Ersatz Islam

USA Today recently featured an editorial by Ralph Peters who wishes to persuade us that Islam is really not at war with the West. The people who are fighting against us, he argues, are not true Muslims. They are counterfeits parading under the banner of a religion whose basic tenets they consistently violate. He writes:

Suicide bombings. Assassinations. The wholesale murder of prisoners. The mass slaughter of 9/11. Videotaped beheadings and the execution studios recently discovered in Fallujah. We describe it as "Islamic terrorism." And we're wrong.

The hard-core terrorists spawned by the breakdown of the Middle East quote the Koran. They wear Muslim garments. They perform the daily rituals prescribed by the faith into which they were born. But all of us, in the West and the Middle East, have mistaken the identity of these butchers.

For all of their Muslim trappings, the terrorists of al-Qaeda and its affiliates have returned to pre-Islamic practices, to behaviors that Moses, Christ and Mohammed uniformly rejected: They practice human sacrifice.

When the terrorists we face invoke the names of "Allah" or "Mohammed," they are blaspheming and corrupting a great faith. The prophet was appalled by the religious practices of the early desert peoples. Those who murder in his name today have rejected his message even as they claim to revere it.

We'd be a lot more inclined to accept Peters' argument if those who are indeed orthodox Muslims would speak out more forcefully than they have against the extremists in their midst. We are eager to believe that we are not really in another phase of a war that Islam has waged against the non-Islamic world off and on now for seven centuries. We would love to think that those who desire nothing so much as to be able to slaughter our children are just a tiny minority of the Islamic lunatic fringe. But we can't. As long as the Islamic media, the Imams, and the entire cultural leadership of the Arab world continue to preach the most virulent hatred for the West, as long as the majority of Muslims feel a frisson of pride and pleasure every time an Israeli or American dies at the hands of a Muslim, the term moderate Muslim will continue to be seen by us as an unfortunate oxymoron.

Despite what President Bush would have us believe, a very substantial portion of the Islamic world detests the West and wishes to destroy all that it stands for. It is the goal of Islam to convert the entire world, by the sword if need be, to the Muslim faith and culture. The sooner we realize the nature and extent of the conflict we're in the more likely we'll be to successfully defend ourselves against it.