Islam On Trial

Readers of this space know where I stand on this topic. Here are a couple of other hard-headed thinkers amongst the growing number who are standing beside me.

Clifford May gets a B:

[L]et's be clear, Islam is not – as has been repeatedly claimed - a “religion of peace.” Indeed, the idea is absurd, considering that Islam's founding prophet also was a warrior - among the most successful in history, establishing an empire ranging from Spain to the South Pacific.

Nor did Osama bin Laden “hijack” Islam – any more than Hitler hijacked Germanic culture or Lenin hijacked the Russian ethos. Rather, Hitler and Lenin drew upon the ugliest threads in their nations' fabrics. So, too, has bin Laden invoked Islam's most radically xenophobic doctrines to legitimize a vicious assault against all those who refuse to accept his authority, all those he demonizes as “infidels.”...

[W]hile recent polls have found support for suicide bombing declining in most Muslim countries, it is still far from clear that most Muslims unequivocally reject those who murder children in the name of Islam and Islam's many grievances.

And that will not become clear as long as commentators on Arab television praise the killers of Iraqi civilians. It will not be clear as long as Muslim clerics in the holy city of Mecca continue to call for “jihad” against the West.

Rather reminiscent of when Mein Kampf was published in the 1930s but was ignored in the West, even though it was Adolph Hitler's candid manifesto and blueprint of everything he went on to do, plus quite a bit more that he was unable to accomplish. Ditto the repeated vows of the Soviet communists that they would "bury" us. In our comfortable decadence, we didn't take such threats seriously because to have done so would have goaded us out of our comfort zones and required us to take steps and do things that we didn't want to do to counter a threat we didn't want to face. Far easier to just pretend it wasn't there, or laugh it off as a joke. Once again, "out of sight, out of mind."

A global war that slaughtered an estimated sixty million people ought to have taught us a lesson vis-a-vie the Cold War - which it did, though barely and only because Ronald Reagan won the presidency when he did. And the lesson should have stuck vis-a-vie the enemy waiting in the wings - Islamic fundamentalism - which was hardly hiding or laying in ambush, having repeatedly attacked Western targets since the 1970s, and with escalating frequency and magnitude during the halcyon days of the Clinton Hedony.

But it didn't. And 9/11 was the result. And still there are many who will not learn the lesson, either at all or in its most crucial aspect, the understanding of just who, and how many, the enemy is.

The enemy keeps telling us - heck, they won't shut up about it:

The West “doesn't want us even to say the words 'Allah's enemies,” the Saudi cleric Musa Al-Qarni groused recently on Saudi government television. “They don't want us to say that the Jews and the Christians are the enemies of the Muslims and the enemies of Islam.” But, he added: "This is fixed and established in the Koran...”

Hateful rhetoric and incitement to terrorism also can be heard on al-Manar, Hezbollah's television station, from Iran's ruling mullahs and even from the Palestinian Authority under “moderate” President Mahmoud Abbas. “By Allah, the day will come when we will rule the entire world again,” the PA's Sheikh Ibrahim Muayris said last month. [emphases added]

Muayris is, at best, wildly premature, but al-Qarni is absolutely right. Islam does teach that Jews and Christians ("the people of the Book") are enemies of Islam and are to be conquered and either made to convert to Islam, accept de facto slave ("dhimmi") status, or killed. It doesn't matter if the Jews and Christians in question don't consider themselves to be enemies of Islam, or that the Jews and Christians in question may not actually be Jews and Christians in the religious sense. Islam speaks culturally and ideologically at least as much as, if not more than, it does in any recognizeable religious mode, and the Koran unequivocally designates any part of the world not under sharia law as Dar al Harb, "the abode of war," that war being the permanent "holy" variety which is to continue until the global Islamic caliphate is established.

Unfortunately Mr. May can't resist the politically correct urge to throw in some mitigating ecumenicalism:

The Spanish Inquisition, the Thirty-Years-War, John Brown's Pottawatomie Massacre, the terrorist attacks of the Irish Republican Army, the Oklahoma City bombing — these are just a few examples of violence carried out by extremists who found inspiration in their Christian faith.

Jewish radicals have justified violence against Arabs by citing the “holy war” that God commanded Israel to wage against the Canaanites for possession of the Promised Land. As recently as 1994, Baruch Goldstein, a deeply religious Jew, murdered 29 Muslims worshipping in a mosque in Hebron.

The kamikazes of World War II were religiously motivated. And it was members of Aum Shinrikyo, an offshoot of Japanese Buddhism, who released vials of poisonous gas into the Tokyo subway in 1995.

There have been Hindu terrorists (the word “thug” originally referred to those who murdered to honor the Hindu goddess Kali); also Sikh suicide bombers.

So those who think Islam is the only religion that gives rise to extremism and carnage need to think again.

No, we don't, because here Mr. May misses the point. None of his examples of violence carried out by "Christian" extremists found inspiration in their faith because no doctrine in their faith teaches violence. When the Apostle Peter whipped out a sword to defend His LORD when Judas Iscariot and his mob came to seize Him, Jesus stopped Peter and rebuked him, pointing out that, "all those who take up the sword shall perish by the sword. Or do you think that I cannot appeal to My Father, and He will at once put at My disposal more than twelve legions of angels? How then will the Scriptures be fulfilled, which say that it must happen this way?"

Ditto the Jewish examples vis-a-vie the Old Testament. The account of God's command to the ancient Isrealites to conquer Canaan and the campaign that followed is historical narrative, not ongoing, applicable doctrine.

By contrast, the Shintoist kamikazes only ceased their suicide bombings when their "god," Emperor Hirohito, told them to. There is no such central, and available, figure in Islam, short of Mohammed being resurrected like the Klingons on Boreth did (in a way) Kahless. Similarly, the Buddhist, Hindu, and Sikh examples cite acolytes who have murdered on behalf of their religion, but not at its doctrinal direction.

Islam alone preaches "evangelism" by the sword. Were this not the case, we really would be dealing with only an isolated few, and one would be hard-pressed to see the conflict as "war," versus a matter of "law enforcement."

This is the inherent contradiction that President Bush built into his case and justification for the GWOT from day one, and it is not unfair to say, as evidenced by this week's attempt at "rebranding," that that flaw, initially tiny, is growing into a major problem.

The other hard-headed thinker referenced above, a frequent Blogs for Bush commenter, gets an A+ with these two graphs:

I don't believe that Islamists have any desire to "adapt to the real world situation". To them, they live in the real world and we live in sin and are all infidels. And any Muslim who lives in sin (Democracy) is no longer in their real world of Islam [Dar al Islam, the "house of peace"]. I believe Islamists feel that it is the rest of the world that must change back to their "13th Century standards", because that is how they believe the world should be.

It is kinda like the criticism from liberals of Christians who want to "send us back to the days of no rights for women and back-alley abortions". Liberals see the Christian way of life as archaic, just as we describe the Islam[ic] way of life as archaic. The difference is Christians do not kill people to force them into their way of life, yet Islamists do. And the other difference is not having sex until one is married, not having abortions and actually living a disciplined life is not archaic. Treating women, homosexuals and all non-Muslims as inferior human beings and worthy of nothing more than contempt or death is definitely archaic.

But just as the Catholic Church has no intention of "adapt[ing] to the real world situation" of liberals calling for the acceptance of abortion and homosexuality, Islam has no intention of adapting for a call for reform. That is their belief system. If they adapt, then their belief system no longer exists. Or to put it another way, if Islam reforms, it is no longer Islam. [emphasis added]

This is why the vast majority of non-jihadi Muslims either remain mum about or make excuses for the holy war carried out in the name of their faith - because their faith teaches holy war.

Fascism could not endure as a coherent ideology because it was too identified with founding leaders. Communism could not achieve world domination because it lacked the power to inspire even the followers it did attract, and thoroughly alienated everybody else. Islam has the same imperialist, warmongering traits as its two predecessors without their respective fatal flaws, plus a fanatacism in its adherents neither ever managed to attain.

This is why there can be no Islamic equivalent of a Reformation, because the Christian Reformation was a return to original biblical doctrines. The argument can be made that jihadism is the Muslim Reformation, for they too have returned to their own core doctrines. And their idea of "reform" is to drag the entire world back into the Dark Ages.

The danger to our hearth and home isn't that the enemy can actually make that happen, but that he believes he can because his "god" has told him to do it. And there are hundreds of millions of his brethren who will march right along behind him, straight into the mouth of the hell that spawned him, and whose fires he, and they, are eager to unleash.

Like it or not, this is a religious war. It cannot be mitigated, sanitized, or secularized. It is a clash of civilizations. It is a war of annihilation. Only by acknowledgement of same can it begin to be fought in the way needed (security profiling, crackdowns on subversive Muslim organizations, as the Brits have started doing, liberating Syria and Iran and completing the sweep of the "Arab crescent") to make swift and comprehensive victory - and minimized annihilation on both sides - possible.

The President on Iraq is like the mule starving to death between two bales of hay. One bale is retreat and defeat, the other is advance and victory. It's time again for him to choose - before the enemy makes his choice for him.

UPDATE: This was not the kind of choice I had in mind....