Homeland Security - Michael Chertoff

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idealized origin, so that an ideologically pure pan-Islamist movement and its leaders would arise and its leaders would take their place as masters of the Middle East and eventually the world. University of London professor Efraim Karsh noted how Banna admired Hitler and Mussolini, created a paramilitary wing patterned after Hitler's SS, and synthesized “the tactic of terror, the cult of death, and the lust for conquest.”11 Banna himself stated that “death is an art, and the most exquisite of arts when practiced by the skillful artist.”

      What Banna supported, in other words, was not only the rejection of liberal democracy, but the violent perversion of traditional Islam for the purpose of advancing a more radical, politically driven vision similar to today's radical Islam. Not surprisingly, Banna warned his followers to expect vehement opposition from traditional Muslim scholars and clerics.12

      The affinity of his vision with totalitarianism, along with its hatred of Jews and Zionism, led Banna's Brotherhood to connect with Nazi Germany through the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, a Nazi collaborator who lived in Berlin for most of the Second World War. The intellectual commerce between Banna's Is-lamism and Hitler's Nazism helped open the Middle East to paranoid conspiracy theories alleging Jewish capitalist control of the world's financial and economic systems, as well as the notorious Czarist forgery, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” about a supposed Jewish plot to control the world. And following the end of World War II, when Britain and the United States were seeking to apprehend Husseini as a war criminal, the Brotherhood helped ensure that he was granted asylum in Egypt.13

      By the close of World War II, Banna's organization claimed more than 500,000 members in Egypt alone. More important, in the decades that followed, it spawned a new generation of leaders and disciples that created the extremist organizations of today, along with their totalitarian mindset and practices.

      In 1949, following the assassination of Egypt's prime minister, the government responded by assassinating Banna. His successor, Sayyid Qutb, further articulated the Islamist vision, employing both Marxist and fascist critiques of democratic capitalism. Tellingly, he compared his version of Islam not to other religions, but to distinctly secular ideologies and stages. As part of this effort, Qutb explicitly embraced Marx's stages of history. Along with Marx, he believed that just as industrial capitalism had replaced agrarianism, capitalism, in turn, would yield to a superior Marxian socialism. Significantly, he added Islamism as the fourth and final stage that would follow Marxism.14

      Ultimately, Qutb wanted this extremist ideology imposed from above by an elite revolutionary vanguard seizing state power in Bolshevik fashion. Building on Banna's teachings, he supported unleashing this vanguard in pursuit of a world caliphate by removing all traditional restraints on warfare. In 1966, Qutb, along with a number of other Muslim Brotherhood members, was hanged for conspiring to assassinate Egypt's nationalist president, Gamal Abdel Nasser.

      Among the many members arrested in connection with that conspiracy was a fifteen-year-old named Ayman al-Zawahiri.15 Zawahiri first met bin Laden in the mid-1980s and then joined him in Sudan in the early 1990s. He is said to have exclaimed that bin Laden was “the new Che Guevara.”16 By the early 1980s, bin Laden was in Afghanistan. Concomitantly, in Peshawar, Pakistan, fellow member Sheikh Abdullah Azzam was providing the infrastructure to fight the Soviets through his Office of Services, which would later form the basis for Al Qaeda.17

      Today, the Muslim Brotherhood publicly renounces violence. Yet unquestionably its early formation and development, influenced heavily by Western totalitarianism, helped produce not only the ideology but eventually the leadership for today's violent Islamist extremism.18 That includes not only the Sunni extremism of bin Ladenism but the Shiite radicalism of Khomeini's regime in Iran. From the beginning, Banna had envisioned a pan-Islamic ideological and political network that would span the Muslim world.

      As World War II drew to a close, Navab Safavi, an Iranian cleric, created a radical group that assassinated a number of Iranian intellectual and political leaders. In 1953, he visited the Brotherhood in Egypt. While Safavi was later executed for attempting to assassinate his country's prime minister, several among his group went on to play critical roles in helping Khomeini seize power a generation later.19 Khomeini's conversion from conservative cleric to radical Islamic ideologue by the early 1970s helped paved the way for the Revolution of 1978 and for Islamism to penetrate Shiite strongholds in the Middle East, including parts of Lebanon, where the terrorist group Hezbollah was created.

      Far from being an exclusively Shi`a phenomenon, Khomeini's revolution made it a point to honor Sunni fellow radicals. Under the ayatollah, a postage stamp commemorating Qutb was unveiled, and under Khomeini's successor, Ali Khamenei, Qutb's voluminous works were translated into Persian.20 Until 2006, streets in Tehran, such as Islambouli Street, could still be found named in honor of the Sunni assassins of Egyptian President Anwar Sadat, with collages erected in their memory.

       We Are at War

      In short, just as totalitarian communism and fascism were the main ideological threats of the twentieth century, the totalitarian ideology of violent extremist Islamism wars against the world today. Based on the words and deeds of the terrorists themselves, we are very much at war. In 1998, Osama bin Laden made an open declaration of war that ended with the command “to kill the Americans and their allies—civilian and military, in any country where it is possible to do it.”21 In the decade following, bin Laden and his cohorts have done precisely that, plotting against the entire global system of security, safety and prosperity.

      Their efforts belie the scope of the current struggle. We are at war with an ideology that is every bit as fanatical and ruthless as that of fascism or communism. Spread by a sinister network of cultlike entities that spans the world, this fanatical worldview sanctifies the torture and slaughter of innocents; it denies the dignity and humanity of its opponents; and it includes among those it targets mainstream Muslims who dare to reject its pseudo-religious message of intolerance and bigotry.

      These extremists have proved themselves quite capable of waging the war that they have declared. They have been helped in part by twenty-first-century technology, which has provided even small groups with enormous capability for destruction and damage. Radicals affiliated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban or other similar extremist groups—from North Africa to Iraq and South Asia—are fighting for, and sometimes achieving, control of territory that they use to train, assemble advanced weaponry, and perform experiments to develop ever deadlier ways of killing their enemies, and over which they impose their own vision of repressive law and seek to dominate local life.

      And finally, through atrocities like the 9/11 bombings, the radicals have demonstrated that they are quite capable of visiting consequences upon us every bit commensurate with war. Their goal is clear; what our enemies want is “a dialogue with bullets and the ideals of assassination, bombing and destruction.” These are not my words; they are from an Al Qaeda training manual.

      The nature of our enemies and the ideological threat we face brings to mind Winston Churchill's famous dictum, uttered in 1946 in reference to a different threat, that of the Soviet Union, but equally applicable here: “There is nothing they admire so much as strength, and there is nothing for which they have less respect than for weakness.”22 Simply put, this is how ideological fanatics view the world. Whether it is Adolf Hitler or Josef Stalin, Osama bin Laden, or President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran, for every fanatic, weakness is provocation. That is why we must never fool ourselves into thinking that submissiveness is a path to peace.

      The United States has heeded this counsel. Following 9/11, President Bush took decisive action, striking back against Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, deploying our intelligence assets across the globe, capturing or killing terrorists on nearly every continent, and partnering with our allies on shared intelligence against this common menace. Without such steps, the United States would have doubtless faced other, equally devastating attacks over the past eight years.

      But there is another element in this struggle that is as important as strength: resolve. In his day, Ronald Reagan counseled that the United States should be “not warlike, not bellicose, not expansionist—but firm and principled in resisting

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