Does McMaster minimize the threat of Sharia Supremacism?

Andy McCarthy writes at National Review,

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).

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.

...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).

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.

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