(By John Andrews, Centennial Fellow) We meet today in defense of the freedom of religion that gave rise to America in the first place, the freedom of thought that enables us to choose our political leaders, and the freedom of speech that makes possible an industry like yours and a forum like this one.
All are at risk from a totalitarian political system that is increasingly subverting the constitutional liberties of the United States and the peaceful ideals of the United Nations. Our mission at the Center for Security Policy is to awaken Americans to resist this mortal peril before it’s too late.
Note: This essay is adapted from John Andrews' speech at a Center for Security Policy luncheon on Feb. 25, 2016, during the National Religious Broadcasters Convention in Nashville, Tennessee. John is affiliated with the Center’s new counter-jihad campaign. He was previously director of Centennial Institute, president of the Colorado Senate, and an appointee of four U.S. presidents.
It was in 1983, at a national Christian conference much like this one, that President Ronald Reagan courageously identified the Soviet Union and world communism for what they were, "an evil empire."
Today it’s up to you and me to tell the same inconvenient truth about the global jihad movement and its agenda to subjugate all mankind under shariah law.
Evil Empire
The evil empire of our time is this drive for Islamic supremacy, all the more dangerous because of its exploitation of Americans’ tolerance and generosity under the false cloak of religion.
Yes, I said “false cloak.” The Muslim Brotherhood’s charter, acknowledged in court during a 2008 terrorism trial, reveals it to be a revolutionary group no different from those that struck at the heart of American self-government and Western civilization in centuries past.
Doubtless many individual followers of Allah, religiously obeying the Quran, wish no ill to their neighbors. But there is nothing religious about the Muslim Brotherhood master plan for making shariah the one and only law of the land through their sworn commitment to violent as well as nonviolent struggle, known as jihad.
This is a political threat requiring a political response. To regard it as a religion is to commit what’s called a category error, as if someone from Mars was offered a plate of food and attempted to eat both food and plate.
Lincoln once asked in a debate, “How many legs does a mule have, if you call a tail a leg?” It still has only four, because calling a tail a leg doesn’t make it one. Neither does calling the Muslim Brotherhood a religious group make it one.
This is a tempting error for us as religious people, Christians and Jews of goodwill, and equally tempting for many secular people who dismiss all religions categorically. But it’s a fatal delusion we must avoid.
Know Three Things
We need instead a threefold knowledge. First, as Americans of every humane faith or no faith at all, we must know our enemy, the jihad movement that wants us enslaved under shariah or dead if we resist.
Then second, we must know our strength, the irresistible might of millions and millions of free citizens who will not be cowed by the Islamist bullies and thought police.
And third, for those of us who follow Jesus Christ, we must also know our destiny, the assured eternal future that awaits us from serving the victorious Prince of Peace. Thus aroused and thus armed, we can prevail.
What I mean about knowing our strength is this: Muslim Brotherhood strategy calls for stigmatizing and ultimately criminalizing any single word that criticizes Islam, whether as opinion or fact.
Imagine how this would muzzle the preaching in our churches, the free expression in our media, the open debate in our politics. Imagine how it would empower jihad and shariah.
But friends, this kind of stealthy silencing is already happening through UN resolutions, government policy at all levels, and political correctness as enforced across the whole culture by leftists in schools, corporations, entertainment, everywhere. Everywhere!
We Serve the Truth
Yet this wave of censorship and thought control has only the power we give it. Not one bit more. We are many, they are few. We are mighty, they are weak. We serve the truth, they serve the lie. We can overwhelm them and sweep them away. What are we waiting for?
Imagine three masked gunmen bursting through the doors to this dining room and ordering us all to the floor in terrified silence. Would we submit? As 250 fearless Christ-followers against three violent jihadis, God knows we shouldn’t – and, by sheer numbers, we wouldn’t need to.
Much less should the vast majority of free Americans submit to a relative handful of Muslim Brotherhood subversives and their useful-idiot allies on the left attempting to take free speech hostage as one step toward Islamic theocracy in these United States.
Knowing our enemy’s intentions against us and knowing our own strength against them, we are unconquerable. Their stealthy gains toward conquest result only from our inattention and inaction thus far.
Let all that begin to change today, here and now. Let it begin with you and me. Jesus commands us to love our enemy, and so we shall. But that doesn’t mean letting them have their way.
One of the infamous Rules for Radicals framed by Saul Alinsky, Barack Obama’s and Hillary Clinton’s mentor, is “Freeze the target.” The global jihad movement wants to freeze you into wordless passivity as Christians, as communicators, as influencers, as concerned citizens. Don’t let them.
Action Plan
What can you do, you as one person? So many things, the action plan writes itself. Here are just a few:
Speak out. Band together. Coordinate your counter-offensive. Retrieve your wounded. Rally around the boldest. Push the envelope. Be truth-tellers. Unmask the lie. Scorn political correctness. Dare to provoke CAIR.
Enlist your pastor, priest, or rabbi. Engage your school board and city council. Meet with your state legislators. Keep score on your US senators and congressmen. Study up on jihad and shariah, the Muslim Brotherhood and the vision of a global caliphate.
Get up every morning with the conscious awareness that the Brotherhood wants you enslaved or dead. Recognize that today is either another day of them gaining on that objective or us gaining on our objective.
That’s how the communist evil empire was defeated in a death struggle of 10,000 days and more. That’s how the Islamist evil empire must be defeated now. There is no neutral ground and no spectators. It’s us or them, literally. Us or them.
Revolutionary Theocrats
A religion of peace? Hardly. An ideology of merciless war, is more like it. Not every Muslim is a revolutionary theocrat, of course. But in the world of 2016 every revolutionary theocrat is a jihad-compliant, shariah-compliant Muslim.
If we miss that brutal fact, we deserve our fate. But our children and grandchildren surely deserve better from us. Let us not be counted with the fools and cowards who cried “Peace, peace,” when there was none, as the ancient prophet Jeremiah witnessed (Jer. 6:14).
Our own modern prophet, Winston Churchill, knew Islam at close quarters as a soldier, journalist, and statesman. He knew that while Hitler and Stalin were the great threats of the 20th century, the greater enduring threat to Western civilization across fourteen centuries and counting is Muhammad and Allah.
Churchill’s writings sound that somber warning, and it is a warning we dare not ignore. The totalitarian Muslim Brotherhood is a 21st-century menace we must combat with all our strength and resolve, day by day by day.
Burning Hot
In this struggle, our decency as Americans, and especially our mildness as Christians, will make us over-sympathetic to any minority's grievance and over-trustful of their neighborliness. But in the case of shariah and jihad, that’s a dangerous trap.
As the Christian realizes in Pilgrim’s Progress, when a deceiver is about to take him in, “It came burning hot into my mind, whatever he said, and however he flattered, when he got me home to his house, he would sell me for a slave.”
That’s the Brotherhood exactly. That’s CAIR. That’s your local Saudi-financed Islamic Center. They want us enslaved or dead, and the first step is to silence us.
So let us vow here today that we will never be silenced. Never!