Posted on 06/23/2006 1:29:57 PM PDT by Frank T
In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.
"It has always seemed to me ... probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.
Indeed, as one watches U.S. armed forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and Jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
The idea for which our many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet, that Islam, or submission to the Quran, is the only path to paradise and that a Godly society should be governed according to the Sharia, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.
What idea do we have to offer? Americans believe that freedom comports with human dignity, that only a democratic and free-market system can ensure the good life for all, as it has done in the West and is doing in Asia.
From Ataturk on, millions of Islamic peoples have embraced this Western alternative. But today, tens of millions of Muslims appear to be rejecting it, returning to their roots in a more pure Islam.
Indeed, the endurance of the Islamic faith is astonishing.
Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967 and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.
What occasioned this column was a jolting report in the June 20 Washington Times, by James Brandon, alerting us to a new front.
"Arrests Spark Fear of Armed Islamist Takeover" headlined the story about the arrest, since May, of 500 militants who had allegedly plotted the overthrow of the king of Morocco and establishment of an Islamic state that would sever all ties to the infidel West -- to end the poverty and corruption they blame on the West.
The arrests raised fears that Al Adl wa al Ihsane, or Justice and Charity, was preparing to take up arms to fulfill the predictions of the group's mystics that the monarchy would fall in 2006. Though illegal, Al Adl wa al Ihsane is Morocco's largest Islamic movement, which boycotts elections, but has hundreds of thousands of followers and has taken over the universities and is radicalizing the young.
Its founder is Sheik Abdessalam Yassine, who has declared its purpose is to reunite mosque and state: "Politics and spirituality have been kept apart by the Arab elites. And we have been able to reconnect these two aspects of Islam -- and that is why people fear us."
And, one might add, why people embrace them.
If Morocco is now in play in the struggle between militant Islam and the West, how looks the correlation of forces in June 2006?
Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties who hearken to Ayatollah Sistani brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.
This has all happened in the last year. And where are we winning?
What is the appeal of militant Islam? It is, first, its message: As all else has failed us, why not live the faith and law God gave us?
Second, it is the Muslim rage at the present condition where pro-Western regimes are seen as corruptly enriching themselves, while the poor suffer.
Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.
Lastly, Islamic militants are gaining credibility because they show a willingness to share the poverty of the poor and fight the Americans.
What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys.
If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?
To answer the headline, here's my brainstorming on what idea, exactly, whose time has come:
1) The most immediate implication is to withdraw from the global war on terror. Uncle Paddy has been saying for some time now that it's futile. Given the expansion of wahhabist islam, like he points out is happening in Morocco, we're on the losing imperialist side. Perhaps fair?
2) Since Islam is high between Morocco and Pakistan, cede all terroritory, including and especially the western nation Israel, to the jihadists? For the sake of stability?
3) This is more tinfoil hat territory, but I'll say it: time for white Europe to convert to Islam? Is that what he's getting at? The muslims are in favor of the noble idea of merging mosque and state, therefore they are better than us, so we should join them?
4) Adopt a pre-Vatican II style government, so that the muzzies will not attack us? At least be less decadent, so that the caliphate will eat us last? No thanks, Paddy.
It's a damn good thing the Europeans didn't follow this approach a few centuries back. You cannot withdraw from this battle, because the Islamists will eventually bring it to you in your own country - in fact, they already have.
"Islam is peace."
-- GWB, 9/01.
Paddy has the gift of gab and no realistic answers as usual.
His third party kind gave us Carter and Clinton.
The Democrats are saying cut and run after the victory over Zarqawi and Pat is joining in the chorus, which serves as a Paleoconservative coda to the butchering of those two marines of ours.
This is the result of a foreign policy based on hatred of Jews neoconservatives.
The PaleoConservatives base their program on frustrated powerlust -- allegedly frustrated by those wascally Jews neoconservatives.
Incidentally, when Pat talks about the U.S. exploiting Arab resources, they would've never had oil or the Suez Canal without the West. They're parasites who rob the valuable property of the U.S. and the West and try to kill us with the wealth we created for them.
This shows what kind of patriot Mr. Buchanan is.
I don't read that into this particular essay.
It is disappointing that Patsie validates the "blame others for our own dysfunction" worldview of arab islamics.
The interesting aspect of this essay is the highlighting of the radicalization of the arab world. The radicals will have to follow up on their rhetoric, the death cult will do what it has done consistently for the last 1400 years, and we will be forced settle this once and for all -- Asian and Western civilization against arab/Islamic barbarism.
Islamic nihilism makes any of the fluff put out by Marx and the post-modernists look like kindergarten story time. The arab/islamic culture is not and never will be ready for prime time. No matter how messed up we get, failure against the grand masters of dead end ideology is pretty much out of the question.
Get real and answer Pat's question. Pat pointed out a problem for the West. Do you think the best army on earth will stop an idea? Ideas e.g. Communism can be defeated by other ideas. Neither the Jewish or the Christian religion has been wiped out by 4000 years of armies.
Pat, thank God those fine folk from 1938 didn't listen to your kind, else you would have written that article on something called a VolksWriter.
"Islam is peace.""All I want is PEACE! A little piece of Poland, a little piece of France ...."
-- GWB, 9/01.
Islam's biggest flaw is that there is no such thing as "Islam" in the sense that the "mosque" and "state" can be reunited. Pat incorrectly portrays this as a clash between Islamic and Western civilizations, when in fact there is no place in the world today where one prominent Islamic civilization exists without being involved in a constant, ongoing conflict between multiple sects of Islam. The future of a state reconnected to Islam is not one of peace, stability, or anything remotely resembling virtue and spirituality. The more likely scenario is one that is currently being played out in the West Bank and Gaza, where two different Islamic elements (Hamas and Fatah) are engaged in a simmering conflict that will pretty much gaurantee that the place remains a Third World sh!t-hole for a thousand years.
"His third party kind gave us Carter and Clinton."
What are you talking about?
Oh please! Try getting real yourself. If we were just trying to smash Islam with our army, we would not be fighting so PC like and showing so much restraint. We would not be spending hundreds of billions on building schools, roads, water tanks, and on and on. Bush would not be speaking the ideas of FREEDOM over and over again.
Where have you and Pat been the last couple of years, smoking weed together in some bunker?
PaleoPat Ping!
Are you going to refute what he said or is it easier to resort to ad hominem attacks?
Islamism is not as popular as its cheerleaders in the west like to pretend. Mubarak allowed them to contest a tiny number of constituencies, while excluding the more popular reformers, so that anyone who hated him would vote for them. Now he can turn to the west and say, "stop pressuring me to reform or it will only get worse". As long as the mosques are the only independent organisations in Arab countries, there will be support for the jihadists.
But if you open up to real democracy, everything will change. And that is the process that is taking place now. Arab countries are, slowly, reforming. Despite Pat Buchanan, John Kerry, and all their allies suggesting that there will be civil war in Iraq and jihadism will win, the facts on the ground are against them.
So what is his solution? Last time I heard, it was to build a wall on our boarders. Does he have another solution?
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