It Is About Religion

The day held a unique significance for Egyptian President Anwar Sadat as he sat in a reviewing stand accompanied by a host of political, military, and visiting international dignitaries. It was October 6, 1981, and the parade he was watching was celebrating Egypt’s successful crossing of the Suez Canal exactly eight years earlier, starting the 1973 Yom Kippur War against Israel.

As military vehicles passed before Sadat, a truck stopped. Armed men dressed in army uniforms leaped from the vehicle and opened fire. In a matter of minutes, the 62-year-old president of Egypt was dead.

His assassins were disgruntled members of the Muslim Brotherhood, operating under the name “Islamic Jihad.” The driving force behind the murder was essentially twofold: (1) Sadat had followed a secular agenda that suppressed the radical religious elements craving an Islamist-dominated regime; and (2) Sadat had dared to shake hands with Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin. Sadat had visited Jerusalem, negotiated a peace agreement, and in 1979 signed the Egypt-Israel peace treaty that ended Egypt’s perpetual state of war with the Jewish nation.

The Brotherhood’s fanatical motivation was anti-Israel (anti-Semitic) extremism and a religion-driven, imperialist passion either to dominate or die. In fact, the Muslim Brotherhood’s credo proclaims, “Allah is our objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Quran is our law; Jihad is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.”

Western political apologists and journalists can say what they will and remain in a bewildering state of denial, but all of their attempts to deny the Brotherhood’s declared intentions will not alter the facts. The catastrophic events following the “Arab Spring” that brought the Brotherhood to power in Egypt revealed the organization’s underbelly and should dispel any illusions that the Muslim Brotherhood is a lover of freedom and democracy.

Its ultimate goal is to establish a global Islamic caliphate that will install a Sharia-based autocracy. One stage is to destabilize any movement toward secular democracy in the Middle East.

In such a scenario, everyone but the imperialist jihadists lose—which includes truly moderate Muslims who have no desire to involve themselves in the overthrow of nations that offer freedom and a stable future for them and their children.

We are under a constant barrage of protests these days that we are not at war with radical Islam. But that does not alter the reality that radical Islamists are at war with us. The conflict is not an insurgency of disagreement that can be settled by conventional negotiations between parties sharing a sense of goodwill. It is about religious radicalism that tolerates no basis for agreement with those considered infidels: Its bottom line is subjugation or annihilation.

Israel is a capital case in point. While the West wages a campaign for a frustratingly illusive two-state solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict, the unwavering position of the Muslim-Palestinian leadership is for one state only. At the root of that commitment is the Muslim belief that the land belongs exclusively to Allah and his devotees.

The 1967 conference of Arab leaders in Khartoum, Sudan, laid down a marker for future dealings with Israel: No peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, and no negotiations with Israel. That platform of denial has endured for 46 years, buttressed today by radical Islam’s oft-stated potential option of using nuclear weapons to annihilate the Jewish state.

Coupled with Islam’s program to purge the Middle East of Israel and Jewish people is the genocidal campaign to rid the region of Christians, Christianity, and Christian institutions. Violent atrocities in Egypt and elsewhere across segments of the Muslim world confirm Islam’s stated intentions.

These are not eruptions of isolated, secular, nationalistic fervor or misguided, petty, tyrannical ambition. They represent an obsession bent on a triumphalist mission in the name of religion.

It is imperative that people wake up. For the most part, the West, including a large segment of the evangelical Christian community, is either ill-informed or unconcerned. This is not a one-front battle. Foreign soil is not the only battleground. A campaign is being waged in America to eliminate the Christian presence. At the moment the tactics are ridicule, hate speech, and legally imposed bigotry. But tomorrow the tactics may be more like those used against Anwar Sadat.