Title? We Don't NEED No Steenkin TITLE!

I’m beginning to like this girl… a lot. Mary Katherine Ham, writing at Townhall.com, discusses the ABC/Disney Path to 9/11 flap and provides a number of links to other voices on the Right side of the blogosphere. A very good update on the brouhaha. And now the $64.00 question: will I watch it? Hell, no. I couldn’t care less about any Hollywood made-for-TV “docudrama.” Period.

Almost forgot (heh)…the Left are collectively off their meds about this whole thing, in a big way. I’ll not link to any of them; if you want to read any of their bleats and whines, you can find them at memeorandum. Sometimes I find their whining amusing. But on this subject they’re over the top.

Pretty scary stuff: In The Times (UK), “Can the West defeat the Islamist threat? Here are ten reasons why not.” Normally I dismiss defeatist rhetoric, but David Selbourne, the author of this op-ed, makes several points that ring true. Examples:

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.

Point number one is self-evident. One sees it everyday in phrases like “the so-called war on terror,” and in actions such as the NYT’s outing of the NSA telecommunications monitoring program and the financial surveillance program. Additionally, the radical Islamists have powerful geopolitical enablers in Russia and China. Selbourne’s first point is very difficult to refute.

Point number two is debatable, but I am beginning to believe Selbourne is correct here, too. I’ve commented in the past that I’m trying to hold on to the belief that it’s only the radical elements of Islam that are the problem. It’s a little like whistling past the graveyard, no?

Point number five is irrefutable. “Progressives” may be the Number One problem, given that the Progressive community is the major source of dissent on the approach the West should take and the major source of opposition to the current war. The Progressives’ cries of “Negotiate!” are so wrongheaded as to be laughable, yet they persist in thinking the radicals are “reasonable” and can be persuaded. Add in the fact that the media are largely “progressive” and thereby set the tone of the public debate and you have a very serious impediment to the West’s success. The Progressive Academy is also indoctrinating the next generation with its doctrine of cultural relativism that forces “acceptance” of ALL cultures, even those that will destroy you. This is profoundly disturbing.

Selbourne’s other seven points are thought provoking, too.

So, should we throw up our hands and surrender? NO! Emphatically, no! I believe to my core that Western values of personal freedom, equality, and tolerance are superior to Islamic values of submission, intolerance, and suppression of “heretical” thought. We in the US have successfully integrated Muslims into our culture. So far American Muslims, unlike their European cousins, have been able to integrate and co-exist within our culture. I believe Selbourne may be viewing the British/European experience as the bellwether for the West; I don’t think it is and most certainly doesn’t have to BE the model. Additionally, there are examples of “successful” Islamic countries (e.g., Turkey and Malaysia) that are friends of the West and have no Islamic Imperial designs or aspirations. Further, it’s my personal opinion that Islamic radicalism’s strength is in the illiterate and economically deprived masses mired in poverty. The West can solve illiteracy and poverty.

As for the radicals waging war upon us, the solution is also pretty straight-forward. Kill them. One doesn’t reason or negotiate with mad dogs, one simply destroys them. The issue is finding the will to act. And Selbourne is correct in the larger sense that we in the West are lacking in will. It won’t always be so.

Today’s Pic: R. C. Gorman sculpture of a Navajo woman. In the courtyard of the R.C. Gorman gallery, Taos, NM. May, 2004.