Recognize the Islamic Enemy or Lose the War
At a meeting with a number of conservative talk show hosts, Bush was quoted as saying that the, "the War on Terror has to be about right versus wrong, “because if it’s about Christianity versus Islam, we’ll lose.”
The easiest way to lose a war of course is to decide beforehand that you can't win. Plenty of wars indeed have been lost precisely that way and the nations in question long forgotten except as someone else's colonies.
Now I'm not saying there should be an official war declared between Christianity and Islam. But the war cannot be declared as one between 'right and wrong' because to most right and wrong are abstract ideas interpreted subjectively. My right is not necessarily your right. It may be your wrong.
Muslims feel that right involves murdering their daughters, bombing skyscrapers and expanding the dominion of Islam. Convincing them that's wrong requires displacing their current moral system with an alternative moral system. Since their moral system is religiously based, you cannot displace their system of belief without displacing their religion. Islam.
A number of approaches to this involves the belief that we should be promoting the reform of Islam and thus create a moderate form of Islam that will give up on all the bloodshed. There's just one problem. Moderate versions of religion without the bloodshed don't tend to win out over immoderate ones that believe in bloodshed in an arena where guns and bombs are permitted weapons of settling religious debate. A moderate version of Islam hasn't even succeeded among European Muslims. It's delusional to imagine it will succeed in the Muslim world.
The illusion that Islam can be housebroken so that Muslims stop blowing up inside the house is just that, an illusion cultivated by the same refusal to confront the problem that motivated Bush' statement. For the moment Europe and America are frantically spreading newspapers everywhere while pretending they're spreading out the newspapers for everyone as if a family trying not to make their incontinent dog feel bad, lay down the papers equally for their spouses and children as if it's a problem for the entire family, rather than for the nasty stray they've insisted on adopting and remaining loyal to, no matter how often it bites their children.
The war isn't between Islam and Christianity. It's a war between Islam and every other system of belief on the planet. The real alliance should be between Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sufis, Buddhists, Atheists and any religion or system of belief willing to stand up to the murderous thugs of Islam. Instead everyone continues to deny the blatantly obvious and no one seeks to cultivate alliances against a common enemy. It's Hitler rampaging through Czechoslovakia all over again while Chamberlain sits in London and Stalin is planning a treaty and America is trying to ignore it all.
Winning a war means first of all knowing who you're fighting. For all our vaunted War on Terror we refuse to recognize that we're fighting Islam. Not a few men who make Islam look bad since that list of men begins with Mohammed right on to Mohammed Atta. Not a perverted version of Islam but Islam proper. The same people who have killed millions from Thailand, to the Philiphines, to Moscow to Tel Aviv to Paris to New York to London to Madrid to East Timor to Somalia to the Sudan. It's all one war against one enemy. We can't win against that enemy when we're not even allowed to speak its name. We can't win against that enemy when we're instead trying half-assed schemes to appeal to its better nature and reform it, before we've even won the war.
There are indeed over a billion Muslims and their numbers are growing but the global population is several times that. But as long as the rest of the world lacks unity in confronting Islam, Muslims can take it over country by country.
The original wave of Islamic conquest spread Islamic populations across much of the globe from Eastern Europe to Asia to Spain. The modern Islamic conquest begins by radicalizing the local Muslim population, using immigration to import large numbers of Muslims and evangelizing new converts from the host population. And then the real terror begins.
Islamic supremacist groups then begin leveraging wedge Islamic populations within a country to carry out a campaign of violence and terrorism, force the country's leadership to compromise and negotiate and then seize power outright. Thailand which has a Muslim ruler who took power by coup has already fallen to those tactics. The Philippines will follow. France has a generation to live. Israel is on the verge of annihilation because for several decades it has failed to resolve once and for all the situation instead fighting long drawn out campaigns that never actually end in victory or defeat.
America's diverse population and large scale immigration from South America provides some immunity that Europe lacks but it's no coincidence that Latinos have been targeted for conversion to Islam and represent the largest numbers of those converting annually in America. In the end we will face the same threat as France and Israel and Thailand are. Survival rests with resistance.
Some have already accepted the prospect of a new Islamic World Order. A new Dark Ages filled with ruthless cruelties, brutality, ignorance and horror. And that loss of hope alone marks a truly terrible victory.