Of note herein is the high cost of the modernist/secularist inability to take religion seriously.
This is a sadly forgotten lesson that was well learned by end of the once-great Byzantine Empire when the Ottoman Turks captured Constantinople on May 29, 1453, after one hundred years of bloody fighting.
This from frontpagemag.com.
Last week, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times asking the question:
What were Hamas’s leaders hoping for,
and what are Iran’s leaders seeking to achieve?
The answer began with a conversation that revealed the central problem with the West’s misunderstanding of Islamic jihadism—one that still impairs our foreign policy and our plans for dealing with moslem aggressors:
[O]ur modernist inability to take religion seriously.
Gantz wrote:
What the Israeli military and political establishment failed to understand, in part, was the extent to which Hamas was driven by the goal of waging religious war.
‘The intel was there, but I underestimated the jihadi component of Hamas’s and Sinwar’s calculus,’ a senior Israel Defense Forces intelligence commander told me early in the war, referring to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader.
This mistake in divining the motives of militant Islam marks the U.S. conflict with Iran and its revolution and its “goal of waging religious war.”
For example, in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to direct the revolution, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, as David Farber reported, in a meeting with Carter:
[S]oft-pedaled the specific threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ to American interests.
Brzezinski viewed the revolution with Western eyes. He argued:
The religious revolution [will] falter and require secular technocrats and experts, which [will] dilute and marginalize the clerics.
In an even greater failure of imagination and projection of Western principles, Brzezinski advised:
[The U.S. should] pursue relations with individual [moslem] countries on the basis of shared interests, but our emphasis on moral as well as material values, our support for a world of diversity, and our commitment to social justice should place us in a strong position to deepen our dialogue with the [moslem] world.
These sentiments are an object lesson in the dangers of equating other cultures’ beliefs and understanding to our own. No one with any knowledge of Islam’s doctrines and history would counsel establishing a “meeting of the minds” with orthodox moslems—let us not forget, sharia law is bestowed by Allah—by bringing up a liberal Western idea like “social justice,” or our foundational principle of the separation of church and state.
The naïveté involving such an action is glaringly obvious:
[I]n the current ghastly mayhem and aggression wielded by Iran and its jihadist proxies.
Western civilization having blundered erringly into moslem lands has—at least in part—caused “a renewal of traditional Islamic doctrines and waging jihad to recover the faith’s lost glory.” This response includes restoring the Islamic faith’s lost dominance. Thus, the Ayatollah Khomeini warned:
We shall export our revolution to the whole world, [and jihad will be waged] [u]ntil the cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.
Decades earlier, Hassan al Banna, who founded the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, wrote:
It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.
Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb—whom writer Lee Smith called “Osama bin Laden’s intellectual godfather”—fleshes out al Banna’s vision of Islam’s purpose:
Islam came into this world to establish Allah’s rule on Allah’s earth, to invite all people toward the worship of Allah…This Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path so that it may address human reason and intuition with no interference and opposition from political systems.
This is an obvious rationale
for jihad, conquest, and occupation.
Today’s Western nations who ignore these motives:
[O]r prioritize instead Western ideas—like national self-determination, individual rights, education, equality of the sexes, or religious tolerance—will reap the wages of our arrogance starkly obvious in the depredations of Iran and its proxies.
As historian Ephraim Karsh wrote:
[Moslem conquerors and occupiers for centuries] acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.
In the West, “two centuries of secularization have left our institutions and politics nearly bereft of religious passions or ideas.”
Bernard Lewis wrote that Islam is quite the opposite:
In most Islamic countries, religion remains a major political factor—most [Islamic] countries are still profoundly [moslem], in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian.
Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most [Islamic] countries.
The contrast reveals the danger of secularism in the conflict between the West and Islam, particularly as an impediment to understanding our adversary’s spiritual motives and aims. In the Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote about this amnesia:
Millions of modern people…have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted it is decaying, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them.
It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past…the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed—but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.
Israelis believe the ignorance about the true nature of Islam has led to the current war against Iran and its proxies.
NOTE: Despite the jihadist success on 9/11, American Leftist leadership still seeks to appease the jihadists— supported and financed by Iran—who are continuing to pursue our destruction. Iran’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons will certainly make this possible.
