Britannia Radio

Civilization Or Not? The West Must Decide

From the desk of AWR Hawkins on Fri, 2011-11-11 13:36

Ours is a time of social upheaval and seismic paradigm shifts. The world is changing before our eyes while we Westerners sit still, seemingly lost in the belief that our passivity will somehow bring peace.

On our televisions, reports of beheadings, stonings, and suicide bombings regularly fill large portions of a news hour that was not so long ago devoted to car accidents, train wrecks, and market fluctuations. Islamists are steadily marching upon the West with conquest in their eyes, and little has been done to stop or even to slow them down. All the while, renowned institutions, press outlets, left-leaning politicians, and university professors are stepping on themselves to assure us that radical Islam and the West can co-exist, but reality seems to argue for another conclusion altogether.

The horrible truth is that our passivity is a form a suicide, both individually and culturally. And the alternative to Western Civilization, at this point in time, is no civilization at all.

In other words, it’s not like our choices are between our civilization and their civilization. Rather, our choice is between a 21^st century anchored in Western Civilization’s strength – which is founded upon law and liberty – or a 7^thcentury draconian society in which might makes right, women are second class citizens, and freedom of speech is as non-existent as are Bibles in Saudi Arabia.

Let’s face it—the “Arab Spring” has given way to a brutal winter, where Islamists whom President Barack Obama cheered, and in some cases helped (Libya), are setting up new governments in which Sharia law will be predominant. What this means is that they’ve traded the yoke of men who were either tyrannical or egomaniacal, for governments that could prove even more brutal. (In Egypt the truth may be that the Muslim Brotherhood simply wanted Hosni Mubarak ousted as a means of creating a vacuum they can fill.)

By the way, in Egypt the Islamists are now killing Christians in the open, And in Libya, Gaddafi’s death portends the establishment of truly Sharia State.

In Tunisia, which just held elections President Obama described as an “inspiration,” an Islamist party led by Sheik Rached Ghannouchi gained majority.

For anyone not familiar with Ghannouchi, on the eve of the Gulf War in 1990, it was he who said: “We must wage unceasing war against the Americans until they leave the land of Islam, or we will burn and destroy all their interests across the entire Islamic world.” He also said, “The greatest danger to civilization, religion, and world peace is the United States Administration. It is the Great Satan.”

Only a fool fails to see the dichotomy between the Islamists and Westerners.

Yet, for those who are slow to admit the truth, there are other examples that can be added. For instance, in north-eastern Malaysia, “hardline Islamists [are] mulling a suggestion to impose whipping and jail terms as penalties for divorcing without valid cause.” And in Saudi Arabia, where Islamism appears rampant, people are beheaded for a wide variety of causes, all of which ultimately come to back to the Islamist’s laws. Most recently, a video of the beheading of an alleged practitioner of “sorcery” has appeared, as well as one of a 54 year-old woman being beheaded for killing a man who was abusing her.

The atrocious nature of these things is magnified by recent videos of a young Iraqi girl being stoned to death for falling in love with a boy whose Islamic religion was not the same as her own. (And I didn’t even mention the numerous Westerners who were beheaded with dull knives instead of sharp swords during the last decade.)

What harmony can exist between such barbarism and the West?

But sadly, although these examples represent only a handful of innumerable others that could be provided, the Islamists will quickly have their apologists in the West. Worst of all, many of those apologists will be leftists who are female—university professors and such—that refuse to see what their own end would be were they to fall into the hands of the Islamists.

And what makes this even worse, is that for every reported Islamist-led attack on human life that takes place in countries like Egypt, Iraq, Tunisia, or Saudi Arabia, there seems to be an equally large number of attacks on freedom of speech and of religion that are carried out in the court of public opinion throughout the West. For example, right now in the city of Detroit, Michigan, “Dawud Walid, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations…says a Christian prayer summit to be held at Ford Field [on Nov. 11] promotes anti-Muslim sentiment and is warning local mosques to step up their security.”

While there is absolutely no evidence that the prayer summit is going to be anti-Muslim, but plenty of evidence that it isn’t, Walid is using the event to cast Christians in a light that makes their right to free speech less valuable than his own. And while this is anti-Western, generally speaking, it is specifically anti-American, as the Bill of Rights protects speech even if that speech is disagreeable or repugnant to the hearer.

In the most surreal turn of events imaginable, Walid has actually called on the heads of local mosques to “maintain security at all entrances, and make sure to notify the police immediately if suspicious persons congregate on mosque property." In other words, the exercise of free speech by a group that is Christian rather than Muslim is seemingly being used by Walid to justify fortifying mosques in the Detroit area.

Yet the majority of Westerners sit silently. Too worried about giving offense to realize they’ve just been offended, and that their most fundamental of rights—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, etc.—are being attacked at this very moment.

Perhaps Michael Mukasey, former Attorney General of the United States (2007-2009), put the situation most clearly when he said the West’s fight against “Islamism…[is] handicapped…by the refusal…to acknowledge the goals of our adversaries.” He then succinctly described those goals as “essentially political” ones that “involve the recreation of an Islamic caliphate and the imposition of Sharia law over as broad a swath of the world as possible.”

The citizens of the United States and Europe have to make a choice and stand by it—do they want civilization or not? If they do, they have to enter into the arena of ideas and make an unflinching defense of Western Civilization. If they don’t, they are dead while living, and an embarrassment to the posterity they could have had.