R.E.A.L.’s Jeffrey Imm has been having an online discussion with Mr. Hussam Ayloush, who describes himself as an Executive Board Member at the California Democratic Party and an Executive Director of CAIR – Greater Los Angeles Chapter.

R.E.A.L. has been urging Mr. Ayloush to get more serious about challenging the ideology behind extremist terrorist attacks after repeated recent terrorist attacks, including a bombing attack by an extremist terrorist on Sunday killing 25 religious minority Shiite Muslims in Pakistan, and another attack in France.

Mr. Ayloush is predominantly focused on Republican candidate Donald Trump. While Mr. Trump’s extreme views may be unworkable and deserve criticism, the problem we face with violent extremists behind terrorist attacks will continue whether or not Mr. Trump is running in politics. Such distractions keep us from maintaining our focus on the primary challenge that we have faced and will continue to face with violent extremists, until we recognize the problems.

Mr. Hussam Ayloush’s fundamental position is now to me directly that ISIS and other such terrorists do not really have an ideology that we have to challenge — “other than power hunger.”  According to CNN and other major news media, this represents the views of an executive director of a major organization, which represents itself as speaking on the human rights for American Muslims.

This Denial and Delusion is the fundamental root of our problem.

In America, if our only challenge to white supremacist ideologies was to criticize white supremacists abuses as simply “power hunger,” without challenging the white supremacist ideology, we would still have a largely segregated and publicly racial discriminatory society today. The ugly, miserable, painful, and completely NECESSARY struggle in America was essential to providing a significantly different level of human rights in America to African-Americans today than during the 1960s-1970s. We could not have moved on as an nation. We had to face the truths that too many Americans were initially unwilling to hear.  Furthermore, it was essential that the victims did not abandon a commitment to human rights to become victimizers.   As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. stated a “doctrine of black supremacy is as dangerous as a doctrine of white supremacy,” and we must learn to keep our focus on “the freedom of the whole human race.”

A focus only on political outrage, rather than a real “war of ideas,” also fuels the attacks of anti-Muslim extremists such the attack on a mosque in Coachella, California.  We must always remember to challenge anti-human rights extremists from every avenue, including those that would spread hate against our fellow human beings who are Muslims, who have freedom of religion guaranteed in our Universal Declaration of Human Rights like all people.  We must challenge this ideology of hate as well.

In every instance, we cannot simply ignore the ideologies of extremists, and hope that our security, police, and tactical methods will minimize their violence.

We cannot ignore the ideology of extremists and simply fight a tactical war against them. There will never be enough police, enough military, enough security; they cannot be everywhere and anywhere.  We can’t create watch lists big enough or dynamic enough.  Even if we had a “perfect” watch list of extremists, we don’t have the resources to “watch” those on the “watch list.”  We don’t have the resources to “watch” those on a “watch list” now.  Security tactics can help us “buy time,” certainly and are necessary, where they provide some effectiveness. But in the course of the protracted struggle against extremists, we must choose and commit ourselves to fighting a war of ideas.

Concentrating on the wrong thing is just as misguided as doing nothing, and vice versa.

Furthermore, the righteous anger in response to desperate comments by uninformed individuals who want to “do something” about one type of extremists, regarding how genuinely offensive it is to our shared human rights to have a “list” of all Muslims or to “monitor” all mosques — misses the obvious point — it is impossible, especially in such a vast and fluid nation as the United States of America in the 21st century.  The outraged arguments on desperate and unworkable ideas for immigration control also miss the main point – it is impossible.  If we asked extremists to give us information to help identify them at the border, they would just lie, of course.   Just like real extremists can get fake passports, saying whatever they want them to say.  (We could change the name of the identity group, and we would get the same result.)

Tactics aren’t enough.  This is obvious, but the voices of anger and desperation are so loud in debating this, that they haven’t stopped to reflect on this.  The voices of desperation and of anger may be loud and they have their right to be heard, but we cannot allow the important struggle against extremism to be swallowed up by such shouting over what is, candidly, nonsense.

Desperate and confused people want to retreat to “tactics” in the vain and misguided hope that security tactics will “do something.”  This desperate reaction is only inflamed by those who mislead the public and develop policies to do “nothing,” making such individuals more desperate, which perpetuates the cycle of desperate statements, followed by angry responses, again and again.

In the meantime, violent extremists continue to recruit enemies against freedom, and we are not consistently challenging such extremist ideologies, when we stubbornly seek to deny such ideologies even exist, even when we know that doesn’t make any sense.

We need to learn from history and we need to begin to fight a “genuine battle of ideas,” as Senator Obama committed to do in August 2007, if he was elected president.

To fight the War of Ideas,  the “war we need to win,” we can’t wait for the White House or our politicians or the media to understand and to even begin such a war of ideas.

This is OUR responsibility, as those who are responsible for equality and liberty.  

We need to take charge, all of us, from all identity groups, of our destiny.   We need to be responsible for the world that we will leave behind for the next generation.

Failure to fight a “war of ideas” against the ideologies and the ideas of extremists is nothing less than surrendering on our Universal Human Rights. We must recognize such ideologies and combat them with the truth of our shared universal human rights.

In my discussion with Mr. Ayloush, however, he has decided, that the focus should be in a political partisan battle, while Muslims are being killed by ISIS terrorists right now. Like others, Mr. Ayloush believes that if we only focus on the ISIS activities in Syria, we are addressing the “root cause” being the “political, economic, and military repression” of ISIS activists.

Have all of the American ISIS recruits been politically, economically, and militarily repressed?  Including those with sophisticated jobs and educations in San Bernardino?  Were the terrorists who committed the Paris terrorist attacks politically, economically, and militarily repressed? Were the ISIS terrorists who have attacked mosque after mosque, blowing them up, and mass-murdering other Muslims in country after country, killing other Muslims simply because they are politically, economically, and militarily repressed?  Does this rationalize blowing up mosques full of praying Muslims by ISIS?

Denial and Delusion are the primary fuels to enable extremists and certainly to promote political overreaction. When your government’s primary focus is on Denial and Delusion, people look to anyone else, because they are that desperate. When your media refuses to report on news due to Denial and Delusion, people look elsewhere to find the news that doesn’t get reported in their goals to shape public opinion.

Today,  the French news media reports that the ISIS terrorist publication, written in French, ” ‘Dar-al-Islam’ has called for attacks against officials of Education, which it calls the ‘the enemies of Allah’ who ‘teach secularism’ and that are in ‘open war against the Muslim family.’ The active jihadist group in Iraq and Syria, which recruited hundreds of young French, has been calling for ‘fighting’ and ‘killing’ of officials of social services.”  CNN decided NOT to report that part of the story, which you need to go to European news media to learn.  CNN is reporting from Paris, they have the entire news story, but they choose to shape the news, to omit any information necessary to help those challenging the ideology of the ISIS terrorists.

It is essential that we continue a War of Ideas to challenge ISIS and other extremists, and that we do not lose sight of their ideological threats against our shared human rights, including their threats against other Muslims who are responsible citizens in our societies.

Here is my discussion with Mr. Hussam Ayloush.  To be fair to Mr. Ayloush and myself, the Twitter limited characters do not allow us to provide the complete and nuanced comments necessary for a full discussion.  But the basic idea of denial – that there is no real ideology of ISIS that we must confront – remains the primary challenge for the world today.  We have to learn from the past.  We have to use our knowledge of what works and what does make change to defy extremist views in others and in ourselves.

To R.E.A.L., Mr. Ayloush writes:
— @realhumanrights ISIS must be condemned and fought, even as we try to address its root causes.
— Reply to @HussamA But if we do not challenge the extremist ideology of ISIS we do not begin to address the root causes.
— @realhumanrights it’s not a mutually exclusive approach. We can do both, challenge ISIS & the repression that nurtures it.
— Reply to @HussamA That repression based on ideology accepting crimes against humanity. Mr. Trump’s misguided views <1% of problem, 99% of discussion
— @realhumanrights that repression is mostly not based on any ideology other than power hunger.
— @realhumanrights the evil of violent extremism is often fueled by political, economic, and military repression.
— Reply to @HussamA While I am not defending Trump, using him as an excuse, ignores this problem isn’t going away until we challenge extremists.
— @realhumanrights ISIS terrorism is a symptom of deeper issues in that region

To be Responsible for Equality And Liberty, we need to be honest and responsible to ourselves as to the truths of ideological threats from extremists that our society faces, and that we may find in ourselves.  We need to challenge such extremist views from all, and urge all of us to support our Universal Human Rights for all.