremism.  Victor Davis Hanson knows what the President should, but will never say: “Dear radical Muslims, you, not us, created your present misery through religious intolerance, gender apartheid, statism, corruption, tribalism, anti-scientific fundamentalism, and autocracy, and we have neither regrets about our own success nor responsibilities for your own self-induced miseries, unfortunate as they are.”

No one, least of all Jamie Glazov, would be surprised at the Media and liberal Left’s misplaced sympathy for Islamist militancy, sympathy that obscures the underlying Islamist motives in even such obvious cases as the Fort Hood massacre.  As Robert Spencer sagely observes: “They reflexively deny and ignore these conclusions because they are completely sold out to the idea that Muslims, as non-white, non-Christian, non-Westerners, cannot possibly be anything but victims.”

Steven Emerson has been relentless  in exposing seemingly moderate  Muslim organizations that are, in reality, working to “… infiltrate the corridors of power (Congress and the government), the media, Hollywood, the intelligentsia and even law enforcement, an agenda Emerson sums up as secretly aspiring to a “civilizational-jihadist process “.  More than anyone, Emerson has exposed one such organization, the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), for what it truly is: a Muslim Brotherhood associated political/propaganda organization with a concealed history of support for Hamas, posing as a civil rights group interested only in protecting Muslims from alleged discrimination.  Emerson exposes CAIR’s collaboration with other radical groups including J Street, an organization that feigns sympathy for Israel while working with CAIR against it.  Congresswoman Sue Myrick’s interview is a reminder that there are intelligent, diligent members of congress—though not as many as a majority driven institution requires.  Her patient, sustained criticism of CAIR stands in sharp contrast to the uncritical acceptance it has gained in some parts of the Congress and the media.  Taken together, Emerson and Myrick demonstrate that serious analysis and reporting can have a real impact when members of Congress are armed with facts.

Print This Post

A A A