Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”
Eleven days before Christmas, jihadists launched an attack on a famous Australian beach during a Hanukkah festival, killing 15 celebrants. Such violence is part of a campaign in a war against “infidels” that began 1500 years ago with the rise of Islam, whose first victims were Jews. In 1996, political scientist Samuel P. Huntington in his book the Clash of Civilizations dubbed this history “Islam’s bloody borders.”
Despite its accuracy, Huntington’s phrase was quickly damned as racist or bigoted by the shock-troops of political correctness who have followed professor Edward Said’s dubious theory of “orientalism” from the 1978 book of the same name.
This hybrid of false history––postmodern linguistic and cognitive radical relativism; hatred and ressentiment of Western civilization and culture, and Marxist bankrupt bromides––preached that “in what every European in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric.”
For example, “jihad” is a construct fashioned by Western imperialists and racists to justify Western dominance of the Middle East, especially Israel’s “settlement colonialism” subjected on the “Palestinians.” In 2002 during the U.S. war against terrorism, a Georgetown professor in the Washington Post cleverly bowdlerized the meaning of “jihad” by claiming it actually denotes “to strive or struggle hard to realize God’s will, to lead a virtuous life, to create a just society and to defend Islam and the Muslim community.”
Left out is how does one achieve all those goals? Listen to the Ayatollah Khomeini, the revered architect of the Iranian Islamic Revolution, who in 1942 wrote:
“Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All those countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.”
And he emphasizes that incessant war will be waged to make this happen: “Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. Islam says: Kill all the unbelievers just as they would kill you! . . . Islam says: Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors!”
Yet despite such exegesis of “jihad” confirmed by multiple devout Muslims, in the secularized West “jihad denial” still persists, even after the massive murders on 9/11 carried out by suicide-bombers. Samuel Huntington’s historically correct expression “Islam’s bloody borders” has been anathematized by politicized academics and their mini-Me’s on the left.
Those wokesters just keep insisting that we Westerners are the aggressors against Muslims’ defensive war, while ignoring the jihadists from Khomeini to ISIS, and the decades of Palestinian Arabs slaughtering Jews living in their ancestral homeland––a holy war obeying Islamic scripture, doctrine, and history supported by thousands of years of war. Our intelligentsia refuses to identify the real enemy––an Islamic civilization that sanctions such murder as the justified means for establishing the religious and political dominance of Islam in fulfillment of the will of Allah.
Nor are those actively killing in the service of this vision some sort of neurotic deformation of Islam created by conditions peculiar to the 20th century and Western imperialism and colonialism. Rather, from its birth in the seventh century A.D., Islam spread by fire and sword, creating converts as a byproduct of conquest and occupation. Remember how much of the modern Middle East had for centuries been Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian, that is, Western, before the rise of Islam. Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, western Syria, northern Egypt, northern Africa, and western Iraq––all were transformed into the “House of Allah” by violent conquest and occupations most of which persist to the present.
Remember, too, that Muslims occupied half of Spain for seven centuries, and that as late as the 17th century, the Ottoman Turks were besieging the walls of Vienna, which they eventually demolished and occupied. The current propaganda about Islam as the “religion of peace,” as former President George Bush embarassingly said during the Afghan war, is belied by fourteen centuries of aggressive war against those considered “infidels” destined to be brought under submission to Muslims, whom the Koran dubs “the best of nations.”
The difference today is that the political and cultural dysfunctions of Islam, laid bare by modernity, mean that this traditional imperative to dominate the infidel by victory in battle cannot be realized. The cultural dynamism of the West––created by science, free market capitalism, technology, individual rights and freedom, rule of law, and the separation of religion and state––all shifted the “clash of civilizations” to the advantage of the West.
And over time, the superiority of the West ultimately led to the destruction of the Ottoman Empire, and the imposition of Europe’s political will and interests on a civilization that for a millennium had preyed on, occupied, conquered, and enslaved its peoples. The dismemberment of that last Islamic empire after WWI––not the creation of Israel––is the true “shameful catastrophe” that Osama Bin Laden referred to in one of his sermons, and that his bloody terrorism sought to reverse.
But the West has its weaknesses: most important the decline of religion and faith into a subjective life-style choice, and, as Pope Benedict XVI described it, “the expression of a consciousness that would like to see God eradicated once and for all from the public life of humanity and shut up in the subjective sphere of cultural residues from the past.” This diminution of Christianity has taken away the spiritual guardrails from the West’s morality, principles, and laws able to restrain humanity’s destructive passions.
As John Adams said,
“We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
Such wages of secularism are true of all free, citizen-ruled governments, which is why totalitarian regimes like communism do not allow freedom or religions or any other authority that they don’t control. For “if God is dead,” as Dostoevsky writes, “everything is permitted.”
Moreover, the marginalization of religion creates a spiritual vacuum that is soon filled with “black market” religions, especially political ideologies like fascism, ethnonationalism, or Marxism, which often mimics deformed features of Christianity.
For many people even Science functions as a faith, which many philosophers of the Enlightenment and scientists today believed. Its hymn is John Lennon’s juvenile paean to atheism, Imagine, which preaches “Imagine there’s no heaven. . . No hell below us, above us only sky . . . Nothing to kill or die for/And no religion too.”
The Muslims at war with us believe deeply in Allah and that they have something to live, kill, and die for: converting or destroying infidels to fulfill the commands of Allah and earn an eternity in paradise. That makes them formidable enemies whose beliefs we cannot negotiate or bribe away. For, as Muslims have said to enemies for 1500 years, “We love death as you love life.”
All these features of the West are obviously diametrically opposed to Islam, and make the West its permanent enemy. And the weakness or absence of faith in the West cripples Westerners in the conflict with Islam.
Accepting that we are indeed engaged in a struggle of competing fundamental values and foundational beliefs, rather than a battle against a fringe minority of “radicals,” means recognizing a grim, sad reality. For history shows that all such struggles, like our Civil War, are resolved through massive, definitive violence. Deeply held principles and visions of spiritual reality and ultimate value, are not bargained or negotiated away. They are given up only when the price of maintaining them is shown to be horrific.
In fact, to the true believer, his opponent’s willingness to negotiate, bargain, or show respectful tolerance is deemed a sign of weak belief in core principles, and so encourages the enemy to press on with the fight.
Recognizing the true nature of the struggle against Islamism would have several consequences. First, we would drop the propaganda that asserts there is a widespread “moderate” Muslim constituency eager to usher their societies into the modern world and accept the core cargo of successful modernity––liberal democracy, human rights, freedom of religion, recognition of sexual identities, and free-market economies.
Instead, we would tell those presumed moderates to put up or shut up: we will no longer credit their crocodile tears after a gruesome terrorist attack, but demand concrete action against the murderers in their midst. For example, Syria would be put on notice that the offices of Hamas and Hezbollah in Damascus and Qatar will be shut down, either by their government, or by American cruise missiles and marines.
Enough with wrist-slapping sanctions and blustering orations before a corrupt and indifferent U.N. and the milquetoasts in European capitals. The men of the West are at war, and should start acting like it.
