Implacable Hatred

Andrew Sullivan mentions, in somewhat disapproving tones, articles by Chuck Colson and Pat Buchanan who address two different aspects of the war Islam is waging upon the West. Colson believes that our decadent culture with its obsessions with sex, both hetero and homo, does nothing so much as inspire the Islamists to redouble their efforts to slaughter us and to convince them that they are pleasing Allah by doing so. Colson states that:

We must be careful not to blame innocent Americans for murderous attacks against them. At the same time, let's acknowledge that America's increasing decadence is giving aid and comfort to the enemy. When we tolerate trash on television, permit pornography to invade our homes via the internet, and allow babies to be killed at the point of birth, we are inflaming radical Islam.

Radical Islamists were surely watching in July when the Senate voted on procedural grounds to do away with the Federal Marriage Amendment. This is like handing moral weapons of mass destruction to those who use America's decadence to recruit more snipers and hijackers and suicide bombers.

One vital goal of the war in Iraq, and the war against terrorism, is to bring democracy to the heart of the Islamic world. Our hope is to make freedom so attractive that other Muslim countries will follow suit. But when radical Islamists see American women abusing Muslim men, as they did in the Abu Ghraib prison, and when they see news coverage of same-sex couples being "married" in U.S. towns, we make our kind of freedom abhorrent-the kind they see as a blot on Allah's creation.

Like Colson's, the column by Pat Buchanan should be read in its entirety. It includes some interesting information about Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh and his murder and concludes with this:

Undeniably, Islam is rising. And, like all rising faiths, it is intolerant. Disbelieving that all religions are equal - "There is one God, Allah, and Mohammed is his Prophet" - Islam does not believe all faiths should be treated equally. Why should they be? If one has God's revealed truth, why should one tolerate lies that lead to the damnation of the faithful?

In its new constitution, the European Union has declared Christianity a dead relic. What Islam is saying - with its militancy, its soaring birth rate, it steady replacement of dying Europeans with young Muslim immigrants - is: "Christianity may be your past, but we are your future." My money's on the true believers.

There's one crucial thing Americans and Europeans must understand about the Islamists but evidently not all of us do. They are not going to be mollified by tossing a little foreign aid their way or even by a revival of traditional sexual morality. There is a deep, chronic hatred for the West ingrained in the Muslim psyche and in Arab culture. The hatred grows firstly out of their conviction that God Himself despises us for our cultural depravity and that He is eager for us to be expunged from the face of the earth. They detest us secondly because of our support for the Israeli people whom they hate with more ferocity than they can summon even for us. Thirdly, they loathe us because of their jealousy. When they reflect that they, a once great and proud people who adhere fervently to the one true religion, are living in abject misery and impotence while the wicked infidels skip happily from one success to the next, disdaining God and his prophet, it drives them to acts of horrific violence and madness.

Their spokesmen have been boldly declaring for decades that they will never stop hating or killing us until they have succeeded in destroying both Israel and Western culture and have subjected all non-Muslims either to the sword or to dhimmitude (second class subservience to Islamic law).

We have three alternatives which might mitigate this intolerable state of affairs. We can commit national suicide by every one of us taking a draught of cyanide-laced kool-aid. Or we can commit genocide by bombing the Muslim world forward into the stone age. Or we can do what President Bush is attempting to do and drag the Muslim world kicking and screaming into the modern era. The first option is rather unattractive, the second is morally repugnant, and the third is not guaranteed success. Indeed, the left in this country is working hard to insure that it doesn't succeed. Yet, it is our only viable hope for avoiding endless war and endless terror.