Getting to the Root in the "War on Terror"

"The Allah That Failed" by Jack Wheeler

The above is an excellent article from a logical standpoint since the clearer we understand our terms, the clearer our judgement is regarding the truthfulness of our propositions. The question is just how do we define the term "War on Terror?" I think Mr. Wheeler gives us plenty to chew on.

What is immediately disconcerting after reading this article is what is implied in the "what or who" that we must do battle. I see that it cuts deep into our knee-jerk political correctness. With the many terrorist organizations (one of whom who struck London that is separate from Al Quaida), it seems futile to try to strike back at them just militarily. These terrorist groups are multiplying and dividing almost at will, which makes our attempts to stop their growth very frustrating and seemingly fruitless. The only way to achieve victory is to deal with the real root of the war: the problem of Islam itself. I think we are afraid to face it, for the implications require us not only to change our tactics, but to do a massive rethink about our own beliefs and philosophies of life individually and as a nation.

Now, I am aware that there are millions of peace-loving Muslims in the world today who are NOT to be faulted with propagating this deadly ideology against Israel and the United States. However it is fair to say they do not follow all the teachings of Mohammed. The "peaceful Muslims" are typified by Islamic "purists" as hypocrites. The ideology of the Islamo-fascist movement is not a perversion of the words of Mohammed, but a direct application of all his teachings from the Q'uran; it's as though his violent ideology that initially established the "religion of Allah" is making a resurgence, although in a more sinister way.

So what is the cure? Perhaps it's with the "dissenters" of Islam that Wheeler refers to who have seen the evil that is from "the inside." Hopefully, this reactionary movement grows, for any external resistance to the Islamo-fascists may stave off the movement, but doesn't alter it from within. Yet I'm not as optimistic as Wheeler; I don't think Islam has the substance within it as a religion that can renew itself. As the Bangladeshi writer Mohammed Bin Abdullah states: “Mankind will not lose a single moral precept if Islam is not there tomorrow.”

So, we must engage our enemy in this war on terror using tactics that are both militaristic and ideological, since Islamo-fascism is a conglomeration of political and religious ideas. We know how to do the military tactics but how do we do ideological combat? I assert that the rampant moral relativism in our culture has no power to defeat the tactics of extreme Islam. I contend that moral relativism is a cowardly belief system that embraces Islam as one of the many acceptable ways in which to believe, even to the point of celebrating it. This will not stop Islamo-facsim; the Islamic killers will ultimately kill the nice moral relativists.

There are no easy political or military answers; we are dealing with a 1400 year-old politico-religious problem. The battle is the same, only the Islamic adherents have changed their tactics from being sword wielding raiders on horseback to bomb-strapping human death machines. Perhaps now, we can drop our smugness and begin appreciating the difficulties the Catholic Church and Catholic kingdoms faced during the Middle Ages against the raging Islamic hords of the Turks and the Moors. Maybe we can learn something from the moral absolutism of our ancestors and the lessons gleaned from their failures. We need to see this struggle for what it is: a cataclysmic struggle for the future of mankind.