We are not at war with Islam, we have been told repeatedly by pundits and preachers and the President of the United States, and this is true. But it is not the only truth. Our enemy may not be Islam itself, but neither is it just a handful of desperate nihilists, cowering in Afghan caves. If there is anything that the events of recent weeks have demonstrated, it is that we are at war with an ideology—one with deeper global roots, stretching from Cairo to Kandahar, Malaysia to Mogadishu, than any of us had realized.

We are fighting a war of ideas, then. And winning that war means coming to grips with our enemies’ beliefs—and doing so with clear minds, unclouded by the woolly-headed, multi-culti “tolerance” that far too many Western intellectuals have applied to the Islamic world over the years.

First, we must recognize that in spite of all the plaints of Western peace-mongers, the ideology of al-Qaeda and its fellow travelers is not the “inevitable outgrowth” of Third World poverty, globalization, U.S. neo-colonialism, and a host of other bogeymen beloved of the know-nothing Left. True, it finds footsoldiers among the poor and dispossessed of Pakistan and Palestine. But the angry young men who crowd the streets of Peshawar and line up to train as mujahadeen are pawns, not leaders, and their marching orders do not bubble up, unbidden, from the “general will” of the wretched of the earth.

No, those orders, and the ideas that animate them, come from men like Osama bin Laden, spoiled son of a Saudi tycoon—or from hijacker Mohamed Atta, born to a middle-class Egyptian family and radicalized by ideas imbibed at German universities—or from the host of Muslim clerics, of imams and mullahs, across the Middle East and Asia, who have fallen over themselves to provide religious justifications for an anti-American jihad. This is not a new phenomenon: revolutionary movements have always found their leaders among discontented middle and upper class types. Think of Danton and Robespierre; think of Lenin and Pol Pot.

Or better, think of Hitler, the frustrated Austrian painter, whose anti-Semitism finds a terrible echo across the Islamic world today.

For this, also, we must understand as we confront our enemies—that however much these Islamo-fascists hate America, they hate the Jews more. For years, this has been portrayed as a matter of mere anti-Zionism, of political opposition to Israel. Such a view is dangerously naive. The Arab press, whose excesses have long been ignored by the Western chattering classes, can be compared in its poisonous rantings only to the anti-Semitic propaganda organs of Nazi Germany. And in the fevered minds of Islamic leaders, from clerics to politicians, every hoary anti-Semitic legend seems to be recycled, with medieval bones clothed in modern flesh.

Two examples must serve for all. Last October, the mainstream Egyptian paper Al-Ahram wrote up a favorable summary of a 1983 book by Mustafa Tlass, now Syria’s Minister of Defense. The book, entitled “The Matzah of Zion,” claimed that “in the records of the Palestinian police...there are many recorded cases of the bodies of Arab children being found, torn to pieces without a single drop of blood.” According to Tlass, “the most reasonable explanation is that the blood was taken to be kneaded into the dough of extremist Jews to be used in matzahs...during Passover.”

The most reasonable explanation, mind you. Then consider the recent words of the Imam of New York’s Islamic Cultural Center. Quoth the Imam: “You see [the Jews] all the time, everywhere, disseminating corruption, heresy, homosexuality, alcoholism, and drugs...These people always seek out the superpower of the generation and develop coexistence with it. Before this, they rode on the back of England and on the back of the French empire. After that, they rode on the back of Germany.” Josef Goebbels, call your office.

These are mainstream voices in the Islamic world—and they make President Bush’s insistence that “the terrorists are traitors to their own faith” ring a trifle hollow. Anti-Semitism runs deep in today’s Islamic world. But violence, and the rhetoric of religious war, runs still deeper. This, too, we must understand—that however much it may pain the goo-goos and Oprah-watchers to admit, our enemies are Islamic, and their ideology is rooted in Islamic traditions that stretch all the way back to when the first Muslim empires were carved from the Arabian desert.

Islam, like all faiths, has its twists and turns, and the Koran, like all holy books, has been interpreted in tangled ways over the course of 13 centuries. The same text that promises that “even if you stretch out your hand against me to kill me, I shall not stretch out my hand against you to kill you” also exhorts the faithful to “slay or crucify or cut the hands and feet of the unbelievers, that they be expelled from the land with disgrace and that they shall have a great punishment in world hereafter.” War or peace, persecution or tolerance, jihad as “internal struggle” or jihad as “crusade against infidels”—these debates have riven Islamic society from the beginning.

True, Christianity has endured similar debates, and Christians have warred as eagerly as Muslims—just ask Pope Urban and his Crusaders. But going back to the beginning of Islam, one finds Muhammed himself—the model Muslim, against whose standard all the faithful must be judged. And where Christianity has a Christ who turns the other cheek and gives himself over to be crucified, Islam has a Prophet who makes war—in self-defense, arguably, but with a glad heart, a warlike spirit and a knowledge that Allah is on his side. It is that example, that spirit of war, that flung the early Islamic empires outward to the corners of the earth, that spirit that inspired militant Muslims down through the centuries—a spirit that divides the world into the House of Islam and the House of Unbelief, and declares irrevocable enmity between them.

That spirit endures to this day. Just ask Osama bin Laden.

Ross G. Douthat ’02 is a history and literature concentrator in Quincy House. His column appears on alternate Mondays.