It appears to me that the war in which we are now engaged - the war against Islamic fundamentalism - is the most important war of our lifetime. Its outcome will forever change the course of Western history.
The weakness in the Western liberal model has become readily apparent in recent decades. The liberalism we all take for granted, the freedoms we have created for ourselves that are the envy of the world, could prove to be our downfall.
In the months after Sept. 11, President Bush was absolutely right in naming the War on Terror as the greatest threat to the West's survival in the new millennium. Radical Islam, as embodied by Osama bin Laden, has emerged in the last two decades as the most powerful anti-Western voice in strategic world politics. It is an ideological force the likes of which we have never encountered. Not in national socialism, not in fascism, not in communism - never have so many people been so willing to forsake their own happiness (witness the willingness of mothers to allow their children to become suicide bombers), or to allow their own states to crumble, for the dream of bringing another civilization to its knees.
A loss in the war on terror poses an existential threat to the West's long-term survival. If we succeed, if the West and its core principles can survive, then the world will continue to be a place where enlightenment and hope, democracy and freedom, tolerance and mutual respect, remain a possibility for all people. If we do not succeed, and the West fails, sacrificing its values in an endless compromise with an intractable enemy, then a new dark age will descend. The failure of Islamic state governance as a viable, sustainable, attractive alternative to Western liberalism will be of no consequence if we in Europe and America refuse to buttress the republican principles that sustain our freedoms.
The reasons for Islam's hatred of the West are a complex thesis, one requiring far more words than I have here. What can be said is that Islam was violently battered by colonization, as well as the subsequent economic and military triumph of the West, and that today it takes great pride in its ability to remain outside of the Western political and social mold.
Neither Muslim states (Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia), nor, unfortunately, many of their emigrants (fleeing violence, corruption and economic stagnation, and flowing westward in ever-mightier numbers) wish to embrace the Enlightenment-based principles of Europe's great democracies - France, Spain, Italy, Germany and Great Britain. In Western Europe (and to a lesser extent in America, though this may change as more immigrants arrive), Muslim communities straddle a highly divisive, paradoxical line. They want access to the freedoms and tolerance of Western liberalism - including its economic prosperity - but refuse to embrace Western cultural values, to learn to be productive elements within the society of their adoptive nations.
Month by month, the examples increase. A near-total Islamic absence from the political process and the free press in Britain, though there are one and a half million Muslims in that country. Rioting and vandalism in Paris' suburbs. Silence from imams over religiously motivated assassinations in the Netherlands, bit with endless condemnation of Christians and Jews and a tacit acceptance of violent responses to political cartoons and op/eds. Willful neglect of neighborhoods and childhood schooling from North Africans in Italy.
Islamic immigrants in Europe ask for the protections of the state, yet refuse to acknowledge the importance of promoting the underlying values of freedom, tolerance and mutual respect, central to those very states' health.
We in the West have become so accepting that our value system risks being incapable of protecting itself. We no longer pressure immigrants to embrace liberal principles, or to take on our language and customs. We allow into our schools children whose parents profess an ideology of hate, yet refuse to contradict those arguments in the classroom or to force our academies to inculcate Western virtues in the mind of every student. We allow onto our hospital beds the wounded of those who fight against us without any extraction of reparation. We put our soldiers at risk by asking them to be mindful on the battlefield of holy places and of women and children, while the very people we fight against refuse to do the same. We respect with our laws those whose very leaders pursue against us an agenda of terror, recklessly though honorably holding ourselves to a higher standard while accepting the world's endless condemnation.
Certainly I do not think the barbarity and tribalism that define the nations governed by Islamic law will ever take root in our societies. But were the West to fail, were the war on terror to become even more bogged down in political infighting and low morale, were the Democrats to appease and the Republicans to hate, then the absence of hope, the meaninglessness of individuality, the institutional violence - all of the more subtle horrors of Islamic states - would undoubtedly infect our civilization as well.
Sam Kessler Gilbride is a contributing writer. E-mail him at opinion@nyunews.com.
Be the first to comment on this article!