Posted on 09/23/2001 11:39:16 AM PDT by MHGinTN
The World Will Never Again Be As It Was 9/10/2001; It Can Be Better
By Marvin Galloway
America and the free world were thrust into a war on 9/11/2001. What occurred in New York City and Washington, DC was an act of war. Let us be clear about this: the enemy made a horrific strike in a war of aggression. The entire free world, not just America, has an enemy that hates our very existence and wants to destroy us. We must go to war, now and over the coming months and years, if our civilization is to survive into the future … but go to war with whom and where, and how do we wage this war?
Former Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, speaking before a Congressional Committee on September 20th, 2001, focused briefly on the issues and objectives. Netanyahu was subdued when defining the enemy and outlining the necessary approach to this war, but it is time to take the gloves off and be clear with the American people, else a rising clamor for restraint will aid and abet a pernicious attacker that must be annihilated; America must resist the tendency to try and make peace with this particular enemy. This enemy doesn’t want co-existence, doesn’t want to try and get along; this enemy wants to end our existence, wants to destroy us.
Radical Islam (we’ll call it Islamism, to set it apart from the much larger body of Islamic faith) wants to end the world as we’ve come to understand it and remake it as they choose to define it. Islamism wants to take over the larger body of Moslem faith, the religion that co-exists with the other great religions. At the outset, let us make a few subtle but vital distinctions: the history of most great religions has a period of violence perpetrated by adherents; the religion of Islam went through such a period, but settled into a peaceful co-existence with the other religions of the world and within the factions of Islam; radical Islamic totalitarian zeal has arisen in the last twenty years, to challenge the peaceful co-existence of religions and societies.
Reasons for this rise of radical Islam, this Islamism, are bound up in the interactions of nations, as the planet has become a world community. Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union caused the combatants to manipulate and influence the Moslem world, as tools in the struggle. The Cold War ended, promising perhaps a new co-existence among nations and religions. Islamism views the co-existence of many religions as heresy to traditions of Mohammed, asserting that compliance with the tenets must be forced if an individual doesn’t obey in free will. With this perspective, the very presence of non-Islamic peoples living and working in certain parts of the world is seen as a threat to Islamismists. Let us also note that those Moslems practicing their faith in a less than fundamental (as defined by the Islamismists) way are also seen as a threat, by the radicals; history records that tens-of-thousands of Moslems have been slaughtered across Northern Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Eurasia because of this clash between Islam and Islamism.
In an essay written by Free Republic’s, Iron Jack, titled Allah Must Be Proud[http://www.freerepublic.com/forum/a3ba5df0b331f.htm], I found the following astute observation:
The most absurd aspect of the Trade Center bombings is that the butchery was committed in the name of religion, as if there’s a god somewhere who delights in wholesale murder carried out in his name. … The terrorists think that couching their savagery in quasi-religious or nationalistic terms elevates it above mere murder and grants it the disposition of nobility. … Apparently we have regressed to an age when religious war once again threatens civilization, as it has for centuries in the Middle East.
From a religious perspective, there is a god that delights in murder; the terrorists willingly serve that god and believe dying while killing non-Islamismists is an instant pass to the paradise of this god of murder. Islamism is the tool with which this god of murder—this god that hates humankind simply because the God of creation loves us—seeks to destroy peace and reason in the world. In a real sense, the god of Islamism is the antithesis of the God of creation, the opposite of God in Christ, the antithesis of Allah, the antithesis of Jehovah, the hater of Buddha, the twister of that which is Hindu; this little god is a murderer from the start, the father of lies, a hater of men, and a lover of enmity.
The war America has been thrust into is a religious war, at least to the terrorists, and it surely threatens civilization as we know it. This war, no matter its outcome, will change everything to some degree. Hopefully, the changes will turn out to be for the betterment of all humankind, but changes are coming and we ought not shy away from facing them squarely. With this world war, we truly have an opportunity to make world-wide changes that benefit all humankind who wish peaceful co-existence, lifting peoples and societies out of poverty and into a world community that values responsibility and self-reliance, that rewards peaceful co-existence and diligence with security, self-worth and fulfillment. But we must annihilate the enemy of those values, first! We must face down this new totalitarian threat with an eye to ending the enmities that give rise to such fanaticism.
In an essay to follow this one, I will try to address the two-pronged assault needed to wage this war against Islamism. We will need a military-economic-political assault, accompanied by a religious-philosophical assault. The true end to Islamism can only come from the Moslem world rejecting this radicalism that disrupts and destroys through terror and intimidation. To achieve that change of Moslem minds will require addressing the issues held by the greater Moslem community, addressing these issues in a peaceful coherency that generates confidence in co-existence rather than suspicion in factionalism … but first, we must accept that we are at war not at peace.
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