Knowing Your Enemies

VA has another nice post up today that she's calling "Those outlawed emotions, again." VA makes some good points that need to be made, and that I'd like to discuss here in a more lengthy entry. But for now I'd like to focus on one statement VA makes in her post...

VA writes:

"I have to return again to Yeats's line, 'The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.' Our enemies, whether they are Latinos with revanchist intentions, or Moslems with jihad, fast or slow, in mind, ARE full of passionate intensity, while too many Americans are still in a state of denial or else they have emotionally and spiritually been disarmed. That must change, otherwise we are outclassed and overwhelmed."

This brings to mind something I recently read in Paul Sperry's book, "Infiltration, How Muslim Spies and Subversives have Penetrated Washington." Mr. Sperry bemoans the fact, and rightly so in my opinion, that we Americans do not know our enemy well. In this case, of course, Sperry is concentrating on our enemy, Islamism.

Mr. Sperry writes:

"We are fighting a spiritual seduction we have yet to fully grasp and comprehend, hung up as we are on measuring the dreams and happiness of others against our own dreams and happiness...A virtual taboo exists in official circles about Islam's role in terrorism. It is treated as if it comes out of the blue, as if there is no religious pattern. According to the president, we are fighting "evil-doers" and "a bunch of cold-blooded killers." To hear him and the FBI director, terrorism is generic, not Islamic." (emphasis mine)

Sperry continues:

"The first rule of war is know your enemy. You cannot defeat it if you do not know what motivates it.

Yet shockingly few FBI supervisors running counterterrorism cases have ever picked up a copy of the Quran to read it, let alone study it. "Supervisors don't study the Quran. They don't do any independent analysis," says former FBI special agent, John Vincent..."When you're fighting terrorism, you have to know how they think," adds Vincent...

Unfortunately, the enemy knows us better than we know it. The al-Qaida training manual quotes an old Muslim general: "The nation that wants to achieve victory over its enemy must know that enemy very well." The Islamic terrorists have studied our system inside and out, and they know its weaknesses and how to exploit them. They know about our open society, our civil liberties, our heavy ethnic mix, and our lax immigration enforcement all too well."

(I'll be adding more to this post later.)