Posted on 06/23/2006 1:29:57 PM PDT by Frank T
In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.
"It has always seemed to me ... probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."
Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.
Indeed, as one watches U.S. armed forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and Jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
The idea for which our many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet, that Islam, or submission to the Quran, is the only path to paradise and that a Godly society should be governed according to the Sharia, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.
What idea do we have to offer? Americans believe that freedom comports with human dignity, that only a democratic and free-market system can ensure the good life for all, as it has done in the West and is doing in Asia.
From Ataturk on, millions of Islamic peoples have embraced this Western alternative. But today, tens of millions of Muslims appear to be rejecting it, returning to their roots in a more pure Islam.
Indeed, the endurance of the Islamic faith is astonishing.
Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967 and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.
What occasioned this column was a jolting report in the June 20 Washington Times, by James Brandon, alerting us to a new front.
"Arrests Spark Fear of Armed Islamist Takeover" headlined the story about the arrest, since May, of 500 militants who had allegedly plotted the overthrow of the king of Morocco and establishment of an Islamic state that would sever all ties to the infidel West -- to end the poverty and corruption they blame on the West.
The arrests raised fears that Al Adl wa al Ihsane, or Justice and Charity, was preparing to take up arms to fulfill the predictions of the group's mystics that the monarchy would fall in 2006. Though illegal, Al Adl wa al Ihsane is Morocco's largest Islamic movement, which boycotts elections, but has hundreds of thousands of followers and has taken over the universities and is radicalizing the young.
Its founder is Sheik Abdessalam Yassine, who has declared its purpose is to reunite mosque and state: "Politics and spirituality have been kept apart by the Arab elites. And we have been able to reconnect these two aspects of Islam -- and that is why people fear us."
And, one might add, why people embrace them.
If Morocco is now in play in the struggle between militant Islam and the West, how looks the correlation of forces in June 2006?
Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties who hearken to Ayatollah Sistani brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.
This has all happened in the last year. And where are we winning?
What is the appeal of militant Islam? It is, first, its message: As all else has failed us, why not live the faith and law God gave us?
Second, it is the Muslim rage at the present condition where pro-Western regimes are seen as corruptly enriching themselves, while the poor suffer.
Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.
Lastly, Islamic militants are gaining credibility because they show a willingness to share the poverty of the poor and fight the Americans.
What America needs to understand is something unusual for us: From Morocco to Pakistan, we are no longer seen by the majority as the good guys.
If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?
What a crock - this is from the populist, Ross Perot school of politics. Spend all your time whining about the problem (as you see it), then ask what is being done to solve the problem. But nowhere do you propose a concrete solution. This is the current Demoncrat strategy - whine about the mean, awful Republicans, but don't offer ANY specific solutions.
If you offer solutions, people might actually analyze them and point out where you are wrong. Someone should ask Pat what he thinks we should do - but I am afraid he might write another article (knowing that no one will actually implement whatever he suggests).
As usual Patty is full of it.
You really have to wonder if he has ever been out of the country except on carefully orchestrated "tours"
At least be less decadent, so that the caliphate will eat us last?
The Wahabist considered the church socials in 1930's Colorado to be decadent.
It's puzzling that a dedicated, traditional Catholic as Pat Buchanan seems to be expressing admiration for Islamic militancy. We can justifiably take the West to task for its secularist, moral decadence, but that, I think, is used by the Islamists as an immediate excuse, and in no way does it justify the brutality of terrorism. I can be more Catholic than the Pope, but an Islamist will still consider me an "infidel" whose life is worth nothing if I don't follow the tenets of Mohammed and the Koran.
Pat, this is dedicated to you:
"It is not the critic who counts, not the man who points out how the strong man stumbled, or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena; whose face is marred by the dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy course; who at the best, knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly; so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory or defeat."
THEODORE ROOSEVELT (Paris Sorbonne,1910)
Only because the world's last superpower is holding its d*** in its hand and not really fighting. And that's only because of our puke liberals. If we ever cut lose on the muzzies, God (the real God, not Allah) help them.
And is it just me, or is Pat back on his meds again? This article almost made sense.
I think Pat has become more of a Wotanist (described in 'The Pink Swastika' than a Catholic). The head Catholic (if I can call him that), Pope Benedict the XVI, not only seems like a nice guy, but he's an astonishingly intelligent, inciteful commentator to boot IMHO.
Capitulation or death are the options militant Islam offers the West. Assuming most Americans prefer a third way, the answer to the problem seems obvious: Adopt retaliatiatory ruthlessness as our governing foreign policy. Those who will never love us will at least grow to fear us.
While most would today recoil from proposals to answer a future 9-11 with, say, the erasure of Tehran, such reservations will evaporate with the next act of mega-terrorism in the U.S.
If they would all stay put and enjoy their Islamicist countries, that might be ok. But they won't.
I'll say this: there is no such thing as time coming for an idea which is provably wrong, no matter how many people may temporarily believe it.
Islam utterly depends on the idea that there is such a thing as prophets and prophecy within our age of the world. That is provably false.
The last real prophet died around the time of Zechariah, something like 2500 years ago depending on whose ideas about chronology you subscribe to. Anybody claiming to be a prophet in 600 AD or anywhere close to that is a BS artist. The long version of that story is found in Julian Jaynes' "Origin of Consciousness" which can still be found in paperback at book outlets.
Prophecy involved using the human mind in a way which ceased to be possible long before the time of Christ. The only two remaining vestages of that antique paradigm for the use of the human mind are schizophrenia and hypnotism.
Yea, where even the Soccer Moms will go mega blood thirsty.
We need the S bomb (Slammnation bomb), i.e. a weapon which spelled outright damnation for slammites within five miles of it going off, and this should consist mainly of freeze-dried pork ground at least as fine as flash powder.
He managed to get surprisingly far into the essay before he started blaming the Joooos. It must have been a tremendous strain on the poor man.
I do not understand why every single non muslim religious leader is not touting the invalid beginnings of the religion of the plagarist pedophile.
Pat admires the Muslims because they hate Jews just like he does.
But what Pat does not understand is that in this case the enemy of my enemy is not my friend. The Muslims certainly hate us Jew infidels, but they also hate the followers of the Trinity, too. The Qu'ran warns they will be sternly punished.
His support of Islam, because of the common enemy Pat and the Muslims have, shows how irrational his policies are and is a further reason for not listening to him.
I'm sorry, I couldn't get past Patsy's first paragraph where he (yet again) brings up the third reich.
Indeed, as one watches U.S. armed forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and Jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.
For starters, Shia and Sunni Muslims don't like each other, so this is hardly one idea. Moreover, the Muslims only have power because the EU and US are not united, and Russia and China are supporting the Islamists.
Islam survived two centuries of defeats and humiliations of the Ottoman Empire and Ataturk's abolition of the caliphate. It endured generations of Western rule. It outlasted the pro-Western monarchs in Egypt, Iraq, Libya, Ethiopia and Iran. Islam easily fended off communism, survived the rout of Nasserism in 1967 and has proven more enduring than the nationalism of Arafat or Saddam. Now, it is resisting the world's last superpower.
Christianity and Judaism have survived more. Perhaps Buchanan is thinking of political Islamism, which is actually rather new and is a response to Modernity. (The Islamic revivalist movements really only started with the fall of the Ottoman Caliphate, although the Wahabists had been fighting their own battle against "decadent" Islam for 200 years.
Islamists are taking over in Somalia. They are in power in Sudan. The Muslim Brotherhood won 60 percent of the races it contested in Egypt. Hezbollah swept the board in southern Lebanon. Hamas seized power from Fatah on the West Bank and Gaza. The Shia parties who hearken to Ayatollah Sistani brushed aside our favorites, Chalabi and Iyad Allawi, in the Iraqi elections. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is the most admired Iranian leader since Khomeini. In Afghanistan, the Taliban is staging a comeback.
This is due to our weakness as well as our silly policy of democratization.
Third, it is a vast U.S. presence that Islamic peoples are taught is designed to steal their God-given resources and assist the Israelis in humiliating them and persecuting the Palestinians.
1. The Saudi clan following the teachings of Ibn Wahab started a Jihad against the Ottomans and the more loberal Hashemites back in the 1750's.
2. The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1923, not 1948.
3. Since Mohammed there have been waves of jihads of conquest. We may be driving some towards the Islamists, but how much more powerful are the Islamists thanks to western weakness?
If Islamic rule is an idea taking hold among the Islamic masses, how does even the best army on earth stop it? Do we not need a new policy?
1. End our reliance on oil.
2. Stop the expansion of Islam in Europe.
3. Contain Islam in the Muslim countries. 4. Kill any Islamists who attack us.
5. Keep the Islamic world divided and weak.
6. Keep Muslim countries militarily weak.
Pat's desire for isolationism does none of this.
Actually, Msulims have done a pretty good job of reducing the number of non-believers in the lands. The former Byzantine Empire is almost without Christians.
Islam does not have what it takes to destroy Christendom, never had it, never will.
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