Smoky Mountains Sunrise
Showing posts with label Islamic Mindset. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Islamic Mindset. Show all posts

Thursday, March 28, 2013

Robert Spencer: The Spiritual Journey of Magdi Allam

By Robert Spencer

The highest-profile convert to Roman Catholicism in recent memory, Magdi Cristiano Allam, has left the Catholic Church.

Allam, who was baptized in the Vatican by Pope Benedict XVI on Easter day 2008, explained that what “more than any other factor drove me away from the Church” was the “legitimization of Islam as the true religion of Allah as the one true God, Muhammad as a true prophet, the Koran as a sacred text, and of mosques as places of worship.”

Allam declared that contrary to all that, he was “convinced” that Islam was an “inherently violent ideology,” and that he was “even more convinced that Europe will eventually submit to Islam.”

Perhaps if the Church he joined in 2008 had been more resolute in standing for the defense of Judeo-Christian values and civilization, he would not have such a dark vision of the future. But there’s the rub: the determination to seek accommodation with Islam at all costs, even as Muslims persecute Christians with increasing ferocity all over the globe, is near-universal in the Catholic Church.

Tuesday, April 5, 2011

Pat Buchanan: 'Who Are We Fighting For?'

By Patrick J. Buchanan

On March 20, , who heads a congregation of 30 at his Dove World Outreach Center church in Gainesville, Fla., conducted a mock trial of the Quran “for crimes against humanity.”

Pronouncing Islam’s sacred book guilty, Jones soaked a Quran in kerosene and set it ablaze in a portable fire pit.

Few noticed. But did.

On March 24, the president of , our presumed ally in the war with and the Taliban, condemned this “crime against the religion and the entire nation,” called on the United States to bring Jones to justice and demanded “a satisfactory response to the resentment and anger of over 1.5 billion Muslims around the world.”

Thus the firebrand here is not just Jones, who perpetrated the sacrilege, but Karzai, who made certain his countrymen knew what happened 10,000 miles away and four days before.

Friday, after prayers in Mazer-e-Sharif, a mob, inflamed by imams denouncing Jones, descended on the U.N. compound. When they left, seven U.N. employees lay dead, two reportedly beheaded.

President Obama denounced Jones’ “act of extreme intolerance and bigotry,” and added that “to attack and kill innocent people in response is outrageous and an affront to human dignity and decency.”

deplored the Quran-burning as “hateful, disrespectful and enormously intolerant.”

Still, on Saturday, rioters waving Taliban flags and shouting “Death to America” and “Death to Karzai” went on a rampage in Kandahar that ended with nine Afghans dead and 80 injured when they tried to march on the U.N. compound and security troops fired on them.

Three more were killed Sunday as riots continued in Kandahar and spread to Jalalabad. Forty more suffered gunshot wounds.

Petraeus then met with Karzai, who issued a new statement demanding that “the U.S. government, Senate and Congress clearly condemn (the Rev. Jones’) dire action and avoid such incidents in the future.”

In short, our ally seized this opportunity to rub America’s nose in what the Rev. Jones did, as though the U.S. government, whose highest civilian and military officials had condemned Jones, is morally culpable for not preventing his Quran-burning and not punishing him for it.

Nor is this sufficient. Henceforth, the U.S. government is to police its citizenry to ensure no such anti-Islamic sacrilege takes place again.

Intending no disrespect, who do these people think they are?

Undeniably, it was an incendiary insult to a religion professed by almost a fourth of the world’s people for Jones to do what he did. But what does this murderous reaction to a book-burning tell us about the people for whose right of self-determination Americans are fighting and dying in Afghanistan?

Candidly, it affirms what we already knew.

Many Afghans believe beheading or stoning is the right response to an insult to Islam. And not only that. Five years ago, Abdul Rahman, an Afghan convert to Christianity, faced the death penalty for apostasy and was forced to flee his own country.

In some Muslim countries, death is the prescribed punishment for Muslims who convert, for who seek converts and for any who insult Islam, like that Danish cartoonist who sketched a caricature of the Prophet with a fused bomb for a turban.

Stoning is also seen as proper punishment for women who commit adultery.

In recently, the governor of Punjab and the Cabinet minister for religious minorities, both Catholics, were assassinated. Why? Both had opposed a law under which a Christian woman had been sentenced to death after some farmhands accused her of blasphemy.

The governor was murdered by his own bodyguard, who was then hailed by 500 religious scholars who urged all Muslims to boycott the governor’s funeral ceremony, as he had gotten what he deserved.

In the last two years, Christians have been burned alive by Muslims in Gorja, Pakistan, and by Hindu extremists in Orissa, India. Christian churches have been torched and scores of the faithful massacred on holy days in Iraq and Egypt. Few of these atrocities have received the media attention of the Rev. Jones’ stupid stunt or the Danish cartoonist’s irreverent scribbles.

Before America sends more of her sons to die for the freedom of Arabs and Muslims, perhaps we ought to have a better idea of what these folks intend to do with that freedom. For across that Muslim world, the faith that created our world, Christianity, is being persecuted and in some sectors annihilated.

To and liberal interventionists, the goal of U.S. foreign policy should be to use our wealth and power to advance freedom until the whole world is democratic. Only then can we be secure.
But if democracy means rule by the people, ought we not to inquire a little more closely what it is these people, down deep, really want, before we bleed and bankrupt ourselves to win it for them?

Maybe had a point.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

Christian Murdered for Drinking Tea from a Muslim Cup


"Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality."

Barack Hussein Obama



International Christian Concern (www.persecution.org) has learned that radical Muslims running a tea stall beat a Christian man to death for using a cup designated for Muslims on May 9. The young man, Ishtiaq Masih, had ordered tea at a roadside stall in Machharkay village, Punjab, Pakistan, after his bus made a rest stop.

When Ishtiaq went to pay for his tea, the owner noticed that he was wearing a necklace with a cross and grabbed him, calling for his employees to bring anything available to beat him for violating a sign posted on the stall warning non-Muslims to declare their religion before being served. Ishtiaq had not noticed the warning sign before ordering his tea.

The owner and 14 of his employees beat Ishtiaq with stones, iron rods and clubs, and stabbed him multiple times with kitchen knives as Ishtiaq pleaded for mercy.

The other bus passengers and other passers-by finally intervened and took Ishtiaq to the Rural Health Center in the village. The doctor who took Ishtiaq's case told ICC that Ishtiaq had died due to excessive internal and external bleeding, a fractured skull, and brain injuries.

Makah Tea Stall is located on the Sukheki-Lahore highway and is owned by Mubarak Ali, a 42-year-old radical Muslim. ICC's correspondent visited the tea stall and observed that a large red warning sign with a death's head symbol was posted which read, "All non-Muslims should introduce their faith prior to ordering tea. This tea stall serves Muslims only." The warning also threatened anyone who violated the rule with "dire consequences."

A neighboring shopkeeper told ICC on condition of anonymity that all Ali's employees are former students of radical Muslim madrassas (seminaries).

Ishtiaq's family said that they immediately reported the incident to the police and filed a case against Ali. However, the murderers are still freely operating the tea stall.

When ICC asked the Pindi Bhatian Saddar police station about the murder, the police chief said that investigations were underway and they are treating it as a faith-based murder by biased Muslims. When asked about Ali's warning sign, police chief Muhammad Iftikhar Bajwa claimed that he could not take it down. However, the constitution of Pakistan explicitly prohibits such discrimination.

The public is encouraged to call the Pakistani embassy of their country to protest this heinous crime?

Pakistan Embassies:

USA: (202) 243-6500,
info@embassyofpakistanusa.org
Canada: (613) 238-7881, parepottawa@rogers.com
UK: 0870-005-6967, hoc@phclondon.org

Sunday, May 31, 2009

Will France Really Be A Muslim Country?




The following translation from a Muslim forum is an extraordinary insight into the thinking of Islamists about the future of France. The Islamization of other European countries is happening at an even swifter pace.

From The Brussels Journal
By Tiberge



There's a 16-page discussion at a Muslim forum called Mejliss el kalam, linked by François Desouche. To translate the entire discussion is out of the question. But here is the first page somewhat simplified....

The initial question, dated April 11, 2009, comes from ShamsTabrizi, from Somalia:

- Salam. In a city of 22 thousand inhabitants a few miles from Paris, more than 6 thousand persons participated in the Friday prayer at 2:00 p.m., including a significant number of converted Frenchmen and Frenchwomen. At the end of the prayer, seeing these people, I began to wonder in how many years France will be a mostly Muslim country.

- (Abelatif from Belgium responds): You must not have any illusions, my brother. France as a Muslim country will be several generations form now, or more. But it's true that it's beautiful to see Muslims of all origins at the mosque... Praise be to Allah

- (ShamsTabrizi): I don't agree. considering the evolution of the situation I have been witnessing, I do not give it more than 30 years before we will see mayors giving sermons on Friday to the faithful.

- (Abdel93600 from The Netherlands): Salam. The French are no longer having many children. Let's do France a favor and ensure the renewal of generations. It's a problem for many European countries! The birth rate in France recently reached a record, the highest in Europe, due in great part, to immigrant women.

- (Prince.Hakim from Belgium): I think we're heading for a Franco-Creole-Maghrebin civilization with massive intermarriage under the aegis of Islam.

- (Maléikite from Belgium): Brussels will be majority Muslim in less than 20 years (these are non-Muslim statistics). Inch'Allah.

- (MonSpeudo2 from France): Stop dreaming up tales about our country. It will never belong to you

- (ShamsTabrizi to Prince.Hakim): Then you agree with me. France will surely be a Muslim land for our grandchildren, maybe our children. So we must begin to construct a good basis to avoid unpleasant surprises for them in the future.

- (Maléikite to MonSpeudo2): Don't worry, we'll protect your rights, you will have the status of dhimmi.

- (ShamsTabrizi to MonSpeudo2): Ask your father if he ever imagined so many mosques and Muslims when he was your age. Then you'll have the answer as to whom France will belong. I like France, and I will like it even more when it's Muslim. Don't worry, we will be lenient on Christian minorities.

- (Prince-Hakim to MonSpeudo2): It will not be a matter of conquest, but of adherence to a joint effort between Frenchmen and Maghrebins. You should consider converting to Islam.

- (Ilyas_95 from France to MonSpeudo2): Bah! As far as I know France belongs to me as much as to you, doesn't it?

- (Parisien from France to Ilyas_95): No. I don't think so...

- (Prince.Hakim to ShamsTabrizi): I would even say the French deserve to be a part of the Umma.

- (Ilyas_95 to ShamsTabrizi): It's ridiculous to use threats... We're stuck in the suburbs and the high-rises. To say things like we're going to turn France upside-down, when we are not even able to agree on the best way to scratch our noses...

- (Ilyas_95 to Parisien): Really? Why not?

- (El-che from France): In 1974, at the UN, the Algerian president Houari Boumediene, declared: "One day, millions of men will leave the southern hemisphere to go north. And they won't go there as friends. Because they will be going to conquer. And they will conquer and people the land with their sons. It is the womb of women that will bring us victory."
In Le Figaro, December 19, 2006, our great friend Muammar Quadhafi declared: "Without sword, without rifles, without conquests, the 50 million Muslims in Europe will transform it soon into a Muslim continent!"

- (Prince.Hakim from Belgium): I think we should have a friendly attitude towards the French and convince them to join us.

- (ShamsTabrizi to Ilyas_95): There is no threat but a simple observation, and when you say we can't agree among ourselves you're off the topic. I don't see what that has to do with the evolution of society advancing in the interests of Islam and Muslims. And that is precisely why I said earlier that we must begin to construct a good basis for the future of our children.

- (Abdel93600 from The Netherlands): Salam. Are there any cities in France that are already majority Muslim or close to it? Except for Roubaix (that goes back a long time) and Marseilles? We're off to a good start, one at the northernmost end the other at the southernmost end?

- (Ilyas95 to ShamsTabrizi): The political power is now in the hands of a minority that remains in power. The numbers do not in any way change the rules of the game... we just have to see to what extent "our" cities (those that are majority Muslim) represent an enviable model for the entire world...

- (Le Compagnon from the UAE to MonSpeudo2): It already belongs to us. First mission accomplished, second mission: children, third: Islamization. End of operation. You will have the right to attend school without a veil.

- (Shams Tabrizi to Prince.Hakim): Salam. That's the way things are going. In the mosque where I prayed on Friday, it was the number of French Muslims that surprised me the most. Naturally, Islamization of society will take place with their help.

- (Ilyas_95 to ShamsTabrizi): What is "Islamization" of France??? The fact that everybody is Muslim???I say this because it is an important point after all...

- (Parisien from France): Then the Israelis are right after all.

[Note: He links to another thread where Israelis are said to call for the slitting open of the stomachs of pregnant Muslim women. "Parisien" was eventually suspended from the forum, not surprisingly.]

- (Need_Peace from Morocco): Assalam alaikom to all. I was in France just once, in August 2007. I spent two weeks there on holiday. I did not make any particular acquaintances with our brothers and sisters of Islam, but for the entire time, I had the certitude that it was a country where Islam will be majority, and I said to everyone that France will be glorified by Islam. Inch'Allah. It warms the heart to see the number of committed sincere converts.

- (ShamsTabrizi to Ilyas_95): Who said anything about taking power? Here we are talking about a majority of the population and it's already a good start. If you also want power, then instead of thinking of yourself as weak and saying that we'll never succeed, rise up and give yourself the means to do it. Don't look for excuses to stay in bed.

- (Didyme from France to ShamsTabrizi): Hello. There are about 3 thousand converts to Islam each year. Let's be liberal and say 5 thousand. Let's forget about the Muslims who become apostates. In order for France to become a majority Muslim country only through conversion, 20 million Frenchmen would have to convert (half of the 60 million Frenchmen minus the 10 million who are already Muslim).

[Notice that he said TEN million, not the usual five or six we so often hear about.]
At the rate of 5 thousand conversions per year it would take... 4000 years! So it's difficult to count on conversions alone.
You can count on the higher birth rate among immigrant Muslim families than among non-Muslims. But as Muslim immigrants attain the same standard of living as non-Muslims, the birthrates will become equal.
You can count on immigration even though the current policies indicate the opposite, that is, a policy of expulsion.
[Note: If he thinks Sarkozy is expelling many immigrants, he is perhaps fooling himself. Larger numbers are coming in than returning home.]
But some can always dream about a majority Muslim France in a "maximum of 30 years."

- (El-che to Prince.Hakim): We are not supposed to be a people who terrorize and who seek to wage war and cause blood to be shed, so yes, we must have a friendly attitude towards them.

-(Prince.Hakim to Parisien, re: the Israelis): They should go back to Russia or Poland or Ethiopia.

The conversation goes on for 15 more web pages. I have not had time to read through it all, but French readers may be interested. The comments at François Desouche are worth a look, although I can only post a few at random out of the 200:

- I will not have my children baptized, so that they don't appear on the lists of Christians. Islamists, when they are in power in France, like the Nazis before them, love to consult lists.

- History always ends with massacres and bloodbaths! If you know how to read between the lines, you know what you have to do!

- (...) In short, I'm very pessimistic for the future of France. I think that the only element that could change the situation might come from international events and a possible conflict with Iran. The Muslims of France will feel threatened and I think very violent riots are foreseeable on French territory, even kamikaze attacks! At that moment, a possible civil war between pro-Iranian and ethnic Frenchmen (of Christian origin) could break out.

- What a bunch of rats... but frankly, even if the country becomes Islamized, I don't think it will become a Muslim country so easily. I have hope that the French people in their majority will finally revolt before that happens.

- We still have time. You don't need 50% Muslims in France for chaos to reign. there are about 4-5 million Muslims in France, or 6 to 8% of the population. They already have quite a bit of nuisance value. Not to mention the non-Muslim foreigners. In all, perhaps 8 million non-Europeans, or 13% of the population.

- (...) Really I would tend to say there are about 8 to 10 million Muslims in France.

- With respect, I feel that the number of 5 million Muslims in France was surpassed long ago. There are at least 10 million!!

- I would say 10 to 12 million. Sometimes, I feel like leaving this country. It's becoming too hard, like seeing a woman you love, with her veins slashed, in a bathtub, and not being able to help her.

- Nobody is really fooled. At any rate not the ethnic Frenchmen. Almost everybody knows that there will be violence at the moment of the "passing of the torch", when the Muslim community is almost in the majority and their "cultural demands" become laws... There will always be a temptation on the part of this community to affirm its domination. It's then that things will begin to go badly.

- (...) Our friends the immigrants, Islamists, collaborators should not worry too much: the French are patient, very patient, too much so, but above all they are unpredictable and the day when the fire is lit, no one will be able to stop it. History has already proven that. (...)

- Having worked a various maternity hospitals in Paris and the nearby suburbs, I can attest that black women are in a very large majority. And they don't have just one child... I saw fewer Maghrebins.

- (In response to the reader who said he wants to leave the country) And that doesn't take into account the social climate. I don't know how it is where you work, but at my job it's war.

- At my job if they're unhappy, they back off. But there's a Frenchman who praises the "virility" of the immigrants, but when it's said about a white man, that's no good, it's Le Pen. Yet in his heart, I feel sure that he suspects it will end in complete chaos. But he prefers to live like an ostrich.

Like the discussion at Mejliss, this goes on and on. It's very interesting, but the main question still remains: What will really happen when the tipping point has been reached? Will the French wait until that happens, then rebel in violence? Violence can be prevented by sane immigration policies, a refusal to build mosques and an affirmation of nationalism, if not Christianity. If violence does erupt it will be chaotic and directed at the "collaborators" as much (possibly more?) as towards the Muslims.

One recurring theme is that despite outward passiveness, the French, in general, know that violence will come. This seems to indicate a higher level of awareness on the part of the population than is generally acknowledged. Notice that the Muslims calmly plot the takeover without any thought of a rebellion from the natives.


Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Religion Of Peace Update: Wife Beheader Only Charged With Second Degree Murder


From Traditional Values Coalition

Muslim TV Executive Muzzamill Hassan, the man who has been arrested for cutting his wife Aaisya’s head off, is being charged with second degree murder in the slaughter.

First degree murder includes premeditation, planning or lying in wait to kill the person; second degree murder is non-premeditated.

“Why is this man only being charged with unpremeditated murder,” asks TVC Executive Director Andrea Lafferty. “Police have yet to find the weapon used to cut her head off, but it’s likely that he planned this killing and lay in wait for her. How many people routinely carry around swords or cutting weapons big enough to lop off a head? Would Muzzamill have been charged with first degree murder only if he’d used a wood chipper or a guillotine?

“Are police going easy on Muzzamill because he’s a Muslim? Would cops treat evangelist Pat Robertson the same way if he chopped off his wife Dee Dee’s head at the 700 Club headquarters in Virginia Beach?”

Muzzamill had a long history of mistreating his wife. This is why she finally decided to divorce him and seek a restraining order to keep him away from her. This is Muzzamill’s second wife.

According to Islam expert Daniel Pipes, Islamic theology teaches that a Muslim who has his or her head cut off cannot enter into Paradise!

A battle is looming over whether or not to interpret this crime as an honor killing or domestic violence. An honor killing is done to a woman who has shamed or embarrassed her family or husband. In this case, Muzzamill had claimed she had no right divorce him – even though she was his second wife.

In addition, the whole concept of Bridges TV was fraudulent. It pretended to be a moderate voice for Islam, yet was endorsed by some of the worst Islamic radicals in the U.S., including Nihad Awad, Ibrahim Hooper, Iqbal Yunus and Louay Safi.

Phyllis Chesler has written on the topic of domestic violence versus honor killing: “Are Honor Killings Simply Domestic Violence?”

Cutting Off Heads Is Standard Practice And Religious Duty In Islam

The Qu’ran (Koran) contains numerous verses that encourage Muslims to behead, mutilate or slaughter those considered to be infidels. Here are a few:

5:33-“The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His Messenger, and strive with might and main for mischief through the land is: execution (by beheading), or crucifixion, or the cutting off of hands and feet from opposite sides, or exile from the land: that is their disgrace in this world, and a heavy punishment is theirs in the Hereafter;”

8:12- “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off.”

47:4- “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), strike off their heads; at length; then when you have made wide Slaughter among them, carefully tie up the remaining captives”: thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom: Until the war lays down its burdens.”

9:123: “Oh ye who believe! Murder those of the disbelievers and let them find harshness in you.”

2:191- “Kill them wherever you find them, and drive them out from wherever they drove you out.”

5: 45-- “We ordained therein for them: “Life for life, eye for eye, nose for nose, ear for ear. Tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal.”

2:193- “Fight them on until there is no more tumult and religion becomes that of Allah”

9:29- "Fight those who do not believe in God and the last day... and fight People of the Book, (Christian and Jews) who do not accept the religion of truth (Islam) until they pay tribute (Zizziya tax) by hand, being inferior.”

8:17—It is not ye who Slew them; it is God; when thou threwest a handful of dust, it was not Thy act, but God’s…..” (Allah is a real merciful indeed!)

“As more Muslims immigrate to America, we will be seeing more and more cases of violence against Muslim women – including beheadings,” said Lafferty. “Islam poses a serious threat not only to American security, but to women who are treated like slaves or property in Islamic homes.”

Thursday, May 22, 2008

The Heart of an Islamist


[The following is an excerpt from David Solway's new work-in-progress, Living in the Valley of Shmoon .]

The West, whether the European Lilliput or the American Brobdingnag, has not yet realized that Middle Eastern-style autocracies are categorically different from Western-style democracies. It does not appreciate the role of culture and history in forming the folkways, attitudes and presuppositions of a people. It has not understood that the Islamic world does not play by our rules and that it lives by an entirely different code of conduct from that which we have taken for granted for centuries—a code in which reciprocities, trade-offs, standard negotiating parameters and the dialectic of mutual advantage do not signify. We refuse to see that we are dealing with a culture that is fundamentally alien to ours and that does not accept the axioms, postulates and expectations of politically pragmatic discourse or the procedures of reasonable accommodation. It is a culture whose institutional basis has almost nothing in common with the civic armature of Western civilization that has allowed the latter, albeit at great cost and in far too desultory a fashion, to resist its own homegrown tyrannies.

In the 21st century the Leviathan that would swallow us rises from another sea than our own. Western Christendom and post-Christendom are based on a completely different “symbolic order”—Jacques Lacan’s term for the way symbols are used unconsciously by a culture—from that of the Islamic world, especially with respect to the concept of individual autonomy, the modalities of personal salvation, the idea of citizenship, the rule of established law and the binding force of international accords.

We must also bear in mind that the enemy holds a clear advantage in what Norman Podhoretz has called, after the Cold War, World War IV: the terrorist camarillas, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have few structural assets to protect and the rogue regimes which protect them rely on their control of the oil supply and their stockpiling of Western currency reserves for immunity from retaliation. When a set of cultural assumptions rooted in an alien scripture and a traditional worldview which repudiate what we have come to understand as social and political evolution is added to these factors, the task before us takes on dismaying and redoubtable proportions.

We really have little idea how foreign the Islamic mindset is to our way of thinking and feeling. For example, we regard a death in battle as a loss—the word “losses” is a common synonym for “casualties”; whereas in the Islamic view, as attested in both the Koran and the hadith, each “loss” in battle is no such thing but a translation into paradise, a picayune price to pay for the gift of immediate salvation and part of the “bargain” the believer has closed with Allah. What we see as losses, the Muslim sees as gains, the “supreme triumph” guaranteed by the Faith. “Allah has purchased of the faithful their lives and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for his cause, slay and be slain…Rejoice then in the bargain you have made” (Koran 9:111). Death is sought and celebrated. This has no point of contact with what we have hallowed as the dicta of reason. What we do everything in our power to evade, the enemy joyfully welcomes. What we suffer as a privation, the enemy cherishes as a promotion. What we regard as a curse, the enemy accepts as a benefaction. Try, as they say, to get your mind around that.

As Lee Harris argues in The Suicide of Reason, in a prolonged standoff the rule of law is no match for the rule of the jungle, the individualist “rational actor” cannot hope to triumph against the collectivist “tribal actor”—at least, not until he adapts his strategy to meet the challenge—and the “myth of reason” in which we have come to believe, if we are unable or unwilling to refocus our attitude to the world, will see to our defeat at the hands of those who do not recognize the “normal rules of engagement” and “cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of [their] tribe.” And the crisis we are now facing does not allow for that species of adjournment we call diplomacy or the nepenthean illusion of “dialogue” with an interlocutor who does not abide by its formative assumptions. Time is running out. “The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors,” cautions French philosopher André Glucksmann, “allows us little leisure for procrastination” (City Journal, August 2007). If we are not careful, it may well be game, set, match.

What the situation cries out for today are deeply educated and farsighted statesmen of the stamp of Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion, or at the very least determined political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Instead, our fate is in the hands of one-dimensional, small men and women without vision, knowledge of history or the courage to act, except insofar as they are prospecting for votes. It is not only, as Joe Klein contends in Politics Lost, that the political process has been trivialized by the burgeoning tribe of “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters who…have robbed public life of its romance and vigor,” but that the subjects of the “pollster-consultant industrial complex” are themselves devoid of moral and intellectual substance to begin with. This fact was recognized by Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who in a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia said: “When I speak with the American, I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything” (Steven Emerson Blog, March 25, 2008). Add to this sorry spectacle of political vapidness and acedia the editorial vaporizings of a philistine press and the parlous state of journalistic ethics, and we have, to put it mildly, a big problem. Yet it does not take a mantic expertise to discern the probable future should we continue to sit back, swallow the sedatives of standard political analysis and let events take their course. For it is not just that Jews are under threat in the new wave of antisemitism spreading throughout the world. It is the Western secular democracies as well, in which both Jews and non-Jews have, if only intermittently, enjoyed the benefits of peace, prosperity and common egalitarian values, that are in grave danger of subsidence.

This is what all too many in the West, including its power-holders and influence-peddlers, refuse to understand. We are truly in a war, different from any war we have fought in the past, waged on many different fronts from fifth column infiltration to an expanding demographic to incendiary physical assault to “Dark Web” terror attacks on basic cyber infrastructures to the introduction of Shari’a Compliant Finance on the stock market, but a real war nevertheless that will persist well into the century. Let us not dissemble or extenuate. In its militant dimension it is a war that is once again approaching our shores—9/11 was only the opening salvo—and which will have real consequences in large numbers of casualties, civil disruption, cultural prostration and economic breakdown.

And it is a war that, in the long term, we may well lose if we do not awaken to the peril which confronts us. It is not by the pricking of our thumbs that some of us fear the imminence of a generations-long tumult but by a sober reading of the historical archive, the absorption of the relevant literature and an informed and common-sense alertness to the current scene. Those of us who are sounding the alarm will naturally be accused by the droves of sleepwalkers shuffling in the public domain of exaggeration and even of war-mongering in our turn. But when these contemporary R.I.P. Van Winkles are finally jarred awake by events, they will likely find themselves living and dying in a very different world from the one in which they fell asleep.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays (2002), entitled “To Open a Millennium,” Stephen J. Gould remarked that, as the 20th century began at the end of World War I, so the 21rst century dawned the day after September 11, 2001. This was the “fateful year” and the meaning of 9/11 was the substantive issue to be addressed. I venture to say he was correct. We are now challenged as never before as the 21st century unfolds toward the seismic event of civilizational conflict between a messianic world-faith and a secular world-view. There are no atoms of compatibility between two such global systems of culture and belief. Let us listen to the music before we have to face it. For the theme song of the Islamic adversary—we have the authority of Hamas chieftain Mahmoud Zahar on this—may be regarded as a modification of the famous Leonard Cohen lyric: first we take Jerusalem, then we take New York.