FrontPage Magazine

In the ongoing struggle between Islam and the West, one important fact is regularly overlooked: one civilization has the will to triumph, but not the way; the other has the way to triumph, but not the will.

Some who dread Islam do not seem to understand this. They think that Islam is an irresistible force to be reckoned with; they see Muslim migrants as hordes of violent men invading Europe; they call on Western men to make a stand, resist the onslaught, save their women and children.

To be sure, this portrayal is historically valid: for one thousand years, Muslims repeatedly invaded and conquered portions of Europe—terrorizing, massacring, raping and enslaving in the name of Allah—and were only repulsed by force of arms.

Today’s situation is far less dramatic and epic; it’s actually quite pathetic. Muslim terrorists, rapists, and ISIS-sympathizers are not entering the West against its will but because of it. In other words, the West is 100% responsible for this “invasion.”

Consider it by analogy. What if zoos began to maintain that it’s a slanderous stereotype to say that lions by nature prey on zebras? Zoos start introducing lions into zebra enclosures. The inevitable happens: although well fed, some lions continue chasing and mauling zebras. Surely only a great fool would blame such carnage on lions—who, after all, are merely being lions—while ignoring those who insist on placing lions with zebras in the first place.

Similarly, those Western policy makers who continue insisting that Islam is peaceful (despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise), and that Muslim immigration is fine (despite the overwhelming evidence otherwise), are 100% to blame when Muslims terrorize, rape, and kill non-Muslims in the West—that is, when they do what comes natural back home.

Still, Western politicians get away with warped policies because the general public—including the average voter—has been bred on warped views. Thus, even as Germans were being overwhelmed by a million Muslim migrants, Dr. Stefanie von Berg, speaking before parliament, loudly proclaimed:

Mrs. President, ladies and gentlemen. Our society will change. Our city will change radically. I hold that in 20, 30 years there will no longer be a [German] majority in our city. …. And I want to make it very clear, especially towards those right wingers: This is a good thing!

Such suicidal words can be spoken and enacted only because voters have been conditioned to accept and support suicidal policies (which of course are dressed up to satisfy Western vanity). If they hadn’t, people like Berg, far from being elected to parliament, would be incarcerated for treason or committed into mental wards.

In the end, the relationship between Islam and the West is understood by the dichotomy of the will and the way. The West has the way—including the military and economic might—to utterly neutralize Islam, one way or the other. Yet it doesn’t even have the will to preserve itself. Ban Islam’s presence from the West—which is doable, provided the will is there—and Islamic terrorism on Western soil ceases. It’s that simple.

Conversely, Islam most certainly has the will to eliminate the West, though it currently doesn’t have the way (minus those ways the West gives it). Historically, for over one millennium, whenever Islam had the way, it always went on the offensive.

Back then, when much of the world was limited to fighting with swords and spears, arrows and fire—back when Islam was on an even footing with its neighbors—untold millions of non-Muslims were slaughtered, enslaved, or converted to Islam. This is seen in the historical fact that the overwhelming majority of territory that today constitutes the “Muslim world” was seized from non-Muslims by great violence and bloodshed.

Western military technology eventually progressed to the point that Islam was left in the dust. Its will to dominate went dormant but remained intact.

Put differently, if Islam was the one to develop sophisticated armaments and weapons of mass destruction, while the West was still using swords and spears, there would be no West to speak of today. Faced before Islam’s three choices—conversion, enslavement, or annihilation—the West would’ve gone the way of the dodo, like many civilizations before it.

Yet here is the free and mighty West, refusing to use its powers—even in the name of self-preservation—while empowering an Islam that openly vows to, and will, subjugate the West, once the way to do so becomes available.

Update: In the context of the topic of this article, commenter WFC points out that Winston Churchill once said:

[I]f you will not fight for the right when you can easily win without bloodshed; if you will not fight when your victory will be sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.

CDN, by Bob Taylor

CHARLOTTE, N.C., April 9, 2016 – When it comes to understanding Islamic extremism, jihad and Muslim thinking, you can count on Middle East analyst Raymond Ibrahim to have an interesting take on the subject.

Ibrahim says he never writes about the latest terrorist attacks anywhere in the world because there is no need. “What can one add when a symptom of the root cause he has long warned against occurs other than ‘told you so’?” he asks.

As Ibrahim sees it, the Islamic world is weak when it comes to mounting a credible threat against the West. He believes that Islamic terror could easily be halted if the West were not so “scared” to respond adequately.

“For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars —but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under,” writes Ibrahim.

Thus what we are witnessing today is nothing new. It has been around as long as Islam.

With that in mind, Ibrahim claims the Islamists gain their strength from Western thinking when we fail to recognize what is staring us directly in the face. Key among the apologists is President Barack Obama because he is the leader of the free world. Add in Francois Hollande, Angela Merkel and David Cameron, and you have a powerful consortium of Western thinking that gives Islamic jihad free rein to operate throughout the world.

Ibrahim says the West “stifles… examination of Muslim doctrine and history; welcome(s) hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operative and many are simply ‘radical’; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of ‘democracy’ and ‘freedom,’ only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were ‘liberated’ in Iraq, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies.)”

It has been proven time and again that terrorism is incapable of dealing with a response through strength. There is no better example than when the Ottoman Turks were defeated at the gates of Vienna in 1683.

The victory was so important that Osama bin Laden used the Sept. 11 anniversary as a “symbolic” reminder to the West when the twin towers crumbled to the ground in 2001.

The fact that Islamic extremism was “relatively quiet” for more than 300 years afterwards should be enough of a message to Western leaders that Islamic bluster can be defeated through strength.

That does not mean it will be easy or without sacrifice, but it does mean it is better than allowing terrorism free access to the world in our current approach to the situation.

Ibrahim reminds us that the Western leaders mentioned above “insist that Islam is innocent of violence and push for Muslim immigration – because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.”

It is here that Ibrahim makes his knockout punch when he reminds us, and Barack Obama, that he “did not come to power through a coup but that he was voted in – twice. This indicates that Obama and the majority of voting Americans have a shared, and erroneous, worldview. He may be cynically exploiting this worldview, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s because this warped worldview is mainstream that he can exploit it in the first place.”

Ibrahim reminds us that Obama told his own constituents to “get off their high horse” about Islamism. He then dredged up age-old references to the Crusades and the Inquisition, both of which have been distorted by liberal thinking and political correctness, which play directly into the hands of Islamic “victimization.”

Sadly, Barack Obama succeeds in the fact that many, if not most, Americans have little interest in understanding the misrepresentations of Christian, Jewish and Islamic history.

Ibrahim’s solution is revolution, an all-out uprising against Islamic jihad that he says will easily sweep extremism back into the dustbin of history. “For the fact remains: Islam is terrorizing the world, not because it can, but because the West allows it to.”

Not only is Raymond Ibrahim accurate in his assessment regarding Islam, he is also explaining the sidebar phenomenon of the political environment in our current presidential campaign.