Those on the Left claim to stand for tolerance, equality and women’s and gay rights, yet they are largely silent about an ideology, a politico-religious project, that wants to put in place a global legal system contrary to those objectives. Those on the Right claim to stand for liberty, free speech, and individual initiative, yet they too speak sparingly (and unclearly), if at all, about an ideology that opposes their most cherished beliefs. Mark Steyn offers a few words (from his new book) that should have been spoken by someone in public life over the last five years, as background to our current situation, but have not been:

The biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Microsoft but Islamism.

The Saudis took what was not so long ago a severe but peripheral strain of Islam - practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere - and successfully exported it to Jakarta and Singapore and Alma-Ata and Grozny and Sarajevo and Lyons and Bergen and Manchester and Ottawa and Dearborn and Falls Church. It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.

As a bleary Dean Martin liked to say, in mock bewilderment, at the start of his stage act: “How did all these people get in my room?” How did all these jihadists get rooms in Miami and Portland and Montreal? How did we come to breed suicide bombers not just in Gaza but in Yorkshire? In the globalized pre-9/11 world, we in the West thought in terms of nations - the Americans, the French, the Chinese - and, insofar as we considered transnational groups, were obsessed mostly with race. Religion wasn’t really on the radar.

So an insurgency that lurks within a religion automatically has a global network. And you don’t need “deep cover”: You can hang your shingle on Main Street and we won’t even notice it. And when we do - as we did on 9/11 - we still won’t do anything about it, because, well, it’s a religion, and modern man is disinclined to go after any faith except perhaps his own.

But Islam is not just a religion. Those lefties who bemoan what America is doing to provoke “the Muslim world” would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to “the Christian world.” When such sensitive guardians of the separation of church and state endorse the first formulation but not the second, they implicitly accept that Islam has a political sovereignty too. Thus, it’s not merely that there’s a global jihad lurking within this religion, but that the religion itself is a political project - and, in fact, an imperial project - in a way that modern Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism and Buddhism are not. Furthermore, this particular religion is historically a somewhat bloodthirsty faith, in which whatever’s your bag violence-wise can almost certainly be justified. (Yes, Christianity has had its blood drenched moments, but the Spanish Inquisition, still a byword for theocratic violence, killed fewer people in a century and a half than the jihad does in a typical year.)

So we have a global terrorist movement, insulated within a global political project, insulated within a severely self-segregating religion whose adherents are the fastest-growing demographic in the developed world. The jihad thus has a very potent brand inside a highly dispersed and very decentralized network much more efficient than anything the CIA can muster. And these fellows can hide in plain sight.

The questions and the debate need to go even further than Mark Steyn suggested in his piece. There are critically important debates and discussions to be held between the West and the Islamic world, but Jihad gets in the way. We’ll mention a couple of these discussions:

In areas of human endeavor from psychoanalysis, to technological innovation, to full employment — let alone the issues of women’s and gay rights and tolerance for the religions of others — sharia societies are failed societies. However, sharia societies place great value on honor, manliness and modesty, virtues often in short supply in the West. Is there any common ground to build on, to produce socieites of greater progress and virtue?

An essential issue of Islam and the West is that sharia law appears to be fundamentally incompatible with Judeo-Christian-Enlightment law in important ways, and sharia societies are similarly incompatible with the things that make the free-wheeling societies of the world licentious and prosperous. Must this be the case?

Often we never get to points of interesting debate because (a) a mere defense of the West’s ideas is often seen as an attack on Islam — worse, an attack by an inferior, the infidel, on his better, the believer; and (b) the threat of violence hangs over the stage where the debate was to be held. This brings us to the question: are those who threaten violence mere excrescences on the body politic of Islam, or are they acting out the attitude and judgment of sharia law against those whom they find offensive? In other words, are these fellows giving the West a foretaste of what life would be like were they in power and sharia the law? Further, they have no shame or hesitation about their robust threats of violence, and they obviously think there is nothing wrong with them — indeed, they think there is something very right about their Jihad. Thus the question becomes: is Jihad something peripheral and unimportant to Islam, or is it intrinsic and important to Islam?

We are told that Jihad is Holy War, according to the most revered Islamic authorities, and not merely some inner struggle with sin. The writer Spengler asserts Jihad is to Islam as Mass is to Catholicism — it is a means to guarantee entry into heaven and an obligation imposed on every Muslim. There are important policy implications that turn on these assertions, because the West cannot put up with any ideology that by its nature demands the stifling of debate.

Islam in the West needs to renounce Jihad. And the West needs to demand that it do so. In one sense, none of this is a big deal. As Salman Rushdie said “It wasn’t always like this - this religion of permanent outrage. This isn’t the religion I grew up with…” Islam had achieved a kind of lazy man’s Reformation in the West, an adaptation to life, prior to its current Great Awakening with the spread of Wahabbism. Islam’s problem is that the best exegesis of its founding texts is often on the side of the extremists. But that should be Islam’s problem, not the West’s. Anyone who threatens to stifle debate in the West has no business living here.

The Left and Right should have debated this and made common cause long before now; we have said that their failure to discuss the role of religion in Jihad is the greatest failure of politics in America since the mid 19th century. The Left and the Right have both put our society at risk by avoiding this difficult subject.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 17th, 2006 at 9:27 am and is filed under Democrats, General, MSM, Religion, Republicans, War, art, culture. 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.