Surveillance in Muslim communities is indispensable for defeating terrorism. With no hope of winning an argument on the facts, demagogues resort to the argument ad hominem. Too often, it works. And in the modern “progressive” West, no demagogic tactic works better than branding one’s political adversaries as racists. That is why the Muslim Brotherhood, the world’s most influential Islamic-supremacist organization, dreamed up the term “Islamophobia.” It is why Western progressives, stalwart allies of the Brotherhood, have lustily embraced the Islamophobia smear tactic — even sought to engrave it in our law, in brazen violation of the First Amendment.

It beats trying to refute the irrefutable nexus between Islamic scripture, sharia supremacism, and jihadist terror. It beats trying to rationalize the sheer idiocy of a policy, their policy, that idealizes Islam as the irenic monolith they would like it to be, rather than the complex of competing and contradictory convictions it is. Of the latter, the most dynamic is the conviction that Islam is an alternative civilization determined to conquer the West by force, by political pressure, by cultural aggression, and by exploiting Western civil liberties (liberties that are forbidden in the sharia societies Islamists would impose). Ted Cruz found himself in the middle of this demagogic storm this week. Reacting to the latest jihadist atrocity in Brussels, in which 31 were killed and 230 wounded, Senator Cruz argued that to protect our national security against radical Islamic terror networks, it is imperative for law enforcement to conduct surveillance in Muslim communities.

Cruz was not calling for a dragnet targeting all Muslims. In his presidential campaign (to which I am an adviser), he has stressed the importance of identifying the enemy as radical Islam. That is not campaign rhetoric; it is how we figure out who warrants surveillance — and far from being anything new, it is how counterterrorism was done before President Obama came to power. Yet, as night follows day, the Islamist-leftist alliance pounced with the fury of an emperor whose lack of clothes has just been noticed. It is simply, undeniably, a fact that some Muslim mosques and surrounding communities are hotbeds of Islamic supremacism, a fundamentalist interpretation of Islam that holds that Muslims must struggle against non-believers — by force and by all other means –- until Allah’s law (sharia) is established throughout the world. Islamic supremacism is not the only way of construing Islam, and millions of Muslims reject it. This, however, does not undo the remorseless fact that millions of Muslims accept it, that it is a mainstream construction of Islam (it is, for example, the Islam of the Muslim Brotherhood), and that it has a considerable following in the West.

Why do millions of Muslims accept it? Why do I describe it as a “fundamentalist” interpretation of Islam? Because it is drawn literally from scriptures, which are quite easy to read and grasp. That is why Islamists and leftists slander as a racist/Islamophobe anyone who points out this inconvenient fact. They want you to smile and repeat after them: “Religion of Peace!” — end of story. They are desperate that you do not pick up the Koran (which Muslims take to be the verbatim, immutable word of Allah) and read what Muslims read, such as this (from the ninth chapter, or sura): Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor Hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the Religion of Truth, from among the People of the Book [i.e., Jews and Christians], until they pay the jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued. (The jizya is a tax imposed on dhimmis — non-Muslims who are permitted to live because they’ve submitted to the authority of an Islamic state. It is designed to remind them of their inferior status under Muslim law, so that they “feel themselves subdued.”) Again, as I have pointed out on numerous occasions, there are modernist Muslims who embrace the Western Enlightenment and reject the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam — Islam for them truly is a faith rather than a totalitarian political ideology. But while we welcome them into our society (many of them are our fellow Americans), it makes no more sense to see them as the only true Muslims and thus absolve Islam than it would to see the fundamentalists as the only true Muslims and condemn Islam.

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Source: Andrew C. McCarthy, nationalreview.com