Worth Thinking About

Very cogent, very disturbing. Not sure I agree entirely, but worth thinking about...

Asia Times, 8 Jul 03

"Did someone in Washington take Kant literally and set about devising a constitution for devils with the Arab world in mind? Does it matter? Washington must talk about democracy in the Arab world...as in the Jewish joke about the man who sees a shop whose windows are full of clocks. He enters and tells the proprietor, "I want to buy a clock." The proprietor responds, "I don't sell clocks." "Then what do you do?" "I am a mohel [ritual circumciser]." "Then why do you put clocks in the window?" "What do you want me to put in the window?"
Which brings us to the threat of radical Islam. "You are decadent and hedonistic. We on the other hand are willing to die for what we believe, and we are a billion strong. You cannot kill all of us, so you will have to accede to what we demand." That, in a nutshell, constitutes the Islamist challenge to the West.

Neither the demographic shift toward Muslim immigrants nor meretricious self-interest explains Western Europe's appeasement of Islam, but rather the terrifying logic of the numbers. That is why President Bush has thrown his prestige behind the rickety prospect of an Israeli-Palestinian peace. And that is why Islamism has only lost a battle in Iraq, but well might win the war.

Not a single Western strategist has proposed an ideological response to the religious challenge of Islam. On the contrary: the Vatican, the guardian-of-last-resort of the Western heritage, has placed itself squarely in the camp of appeasement. Except for a few born-again Christians in the United States, no Western voice is raised in criticism of Islam itself. The trouble is that Islam believes in its divine mission, while the United States has only a fuzzy recollection of what it once believed, and therefore has neither the aptitude nor the inclination for ideological warfare."

Monk