Posted on 03/27/2006 10:09:17 PM PST by goldstategop
Only four types of individuals can deny the threat to civilization posed by the violence-supporting segment of Islam: the willfully naive, America-haters, Jew-haters and those afraid to confront evil.
Anyone else sees the contemporary reality -- the genocidal Islamic regime in Sudan; the widespread Muslim theological and emotional support for the killing of a Muslim who converts to another religion; the absence of freedom in Muslim-majority countries; the widespread support for Palestinians who randomly murder Israelis; the primitive state in which women are kept in many Muslim countries; the celebration of death; the "honor killings" of daughters; and so much else that is terrible in significant parts of the Muslim world -- knows that civilized humanity has a new evil to fight.
Just as previous generations had to fight Nazism, communism and fascism, our generation has to confront militant Islam.
And whereas there were unique aspects to those evils, there are two unique aspects to the evil emanating from the Islamic world that render this latest threat to humanity particularly difficult to overcome.
One is the number of people who believe in it. This is a new phenomenon among organized evils. Far fewer people believed in Nazism or in communism than believe in Islam generally or in authoritarian Islam specifically. There are one billion Muslims in the world. If just 10 percent believe in the Islam of Hamas, the Taliban, the Sudanese regime, Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism, bin Ladin, Islamic Jihad, the Finley Park Mosque in London or Hizbollah -- and it is inconceivable that only one of 10 Muslims supports any of these groups' ideologies -- that means a true believing enemy of at least 100 million people. Outside of Germany, how many people believed in Nazism? Outside of Japan, who believed in Japanese imperialism and militarism? And outside of universities, the arts world or Hollywood, how many people believed in Soviet-style totalitarianism?
A far larger number of people believe in Islamic authoritarianism than ever believed in Marxism. Virtually no one living in Marxist countries believed in Marxism or communism. Likewise, far fewer people believed in Nazism, an ideology confined largely to one country for less than one generation. This is one enormous difference between the radical Islamic threat to our civilization and the two previous ones.
But there is yet a second difference that is at least as significant and at least as frightening: Nazis and Communists wanted to live and feared death; Islamic authoritarians love death and loathe life.
That is why MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) worked with the Soviet Union. Communist leaders love life -- they loved their money, their power, their dachas, their mistresses, their fine wines -- and were hardly prepared to give all that up for Marx. But Iran's current leaders celebrate dying, and MAD may not work, because from our perspective, they are indeed mad. MAD only works with the sane.
There is much less you can do against people who value dying more than living.
The existence of an unprecedentedly large number of people wishing to destroy decent civilization as we know it -- and who celebrate their own deaths -- poses a threat the likes of which no civilization in history has had to confront.
The evils committed by Nazism and Communism were, of course, greater than those committed by radical Islam. There has been no Muslim Gulag and no Muslim Auschwitz.
But the threat is far more serious.
Winston Churchill on Islam:
"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy.
The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live.
A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property -- either as a child, a wife, or a concubine -- must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.
Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.
Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science -- the science against which it had vainly struggled -- the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome." -Winston Churchill
btt
1942: Europe from Brittany to the Ukraine, the Mediterranean to the Arctic Circle in Hitler's hands. Bombs falling on London. Balkan states and puppet regimes aligned with Hitler with the potential for Spain, Turkey and other countries to throw in with him as well. The Pacific Hemisphere from Thailand to the Aleutians, Manchuria to New Guinea under Japanese control. The potential for millions of colonial peoples to joint with the Axis against the US and UK.
1950: The millions of Russia and China, North Korea and Eastern Europe taught to revere Stalin. Northern Eurasia from Stettin and Vienna to Shanghai and Vladivostok all apparently under Red control. The largest armies in the world, war-tested, equipped with nuclear weapons, and indoctrinated to view us as the enemy. Communist sympathizers in France and Italy and the rest of Europe. The potential for Indians and Africans and Arabs and Latin Americans to fall under Communist rule.
The prospect was certainly darker then. What Prager's doing is contrasting a potential situation today with what he takes to be the actual situation then. What he forgets is the potential for trouble then. Prager ought to compare potential with potential or actual with actual (so far as we can get at the actual), not potential now with actual then. The actual destruction and suffering were greater then than now, and the outlook for the future was very dark indeed in those days.
Government power counts for a lot. Hitler or Mussolini, Stalin or Mao could send tens of millions into combat. I don't want to minimize the threats and difficulties today. Terrorists can do a lot of damage with an airliner or a truck filled with explosives or a nuclear weapon. But it helps to keep things in perspective.
Prager's at his worst, though, when he says that the totalitarians of the Thirties, Forties, and Fifties wanted to live, while Islamic terrorists today want to die. Listen to the songs or watch the films of Nazi Germany or militarist Japan: they expressed the same passion to die, in this case for nation or leader. It's funny that we forget how strong the idea of a "glorious death" for the fatherland was in recent Western history.
In other words, the entire Islamic world is a Gulag. Not just a relatively small area surrounded by barbed wire.
Disagree. Some of the most radical members of Al Qaeda are Western educated.
I think the fair comparison is to 1935-6. Nazis already showed what they want, but no large scale blood-letting yet. Spain is bleeding, but its mostly reds v browns, so who cares. Bolsheviks won the very bloody Civil War in 1922 and after some years of relative quite exterminated productive farmers as class and further subjugated Ukraine with the famine. But it was "far away" so the west is still full of utopian communist sympathizers. Japan is rising, but their demands for more resources are understandable, aren't they?
We are not in 1942 yet, and that's the point: this way around we can avoid it.
WHAT YOU WROTE WAS ABSOLUTELY SPOT ON!!
Thanks for doing such a great job giving him heck!!
I read that bin laden was laughed at by a western girlfried when he was a teenager because he, like so many islamic men, have badly shaped privates... oh, wait, that was clinton.. oh, well... same difference... both evil guys.
And then there is Albania another third world hellhole, also islamic and being propted-up by the USA and dollars!!
Bin Laden is often rumored to have Marfan Syndrome. That could well shorten his lifespan before we get to him.
I hope it is a PAINFUL disease.
Very good!
Do you realize how offensive that comment is to people who survived the Soviet camps or lost relatives there?
That would make more sense, but I still don't know about his comparison. If Hitler had started blowing things up in the twenties, rather than take over Germany, he wouldn't have been as successful as he was.
Of course there are differences between European and Near Eastern cultures. Perhaps terrorism is more attractive to some populations than to others, but controling a nation and its resources usually makes a maniac far more formidable than just calling for terrorist attacks.
You can see this by contrasting Lenin with his precursors who robbed banks and killed officials. I'm sure that today, such terrorists would be more formidable with the weapons that are available. But it's debatable whether they'd be as much of a threat as a present-day Hitler or Lenin in command of a nation of many millions would be.
Now it may be that the danger now is that you can't precisely tell where the threat is coming from. You don't have a large nation that you can point to and say, that is the enemy. And the process of deterrence doesn't work under those circumstances.
That may very well make things worse, but it also limits our ability to cope with the situation. Do everything right now, and you may still be hit with a strike from abroad.
I don't have a date for when this was posted in Australia, but it's chaulk full of common sense. "Sharia Law" is where the real trouble begins. We all better wake up..and wake up fast. Because this storm has been brewing for decades! These people are teaching their young in the Madrasses as I type. Are our young ready? Are we brainwashing our young to fight them? I don't think so...
Anyway.. Read on:
Three cheers for Australia
Muslims who want to live under Islamic Sharia law were told on Wednesday to get out of Australia, as the government targeted radicals in a bid to head off potential terror attacks.
A day after a group of mainstream Muslim leaders pledged loyalty to Australia at a special meeting with Prime Minister John Howard, he and his ministers made it clear that extremists would face a crackdown.
Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament.
"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," he said on national television.
"I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that is false. If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts, democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country, which practices it, perhaps, then, that's a better option," Costello said.
Asked whether he meant radical clerics would be forced to leave, he said those with dual citizenship could possibly be asked to move to the other country.
Education Minister Brendan Nelson later told reporters that Muslims who did not want to accept local values should "clear off".
"Basically, people who don't want to be Australians, and they don't want to live by Australian values and understand them, well then they can basically clear off," he said. Separately, Howard angered some Australian Muslims on Wednesday by saying he supported spy agencies monitoring the nation's mosques.
AMERICA and Canada.... ARE YOU LISTENING?
Remember that the Dutch cartoons circulated in the Middle East were "enhanced"
Imagine what Jefferson would think of our creating Israel in the first place?
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