It's the Hateful Ideology, Stupid

Anne Applebaum wrote in JWR Only two senators were in the room when Karen Hughes testified at her confirmation hearings. When it came time for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to vote on her nomination Tuesday, she was easily approved. And thus with no discussion and no debate, Hughes takes over the least noticed, least respected and possibly most important job in the State Department. Her formal title is undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs. In plain English, her job is to fight anti-Americanism, promote American culture and above all to do intellectual battle with the ideology of radical Islam, a set of beliefs so powerful that they can persuade middle-class, second-generation British Muslims to blow themselves up on buses and trains.

And I believe that GWB selected well, because I believe that Karen is a good person for that job.

Presumably, President Bush selected Hughes for this task because she was very good at running his election campaigns. And indeed, in the testimony she gave last week to a nearly empty room, she sounded like she was still running an election campaign. Like Hillary Clinton, she said she wanted people around the world to know that she would be "listening" to them: "I want to learn more about you and your lives, what you believe, what you fear, what you dream, what you value most." Like Jesse Jackson, she deployed alliteration, alluding to the four "E's": "engagement, exchanges, education and empowerment." Unfortunately, Hughes's most important constituents aren't going to respond to engagement and empowerment, let alone exchange and education, unless the latter involves those flight schools where they don't teach you how to take off or land. It has become clear in Iraq, if it wasn't already, that what we call the "war on terrorism" is in fact a small part of a larger intellectual and religious struggle within Islam, between moderates who want to live in modern countries, and radicals who want to impose their extreme interpretation of sharia , or religious law.

That is true, and it is the moderates that Karen will be focusing on with "engagement, exchanges, education and empowerment" as she seeks to strengthen their backbones to stand up to the radicals.

So far, most of the money, and most of the "public diplomacy," has been channeled to the radicals. Consider, for example, an extraordinary report published this year by the Center for Religious Freedom, a division of Freedom House, which surveys more than 200 books and pamphlets collected at mosques and Islamic centers in U.S. cities. Most were in Arabic. All were published by the Saudi government or royal family, and all promote the extreme form of Wahhabi Islam found in Saudi Arabia. The books reflect contempt for the United States, condemn democracy as un-Islamic, and claim that Muslims are religiously obliged to hate Christians and Jews. Most insidiously, the documents denounce moderate Muslims, especially those who advocate religious tolerance, as infidels. If a Muslim commits adultery or becomes a homosexual, one pamphlet — published by the Saudi government's ministry of Islamic affairs — advises that "it would be lawful for Muslims to spill his blood and take his money."

We need to sic the ACLU on them. While I don't approve of either adultry or homosexuality, I think their solution is a bit extreme. Perhaps not as extreme as stoning a woman to death because she was raped, but extreme none the less.

I am citing this study not merely to finger the Saudis, but also to show what we are up against. The Saudi king's own Web site boasts of his support for mosques and schools in Lagos, Islamabad, Madrid, Buenos Aires and elsewhere. A friend reports recently seeing a new Saudi mosque in Kosovo. We have to assume that the materials found in the United States exist in all of those places, too.