The West, particularly the U.S., is facing a formidable enemy in radical Islam. But sometimes, we are our own worst enemy.
It seems our leaders’ decisions, and our national will, sometimes oppose our best interests.
The most egregious case in recent days was President Obama’s hot mic incident. Last Monday, Obama was overheard asking Russian President Dmitry Medvedev for “space” on the contested issue of the missile defense. After he wins re-election, Obama implied, he would offer the Russians “more flexibility” in negotiations. Presumably, once he’s elected for the final time, he won’t be accountable to the American people and can negotiate away our defensive strength.
Another case of “cutting of our nose to spite our face” was the Obama administration’s recent rejection of the Keystone Pipeline. The pipeline would have delivered approximately half-a-million barrels per day of oil from Canada to the U.S. That’s half-a-million barrels we could have bought from an ally instead of the Middle East.
For many decades, oil has been our national addiction. And Islamic countries have been more than happy to be our “dealer.” The oil revenue for OPEC nations, for example, has grown from $50 billion in 1974, to $200 billion in 1980, to $847 billion in 2011.
The U.S. is the largest importer of oil, much of it from volatile parts of the world. But we cannot blame President Obama alone for an indifference to this dangerous situation. Every American president since Richard Nixon has promised to move us toward energy independence. But despite obvious reasons to do so, our dependency only grows.
In my recently-released book, Blindsided: The Radical Islamic Conquest, I explain the mindset of Islamic radicalism and its aim to spread Islam through conquest. Muslims have historically achieved conquest through war. But in recent times, they’ve viewed oil as a complimentary method.
As it relates to oil, I write in Blindsided:
This represents a staggering flow of wealth from the Western nations to the Arab world. We have created a situation which may prove to be our undoing. We show no signs of lessening our dependence on foreign oil, even though we have enormous undeveloped petroleum reserves within our own borders or just off-shore. We show no inclination to explore them. Yet we know that OPEC nations have the ability to generate an "oil crisis" that can trigger a massive upheaval in our society and our economy.
Muslims regard economic success as a sign of Allah’s blessing. Because of that, even moderate Muslims often won’t disown radical leaders. For example, although the Ayatollah Khomeini’s excesses during the Iranian revolution embarrassed moderate Muslims, many of them saw the economic success under his leadership as proof of God’s pleasure.
Oil is regarded as a material gift for Islam to achieve world superiority. It is a gift—and a weapon.
J.B. Kelly, author of Arabia, the Gulf and the West, has written:
. . . Arabs see the oil weapons as a gift sent by God to redress the balance between Christendom and Islam. It enables them to act as though the might and grandeur of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphates has been restored, to lay the Christian West under tribute to the Muslim East, and to fulfill the destiny which God in his infinite wisdom has ordained for those to whom he has chosen to reveal the one true faith.
The use of oil as a weapon is not a mere theory. After the Yom Kippur War, an angry OPEC imposed an oil embargo against the United States and Western Europe as revenge for their support of Israel. Oil prices increased 366 percent. After the Iranian Revolution, prices doubled. After the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, they skyrocketed again.
But that’s not their only leverage. Oil countries invest much of their wealth in Great Britain, Europe, and the U.S., often by hiding their identity through multiple corporate layers. The massive Arab investment in our economy provides a far more effective way of manipulating our foreign policy than we realize, especially now that Islamists control several of those governments.
In Blindsided, I write:
Oil fuels the engine of the Western economy. But oil is also a weapon of jihad. The goal of jihad is to defeat Christianity, to collapse the "Crusader nation," and to bring about the subjugation and surrender of the West—and oil is a potent weapon in that struggle. One of the great ironies of our age is that the very oil that runs our economy may ultimately fund our destruction.
Eventually, we must face our enemy—the one abroad, and the one in the mirror. We cannot keep our heads tucked in Middle Eastern sand forever. We will have to face the reality of Islam. And we will have to face our culpability in emboldening Islamic power.
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