Donald Trump's campaign remarks about Muslims were both taken out of context and decoupled from a necessary, larger framework.
Trump is neither anti-Muslim nor against states with majority Muslim populations. Quite the opposite is in fact the case, as his long business associations, various joint ventures and employment practices in the private sector prove. However, he is deadly serious, unlike the present administration, about protecting America from all terrorists. The unpleasant reality is that most of these terrorists come from the Muslim world. Why is that?
"Temporarily halting" migration and immigration of a group of people (especially undocumented refugees) is a safety precaution that would be put in place to put a stop to terrorism against Americans. That is the intended goal after events that could have been avoided. Presidents as diverse as FDR, Nixon and Carter have initiated such practices in the past – so Trump is not out of bounds.
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Trump's determination to re-examine U.S. immigration policy in light of a realistic assessment of current terrorist threats should not be seen as a permanent measure. As Trump stated, we simply need to reinspect our current policies and procedures to insure that they are properly adapted to protect all Americans against the real threat posed by ISIS and other radical Islamist groups.
This process would be time-sensitive and urgent. The goal would be to close loopholes and to put in place controls likely to work, including using social media to glean information on all visa applicants.
Without such measures, we only risk more terrorist activity on U.S. soil. Both the CIA and the NSA have recently testified that such terrorist activity on American soil is likely. Should we not take precautions given the warnings authorities like the CIA and NSA have already issued?
The larger framework, however, should not be forgotten.
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In 1996, the late, brilliant Harvard professor Samuel P. Huntington published a book entitled "The Clash of Civilizations" that was most prescient. Huntington suggested a theory that cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post-Cold War world.
It appears Huntington's analysis 20 years ago has today begun to come to fruition. His forecast becomes more relevant each passing day in our post-9/11 world, where the threat of Islamic radicalism is not only tearing at the social, economic and political fabric of America, Europe, Africa and Asia, but it also is the core conflict in a Middle East thrown into civil war by the centuries-old enmity still dividing Sunni and Shiite Muslims.
Global conflict today is increasingly about culture.
The battle lines of the present are not confined to the arc of the Muslim world spreading now into the United States, Europe and Africa. The end of ideologically defined states in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union has allowed traditional ethnic identities and animosities to rise; and rise they have. Just pause to ask how many different ethnic groups comprise the former Soviet Union, or take a moment to contemplate the hopes and dreams that motivate Kurds in nations like Iraq, Iran and Turkey to want their independence.
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To quote Huntington himself: "The clash of civilizations thus occurs at two levels. At the micro-level, adjunct groups along the fault lines between civilizations of territory and with each other. At the macro-level, states from different civilizations compete with each other for relative military and economic power, struggle over the control of international institutions and third parties, and competitively promote their particular political and religious values."
The most significant dividing line in the world now is the Western boundary of Christianity in the year 1500. It is not only a divide but also a line of bloody conflict. That fault line between Western and Islamic civilizations has been going on for some 1,300 years. Islam twice laid siege to Vienna.
Huntington predicted that the interaction between the West and Islam would not decline but rather accelerate. He said it would become more violent. The historian Bernard Lewis came to the same conclusion; so did the distinguished Muslim scholar A.J. Akbar.
The larger conclusion for our debate today is that the West, especially led by the U.S., will have to develop an understanding of various civilizations, primarily the violent aggression of radical Islam understood both as a religion and as a political movement. The United States today needs to maintain and rebuild the economic and military power necessary to protect our national interest, to better defend ourselves, protect our citizens and preserve our civilization.
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Trump understands that Islam is one of the three great Abrahamic faiths and that a minority of its adherents have hijacked Islam for violent political ends. Radical Islamic terrorists are destroying their own culture even as they strike out against everything they hate in Western civilization. The truth is Islam needs to undergo the type of reformation experienced by the other two Abrahamic faiths. Millions of Muslims throughout the world realize that the needed reformation must emanate from within Islam itself, such that it cannot be imposed on Islam from the outside.
For the needed reformation to take place, true-believing Muslims and Muslim-majority states must take back their own religion and oppose all forms radical Islam that profess political terrorism, with a resolve to condemn and defund Islamic terrorism wherever it raises its ugly head. This is the place to start.
Meanwhile, we need to both protect ourselves and combat terror with all the means at our disposal. This is not a halfhearted or feeble exercise. It will take time, money, and effort, and it starts with fixing our immigration system much as Trump has suggested, and by rereading Huntington to get a firm intellectual grasp on how best to resolve the global clash of civilizations that today threatens to destroy civilization itself.
