The late southern Sudanese leader John Garang, in 1999, posed the following dual-part existential question for our era:

Is the call for jihad against a particular people a religious right of those calling for it, or is it a human rights violation against the people upon whom jihad is declared and waged?

As nearly  20,000 deadly jihad terror attacks since the cataclysmic acts of mass murderous jihad 11 years ago on this date should make plain, the answer to both parts of John Garang's query is "Yes!"

Theodore Roosevelt offered this historical perspective in 1916 on the consequences for Western civilization of succeeding, or failing to repel jihad conquerors:

The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia exists today at all only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization . . . [including] those of Charles Martel in the 8th century [over Arab jihadists] and those of John Sobieski in the 17th century [over Ottoman Turkish jihad足ists]. During the thousand years that included the careers of the Frankish soldier [Martel] and the Polish king [Sobieski], the Christians of Asia and Africa proved unable to wage successful war with the Moslem conquerors; and in consequence Christianity practically vanished from the two continents; and today nobody can find in them any "social values" whatever, in the sense in which we use the words, so far as the sphere of Mohammedan influence [is] . . . concerned. . . . There are such "social values" today in Europe, America, and Australia only because during those thousand years the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do-that is, beat back the Moslem invader. It is of course worthwhile for sociologists to discuss the effect of this European militarism on "social values" but only if they first clearly realize and formulate the fact that if European militarism had not been able to defend itself against and to overcome the militarism of Asia and Africa, there would have been no "social values" of any kind in our world today, and no sociologists to discuss them.

Nearly a century later, the preponderance of Muslims, from Morocco to Indonesia, share the goal of reestablishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data released April 24, 2007, in a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4,384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006, and February 15, 2007-1,000 Moroccans, 1,000 Egyptians, 1,243 Pakistanis, and 1,141 Indonesians-reveal that 65.2 percent of those interviewed-almost two-thirds, hardly a "fringe minority"-desired this outcome (i.e., "To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate.")

The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5 percent of this Muslim sample approved the proposition "To require a strict application of Sharia law in every Islamic country."  Publication June 7, 2011, of the landmark "Sharia and Violence in American Mosques" study provides irrefragable evidence that 81 percent of this nationally representative sample of US mosques-consistent with mainstream Islamic doc足trine, practice, and sentiment since the founding of the Muslim creed-are incul足cating jihadism with the goal of implementing sharia here in America.

These mosque data represent another manifestation of institutional American Islam's jihadism expressed clandestinely twenty years ago in a Muslim Brotherhood state足ment dated May 22, 1991, written by an acolyte of Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Titled "An Explanatory Memorandum on the General Strategic Goal for the Group in North America," the document-uncovered during the Holy Land Foundation trial-is indeed self-explanatory.

The Ikhwan [Muslim Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and "sabotaging" its miserable house by their hands and by the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and God's religion is made victorious over all other religions.

Whittaker Chambers's transcendent 1952 autobiography Witness, which chronicles his apostasy from Communism, offers these searing insights that elucidate how American Muslims could rationalize such seditious behaviors-consistent with Islamic doctrine-and why this phenomenon remains largely incomprehensible to non-Muslim Americans, despite its existential threat to them.

What went on in the minds of those Americans . . . that made it possible to betray their country? Did none of them suffer a crisis of conscience? The question presupposes that whoever asks it has still failed to grasp that Communists mean exactly what they have been saying for a hundred years: they regard any government that is not Communist, including their own, merely as the political machine of a class whose power they have organized expressly to overthrow by all means, including violence. Therefore the problem of espionage never presents itself to them as problem of conscience, but a problem of operations. . . . The failure to understand that fact is part of the total failure of the West to grasp the nature of its enemy, what he wants, what he means to do and how he will go about doing it. It is part of the failure of the West to understand that it is at grips with an enemy having no moral viewpoint in common with itself, that two irreconcilable viewpoints and standards of judgment, two irreconcilable moralities, proceeding from two irreconcil足able readings of man's fate and future are involved, and hence their conflict is irrepressible.

Does twenty-first-century America possess Whittaker Chambers's moral compass and fortitude to combat the modern scourge of ancient Islamic totalitarianism?