Even though he says "Finley Park Mosque" for "Finsbury Park Mosque," Dennis Prager still largely has it right in this column (thanks to Olivia):
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.
Read it all.
You can add one more type to the 4 types of individuals you mentioned. That is: the Hindu-haters. You may note that there are more Hindus in this world than the Jews. Hinduism has successfully thwarted the assault of Islam in the Indian sub-continent for more than 13 centuries. Naturally one can expect the Muslims to hate the Hindus and their religion.
"Just as previous generations had to fight Nazism, communism and fascism, our generation has to confront militant Islam."
We are doing it sir, just not effectively. We will slowly get better, remember we didn't start out very well when we faced Nazism, communism and fascism but we learn. Once we get the people aware, then the kid gloves come off.
Folks, we are in WW IV, WW III was in truth the Cold War.
I appreciate how he uses the phrase "militant Islam" rather than "radical Islam" because it more accuratly describes the what is happening. Militant Islamists are acting on their duty to wage jihad, where as non militants choose to ignore their islamic obligations. There is no difference between radical islam and islam.
The identification of Islam as the major enemy of the free world is all very well but without deeper analysis we will not be able to mount an effective defence. The previous recent enemies - Soviet communism, fascism and nazism could be defeated as world threats because they rested on economic foundations that could be militarily destroyed or, in the case of the USSR and its satellites, the economic bases simply collapsed in tandem with a sudden outpouring of free speech and aspirations. The containment of Islam is a different problem entirely because Islam does not intrinsically need an economic base of its own in order to flourish and propagate. Contrary to what I have frequently read here in these comment responses the removal of oil wealth would not significantly impact on the millions of Islamic poor who are the foot soldiers of jihad. The challenge the non-Muslim world faces is one it has actually been facing for over one thousand and four hundred years. Given that the engines for Islamic expansion were, for most of those years, largely confined to the wielders of the sword, the sling, the lance and the whip, plus chains, camels, horses and sailing ships, the Muslims were formidible and cruel enemies long before there was oil wealth.
Now, would somebody from the State Department relay this to the President Bush and the Secretary of State Condolezza Rice?
"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."
Why I'm Islamophobic in a nutshell.
Islam will not be defeated by brute force alone. Force applied by "civilized" standards will only serve to forestall Islam's advance. And while the West hypothetically has the power to rain great destruction upon the Moslem world, a vacuum is not replaced by a void. The excesses of jihad are not defeated if the actions of the West become indistinguishable from those of the jihadis. The jihadis know of this dilemma in Western thinking and currently exploit it.
Hard and sensible military action will be necessary in the years ahead, but --as other posters have noted-- the real solution will come when a genuine antidote is brought to those carrying the virus: the ignorant, easily roused Moslem masses. Until such a time comes, the illness must be named for what it is, in order to innoculate the innocent against the predations of the infected. And those infected must be quarantined.
With all due respect, Prager is wrong. Both Nazism and Communism enjoyed considerable support outside their mother countries, Communism especially. Every country on Earth had a Communist fifth column. Does anyone remember that terrible time in the late seventies when practically every government outside of North America, Western Europe, Australia, Japan and a fistful of military tyrannies supported by the CIA were more or less overtly pro-Soviet? I do. And the collapse of the Soviet Union, much though we take pleasure in it, was not the end of the story either. Just visit any university and see Che Guevara's pretty face grinning at the glorious Red future of massacre and repression he envisages. We all know that this dreadful Communist hangover is one of our worst problems in finding a way to negotiate the Muslim issue. So let us not diminish it in our memories. The temptation to make our time unique in its wickedness is as ancient as the sentimental belief that our fathers and grandfathers had it easy and lived simpler lives. It is not true and never has been. The instinctive sympathy between tyrannies is something that lasts for ever, too: again in the late seventies, practically every Muslim government was pro-Soviet, and the KGB used the PLO as its own catspaw in directing and training Western Marxist terrorists such as the Red Brigades.
Paolo:
You raise good points concerning our tendency "to make our time unique in its wickedness," as you nicely put it. However, the demographic information that Prager cites is pretty hard to ignore.
Given the number of people in the US of German extraction, "Aryans" if you will, Nazism should have had a lot more traction in the US than history records. Many tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of German-Americans did the right thing and defended democracy against the Nazis and other fascists, from Eisenhower on down. Japanese-Americans showed exemplary bravery in defense of democracy as did Americans of Italian extraction.
As for the Communists, yes they were certainly active widely across the globe, but once in power were soon the targets of directed cynicism from the very workers they were to lead into the workers' paradise. They seduced the workers with the plausible absolution that their problems were due to exploiters: "It's not your fault. Blame the capitalists." With personal responsibility down-played, permanent infancy was encouraged and you can't run a governmnet that way.
Islam, like Communism, relieves the adherent of personal responsibility. Islam, like fascism, is sociopathic in its core and practice. In my view, these two features together account for Islam's poularity among many of the world's poor and its virulence.
So I agree with the main thrust of Prager's comments: Islam poses a tremendous threat to the West --not for the first time in history-- that likely exceeds the threats posed by Communism and 20th century forms of fascism. Islam's threat will not be finally dispelled until Moslems cease to confound triumphalism with truth, nor tolerance with fear. The war is against Moslem ignorance. It will be a long war, but there is no other way to wage it.
"Militant Islam" is a redundant phrase. Per the Islamic canon (Quran, ahadith and Sira), "Non-militant Islam" does not, cannot, exist.
DU will make the ME uninhabitable for about the next 4.5 billion years. Most will die within the next 5 to 20 years.
First, Communism and Islam are very different. If you do not look at how it was implemented, Communism is actually a nobel idea that simply does not work because people are naturally self-serving. It does not call for killing of all capitalists "whereever you may find them." It simply does not have the multitude of quotes that can be used to rile up a crowd to go on a murder spree. Have you ever heard of communist suicide bombers blowing up innocent people?
Second, Soviet Union might not be European, but they were no psycho like say Iran. Two civilized white countries were fighting over power, but nobody was ever going to pull the trigger because they did not want to die themselves. Iran's president, on the other hand, will pull the trigger. It just the culture of revenging the shame that exists among arabs calls for destruction of anybody who shames them and makes them look weak.
Third, this whole idea of changing their culture through politics, or "spreading democracy" bullshit does not work. Try to convince a single muslim that Koran is evil, that some of the verses (that are supposedly the words of God) must be ignored and that they must challenge Muhhamed's words? They will simply tell you that you are a heretic. Moreover, if a muslim speaks negatively of Islam or ignores the teachings of the Koran or wants to add or modify the "words of God," it is considered apostacy for which the punishment is death. The system is setup so you cannot change it. I do not know what the solution is, but it surely is not speaches and wisdom of the Westerners that will be able to change the culture.
Lastly, fighting a war witht the same methods as the Muslims do, such as targetting civilians which we don't do, does not make us the same as them. The world fought the nazis will military power just as Nazi's did the world. That did not make us Nazi's. People have the right to defend themselves and sometimes, there are the good guys and there are the bad guys. If you think we are the bad guys because we "colonize" poor Muslims, when you will die for your appologetic attitudes.
"There has been no Muslim Gulag and no Muslim Auschwitz."
After a largely spot-on column, I'm curious why Prager ends with this jarring inconsistancy. After all, Islamic mass-murders are not only scattered throughout history, but ongoing in one of the very places he names in his column: Sudan.
"There has been no Muslim Gulag and no Muslim Auschwitz."
Perhaps not. They usually killed all the men and took women & children into slavery. Does that give them the moral high ground?
The communists have not disappeared.
They have, however, changed their names. Communism is no longer an acceptable ideology and the nomenclature has been revised.
If you want to see communism in action, just look at the evening news. All the marchers and demonstrators protesting laws against illegal aliens were not the spontaneous demonstrations of poor, oppressed, huddling masses of the downtrodden and invisible.
This was extremely well-organized and well-coordinated, multi-city mobilization. It was the result of machine politics that has been practiced again and again. It contains the anti-globalization folks, anti-war and anti-Bush people, probably even animal rights people. But mostly is will be found to be run by the Socialist Workers and similar leftist labor groups, with the help of union organizers, anti-American clerics, the usual academic idiots, and etc.