The face of the enemy

From The Washington Times:

KABUL, Afghanistan -- Senior Muslim clerics demanded yesterday that an Afghan man on trial for converting from Islam to Christianity be executed, warning that if the government caves in to Western pressure and frees him, they will incite people to "pull him into pieces."

In an unusual move, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice telephoned President Hamid Karzai yesterday seeking a "favorable resolution" of the case of Abdul Rahman. The 41-year-old former medical aid worker faces the death penalty under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for becoming a Christian.

His trial has fired passions in this Muslim nation and highlighted a conflict of values between the West and Islam, which forbids those born as Muslims from converting to other religions.

"Rejecting Islam is insulting God. We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said cleric Abdul Raoulf, who is considered a moderate and was jailed three times for opposing the Taliban before the hard-line regime was ousted in 2001.

This case illustrates the difficulties of dealing with the Islamic world. The Koran is what it is and this is what it says. The great majority of the Afghan people are fundamentalist Muslims and letting this guy go free is as incomprehensible to them as Moloch worship (where parents burn their own infant children to death as a sacrifice to the god) is to the average Christian.

This is why, despite what anyone might say to the contrary, Islam is the enemy in this war. It is Islam that inspires Osama bin Laden and Islam that sends young Palestinians into crowded Israeli restaurants wearing suicide vests. As the 9/11 hijackers sat in the cockpits of their hijacked airliners and saw the towers of the World Trade Center growing large before them they cried out, “Allah is great”.

It was Islam that sent millions of average Muslims out into the streets to celebrate after the video footage of the Towers falling was shown on international cable news. It is Islam that inspires kidnappers to take innocent hostages in Iraq and saw their heads off on live TV.

It was young men whose minds had stewed in Islam who drove a boat laden with explosives into the USS Cole. It was a man in the grip of Islam who drove an SUV into a crowd of students at Chapel Hill.

Even though dictatorial Muslim governments have murdered more Muslims in the past few decades than all the Western/Crusader/Christian/Jewish forces have in all of history it is Islam that leads Muslims to support those governments and oppose any attempt to liberate their victims.

It is time, and past time, to start calling our enemy by its true name. We are not fighting a war on terrorism. Terrorism is a tactic, not an ideology or a nation. Imagine Churchill calling on the British people to fight and defeat Blitzkrieg or Roosevelt asking congress for a declaration of war on Surprise Attacks after Pearl Harbor.

I am not saying that our efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan are somehow illegitimate unless we also invade Saudi Arabia and Pakistan. I am saying that we need a long term strategy to eliminate Islam as an influence in the world. This can be done either by converting Muslims to another faith(s) or by reforming Islam into a non-malignant form.

We are sometimes told that reformation of Islam is something that can only come from within. I do not agree. Martin Luther found that it was impossible to reform the Roman Catholic Church from within. The unscriptural additions to Christianity that Luther objected to were what the hierarchy of the RCC at that time was most interested in protecting (because that was the source of their power).

In the same fashion imams who demand that nations be governed by their interpretation of the Koran will not willingly give up that power. Those who would reform Islam face an additional problem that Luther did not have to deal with. While Luther objected to those parts of Roman Catholic doctrine that had no foundation in the Bible, and could therefore appeal to the Bible for support the would-be Muslim reformer cannot do the same with the Koran.

The Koran, despite Mohammad’s pretensions to divine inspiration, is nothing more than the recorded sayings of a murdering, child molesting, highway robber who managed to form a really big gang and then order them to spread his “faith” at sword point. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar have more in common with the historical Mohammad than any of Islam’s moderates.

The fact is that it is the Islamofascists who can appeal to the Koran for support and the reformer who must twist meanings and import alien doctrines into the religion. This makes reform extremely problematic. In fact it may be impossible. This leaves one other option.

Conversion. If enough Muslims convert to another, non murderous, faith then the problem largely goes away. It is strange to think that the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association may have more to do with winning the war than the United States Marine Corps.

The great problem with conversion as official policy is that the US government is constitutionally forbidden to engage in this kind of activity. If conversion is to be an answer, even a partial one, to the problem it will have to come from non-governmental organizations and persons. At any rate it cannot be counted on to have any significant impact. I’m not saying that it couldn’t, just that we cannot count on it.

Of course there is another thing that could work. Cattle prod every Muslim now living in the west back to the Middle East and place all of the oil fields under American control. Without their oil money and denied the ability to infiltrate Western nations the Global Jihad would be reduced to throwing rocks, at each other.

Is that a practical solution? Probably not. To the Roman Empire it would have been, but we are so mired in political correctness that we would never be able to summon the will.

This leaves us doing what we have been doing since the end of WWII. Just muddling through somehow. Historically Islam goes quiescent when faced with power that it can’t overcome. If we can somehow maintain the will to keep our forces in Iraq until they have a stable government and effective military (something that could take 10 or 15 years) it is likely that the jihad will go back underground for another generation or two.