Fouad Ajami: Samuel Huntington was right, there is a clash of civilizations

I hope the day comes when Robert Spencer is generally acknowleged to be clear-eyed and farsighted--and perhaps recalled in the same frame as Samuel Huntington and his thesis.

We are fighting the wrong Wars in the Wrong Places:
THE WAR AGAINST WHAT NO ONE DARES NAME

The sad reality, denied by the elites.

If you're interested in the Aussie Jihad sheila's you can watch here:

http://sheikyermami.com/2008/02/06/aussie-jihad-sheilas/

Re: " The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels: in that European shelter, the Islamists shrewdly hope they can find protection against the power of the military."

The Islamists are attempting to infiltrate Brussels and other governements of the west with their Arab supremacy. Ultimately, they want to "subdue" the west and fully convert it to Islam.

Sadly, the majority in the west are simply unwilling to take a firm position against Islam. Many Europeans have accepted the false notion that Islam is a "religion of peace" that is hijacked by a minority of extremists while failing to take into account that Muhammad was a violent warrior on the battlefield who took slaves and advocated for violent jihad.

Other Europeans are willing to let Muslim immigrants to take full advantage of their generous socialist welfare system while not requiring them to fully intergrate into European society.

Look how reluctant Europe has become in fighting the Taliban and Al qaeda in Afganistan. Meanwhile, the Taliban is gaining strenth and is resurgent in the regions of Pakistan and Afghanistan. The burden falls again on the Americans to take military action and fight the Islamists.

How bold is Europe to stand up for democracy in the Middle East? Israel is one of the few counties in he Middle East where democratic principles truly exist and yet the majority in Europe despise Israel and support ($$$) their terrorist Arab neighbors.

How bold is Europe to stop Islamic states from springing up in their backyard? Take a look at Kosovo. The majority of European countries and the U.S. are supporting the creation of Kosovo, an Islamic state in Europe.

Exactly. The Islamists are fully engaged in the war both militarily and with infiltration and propaganda. However, the western side fails to understand that we are at war, refuses to identify the enemy and in some cases enables the enemy by engaging in politically correct behaviour that sponsors its intent to overthrow the political establishments of the West.

This can only be countered by:
1) Developing a harsh, impervious political system that recognizes, identifies and obliterates the enemy. This political party will have no resemblance to the decadent appeasing politicos that now establish Western rule.

2) Through art, encourage the Infidels to rise up and defend themsleves as the Infidels of the past had done. We, as artists, must romanticize the Crusader elements of our past that defended and pushed back the Islamist onslaught. We must recognize the brotherhood of all relgions and belief systems that are not Islamic and that Islamic thought has no place within the institutions of Western society.

3) It must become fasionable to wear the anti Islamic symbols in dress, thought, speech and practice so that anywhere the Islamic disease presents itself it has opposition and this opposition is seen as a courageous act of preserving Western civilisation and not an act of bigotry or so called "racism".

Welcome to my pre-9/11 world. The first WTC bombing, Khobar Towers, twin embassies, and USS Cole got my attention. Someone was ticking off acts of war for some reason. The eventual Twin Towers coup de grace was shocking, but fit with everything we'd seen before. Going all the way back to the hostages and Lebanon bombings, it was obvious someone had some ancient but modern ideas about warfare.

Where have you been Fouad?

The best question someone asked me was "Why Islam and why now?"

You can go on and on with answers to that question. Multiculturalism spun to absurd extremes figures prominently, but the answers never seem stop once you start. The mainstream media is a big factor. Corporate surrender on a large scale. Academia selling out. And so on.

Terrorism is one small factor.

Jimmy Carter. Aside from the RFK assassination, how many acts of Islamic-inspired terrorism against the West (other than Israel) predated his election in 1976?

Carter's support of another "religious" man, Ayatollah Khomeini, gave Islam a huge, and open, state sponsor of terrorism.

Fouad Ajami is making progress, too slowly for someone so intelligent, towards certain conclusions about Islam, its meaning and menace. But in his earlier, less relaxed years, when still engaged in building his career, with so much of that career devoted, in essence, to personal narrative -- that Nasserite temptation of a young Arab in those heady Beirut days (with Fouad Ajami as “Every-Arab”) – he was ill-inclined to think about Islam. And while he admired (extravagantly) Bernard Lewis, for his immense learning, he could not or would not emulate the same kind of scholarship. His analysis of the “Dream Palace of the Arabs” left out the basis of that “Dream Palace” – Islam, and the history-haunted nature of the Arabs because of Islam. Everything was mentioned, everything was analyzed, without reference to Islam.

And now he finally accepts the phrase “clash of civilizations/” But that phrase itself is not useful, for it obscures the real situation. There are not many different “civilizations” all clashing. There is Islam, and then there is everything else. Whatever “clashes” there may be in the future, between China, for example, and India or the United States, it will be akin to the Great Power clashes of yore. There is the non-Islamic world, and there is Islam, and within Islam, it is the doctrine – not a new one but an old one, a permanent one, that temporarily fell (during the last two centuries) into desuetude, not because of any change in the Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, but because of Muslim weakness vis-à-vis the non-Muslim world, and that weakness has seemed to have ended with the OPEC trillions, the Muslim millions who were permitted to settle deep within Dar al-Harb, and the appropriation of Western technological advances that have made the spread of the Muslim message easier. None of this is suggested by that unhelpful phrase “clash of civilizations.”

Possibly Ajami, sensing his own growing irrelevance, and keenly aware of how necessary it is to keep up as others learn more, and even outrun him (his usefulness as a relative truth-teller – as with Edward Said – is less impressive when there are others, such as Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan – who have gone beyond Fouad Ajami, far beyond the “liberals” of the Behbehani persuasion. Ultimately, he will have to arrive at the only position that makes sense: Islam is a menace, not least to its own adherents, and the failures of Muslim states and Muslim peoples, of all those suffused with Islam, political failures, economic failures, social and moral and intellectual failures, can be attributed to Islam itself.

Will he get there? Perhaps. I think the logic of things will force him to. How long will it take? Hard to say. But on the basis of the evidence so far, longer than it should.

Here is a previous article on that “Clash of Civlizations” formulation, and how, and why, it misleads:

October 9, 2005

Fitzgerald: Clash of civilizations? Yes and no

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores some of the limitations of the increasingly common "clash of civilizations" paradigm.

"The phrase "clash of civilizations," made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington's formulation (he owed an unacknowledged good deal to Adda Bozeman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence in the days when Kurt Rausch taught painting to well-bred young women and Randall Jarrell was taking notes for "Pictures from an Institution"), there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense. There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam. If, in the future, China and America were to go to war, it would not be because the former is "Sinic" and the latter "Christian" or "Western" or somesuch, but because of perceived Great-Power rivalries -- for China and America are now part of the same civilization, the shared, modern, universal civilization, with disagreements at the edges, but nothing like the clash between Islam and all Infidels. In fact, a war between China and America would be about power, and thus no different from, for example, the rivalry, ending in war, between Germany and England in the pre-1914 period.
It is interesting to note, meanwhile, that Arab and Muslim analysts around the world tend to prefer the phrase "clash of civilizations" -- because it avoids the truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam. And it also gives the impression that America or "the West" or Western Christian or Western post-Christian civilization are the enemy, while in reality the global Islamic jihad is as much directed at Hindus and Buddhists, and the Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and the non-Muslim black Africans, as it is against the much more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, United States of America.
Bassam Tibi epitomizes the confusion caused by clash of civilizations talk, and the difficulties to which it gives rise. Tibi is a Syrian, married to a German, who is Muslim in name only. And he has many virtues. But imagination is not among them. When he posits only two possibilities -- Europe becoming thoroughly islamized, or Islam becoming Europeanized -- he shows that limited imagination. When he offers the possibility of Islam becoming Europeanized, he fails to discuss what that would mean. Would it mean simply Muslims wearing Western dress? Throwing out the hadith? Throwing out the hadith and the sira (going beyond the Ancient Mariner, would Tibi have them stoppeth two of three)? Throwing out all of the sira, and all of the hadith, and then in addition throwing out traditional conclusions of the interpreters of the Qur’an -- in a kind of reverse abrogation, in which all the softer verses are now kept and the harsher ones removed, instead of the other way around as mainstream Muslim Qur’an commentators now have it? Just how is this to be done? Who would do it? A committee? What committee? And how would it acquire sufficient authority to command belief from -- Believers?
No, there is another way, or many other ways. And the first way is to put a complete stop to Muslim immigration, and to find creative ways to deport all Muslim non-citizens. These two measures would be accompanied by the creation of an environment where the practice of Islam is made not easy but difficult. Meanwhile, authorities would engage in wholesale efforts to explain, both to the population of Europe and to the Muslims in its midst, the real nature of Islam. They would explain why it is encourages despotism (because allegiance is owed the ruler as long as he is a Muslim), economic paralysis (the fatalism of Islam -- just look at the "wake-me-when-it's-over" attitude of the Iraqis as the American soldiers struggle to rebuild, or build, a country that is populated by people who in the main are innately and immutably hostile to Infidels, but want to be transformed by those Infidels into New York -- and in a New York minute), intellectual failure (the cult of authority, the hostility to free and skeptical inquiry) and moral failure (the bland acceptance of the division of the world between Believer and Infidel, and the belief that it is right, it is just, to treat the Infidel, no matter what, as an inferior being and an enemy no matter how generous and open-hearted he may be, for after all he remains an Infidel, and not even to grasp the possibility that Infidel peoples and polities, too, no matter how small, deserve to survive, and to possess rights that do not depend on Muslims).
Then one might engage in efforts to convert the Muslims of Europe -- persistent efforts that would either work in some cases, or drive those who were worried or offended to leave Europe for "safer" regions in the dar al-Islam. Both results are desirable. And both would make it clear just what kind of a "clash of civilizations" is now in the offing."

Four of the many mentions of Fouad Ajami at this site:
#1.

On Ajami’s praise of Maria Rosa Menocal’s mythologizing about “convivencia” in Islamic-ruled Cordoba and the rest of Islamic Spain:

Fouad Ajami and Hugh Fitzgerald lionize Bernard Lewis

May 1, 2006:

"The myths about Islamic Spain (known collectively as the "myth of Andalucia") have their origins in the romantic writers of the early 19th century. Just as Sir Walter Scott, venturing beyond Scotland, painted a completely fictional portrait of the "noble Saracens" tutoring thhe Christians in chivlarous behavior, so the myths of wonderful toleranet Andalucia owes its existence to two highly imaginative works by convincing writers,"Tales of the Alhambra" by Washington Irving and "Le Dernier des Abencerages" by Chateaubriand. The latter, of course, thought nothing of making things up even about his own life -- as some of his entirely fictional trips set down as fact in "Memoires d'Outre-Tombe."

The apotheosis of this is the dreamy effort of Maria Rosa Menocal, entitled "Ornament of the World," which purports to be about Cordoba, where "three faiths" worked harmoniously blah-blah-blah a lesson and hope for our age blah-blah-blah Maimonides blah-blah-blah. Now the first thing to know about this impressionistic fantasy is that it completely ignores, does not even mention in its bibliography, any of the major scholarly works on Muslim Spain -- including those of Evariste Levi-Provencal, of Dufourcq, of Bousquet, of many others. It ignores a good deal else as well, including Maimonides' own words: "...the Arabs have persecuted us severely, and passed baneful and discriminatory legislation against us...Never did a nation molest, degrade, debase, and hate us as much as they..."

This is particularly disturbing because this book received all sorts of praise, including some uncharacteristic guff from Fouad Ajami. The author is a "professor at Yale" and the "Director of the Whitney Humanities Center." Well, no one takes academic standards very seriously anymore, what with Cornel West being snapped up at Princeton, and Rashid Khalidi offering his PLO propaganda at Columbia, and the "post-colonial hegemonic discourse" still apparently in full swing. And one cannot here resisit the temptation of noticing that more than one teacher of literature has publicly expressed his long-past-receiving-of-tenure version of a deathbed conversion, and publicly admits that all that theory, that post-hegemonic discourse, whether of the Derrida-delirium, or Saidian swamp variety, was a monstrous error, and that one would do better to teach students in this audiovisiual age to read books with attention, affection, and a well-stocked mind. (See Frank Lenticchia, et al, who have attempted to express more or less the same thing).

Islamic Spain was far from being a paradise. Cordoba was no "ornament of the world." Maimonides had to flee the city because of the persecution of the Alhohads, but as Andrew Bostom points out in his "The Corrosive Hagiography of Muslim Spain," even before the Alhomads, the treatment of non-Muslims was dismal. When the Jewish viziers Samuel ibn Naghrela and his son Joseph were both murdered, and then the entire Jewish community of Grenada -- home of the "Alhambra" of which Washington Irving sung -- it was not something without deep Islamic roots.

A well-known jurist and poet of Muslim Spain may have helped to promote the Grenada massacres in his famous anti-Jewish poem:

"Bring them [the Jews] down to their place and Return them to the most abject station. Thjey used to roam around us in tatters Covered with contempt, humiliation, and scorn. They used to rummage amongst the dungheaps for a bit of a filthy rag To serve as a shroud for a man to be buried in...Do not consider that killing them is treachery. Nay, it would be treachery to leave them scoffing."

In all of the history of Islam, in all the 1400 years of conquest, there is only one story where there is even a colorable claim for "tolerance" and that is Muslim Spain. But Richard Fletcher's "Moorish Spain" and the scholarship of Levi-Provencal and others, all show that this "tolerance" was born from the Romantic poets-in-prose, such as Irving and Chateaubriand, and is directly contradicted by the historical evidence. The records of the Muslim jurists, such as Ibn Abdun, confirm the myth of tolerance. In his opinion on the treatment of the Christians and Jews of Seville Ibn Abdun insisted that "No...Jew or Christian may be allowed to wear the dress of an aristorcrat, nor of a jurist, nor of a wealthy individual; on the contrary they must be detested and avoided. It is forbidden to accost them with the greeting, 'Peace be upon you'.. In effect, 'Satan has gained possession of them, and caused trhem to forget God's warning. They are the confederatses of Satan's parth; Satan's confederates will surely be the losers! (Quran 58:19). A disstinct sign must be imposed upon them in order that they may be recongnized aand this willbe for them a form of disgrace." This has not prevented such Muslim apologists as Abdul Rauf from starting their own little "Cordoba Dialogues" and suchlike; it does not prevent the sentimental and sloppy, such as Menocal, from adding their embarrassing mite (if I were she, I would try to recall all copies of the book, or at least publicly announce that she will never, ever, publish a book without doing her homework again -- and write that on the blackboard at the Whitney Humanities Center 100 times, to be followed by a lesser mea culpa from Fouad Ajami for the blurb he gave her -- if he does not know the truth about Andalucian Spain, he is certainly capable of learning it), and it will not prevent Zapotero and other Spaniards from wanting so desperately to believe that once upon a time, in an ancient land called Andalucia, Muslims, Jews, and Christians lived happily together.
When the new mosque in Grenada was opened with on July 10, 2003, marking "a return of Islam to Spain," a conference was held in Granada at the same time. Andrew Bostom notes in one of his several articles on the myth of Andalucia that "the keynote speaker at this conferece, Umar Ibrhaim Vadillo, a Spanish Muslim leader, implored Muslims to cause an economic collapse of Western economies (by switching to gold dinars, and ceasing to use Western currencies), while the German Muslim leader Abu Bakr Rieger told attendees not to adapt their Islamic religious practices to accomodate European (i.e., Western Enlightenment) values."

Oh, al-Andaluz, al-Andaluz. Cordoba, and the red gitanillas flowing over the balconies above the whitewashed walls flanking the narrow alleys, and from outside one can hear the pleasing plash of fountains in the inside hidden courtyears, and one can see, in one's imaginative mind's eye, venerable old scholars, one Muslim, one Jew, one Christian (in a kind of backdated Benetton ad), walking together, talking animatedly of philosophy and spiritual manners, in an atmosphere of the highest mutual regard and understanding -- for that was Al-Andaluz, wasn't it? -- and the smell of the orange blossoms, and in the distance a glimpse of the Guadalquivir, and....fill in the rest yourself, courtesy of the Tourist Board of Spain or your own imagination.

The Myth of Andalucia originates in the Western Romantic movement. And it is also linked with the human need to believe in a Golden Age; in the Western world, this myth has been summed up by Harry Levin, in his essay on "The Myth of the Godlen Age in the Renaissance." (The same "myth of the Golden Age" has a Muslim version -- the Sunna or behavior of Muhammad, and the kind of life the Prophet and the Companions led, which was perfect in all respects).

And nowadays, in an age which we think of as tough-minded, realistic, skeptical, and so on, the dreamily romantic myth-making about Islam lives on for geopolitical reasons. It is difficult to face reality and a threat that will not disappear, not through word-conjuring, nor logic-chopping, nor further protesting-too-much that Islam is a "religion of peace and tolerance." Too much evidence, and more of it every day, suggests the opposite.

So we are left with a myth of Al-Andaluz that requires ignorance of the facts to survive, and many -- Menocal is hardly alone, and hardly the worst offender -- are happy to oblige. Yet even these romanticizers who write of Al-Andaluz as the great exemplar of tolerance, also consider it to be, at best, a unique example in the long 1400-year history of Islam -- which already is a way of admitting that the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam in general was not a paraidse of "tolerance" and fruitful mutual accomodation.

How pleasant it would be to make of history what it was not. How wonderful to think that at least once, just once, in the whole long history of Muslim conquest, there really was one spot where there was real tolerance, not the tolerance that is purchased by the Christians and Jews through payment of the jizya, and submission in a hundred ways to a crushing regime of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity. No wonder it is not only non-Muslims who like to imagine such a world, but also those Muslims who feel they must stick with Islam, they cannot jettison that belief-system with which their entire civilization, their ancestors, and they themselves are so identified, and so must create, or must believe in, a mythical world of past tolerance that is now being "ruined" by these Bin Ladens and the others who have "hijacked a great religion."

Oh, the Will to Believe is strong. One wants to believe in Eden, and Santa Claus, and Endless Peace (das ewige Frieden), and once upon a time living happily ever after, in the thrice-nine kingdom, over hill and down dale, and the princesse lointaine awakened by her prince, and in the "buzzin' of the bees/In the cigarette trees/Near the soda water fountain/At the lemonade springs/Where the bluebird sings/On the big rock candy mountain."
Dream-worlds do no harm -- except in cases of civilizational peril. If dreams, about the past or about the present, prevent sensible measures from being taken to prevent mass war, and to prevent the disappearance of one's own imperfect, silly, but still-wortth-defending Infidel civilization, then the hollowness of those dream-worlds, whether the creation of Romantic writers or of slapdash historians, aided by a publishing industry without standards, must be exposed.

The reality of Muslim Spain should be based on a familiarity with Levi-Provencal and other scholars of that period. One's views should not consist of repeating phrases about "how wonderfully people of all faiths got along in Andalucia -- gosh, why can't we just do that again." Schoolgirl gush is not permissible in current grim circumstances. Some "congress of dialogue."
Some "springwell (sic) for the enlightement." Some convivencia.”

[Posted by Hugh May 1, 2006]

#2.

On Ajami’s title “The Foreigner’s Gift”:

“Is Mary Habeck by any chance now at the Johns Hopkins School of... not International Studies, but something far grander, Advanced International Studies? That is the institution where that Middle East expert Paul Wolfowitz was once Dean, and where the new head is the charming are intelligent Fouad Ajami. Ajami is the one who used to smite Edward Said hip and thigh, but who on his own trip to Iraq, he found himself stirred elementally by his visit with Sistani. He called his book on Iraq "The Foreigner's Gift" instead of, as it ought to have been called, "The Infidel's Gift." And clearly, like other "good" merely "cultural" or Muslim-for-identification-purposes Muslims, he listened to a bit too much to the soothing blandishments being peddled. And neither Fouad Ajami nor still less Vali Nasr or others of that ilk could conceive of or could bear to hear about the only policy that makes sense: to educate Infidels, and then to create the conditions that will force a sufficient number of Muslims as well, to recognize that the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Islamic states and societies suffused with Islam are a direct result of Islam itself.

[Posted by Hugh at May 19, 2007]

#3

On Ajami and the limited usefulness of the Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims:

“But if an envoy [American envoy to the O.I.C., proposed by some in the Bush Administration] is to be sent, and since it cannot be an apostate -- Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali --- then at least let it be, not a phony "moderate," but an articulate Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslim, who will make the point that political, economic and social woes in states and societies suffused with Islam are to be traced to Islam itself.

Possible candidates:

Kanan Makiya, Fouad Ajami.
The first no doubt is enjoying his total autonomy as the Hassenfeld Professor at Brandeis (but how naive the students are! how innocent of history!), and his Cambridge apartment and that "Iraq Project"; still, he may by now have reflected on the failure of Iraq and Iraqis, and finally begun to stop being defensive about Islam and his pious Shi'a grandmother, and come to his senses. He might enjoy the challenge.

As for Fouad Ajami, he's carefully avoided for decades the subject of Islam, and his verbal ticks are getting to be most annoying, of the easily parodied kind -- "in that cruel summer of 2003, in that cruel land to which the American farm-boys arrived, boys so totally innocent of the Arab wiles, and the Arab torment, and the Arab predicament, and the Arab sense of destiniy, and the Arab decline, and the Arab fall, which American innocents could hardly be expected to understand..." -- and maybe, having been one of the enablers of the Iraq fiasco, he'd like to do the handsome thing and help out with the O.I.C.
I doubt that either one would do it. They're not that willing to make the kind of sacrifices for the United States that hundreds of thousands of American soldiers were asked to make by spending a year or two or three in Iraq. They have academic positions, one with real, the other with effective tenure, and access to all the largesse that foundations have made available to the "good" Muslims, not to mention the odd Bradley Prize or two. But who knows -- perhaps one of them will see the need.
And if both were to turn it down, there is always the fetching author of "Reading 'Lolita' in Teheran."

[Posted by: Hugh at June 27, 2007 3:47 PM ]

#4

On Ajami’s limited usefulness, because of his perceived need not to declare himself an apostate, that is not to complete the mental journey that Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali have made, and thus permanently condemning himself to a misleading, always slightly-off analysis, of what is past, and passing, and to come, in the immutable and inevitable clash, not of “civilizations,” but of Islam with all that is non-Islam:

“The business of "careerism" can be seen, for example, in the example of Fouad Ajami, who has little to gain by coming out, and would likely be far less free to travel to Kuwait (quartier Behbehani) and Lebanon, and elsewhere in Muslim lands, indeed probably such travel would be out of the question, were he to be an open apostate. But behind closed doors, in Washington, with those who think well of him, he should not hesitate to change his tone and his shtick, and instead of talking about the "Arab Dream Palace" and the "Arab Predicament" and the "Arab" this and the "Arab" that in the "cruel summer" of this year, in the "tortured land" under the "cruel sun" (fill up the page with this stuff and you'll get some idea of how his prose --not least in that overstuffed "The Foreigner's Gift" -- begins to pall), but with the problem of Islam, of what Islam teaches about the role of Muslims, about the division between Believers and Infidels, and about the habit of mental submission, and of inshallah-fatalism, both encouraged by Islam. He's got a claque, a fan club, and he ought to start enlightening them, if only behind the scenes. Otherwise, he becomes less and less of value as a guide to anything -- merely an example of the "good Arab" who came out of some goddamn Nasserite hubble-bubble cafe (this personal narrative, as part of the shtick, is also wearing thin), came to America with his head full of anti-American cliches and, because he was very intelligent and hardworking, and also was helped at every level, and had a charmed academic career as that "good Arab," has ended up as he has today. But he should demand more of himself, much more. Seeing through Saddam Hussein, or the crap that passes for political discussion among so-called Arab "intellectuals," just isn't good enough. He can do better. But he calculates, I think, that he has to not come out as an apostate in order to be more effective: a variant on those who wanted their rebellious cake and to eat it too by "working within the system."

[Posted by: Hugh at June 28, 2007 8:16 AM]

"I think it (referring to jihad against the west) is way more than a clash of civiliations"--Nonie Darwish in "OBSESSION: RADICAL ISLAM'S WAR AGAINST THE WEST" (a must-see docu-film that's been discussed on this blog before).

So, the apocalyptic destruction of Hindustan was just a CLASH?? The destruction of Egyptian, Persian, and Byzantine civilizations were CLASHES??? I agree with Nonie here jihad attacks are far more than that.

Calling the present global jihad a "clash" is truly a gross UNDERSTATEMENT. Islam "wishes to strike down the west," in the words of Robert Wistrich; I maintain that he is 100% correct. I also maintain that westerners should interpret the present situation in the west vis-a-vis Islam and jihad as an apocalyptic historical development based upon a violently divergent clash of beliefs between Islam and western civilization. We have passed the point where we can call this a "clash" I think.

ps-Islam to me is NO "civilization" and calling it such debases the term!

'The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels:'

Why choose one or the other? Why not choose both? The Islamist in Turkey could have a pan-Islamic empire stretching from Dublin to Tashket.

Thus completing the task temporarily halted at Vienna in 1683!

'The Islamists have prevailed, but their desired destination, or so they tell us, is still Brussels:'

Why choose one or the other? Why not choose both? The Islamists in Turkey could have a pan-Islamic empire stretching from Dublin to Tashkent.

Thus completing the task temporarily halted at Vienna in 1683!

Also, as is buried in Hugh's posts, the word "clash" is misleading: it implies a relatively equivalent interaction of two entities: the blame of this "clash" of the two "civilizations" -- Islam and the West -- in this process are, with Huntington's phrase, conceived as though they were two tectonic plates that move toward each other and crash into each other. The tendency toward relativistic equivalency -- where both entities are equally to blame for the "clash" -- is great in such terminology.