Please read this post by one of the best bloggers in the entire blogosphere regarding Islamism: Muslihoon.
Excerpt:
Two people I admire very much (Dr. Victor Davis Hanson and Oriana Fallaci)—joined with many others I also admire—have made our engagement with Islamism clear: it is not only a war with bullets but also a war of wills and of civilizations (so to speak). If we focus only on the military aspect, we still might loose. We need to focus on all aspects of this war.
Islamists characterize The West’s response to the Islamist assault as a resumption of the Crusades. This is a revealing comment because the Crusades were launch as a response to Islamist jihad against Christian lands. Therefore, if we are engaging in a new Crusade, they must be waging a new jihad against us. But some of them see no “new� in this situation: it’s a continuation, rather than resumption or renewal, of the typical contact and engagement between The West and Islam. As such, we need to recognize that their jihad against us is not seen as a new movement or program but one that has continued since the birth of Islam. It may seem to have ended and then resumed due to the abolishment of the Caliphate or (before even that) Europe’s effective check on Ottoman expansion (and, therefore, the Caliphate’s expansion). But the Initial Jihad may be said to be continuing, and it may also be said that this is how Islamists view their actions.
Part of this jihad deals with Islamist propaganda. This is a part of the da‛wah ilÄ?-l-islÄ?m (دعوة إلى الإسلام, inviting people to Islam) and tablÄ«gh al-islÄ?m (تبليغ الإسلام, propagation or promotion of Islam) aspects of jihad, attempts to conquer minds and hearts to effectuate not only surrender to the Islamic polity or the supremacy of the Islamic political system but also to secure our submission to Islam itself. Although often seen in the context of trying to convert people to Islam (or, as it is said more technically, inviting people to Islam), we should not divorce these proselytizing efforts from efforts to defend Islam, promote Islam, make Islam look good, secure popular respect and approval for Islam, and establishing and defending Islam’s superiority. If we don’t convert but we concede to Islamist demands for special considerations, they would have won; they would have been successful. But, remember that propaganda is propaganda: it never displays the entire picture. In some cases, it may make spurious claims or perpetuate falsehoods.
Unfortunately, we have made the Islamists’ work easier: we don’t have pride in our civilization, we do not defend our civilization, and we too easily concede to the duplicitous remarks by peoples of other civilizations. We don’t challenge other civilizations as they challenge ours.
Dr. Victor Davis Hanson and Oriana Fallaci have warned us that if we don’t begin to engage ourselves with learning about and appreciating our civilization and its history, we stand in danger of loosing the propaganda war: we stand to loose hearts and minds, our own hearts and minds.
Pride is a flaw. We should not believe our civilization is perfect or infallible. (But then, no civilization is perfect or infallible, the Islamist civilization included.) But we must be confident in our civilization: confident in its strength, confident in its history (spotty as it is), confident in its superiority to all other alternatives, confident in what we get from it, confident in what it offers others, and confident in the fact that it will prevail over all others. The last point will only come about if we remain faithful to our civilization; that is, it will happen if we don’t whore ourselves out to foreign and barbaric civilizations or systems, if we don’t commit civilizational adultery and go after strange and abusive men, no matter how seductive their words and appearances may be. It has always been the case that when we have nourished our civilization, our civilization has nourished us and vaunted us to the very top of the world.
Read the whole thing and weigh in.
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