Why Obama and Trump Are Both Wrong About Islam

Jeffrey Herf

Politics, Americas

Blanket generalizations have now dominated the public rhetoric of three American presidents.

Political correctness about Islam isn’t confined to America. It also exists in Europe. Last week Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel thus learned a sad lesson in Ankara: those who seek to distinguish between Islam and Islamism face accusations that they are condemning a whole religion and are thus being “Islamophobic.” On February 3, 2017, Merkel, while meeting with Turkey’s President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, defended the importance of protecting the right of opposition in a democracy and called for joint opposition to the “Islamist terror” of the Islamic State. Erdogan immediately replied that there it was not acceptable to speak of “Islamist terror” because Islam was a religion of peace. He rejected her efforts to distinguish between “Islamic” and “Islamist” and presented himself as a defender of Muslims in general against the unbelievers.

Unfortunately for her, Merkel’s lesson came in a very public setting, but the message is one that a group of scholars and intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic and some in the Middle East have been hearing since the attacks of 9/11 as they have tried to make the same point. In numerous essays and books, I and others have argued that an ideology alternatively called Islamism or radical Islam has been the inspiration for a war of terror launched against the West in Europe, the United States and Israel, and against Muslims especially in Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, Gaza and Lebanon. This ideology, which has Sunni and Shia variations, emerged in the Arab world 1930s and 1940s in the era of fascism in Italy and more importantly Nazism in Germany. Despite sectarian differences that have even led to violence between Islamist groups, the bottom line is clear: Islamism everywhere opposes liberal democracy, denies the state of Israel the right to exist, is blatantly and proudly anti-Semitic against both the religion of Judaism and Jews as a group as well as the state of Israel, and equally proudly calls for terrorist attacks on the people, values and institutions of Western liberal modernity.