Tony Blankley, former Press Secretary to Newt Gingrich, and current editorial page editor of The Washington Times has authored a new book titled The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win The Clash Of Civilizations.
The Times is currently running a three-part series of excerpts from the book. Today’s entry is entitled ‘An Islamist Threat Like The Nazis’ and examines the threat radical Islam plays to the cradle of Western Civilization.
The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.
We cannot afford to lose Europe. We cannot afford to see Europe transformed into a launching pad for Islamist jihad.
As Blankley notes, the most recent example of this rise of Islamo-facsism can be seen in the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh, who dared make a film critical of radical Islam, is but one example of this threat. The terrorists who attacked America four years ago began their planning in Germany. Madrid was the sight of one of the worst terror attacks in the last two years. And the London bombings were the work of homegrown terrorists, not radicalized Saudi Arabians.
What Muslims say and do now is the measure of the political, cultural and military danger facing the West.
Most other religious developments around the world, such as the spread of Christianity in the Southern Hemisphere, have benign or nonviolent consequences.
However, the overwhelming political fact deriving from the ferment in Islam is that, to some degree, some percentage of Muslims are prepared to murder — and are murdering — great numbers in what they feel is their religious duty.
A harsh thing to say, perhaps, but firmly based in reality. Who can forget the sight of Palestinians cheering on September 11th ? Even today, the Israeli withdrawal from Gaza has been met with looting.
And, as with the murderers of a great-great-nephew of Vincent Van Gogh and the London bombers, those who recruit for a European jihad would not have to look far.
Many Muslims in Europe are content to be law-abiding, culturally integrated citizens. But an increasing number feel some degree of alienation. Many are beginning to believe that they have a religious duty not to integrate.
Radical Islam, sometimes accurately called Islamo-fascism, has all the “advantages” the Nazis had in Germany in the 1930s. The Islamo-fascists find a Muslim population adrift, confused and humiliated by the dominance of foreign nations and cultures.
They find a large, youthful population increasingly disdainful of their parents’ passive habits.
Just as the Nazis reached back to German mythology and the supposed Aryan origins of the German people, the radical Islamists reach back to the founding ideas and myths of their religious culture. And just like the Nazis, they claim to speak for authentic traditions while actually advancing expedient and radical innovations.
Whether an Islamic Hitler would arise to lead these radicals is an open question, but I’d prefer not to find out. The course that might be followed is clear, though:
As the Muslim populations — and their level of cultural and religious assertiveness — expand, European geography will be “reclaimed” for Islam. Europe will become pockmarked with “little Fallujahs” that effectively will be impenetrable by anything much short of a U.S. Marine division.
Not only will Islamic cultural aggression against a seemingly passive and apologetic indigenous population increase, but the zone of safety and support for the actual terrorists will expand as well.
And this is why this is important for America. A radical Islamic base in Europe, whether in the Balkans or elsewhere, would be an even greater threat to the United States than the al Qaeda stronghold in Afghanistan was. And it would be a tremendous blow to Western Civilization.
