Mr. Chairman and honourable members, I want to begin by thanking you for inviting me to speak to you as a Canadian who happens to be a Muslim.
As an academic with a focus on international relations studies and area studies of the Middle East and south and southwest Asia, I have been writing and speaking as a public intellectual on matters related to what the late Professor Samuel Huntington of Harvard so presciently warned about in his book The Clash of Civilizations. Huntington’s warning was made in the early 1990s. More than a dozen years after radical Muslim terrorists attacked New York and Washington on September 11, 2001, the western powers, including Canada, remain in various stages of denial of the war that Islamists declared against the west and have been waging across the Arab-Muslim world.
The issue at hand is Canada’s role as part of the U.S.-led coalition to degrade the Islamist terrorist organization ISIL, or IS. Operation Impact, while politically and militarily significant, is nevertheless relatively small and of limited duration. I support the mission. I laud Parliament for authorizing this mission. We need to be cautiously realistic, however, given the scope and terms of the mission. There have been some concerns and criticisms raised in regard to how the mission has handled its task within a fluid situation of an ongoing war in the region, and these, therefore, in my view, lack credibility.
Realism demands a more forthright assessment of not only this mission but also beyond it, an assessment of the manner in which Canada has evaluated the nature, capacity, and objectives of radical Islam, political Islam, or the Islamist threat regionally and globally. Canada is not alone in demonstrating a lack of coherent assessment of the threat of Islamism, or political Islam. The striking fact is that a coherent threat assessment of Islamism is missing in the foreign policy of all the major western powers. There is reluctance, even fear, to describe who the enemy is, against which the western powers, including Canada, have deployed military force.
ISIL is not simply a terrorist organization that has carried out with shocking audacity heinous atrocities in the region historically known as the Fertile Crescent. ISIL is not simply the most recent version of Hulagu Khan, a grandson of Genghis Khan, the Mongol leader of a ravaging army that laid waste to this region and its capital, Baghdad, in the 13th century. ISIL, or now IS, gleefully, capriciously, and mockingly has gone on a rampage, destroying religious sites of immense historical interest and systematically plundering, raping, and slaughtering men, women, and children in ancient communities of Christians, Yazidis, and minority sects in Islam. We are witnessing genocide not for the first time in this region.
ISIL is fuelled by the ideology of Islamism. We need to fully grasp the meaning and objective of this ideology, as we in the west once did when confronted with Soviet Communism. This is essential if we are to put forward a coherent policy instead of band-aids to contain and defeat what ISIL represents. Islamism is the ideology of armed jihad, of waging war by any means available to enforce sharia rule in Muslim majority countries and seek sharia compliance by democracies in the west for Muslim immigrants.
ISIL is the latest incarnation of Islamism, the ideology of political Islam constructed by the Egyptian founder of Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna, in the 1920s, and by the south Asian founder of Jamaat-e-Islami, Abul A'la Maududi, in the 1940s. In effect, Islamism is the third surviving totalitarian movement from the 20th century that confronts the modern world of freedom and democracy.
ISIL has risen from the ashes of al Qaeda in Iraq. Its current leaders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the self-declared caliph of the IS, were al Qaeda warriors and henchmen of the maniacal murderer Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was tracked and killed by American forces in 2006. The difference between ISIL and al Qaeda is that the former, unlike the latter, has managed to carve out a shell state over an expansive territory that spills over the borders between Syria and Iraq as a nucleus of a future Islamist state.
Given the limited time I have, I want to draw your attention to the following facts.
Some 14 years since 9/11 and the war on terror initiated by the American-led coalition in Afghanistan and Iraq, the reality on the ground in the greater Middle East and beyond is Islamist terrorism remains robust and expansive. The claims made by the Obama administration in Washington following the killing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, that al Qaeda had been effectively destroyed, were unreal. Islamist terrorism as a globally oriented movement has proven to be highly adaptive, flexible, and opportunistic organizationally in recruiting jihadists and using modern technology, arms, and the media for broadcasting its terrorist activities and goals. Islamist parties and militias, as in Pakistan or Nigeria and elsewhere, have shown their efficacy in infiltrating and degrading institutions of governance in their respective societies and pushing forward their agenda of sharia rule.
The Islamist ideology of ISIL is shared by a large segment of Arab and Muslim populations and can hardly be differentiated from the Wahhabi and Salafi ideology of the ruling elite in Saudi Arabia. Compulsion and religion, Islamic triumphalism and non-compliance or rejection of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights are a commonly shared value of ISIL and most Arab states, including non-Arab member states of the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation, or the OIC.
Finally, the relative success of the global Islamist movement based on the organizing principles of Islamism as an ideology, as once the global communist movement was based on the ideology of communism or Marxism-Leninism, has spawned homegrown terrorism in the west among second- and third-generation immigrant Muslims and non-Muslim converts enticed by Islamism. This phenomenon of homegrown Islamist terrorism since 9/11 poses clear and present danger to the domestic security of western democracies, as we have witnessed recently in Canada, Australia, and France. Consequently, we in Canada and the west need to urgently recognize the lack on our part of a coherent understanding of Islamism and Islamist terrorism as a means by which Islamists seek to advance their aims.
The absence of a coherent understanding of Islamism makes for the absence of a coherent strategic policy to contain and defeat it. Such a coherent policy if adopted would be somewhat akin to the policy that the west, led by the United States, adopted soon after the Second World War ended in 1945 to contain and eventually defeat the Soviet Union. This was a containment strategy or policy conceived by George Kennan and adopted by the Truman administration. Canada was an important partner of the western alliance led by successive American administrations, Democratic and Republican, during the nearly five-decade-long strategic commitment to contain the former Soviet Union.
You urgently need to take a page from that history if you are serious about the threat Islamism poses to the Middle East and beyond and if you're going to commit yourselves, provided we truly care about freedom and democracy, to contain and defeat the forces of this totalitarian movement in our time. If the west, including Canada, is unwilling to invest in a coherent strategy to contain and defeat Islamism, then the public needs to know.
In our contemporary world, the west is not insulated against the war raging within the world of Islam. Islamists and apologists for Islamism are in our midst and have duly infiltrated western institutions to degrade and subvert liberal democracy. They have been skilful in manipulating the west's liberal democratic values for their aim. They have exploited multiculturalism to push their agenda of sharia rule in Canada, Britain, France, and elsewhere in the west.
We may not want to be involved against Islamism and declare that none of this is our problem. History, however, is merciless in pointing out that those who appeased the enemies of freedom and democracy in the hope that they would be saved from the impending peril—for instance, of Nazism or Communism—only made the cost of eventually defending freedom and democracy immensely greater than it would have been, had more robust actions been taken sooner rather than later.
Thank you.