There is no longer any question as to the existence of the "Clash of Civilizations." This war is real, and the Islamists are winning. Moreover, it is the West's own fault that they are losing this war, compromising its values of liberty and freedom, while denying the dangerous realities of modern Islamism.
Don't believe me?
In July 2005, Britain's House of Commons passed a bill that criminalizes "words or behavior that stir up racial or religious hatred," while France prosecuted the late great journalist Oriana Fallaci for "making derogatory comments about Islam." She was acquitted in France, but was still awaiting trial on the same charges in Italy when she died last week.
Indeed, freedom of expression is at an all time low in Europe. Last year, filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in downtown Amsterdam by a radical Islamist for making a film that exposes the suffering of women under Islam. Last February, dozens of people died over doodles printed an obscure Danish newspaper. Pope Benedict's less-than-subtle insinuation last week that Islam is a violent religion resulted in seven churches being fire bombed in the West Bank and Gaza, a fatal shooting of a nun in Somalia and dozens of blood-curdling death threats directed toward the man-in-white himself.
Undoubtedly, this Muslim uproar has been directed by the machinations of a number of political opportunists. But as Daniel Pipes argued in the New York Sun Sept. 19, the uproar almost certainly has a defined goal: the West must follow the rules set by political Islam or else risk violent retribution.
Should the West concede the freedom to criticize religion - a freedom so basic, it is integral to our very nature - it will surrender its traditions to those of Sharia law, opening up the door to further capitulations.
Meanwhile, liberals in this country and in Europe continue to insist that the malevolence of American foreign policy is the only explanation for their hatred of us, claiming that if we treated Muslims with the respect they deserve, then we could count on these victims to embrace reason and tolerance. In other words, Muslim fanaticism is entirely our own fault. Only when imperialism and poverty have been removed from the Middle East will an era of peace reign between Islam and the West.
Feh! This liberal ideology robs the Muslim world of its own agency, turning it into a vast community of minors. It is explicit bigotry that excuses the outrageous behavior of radical Islamists, when they should be held responsible for their actions. Besides - liberals are just plain wrong. Sociological and psychological research has shown that suicide bombers strap dynamite to their chest not because they are victims, but rather due to a sense of empowerment. Additional studies have shown that most radical Islamists are in fact more highly educated than the average Muslim in the Middle East, and better off economically. Let's not forget that Mohammed Atta was an engineer who received his training in Germany and Osama bin Laden was a rich business mogul from Saudi Arabia before turning to Islamic terror.
Liberals in the Western world prove themselves to be hopeless Pollyannas when they fail to acknowledge the cult of death that is emerging in the Islamic world, based on martyrdom, jihad and the promise of 72 virgins after death. They fail to discern the basic moral difference between America and Israel's determination to avoid civilian deaths, while Islamists waging jihad actively seek this goal, even using their own civilians as human shields to aid their political cause. They refuse to acknowledge that calls for the extermination of the Jews are issued daily in the Muslim world, a world where the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Mein Kampf can be picked up on any street corner for a bit of light reading, and where a journalist must fear leaving the Middle East with his head detached from his body.
But to counter the inevitable accusations of Islamophobia, I would of course say that we are not at war with the entire faith of Islam. As Sam Harris put it in the Los Angeles Times a week ago, we are absolutely fighting those who believe that "death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy." The unfortunate truth is that a great number of Muslims throughout the world perceive politics and religion entirely through the prism of Islam, leading them to have a priori sympathy for the deranged ambitions of radical Islamists. How else do we explain the sudden rise to fame this summer of Secretary General of Hezbollah Hassan Nasrallah?
We are waging a campaign against religious orthodoxy and those who value paradise over this world. It demands that we hold fast to our traditions of freedom and liberty, while opening our eyes to the true enemy. Only then can we hope to preserve the foundations of Western civilization before they are stripped away by our own carelessness.
Benjamin Bright '07 writes for the Brown Daily Squeal.
