Islamic Jihad, The Evil Empire And The Appeasers

Knowing your enemy is the first rule of warfare. A lesson the left still have to learn.

We see the same pathological double standard everywhere today. Western “insults” to Islam––which most of the time are, as in the cartoon controversy or the Pope’s recent remarks, exercises in the precious Western value of free speech––are decried by apologists. Yet the rankest anti-Semitic and anti-Christian slander in Muslim lands, most of it emanating from government-sanctioned media or the religious establishment, are mostly ignored. A punk who rolls a pig’s head into a mosque gets much more attention and condemnation than a Muslim who shoots a pregnant Jewish woman or who rams his car into “infidels.” The genocide in Darfur––a race- and faith-based persecution––is never linked to Islam, and the Muslim world is rarely called to account for their total silence about this human catastrophe. Meanwhile, the American attempt to create freedom and democracy for Muslims in Iraq is condemned as vicious imperialist aggression. Such critics may think that their willingness to ignore the blatant sins of the “other” even as they use a microscope to find the sins of their own culture is a sign of intellectual sophistication. But in actual fact it is, as with the earlier apologists for communist tyranny, a “morbid affliction,” to use Conquest’s phrase––and a sign of Western spiritual corruption in the eyes of the jihadist enemy.

Rather than the dubious comparison of jihadists to fascists recently popular with some commentators, we should instead look to the war against communism for insights into our present crisis. Not because the jihadists are like communists in their ideology, but because the cultural pathologies that endangered the struggle against Soviet tyranny have not disappeared and are today compromising the war against jihad. As with the Cold War, winning this current struggle will require that we see the enemy and his motivations clearly and not dismiss them on the basis of our own prejudices and superstitions.

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We not only have to defeat the Islamists, we have to refight the left all over again. We defeated communism and the left lost their cause. They have now claimed Muslims as their victims.