A borderless war to reinstate the 7th century
We have previously referred to this piece by Australian Paul Sheehan, but it bears re-reading today (with an additional paragraph from New Media Journal):
What makes this global war different from the First and Second World Wars is that there are tens of thousands of combatants who actually want to die, and in the process kill as many non-believers as possible. As the bombs, missiles and rockets have been exploding in Lebanon, Israel and Gaza, medievalists who are key drivers in this cultural struggle have been ecstatic. You can hear it in the rhetoric of Hezbollah’s spiritual leader, Hassan Nasrallah, and Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
Most disturbingly, jihad is being driven by three separate, distinct and often competing strands of Islam: Sunni, financed by the oil-powered Wahabist fundamentalists of Saudi Arabia, and dominated by the ideology of al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden; Shiite, an extension of the theocracy of Iran, and highly active in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan and the Palestinian territories; and Pakistani Muslim nationalism, the wellspring of jihad in Kashmir, support for the Taliban, and terrorist attacks in India and Britain, with its large Pakistani emigre community. What these distinct mutations of Islam have in common is an appetite for war and murder and sexual oppression…
War and murder have been carried out in the name of Allah in Thailand, Bali, Sumatra, the Philippines, Nigeria, Algeria, Somalia, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Gaza, the West Bank, Egypt, Afghanistan, Lebanon, Pakistan, India, Bosnia, Albania, Kenya, Tanzania, France, the Netherlands, Britain, Spain, Denmark, Russia, the United States and Sudan, where mass murder and mass rape have been the tools of cultural war….
The world stands on the brink of world war and the battle lines could not be more evident: The Munich Olympic Massacres of 1972; the Iranian hostage crisis; the assassination of Anwar Sadat; the bombings of the US Embassy and Marine barracks in Beirut; the 1985 hijacking of a TWA flight from Athens to Rome; the Achille Lauro hijacking; the 1985 airport attacks in Rome and Vienna; the bombing of TWA flight 840 in Greece; the kidnapping and murder of U.S. Marine Corps Lieutenant Colonel W. Higgins; the 1991 assassination of Indian Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi; the 1992 Bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Argentina; the initial 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, the 1995 bombing of the Egyptian Embassy compound in Islamabad, Pakistan; the bombing of the Khobar Towers; the 1997 Tourist Killings in Egypt; the 1998 bombing of the US Embassy in Nairobi, Kenya; the attack on the USS Cole; the September 11th 2001 attacks; the train bombings in Spain; the July 11th London train bombings; and most recently the terrorist bombings in India. All of these brutal acts of the cowardice that is unprovoked terrorism have one thing in common; they were all perpetrated in the name of Allah…
One premise of the Iraq War is that those making war against America were a small group of extremists, and if we could tie them up fighting way over there and pick them off, so much the better. Meanwhile, decent Iraqis would create a decent society and then they could kill the remaining thugs.
Something has changed in the last few years, however, with the metastasis of slaughters and rampages and hundreds of plots to London and Paris and Canada. The West has come to see that men who claim to represent the very heart of Islam are doing all this killing and plotting in every nation they inhabit. And the silence of their co-religionists is deafening.