The struggle against militant Islam re-echoes, not so much the themes of the Cold War, but the causes of the American Civil War. Are the Islamists, in the name of peace, not entitled to their own "peculiar institution" of
sharia law, with its stonings and mutilations, its whips and its chains, its ethnically cleansed communities? Is there not, in the Ayatollah's vision of a Muslim world, something of the echo of the "purple dream" of a federation of slave states stretching south from the Mason-Dixon line to the Tierra del Fuego?
The liberals, like Henry Clay, cling to the hope that a final breach can be avoided. The Compromise of 1850 and Fugitive Slave Act reprise on the world stage under the modern title of a ceasefire. But will it hold?
Lincoln, in analogous circumstances, thought not:
"'A house divided against itself cannot stand.' I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free. ... It will become all one thing, or all the other. Either the opponents ... will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction, or its advocates will push it forward till it shall become alike lawful in all the States, old as well as new ..."
For my part, I do not think there is room enough on the planet for militant Islam and civilization together. It is out to kill me, and I do not intend to die.
Wonderful post. Thank you. I hadn't thought of the parallels between the peculiar institution of sharia law and slavery, though in retrospect they seem so obvious!