Paul Eidelberg
What should be America’s attitude toward Islam? U.S. Congressmen Lt. Col. Allen West recommends Ronald Reagan’s approach toward the Soviet USSR—“We win, you lose."
Lt. Co. West, who fought in Iraq, has been the most forthright critic of Islam, and he displays solid knowledge of Islamic military history and scriptures. He warns us that today’s Islamic leaders, no less than yesterday’s, are committed to the destruction of our Judeo-Christian civilization.
His candid assessment of Islam been enunciated by Winston Churchill as well as by eminent theologians and scholars in one country after another. Indeed, learned Muslims have renounced Islam for its savagery. Most appalling, however, are the number of Western pundits and politicians who are afraid to expose this ticking bomb. They are afraid to highlight what drives Islam’s global ambitions, namely, its theology.
Few scholars are bold enough to describe this theology as a perverted form of monotheism. But what else is to be said of a theology that denies free will and the inviolable dignity of the individual; a theology who’s most admired teachers and practitioners from Muhammad to Bin Laden acclaim the primacy of power as opposed to the primacy reason; a theology that exalts conquest and scorns justice, a theology that treats women as chattel; a theology that celebrates death, not life.
Far from being a religion of peace, Islam is more accurately described as a pseudo-religious fantasy of total war against “infidels." Individual exceptions aside, a frightful number of Muslims go through life with the semi-paranoid mentality—“us” verses “others." A latent paganism erupts across the Islamic world, warning us of cultures that have yet to internalize basic ingredients of civilization.
In his book Civilization and its Enemies, published in 2004 (hence before the present chaos sweeping across the Muslim Middle East), Lee Harris sees civilization as having four prerequisites: a stable social order, the co-operation of individuals pursuing their own interests, the ability to tolerate or socialize with one’s neighbors, and a hatred of violence. Clearly, Islam lacks these prerequisites. In fact, Syrian-born psychiatrist Dr. Wafa Sultan goes so far as to deny that Islam is a civilization! Egyptian-born scholar Bat Ye’or calls Islam a “culture of hate."
Given Islam’s all-consuming militancy, our only rational strategy is to destroy this enemy of civilization before its leaders develop weapons of mass destruction. All talk of negotiations is a confession of intellectual bankruptcy and moral cowardice.
The leaders of Islam, especially Iran, have declared total war on America. If a recent date is wanted, the war was initiated when Iran seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1979. Need we also mention the simultaneous attacks on the U.S. Embassies in Nairobi, Kenya and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on August 7, 1998; the attack on U.S. destroyer Cole while it was harbored in the Yemen port of Aden. Seventeen American sailors were killed, and 39 were injured were killed in that October 12, 2000 attack. These attacks paved the way to the September 11, 2001 destruction of the World Trade Center and the slaughter of almost 3,000 Americans on the. Viewed in this light, would it be premature for the United States to attack Iran before it deploys nuclear-tipped ballistic missiles?
Of course, this will not be done as long as Barack Hussein Obama is on the White House. Will his successor launch a preemptive attack against the enemy of civilization? Is this likely?
Some say the enemy can be militarily incapacitated by detonating a single electromagnetic pulse warhead at high altitude over central Iran, apparently without the spread of radiation. We would still be confronted, however, by a 1400-year bellicose ideology. This ideology animates more than a billion Muslims, among whom revenge is a religious imperative. Among them are countless suicide bombers, and their mullahs are not about to relinquish their power and renounce their ambitions.
We are not dealing with Muslim Gorbachevs. Islam is not going to be psychologically disarmed by a Voice of America beaming anti-Muslim propaganda into Islamdom. The VOA did not have to convince Russians about the “Evil Empire.” The Russians needed to hear these words from an American president like Ronald Reagan. But the task of opening the long closed Islamic mind is of another order.
The Muslim architects of 9/11 asked: What landmarks conspicuously represent America? Two: the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
We must therefore ask: “What landmarks conspicuously represent Islam,” and whose destruction would devastate the mentality of “believers?”
Must we wait for another, perhaps super, mega 9/11 to recognize the truth and act accordingly—if still we can? We need a president who can tell the enemy, “We Win, You Lose.”
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