ISLAM IN LIBYA

Remember this scene in many a John Wayne movie?

He’s walking down the street of a Wild West town when he sees a gang of bad guy thugs beating up a young kid and molesting his mother.  He walks right on by, saying to himself with a shrug, “That’s none of my business.”  In another version of the scene, he rushes off to get approval of the town council before he dares intervene.

Don’t remember?  That’s because there never was such a scene.  We know exactly what Wayne would have done – gone to the victims’ rescue without hesitation.  That’s what makes him a hero.

Any comparison between John Wayne and President Zero is obscene.  Nonetheless, imagining this faux movie scene should give conservatives pause regarding Zero and Libya.

After all, when the world’s scum – like Hugo Chavez, Evo Morales, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Robert Mugabe, Louis Farrakhan, and Michael Moore – denounce Zero as a “warmonger,” and moonbat fruitcakes like Dennis Kucinch and Ralph Nader are demanding his impeachment, it has to mean that Zero for once is doing something right.

Something, not everything – for this is Zero we’re talking about so of course he’s going to botch it. And of course it’s fun to throw his words as a Senator back in his face.

But the only guy on the right with his head still screwed on is Mark Levin, while almost everyone else is running around amok claiming Zero bombing Gaddafi is somehow “unconstitutional” because Congress didn’t “authorize” it.

Folks, the very last time Congress issued an actual declaration of war was World War II.  In all the military activities the US has engaged in for the last 70 years, including the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and everything else, Congress has not once declared war.

Instead, Congress will “authorize” or “consent” to the president ordering the use of military force via a Resolution – such as S. Res. 23 in 2001for the War in Afghanistan, or S. Res. 85 passed unanimously by the Senate on March 1^st, supporting “the imposition of a no-fly zone in Libya.”

As an aside, there was no specific Congressional authorization of any kind for Reagan’s April 1986 attack on Gaddafi.  Reagan relied on the War Powers Act of 1973, which grants the president (and thus Zero now) wide discretion on military force for up to 90 days.

So what’s up with the angst?  Why aren’t conservatives thrilled that American firepower is cleaning the clock of one of the world’s most evil men?  The only problem is that Zero is waffling and not using enough firepower to kill the bastard outright  — like George the Elder’s wimping out at the end of the Gulf War and not finishing off Saddam Hussein.

Gaddafi is a criminally depraved murderous monster whose assassins have killed opponents all over the world, imposed a hideous tyranny on his people, and slaughtered 270 people in horrifically cold blood by ordering Pan Am Flight 103 blown out of the sky over Lockerbie, Scotland on December 21, 1988.

He has no right to life whatever and should have been knocked off decades ago.  That Libyans have finally summoned up the courage to fight against him is something to cheer and celebrate.  When they are attacked by the monster who promises to murder them all, and promises in retribution to blow a civilian passenger plane out of the sky from any country who tries to protect them, this lunatic has to removed from the face of the earth.

It’s not surprising that the world’s Communists, Marxists, and Moonbat Leftists are on the monster’s side – but for conservatives to get the vapors and let their hearts go pitty-pat in fear of some imagined “Islamic takeover” of Libya such that they are born-again Gaddafi supporters is just so disappointingly sad.

So let’s talk about Islam in Libya.

First, an adianoeta[1] alert.  “Islam” is the name of the Moslem religion because it is an Arabic word meaning “submission.”  Moslems pretend this is submission to their god, when it really means submission of infidels to them.  What “islam” should mean for us, however, is the submission of Moslems to civilized behavior.

So we are going to talk about how Libya can become a civilized country again by adhering to its homegrown version of Islam.

Libya is an old place, originally inhabited by Berber nomad tribes the ancient Egyptians called Libu.  The ancient Greeks colonized the littoral of eastern Libya, starting with a colony named Cyrene in 631 BC, with the whole region subsequently ruled as Cyrenaica under the Ptolemaic Greeks thanks to Alexander the Great who conquered Egypt in 332 BC.

Around the same time during the 7^th century BC in western Libya, Phoenician colonists founded the colony of  Oea, which the Cyrenaican Greeks took over and called Tripolis (three cities, incorporating two other towns).  The Phoenicians of Carthage grabbed it, the Romans wiped out Carthage (146 BC), and called western Libya their province of Tripolitania.

The Ptolemaic Greeks ceded Cyrenaica to Rome in 74 BC, and both provinces under Roman rule became immensely rich.  By the early 300s AD, they had become firmly Christian.  Yet they remained different, with Tripolitania retaining its Punic or Carthaginian heritage, and Cyrenaica its Greek.

Thus in 395, Tripolitania became part of the Western Roman Empire of Rome, while Cyrenaica was joined to the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium (Constantinople).  As the rule of Rome disintegrated in the following century, all of Libya was absorbed into the Byzantine Empire.

Then in 647, a horde of 40,000 Arab horsemen swarmed into Libya and subjected its Berber Christian population to their invention of Islam.  A series of Arab and Berber warlords ruled it for centuries until the Ottoman Turks showed up as slave-raiding pirates in the early 1500s.

The most famous of them was a Turk named Hizir whom the Italians (bearing the brunt of his slave raids) called Barbarossa (Redbeard, 1478-1546).  It was after him, and his Berber cutthroats, that Libya became known in Europe as the Barbary Coast.

For 300 years, the Moslem Barbary Pirates so devastated the Christian Mediterranean that entire coastlines of Spain and Italy were depopulated, there were slave raids as far away as Ireland, and over one million Christians captured and enslaved, who “would end their days as slaves in North Africa, dying of starvation, disease, or maltreatment,” in the words of British historian Robert Davis.

Thomas Jefferson put an end to it.  The Pasha of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, was holding the captain and crew of a US Navy ship hostage for ransom.  President Jefferson sent the Marines, who captured Tripoli’s city of Derna on April 27, 1805.  They were led by Marine Lieutenant Presley O’Bannon, who became the first man ever to raise the American flag in victory on foreign soil.

The Pasha surrendered, the crew was released, and O’Bannon was presented with a Mameluke sword for his bravery, which Marine officers carry to this day.  Ever since, the Marines have sung about “the shores of Tripoli.”

Thus it was Jefferson and the Marines who introduced real islam – submission to civilized behavior – to Libya.

Such submission had a profound effect on a teen-age boy named Mohammed bin Ali as-Senussi (1787-1859).  From a small coastal town in what is now Algeria and claiming descent from Mohammed through his daughter Fatima, he began preaching a different kind of Islam that appealed to the Berber nomads of North African oases.

Senussi Islam was an eclectic selection of beliefs and practices taken from disparate varieties of Islam – from Salafi austerity to Sufi mysticism.  Wherever he went, from Morocco to Cairo to Mecca, people listened to him and the orthodox clerics issued fatwas against him because of his subversive insistence on ijtihad.

We learned about ijtihad – independent reasoning – in Opening The Doors of Islam.  But that was a while ago, December 2006, so you might reacquaint yourself with the concept that can save Islam by re-reading it now.

In 1843,  As-Senussi founded a monastery or zawia at Al Bayda on the coast of Cyrenaica near the ruins of Ancient Greek Cyrene (al-bayda means “the white” or “city of snow,” as it snows there a lot in the winter).  From there, his sermons on ijtihad and its opposite, taqlid, spread across Libya.

Taqlid is Arabic for “imitation.”  As-Senussi derided it as “blind following” of ceremonies and tradition like a camel on a leash – for the word comes from al-iqlid, the camel’s nosering through which it is leashed.  Instead of observing prayer rituals and obeying the edicts of imams or sharia laws out of imitation or taqlid, he taught, Moslems must have the freedom to practice their faith according to their own best educated and well-reasoned judgment.

Such teachings are of course revolutionary, a direct attack on Islamic elites pretending to speak for God in maintaining the status quo.  And it is just what the Moslem world needs now.

As his followers spread, As-Senussi exercised virtual sovereign rule over most of Cyrenaica (as the Ottomans were absentee landlords), which was expanded and solidified by his son Mohammed al-Mahdi as-Senussi (1845-1902).  Then al-Mahdi died and the Italians showed up.

At the end of the 19^th century, European powers were carving up Africa, the Ottoman Empire was dying, and Italy wanted in on the colonial game.  Britain had Egypt, France had Algeria and Tunisia, and Italy wanted what was in between – the Ottoman provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica.

The Italians thought it would be a walk, but it took 100,000 of them in 1912 to subdue the region, along with the almost total destruction of Tripoli.  Then they had to withdraw two years later as World War I broke out.

After the war, the Brits designated al-Mahdi’s son (and as-Senussi’s grandson) Sidi Idris as-Senussi (1889-1983) as Emir of Cyrenaica, and allowed Italy to maintain Tripolitania and Cyrenaica as Protectorates.  The came Mussolini in 1922 with his fascist brutality.

Sidi Idris designated an accomplished guerrilla fighter against the Italians, Omar Muktar, to lead a Senussi revolt against Mussolini.  It took Mussolini nine years and wholesale slaughter of Senussites in the tens of thousands to defeat Muktar, who was captured and hung in 1931.  Sidi Idris fled to exile in Egypt.

During World War II, Idris led his Senussites against Italy, fighting along with the British.  He reclaimed the Emirate of Cyrenaica in 1943, and in 1949 was proclaimed by a council of tribal elders the Emir of Tripolitania.

In 1951, a National Congress adopted a constitution and elected a parliament, which in turn elected Idris as King of Libya.  For the first time in history, the ancient land of Libya was unified and independent.

While Libya prospered under King Idris due to the discovery of oil and the benign rule of a tolerant Senussi Islam, Idris infuriated Nasser in Egypt by refusing to join his Arab Nationalist campaign against the West.  Idris, a staunch Anti-Communist who despised the Soviets, even signed alliances with the Brits and the US, and had the US Air Force and Strategic Command establish a major military base, Wheelus Air Base.

By the mid-1960s, Idris was approaching 80 and his health was failing.  Nasser and the KGB sent agents into Libya to find recruits for staging a coup.  They found one in a rabidly anti-Semitic admirer of Nasser who hated Idris for being pro-West.  He was a 27 year-old charismatic junior officer in the Libyan Army named Muammar Gaddafi.

It was my dear friend Ray Cline, former Deputy Director of the CIA, who years ago told me about Gaddafi’s sponsorship by the KGB.  Ray passed away in 1996, and I sure wish he were here now.

The KGB planned the coup well, taking place on September 1, 1969 while Idris was in Turkey for a medical procedure.  The worldwide Soviet media hailed it as a “bloodless coup,” with Moscow and every Soviet-aligned state instantly recognizing Gadaffi’s Revolutionary Council as Libya’s legitimate government.

Gaddafi quickly moved to nationalize the oil industry, set up a secret police, establish a totally ruthless Islamic dictatorship, and use his oil millions to sponsor every Marxist and Moslem terrorist group on the planet.  The rest is evil history for 42 years.

With any luck, that evil will soon come to an end.  My sources in NATO tell me there is no way what is going on is the “disaster” the enemedia are claiming and hoping for.  “This is a very effective mission so far,” I’m told, “a very well done functioning operation coordinated between several countries.”

My source was talking about the military side of it – but cautioned me that the political side of NATO was another matter, especially with the French demanding they be in charge while they have no real staff officers within the NATO command structure.

My source has nothing but admiration for the Brits, who are showing the world that “The West is getting its balls back.”  He confirmed the report that MI6 is calling up Libyan generals to advise them to “Defect or die,” asking:

“General, we’ve got the GPS co-ordinates of your command post. They are programmed into a Storm Shadow missile. What do you want to do?”

And if a missile happened to be accidentally mis-programmed such that it killed Gaddafi, as British Defense Minister Liam Fox has implied, well… sorry about that.

This is great, folks… this is cool.  At last we’re going after one of the world’s worst bad guys.  Every other murderous monster running some awful tyranny is starting to sweat.  We should be celebrating this.  Our angst should be directed at Zero’s proven capacity to wimp out and screw it up.

Further, we should be celebrating the attack on Gaddafi’s Libya as an opportunity to transform a Moslem country from radical to tolerant Islam.  Gaddafi has done everything he can to abolish Senussi Islam and impose Sharia – including amputation of thieves’ hands and feet, and public lashing of men and women for “fornication.”

Yet Senussi Islam and its tradition of ijtihad is deep, it’s still there.  Libyans are not rebelling against Gaddafi because they want more Sharia laws imposed on them, to have imams and mullahs controlling their lives instead of Gaddafi.  They are Moslems and they want freedom.  Senussi Islam encouraging them to think for themselves is the solution.

Libya before Gaddafi was our friend and ally.  It could be again – or not as things could go sideways.  But we simply have to get over this paralyzing fear that if we don’t support monsters and dictators, Moslem Brotherhood/ Al Qaeda terrorist crazies are going to take over for sure.

Gaddafi will soon be history.  Zero will have been an accidental and reluctant cause – and good for him in any regard.  Gaddafi’s Libya will be forced to submit to civilized behavior, and a Libyan Islam of reasoned thought instead of mindless imitation may emerge in its place.    That’s what’s possible and we should strive for it.

[1]   An adianoeta is an expression with one obvious meaning and another hidden meaning.  E.g., when Claude Raines says to Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca:  “Rick, I’d like you to meet Colonel Strasser. He’s one of the officers who has given the Third Reich the reputation it has.”