This deliberate perversion of Islam into an alleged totalitarian ideology like Communism has been bought hook, line, and sinker by many academics in universities, who are responsible for the preparation of policy paradigms, by most of the think-tanks, who rely on the expertise of academia to set the agenda for policy in Washington, and by all of Bush's close Neo-Con associates, who make and implement policy in pursuit of a totalitarian utopia with total disregard for either Congress or the American people.

Over the decades, I have collected dozens of the best books by and about utopian thinkers, all of whom produced in the end nothing but abominations in human life. The worst and most dangerous of the bunch may be the Neo-Cons, if they can survive their own arrogance.

These are the people against whom America's Founders warned as the maximum threat to the traditionalist thought of Edmund Burke. As leader of the minority party in the English parliament, he was the Founders' principal mentor in the years leading up to the Revolution, even though he taught that reform was better than revolution and subsequently rejected what he considered to be the Americans' inopportune misreading of his message.

A forerunner of the Neo-Cons and an idol of some of them in their early years was Lenin, who translated the writings of the theoretician, Karl Marx, into operational policy. The utopia of Lenin differed from the Neo-Cons' only in that he was not motivated primarily by fear. They both agree on a single approach to capitalism: "take it or leave it," and "my way or the highway." Paradigmatic and structural reform simply are out of the question, which is why all such totalitarian utopias must fail in the end.

There is a third way. One perspicacious but provocative Muslim intellectual, Moin Ansari, says this third way is Islam. Muslims should know this, but it has taken Christians and Jews to flesh this out with programmatic solutions, because too many Muslims buy into the Qutb/Neo-Con obsession about a zero-sum clash of civilizations.

This third way has been spelled out over the last few decades by, among others, the Center for Economic and Social Justice, which I co-founded with Norman Kurland in 1985 to establish President Reagan's Presidential Task Force on Economic Justice. A number of web-sites have developed this approach in recent years, some of the most useful documents of which include the following:

www.americanrevolutionaryparty.us/partyplatform.htm
www.globaljusticemovement.org/mission_shared_vision.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/comparison3rdway.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/iraq-nationbuilding.htm
www.cesj.org/thirdway/paradigmpapers/csid-040528.htm
www.cesj.org/homestead/strategies/regional-global/katrinaplan050907.html

As I have taught for more than a quarter century, there is a near identity between classical American thought, encapsuled in the Preamble to the American Constitution, which lists justice first and freedom last as the purpose for forming the American union, and classical Islamic thought, encapsuled in the maqasid al shari'ah or universal principles of human rights, which form the governing paradigm of classical, but now almost extinct, Islamic jurisprudence.

Radical utopians now are trying to hijack our jointly held traditional wisdom, which we may call "the just third way." The radical Muslims want to impose what they call an "Islamic state" or even "a global Islamic caliphate," and the radical Neo-Con globalists want to impose what they call "democratic capitalism." These radical utopian terms are absurd oxymorons designed to hide the common goal to impose stability as the only ultimate goal under the guise, respectively, of "the Will of God" and "freedom and democracy."

The Neo-Cons have now embarked on a desperate public relations campaign to sell America without changing any American policies. Not once during the past five years has President Bush mentioned the word "justice," except in the sense of revenge and twice in a throwaway line inserted by his speechwriters without any follow-up. Freedom and democracy without a paradigm of justice to give them meaning is incomprehensible to 90% of the people in the world. For them the Neo-Cons are "speaking Greek" because they live in a world of their own cut off from reality.

The Neo-Con use of oxymorons to associate the religion Islam with the evils of radical terrorists is known as "mimetic warfare," which is the use of symbols (words) to influence the thinking of the target audience subliminally, that is, to capture their minds without them being aware that they have been victimized.

The sophistication of this threat to the traditional teachings of all the world religions is shown by the fact that these oxymorons are accepted even by some of those who oppose the Neo-Cons and try to be objective about Islam as a religion. Even otherwise intelligent Muslims have fallen for this trap in order to gain acceptance as "moderate," "liberal," or "progressive" Muslims, whom the Neo-Cons hope then to co-opt.

The sophistication of this strategy is shown by the campaign to get both Muslims and non-Muslims to adopt a litmus test for what constitutes "militant Islam." Daniel Pipes systematized this new technique by attempting to identify professors in American universities who in relation to Muslims were the equivalent of what "Commie-symps" were during the Cold War against Communist totalitarianism. As Sheila Musaji points out in her most recent article, "Through the Looking Glass," this demonization matrix has been further developed and publicized by the militantly Zionist magazine Frontpage, which lists anywhere from seven to nine danger signs of "militant Islam." She suggests that, "given a little time this list will grow."

This new game of testing Muslims for how well they accept the mimetic warriers' perversion of Islam reminds one of the CIA's word-count game a generation ago when authors were graded by how frequently they used the phrase "social justice." A high count indicated the degree to which one was disloyal and thus a threat to the Free World. The very use of the word "justice" flagged a security risk, because the only acceptable word was "freedom." In this mind-game the word "freedom" was used to flag those who agreed with American foreign policies.

Perhaps the most subtly misleading terms in modern mimetic warfare are "Islamic country" and "Islamic world," which in mimetic warfare are designed to group majority Muslim countries together as a single, systemic threat. Even Muslims use this terminology, although they know perfectly well that there is not a single Islamic country in the world. As Jeremy Henzell-Thomas points out in his article, there are indeed few countries that one should even categorize as "Muslim".

The word Islamic refers to the submission of a person or community to God. One can define this socially as one's commitment to human rights or to the pursuit of peace through justice and justice through peace. Or, more basically one can define "Islamic" as practical commitment to the interdependent goals of order, justice, and freedom, which provided the normative paradigm for all the Founders of America and forms the core belief in the perennial wisdom of every traditionalist religion.

It is ironic that America is by far the best example of what should be meant by the term Islamic world, because the ecumenical wisdom of America's founders has survived and is practiced in the United States better than anywhere else on earth. This is true despite the fact that the American media and the White House often reflect and grossly portray the very opposite of everything Islamic.

Why do both Muslims and non-Muslims go along with this game of mental perversion, like sheep to a slaughter. The innocent and naive argument for "going along with the flow" is that everyone is using these terms, so we must accept them in order to participate in public policy debates. This is nothing more than acceptance and practice of what the novel, 1984, termed double-speak, which is at the heart of every totalitarian strategy to enslave the world in pursuit of unlimited economic, political, and military power~~Bob Crane