The Daily Elephant

There is a difference between Islamaphobia, and the fear of the spread of Islamic culture and practices. I, for one, do not share as hard-line a view as many of my colleagues in the blogging world who believe that Islam is nothing more than a religion of hate-mongering and violence. Rather, I think that Islam has entered its own Dark Ages, and has done so in a technologically more dire time than the Christian Dark Ages. Add to this the simple fact that Islam is by nature “evangelical” and not open to anything less than absolutist interpretations–and literal translations–of the Koran, and you begin to see why the spread of Islam into the West can, and should, be viewed as a threat.

I do not believe that all Muslims want “death to America” or that in every Mosque, the Sheikhs are crying for the utter devastation of Israel, but I do know that in many Mosques, many Muslims and their leaders are calling for our destruction. The notion that any country should be wiped from the face of the Earth is appalling and sinister, and the concept of entire populations of people believing that this should occur is purely frightening.

The utter destruction of Israel is not simply something Mahmoud Ahmadinejad spouts in his hate-filled speeches–it is a sentiment shared, perhaps to one degree or another, across the Muslim world. I have yet to hear a Jewish politician or newspaper call for the destruction of any Muslim state, nor any American call for “death to Iran.”

It is important to recognize, however, that it is not necessarily the fault of many of the practitioners of Islam. This is a religion that is used in many parts of the world to increase the power of the few by creating fear, ignorance, and inspiring hatred amongst the lower classes. The wealthy fund terrorist organizations and radical schools, because this creates foot-soldiers in their war against the West. These schools and terrorist organizations preach vehemently against America, and steer their attention away from the real enemy–the oppressive regimes under which the students and terrorist recruits live. This is a brilliant, if short-sighted maneuver. The Saudi’s and Iranians can live without fear of retribution from their own populations, because they have so tactfully directed all that “angst” against the West.

This explains much of the violence emanating from the Middle-East. One can follow the money and see how the pieces have fallen into place over the years. Instability, also, has given rise to radicalism, especially in places like Afghanistan, where the brutal Taliban filled the void left by the Soviet invasion and the corrupt regimes that followed. Purity and purpose are two of Islam’s greatest recruiting tools. There is a stark simplicity to utter submission. It is a dark sort of faith that can inspire suicide attacks against innocents–that can stretch the meaning of the word martyr to include those that blow up civilians who have done them absolutely no harm. (If only a new definition of martyr could be spread across the Muslim world, perhaps this insanity would decrease….)

Still, while the money, the poverty, the repression and ignorance, the propaganda of Middle-Eastern dictators explains why so many terrorists emerge from those States, what explains the radicalism of European Muslims? Is it like some contagious disease? Has the fervor of the Middle-East simply infected the immigrant population of Europe? One would think that those emigrating to the West would be of a more moderate, a more democratic leaning. This, sadly, is not the case. European Muslims have proven themselves to be easily as radical as their Middle-Eastern counterparts. Here, they live freely. In Europe and America they are given rights they would never achieve in their homelands (except for, perhaps, in hated Israel!). Many of these immigrants call for the destruction not of the countries they now inhabit, but of those countries’ cultures. “Death to Europe” is sung not with the intention of actually slaughtering the populations there (as in the “death to America and Israel” variety) but with the intention of overwhelming the European culture, legal system, and set of values.

The void Christianity has left in Europe leaves that continent ripe for Islamification. Sheikhs push for Sharia, or Islamic Law, to be implemented alongside Civilized legal systems, and it looks as though some governments might cave to this. While not personally religious, and suspicious of any radical religious movement, I find myself wishing that a Christian counterpoint to all this madness existed in Europe as it does in North and South America.

So is this prejudice, to warn against the spread of Islam? Prejudice, I think, seeks out hatred. It takes fear of the unknown and turns it into a weapon. It uses ignorance to subjugate and destroy. Prejudice has spawned all sorts of atrocities. But was it prejudice when Churchill warned of the Nazi threat? Nazism shared much of the same fervor of Islam, though it was more hateful by far.  Islam, we must remember, is as much a political philosophy as it is a religion. This is an important fact to consider when discussing Islam. We are not simply talking about a belief system whose practitioners are happy to follow in privacy or in church on Sundays. Islam calls for Islamic Law wherever it spreads and by whatever means. Like Nazis, who cannot practice their beliefs without infringing on someone else’s, Islam calls for the eventual, gradual, take-over of the entire world. Global Caliphate. Certainly many Muslims don’t believe this is necessary. I believe that, in America at least, many Muslims are of a more moderate stripe, and admire greatly the system we have in place. It isn’t these Muslims I worry about, though I am nervous to see what the next generation of American Muslims will have to offer. In France, one moderate generation has become replaced by radicalism.

I don’t consider myself a prejudiced person. I think many Muslims are good, honest, hard-working people. I distrust wholly, however, the religion to which they subscribe. I think it is a poisonous one. I think anything or anyone that calls for the combining of Church and State is a danger to free peoples. The moderates of the world have never stood a chance against the radicals, at least not in the short term. Moderation and sanity may win out in time, when those appeasers of radicalism are finally woken to act. After several long years of war and genocide in Europe during World War 2, the powers of sanity and moderation finally quelled the Nazi threat.

But Nazism was just a young child at this time, barely twenty years old, and only really standing for a little over a decade. Islam stretches back centuries, has cultivated its ideology over a millennium. It won’t ever fade the way Nazism has, and its spread is more gradual and more insidious. Indeed, those whom it captures are far more likely to become true believers than the puppets Hitler collected.

Islam has all the radical threat of Nazism and all the insidiousness of Communism but adds that last element–faith–into the bloody mix. The Free World, the West, must maintain its principles and values as it combats this infection. The political ideology of Islam is a danger to everything we hold dear, and it must be stopped both militarily and through diplomatic and social means. We must not censor ourselves. We must not retreat into apologies. We must not pander to Islamic statesmen in the United Nations, nor retreat in the court of public opinion.

Is it hard-line to want to preserver one’s culture? Is it right-wing to want to protect one’s legal system? These are human values, and should belong to no one political framework. When there is a threat, it must be stopped, and we must unite to stop it. This includes staying the course overseas as well as at home.

America must stand behind those Europeans who are fighting to preserve their heritage. Otherwise, sooner than we can even imagine, Eurabia will be a reality, and our greatest allies will transform into something else altogether.