H.R. McMaster’s Blind Spot: The Global Threat of Islamic ‘Sharia Supremacy’

Former US prosecutor in the 1993 WTC bombing, author and National Review (NR) columnist has a important identification of the blind spot of Trump National Security Adviser, Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster, while paying credit to McMaster’s valorous military service and command record.

What McCarthy does in his NR column is zero in on the lack of understanding that the threat assessment blind spot about Islam , that the Bush and especially the Obama Administration refused to recognize is the doctrine behind “radical Islamic extremism and terrorism”.

In two words it is Shari’a Supremacism.

The term best defines what is the core of this totalitarianism with a thin veneer of religious practices governing every aspect of one’s life, denying human and civil rights for everyone who is not a Muslim, the Kufr or infidels: Christians,Jews Buddhists, Hindus and others, women, gays and apostates-those who have left the faith under penalty of death fatwas It amounts to a doctrine that venerates death over life in the hereafter for following in the way of their god, Allah, Jihad.

That is captured in this comment from McCarthy’s NR essay HR McMaster & Islam-He minimizes the threat of Shari’a Supremacism:

“Most of us recognize that there is a straight-line nexus between Islamic scripture and Muslim aggression and — critically — that this aggression is not only, or even mostly, forcible.”

Read this excerpt from McCarthy’s NR essay on why McMaster minimizes the threat of Shari’a Supremacism under Islam:

The policy problem I have with McMaster involves Islam. It’s the same problem I’ve had with Washington for 25 years. I should be less concerned about McMaster’s views on Islam because it is one of the few subjects on which candidate Trump purported to have real convictions. He was going to force us to come to grips with “radical Islamic terrorism.”

Alas, as I pointed out during and after the campaign, this might be a sign of real resolve; or, in the alternative, Trump might have no idea what he was talking about — it might be another exhibition of his talent to sense the divide between irate Americans and their smug government, and to tell the former what they want to hear.

It turns out Trump is different from other swamp creatures only in his willingness to mouth the words. When it gets down to brass tacks, what he’s against is terrorism. Well, great, so is everyone else. He gets some plaudits, I suppose, for acknowledging that the terrorists are overwhelmingly Muslim. But he seems insouciant about the reasons for that.

Islam is not going away, we have to deal with it. In figuring out how, desirous of not giving gratuitous offense to Muslims, we’ve overcomplicated something that is actually pretty simple: Islam must be seen either as (1) a big problem that we have to work around, or (2) a part of the solution to our security challenge. I am in the first camp.

McMaster seems solidly in the second, and the “principled realism” speech in Saudi Arabia shows the president leaning his way.

The difference is straightforward. In the first camp, most of us do not dispute that there are authentically “moderate” interpretations of Islam (non-aggressive is a better descriptor).

We recognize, however, that there is a straight-line nexus between Islamic scripture and Muslim aggression and — critically — that this aggression is not only, or even mostly, forcible. That is why “sharia supremacism” is more accurate than “radical Islam,” and by leaps and bounds more accurate than “radical Islamic terrorism.”

“Sharia supremacism” conveys the divine command to implement and spread Islam’s societal framework and legal system. It demonstrates that our quarrel is not with a religion per se but with a totalitarian political ideology with a religious veneer.

Violent jihadism is only one way — the most immediately threatening way — of carrying out the mission. Muslims who adhere to sharia supremacism are Islamists, and all Islamists — violent or non-violent — have essentially the same goal, even if their methods and the strictness of their sharia regimens differ. Not nearly all Muslims are Islamists, and only a small percentage of Islamists are jihadists. But jihadists, like all Islamists, quite legitimately call themselves Muslims. Fourteen centuries of scholarship supports them.

McMaster’s familiar bipartisan Beltway camp holds that Islam simply must be good because it is a centuries-old religion that nearly 2 billion people accept. Sure, it has scriptures ill-suited to the modern world, but so does the Bible. Bellicose Muslim scriptures have, in any event, been nullified or “contextualized” to apply only to their seventh-century conditions — just ask anyone at Georgetown . . . even if they don’t seem to have gotten the memo in Riyadh, Tehran, Kabul, Baghdad, the Nile Delta, Peshawar, the Bekaa Valley, Aceh Province, Chechnya, or in swelling precincts of London, Paris, Berlin, Brussels, Malmö, Copenhagen, Rotterdam, Vienna, or pretty much anyplace else in the West where the Muslim population reaches a critical mass (roughly 5 to 10 percent).

Thus, we are to believe, the Islam that terrorists claim to be relying on no longer exists (not that it ever did, of course). Terrorists must, therefore, be understood as perverting the “true Islam” — indeed, they are “anti-Islamic.” In fact, they are best seen as “violent extremists” because Islam is no more prone to instigate aggression than any other religion or ideology taken to an extreme (you know, like those violent extremist Quakers).

If more Muslims than other religious believers are committing terrorist crimes, we must assume there are economic and political explanations — or dodge the charge by pointing out that Muslims, far more than others, are victims of terrorism (a non sequitur that more exposes than explains away the problem).

Accomodations made to Islamists in places where we have no choice but to deal with them are not accommodations that should be made here at home.

The principal flaw in the second camp’s reasoning is that, by removing Islam as an ideological catalyst of terrorism, it turns terrorists into wanton killers. With the logic and aims of the violence thereby erased, also concealed is the cultural (or even “civilizational”) aggression spurred by the same ideology. This, in turn, diverts attention from the tenets of that ideology, which are virulently anti-constitutional, anti-Western, anti-Semitic, and corrosive of individual liberty, equality, privacy, free speech, freedom of conscience, and non-violent conflict resolution.

To accommodate the ideology in the West is to lose the West. There have been complaints that Trump is too reliant on his generals, that he is running a militarized, right-wing government. This is mostly fatuous.

On balance, besides their can-do discipline, modern military officers — especially warrior-scholars in the McMaster, Mattis, Petraeus mold — tend to be politically progressive and prudently cautious about the wages of war. There is, however, an aspect of the charge that has merit. Our commanders experience Islam on overseas battlefields where it is the only game in town. They encounter not only Islamist enemies but also Islamists with whom they can and must ally. They form strong bonds with these allies, seeing them for what they are in those settings: the progressive elements. It may not be so easy to remember that they are “progressive” not because they are, in fact, progressive but because the milieu is a fundamentalist sharia society.

This is only natural. In the foreign realm, we encounter many actors who must be dealt with on their own terms, terms that would not be a good fit for our society. It is a fair criticism that many of us who are hostile to sharia supremacism have unreasonable expectations about how (and even whether) our government should interact with shady Muslim regimes and movements overseas. It is just as valid, however, to point out that the accommodations made to Islamists in places where we have no choice but to deal with them are not accommodations that should be made here at home. On our turf, sharia principles contradict our culture — as evidenced by the Islamists’ perdurable resistance to assimilation (see, e.g., Europe’s parallel societies).

We have a right to expect that our national-security officials will appreciate, rather than blur, this distinction. It is one thing to say, as Washington does, that picking unnecessary fights with Islamists — e.g., designating the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization — complicates our ability to make and keep alliances against global jihadism. It is quite another thing to fail to recognize the threat Islamists pose to our own society and constitutional system. An Islamist is a Muslim committed to the imposition of sharia. There may be “moderate Islamists” in Anbar Province; there are none in America. I have great respect for General McMaster, but I’m just as worried about whether he gets that, as he apparently is worried about whether there are too many Islamophobes on the NSC. As for the president, well, he talks a good game.

Read more at: http://www.nationalreview.com/…/h-r-mcmaster-islam-he-minim…

McMaster and the Challenge of Sharia Supremacism

---