OPINION:
Most Americans, according to the polls, think radical Islam is the greatest threat to America’s peace and stability. It’s the economy, too, as Mr. Stupid is forever trying to learn, but you can’t enjoy a good job and a strong economy if you’re dead at the hands of a religious fanatic.
Within the consensus are two distinct ideas about what to do about it. One calls for a long march to destroy the terrorists. The other calls for an all-out strategy to destroy the terrorists at once, to flatten their sanctuaries and if necessary make the rubble bounce. These two approaches have begun to cross party lines, now that Barack Obama is not much longer in the White House, and Democrats can now look to the defense of the country as well as the defense of the president and the party. Hillary Clinton, despite her implied promise to deliver Mr. Obama’s third term, tends to fudge on No. 2. Donald Trump promises to take the No. 2 route and, like Hillary, is short on specifics.
Many voters are too young to appreciate the execution of the long and ultimately successful war against communism and the old Soviet Union, when the world lived for decades on knife’s edge through several frightening crises. Will the fight against Islamic terrorism be a similarly long and tortured conflict? Will the public have the patience to drag the leaders to an appreciation of the problem, and then to the planning and execution of a successful strategy?
There’s evidence that the current resistance to fanatical Islam’s penetration into Western societies is in some ways a repetition of those earlier struggles. Political Islam, with ritual and moral concepts borrowed from Jews and Christians, has been repelled by the West before. But earlier Islamic efforts to overwhelm other cultures were led by armies. This time the threat is an ideological assault on a Christian world which has lost faith in its own institutions, and by an enormous wave of Muslim migrants filling the empty spaces left by falling Western birthrates.
The West is disarmed by its instincts to be nice, and attempts to give Islam irrational ideological tolerance in the open forums which are the essence of modern democratic societies. When in 2016 Pope Benedict XVI reasserted intellectual criticism of the foundations of Islam, there was a torrent of abuse from the elites, who long ago abandoned their own faith and the church, except for convenient places to marry their daughters and bury their dead. Benedict’s critics could hardly remember enough theology to understand reason vs. will. The first understanding encourages the continuing development of civilization and freedom, the second sows the seeds of oppression without reason.
To sling the epithet of “Islamophobia” at those who merely observe the fundamental differences between the Islamic culture and the intellectual inheritance of the West is to not only misunderstand the argument, but to threaten the security of everyone, including peaceful Muslims.
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