David Forte Editorials and Biography

Wednesday, Sept. 26, 2001

Following are two editorials by David F. Forte written September of 2001 on the Islamic religion titled, Radical Islam vs. Islam and It's the Regime, Not the Religion as published on the Ashbrook Center for Public Affairs Web site.

Radical Islam vs. Islam | It's the Regime, Not the Religion | David Forte Bio

Islamic radicals hijacked airplanes to attack and undermine the West. They killed thousands of innocents without a single moral qualm. But their enmity is not just directed against us. They also mean to hijack Islam itself and to destroy 13 centuries of Islamic civilization. We are not in a war between two civilizations. We are fighting an enemy of two civilizations.

Osama bin Laden has a strikingly simple and violent conception of the world. It is bipolar. Taking his lead from ancient Islamic legalists who wrote when the world knew nothing but empires, bin Laden divides the earth into the dar al-Islam (the realm of Islam) and the dar al-harb (the realm of war). Between the two there is unceasing conflict.

But for bin Laden, the dar al-Islam is no longer the realm of Islam, or as is sometimes translated, the realm of peace. In common with many Islamic radicals, bin Laden believes that the Islamic world has fallen into perfidy and apostasy. He makes civil war on Islam as much as he makes international conflict with the United States.

He targets moderate Islamic leaders like Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, former Pakistani President Benizir Bhutto, and Jordan King (then Prince) Abdullah. He has no respect for the Saudi government because it permits the stationing of Western troops, contrary to his view of the ancient Shari'a's prohibition of non-Muslims living on the holy soil of Arabia.

Bin Laden and other Islamic radicals claim they represent ancient Islam. It is true that they do represent one tradition in Islam, but it is a tradition that Islam early on rejected as opposed to the universal message of its Prophet. In the earliest centuries of Islam, a great civil war was fought over who should be the successor to Muhammad. The battle was between the partisans of the assassinated third Caliph, Uthmann, and those who supported the fourth Caliph, 'Ali. This was the conflict that ultimately led to the division between Sunni and Shi'a Islam. But there was a moment when a truce and an arbitration promised a possible peaceful resolution to the conflict.

One group was adamantly opposed to any arbitration and any compromise. Later called the Kharajites, this sect believed that only God could determine who should be the proper successor, and God would let his will be known in battle. The Kharajites withdrew and made war on both factions. They held that any person who strayed from the perfect practice of Islam was ipso facto an apostate and could be killed. And they believed that only they had the true notion of what Islam required. They applied their doctrine with a ferocity against both the developing Sunni and Shi'a traditions of Islam, even assassinating 'Ali. Their tactics were frightfully violent, and it took centuries before they were put down.

Today, radicals like bin Laden replicate that ancient sect that threatened to destroy Islamic civilization at its inception. They copy that sect that stood against what came to be a civilization known in its time for its learning, science, openness and toleration. They engage in tactics that are far beyond what is acceptable in the Islamic moral tradition. They insult the vast multitudes of Muslims who abhor such actions.

Partly because of the timidity of the West, these radicals have gained influence. Some regimes protect them. Some apparently even sponsor them. . Many leaders in the West, bereft of and often hostile to their own Christian roots, have patronizingly assumed that radical violence was an essential part of the Islamic faith. Our own weak responses have helped to legitimate those whom Islam fought so earnestly to rid itself of at its beginning. If we have respect for ourselves, if we have respect for Islam, we can no longer tolerate the evil they represent. Two civilizations hang in the balance.

How did Harry Truman prepare the nation to fight the Cold War? How did Ronald Reagan win it? According to Dr. Elizabeth Spalding of Claremont-McKenna College, they understood that it was the ideologically hostile regime that was our enemy. Russia was not our enemy. Soviet Communism was.

By itself, Marxism is only bad philosophy and bad social science. But ideologically allied with a regime, it becomes our enemy. Truman and Reagan focussed on the nature of the regime that was a threat to our liberties, and in doing so, they led the two most successful presidencies in the latter half of the last century.

Osama bin Laden spouts an ideology of hate and an unquenchable craving for total power. By himself, he is just a dangerous thug. Allied, comforted, protected, or supported by a regime, he becomes an enemy of freedom. It doesn't really matter if his ideology derives, however distorted, from a religion, or from a philosophy, or from a theory of history. Once it becomes part of the policy of a regime, he and the regime become enemies of our country.

In international law, it is the state that bears responsibility for the actions of its people or of those it harbors or supports. In international politics, it is the government of that state that must pay the price for attacking our citizens or our homeland. The corollary is just as true. Without the support of governments, international terrorism could not succeed in its goals.

The Taliban themselves are just brutal thugs that have taken control of most of Afghanistan. They have combined an extreme version of Islam with primitive tribal mores and terrorized their own people. They have slaughtered Shi'ites, degraded the place of women, and threatened visiting Christian aid workers with imprisonment or death.

In many ways, Osama bin Laden is not just a "guest" in Pakistan, as the government there dissimulates. He is an ally and an ideological mentor. According to ABC news, bin Laden "bankrolled the Taliban's capture of Kabul." He has planned assassinations of moderate Arab leaders. He has even called the Saudi rulers "insufficiently Islamic." His sponsors, the Taliban, are such pariahs in the Islamic world that only three states have recognized them, one of which -- Pakistan -- has swung strongly to our side. Islamic governments know that extremists like bin Laden and the Taliban do not want to capture just Afghanistan. They want to capture Islam itself.

President Bush is correct. By focusing on the regimes that support or harbor terrorists, he defines the nation's enemies. He provides a practical basis for a successful containment and destruction of the threat. He follows in the footsteps of Truman and Reagan. He knows that it is the regime, not the religion, that is our enemy.

David F. Forte is a Professor of Law at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in Cleveland, Ohio and an Acting Municipal Judge in Lakewood, Ohio. Prior to teaching at Cleveland State, Dr. Forte was a Bradley Resident Scholar at the Heritage Foundation, and was the Counselor for Legal Affairs on the United States Mission to the United Nations. After graduating from Harvard College, Mr. Forte received his M.A. from the University of Manchester, and his Ph.D. in Political Economy from the University of Toronto. In 1976, he earned his law degree from the Columbia School of Law. Among his other Professional activities, Dr. Forte is on the Board of Directors at the American Journal of Comparative Law and is an Honorary Trustee of the National Lawyers Association. He is author of The Supreme Court, and has edited Natural Law and Contemporary Public Policy and The Supreme Court in American Politics: Judicial Activism vs. Judicial Restraint, as well as the author of numerous papers, articles and addresses.