No other holiday embodies the principles that define America like Independence Day. And there is no better day to launch Big Peace than today. President Reagan led us to victory over the Soviets at the end of the Cold War without firing a bullet against them by maintaining an indefatigable position of "peace through strength."
The current administration and many in our seemingly fatally politically correct governmental leadership choose to look away from the obvious ideological threat that our nation faces today. The traditional media and apologetic politicians in print and television echo the same denials that each terror incident is a "one-off," "a simple crime problem," a "man-made disaster," a spontaneously generated mutation never to be called by the names or the ideas they call themselves. Jihadists. Islamists. Soldiers of Allah. Muslim Brothers. Part of the Ummah.
Beyond this willful blindness, the reality has been that the increasing number of thwarted Islamist terror plots have made the past year the most dangerous to our citizens domestically since 9/11. I know Big Peace will go where traditional media has refused to go in teaching our citizenry about the realities of the threat we face. The fact is that the vast majority of Muslims are non-violent. However, violent Islamists, those who resort to acts of terror, share a common goal. They all seek an Islamic state and the implementation of their versions of shar'iah law (Islamic law). This goal may be part of the current mission of a plurality if not of a majority of Muslims around the globe. That is the deeper threat – the pervasive, theocratic ideologies of a virally spreading movement of Muslims who believe in the platform of political Islam. To insist that peaceful Islamists are vastly different from violent ones is to miss the cure, to miss the Big Peace.
Americans know better than any citizenry how foundational the fight against theocrats can be to defending the ideas of liberty and freedom. This war against militant Islamism will not be won militarily. It will not be won by non-Muslims. It can only be won by taking sides in the civil war within the House of Islam. So far the advance of the ideas of political Islam globally has been relatively unopposed. The advocates for liberty within Muslim communities domestically and around the world are being abandoned for the "short Peace" rather than the Big Peace.
Thomas Jefferson most poignantly reminded the nation in its Declaration of Independence about "self-evident" truth:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness.
That was July 4, 1776. On July 4, 2010, thankfully, many of us do not limit ourselves to old-fashioned media in print and television. If we did, we would have lost the fact that those universal principles of human rights are our greatest bulwark against political Islam – the root cause of Islamist terror. In fact, I have dedicated my life's work to Islamic reform and the separation of mosque and state – true religious freedom. The advocacy of those principles by devout Muslims is the only chance at inoculating Muslim youth against the anesthesia of Islamist supremacism.
The greatest threat today to world peace is radical Islamism and the platform of political Islam that feeds it. Its time to stop playing defense and play offense against political Islam. It is time to advance further the long overdue war of ideas within the House of Islam for Muslims who believe in liberty and against those who believe in political Islam.
The Big Peace depends upon the victory of Jeffersonian Muslims over the theocrats.