Amateur Megalomania

I had a short conversation with a friend the other day, and unusually for us, the topic turned to the War in Iraq and the general state of US anti-terror policy. We don’t normally venture into this territory, not for any particular reason – it just doesn’t come up often. The conversation was certainly civil and open, but we certainly occupied opposite sides of the debate.

Considering my posting history, even I was surprised at how I felt about this. I shied away from the debate. Not because I didn’t want to support my position, but that the situation seems far to complex for verbal argument. It is difficult to say everything that needs to be said, while mentally book marking rebuttals, side statements, and other loose ends that need to be addressed in the chaotic give and take of face to face conversation.

But there is more to it than that. This stuff matters to me more than anything else right now. I feel like I’m living in 1939, watching the world sleepwalking towards an unimaginable horror. So I tend to get quite emotional about the topic. It is better for me not to engage in these debates with people I care about, since I fear going too far or coming across as too angry. Of course I’m not angry at my friend, but passionate debate can destroy the atmosphere of a room.

So, while my friend is reading this, I’d like to put my thoughts together in a coherent form. Things are so incredibly complicated; I don’t know any other form suitable for communication. I completely respect the reasonable opposition – I don’t WANT to be walking around in 1939, so if I can be convinced that things are going to be rosy, bring it on.

I believe that our children are going to experience more horror than any generation since the European plague years.

I believe that our children are more likely to die violently than to reach old age.

I believe that we will look back on the relative peace of the Cold War as our last tranquil era.

These things will come to pass if we continue to ignore the threats emerging almost daily.

Yeah, I sound like a doomsayer nut case. I admit it. It sounds ridiculous.

Our civilization works against us. For all of the marvelous things it provides, it blinds us to the base reality of the human condition: a lot of people have a madness for God.

Secular Europe and, to a lesser but still problematic extent, the United States does not take religion very seriously. Faith in God is something of a quaint relic of our past. Generally speaking, Church is more social than spiritual. We find it hard to believe that a good portion of the Islamic world takes faith quite seriously indeed, seriously enough to die and/or kill for God. This idea seems so ludicrous to us, we ignore this truth and search for other ‘root causes’ of our conflict with militant Islam (or as I think we need to start calling it – ‘Islam’). We look at poverty (Saudi Arabia is fantastically wealthy, and a bunch of wealthy Saudis took a ride on 9/11/01). We look at the Israeli situation (ignoring the vast concessions to the Arabs, the refusal to accept these concessions, and the irrational acts of the so called aggrieved). We examine cause after cause, ignoring the very words of the Jihadists who praise Allah and proclaim that Islam MUST rule the world, that the infidel must not be permitted to exist without feeling submission to Allah.

[8.12] When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.

[8.39] And fight with them until there is no more persecution and religion should be only for Allah; but if they desist, then surely Allah sees what they do.

[9.29] Fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Apostle have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection.

[9.123] O you who believe! fight those of the unbelievers who are near to you and let them find in you hardness; and know that Allah is with those who guard (against evil).

It goes on. They tell us what they want, but we can’t seem to hear it. Because no one takes religion that seriously, right?

The President of Iran has made threat after threat toward Israel and the West. We dismiss it as rhetoric. Islamic clerics living in Europe frequently denounce Western culture and call for its destruction. We wave it away as mere words.

Fifty years ago, Islamic rantings meant nothing to the civilized world. The nut jobs could shake their fists and throw together the occasional terror bombing in their own states, killing a few dozen a year. Terrible as that is, it certainly wasn’t something for us to be concerned about. Fifty years ago, I would have been preaching containment, law enforcement, and generally ignoring the whole problem. They couldn’t do much damage.

Today, they still can’t do a lot of damage. To be quite honest, the deaths of 9/11, when viewed on a global scale, do not provide an obvious beacon of impending doom for Western Civilization, not by themselves. I think this is why most people supported the Afghanistan campaign, but leave the bus when it comes to the wider war on terror the administration is (ineptly) pursuing. 9/11 is an undeniable escalation, but it falls short of placing Western Civilization in mortal peril.

My fears run from deeper trends.

Europe is facing a crisis of demographics. For a population to remain numerically stable (without immigration – this caveat will be important), the birth rate has to be at 2.1 or above. Consider the future of Europe and the West (source – 1997 World Population Data Sheet.).

In contrast, now consider the bulk of the Islamic world.

The freest countries in the world, the most successful economies, are breeding themselves into oblivion. Simultaneously, the most backwards, tyrannical and poorest of nations are exploding in population. We are observing a reverse-Darwinism of socio-economic systems.

How does a graying population sustain the economic Ponzi Scheme of the welfare state as the average age continues to swell toward retirement? By importing young labor from abroad, just as you are now seeing in the ever-expanding Islamic population of Europe.

Most major European cities are surrounded now by a highly Islamic ring of suburbs. European Muslim youths walk around in tee-shirts proclaiming ‘2030 – the year we take over’.

Islam does not need to conquer the West by the sword. They simply have to wait for this trend to play itself out.

They’ve done it before.

Recall that Lebanon was under Christian control as recently as 1975. Beirut (‘the Paris of the Middle East’) was a thriving, lively city of culture and commerce living under Western ideas of liberty. The Muslim ‘revolt’ resulted in savage inner-city civil war, shattering the city. Who remembers the sights of militants fighting block to block while people tried to live their lives in the middle of a raging battlefield?

Consider the same scenes playing out in Berlin, Paris, London, Amsterdam, Copenhagen, Rome, Geneva, and so on. Consider the ethnic cleansing of the Balkans playing out all over Europe as regions fall under the sway of Sharia Law. Imagine all of Europe as a breeding ground for radical organizations turning their attention towards America next.

Muslim conquest will not happen through the clash of organized armies on a battlefield.

So how is it prevented?

Will the West shut down the largest migration of humanity in recorded history? Doubtful. Will the West demand utter assimilation to Western ways for immigrant populations? Don’t hold your breath. Will the West begin having babies in sufficient numbers to reverse the decline? Not when the state saps so much income as to make child rearing an expensive proposition.

I don’t think the Islamic majority can be stopped. Therefore, I believe our only hope is to attempt to midwife a new Islam, purged of the violence, jihad and intolerance.

Now can you understand my grim perspective?

Christianity was like Islam once, in the Middle Ages. Christianity had its time of butchery and persecution of anyone not Christian enough. Fortunately, Christianity outgrew the madness for God before they had access to world-killing technology.

Islam has not yet reached that point. And while they do not yet have access to such technology, the entry barriers are getting lower all of the time.

My greatest fear is not the nuclear weapon. While the required technology becomes more available, the delivery will still make the weapon impractical for global carnage (unless we sit still and let an Islamic nation build a whole ICBM arsenal). The radical revolution in world killing will come from biotechnology.

A well equipped college or high school lab will soon have the basic abilities to perform sophisticated gene manipulation. It isn’t unreasonable to imagine more and more capabilities being widely available as we continue to expand our understanding of genetics. Imagine someone cobbles together a rice-killing virus and wipes out the staple food supply of Asia. How about taking down wheat and corn? The entire world exists on essentially those three crops.

And then there are the obvious scenarios of super-ebola, super-flu, super-you-name-it. All brewed in your Allah-sponsored cottage lab in a shattered warehouse in London-istan, ready for distribution to scour the earth of the unbeliever…and Allah shelters those who die doing his work, so collateral damage isn’t something to be concerned about.

Technology will continue to make dangerous people more dangerous, and I don’t have faith in the idea that it will also make us safer. A madman only has to have one success, and we only have to suffer one failure. New opportunities for holocaust will present themselves provided people continue to imagine that God wants them to kill in His name.

We can no longer ignore or isolate the crazies. So we must confront them.

And in the end, that is why I am in favor of the Iraqi campaign, for very abstract reasons that aren’t going to satisfy a lot of people.

Islam can only be reformed by Muslims. We can’t do that for them. But Islam will never reform under tyranny or oppression. Nor will Islam reform without the pressure to do so. Nor will it reform if regional Muslims, isolated from the world and subject to mosque propaganda, fail to understand the West they have been taught to hate.

By marching into the heart of the Islamic world and confronting them, we do a number of things. We attempt to improve the lives of the average Muslim. We attempt to give them immediate exposure to some of the finest men and women the Western world had produced. We hunt down and kill those that actively seek to wage jihad. We try to make their dreams of a World Caliphate too expensive to continue.

These actions are probably useless individually, or if evaluated in the context of a traditional military action with concrete, measurable goals. But collectively, they challenge Islam to reconcile with something new – unbelievers walking their streets, showing themselves to be decent people, and willing to defend themselves and others under a code of freedom. It is easy to demonize the West when your people are insulated from what you condemn. It is more difficult when the demon defends your child on the way to school, or builds you a sewage system, or removes a cataract from your blind brother.

Is it working? I have no idea. There are serious problems. We’ve had soldiers do bad things (very few, but it doesn’t take much to taint everyone). People argue that in killing jihadists we are creating more. Maybe. Maybe a young ten-year-old boy watches his fifteen-year-old brother die trying to kill a Marine, and he grows up embittered, swallows the poison of Islam and joins the jihad. At some point, we have to make this cycle too painful for the Islamic culture to endure. At some point, Islamic parents will get sick of their children dying in a useless attempt to rid the world or infidels. It is a path of blood – so much blood as to make any civilized person sick.

But what is the alternative? Can we negotiate with this faith? Go read those passages again. Go read more of the Koran. Go troll the Islamic chat boards. Listen to the words of the Imams at Friday prayers (widely available on the net). Figure out how to reform a religion without applying the only pressure it understands – blood.

War is a terrible thing. War cannot be avoided by ignoring the enemy or pretending there isn’t a war. In any conflict, those most tolerant of atrocity dictate the terms of the battle. The jihad isn’t going to stop unless the cost of jihad grows too high.

Christianity outgrew ‘jihad’ only by wading an ocean of blood. Show me another way to reform Islam in the time we have left and I would be grateful. Show me how the Western ideas of freedom and liberty can survive the coming tide of Sharia Law. I really want to know.

Filed under: Islam