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Yet terrorism is only one of three levels upon which the threat is attacking us and al-Qaeda is only a piece of the
terrorism level. The second level, the “Civilization Jihad,” a term used by the Muslim Brotherhood itself to
describe its long term effort to peaceably infiltrate American and Western society at all levels in order to bring it
down from the inside through the freedoms that Western Constitutions afford, is well at work and in process
today. This has also been called the “Stealth Jihad.”

There is a third level, the “International Institutional Jihad,” upon which organizations such as the UN, along with
its 57 Member State bloc the Organization of the Islamic Conference, work to push through those principles of
Sharia Law and Islamic doctrine which it Members can agree upon such as the 1990 Cairo Declaration of Human
Rights which is fully at odds with U.S. Constitutional tenets. Once these principles become international
standards, the institutions seek to push them into Western societies through treaties and trade deals over which
the Members have leverage.

McDonough’s words, by limiting the threat to Al Qaeda, intentionally ignore the other levels of threat which, for
all intents and purposes can be even more dangerous because our Constitution does not afford us easy means to
combat. Nor does our desired general sense of morality.

2. By focusing on “reasons” for this terrorist piece of the pie, the Control Factor further sets out the narrative
that we can gain control over the problem. By looking for “root causes,” we advance the notion that by
eliminating or reducing those elements we can eliminate the symptom-terrorism. This is part of a long-engaged
Leftist narrative that has been utilized across a vast array of social problems in order to gain control over funding
and policy. Now, it is being used to avoid seeing a problem clearly, much less addressing it intelligently.

It is this administration’s (and also, unfortunately, many members of Bush’s as well) distortion to frame terrorism
as a result of victimhood. That is, by establishing the root causes of terrorism as either a response to U.S. policy,
to economic conditions, to Israeli occupation, and so on, the Control Factor sells the buried wish that since we
cause the conditions, we can fix the symptom without the grueling costs of war and confrontation. When both
sides collude in this form of narrative, we allow it to continue and grow. Yet placing the cause of the problem
within ourselves is false and strips us of the proper incentive to stand up and fight against a threat that simply
seeks our destruction no matter what we do.

3. McDonough fights the enemy’s battle for us in the simple phrase of those “who falsely claim to be fighting in
the name of Islam.” Here, the Control Factor refuses to accept what the enemy has repeatedly made clear—there
is a Holy War between Islam and the Western world, it has been declared by a significant faction of Muslims and
agreed upon by many more either explicitly or through silence and omission, and the war is defined by the enemy
itself under the banner of Islam to seek the destruction of Western society as it is and to replace it with a Sharia
based global Islamic Ummah. This is what the enemy says itself. The Control Factor tells us that this can not be,
that Islam is a “peaceful” and “great” religion that has been “hijacked” by a few “crazies” and that most
Muslims worldwide are much like us peace loving Westerners who seek a world based on mutual tolerance. If
there is any “war,” it emanates from those of us Westerners who are “racists,” “bigots,” or otherwise and fail to
acknowledge the realities of the Muslim peoples. The critical issue here is that the Control Factor, as expressed
through McDonough, takes full responsibility for defining Islam and identifying the enemy. The enemy, however,
defines itself and needs to identify itself both through its actions, its words, and importantly what it does not do
and say.

This “transfer of responsibility” from the enemy to ourselves that McDonough’s words so freely take on is
symptomatic of the deep addictive style the West has adopted to avoid hard confrontation. Once again, the
Control Factor utilizes Western guilt to define the conflict as resulting from improper acts of its own. It then
seeks to redeem itself by accommodating the enemy. This shows up in America’s dealings with Islam as well as
the “Israeli-Palestinian Conflict;” responsibility for the problem is transferred to the West or Israel in a grand
psychological effort to avoid facing the terrors and costs of hard confrontation, terror, or war. And in each
example, as with all psychological defenses, the defense creates the very conditions it seeks to avoid. Until the
West is fully able to place responsibility back upon the Islamic world for the actions it takes and omits to take,
the West will only dig itself deeper into a weaker position. Unfortunately, the game of guilt gives us no guidance
as to how it is to end; when enough has been repaid. Instead, it is geared to continue indefinitely.

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