Author and Oxford historian David Selbourne asks in the Times of London: Can the West defeat the Islamist threat? Here are ten reasons why not. Here are a few of his list:

LET US SUPPOSE, for the sake of argument, that the war declared by al-Qaeda and other Islamists is under way. Let us further suppose that thousands of “terrorist” attacks carried out in Islam’s name during the past decades form part of this war; and that conflicts that have spread to 50 countries and more, taking the lives of millions — including in inter-Muslim blood-shedding — are the outcome of what Osama bin Laden has called “conducting jihad for the sake of Allah”. If such war is under way, there are ten good reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated in it.

1) The first is the extent of political division in the non-Muslim world about what is afoot. Some reject outright that there is a war at all; others agree with the assertion by the US President that “the war we fight is the decisive ideological struggle of the 21st century”. Divided counsels have also dictated everything from “dialogue” to the use of nuclear weapons, and from reliance on “public diplomacy” to “taking out Islamic sites”, Mecca included. Adding to this incoherence has been the gulf between those bristling to take the fight to the “terrorist” and those who would impede such a fight, whether from domestic civil libertarian concerns or from rivalrous geopolitical calculation.

2) The second reason why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated is that the strengths of the world community of Muslims are being underestimated, and the nature of Islam misunderstood. It is neither a “religion of peace” nor a “religion hijacked” or “perverted” by “the few”. Instead, its moral intransigence and revived ardours, its jihadist ethic and the refusal of most diaspora Muslims to “share a common set of values” with non-Muslims are all one, and justified by the Koran itself.

Islam is not even a religion in the conventional sense of the term. It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems. It therefore holds that it is in mankind’s own interests to be subdued under Islam’s rule. Such belief therefore makes an absurdity of the project to “democratise” Muslim nations in the West’s interests, an inversion that Islam cannot accept and, in its own terms, rightly so. It renders naive, too, the distinction between the military and political wings of Islamic movements; and makes Donald Rumsfeld’s assertion in June 2005 that the insurgents in Iraq “don’t have vision, they’re losers” merely foolish. In this war, if there is a war, the boot is on the other foot…

5) The fifth disablement is to be found in the confusion of “progressives” about the Islamic advance. With their political and moral bearings lost since the defeat of the “socialist project”, many on the Left have only the fag-end of anti-colonial positions on which to take their stand. To attribute the West’s problems to our colonial past contains some truth. But it is again to misunderstand the inner strength of Islam’s revival, which is owed not to victimhood but to advancing confidence in its own belief system.

Moreover, to Islam’s further advantage, it has led most of today’s “progressives” to say little, or even to keep silent, about what would once have been regarded as the reactionary aspects of Islam: its oppressive hostility to dissent, its maltreatment of women, its supremacist hatred of selected out-groups such as Jews and gays, and its readiness to incite and to use extremes of violence against them. Mein Kampf circulates in Arab countries under the title Jihadi.

Mr. Selbourne makes some fair points, and he may be correct if you can extrapolate current trends indefintely; we think that is a stretch, however. He fails to mention the historical barbarity of his country when dealing throughout history with what it has perceived as threats. England is the country that expelled and banned Jews for centuries — from 1290-1656, for example. Is it so impossible the think that those harboring any version of a totalitarian Islamist ideology might one day face a similar fate, or worse? We have said before not to underestimate the still quiescent and repressed survival instincts of Western man.

In the long run, human nature will out, and human nature is not a pretty story. Mankind survived for hundreds of thousands of years as hunter-gatherers — we are not about to believe that these deep survival instincts can be bred out of man with a couple of generations of welfare checks. Right now the feminized West and its institutions are still mired in political correctness, and this may persist for a long time and get very unpleasant, with governments getting ever more repressive to preserve their fairyland view of how things should be. Indeed, we certainly grant the possibility that Mr. Selbourne may be correct, and that Islamic fundamentalism, demographics, and the power of a police state may bring about a muezzin atop Buckingham Palace.

But it is foolishness to think that this is inevitable. As we have discussed, radical discontinuities in human circumstances and affairs have happened many times throughout history; their unexpected nature is why, for example, we have stock market bubbles. People do not recognize bubbles when they are in them. Right now, much of the West is still in a bubble of political correctness. Just like a stock market bubble, most everyone thinks it is going to go on forever. If history is a guide, this bubble will end too, as all bubbles do. We think that the bubble of political correctness is likely to end particularly badly if it ends, by the way.

What makes seeing this war clearly a difficult matter is that there are two wars going on. The first war is with fundamentalist Islam. The Islamists, thank God, are extrmely clear in what they want: convert to Islam or die. That war is pretty straightforward, though the West to date has been too polite to fight that war as it might be fought. (No politician, to date, has wanted to engage the thorny issues of defining what is and is not covered under freedom of religion, or calling for loyalty oaths to a secular state, or take on the ideological war against sharia, for example.)

It is the second war that muddies the waters, the political correctness war in the West. That war against naming the first war clearly and acting to defeat the enemy is a step-child of the failed socialist project of the twentieth century. Political correctness is the valuing of utopia over reality, human nature as it ideally might be over human nature as it is. Because the political correctness project is so flawed, it needs elements of totalitarian power to keep itself in business. The strength of the political correctness movement is that it has institutionalized itself in the fabric of government and media during years of ease and plenty; its weakness is that of all movements that rely on totalitarian power — when a certain percentage of people become willing to speak out and rise up, it suddenly becomes clear that the emperor has no clothes. The PC movement might not fail: it might become the vanguard of the Islamist state. But if and when it does fail, there may well be calls for revenge and retribution.

In summary, do not bet your last dollar on the proposition that the West has become the graveyard of the survival instincts of secular man.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 9th, 2006 at 8:15 am and is filed under art, culture, EU, General, Iran, Law, Left of Left, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.