Dr. Miklos K. Radvanyi
America’s enemies do not become harmless because Americans lose the vocabulary to describe them. Individual terrorists and terrorist movements remain terroristic even when their representatives invoke liberation. Tyrannies remain tyrannies when they renounce Western values. And political ideas that subordinate individual liberty to collective purposes do not become benign merely because their advocates speak warmly about justice.
Yet, identifying enemies requires judgment based on genuine knowledge. Political disagreements are not treasonous by themselves. A Muslim American’s religion establishes nothing about integration, assimilation, or loyalty, just as a Christian’s patriotism cannot be inferred from church attendance. The relevant questions concern conduct, principles, and consequences. Zohran Mamdani and Abdul El-Sayed deserve scrutiny because of their public positions, including their ancestry and faith.
Their rise raises a troubling question: can American voters distinguish attractive promises of social improvement from the evasions and religious-ideological assumptions accompanying them? Housing, healthcare, and affordability are serious concerns. They should not become protective camouflage that prevents scrutiny of a politician’s judgment about terrorism, antisemitism, constitutional liberty, and America’s international interests.
Zohran Mamdani supplies an unusually revealing statement in his inaugural address: “We will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism.” The phrasing deserves attention because it presents individualism as a moral deficiency and collectivism as its humane remedy. This is a profoundly misleading account of American achievements. The United States of America’s Constitution protects the individual precisely because majorities, governments, and movements can become oppressive. Freedom of conscience, speech, association, and enterprise gives people room to cooperate without submitting every choice to political authority. Families, religious congregations, charities, and voluntary associations demonstrate that solidarity need not depend on Marxist, Leninist, Stalinist,
Maoist notion of collectivism. The warmth of community is not a government monopoly.
Equally, his vocabulary also invites a necessary examination: where his extremist “collective solidarity” comes from, where does it end, and where does coercion begin? Clearly, it comes from his Islamic beliefs. The conventional media rendering of the Islamic battle cry “Allahu Akbar” as simply “God is Great” does not explain the true meaning of the word “Akbar” that in reality means not “Great,” but the “Greatest.” Indeed, the arc of Islamic fundamentalism establishes a divine link between the “Supreme Ruler Allah” and all the ruled without exception through the total submission of the latter to the sovereign tyranny of the former. In order to enforce such a total submission, the Qur’an, the Hadith, and the Sharia put the principle of corporal punishment, including the frequent imposition of the death penalty, at the center of Islam. From this religious fundamentalism, “martyrdom,” the “denial of individual freedom,” the “denial of justice,” the “immorality of hatred,” the “mentality of extreme violence,” the “phenomenon of terror,” and the “theology of contemporary terrorism” were born. In a liberal democracy, any politician must answer these fundamental political questions: Who decides which private interests must yield to the collective and what limits restrain officials convinced that their intentions authorize expansive power? The worldwide slogans of the bloodthirsty Muslim mob about the “Marseillaise of Arab Conquest” in France, the “Muslim Nuclear Bomb” throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, the “Fear of the Capitalist West” that goes back to the Warlord Mohammed, are all expressions of guaranteed victory in the future against the rest of the world. Thus in the Muslim mind, Islam shall be in permanent war with the non-Muslim world and itself until the earth will be exclusively Islamic.
Moreover, Zohran Mamdani’s October 7 anniversary statement raises another concern: selective moral framing. He condemned Hamas’s war crimes and acknowledged the Israelis killed and abducted. He then turned to Gaza and accused the State of Israel of an ongoing genocide. The criticism, therefore, was not that he failed to condemn Hamas. It is that he used a commemoration of its victims to advance a sweeping indictment of the State of Israel. A mayor serving a city with a large Jewish population should understand the difference between recognizing another community’s mourning. Political leadership in a liberal democracy requires the discipline to acknowledge murdered and abducted people without immediately making their remembrance serve an ideological argument.
Abdul El-Sayed’s record presents related questions of judgment. His campaign opposes unconditional military funding to several foreign governments, including the State of Israel. Yet, his generalized objection does not answer the geostrategic question: what happens when abandoning defensive assistance increases the vulnerability of an ally and strengthens the leverage of its adversaries? During his debate with Mike Rogers, Abdul El-Sayed rejected defensive aid to the State of Israel even if it were attacked and portrayed both the State of Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran as dangerous in different ways. Such judgments deserve more than campaign applause. A future senator must distinguish disagreements with an ally from threats posed by a hostile government. Treating every foreign entanglement as an avoidable expense can become an excuse for refusing to calculate the costs of retreat. His handling of Hasan Piker is equally revealing. He repeatedly resisted demands to disavow the streamer, while disagreeing with some remarks, and saying they would not campaign together again.
The problem of these two so-called American politicians extends beyond them. Parts of American political culture increasingly assess conduct through a predetermined hierarchy of oppressors and oppressed. Once this hierarchy is becoming absolute, evidence loses its authority. Violence by a favored cause receives contextual explanations; violence by a disfavored state becomes proof of inherent wickedness. Individual responsibility disappears into political categories. This habit is dangerous because real enemies exploit it. Terrorist organizations benefit when the language of resistance blurs deliberate attacks on civilians. Tyrannical regimes benefit when democratic shortcomings are treated as equivalent to organized repression. Antisemitism benefits when hostility toward Jews is excused as an understandable consequence of events abroad. Precision is a democratic necessity.
America knows its enemies only when the majority of its citizens understand that the violent route to power is defeated and shown as bringing ubiquitous shame rather than respect and political reward. Otherwise, the glory of violence and the demonstration of its effectiveness will become more powerful than the Judeo-Christian Western values of peace and tolerance. Moreover, anti-Judaism, which includes antisemitism as well as anti-Zionism, and anti-Westernism must not be tolerated. The supremacy of Islam and of Allah, contained in the Arabic language phrases “istishhad” and “la ilaha illa Allah,” shall not be tolerated in Western politics discourse. Actions that are carried out under the false English translations of “martyrdom operations” are, in reality, ruthless terroristic acts by which the faithful Muslims accept death in the religiously righteous pursuit of getting closer to Allah.
The virulent hatred of the Jews in general and the terroristic loathing of the State of Israel in particular have again reached lethally hysterical proportions throughout the world. However, there should be no doubt that this avalanche of hateful sentiments are precursors to the total destruction of Western culture and Western liberal democracy. Martin Niemoller, the German Protestant pastor who suffered the barbarity of a Nazi concentration camp, published in 1946 a confession under the title “First They Came.” This personal confession begins with the words: “First they came for the communists and I did not speak out – because I was not a communist.” After listing the socialists and the trade unionists, he concludes thus: “Then they came for the Jews and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me.” This ending definitely sounds like a practical warning: protect others because you may eventually need protection yourself. Yet, the deeper moral reading is that persecution deserves unmitigated opposition even when the observer will remain safe for a while. Yet, its most demanding lesson is both personal and universal: one shall examine whose sufferings you condemn or approve because the victims were not “your people.”