Don Quixote imagined that the enemies of his king had come
to fight the monarch, so he fought back. When he realized he was fighting
against something that's not seen, he thought of the windmills as living, breathing
enemies and started to fight them in defense of his king.
This story is now repeated by Ralph Peters who sees enemies
everywhere and fights them with words as sharp as the sword. If he keeps it up,
he'll realize he is fighting something that doesn't exist. He may or may not
take on something like windmills eventually but for now, he is wielding his
verbal sword only at the wind.
His latest contribution in this realm came under the title:
“How to defeat the Islamist fanatics,” published on June 14, 2016 in the New
York Post. While there are fanatics in this world, some of whom claim to be
“Islamist,” Peters has failed to identify them when he said: “Our leaders have
chosen not to defeat Islamist terrorism. Their sins have been those of
omission, of avoiding action and of crippling self-delusion. Consistently, they
have denied the nature and scope of the threat”.
Like Don Quixote, Ralph Peters is driven by a fanatic idea
that took control of him. It is this: “You cannot defeat an enemy you lack the
courage to name.” Regardless of the merit of the idea, is there a reason why he
developed this particular one? Apparently, there is. In fact, he gives two
reasons himself: “George W. Bush pandered to Muslim activists and worried more
about offending them than winning. Obama propagandized for Islam as a religion
of peace”.
This leads Peters to tell of the prerequisite that's
necessary to defeat the enemy. First, he complains that the administration of
neither president employed the terms “radical Islam” or “Islamist terrorism,”
and then, asserts that you cannot defeat an enemy “you lack the courage to
name”. So he counsels knocking off the “baby-talk,” and he insists that we try
honesty for a change.
In short, trying to define who or what the enemy is, Ralph
Peters did nothing more than verbally associate the word terrorism with the
word Islam, and went on to tell how to defeat this amorphous thing he calls
Islamist fanatics. To this end, he describes a strategy in seven points. They
are these: Declare war; Call out double-crossing allies; Empower law
enforcement; Surveillance is essential; Criminalize Internet Jihad; Mandate
law-enforcement Intelligence-sharing; Treat Muslims exactly as we would any
other Americans.
Because he failed to give a precise definition as to who the
enemy is, you hope to find such definition in the details of the strategy he
describes but find nothing of the sort. So you set out to discover on your own whom
the possible enemy of America
may be, to see if the Peters strategy makes sense despite its shortcomings.
Researching the subject, you discover that America has two
kinds of enemies. One is based overseas, calling itself al-Qaeda, ISIS or some other name. The other is based in America … the
so-called homegrown terrorist. The one overseas may have been trained by America to fight a third party but then turned
against America .
The homegrown is a dissatisfied youngster who lashes out at a society that did
not pamper him enough.
That style of life being a part of the American history for
a time now, it has mutated in such manner that some youngsters associate
themselves with ISIS in reality or in name
only. They do so because they have been radicalized by it or they
self-radicalized, or because they know that associating their name with ISIS will get them the media coverage they crave.
These being America 's
enemies, you wonder how Ralph Peters would fight a declared war on them, or how
he would execute any of the undertakings he describes in the article.
In fact, if he can get everyone in America to talk
in terms of “radical Islamic terrorism,” he will only raise the profile of that
concept and make it more enticing for the publicity seekers to identify with
it. Thus, instead of solving the problem, Peters would have encouraged it.