The term “quisling” refers to anyone who collaborates with an enemy occupying force. The word originates from the Norwegian war-time leader Vidkun Quisling, who headed a domestic Nazi collaborationist regime during WWII. That era also produced appeasers, such as as former British Prime Minister Arthur Neville Chamberlain, who is most famous for his signing of the Munich Agreement in 1938, conceding the German-populated Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to Germany. However, when Adolf Hitler continued his aggression by invading Poland, Britain declared war on Germany on 3 September 1939, and Chamberlain led Britain through the first eight months of World War II.
In the 21st century, we are witnessing the rise of a new global threat that threatens to engulf the world—Jihadic Islam, whose express goal is to convert the entire world to their vision of Islam. However, as bad as Quisling and Chamberlain were, they never acted as apologists for the Nazi regime. But Barak Hussein Obama not only combines the qualities of Quisling and Chamberlain, he has emerged as an apologist for the global Jihad movement. The Washington Post columnist Marc Thiessen stated in his article, “To the terrorists, Obama is ‘Crusader in chief’.” Thiessen argued that, since ISIS and al Qaeda criticize the American military as crusaders, Obama’s criticism of the medieval crusades gives the terrorists a “propaganda gold mine.”
Does this make any sense to you?
Sure enough, the ISIS literature often invokes imagery from the Crusade’s history, and most recently announced that they intend to unfurl their flag over the Vatican and behead the Pope.
While I think Obama is correct in saying that our conflict is not a war against Islam, I think the President ought to be mobilizing more Arab countries who are willing to take them on rather than using his office to stymie any efforts to prevent the ISIS caliphate from expanding.
That kind of approach demand forceful leadership of our President. He has yet to demonstrate this kind of statesmanship—but fortunately, others are showing us the way.
At the first of the New Year, Abdel-Fattah El-Sissi summoned all the imams and Muslim scholars of his country and called for a “revolution” in Islam to reform the interpretations of the faith entrenched for hundreds of years, which he said have made the Muslim world a source of “destruction” and pitted it against the rest of the world. In his speech, el-Sissi’s threw the gauntlet in positioning himself as modernizer of Islam. His professed goal is to purge the religion of extremist ideas of intolerance and violence that fuel groups like al-Qaida and the Islamic State – and lie behind Tuesday’s attack in Paris on a French satirical newspaper that killed 12 people.
Watching el-Sissi in action is like watching 16th century European history play itself out in the present. el-Sissi’s has emerged as a modern day “Muslim Martin Luther.” In his Jan. 1 speech at al-Azhar addressing Muslim clerics – held to mark the Prophet Muhammad’s birthday – el-Sissi called on them to promote a reading of Islamic texts in a “truly enlightened” manner to reconsider concepts “that have been made sacred over hundreds of years.” He also said that the Jihadist thinking is “making enemies of the whole world. So 1.6 billion people (in the Muslim world) will kill the entire world of 7 billion people? That’s impossible … We need a religious revolution.”[1] Continue reading “The Spirit of Quisling and Chamberlain Live On….”