The threat of the Islamic State of Iraq and Sham, or ISIS, will be unlike any other the U.S. has ever faced. Moreover, to fight it may require some radical rethinking of democratic and U.S. constitutional values.
So contended Mordechai Kedar, Ph.D., in a telephone interview with The Chronicle on Jan. 12; and so will he contend at greater length when he speaks at the Joseph and Rebecca Peltz Center for Jewish Life, 2233 W Mequon Rd., on Tuesday, Feb. 17, 7 p.m.
This fight will be different for three reasons, said Kedar, an expert in Arabic language and literature at Bar-Ilan University and a former Israeli military intelligence worker.
First, “it’s not such a thing as you can get rid of with two days of war, and it’s not the kind of thing you can get rid of from the air,” Kedar told The Chronicle. “If you really want to topple it…you must go in with ground forces, many ‘boots on the ground.’”
But the problem here is that “unlike a regular state” with a regular military establishment, this one has no “bases, positions, tanks, an air force or a navy which you can destroy,” he said. “This is not a conventional war that the U.S. Army is trained for and equipped for.”
That leads to the second problem, which is that the enemy fighters “are in the population. Many don’t have uniforms. How can you identify them from the local population, which you don’t want to target?”
The third problem is that ISIS “is not only a state of the ruins of Syria and Iraq,” Kedar said. “It is also an idea which is spreading very rapidly all over the Islamic world.”
“You have in many places individuals and organizations that have already pledged allegiance to the calif of the Islamic state,” Kedar explained. “They consider themselves to be some kind of extensions of that state wherever they are” — in Sinai, Nigeria, Libya, Tunisia, Lebanon and many other places, including the Palestinian Authority regions ruled by Israel.
“So even if you topple the Islamic state, what are you going to do in the other places of the world where this idea has started to act?” Kedar asked.
So this will result in a “different kind of war which I am not sure the world is ready to wage.” Not only will countries need to use their police forces and intelligence agencies as well as their armies, but “you will need to change the laws in some places” in such as way as to “incriminate pledging allegiance to this organization.”
This strikingly contrasts with U.S./Western freedom of speech principles. Kedar acknowledged as much, but insisted on the necessity of changing those principles.
“If you fight [ISIS] you can’t allow its ideas to become part of the public debate,” he said. “Otherwise you try to face them with at least one of your hands tied behind your back.”
“The democracies have to decide whether they are democracies which defend themselves from elements who don’t believe in democracy but misuse democracy into order to push forward the anti-democratic agenda, or whether they are democracies on a suicide track,” Kedar said.
“If a democracy doesn’t defend itself, it will collapse under the pressure of people who don’t believe in democracy,” Kedar said.
Kedar, 62, served for nearly 25 years in Israeli military intelligence. A Tel Aviv native, he earned his doctorate in Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in 1998, and has taught at Tel Aviv University and Ariel College as well as Bar-Ilan.
He said he became interested in the subject first because he had “an excellent teacher for Arabic in high school” but he later fell in love with the literature and culture.
“It is a culture which is totally different from our culture,” he said. “It showed that not everybody is like us.”
Moreover, Jews should have a particular interest in Arabic because with it “we are able to read Jewish sources written in Arabic originally.”
When asked if there were one fact about this region that he would like people to carry in their heads, Kedar said it would be that “Israel is not the problem in the Middle East.”
“Radical Islam has existed since the Seventh Century, way before Israel came into the world,” Kedar said. “The Islamic domestic struggles, Sunni and Shi’a, is already present in the 14th Century. The Arabs hate the Kurds and vice versa no matter what Israel does.”
“To see the Middle East problems through the lens of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a very big mistake, which unfortunately too many people here make,” he said. “Even if it will be solved, it will not solve any other problem.”
Admission to the lecture is free. For more information, call 262-242-2235 extension 204.
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