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 Fanatically
Certain
Ignoring the spiritual clash…
[by Bruce S. Thornton] 2/27/06
Coming hard
upon the heels of the cartoon riots and the election of the
Hamas terrorists, the destruction of the Shi’ite mosque
of the Golden Dome in Samarra by Sunni jihadists, and the subsequent
Shi’ite bloody retaliation, should put paid to Western
delusions about the true nature of Islam. But don’t hold
your breath. Such displays of Islam’s violent intolerance
have been coming thick and fast the last few decades, and can
be found on every page of history going back to the 7th century,
when Islam began its expansion with the blood of several hundred
decapitated Jews.
Yet still
some Westerners, enthralled to their own materialist assumptions
and multicultural “we are the world” sentimentalism,
wave away this evidence and reduce this destructive behavior
to any and every cause except the one that counts: spiritual
belief. So we hear that the violence is caused by a lack of
jobs, or a lack of liberal-democratic institutions, or “frustration” and
insecurity about the dismal backwardness of most Muslim states,
or wounded pride in the face of Western success, or resentment
of Western imperialist and colonialist sins, or oppressive
autocrats, or . . . take your pick. The same therapeutic mentality
that thinks destructive behavior in teens results from a “lack
of self-esteem” reduces the religious values of Muslims
to mere “epiphenomena,” as the Marxists put it,
symptoms of some underlying condition rooted in material deprivation,
political impotence, or psychological trauma.
The problem
with Islam, however, is not a lack of self-esteem but too damned
much. This is a faith fanatically
certain of its
truth and righteousness, the culminating vision of God’s
relations with humanity, the ultimate meaning of human existence
on every level, including the social and political. As such,
its destiny is to spread over the whole world until the benefits,
both in this life and the next, of submission to God are bestowed
on all humans, and the dysfunctional man-made values–– including
democracy, materialism, “equal rights,” and freedom–– are
swept away. For however alluring, these do not deliver true happiness
or true freedom, but mere hedonism and license that create misery
and degradation in this world and put the soul at risk in the
next.
If, then,
you are in possession of this truth that you are absolutely
certain holds the key to universal
happiness in this world and
the next, why would you be tolerant of alternatives? Why should
you tolerate a dangerous lie? Why should you “live and
let live,” the credo of the spiritually moribund who stand
for everything because they stand for nothing? And why wouldn’t
you kill in the name of this vision, when the infidel nations
work against God’s will and his beneficent intentions for
the human race?
This is precisely
what the jihadists tell us, what fourteen centuries of Islamic
theology and jurisprudence
tell us, what
the Koran and Hadith tell us. Yet we smug Westerners, so certain
of our own superior knowledge that human life is really about
genes or neuroses or politics or nutrition, condescendingly look
down on the true believer. Patronizing him like a child, we tell
him that he doesn’t know that his own faith has been “hijacked” by “fundamentalists” who
manipulate his ignorance, that what he thinks he knows about
his faith is a delusion, and that the true explanation is one
that we advanced, sophisticated Westerners understand while the
believer remains mired in superstition and neurotic fantasy.
And of course,
it doesn’t help that the Westernized Islamic
apologists and propagandists, having taken the measure of the
West’s own superstition and fantasy, speak in our terms
and manipulate our materialist causes. So we hear that Western
support of autocrats is really to blame for terrorist discontent––but
overthrowing Saddam Hussein, one of the most brutal murderers
of Muslims ever, and creating for the Iraqi people an inclusive,
law-based government, earn us absolutely nothing other than more
hatred and murder. Ah, but the neo-colonialist Zionists are responsible,
we are told. Yet billions of Western dollars given to the Palestinian
Arabs, decades of obsessive, fawning attention on the part of
the Western media and the UN even as millions have suffered and
died elsewhere, have not moved us one inch closer to resolving
the crisis or removing the existential threat to Israel. Give
us jobs, we are told, an excuse echoed recently by Thomas Friedman,
and we will be happy. Yet the terrorists in the main are not
poor or dispossessed. Their leaders are billionaires, surgeons,
engineers, and the college educated. But the West disrespects
Islam, they cry, all the while our apologetic gestures of admiration
for Islam do not stop the persecution and murder of Christians,
do not elicit reciprocal apologies for the vile insults to Judaism
that appear in state-run media throughout the Muslim world.
Meanwhile,
all our attempts to bolster Muslim self-esteem, our desperate
protestations of respect for their
wonderful religion,
our groveling apologies for exercising our own rights and values,
our donning of the hair-shirt of racist, colonialist, or imperialist
guilt, do nothing more than convince the jihadist that his spiritual
superiority is justified. He looks at our appeasement, our fear,
our rationalizations, our self-doubt, our unwillingness to defend
the values we preach to the world, and sees the craven inferiority
of the dhimmi, the conquered infidel who must acknowledge by
his public actions the superiority of Islam, and who must pay
the jizya, the “poll tax” that purchases his trembling
security. Only we call the poll tax “foreign aid” or “welfare
payments,” and the gestures of submission “respect
for diversity.” We think our submission buys us affection
and gratitude and respect for our interests, but in fact it purchases
nothing except more contempt for our spiritual bankruptcy, more
scorn for our belief that money and material comfort trump spiritual
truth.
The true
measure of our failure adequately to respect spiritual motives
can be taken from the Bush administration’s steadfast
refusal to put the crisis with Islam in these terms. The materialist
left, of course, has been taught by Freud and Marx that religion
is an “illusion,” so obviously we can’t expect
them to grasp how powerfully spiritual imperatives can move people.
But when a self-proclaimed born-again Christian either can’t
or won’t see the clash of spiritual goods underlying the
conflict, then we know how thoroughly the materialists have done
their work of marginalizing religion in the West.
Perhaps the
best example of this contempt for our spiritual foundations
came when the President apologized
for using the
word “Crusade.” The demonization of the Crusades
is a historical distortion that acquiesces in the jihadist rewriting
of history in order to exploit Western self-loathing and spiritual
emptiness. Whatever the sordid or brutal motives and actions
of the Crusaders, they were still for the most part driven by
a spiritual imperative to restore the Holy Land to the Christian
civilization that had defined the Middle East for six centuries
before being violently transformed by the armies of Allah. For
the most aggressively imperialistic culture in the history of
the world to whine now about Western imperialism–– and
be taken seriously by Westerners–– testifies to the
intellectual corruption endemic in the West.
If we continue
down this road of appeasement, apology, and blackmail, then
our outlook is indeed grim. A
culturally weaker and ruder
Europe turned back the Islamic tide because it was united by
its Christian faith, the spiritual strength of all those before
us who died and killed so that this prosperous, free world we
enjoy could exist. But what unites the West now, when our credo
seems to be that juvenile sentiment from John Lennon’s “Imagine”: “Nothing
to kill or die for, and no religion too”? Is this the belief
that can resist an enemy who knows with absolute certainty what
is worth killing and dying for? -one-
copyright
2006 Bruce S. Thornton
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Greek Ways
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Bonfire of the Humanities
by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, Bruce S. Thornton |
Plagues of the Mind
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Eros: The Myth of Ancient Greek
Sexuality
by Bruce S. Thornton |
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