The Jarring Gong of Self-Preservation

Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong—these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.
-Winston Churchill


The words that Winston Churchill spoke above were to the British Parliament in 1936. The menace he saw looming on the horizon, a menace that the World was loath to confront, was the rise in Germany of Adolf Hitler. In Hitler, he saw a men bent upon world domination. he was a man determined to stretch his evil hand across Europe, to subjegate any peoples who opposed him, through military force.

How did Churchill know that this was Hitler's plan? Because Hitler told the World what he intended to do with his 1925 biography, Mein Kampf.

"...it [Nazi philosophy] by no means believes in an equality of races, but along with their difference it recognizes their higher or lesser value and feels itself obligated to promote the victory of the better and stronger, and demand the subordination of the inferior and weaker in accordance with the eternal will that dominates this universe." - Hitler states in Mein Kampf.

Mein Kampf also provides an explanation for the military conquests later attempted by Hitler and the Germans. Hitler states that since the Aryans are the master race, they are entitled simply by that fact to acquire more land for themselves. This Lebensraum, or living space, will be acquired by force, Hitler says, and includes the lands to the east of Germany, namely Russia. That land would be used to cultivate food and to provide room for the expanding Aryan population at the expense of the Slavic peoples, who were to be removed, eliminated, or enslaved.

It is interesting to note that the name of his biography, Mein Kampf, translates into English as, "My struggle." It is of further note, that the tool by which radical Islam attempts its World domination, Jihad also translates into English as, "My struggle." Is this a coincidence? Hardly! It is because of this "coincidence" of World views that many of us choose to call the people we fight today by their real name, Islamofascists!

Although the struggle between Islam and Christendom has been going on for fourteen centuries, the roots of the current conflict can be traced to the Second World War. Note, if you will, that I identified the two antagonists as Islam, a religion, and Christendom, a secular entity or entities. Christendom to most of the Muslim world has always meant Europe, although in this century it includes America and its allies.

It is important to see the difference in philosophies here. We, in the West do not view our nations in terms of a religion. The militant Islamofascists do! The battle, in the minds of our enemies is entirely rooted in religion. First, let us explore a little history of the struggle.

In The Roots of Muslim Rage, Bernard Lewis, one of the Worlds foremost scholars on Islam, has this to say:

Like every other civilization known to human history, the Muslim world in its heyday saw itself as the center of truth and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course enlighten and civilize.

This attitude is, of course, not confined to the Muslim world. Throughout human history, conquerors have used this view to excuse their conquests. The West is just as guilty of this as any other peoples. The difficulty for many of us today is in grasping the fact that many of our enemies are fighting a battle we thought settled centuries ago.

The struggle between these rival systems has now lasted for some fourteen centuries. It began with the advent of Islam, in the seventh century, and has continued virtually to the present day. It has consisted of a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests. For the first thousand years Islam was advancing, Christendom in retreat and under threat. The new faith conquered the old Christian lands of the Levant and North Africa, and invaded Europe, ruling for a while in Sicily, Spain, Portugal, and even parts of France. The attempt by the Crusaders to recover the lost lands of Christendom in the east was held and thrown back, and even the Muslims' loss of southwestern Europe to the Reconquista was amply compensated by the Islamic advance into southeastern Europe, which twice reached as far as Vienna. For the past three hundred years, since the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and the rise of the European colonial empires in Asia and Africa, Islam has been on the defensive, and the Christian and post-Christian civilization of Europe and her daughters has brought the whole world, including Islam, within its orbit.

It is difficult, as I have said, for many of us to think in terms of a fourteen hundred year war. This is not so for the Islamofascists.

Jihad is a central duty of every Muslim. Modern Muslim theologians have spoken of many things as jihads: the struggle within the soul, defending the faith from critics, supporting its growth and defense financially, even migrating to non-Muslim lands for the purpose of spreading Islam. But violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. Many passages of the Qur'an and sayings of the Prophet Muhammad are used by jihad warriors today to justify their actions and gain new recruits. No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad. The theology of jihad, which denies unbelievers equality of human rights and dignity, is available today for anyone with the will and means to bring it to life. (emphasis mine)

It is important to note that emphasis! Moderate Muslims have not repudiated the doctrines espoused by the radical Islamofascists. Until Muslims worldwide acknowledge the dangers that radical Islamofacism poses both to themselves and to the West, this armed conflict will continue to recruit new fanatics from their ranks.
Let us return now to the modern struggle. For the most part, little or nothing was known about America in the Mideast until oil was discovered on the Arabian Peninsula in the mid-1920s. American oil companies made deals with the ruling tribes, the House of Saud, to extract that oil. Many Muslims saw this as an unwelcome intrusion into their culture, even as American money allowed the rulers to acquire luxuries and comforts never before known in that part of the world.
The influence of Nazi theocracy to the Mideast came about with the collapse of the French Government during World War II. A puppet French Government was set up by the Nazis in Vichy, France. French colonies throughout the world, particularly those in the Middle East were given the choice of recognizing the Vicky Government, and their Nazi overlords, or being attacked by the German Army. Most chose Vichy. With the Nazi occupation of Mideast came the Nazi doctrine of Jewish cunning and American imperialism.
This doctrine fell on fertile ears among the Muslim populations.

In this perception, America was the ultimate example of civilization without culture: rich and comfortable, materially advanced but soulless and artificial; assembled or at best constructed, not grown; mechanical, not organic; technologically complex but lacking the spirituality and vitality of the rooted, human, national cultures of the Germans and other "authentic" peoples. German philosophy, and particularly the philosophy of education, enjoyed a considerable vogue among Arab and some other Muslim intellectuals in the thirties and early forties, and this philosophic anti-Americanism was part of the message.

And, of course the cause of all misery within the Muslim lands, was the Jews. Jewish people from all across Europe had been emigrating from their homelands to the holy lands in increasing numbers since the late 1800s. Interestingly enough, for the most part, the Jews and Muslims had been living side-by-side in relative peace throughout that time. It was with the influence of Nazi theory during their occupation of the area that brought about the schism between the two peoples that has stayed with us to this very day.

After the collapse of the Third Reich and the temporary ending of German influence, another philosophy, even more anti-American, took its place -- the Soviet version of Marxism, with a denunciation of Western capitalism and of America as its most advanced and dangerous embodiment. And when Soviet influence began to fade, there was yet another to take its place, or at least to supplement its working -- the new mystique of Third Worldism, emanating from Western Europe, particularly France, and later also from the United States, and drawing at times on both these earlier philosophies. This mystique was helped by the universal human tendency to invent a golden age in the past, and the specifically European propensity to locate it elsewhere. A new variant of the old golden-age myth placed it in the Third World, where the innocence of the non-Western Adam and Eve was ruined by the Western serpent.

Again, this new philosophy blamed the West, and particularly America for all the ills befalling the Muslim people. It has been to the benefit of the despots who have ruled these nation states to foster this hatred. By focusing the attention on the West, and away from their own policies of subjugating their peoples, they maintain their tyrannical rule.
And, of course, the West has been a willing accomplice in this charade, with its self-loathing brought about by liberal ideologies. The “Blame America First” crowd has aided and abetted our enemies throughout the past century and into this new one.

We of the West are accused of sexism, racism, and imperialism, institutionalized in patriarchy and slavery, tyranny and exploitation. To these charges, and to others as heinous, we have no option but to plead guilty -- not as Americans, nor yet as Westerners, but simply as human beings, as members of the human race. In none of these sins are we the only sinners, and in some of them we are very far from being the worst. The treatment of women in the Western world, and more generally in Christendom, has always been unequal and often oppressive, but even at its worst it was rather better than the rule of polygamy and concubinage that has otherwise been the almost universal lot of womankind on this planet.

If the West once embraced slavery, it was the West that in fact, abolished that tradition. Slavery was once, after all a worldwide custom. It is now confined primarily in Muslim lands.

If the West once embraced Sexism, denying women the equality they deserve, it was the West that brought about universal suffrage, and equal rights laws. Nowhere are these rights less obvious than in Islamic law.

If the West could once be accused of Imperialism, is there any portion of the world that is not so guilty? It has been the West, after all, which has led the fight, albeit sometimes under duress, to end colonialism and imperialistic encroachments. The same cannot be said of the militaristic imperialism of worldwide Communism or radical Islam. It is, in fact, the imperialist domination sought by Islamofascism that we fight today.

Imperialism, in its generally accepted definition, is different than what is meant by our enemies in radical Islam.

. But the way this term is used in the literature of Islamic fundamentalists often suggests that it may not carry quite the same meaning for them as for its Western critics. In many of these writings the term "imperialist" is given a distinctly religious significance, being used in association, and sometimes interchangeably, with "missionary," and denoting a form of attack that includes the Crusades as well as the modern colonial empires. One also sometimes gets the impression that the offense of imperialism is not -- as for Western critics -- the domination by one people over another but rather the allocation of roles in this relationship. What is truly evil and unacceptable is the domination of infidels over true believers. For true believers to rule misbelievers is proper and natural, since this provides for the maintenance of the holy law, and gives the misbelievers both the opportunity and the incentive to embrace the true faith. But for misbelievers to rule over true believers is blasphemous and unnatural, since it leads to the corruption of religion and morality in society, and to the flouting or even the abrogation of God's law.

The Islamofascists see the natural order to be that Islam reign supreme over all other religions throughout the world. In their world view, non-believers must be subjugated to Islam. There is no room in their world for any other religion but their own.

Many of our modern day appeasers would have us believe that we can compromise with the radicals. If we would just remove ourselves from the Mideast, they will leave us alone. If we simply stop our support for Israel the Islamofascists will stop hating us.

This is a simplistic view of history, myopic in its approach, and frighteningly dangerous in its implementation. Like Adolph Hitler during the 1930s, radical Islam has told us their plan. Like Europe of that same period, the world has chosen to appease.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad tells us his plan to bring about a worldwide Islamic Caliphate, and his intention to exterminate Israel and the Jews, we ignore his warning, believing instead that it is empty rhetoric.

When Evil speaks, it behooves us to listen!