Posted on 10/14/2001 9:30:12 PM PDT by Pokey78
Why everything is at stake.
EUROPE'S GREAT RELIGIOUS WARS ended in 1648. Three and a half centuries is a long time, too long for us in the West to truly believe that people still slaughter others to vindicate the faith.
Thus in the face of radical Islamic terrorism that murders 6,000 innocents in a day, we find it almost impossible to accept at face value the reason offered by the murderers. Yet Osama bin Laden could not be clearer. Jihad has been declared against the infidel, whose power and influence thwart the triumph of Islam, and whose success and example--indeed, whose very existence--are an affront to the true faith. As a leader of Hamas declared at a rally three days after the World Trade Center attack, "the only solution is for Bush to convert to Islam."
To Americans, who are taught religious tolerance from the cradle, who visit each other's churches for interdenominational succor and solidarity, this seems simply bizarre. On September 25, bin Laden issues a warning to his people that Bush is coming "under the banner of the cross." Two weeks later, in his pre-taped post-attack video, he scorns Bush as "head of the infidels."
Can he be serious? This idea is so alien that our learned commentators, Western and secular, have gone rummaging through their ideological attics to find more familiar terms to explain why we were so savagely attacked: poverty and destitution in the Islamic world; grievances against the West, America, Israel; the "wretched of the earth"--Frantz Fanon's 1960s apotheosis of anti-colonialism--rising against their oppressors.
Reading conventional notions of class struggle and anti-colonialism into bin Laden, the Taliban, and radical Islam is not just solipsistic. It is nonsense. If poverty and destitution, colonialism and capitalism are animating radical Islam, explain this: In March, the Taliban went to the Afghan desert where stood great monuments of human culture, two massive Buddhas carved out of a cliff. At first, Taliban soldiers tried artillery. The 1,500-year-old masterpieces proved too hardy. The Taliban had to resort to dynamite. They blew the statues to bits, then slaughtered 100 cows in atonement--for having taken so long to finish the job.
Buddhism is hardly a representative of the West. It is hardly a cause of poverty and destitution. It is hardly a symbol of colonialism. No. The statues represented two things: an alternative faith and a great work of civilization. To the Taliban, the presence of both was intolerable.
The distinguished Indian writer and now Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul, who has chronicled the Islamic world in two books ("Among the Believers" and "Beyond Belief"), recently warned (in a public talk in Melbourne before the World Trade Center attack), "We are within reach of great nihilistic forces that have undone civilization." In places like Afghanistan, "religion has been turned by some into a kind of nihilism, where people wish to destroy themselves and destroy their past and their culture . . . to be pure. They are enraged about the world and they wish to pull it down." This kind of fury and fanaticism is unappeasable. It knows no social, economic, or political solution. "You cannot converge with this [position] because it holds that your life is worthless and your beliefs are criminal and should be extirpated."
This insight offers a needed window on the new enemy. It turns out that the enemy does have recognizable analogues in the Western experience. He is, as President Bush averred in his address to the nation, heir to the malignant ideologies of the 20th century. In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism. The destruction of the World Trade Center was meant not only to wreak terror. Like the smashing of the Bamiyan Buddhas, it was meant to obliterate greatness and beauty, elegance and grace. These artifacts represented civilization embodied in stone or steel. They had to be destroyed.
This worship of death and destruction is a nihilism of a ferocity unlike any since the Nazis burned books, then art, then whole peoples. Goebbels would have marvelled at the recruitment tape for al Qaeda, a two-hour orgy of blood and death: image after image of brutalized Muslims shown in various poses of victimization, followed by glorious images of desecration of the infidel--mutilated American soldiers in Somalia, the destruction of the USS Cole, mangled bodies at the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. Throughout, the soundtrack endlessly repeats the refrain "with blood, with blood, with blood." Bin Laden appears on the tape to counsel that "the love of this world is wrong. You should love the other world...die in the right cause and go to the other world." In his October 9 taped message, al Qaeda spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith gloried in the "thousands of young people who look forward to death, like the Americans look forward to living."
Once again, the world is faced with a transcendent conflict between those who love life and those who love death both for themselves and their enemies. Which is why we tremble. Upon witnessing the first atomic bomb explode at the Trinity site at Alamogordo, J. Robert Oppenheimer recited a verse from the Hindu scripture "Bhagavad Gita": "Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds." We tremble because for the first time in history, nihilism will soon be armed with the ultimate weapons of annihilation. For the first time in history, the nihilist will have the means to match his ends. Which is why the war declared upon us on September 11 is the most urgent not only of our lives, but in the life of civilization itself.
Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
Krauthammer nails it here::
In its nihilism, its will to power, its celebration of blood and death, its craving for the cleansing purity that comes only from eradicating life and culture, radical Islam is heir, above all, to Nazism.
This article lays it all out.
The longest journey begins with one step.
I think you are exactly right. It really does boil down to this simple statement. My question is, does the rest of America see it that way? Joe six pack might, the media no, the intelligentia maybe. America as a whole? I wish I knew for sure.
If the Anthrax BS gets linked back to Irag, it will be fascinating to see the answer develop.
There are so many variables, (China etc) that predictions aren't worth much, but I think that OBL will get his holy war between Islam and the West.
More terrorism in the USA will lead to US strikes beyond Afganistan. ("The Bush Doctrine.")
The brainwashed zombie moslems from the Philippines to Nigeria are going to go berzerk, killing every Westerner they can get their hands on, Algerian style.
Major Western rescue operations will be mounted to save besieged Western enclaves, this will be seen as "crusaders invading the Islamic world".
At some point the oil gets cut off, as regimes topple and new anti Western "Ayatollahs" come to power.
More terrorism in the West will belatedly lead to internment and deportation of Moslems, beginning with non-citizens, and working outward to recently naturalized citizens, as the terrorism continues.
In a few years we will arrive at a total defacto split between the West and Islam. No trade, no travel, no jets, no ships.
This will lead to an economic depression in the West as we absorb an oil shock worse than 73-74. But we will work out of it as we replace supplies: the market will work, oil is just another fungible commodity in the end.
In the Islamic nations the economic split will lead to starvation, civil war, disease, and anarchy, with many Islamic capitols resembling Mogadishu or Kabul as warlord chieftans battle for the rubble. Only this time, no Western food or medical aid will be forthcoming.
A few Islamic nations may come out of their civil wars with a local "Attaturk" in charge who will crush the Islamists and enforce strictly secular states. They will be able to rejoin the civilized world.
Of course, it could veer into unexpected directions, then all bets are off. (Chinese invasions of Taiwan, Malaysia, Philippines etc. in response to Chinese economic depression for one example.)
A good point, and not to be ignored.
But keep in mind, most of these enemies of Isreal have no love for us, and will become our enemies if not dealt with. Whether or not this was just Isreal's war to begin with, it's ours now as well. Has been since 91101.
It would seem that china would prefer their confrontation with us would be somewhere in the future. But sooner or later.
And what if they (Al qaeda) blow up the oil fields? As Rumsfeld said, this is a war unlike previous wars.
WHAT! No scenes from Chechnya where they slice the heads off captured Russian soldiers. This is favorite Jihadist video footage and can be purchased from the right people. Krauthammer is right about the blood blood blood part.
There are others.
He's being optimistic. The middle east will come out
radioactive.
He is right. It is nihilism, with an Islamic Justification. They really do want to return to the "pure" life of the dark ages. The Arabic countries were ahead of the west in the sciences and Art, until the scourge of Islam laid waste to their civilizations. They have never recovered. Every country they take over slides into the pit of the dark ages with feudal warlords, slavery, polygamy and abject poverty. Any schooling beyond the third grade is squelched for the "higher learning" of the Koran. They fear any higher schooling because it causes the people to question the rule of the religious leaders. Europe came out of the dark ages with the separation of Church and State to remove the scepter of God from the hands of men. America improved on that by founding a Godly nation with the scepter of God in the hands of the people.
That by the way is no longer true for the State has adopted the religion of Atheism with the invention of humanism as God. That caused the people who held the scepter to believe They were god. Big mistake. In our pride we slept while the State stole the scepter back from our hands. The recent reinterpretation of the law that the State shall not infringe the rights of worship of the people to “Separation of Church and State” has allowed the scepter of “god” back into the hands of the State. Now the State makes laws on the rights of worship on a group by group basis. America is no longer free, and has fallen quite far into the pit of the dark ages in the last generation. We are dumbing down our schools for the very same reasons that the Islamic Clerics did. We just have Humanist Clerics like Hildabeast “it takes a village” instead of Islamic ones. We no longer have the moral vision to stand up to Islam, so Islam has risen again. It was the Christian’s who defeated Islam last time. Who has the vision to do it now? I am sure Hildabeast will hold hands with them and sing Kumbyia, Just like Bush is doing.
(Do you think they will still go on pigrimages to a big radioactive crater?)
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