Phares: Western Public Must Educate Itself About Jihadist Threat

"The Confrontation", Dr. Walid Phares' third book in his trilogy on the war against jihad ("Future Jihad" and "The War of Ideas" prceeded it), was released this month. Phares has consistently placed strong emphasis on the need for the Western public to be educated about the nature of jihadism and its threat to our society. He castigates Western academics and the MSM for defaulting on their responsibility to supply the public with the relevant information needed to form an accurate picture of the Islamist threat and act accordingly. Below are excerpts from Chapter 3: Cultural Revolution in the West.

The major missing component in the Western War on Terror is undoubtedly: public action and knowledge. The man or woman on the street is strangely absent from the raging debates on the conflict... On the afternoon of September 11, 2001, one might have expected to see millions in the streets demonstrating against al Qaeda and its ideology... but the people of America didn't show a visceral anger. Lighting candles, holding cermonies, and displaying the flag showed they were touched, hurt, and concerned. But the question most often asked was "Why?" This... showed how shielded the American public was from what had happened. The dominant elites had performed a lethal brainwashing... the public was denied the truth, and actively miseducated.

The marginalization of... the Western public denies them their basic right to resist the Jihadist onslaught. It denies the public the right to obtain information and to act. Ordinary men and women in societies under attack knew with their basic instincts that their culture and their very existence was being assaulted. But they were deprived of the knowledge needed to transform their feelings, their frustration, and their real aspiriations into action -- and by their own establishment... The elite... has acted in conjunction with the terror campaign, in fact betraying the confidence of its constituency.

In a besieged political culture, where the command-and-control systems are solidly in the hands of the oil-backed (and mostly Jihadi) cartels, the only choice when survival is at issue is for the public to rise... and presssure the press and audiovisual media to end the dominance of the apologists and open the media to a plurality of views on the terror wars. The public also has to look beyond the traditional media to a new media now available to civil society: bloggers, direct news from the field, YouTube, chat rooms, free media...

Citizens will have to educate themselves on the most dangerous development of the twenty-first century and begin electing officials on the basis of their understanding of the threat and their will to combat it.