THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume VI, Issue # 26, February 5, 2004
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
DEADLY ISLAMIC FANTASIES & WORLD WAR IV:
AMERICA & THE WEST AS THE DECLARED
ENEMY IN AN ISLAMIC FANTASY
By Alan Caruba
It is to our credit as a nation, a society, and a culture that Americans instantly grasped the true meaning of 9/11. We understood, as we
had not fully grasped before, that we were the declared enemy in an Islamic fantasy.
“It is the enemy who defines us as his enemy, and in making this definition he changes us, and changes us whether we like it or not,”
writes Lee Harris in his new book, Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History ($26.00, Free Press). “To insist on
maintaining utopian values when your society is facing an enemy who wishes only to annihilate you is to invite annihilation.”
If you still have any doubts whatever, consider what Sheik Saleh al-Taleb, a Saudi Arabian imam told 500,000 people in Mecca’s Grand
Mosque on January 30, 2004, during the annual hajj that brings millions of Muslim pilgrims there every year. “Oh God, give victory to
the holy warriors everywhere. Give them victory in Palestine. Oh God, make the Muslims triumphant and destroy their enemies, and
make this country and other Muslim countries safe. Oh God, inflict your wrath on the criminal Zionists.”
It was the power of that fantasy --- the destruction of America --- that was played out with the lives of those who seized the planes,
those in the planes, and those in the Twin Towers and the Pentagon. More than 3,000 died that day, including those on the plane
that crashed in Pennsylvania.
Those Democratic candidates who are berating President Bush for having “lied” us into the war in Iraq completely miss the essential
reason for our “liberation” of that nation. (And they ignore the years of UN resolutions Saddam Hussein ignored with impunity.)
While they understood invading Afghanistan to rid the world of Osama bin Laden, al-Qa'ida, and al-Qa'ida’s base of operations in
Afghanistan, the Democratic Party critics of the President have not grasped the necessary for our military presence in the Middle East.
We are projecting our power to threaten and, if necessary, destroy any state political regime that harbors the Jihadists. It is a matter of
national survival.
Many of us look at the images of men on their knees, their heads pressed to the ground, facing in the direction of Mecca, and praying
five times daily as some odd form of behavior left over from earlier centuries. We cannot grasp the passion with which Middle Eastern
and other Muslims express and define themselves. We cannot see them as who they are, nor can they see themselves as we see them.
We are a religious society, but most of us do not express our faith as those in the Middle East. Our churches are places of beautiful
music and quiet meditation. We joke about boring sermons. We believe in tolerance for other faiths. We regard them often as simply
different paths to the same God. We may begin a meeting with a prayer or benediction, but we are not suffused with the view that
religion is the sole subject worth discussing. The notion that millions of Muslims are bent on killing us for being “infidels” is beyond
our imagination. The fact that this is preached in thousands of mosques is ever more bizarre and frightening.
We are rational people living, we think, in a rational world. Only we are not living in a rational world. If that were the case, we would
not have a system of “alerts” in place, nor would we submit to searches in airports or have to ponder what a “dirty bomb” could do.
We would not live each day wondering when and where “they” will strike next. Our enemy is not rational and will not yield to the
rational efforts of diplomacy to deter their intent to destroy us.
Our efforts to communicate our intent, our good will, our desire for peace to those in the Middle East, are wasted on a people so
indoctrinated with hatred for the West, that anything we say will be dismissed. A society that thrives on conspiracy theories is
indifferent to our instinctive wish to resolve conflict.
We liberate a nation from the worst despot since Adolf Hitler and elements within that nation continue to wage war against our
allies and us. And against their own people! At great expense and great risk, we freed them and they now seem only to want us to
leave. Thanks, but get out. They haven’t a clue about how to run a constitutional democratic society, they only know they don’t
want us around. The Arabs of the Middle East are the world’s adolescents.
As Harris explains, “If we look at the source of Arab wealth, we find nothing that the Arabs created for themselves.” Indeed, the
Saudis and Saddam Hussein were paid for natural resources “the West could simply have taken from them at will…” What the
West has done is provide “the prodigious funding of fantasists who are thereby enabled to pursue their demented agendas
unencumbered by any realistic calculation of the risks or costs of their actions.”
Literally millions of Arab and Persian Muslims, as well as others spread across Africa, India, Indonesia, and other Muslim
population centers, are caught up in the most dangerous theologically-based fantasy since the last century, when the Germans
under Hitler, the Italians under Mussolini, and the Japanese under Tojo yielded to the fantasies that led them into the Second
World War. Fantasies of past and future empires mesmerized them all.
Of all fantasies, though, the most dangerous are those embedded in religion. For these fantasists, it is not merely Osama bin Laden,
the ayatollahs of Iran, or the Palestinian leaders calling upon them, but God himself. This is the fantasy of the Islamic Jihad, or Holy
War. The Muslims --- and we cannot tell who among them are with us or against us --- have become our enemies and the enemies of
Western Civilization.
This is why tiny Israel has never ceased to be under attack by Muslims, now calling themselves Palestinians, despite having no
claim to statehood, along with neighboring Syria and other nations throughout the Middle East. What is at stake is the very
existence of Israel and its Jewish citizens. The same hatred directed at them is the hatred directed at the United States of America
and its allies in the West and elsewhere.
Generations grew up during the half-century “Cold War” with Communist Russia. We understood the Soviets, however, to be
rational people unwilling to risk their lives and their nation to impose Communism through war. The concept of mutually assured
destruction worked because Russia’s leaders were not crazy. Al-Qa'ida does not operate by the rules that guide the affairs of most
nations of the world. Al-Qa'ida is not a nation; it is a fanatical, extremely violent, and highly subversive religious movement.
Harris points out that “in the fantasy ideology of radical Islam, suicide plays an absolutely indispensable role. It is not a means to
an end but the end in itself. Seen through the distorting prism of radical Islam, the act of suicide is transformed into an act of
martyrdom --- martyrdom in all its transcendent glory and accompanied by the panoply of magical powers that religious tradition has
always assigned to it.”
Thus, as this new century begins to take shape, we confront an enemy for whom death not only holds no fear, but is embraced. It
explains the bomber who kills innocent men, women, and children in an Israeli restaurant. The bomber in Bali and the attacks on the
United Nations and Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad. It explains 9-11.
It tells us that we must find and capture or kill the cancer loose in the world -- the cancer called al-Qa'ida.
Think of the transformational power of Martin Luther’s edicts that altered the history of Christianity. Think of the transformational
power of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Understand now that Islam must embrace its own transformation or face a
rational and relentless enmity from those it deems infidels.
I do not want to die for some Islamic fantasy. America will not let itself be destroyed for some Islamic fantasy. This is about the
survival and triumph of Western Civilization. Or its loss.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
Alan Caruba is a veteran business and science writer, a Public Relations Counselor, Communications Director of the American Policy Center,
and Founder of the National Anxiety Center, a clearinghouse for information about media-driven scare campaigns. Caruba writes a weekly
column, "Warning Signs," posted on the Internet website of the National Anxiety Center
(www.anxietycenter.com). A compilation of his past col- umns, entitled Warning Signs, is published by Merril Press. In addition
to Warning Signs, Caruba is the author of A Pocket Guide to Militant Islam and The United Na- tions vs. the United States,
both of which are available from the National Anxiety Center, 9 Brookside Road, Maplewood, New Jersey, 07040.
Copyright 2004 Alan Caruba
Published with Permission of Alan Caruba
ACaruba@AOL.Com
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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