Meeting The Challenge

"[Obama] has demonstrated his own distrust of American power as a force for good in the world. [The President] treats American influence as a problem to be solved [unlike John F. Kennedy that America be forever] a watchman on the wall of freedom"
"We are at war. We must do what it takes, for as long as it takes, to win. We should immediately hit them in their sanctuaries, staging areas, command centres and lines of communication wherever we find them."
Former U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney

"America, our endless blessings bestow an enduring burden."
President Barack Obama

WASHINGTON, DC - AUGUST 28: U.S. President Barack Obama makes a statement at the James Brady Press Briefing Room of the White House August 28, 2014 in Washington, DC. President Obama spoke on various topics including possible action against ISIL and immigration reform.
lex Wong / GETTY

That burden has now, reluctantly, been hoisted to the tired shoulders of a greyer, unsmiling, President of the United States of America. Who goes to great pains to emphasize, time and again, that "true" Islam is "a religion of peace", a religion that has been "perverted" for the nefarious purposes of "terrorists" like al-Qaeda and Islamic State. In fact, he can assert, as though he believes it implicitly, that Islamist jihadis are not true Muslims.

Which is passing strange, since the true hadiths and the Koran characterize true Muslims as those willing to surrender to the dictates of Islam as a primary focus of their lives, the foremost among them being to pursue jihad, to make themselves better Muslims more in tune with Islam and its founding principles by destroying those who shun Islam rather than recognize it as the one true faith incumbent upon all humankind to embrace.

The "religion of peace" has never been at peace with itself. The cleavage between Sunni and Shiite runs so deep and so packed with malicious hatred, each consider the other to be apostates, insults to the heritage they were left by the Prophet Mohammed. Just as Islamist Sharia law calls for apostates to face death for their heretical views, pious Muslims are prepared to deliver that sentence. Islam was spread by the sword and it continues to pursue that avenue.

While Islamic secularists, if such a paradox is even feasible, call upon Islam to enlightenment in reflection of the need to understanding democracy, minority rights, gender equality, freedom of speech and conscience, they claim to find in the sacred texts appeals to embrace these  concepts. Also in the texts and more vibrant and numerous are those calls to arms which the radicals cling to, justifying their decision to become mujahadeen and martyrs for the cause.

That cause within the Islamic canon is the universality of Islam, to encompass and eclipse all other societies, religions, ideologies, societies and cultures into one great consolidated monolith of Islam. At the very time when the fount of Islam is rent with bloodshed and atrocities beyond the scope of the ordinary imagination because of sectarian hatred and violence, Islam also decrees that as a religion of peace and brotherly embrace, all of humankind must be captured by the inherent goodness of Islam.

That inherent goodness is one expressed by minority Islamic groups like the Ahmadyya and Ismaili Muslims. And they are hounded, oppressed, detested, threatened and considered heretics by mainstream Sunni and Shia Muslim communities. Muslims, divided into their specific sectarian beliefs are intolerant of one another. How to expect them to have tolerance for the diversity and pluralism that the rest of the world represents?

The doctrinal adversarial positions within Islam present it as a ghastly nightmare taking place before our very helpless eyes, a hopeless patchwork of hatred and violence consuming itself from the inside out. While the forgiving world of the West sighs and insists, along with the moderates within Islam that this is not their religion taking central place on the terrorist staging of world conquest, but a tragic misunderstanding.