Uprooting jihad

Letters to the Editor
Washington Times | 11 July 2007

In his letter “The roots of terror” (Monday), Chuck Woolery claims that we misrepresented the “root” causes for Muslim suffering. Yet, “[t]he repression, suffering and death of hundreds of millions of Muslims” does not result from Western or Israeli policies or actions, but from totalitarian, corrupt Arab and Muslim regimes and clerics who confine them to the Dark Ages.

The current Sunni and Shi’ite fight in Iraq exhumes earlier wars, predating the American presence. Palestinians have received more financial aid than any other refugee group in history. They suffer because their corrupt leaders squandered it all, and prolonged the Palestinians’ misery. Bolstered by the Saudi/Gulf and Iranian regimes, the Palestinians advanced a culture of death and destruction, strangling the development of a viable society.

Jihad is an eternal Muslim institution, antedating modern Israel’s creation by 13 centuries. Through this institutional religious mechanism of war and repression, pre-Islamic Jews and Christians of historical Palestine were conquered, massacred, pillaged, enslaved and deported. The survivors and their descendants suffered the brutal Shariah-inspired system of dhimmitude until the League of Nations Mandate in 1918. That the Jewish people are now flourishing in democratic Israel, rather than as dhimmis under oppressive Islam, is still a basic “grievance” to Arabs and Muslims.

Appeasement and “critical and constructive dialogue” with jihadists whose goal is to restore the caliphate by any means, only proves ignorance of the Muslim Brotherhood agenda.

To stop the jihadists and alleviate the suffering of oppressed Muslims worldwide, we should discourage discussions with Islamists. Let the Islamists denounce their incessant attempts to politically enforce a seventh-century religious ideology upon entire nations. Let them also prove their denunciations by dismantling their terror funding networks.

When all jihadists renounce terrorism, al Qaeda stops killing “infidels,” Palestinians no longer indoctrinate children to become suicide bombers, Iran no longer seeks to eliminate the United States and Israel and Muslim nations institute basic human freedoms, only then can Mr. Woolery’s and our hopes for a peaceful world be realized.

Rachel Ehrenfeld and Alyssa A. Lappen
American Center for Democracy

Alyssa A. Lappen

Alyssa A. Lappen is a U.S.-based investigative journalist. She is the former Managing Editor at the Leeb Group (2012-2017); a former Senior Fellow of the American Center for Democracy (2005-2008); and a former Senior Editor of Institutional Investor (1993-1999), Working Woman (1991-1993) and Corporate Finance (1991). She served six of her 12 years at Forbes (1978-1990) as an Associate Editor. Ms. Lappen was also a staff reporter at The New Haven Register (1975-1977). During a decade as a freelance, her work appeared in Big Peace, Pajamas Media, Front Page Magazine, American Thinker, Right Side News, Family Security Matters, the Washington Times and many other Internet and print journals. Ms. Lappen also contributed to the Terror Finance Blog, among others. She supports the right of journalists worldwide to write without fear or restriction on politics, governments, international affairs, terrorism, terror financing and religious support for terrorism, among other subjects. Ms. Lappen is also an accomplished poet. Her first full-length collection, The Minstrel's Song, was published by Cross-Cultural Communications in April 2015. Her poems have been published in the 2nd 2007 edition of Blood to Remember: American Poets on the Holocaust and both 2007 issues of Wales' award-winning Seventh Quarry: Swansea Poetry Magazine. Dozens of her poems have appeared in print and online literary journals and books. She won the 2000 annual Ruah: A Journal of Spiritual Poetry chapbook award and has received a Harvard Summer Poetry Prize and several honorable mentions.