By Selwyn Duke
Adolf Hitler wrote his infamous work, "Mein Kampf" [My Struggle], in 1924, while cooling his heels in Landsberg prison for nine months after a failed coup attempt. In this book he outlined a blueprint for Germany's future that indicated clearly that he had plans for world domination. The man who would ultimately become his nemesis, Winston Churchill, heeded Hitler's words and sounded the alarm - but his warning fell on deaf ears. It seems that the pseudo-intellectual character of most of his fellow statesmen precluded them from being able to perceive evil. Perhaps they just outsmarted themselves - perhaps they were so bent on seeing the world in shades of gray that they couldn't perceive blackness even when it was staring them in the face. This is not surprising though, after all, many of them were the same people who said that WWI would be the "war to end all wars." This kind of naiveté is a common human failing. People tend to be so thoroughly entombed in the walls of their own mindset that they can't conceive of the far superior, holy will of an angel in the ether, or the far inferior, dastardly will of a demon in Hades. Simply put, they can't imagine how anyone could think that much differently than they do. People also tend to believe that significant events or the technology that makes them feel civilized change human nature; bad things were what happened before people ascended to our enlightened state, you see. So, one of these ingenuous sorts, Neville Chamberlain, traded the Sudetenland for "peace in our time" and the rest is what accounts for what seems like twenty-five percent of the line-up on the History Channel.
Because human nature doesn't change, the Adolf Hitlers, those who are bent on destruction, are always with us - sometimes lurking in the shadows and sometimes overshadowing mankind. And, the Neville Chamberlains, people who can't recognize them, are also with us. Both these breeds are figuring prominently in what we call our "War on Terrorism." There's another commonality though: the voice of the perennially endangered species known as the Winston Churchill echoes from the past but is silenced in the present.
The fact of the matter is that today we are once again being confronted with an evil that has issued similar threats. Most of us know about Osama Bin Laden's issuing of a fatwa [death sentence] against all Americans and that he has called for a holy war against the west. But what many of us don't realize is that this attitude is not only not uncommon in the Islamic world, but has actually been a constant theme in it since Islam's inception 1400 year ago. What is also glossed over during all of our touchy-feely all-religions-are peaceful-and-equal talk about this is that at the very heart of Islam lies a mentality that prescribes war. Unlike Jesus Christ, Mohammed, the founder of Islam, was a military man. In 624 A.D. he announced the concept of Jihad, or holy war, and he wrote in the Koran, "I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers: smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger-tips off them. ...And slay them wherever ye catch them...." During the next nine years Mohammed launched no fewer than 27 military campaigns - nine of them he lead himself.
The soul of Mohammed lives on in those who have inherited his mantle - Bin Laden is just the tip of the iceberg. The Ayatollah Khomeini, the former leader of Iran, echoed Mohammed's sentiments when he called for a war against the west and stated that it was every male adult's responsibility to participate in this vanquishing of infidels. He said, "Islam does not allow peace between... a Moslem and an infidel." Ayatollah Khomeini is dead now, but his quintessentially Muslim view of what should be visited on non-Muslims has only become more prevalent in the Muslim world. In fact, the Islamic fundamentalism under whose banner he paraded now has approximately 100,000,000 adherents worldwide.
Like their forefathers in the Muslim hordes that conquered much of Europe, many of these modern day Islamic warriors seek to unite the world by way of the "Sword of Islam." This war is being fought on many fronts - terrorism is only one of them. Another, more subtle part of this conflict is the funding of Madrassas, or Muslim schools, all across our country. Much of the funding for this comes from Saudi Arabia, and the effort has already seduced one million black Americans into embracing Islam. The limited length of this piece proscribes me from enumerating even a small fraction of the admissions by high profile Muslims of the contempt they have for, and designs they have on what some of them have termed "The Great Satan." Suffice it to say though, that from all four corners of the earth Muslims of all stripes, from Imams to secular college professors, have made no bones about their desire to unite the world under Muslim rule.
Yet, despite the fact that this is true and that the dust has barely settled over the World Trade center site, what do we hear? When people like myself try to be as Churchillian as we can and sound the alarm, we are called hateful for warning about hate. When we talk about how we need to crack down on illegal immigration and start acting as if we actually have borders, we are told it's racist. Never mind the fact that many terrorists have come here illegally and three of the 9/11 hijackers were illegal aliens; never mind the fact that we have perhaps as many as 13 million illegals in our country at this very time, including 115,000 from middle eastern countries who have either illegal or quasi-illegal status. No, never mind that, we still have powerful lobbying groups in this nation that care more about the supposed rights of foreigners who've invaded our soil than about those of Americans. Hey, ever hear of how it says in the Preamble to the Constitution that the government is supposed to "ensure domestic tranquility?" And, yeah, yeah, I know that at this point I'm supposed to issue the obligatory disclaimer about how most of these foreigners are good people and are not our enemies...yada, yada, yada. Listen, that fact is completely and totally beside the point; let's wake up and smell the coffee - they're here ILLEGALLY - they're NOT supposed to be in the United States. But, this doesn't seem to matter to most politicians nowadays, because almost to a man they simply mince words and make pandering statements about how we need to "solve" the problem. This isn't rocket science - ever hear the word "deportation?" You see, we just don't get it.
Then you have the politically correct, hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil crowd. They tell us that the exercise of common sense under the guise of profiling is wrong, and that we have to check our brains at the door and regard a ninety year old Norwegian woman as being the same as a thirty year old man dressed like Yassir Arafat. That's smart; we did this before 9/11 - I heard that someone at the flight school attended by some of the hijackers said that while these men had all the earmarks of terrorists, he didn't want to give voice to that suspicion for fear of being perceived as racist. Isn't that special? Hey, nothing is more important than polishing up our liberal credentials and safeguarding our reputation. We didn't get it back then, and because of that we got it on 9/11.
Then there's the tolerance and diversity uber alles crowd. The greatest heresy in their relativistic book is stating that some ideas, some religions, some philosophies and some ideologies are right and others wrong. To them, a greater crime than flying planes into buildings is the professing of the fact that since different cultures and religions espouse different values, not all cultures and religions can be morally equal. This is incongruent with their effort to spread their "if it feels good do it" philosophy; a doctrine which states that everything is just a matter of opinion, so we can't cast aspersions on anyone else's belief - unless that person happens to disagree with their perverted concept of tolerance, that is. So, whenever we start to broach the subject of the pernicious threat posed by radical Islam, they squelch the debate by telling us that we're being intolerant and that it might cause people to persecute Muslims. So powerful is their influence that we won't even call our enemy by name for fear of "offending" someone. The fact is that this isn't a war on terrorism, because we're not fighting any and all terrorists no matter where they may be. This is a war against Muslim extremists; that's a fact and we can't be afraid to say the emperor has no clothes. Listen, I only want to condemn the sin, not the sinner, but if we can't even open our eyes and see what's right in front of our face, we're a lost cause. We still don't get it.
The same crew likes to try to sanitize Islam by drawing an equivalency between it and Christianity. They love to point to examples in history where Christians supposedly perpetrated similar acts for identical reasons - the Crusades for instance. But a very salient point is missed here: for a Christian to commit such acts he must be willing to VIOLATE what is clear Christian teaching. However, there is not only no clear proscription against such violence in Islam, there are actually prescriptions for acting thusly. In fact, so foreign is the Christian mentality to many Muslim clerics that Ayatollah Khomeini actually said, "This idea of turning the other cheek has been wrongly attributed to Jesus (peace be unto him); it is those barbaric imperialists that have attributed it to him. Jesus was a prophet, and no prophet can be so illogical." In other words, it is so inconceivable to some Muslim theologians that a prophet would counsel people to be peaceful, that they believe Jesus' words must have been distorted. Despite these facts, the pressure brought to bear by the sensitivity patrol is so great that President Bush and everyone else feels compelled to pay lip service to the idea that Islam is a peaceful religion. This is like having been reluctant to criticize Naziism during WWII for fear of offending Germans. We just don't get it.
But let's put that aside for a second and assume that Christianity does allow for the same actions and that those ancient Christians were cut from the same stone. The fact of the matter is that this conversion by the sword, smite your enemies attitude that these liberals hate so much doesn't manifest itself in Christendom today. It's a relic of the past everywhere but one place: the Muslim world - and that's what's relevant. If we're going to let propagandists shift our focus to what happened a millennium ago and blind us to what's occurring today, then we will be the authors of our own demise. We just don't get it.
We have to pull our heads out of the sand and recognize the reality of what's confronting us. You may think that being a sophisticate means seeing only shades of gray, but evil does exist and this evil doesn't subscribe to that philosophy. It sees the world as being black and white and considers us to be as black as pitch. Muslim jurists have declared that the world is divided thusly: the world of Islam, Dar al-Islam, and the non-Islamic world, Dar al-Harb, and they believe that these two realms are in a state of perpetual war. You may not attend Church; you may not even consider yourself to be a Christian; you may even despise the religion. But understand this: much of the Muslim world sees YOU as being part of Christendom - you are part of Dar al-Harb whether you like it or not. Osama Bin Laden's death sentence is against every man, woman and child from Maine to Hawaii - you are in the crosshairs and a bull's-eye has been painted on your back. We are all on the ship that those who control the levers of power in Dar al-Islam want to sink. They are obtaining weapons of mass destruction and they aren't the atheists in the former Soviet Union who believed that death means disappearing into oblivion. They are people with an apocalyptic world view who believe that dying while killing infidels like us is a ticket to paradise. Their message is crystal clear: convert or die. We have to decide whether we're going to be Churchills or Chamberlains, because we didn't get it before and we got it. We still don't get it, and if we don't get it soon we're going to get it again.
