11/17/2015 Wage Political War On Radical Islam
Source: The Daily Caller
Using his trademark subterfuge, President Obama on Monday said there must be no “religious test” for refugees coming to America. What he meant was that asylum seekers like the Paris suicide bomber who posed as a Syrian refugee probably won’t be asked about their views on radical Islam, much less disqualified for subscribing to the Islamist political ideology. Unfortunately, by refusing even to name the force that animates our enemies, we ensure that we will never fully defeat them. Worse still, this refusal prevents us from even beginning what is most necessary to turn the tide on radical Islam: political warfare.
In statecraft, political warfare is the reverse of espionage. Whereas spying involves the “pull” of information our enemies don’t want us to have, political warfare is the “push” of ideas, information, people, and events with which our enemies would rather not contend. During the Cold War, the West had great political warfare victories, ranging from support for Eastern Bloc dissident groups like Polish Solidarity to aiding the underground “samizdat” press and other media efforts that weakened the Soviet Union. CIA operations helped the Christian Democrats beat the communists in Italy and funded intellectuals in Europe who were left-leaning but anti-Soviet.