Against Enemies Foreign And Domestic

By David Larson
Carolina Journal

Yesterday, Sept. 10, marked the one-year anniversary of the killing of conservative commentator and organizer Charlie Kirk at a campaign event in Utah. Today marks the 25th anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks by Al Qaeda on the World Trade Center complex in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, DC. These two anniversaries will now forever be linked in a grim two-day remembrance.

But it seems appropriate that they be remembered together. In the first attack, 25 years ago, we came face to face with the fact, which many had forgotten, that we have real enemies in the world that hate us and our way of life. And even if we do not wish to harm them, they wish to harm us. In the second, it was clear that we have enemies to our way of life living among us too.

The word “enemy” can feel a bit judgemental, like maybe we are participating in “the cycle of violence,” without which, we’d have reached world peace long ago. But sadly, the word is still necessary to describe a reality in our world that has not disappeared and likely never will.

What is it that makes it necessary to call them an enemy? At its core, it comes down to an incompatibility of social and political institutions — like if you wanted to build a structure on a hill with one kind of foundation and particular pillars and another person wanted to build something completely different. One would have to give way to the other. The beauty of our structure — liberal democracy — is that it allows many of those who had disagreed in the past to build largely what they wished to. But others are not content with that live-and-let-live approach.

Those who attacked us 25 years ago hated our system because they wanted to replace it with a form of political Islam. Al Qaeda grew out of the Salafi movement, an interpretation of Sunni Islam that is at once very radical and traditional. The man often credited with starting the movement was Muslim Brotherhood theorist Sayyid Qutb.

Qutb, an Egyptian, spent time in the late 1940s in the United States studying in universities, including in Washington, DC, and at Stanford. But more of his time was in Greeley, Colorado, at what is now University of Northern Colorado. Greeley in 1949 was a dry town and fairly wealthy, conservative, and religious, but it was still far more liberal in its customs than what Qutb had apparently expected.

He was shocked by jazz music, which he said was bestial and primitive. He said American women were all purposefully seductive in their dress and interactions with men. He found the large green front lawns of Americans a sign of greed and excess. And (most of all) he was disgusted by the fact that men and women freely mingled everywhere and saw it as a sign of complete sexual laxity and immorality. Even conservative small town America was basically a progressive dystopia to him. He would have likely felt the same visiting many of the small towns here in North Carolina.

When he returned to Egypt, Qutb wrote “The America that I Have Seen” to convince many of his fellow Arabs that the West was a cultural and spiritual wasteland to be confronted, not imitated. Later he wrote his manifesto, “Milestones,” which every major Salafi leader, from Osama Bin Laden of Al Qaeda to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi of ISIS, has placed prominently on their bookshelf. I also have it on my bookshelf, which may have put me on a watchlist or two, but it’s worth putting in the time to really “know your enemies,” as Sun Tzu said.

The point is, we have built something, a place where we can live in freedom, speak our minds, move where we want, pursue the professional projects we want, mingle with members of the opposite sex in public, worship (or not) as we want, and even mow our front lawns while listening to jazz on our ear buds. Qutb’s descendants want to knock all that down, with that symbolism being made very real with their knocking down of the Twin Towers. They are our enemies.

But not all enemies are foreign; there are many that are domestic, walking among us. Fortunately for them, the structure we have built allows for them to speak their minds as well, even if they ultimately would prefer we knocked this all down and started over. Both far-left socialists and far-right “post-liberals” have their grand plans for what should be built after this task is done. But they are happy to delay the debate about what to build next until later. For now, an alliance of convenience among the far left, far right, and the Islamic radicals is aligned on what needs to be done first — putting cracks in those pillars of our American structure, especially freedom of expression in all its many forms.

When Charlie Kirk was shot and killed at an event on a college campus, where he was speaking his mind and inviting others to openly speak theirs too, it served the purposes of all those dedicated to destroying the American way. Those who would rather those civil disagreements not happen, because it legitimizes views they believe should be shut down, were often not too sad to see Kirk silenced. Many of those on the far left now show this by celebrating the anniversary with Charlie Kirk dance-offs, “Kirkmas” carols, and other mockery.

I would classify these also as enemies of what we’ve built. Instead of free expression, they want to shut down views they disagree with. Instead of free enterprise, they believe business should be highly regulated and taxed, seeing it more as a hoarder than a builder of wealth for the country. Instead of freedom of religion, they want their particular worldview, whether it’s Salafi Islam or Marxist atheism, enforced with an iron fist.

Of course, for those of us who are Christian, we believe Christ told us to love our enemies, so we should still will their good and protect their rights too. But he didn’t say we wouldn’t have any enemies. And these last two days should remind us of that every year — and that we will need to fight in many ways to protect what past generations fought and died to build and hand down to us.

To badly paraphrase Winston Churchill:

We shall fight on the campuses; we shall fight in the opinion pages; we shall fight in the comment boxes and social media; we shall fight at the ballot box; in the battlefields of ideas and, when necessary, the battlefields of war; we shall never surrender.

David Larson is managing editor of Carolina Journal.