The Islamic Danger to Western Civilization (Old article -- timely reminder -- Remember Khobar)

1. The Historical Background of Islamic Resurgence The West itself is largely responsible for creating and fostering the dangers to its civilization. Throughout human history empires rose by military conquest and fell when their rulers took their power for granted, indulging their greed without counting the cost. The basic pattern progressing from war to occupation, exploitation, negligence and collapse has not changed. Often, exploitation was oppressive and cruel from the outset. The more enlightened the exploitation, the longer it lasted, always providing the rulers dealt efficiently with their security problems. These multiplied when it inevitably turned into over-exploitation. A correlation between over-exploitation and negligence seems illogical, but historical evidence supports it. Greed has always blinded power-wielders to danger. It still does.

The problems of exercising power at the end of the 20th century are more complex than in the past because the technological advances of the last nine decades enormously increased the destructiveness of weapons and the ability to communicate instantly with any part of the globe. The main beneficiaries were very big business, the superpowers and terrorist movements. When the century began, Great Britain was boasting of an empire on which the sun never set. But there were also a French empire, a German empire, an Austro-Hungarian empire, a Dutch empire, a Portuguese empire and an Ottoman empire, besides major power centers in the United States, Russia and (after 1905) Japan. Except for some parts of the already disintegrating Ottoman empire, British influence in these states - and many more - was negligible or non-existent.

The first major trauma was caused by the 1914-1918 War, which pitted Great Britain, France and Russia against Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey. Most of the fighting took place in Europe and the seas surrounding it. It soon degenerated into inconclusive trench warfare with enormous casualties on both sides, providing the stimulus for the development of military aircraft, tanks and other new weapon systems. The US entered the war on the British side in 1917, when the strength of the main protagonists was nearly exhausted. Russia was defeated and had a communist revolution later the same year. The US intervention turned the scale. An armistice was signed in 1918.

President Wilson of the US was, therefore, an influential participant in the peace negotiations that followed. The United States was a melting pot of races and nationalities. Yet Wilson’s main contribution to the settlement negotiated was the selective imposition of a national self-determination principle based largely on language to fix the new European borders. It was imposed on the defeated. A resurgent Poland was created from German, Austrian and Russian territory. The mistrusted Russian communists were also compelled to cede large areas to Rumania, Finland and the new Baltic republics of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. Austria-Hungary was broken up. It ceded Transylvania to Rumania, Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia to the new Czechoslovak Republic, Croatia, Slovenia and Bosnia-Herzegovina to the new Serb-dominated Yugoslav Republic and even German-speaking Southern Tyrol to Italy. Austria and Hungary became separate mini-states. The Ottoman Empire was deprived of its Arab provinces in North Africa and the Middle East, which became British or French protectorates, and had to yield some territory in Europe to Greece. But Wilson did not dare to propose self-determination for the overseas colonies of European states. German colonies were eventually put under British, French or US rule.

It is important to stress the American role in promoting ethno-linguistic nationalism in Europe during the 1918-1939 period - if only because the general trend of US propaganda now is to blame nationalism for all the world’s ills (though still promoting it when this is politically convenient, e.g. in the Balkans). Yet the US rarely intervened actively in European affairs during the inter-war years. The economic crash of 1929 and the following depression intensified its isolationism that had paid off so well in 1914-1916. It was maintained even when Hitler surged to power in Germany, though the Americans shared the Anglo-French preoccupation with the potential threat of Soviet communism and began, like the British, to regard the Nazis as a possible bulwark against Russia.

The communist threat was certainly a factor in the Anglo-French appeasement policy allowing Hitler to renege on his international commitments, remilitarize the Rhineland in 1936, rearm massively and then occupy Austria and Czechoslovakia. But the crucial factor was the lack of political courage of the ruling British and French politicians. By 1939, war with Germany was the only alternative to Nazi hegemony - a point those who today believe war is always the worst of all possible evils would do well to consider.

The 1939-1945 war was the second great trauma of the 20th century. It claimed some 52 million dead. The United States, still regarding isolationism as the most profitable policy (excellent for business and saving American lives) kept out of the war until December 1941, and might well have kept out longer had Japan not attacked and destroyed much of its Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor. By then Britain, despite Winston Churchill’s inspired leadership, was almost on its knees and dependent on American supplies - both military and civilian. France had surrendered already in 1940. But Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 had diverted to his eastern front forces essential for a successful invasion of England. Thus the over-confidence and greed of Germany and Japan probably prevented their victory.

By the time they were finally defeated in 1945, the United States was the only power of global economic stature. Britain, France, Germany, Japan and the Soviet Union were totally exhausted by the war and their economic infrastructures had suffered enormous damage. Washington could virtually dictate the rates of their economic revival. It chose to give priority to its wartime enemies over its wartime allies. It would be too charitable to ascribe this exclusively to a desire to avoid the pitfalls of the punitive policy that helped the rise of Hitler after World War I, or even to the fear of Soviet communism. The main American goal, carefully camouflaged by meaningless rhetoric, was to prevent a revival of Great Britain as a great power in its own right and to limit the ability of France to influence events on the continent of Europe.

Though an important positive result of the above US behavior was that Germany and Japan were diverted to seek satisfaction in economic progress and adopted democratic forms of government, "Realpolitik" was its dominant motive. A rapidly revived Great Britain was the only power with the potential to rival the US in the economic sphere - if it retained its colonies and its influence in India, Canada, South Africa and Australia. But in 1946 Britain was down and out. Protecting and even administering its overseas territories seemed an impossible burden. So it was in the US interest to promote decolonization before the British economy revived sufficiently to renew British interest in regaining the status of a major economic and military power. The correct idea that ethnically uniform states would create greater stability was only partially applied in practice even in the post-World War I treaties. Now, the goal was to deprive Britain and France of their influence overseas and to penetrate the ex-colonial markets they had previously largely reserved for themselves. So no attention whatever was paid to ethnic or tribal uniformity. The borders of the new, ex-colonial states were identical with those of the colonies or protectorates they replaced, cutting across ethnic and tribal lines. This caused bitter internal conflicts and sometimes genocide, especially in Africa.

The Communist Party regime of the Soviet Union was no less totalitarian than Nazi Germany’s, persecuting and often killing its political opponents. But its atheist, materialist ideology with its gospel of universal class warfare seemed far more dangerous than fascism to the post-1945 power-wielders in Western democracies. For communist propaganda not only proved attractive in many underdeveloped countries, where, like the US and for similar reasons, it stressed anti-imperialism, but also tended to strengthen socialist movements in the West that could not be relied upon to protect the interests of big business there.

Moreover, Stalin was quick to realize the crucial military importance of nuclear power. The US had ended the war with Japan by killing scores of thousands of Japanese civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs and he did not want to be subjected to nuclear blackmail. By the early 1950s, the Soviet Union had plenty of atomic bombs of its own. These nuclear weapons assured its superpower status. To the West’s chagrin, economic power proved irrelevant in the matter. It sufficed for the requisite military production and living standards above the level at which the population might revolt. More was not necessary.

The bipolar world Stalin created lasted nearly four decades, until Mikhail Gorbachev destroyed it (with crucial help from Ronald Reagan’s "Star Wars" policy) by undermining the foundations of Soviet power and stability. His reforms wrecked the Soviet economic system without putting anything effective in its place, while his advocacy of a united Germany opened the floodgates, drowning the Warsaw Pact and ending Soviet influence in central Europe and the Balkans.

During these four decades, the military balance between the two superpowers resulted in a relatively stable world. They jockeyed for position, trying to gain adherents among the uncommitted states and sometimes precipitating regional wars, but each was determined to keep its allies firmly in their subordinate places. The Soviet Union intervened with its armored forces to keep Hungary communist in 1956. That same year, the United States (jointly with the Soviet Union!) served Britain and France with an ultimatum, compelling them to evacuate their armed forces when they attacked Egypt after Gamal Abdul Nasser had nationalized their key strategic investment, the Suez Canal. This served notice to the entire Middle East that the US would not permit Britain and France to regain any independent influence in the region or to resist its decolonization gambit, which the USSR enthusiastically supported for reasons of its own.

The UN, created after World War II, reflected these US and Soviet policies. The rapid progress of decolonization gradually peopled it with a big majority of underdeveloped authoritarian states, generously permitted to pass non-binding resolutions in its General Assembly. The UN Security Council, however, had teeth. Its five permanent members had the right of veto. Britain, France and China were usually afraid to use it. The US and the USSR were not so shy.

The United States is a democracy. The Soviet Union was not. But the key difference between the two superpowers was the American emphasis on economic development and economic means of wielding power, while the Soviet Union emphasized ideology and military strength. In the UN, the large majority of states was authoritarian, ideologically much closer to the USSR than to the US, and thus tended to cooperate with the Kremlin. During the 1950s, this faced Washington with a dilemma. It needed decolonization to keep its European allies politically subservient, but the ex-colonial states might abandon it unless their ruling elites were permitted to expropriate foreign investments. The decision to allow them to do so was destined to change the balance of economic power. Another effect of the new composition of the UN and the superpowers’ propaganda was more insidious. Reinforced by the rapid development of television and electronic communications, it caused a gradual change in West European attitudes to nationalism and immigration. By the end of 1997, the ethnic composition of the population of Western, Northern and Southern Europe had been radically altered by the influx of Asians and Africans - many millions of them Moslems. There was no move in the opposite direction.

For the USSR, globalism was a means of promoting communist ideology and Soviet hegemony. For the US, it was a means of promoting capitalist profits and US hegemony. This was the basis of the peculiar love-hate relationship between Washington and the Moslem world. During the 20th century, oil and natural gas gradually supplanted coal as the main source of energy. A very substantial proportion of the world’s oil and gas reserves were in Moslem states, among them Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, United Arab Emirates, Iran, Iraq, Libya and Indonesia. Before World War II, British, French and Dutch companies competed with the Americans for control of these resources. After this war, it was no contest. The Europeans were left with just enough to keep them satisfied.

The decision to allow Moslem states to assume full sovereign rights over their oil and natural gas resources and expropriate them in part or sometimes in toto was thus primarily a US gamble based on the hope that these states would cooperate with American oil companies, leaving them effective control and a lion’s share of the profits. In practice, effective control duly passed to the Moslem states concerned, which also appropriated a steadily growing share of the wealth energy produced. Though there is no shortage of oil and never has been, restrictions on output and the fact that (apart from the US itself) communist USSR and China were the two other biggest oil producers, enabled the Moslems - and particularly the Arabs - to use oil embargoes as a political weapon.

Elsewhere in Asia, Japan - at first with substantial US help, but later taking full advantage of its miniature defense budgets - could concentrate on civilian production, exploiting its skilled manpower and technological resources to become an industrial power of the first magnitude. China developed more slowly, but by the 1990s was also an economic giant. Considerable economic progress was also made in India, South Korea, Hongkong, Taiwan and Singapore. The Moslem provinces of India were detached to form Pakistan already in 1948. Until the end of the century, possibly owing to its other Moslem connections, the US consistently supported Pakistan (and its ally, China) against India, virtually pushing the latter into the arms of the Soviet Union. But this was only one of its serious mistakes in Southern Asia. In the 1960s, the American superpower fought a half-hearted war against communist North Vietnam and managed to lose it, its client, South Vietnam, becoming part of a united Vietnam under communist rule. The blunder in Afghanistan was even graver. In 1979, the Soviet Union sent forces into this country and succeeded in establishing a friendly government in Kabul. There was a revolt, chiefly of Islamic fundamentalist elements supported by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The US gave it every possible aid. Unfortunately for the West, the revolt succeeded. The new Afghan government was friendly to fundamentalist Iran and bore no grudges to the Russians. So Pakistan, Saudi Arabia and the US turned against it, fomenting an even more fundamentalist rebellion by the Taleban movement. This too succeeded. In the process, Afghanistan and the Peshawar region of Pakistan became centers of anti-Western Islamic terrorism.

2. The Diagnosis The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1990-1991 left the world with one superpower and an explosive situation - because the United States suffers from ideological confusion generated by economic expediency and contradictory ethics. This confusion is spread around the globe by high-tech visual and vocal electronic media, creating serious difficulties in dealing with resolute ideological forces like Islam, which have their own definitions of right and wrong and know what they want to achieve.

In the past, Japan, China and Russia were regarded as the main threats to Western hegemony. But Japan’s business elite was caught in the globalist trap, with dire results. Today, Japan is politically stagnant, militarily a non-factor and even its vaunted economy is in crisis. It has neither the will nor the ability to challenge US superpower status in the near future. Russia still has the military potential to be a threat. Its arsenal of nuclear weapons and long-range missiles remains large and can be aimed at the US at very short notice. But its attempts to create a capitalist economy were too hasty and slipshod, resulting in Mafia control, disrupted production, an infrastructure worse than in communist times and demoralization, which affected the armed forces no less than the general public. Among the politicians, there is much resentment against the US for contemptuously disregarding Russian interests in Eastern Europe and the Balkans, while doing its best to deny foreign markets to Russia’s conventional arms industries. This resentment is reflected by cooperation with Iran and attempts to play a role in the Middle East. Yet ideologically Russia is now no less confused than the West, while economically it is a disaster. It requires a long period of recuperation and is in no position to challenge Western supremacy.

China’s chief aim is still to become the dominant regional power in Eastern and Southern Asia. It has nearly attained this status but will need time to consolidate it. Communism in China is well established, so there is a clear ideology. Besides, Russia’s unhappy experiments with capitalism served as a warning to Beijing, discouraging ideas of risking democratic or overly drastic economic reforms. The armed forces are strong and relatively well equipped. The military industries are efficient and have succeeded in entering some important arms markets. But there are no indications that China is considering serious attempts to exercise influence in Europe or the Americas as a short-term or medium-term option. It is satisfied with the pampering it receives from the business interests dictating US policy as the largest single global market, which allows China to pursue its regional aspirations unchallenged and is well worth some restraint at the UN and elsewhere.

This leaves the seemingly disunited Moslem world, which has not been considered a serious threat to Europe and the West since King Jan Sobieski of Poland turned back the Ottoman armies at the gates of Vienna in 1683. But the attraction of Islam and the power of Moslem states have increased immensely since World War II and this, together with the emergence of terrorism as a serious political factor, has created a window of opportunity for Moslem common action to achieve what are increasingly being seen as common political goals.

Islam is a religion still grounded in principles formulated by its prophet in the 8th century. Then it spread like wildfire by conquest and subterfuge, which Mohammed preached and practiced. He justifies lying to unbelievers when this furthers the Moslem cause. Ever since, the desire to extend Islamic rule to non-Moslem areas has been deeply embedded in the minds of Moslems - the masses attending mosques and their rulers no less than fundamentalist extremists. Islam is by far the most political of all religions because the realization of this desire depends on concrete political and military action by Moslem regimes. However, Islam’s injunction to Moslem rulers to extend their rule to non-Moslem territory is limited by the pragmatic proviso that those too strong or too distant to be conquered can be left alone until circumstances are more propitious. This is why Moslem aggression ceased to trouble Europe after the 17th century.

It is in the forefront of Moslem minds today precisely because the United States recreated Moslem power by its policy of decolonization, accompanied by the developing of natural resources in Moslem states which were then allowed to be partially or wholly expropriated. It is important to understand why these policies and the Western encouragement of Moslem territorial expansion have not only made all Moslem rulers and their Moslem subjects more aggressive but have caused a revival of fundamentalist Islam. The idea that Moslems can be propitiated and kept peaceful by economic development and political concessions is the reverse of the truth. Their reaction is that concessions by unbelievers prove that Allah has begun to favor the believers. So the more powerful Moslem states become, economically and/or politically, the greater will be their religiously motivated appetite for territorial expansion at the infidel’s expense.

The US belief that its generosity to Moslems would be rewarded by loyalty was mistaken. Loyalty to unbelievers is not a Moslem trait. Pragmatism is. And pragmatism prescribes that when dealing with fools one milks them for all one can get, demoralizes them until they are incapable of protecting their interests, and then deprives them of any influence they have left. The Moslem world today has no love and very little respect for the Western powers in general and the United States in particular. It was for many years a bitterly divided world, where individual rulers competed with each other for wealth, influence and sometimes territory. This was why the wealthy states of the Gulf Cooperation Council were ready to accept protection from American and other Western forces. But four decades of prattling about decolonization and "globalism" have made their mark. If globalism is a good reason for uniting Europe, preventing it is a better reason for uniting Moslem states (which have much more in common than the Europeans) on a policy to wrest power from the unbelievers.

For this purpose, the Moslems enjoy one crucial advantage over the Chinese. Many millions of Chinese live outside China. A fair proportion of them may wish to encourage trade with China. But very few sympathize with Chinese communism or are ready to serve the political aspirations of Beijing. In the ideological sense, the opposite is true of Moslems. Even before the policies of Moslem states have been more or less coordinated, the Moslem dispersion, including Moslems in the US and Western Europe, will provide plenty of volunteers for an active fifth column and for terrorism serving the cause of Islam. Indeed, it has already begun to do so.

Thorough knowledge of US foreign policy during the 1946-2000 period is of vital importance to anyone attempting a serious diagnosis of the weaknesses threatening Western civilization from this direction. Whatever happens to the only superpower is likely to affect the fate of Western Europe. The Europeans only make matters worse by trying to compete with the US for Moslem favors. But perhaps the most serious problem of the West is that the Moslem states are aware of Western greed and its political repercussions. They had very good reasons to believe they will not be punished for increasing their military, political and economic capacity to a point at which they can blackmail the West into accepting their political, cultural or religious demands. Today, after the terrorist attack on New York and Washington, they are hoping that the US will settle for destroying Bin Laden and the Taleban and gradually resume its oil-dictated pro-Moslem policies.

For during the post-World War II era, the United States has tended to support authoritarian Moslem dictatorships on vital territorial issues when their interests conflicted with those of non-Moslem states, needlessly increasing their self-confidence and strategic importance. Israel was compelled to return the Sinai Peninsula (which it had occupied during a defensive war in 1967) to Egypt and may yet be told to cede the strategically vital Golan Heights to Syria – one of the main sponsors of radical and fundamentalist Islamic terrorism. Lebanon, created to provide self-determination for its Christians (then a majority), was allowed to fall under Syrian rule, causing the destruction of the Christian power structure and mass Christian emigration. In the Balkans, the US intervened militarily and falsified election results to maintain a Islamic regime in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Then it used massive military strikes to help Moslem Albania separate the Kosovo province from Serbia, of which it has been an integral part for centuries, disregarding the anarchy in Albania where armed gangs compete for power and trade in drugs. Now it is trying to help Albanians obtain additional rights and influence in Macedonia.

The only identifiable motive behind this long-term US policy is the greed of American business circles determining it and the profits they reap in oil-rich Moslem states. Promoting democracy abroad is certainly not on the US agenda. Even the occupation of democratic India’s territory by communist China has been ignored for the past 39 years, mainly for reasons already stated, but partly because China was an ally of Moslem Pakistan. Consistency is also not a US hallmark. Its media and "globalist" politicians decry ethnic or ethno-religious nationalism when dealing with West European allies but treat it as almost sacred when Moslems invoke it on behalf of their territorial claims.

The erosion of nationalist and/or religious motivations in the West - especially after the bipolar world and the rival superpower disappeared in 1991 - is another important factor affecting the assessment of the dangers facing Western civilization. At the beginning of this century, the US was still very much a Christian state. Since World War II, it is increasingly gravitating towards agnostic liberalism and cynical materialism. The argument that religion was a great rallying cry for war throughout human history is often used against it. However, few have dared to criticize Islam (as distinct from Islamic fundamentalism) on this account, though the question how to motivate power-wielders and populations in democratic states to deal with Moslem aggression and Moslem terrorism must clearly be faced. Patriotism motivated by ethnic nationalism can be a good substitute for religion in this respect. But agnostic liberalism cannot fulfill this function, especially when it is laced with pacifism and globalism. For a superpower, it is a source of weakness and a serious handicap in dealing with terrorists or religiously motivated aggressors.

Not a single Moslem state is a democracy. When there is serious internal opposition to a Moslem ruler, his rivals sometimes demand "democracy" during their bid to topple him, but never maintain it if they gain power. So there is an obvious contradiction between promoting democracy and supporting Moslem states. The contradiction between supporting globalism with ostensibly equal rights for all races, religions or nations and across-the-board support for Moslem territorial and cultural expansion should be no less obvious. These contradictions are a grave American weakness, as ideological confusion hamstrings the ability to act logically and firmly.

The US advocates globalism because it is a means of imposing on the world economic hegemony by a select group of supra-national corporations and big banks, the large majority of which are American. The assumption is that economic hegemony maintains political hegemony. A few big British, German, Japanese and French companies are allowed to share the profits, partly to keep them quiet, but chiefly because their influence on business circles in their countries may limit opposition to American plans or activities. However, since a goodly proportion of the spoils is in oil-rich Moslem states, the Europeans - and especially France - have not always cooperated. They remember the 1956 Suez crisis and, conscious of the US attempt to gain Moslem goodwill by means of political and territorial concessions, have upped the ante by offering more of the same.

Perhaps the most crucial aspect of assessing the only superpower’s prospects of maintaining its status relates to the impact of its policies on the Moslems. These quickly understood that the American talk about promoting democracy was propaganda for internal consumption and that the US preferred to deal with autocratic rulers, who are much easier to bribe. They also understood that they were in no danger of losing US support for their territorial claims against non-Moslems regardless of how they behaved. Syria is perhaps the outstanding example. It has occupied Lebanon. It has long been on the US list of states supporting terrorism and maintains training camps for 10 terrorist organizations operating against Turkey, Israel, Western Europe and the United States. There is clear evidence that the June 1996 bomb which blew up the USAF quarters in Dhahran, killing 19 Americans, was made in the Syrian-controlled Beka’a Valley and transported to Saudi Arabia by truck through Syria and Jordan with the knowledge and approval of Syrian officials. Moreover, Syria is an ally of Iran and has been doing everything possible to help Iraq outwit the embargo the UN imposed upon it. Yet the US still wants Israel to cede the Golan Heights to Syria!

When dealing with Moslems, this kind of political masochism has a heavy price. It promotes terrorism and it encourages the oil-rich Moslem states to buy off the sponsors of terrorism with political and/or financial support. For the burgeoning of Moslem terrorism - radical as well as fundamentalist - the United States, Britain and France have only themselves to blame. It is safe to predict that this terrorism will be one of the main American security concerns in the 21st century. But the political ambitions of the Moslem world may turn out an equally serious problem.

This analysis began by recalling that throughout human history empires rose by military conquest and fell when their rulers took their power for granted and that the basic cycle of war, occupation, exploitation, negligence and collapse has not changed. It noted that greed has always blinded power-wielders to danger. The greed of the business tycoons promoting globalism is far greater in scale and its impact on humanity than any greed history has known - and just as blind. It has nurtured an enemy who cares more about land than about money and has a profound religious urge to prove his superiority to the infidel. The message of history is that the United States will be unable to stem the tide of Islam in the 21st century unless it abandons globalism and begins to treat Moslem states as potential enemies whose strategic assets and importance must be reduced before it is too late.

3. The Cure the West Rejected Unlike all other religions, Islam has been gaining new adherents rapidly during recent decades, not least within the Western democracies themselves. While Western media, politicians, social scientists and educators claim progress towards a "new global society" based on human equality where religion and patriotism are dirty words, reality demonstrates that Islam, the only creed extending its hold on human minds, explicitly claims the superiority of its believers over unbelievers and urges them to take over the unbeliever’s land whenever they can. The said media, politicians, social scientists and educators operate on behalf of the narrow circle of tycoons benefiting financially from the portrayal of their attempt to dominate the globe as "humanist", "progressive" and even "inevitable"... but also from the political and economic bribes to the Moslem states. Which explains why "globalism" and Islam - obviously irreconcilable - have received their simultaneous support.

Human minds are usually inelastic. Wishful thinking comes easy. Changing preconceived notions is difficult. Changing US State Department policies is even more difficult. A small but growing number of people may have misgivings about these policies and the nature of the globalism protected by the US. However, their ability to do something about this is severely limited, since a high proportion of influential Western electronic media and newspapers are controlled, directly or indirectly, by the economic interests promoting globalism and some are heavily funded by Arabs. Even when unconnected with these interests, politicians are hamstrung by their dependence on these media for reelection. Serious critics may be denied the exposure required to influence public opinion. Until the Islamic attack on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, the chances were therefore much better than even that the policy-makers in the US would continue their simultaneous support of globalism and Islam until these destroy Western civilization and democracy the world over. Now the shock of this terrorist attack offers a chance that long-pursued policies will be shelved. Yet the syndrome of greed as a catalyst of collapse may still win out. It always has in the past.

The disease has a difficult and unpleasant cure the West will be reluctant to embrace. The first prerequisite of dealing with Moslem terrorism and Moslem territorial expansion is to admit that they thrive on the pre-Twin Towers policies and can be prevented only if these policies are changed. The second prerequisite is to understand that Moslem terrorism and Moslem territorial expansion are complementary. The character of Islam makes terrorism popular in the Moslem states, unless, of course, it is directed against Moslem rulers. Every successful act of terrorism against unbelievers enhances the prestige and following of terrorist movements among the Moslem masses. Most Western policy-makers are aware of this, and sometimes indirectly admit it in public. Yet they and their tame media were always ready with excuses. The blowing up of the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania is a case in point. Apprehending some of the culprits will discourage terrorism no more than the deaths of suicide bombers. The really important reaction was that of the Arab League, which unanimously condemned the American reprisal raids on Sudan and Afghanistan. It takes a stupid policy-maker to close his mind to the obvious conclusion that the rulers of the Arab states, even when they do not identify with the terrorists personally, know that their acts enjoy widespread support in their own countries. During one Arab League meeting, the entire West viewed the anti-American demonstrations and flag-burning in the Moslem world on its television screens. The PLO took part in this Arab League meeting, voting and allowing the public burning of US flags with the rest. Shortly afterwards, the United States clarified that it wants Israel to cede additional territory to the PLO...

The State Department consistently ignores or excuses the hatred of the US in Moslem states, perhaps in the futile hope that it can be ended by sacrificing Israel (or Kosovo, the Christians of Sudan, Lebanon and Indonesia, etc.) to the Moslem Moloch. This policy indicates the ideological weakness and economic greed of the West to Moslem rulers, encouraging their territorial aspirations and Moslem terrorism alike. It also faces Christians living in Moslem states with the tragic choice between emigration, supporting their governments or hopeless revolt. Sometimes their fears even cause them to join Moslem terrorist movements.

In the West, the fear of Moslem violence has dictated a double standard under which this violence is cited in justification of policies of appeasement, while the victims of appeasement are condemned and sometimes punished for using violence in retaliation. Pre-Twin Tower Western propaganda supported Moslem states against democracies. It also supported the potential aggressor against his intended victims. The parallel with 1936-1939 is amazingly close. But Britain and France were saved from the fatal consequences of appeasing Hitler by Stalin and the intervention of the United States. The United States of today has nobody to save it from the consequences of appeasing the Moslems.

The motivations and patterns of this appeasement have become so deeply embedded in the minds of American policy-makers that to neutralize them remains an almost impossibly difficult task. They seem incapable of understanding that Moslem rulers cannot accept the concept of "one world", unless it is a world under Moslem rule. Islam forbids them to strive for a world under US hegemony. The distinctions between their goals and the goals of Moslem terrorists have been blurring. Western apathy will ensure that they will continue to blur until the terrorists become the rulers’ instrument.

Due to its pretense to "globalism", the West is equally blind to the importance of demographic trends. The Moslem population of the world has been increasing fast - not only in Asia and Africa but also in Europe and the United States. Unlike the Western democracies, China, Japan and India, all of which try to control the birth rate in order to raise living standards, most Moslem states regard demography as a political weapon. A few of their rulers, like Mubarak of Egypt, suffer from Islamic terrorist movements operating from bases in the Western world. But the majority understands that the bigger the Moslem populations in Europe and America, the greater the political influence they will exert, the harder it will be to deprive them of it, and the more concessions Moslem states will be able to extort from the West.

Just as in 1936, checking appeasement requires a revolution in the West’s political thinking. It requires a realization that safeguarding Western power-wielders’ economic interests from Moslem encroachment or confiscation may become impossible if such encroachments continue to be tolerated or encouraged, for whatever reason. It requires understanding that Islam regards lies, violence and threats of violence as legitimate means of gaining political ends and that the only capacity Islam respects in an unbeliever is the capacity to use diplomacy or military force successfully against it. After signing his peace treaty with Israel, President Anwar Sadat of Egypt explained to President Hafez Assad of Syria that their strategic goal was identical but that Israel had to be reduced in size before it could be realized. The same principle must be applied to the Moslem world now. Reducing its size, whether it likes it or not, should be one the West’s urgent strategic concerns. Urgent, because far sooner than Western policy-makers think, it may become impossible - and then the Islamic expansion may gather momentum while the global balance of power will shift rapidly away from the United States.

Such a goal requires much more than modifying existing policies. It requires their reversal. These policies are counterproductive even as regards the prospects of democracy within the Western world. Not ethnic nationalism but the attempt to suppress it (while simultaneously permitting mass immigration of ethno-religious minorities into previously stable nation-states) has created the growing fascist and neo-Nazi movements of Western Europe. Ethnic nationalism and carefully controlled immigration policies limiting the scale of immigration to socially acceptable levels are not "racism" but a legitimate expression of national sovereignty. Moreover, a European state fixing immigration quotas can legitimately take into consideration that most Indians, Chinese and Christian Africans are peaceful while most Moslems have a high subversion potential. It is no paradox that a return to ethnic nationalism is the only way to combat neo-Nazism. It is just common sense. And the growth of neo-Nazism in the US and Western Europe will prove yet another obstacle to checking Islamic terrorism. The two have cooperated in the past and are likely to do so again.

On the ground, the reversal of existing policies means, inter alia, active Western help, diplomatic and when necessary military, to relieve Indonesia of West Papua and the Christian parts of the Moluccas, to expel Syria from Lebanon and create a Christian state in part of Lebanon, to create an independent Christian state in southern Sudan, to detach the Serb-populated and Croat-populated parts from Moslem-dominated Bosnia-Herzegovina, to stop Albanian attempts to take over Kosovo or Macedonia and to force the Arabs to give "land for peace" to Israel. It also means supporting India against Pakistan and independence for oil-producing, Christian provinces of Nigeria. In line with its pro-Moslem policy, the West stood idly by in 1967-1970 when Moslems massacred hundreds of thousands of Christians in these provinces, then called Biafra, during their struggle for self-determination. The time has come to atone for this. The religious tensions between Moslems and Christians in Nigeria are rising steadily.

The inevitable argument against such a policy reversal will be that it will set off Islamic terrorism "on a never before experienced scale." It is as spurious as the logic combining "globalism" and "promotion of democracy" with support of Moslem dictatorships. Islamic terrorism has been thriving because the existing policy is perceived as a sign of Western weakness. Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Sudan, Afghanistan and Pakistan supported it openly before the Twin Towers outrage. Its scale will diminish when it ceases to pay political dividends to the movements concerned and Islam as a whole. This too is in line with the pragmatism promoted by the Moslem religion.

The real problem facing the United States and Western democracy is not how the Moslems will respond to a policy hostile to their interests but whether the West still has the moral strength to adopt any policy causing its power-wielders temporary financial losses. Curbing their greed is a prerequisite for maintaining US superpower status and for success in the inevitable conflict with Islam. Will the ideals of democracy prove too weak to overcome cupidity?

There is very little time. The substitution of "globalism" for nationalism has spawned the twin evils of Neo-Nazism and rampant authoritarian Islam. And, as always in history, greed has spawned negligence. The West will be lucky to avoid serious setbacks even in the sphere of technology on which much of its present predominance depends. It needs a leadership with political courage that knows historical trends at least as well as how to line its own pockets. It needs less hypocritical talk about promoting democracy and more action to discomfit dictatorships. This is still a tall order.

4. Postscript from the Ashes of the Twin Towers The terrorist attack on the United States on 11 September 2001 may or may not prove a watershed. It will not be if the Western reaction is confined to Osama Bin Laden, his followers and Afghanistan, leaving other hotbeds of Moslem terrorism untouched. But now there is at least a small chance of a policy reversal sharp enough to check a deadly historical trend. Superficially, the US request to Israel to renew urgently its "negotiations" with Yasser Arafat is a bad omen. It can and may be interpreted as readiness to reward terrorism in the Middle East while condemning it in America and Europe – a course fraught with great danger for those promoting it. Arafat is an unrepentant terrorist with the deliberate murder of US diplomats on his record and the self-declared goal of destroying the Jewish state. Israeli negotiations with him are no more justifiable than US negotiations with Bin Laden. However, there is a bare possibility that the US is merely seeking to keep the Arabs quiet while its completes its preparations for war.

Even more astounding and dubious is the American attempt to rope Moslem states sponsoring terrorism into a "coalition against terrorism." By now both the PLO and Syria have declared themselves ready to take part and may well expect to be rewarded for this. If this is the poisoned fruit of an appeasement policy towards Arab terror while singling out Afghanistan and Bin Laden for exclusive blame, the West may well die of it in the long run.

The Twin Towers-Pentagon attack requires rapid action on several fronts – not least within the United States. It was carefully prepared over a relatively long period with the active or passive involvement of selected small sections of the Arab-American population. It is already known that Egyptian and Saudi Arabian nationals took part in it and that some of them received training as pilots in the US. But concentrating on these groups only is self-defeating. They are no more anti-American than the Hezbollah, the PLO, the Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and other Islamic fundamentalist or radical Arab movements. Operating for many years in the US and protected by its freedom of expression, some of these raised large sums of money to finance terrorism elsewhere. As terrorism against unbelievers is popular in the Arab world - especially when it is successful - it will now be much easier to recruit their members and sympathizers for more terrorist acts. The minimum requirement to prevent this is their internment.

There is evidence that during the 1990s the CIA was penetrated by many double agents serving Bin Laden and the Egyptian Islamic Jihad. Israel sent a secret delegation to the US in March 1997 to warn Clinton, Madeleine Albright and Sandy Berger about the Islamic Jihad cells, but nobody even agreed to hear it or read the material it brought, on the grounds that this "might interfere with the peace process and spoil US relations with Egypt." Since President George W. Bush left George Tenet and his team at the CIA, the total failure of American intelligence services to come up with advance information concerning the attack on the Twin Towers is not surprising. So much for the contribution of the Middle East "peace process" to the security of the United States…

The immediate US reaction reported by the media was an air attack on Kabul. This may have helped to raise internal morale, but served no useful military purpose. Bin Laden does not live there. An operation aiming to destroy his training camps in Afghanistan and uproot the Taleban regime makes sense, but will do very little to prevent Islamic terrorism against the US in future – even if Bin Laden is killed – unless the Arab terrorist movements mentioned above are also hit hard enough to lose faith in the success of their cause.

Moreover, the terrorist movements are not the only potential source of danger to the West. The states sponsoring them are more dangerous, since they are more likely to produce or acquire sizeable quantities of chemical, biological and possibly nuclear weapons. Pakistan already has nuclear weapons. Iran, Iraq, Syria and Egypt possess chemical weapons and the potential to produce biological weapons at short notice. Iran, Iraq and Syria are strongly anti-American, as is Pakistan, despite the help it received from the US in the past. Egypt’s regime is not, but public opinion there is hostile and the possibility of a fundamentalist coup must be taken into consideration.

The only one of the above states that can be of real help to the US in destroying the forces of the Taleban is Iran. It has a long frontier with Afghanistan, far more easily crossed than the mountains on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border. It has been hostile to the Taleban for a long time. Some believe it might even use its own forces for attacking it. However, President Khatami would be taking a big risk if he tries to agree on this with the United States or to provide the "Great Satan" with air bases. He has no authority to act in this sphere without approval from the Supreme Leader, Ali Khamenei, who controls the armed forces. Even if Khamenei grants it, he may balk at American conditions (e.g. stopping support for the Hezbollah) and demand a pledge that his ally, Syria, and the terrorist movements it supports be left alone. Yielding to him would mean that, in exchange for a Taleban-free Afghanistan, the US ignores more than half of the most dangerous anti-Western terrorists in the Middle East.

If the West intends to hammer away at Afghanistan while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil and its pro-Moslem tilt, it risks being the star actor of a Greek tragedy in which the Gods make the unfortunate rulers mad before they destroy them. The West can neither buy the Arabs who hate it by sacrificing Christian Lebanese and Israeli Jews nor suppress terrorism by embracing states and movements sponsoring it. Creating such a coalition may repeat the failure of the elder Bush’s coalition to suppress the terrorist regime in Iraq. Instead, it should hark back to the World War II and remember how it was won. Some of the same ruthlessness is needed now. The enemy is no less dangerous and even more fanatic. Waiting to be hit by Moslem nuclear bombs because one does not wish to be ruthless with states sponsoring terrorism, to shift to non-oil energy or to interfere with the profits of tycoons who do not even care for the economies of their own countries is no prescription for the survival of Western civilization.

President George W. Bush has no easy task. To win this war, he needs to clean out the Augean stables at his intelligence services and put as many as possible of the Arab-American agents and potential agents for the enemy under lock and key. Some new blood at the State Department not contaminated by longstanding yet outworn policies that can still provide a share of Moslem oil wealth for some multinational corporations but no longer help the US economy and have begun to endanger America’s security would also help. And then - when he is ready – the Moslem terrorists and the states aiding them must be hit, simultaneously or one after the other, but so hard that their confidence in their ability to destroy or seriously harm the United States and its allies is utterly broken.

NOTE: It is to be hoped that aggression by Moslem states and terrorist movements against non-Moslem states will be treated by the West with less leniency, not to speak encouragement, after the terrorist outrage in New York and Washington DC. Moslems usually regard their terrorists as "freedom fighters" when they act against unbelievers.

Irshad Manji - one woman's struggle to come to grips with the disparity between what the Koran contains against what is taught in the madressas.

The following excerpted from here.

Why I'm struggling with Islam
As refugees from Idi Amin's Uganda, my family and I settled just outside of Vancouver in 1972. I grew up attending two types of schools: the secular public school of most North American kids and then, for several hours at a stretch every Saturday, the Islamic religious school (madressa).
I couldn't quite reconcile the open and tolerant world of my public school with the rigid and bigoted world inside my madressa. But I had enough faith to ask questions -- plenty of them.
My first question for my madressa teacher was, "Why can't girls lead prayer?" I graduated to asking more nuanced questions, such as, "If the Koran came to Prophet Muhammad as a message of peace, why did he command his army to kill an entire Jewish tribe?"
You can imagine that such questions irritated the hell out of my madressa teacher, who routinely put down women and trashed the Jews. He and I reached the ultimate impasse over yet another question: "Where," I asked, "is the evidence of the 'Jewish conspiracy' against Islam? You love to talk about it, but what's the proof?" That question, posed at the age of 14, got me booted out of the madressa. Permanently.
At this point, I had a choice to make: I could walk away from my Muslim faith and get on with being my "emancipated" North American self, or I could give Islam another chance. Out of fairness to the faith, I gave Islam another chance. And another. And another. For the past 20 years, I've been educating myself about Islam. As a result, I've discovered a progressive side of my religion -- in theory.
But I remain a hugely ambivalent Muslim because of what's happening "on the ground" -- massive human rights violations, particularly against women and religious minorities -- in the name of Allah.

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