What Is Not In the News

20060410

Worldview | Tech Central Station

     Normally the post for Monday is reserved for the World Watch Preview. Typically, I pick two or three news stories that are wending their way through the 24-hour news cycle- some well known, some not- and provide a snapshot overview of the story and what potential impact that story might have. Today, however, I have decided to deviate from that pattern because I want to discuss a topic that is very important to me and that is not found in the mainstream 24-hour news.

     That topic is the fact that the Western world, whether it acknowledges, agrees with, or accepts the fact, is at war with Islam. There are many who will stop reading this post with the previous statement, dismissing it as the hyperventilating rhetoric of an ultra-conservative. While there may be some truth to that evaluation on some topics that I post on this weblog, the subject of the ongoing Islamic Jihad against anyone who is not Muslim does not fall to that standard.

     Instead, the subject rears up as the single most frightening reality most of us will likely experience in our lifetimes, and when I say ‘in our lifetimes’ I mean in the next months and years, not decades. The problem is that most Westerners, and Americans are probably the worst, have almost no idea what I am even referring to.

     When Islam or the Middle East is mentioned, most Americans immediately think of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or, more recently, the continuously unfolding events in Iraq. Some will think about Islamic extremists and terrorism. Fewer still will think of the religious, political, and social turmoil that constantly plagues the Islamic world from Morocco to the Philippines. Beyond that, just a choice few will think of menaces like Iranian Shiite Islam or Saudi Wahhabism.

     Unfortunately, it is the very few who are truly cognizant of the actual menace we face from the growing sentiment in the Islamic world to once again establish a wider Islamic Caliphate similar to the one that united Islam for the first few hundred years of its history. That is a history that predates the Crusades and the long history that comes after them, and a history that practically no one in the West knows, yet it is a history that many in the Muslim world aspire to and hold up as the ‘golden age’ of Islam.

     The core of that history is that Islam – and I grant that Islam is many things- is a religion of conquest. Very few people know or understand that before 630AD, most of what is now considered the Muslim world had never even heard of Islam, let alone Arabs, and most of what is now the Arab World was ruled by the Easter Roman Empire from its center at what is now Istanbul.

     Very few people know that, around 630, a flood of recently converted Arab Bedouins launched themselves from the Arabian desert into what we consider in the West to be the ‘classical world’ and conquered it by force. Those conquests stretched east to India, north to the gates of Constantinople, and west to the Atlantic coast of Africa. Muslim armies invaded Spain and southern France. This was all accomplished before 800AD.

     Not very many people understand that, before those invasions, most of the peoples conquered by the Muslim armies were Greek or Latin speaking Christians. These people were predecessors to our own modern culture. They thought much like us, they believed much like us, and they found themselves working toward the same goals that would eventually become the ideals of liberty that we so cherish and yet take for granted today.

     Those people were engulfed by the culture of Islam, which is little changed today from how it was 1300 years ago. From the very beginning, Islam was a religion of force and violence, and much of that violence was leveled at those considered to be the enemies of Islam. Muslims then as now persecuted anyone who was not Muslim, using everything from unfair taxes to execution as their means to drive all peoples toward their own religion. They constantly made war with their non-Muslim neighbors, and even when the caliphate eventually collapsed, the Jihad did not.

     The advancing Muslim Turkish armies that continued the Jihad were not defeated by the West until 1529 at the gates of Vienna, Austria, and while their advance was halted, the fighting continued for centuries afterward in some fashion. In fact, the Muslim Jihad begun in 623 did not truly end until 1918 when the Ottoman Empire was disbanded by the Treaty of Versailles that ended World War One.

     If you have lasted this long into this post, you many be wondering where I am going with this brief and somewhat confusing history lesson. The point is that the events of 9-11, and the terrorism that has existed before and since that date are an extension of that same Jihad.

     If you doubt the veracity of such a statement, consider the truth of the organization we know as al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda, as led by Osama bin Laden and his bevy of lieutenants, is the outgrowth of a particularly extreme version of Sunni Islam known as Wahhabism. Wahhabists hearken to a puritanical and strict interpretation of Islam that even other extremist sects of Islam find unpalatable.

     Their complete beliefs are too much to go into detail here, but suffice it to say that Wahhabists believe in a strict interpretation of the Koran, the Hadith, and the Sunnah, which are the three main bodies of teaching within Islam. Among these beliefs, and perhaps foremost, is the belief that Islam is destined to rule the world and that Islam must be ruled by a leader who is both the political and spiritual leader of all Muslims known as the caliph.

     Al-Qaeda grew out of followers of Wahhabism who were insulted by the presence of US and Coalition forces- godless infidels in their minds- in Saudi Arabia as a result of Operation Desert Storm and its aftermath. To their way of thinking, the fact that the Saudi monarchy allowed these infidels onto the holy soil of Mecca and Medina justified a Jihad to topple that monarchy and replace it with a Wahhabist government- the first step on a wider crusade to establish a new Islamic Caliphate with Mecca as its center.

     In declaring this Jihad, al-Qaeda appealed to the first Jihad of the early expanding Islamic nation, calling on their fellow Muslims to set aside their internal differences in order to set the world right first- that is to establish Islam as the only religion by which all peoples of the world will worship Allah. This original Jihad has metastasized since then, but the core of the al-Qaeda objective, to topple the Saudi regime and establish an Islamic state, has remained at the center.

     This call to Jihad has been heard by many Muslims in recent years who, disaffected by the political, economic, and social instability and incapability of most of the governments within the Muslim word, have turned to increasingly more radical forms of religious zealotry as a salve against the problems they cannot otherwise solve. In this growing mass of angry, religious Muslims, organizations like al-Qaeda have found the recruits that have allowed them to challenge the most powerful nations in the world- the US, Britain, Russia, Spain, and others- on their own territory and at times and places of the terrorists’ choosing.

     And all of those challenges- 9-11, Madrid, London, Bali, Iraq, and so many others- are designed for the singular purpose of weakening the non-Muslim world in the face of a rising tide and sentiment within the Muslim world to reestablish the caliphate and resume the Jihad of the Muslim past. This is the ultimate goal of al-Qaeda, of the Shiite ayatollahs of Iran, of Hezbollah, of the foreign fighters in Iraq, of the terrorist sleeper cells and trainees that are even now among us.

     If you have borne with me to this point, you may now see my point becoming clearer. This threat, this reality, is not in the news, yet it walks among us everyday, taking pictures of potential terrorist targets, buying industrial chemicals, testing security in public places, perhaps even just leaving a package unattended at a shopping mall to see if anyone even notices or cares.

     At the same time, through nations like Iran and Syria, these enemies of everything we claim to stand for and believe in are actively and directly seeking to possess a variety of deadly weapons, the most fearsome of which are nuclear, chemical and biological. The goal of these Jihadis, indeed that is how they think of themselves, is to unite the terrorists in place with the weapons that can do us the most harm.

     And now the point coalesces into the reality that it is. While we fight a so-called ‘War on Terror’ it is indeed like fighting a war on fever instead of fighting the flu. Because most of us in the West, especially in America, are so unaware of the reality of the Islamic Jihad against us, that we do not conceive of the reality that a very patient and determined enemy is closer than they have ever been to bringing Armageddon to our own soil.

     Because we refuse to fight the war that has been brought against us, instead reverting back to our tired habits of political correctness, isolationism, and apathy, we have basically handed the battle to our enemies. Because so many of us simply do not care to even know that there is an enemy, we condemn ourselves to be threatened and potentially killed by them.

     Yet, it is not too late. We are far behind in our fight, but it is still a fight we can win. There is no doubt that victory will be a tough road, fraught with the kinds of decisions that no free thinking, liberal society every wants to have to make, but it is a fight that we must take up. The truth is that the end of this fight will mean that either we will all be Muslim, dead, or there will be a lot of dead Muslims. The choice is ours and, whether we decide to act or not, we still choose.

DLH