Blind Faiths

Several authors have published books on radical Islam’s threat to the West since that shocking morning in September six years ago. With “The Suicide of Reason,” Lee Harris joins their ranks. But he distinguishes himself by going further than most of his counterparts: he considers the very worst possibility — the destruction of the West by radical Islam. There is a sense of urgency in his writing, a desire to shake awake the leaders of the West, to confront them with their failure to understand that they are engaged in a war with an adversary who fights by the law of the jungle.

Harris, the author of “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History,” devotes most of his book to identifying and distinguishing between two kinds of fanaticism. The first is Islamic fanaticism, a formidable enemy in the struggle for cultural survival. In Harris’s view, this fanaticism has acted as a “defense mechanism,” shielding Islam from the pressures of the changing world around it and allowing it to expand into territories and cultures where it had previously been unknown.

With few exceptions, Harris sees Islamic expansion as permanent. Although this point is arguable, he bravely attempts to make the case that the entry of Islam into another culture produces changes on every level, from political to personal: “Wherever Islam has spread, there has occurred a total and revolutionary transformation in the culture of those conquered or converted.”

By contrast, the West has cultivated an ethos of individualism, reason and tolerance, and an elaborate system in which every actor, from the individual to the nation-state, seeks to resolve conflict through words. The entire system is built on the idea of self-interest. ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Western Civilization is not built upon the idea of self-interest, but upon equality of all men before God, and that all men ( even Muslims) are endowed with inalienable rights that are our gift from God and an intrinsic part of the human condition.

Ali should look to Judeo Christian belief if she is looking for the foundation blocks upon which our culture is built. If freedom exists anywhere in the world it is because it arose naturally through Judeo Christian belief, or it was imposed upon them because they were conquered ( Japan for example), or in the last century countries saw the wisdom of adopting these principles.

If the warlords of early Western Civilization are guilty of excesses, it is through Christianity that they were tamed and subdued. It is due to the Christian belief in freedom and equality before God that slavery was abolished.

Finally,,,,Islam is not Western Civilizations most serious threat. Marxism is! .

Marxists and their Useful Idiots have thoroughly infiltrated every level of our nation's government, the arts, all government social bureaucracies, and especially our K-12 schools, colleges, and universities. These Marxists are hard at work chewing away at the Judeo Christian belief systems that make all freedom possible. In fact, freedom is impossible with these Judeo Christian beliefs.

Our schools are the Marxists most important weapon..

We can and will survive and overcome any nuclear suitcase bomb, but Western Civilization will not survive if the Marxists succeed in indoctrinating the next generation of voters.

Nationbuilding in Iraq! The Islamic world must receive an action so violent and destructive that all of their military forces in zones even remotely hostile are destroyed so that Moslems everywhere understand that Allah does not will Islam to conquer in this century.
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Japan is a rational and peaceful society today, because they had the “attitude adjustment” that you described.

Western Civilization grew directly out of theJudeo-Christian heritage, And Capitalism, the engine that made the West rich and which the rest of the world tries to imitate, grew directly out of the trust between men and outside of the clan that only the Jews and the Christians could work with. Jews and Christians always accepted that if a man said he would do something, then he would do it. Jews invented Finance and Christians made the modern world with it. Other peoples can only trust their relatives and usually only when there is a strong clan head. The huge Chinese corporations are virtually all either government/PLA operations or they are family businesses. Without Jews and Christians there probably would have been no development of large scale long distance trade and no Industrial Revolution.

Harris also fails to address the enemies of reason within the West: religion and the Romantic movement. It is out of rejection of religion that the Enlightenment emerged;

Only the late-Enlightment writers, like the Philosophes and Hume, really qualify for this description.

Thus, it is not reason that accommodates and encourages the persistent segregation and tribalism of immigrant Muslim populations in the West. It is Romanticism.

Actually, a universalist reason that embraces freedom cannot do much to break down tribalism that grows in its own midst, other than hope such traditions will erode on their own. Universalism has trouble with national borders and immigration quotas on certain parts of the world.

Since when did Hrsi Ali get published in the NYTimes? Her AEI connections? Do, say, Serbian Christians ever get to attack Islam in major magazines, or is that the prerogative of only ex-Muslim atheists?

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