Another Episode in the War between Christendom and Islam

Bruce Thorton pens an insightful article at Victor Hansen's site on what we perceive of the Islamofacists' jihad.

Indeed, what we call Islamic radicals are in fact Islamic traditionalists; it is the so-called "“moderates", those wanting to compromise Islam so it can coexist with Western ideas such as secular government, separation of church and state, and human rights, who are the radicals and innovators. The terrorists are simply fulfilling the traditional and orthodox command of their religion to battle the infidels who resist the revelation of Mohammed and the global socio-political order mandated by Islam.

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Yet listen to a respected historian in a conservative magazine: “Muslim holy wars (“jihads”), as taught in the Koran, were first and foremost a personal inner struggle for moral purity” and only secondarily a war against infidels. So all those Muslim armies that conquered the Christian Near East, North Africa, Egypt, Spain, Sicily, the Balkans, all that plunder, slaughter, rape, enslavement, kidnapping, and destruction were only the '“secondary'” jihad. How could such blindness to the obvious, masquerading as sophisticated '“tolerance',not arouse contempt in the minds of our adversaries? They tell us over and over that they are waging jihad in order to establish the global hegemony of Islam, and we tell ourselves that these Muslims don't understand their own religion. Millions and millions of Muslims all over the world cheer for the jihadists and support them materially and psychologically, millions idolize bin Laden and celebrate the murder of Westerners, but we tell ourselves that they are a minority of confused souls whose minds have been addled by poverty or autocracy or anger over the Palestinians.

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The murderers we call terrorists are traditional jihadists, as much as were the first Islamic armies that swept away the Judeo-Christian and Greco-Roman civilizations of the Mediterranean. They are not going to be bought off with votes, a free press, more cable channels, Wal-Mart, or any other material good that to us constitutes the good life. They are fighting for a spiritual cause, the establishment of Islam as a global order in fulfillment of the will of Allah, and the reduction of all those who will not become Muslims to dhimmi, inferiors who acknowledge the superiority of Islam and the rightness of their subjection to it.

I really can't disagree with this train of thought. We in the West like to think others have the same thought process as us. We fail to understand all people are not Western-centric and do not have the same values. I draw a loose parallel to language. It's like trying to compare character based Eastern languages (Korean) to alpha based languages in the West. They require different regions of the brain. Thus our values may reside outside of what the Islamofacists will find acceptable to exist on planet Earth... It is OUR choice to live.