Ronald Reagan did not declare war on nukes (Jimmy Carter did). He did not call Communism an ideology of peace. He tirelessly talked with the American people about the enemy, the evil empire – the Soviet Union. Despite the Media’s efforts to undermine Reagan’s message, the American people stuck with him. Reagan’s clarity of vision and inspiring message prevailed. The Soviets have been relegated to the dustbin of history.

President Bush declared war on terror. He calls Islam a religion of peace. He tirelessly reminds the American people that the Saudis are our friends. The Iraqis are our friends. The Iranians, Syrians, and Palestinian Arabs are future friends. We have no enemies, other than three bearded guys in a cave in Waziristan. But aren’t we at war? Bush’s message is unclear and down right confusing. No wonder he lost the confidence of the American people.

How did Bush’s message come about? Who advised him, right after September 11, 2001, that he should not name the enemy, but declare war on terror instead? Who did not foresee that lack of an identifiable enemy would rapidly erode support for military action?

The answer is Professor David Forte.

Serge Trifkovic, in Sword of the Prophet, explains.

Of all major religions known to man, the teaching of Islam makes it the least amenable to dialogue with other faiths. Among non-Muslims it seeks converts or obedient subjects, not partners in a dialogue. Nevertheless, among some contemporary Western social conservatives, there exists an a priori desire to forge an alliance of believers against the oral and spiritual decay of a sinful world-an ecumenical jihad, a war of all religions against none:

“If we will work and fight and love in action side by side with our Protestant and Catholic and Orthodox and Jewish and Muslim neighbors, we will come to perceive something we did not understand before. If we did not balk at having Stalin’s followers as our allies against Hitler, we should not balk at having Muhammad’s followers as our allies against Stalin.” Peter Kreeft, Ecumenical Jihad, in Reclaiming the Great Tradition

Exactly the same sentiment drives President Bush’s adviser on Islam, a professor at Cleveland-Marshall College of Law, David Forte. He speaks no Arabic and readily admits that he merely dabbles in Islamic jurisprudence. Nevertheless, his conviction that Islamic terrorists and Muslim aggressors are, by definition, heretics and not real Muslims has been fully internalized by the President, whose speeches seem to pluck whole phrases from Forte’s writings. The problem is that Forte also subscribes to the theory of ecumenical jihad, which is admittedly very different in intent from the usual liberal Islamophilia, but perhaps even more pernicious in its consequences:

Forte doesn’t just want to redeem Islam from its critics. As a Catholic conservative who serves on a Vatican task force on strengthening family, he wants to redeem religious orthodoxy itself-or, at least, cleanse it of the extremist stain. Nothing this evil could be religious, he is fond of saying. It’s a bromide that jibes perfectly with Bush’s own unabashed fondness or religiosity of all stripes. – Franklin Foer: Blind Faith The New Republic, October 22, 2001

He wrote in his 1999 book on Islamic law that though radicals often create an effigy of the West as a devil, their real animus is against traditional Islam. Today’s extremists, he claims, are a theologically marginal tradition that Islam early on rejected as opposed to the universal message of its Prophet. In a remarkable twist of reality, Forte accuses the secularized media establishment of negative stereotyping of Islam because it is a religion: When they talk about Islam, they talk about jihad. They patronizingly assume that violence is an essential of part of Islam. This view, however erroneous, boils down to the conviction that believers, no matter their denomination, are better people than nonbelievers, and that a religious outlook-any religious outlook-is preferable to the nihilistic wastelands of postmodern secularism.

The proponents of an Ecumenical Jihad, from President George W. Bush and Professor Forte to a Christian conservative like Peter Kreeft, share two fallacies. Their faulty understanding of Islamic theology leads them to imagine that Allah is more or less interchangeable with the God of other monotheists. Their incomplete understanding of the phenomenon of secular globalization leads them to seek an equally monolithic counterweight on the side of faith. In reality, the only effective resistance to secularism will come from old identities revitalized and reaffirmed, not blurred and compromised. To survive, Christians need to rediscover theological firmness and doctrinal clarity.

David Forte’s does not see Islam as a danger. Allah is just God by another name. Secularism is the real danger. Here is what he wrote on October 19, 2001 in the National Review Online.

Last week, the Upper Sharia Court in Gwadabawa, Sokoto State, in northern Nigeria sentenced a 30-year-old pregnant woman to be stoned for premarital sex. Human-rights organizations immediately protested the sentence. The human-rights problems in imposing a 1,000-year-old codification of law are not confined to tribalistic Nigeria. Muslims and non-Muslims alike suffer under some of the extreme provisions of the Sharia (Islamic law) applied, directly or indirectly, in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Iran, and other areas. But these actions are not the essentialist Islam. In fact, most contemporary fundamentalist impositions do not even observe the strict procedural protections the Sharia provided, and under which few if any of today’s attacks on human rights could be accomplished. They violate the provisions of the very law they claim to be following. Furthermore, today’s application of the criminal provisions of the Sharia are as ahistorical as they are problematical for human rights. The Islamic empire in its various forms more often substituted its own criminal courts and criminal decrees for that of the qadi (judge), leaving the criminal-law provisions of the Sharia among the least developed areas of classical Islamic law.

The legalistic element of Islam spans wide variations. Not all wish to impose the Sharia in all its archaic details. Many call for a new ijtihad, or redevelopment of the law from its sources to meet modern conditions. Nor is legalism the sole voice of Islam: From the beginning, rationalist, theological, and mystical traditions have vied with it. I believe that, like Christians and Jews, most Muslims crave a moral space in which to worship God and obtain forgiveness and salvation. The imposition of all the elements of a 1,000-year-old code of law would close up that space.

Yet as offensive to human rights and dignity as the stoning of a woman for an act of sexual immorality is, it is not the same as flying a plane into a building to kill thousands of innocent civilians. It is not the same as training thousands to destroy societies and impose political control over millions of people. Mass terror is a different and qualitatively more egregious form of evil. It is outside of even militant Islamic fundamentalism.

Over the past few weeks, I have argued that Osama bin Laden and his Taliban allies represent a perversion of Islam and are engaged in a campaign to change Islam itself to define the faith politically, and not primarily legally or theologically. The evidence, I believe, is unequivocal: His war is as much against Islam as it is against the West. I have written that Islam is a multivocal religion, that from its start it has debated within itself the nature of its identity. And I have noted that among all its varied traditions, one thing remains clear: The acts of the terrorists of September 11, and the justification of them by Osama bin Laden, replicate in modern guise a violent faction, the Kharajites, that Islam found totally anathema to the faith early in its history. In other writings, I have asserted that This form of extremism has been inspired by the writings of influential modernist radicals, such as Sayyid Qutb of Egypt, who believe that virtually all Islam is in a state of unbelief and needs to be reconquered. Thus, in its modern form, bin Laden’s kind of extremism has much more in common with Stalin, Hitler, and Mao than it does with Islamic tradition. Like those state terrorists, bin Laden is at war with his own people. And finally, I have baldly asserted that bin Laden and his extremists are evil, pure and simple, and Islam is not.

Bush has internalized this B.S. and built his global strategy on it.

Now, we know that Michael Moore is as deranged as any Saudi prince, but he is fat and slow and has no Jihadi warrior disciples in search of an orgy with 72 virgins (at least not if it means dying).

Recently a friend tried to convince us that Bush does get it. His evidence was the appointment of Daniel Pipes to the US Institute of Peace. Here is what Daniel Pipes had to say about Professor Forte on October 22, 2001.

In his well-written and thoughtful essay, “Religion is Not the Enemy” (National Review Online, October 19, 2001), David F. Forte makes the important point that extremists like Osama bin Laden “do not represent historic or mainstream Islam” but are propagating “a political ideology” akin to Leninism. He very sensibly urges a U.S. policy that avoids strengthening this foul ideology.

Professor Forte mentioned me by name as an analyst who disagrees with his views, so I feel invited, if not required, to respond to his argument.

He and I do not disagree on the basics: What Osama bin Laden propagates is anathema, it differs profoundly from traditional Islam, and Americans wish to see his ideology lose membership. We differ in one main area: Professor Forte sees fundamentalist Islam as being within the parameters of historic Islam. He argues that “we must remain aware of the moral distinction between sects like the Wahhabis and terrorist groups like al Qaeda and Islamic Jihad.” This moral distinction then has a practical implication: “What we must do, at all costs, is to prevent bin Laden’s call to arms from bringing Islamic fundamentalists into his extremist ranks and into his political battle.”

Professor Forte draws the line differently from me. Whereas Professor Forte sees the problem as a small group of active terrorists in al Qaeda; I see the entire fundamentalist movement constituting the problem. I hold that Islamic fundamentalists stand outside of historic Islam and are already within bin Laden’s extremist ranks.

Etu Daniel? Islamic fundamentalists stand outside of historic Islam?