Free Republic

In his book "The Enemy at Home," Dinesh D'Souza shows little patience with the leftists who reacted to 9/11 by declaring that America had it coming. And yet, his book is a variant on that theme. It was our cultural decadence, our foul popular movies, music and pornography, D'Souza argues, that enraged traditional Muslims worldwide and moved some to violence. D'Souza is a thoughtful and interesting writer, and many of his observations about the cultural left worldwide, and particularly about the dismaying state of popular culture in America, got vigorous head nods from conservative readers. D'Souza summarizes episodes from a...

The Western world has never taken Islam with the full seriousness it has earned. Down through history, once Islamic armies have conquered a land, with very few exceptions, that land has remained Muslim. A Christian will wish in vain that the great circle of Christian lands around the Mediterranean (and on up into Syria, Iraq, Iran, and northwards into Georgia) had not fallen irretrievably into Muslim hands, most of them before 732 A.D. For Christians who think that the future of the world favors movement in their direction, a study of the latent dynamism of Islam is not a little...

BOSTON (Reuters) - Political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book "The Clash of Civilizations" predicted conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has died at age 81, Harvard University said on Saturday. Huntington, who taught for 58 years at Harvard before retiring in 2007, died Wednesday at a nursing facility in Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, the university said on its website. In his 1996 "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order," which expanded on his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Huntington divided the world into rival civilizations based mainly on religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam,...

This interview appears at the new Occidentalis Blog. The interview was conducted by David Reinharc for Israel Magazine. The image is from Journaux DR - We are familiar with the way Le Pen tripped himself up on the Shoah and with his complacent attitude toward holocaust deniers. What is your position with regard to these "assassins of memory" and should those self-proclaimed historians be punished?PDV - I am, as you know, the son of a man who earned the Resistance Medal, a man who was imprisoned and tortured by the Nazis at Lübeck. Holocaust denial is an abomination and of...

Terror Sanitized After the terror attacks in London, a few TV commentators said they would go after those in the media who want to sanitize terrorism. Such bravado may be admirable, but it is a bravado that does not recognize how terrorism has already been sanitized. The leaders of Western democracies have sanitized terrorism because they cannot publicly admit they are helpless to prevent more attacks. Most analysts who study the so-called war on terror could have told you a year ago that there would be a terrorist attack targeting the London subway. Likewise, there are those who will tell...

Declaring that some of the words used by Orianna Fallaci in her book about Islam were "without doubt offensive to Islam and to those who practice that religious faith," an Italian judge has ordered her to stand trial for anti-Islamic defamation. Meanwhile, Condoleezza Rice has in effect accused all of America of anti-Islamic defamation, saying that a single mishandling by a single U.S. serviceman of a single copy of the Koran is a terrible offense that tarnishes the image of our country. Yet even as our Secretary of State condemns America for its bigotry, the Saudi government funds the massive...

If it doesn't exist, then what? When people speak of moderate Islam as the solution to radical Islam, they mean that there is a modernizing core within the Muslim community capable of transforming it into a civilized member of the world community. They foresee that the dar al-Islam, the Realm of Islam, will cease to be at war with the dar al-Harb, the Realm of War, and particularly with that part of the Realm of War known as the West. I describe these ideas as the "ecumenist" school of Western-Islamic relations, because to believe in the existence of moderate Islam...