A Culture Clash with Islam

By Alan Caruba

The news out of Israel is that its air force has introduced a fleet of huge pilotless planes that can remain in the air for a full day. The Heron TP drones are said to be “primarily used for surveillance and carrying diverse payloads.” I love that last one, “diverse payloads.”

Once again the Israelis have demonstrated their ability and intent to remain on the defense in a Middle East that has resisted their existence since 1948 with wars and campaigns of terror.

Better than every other nation, the Israelis understand the culture of the Middle East and the nature of their enemies. They do not underestimate them. Six decades of seeking peace with the Palestinians, pawns of Iran and the other nations that refuse them citizenship, have taught that there is no way to negotiate peace with them. All past efforts such as the Oslo Accords, withdrawal from Gaza, et cetera, lay in tatters.

History records that the Jews lost their homeland in 70 AD, disbursed into a vast Diaspora, and were unable to reclaim it until 1948. Jews had declared Israel their homeland more than three thousand years ago. Jerusalem was and is their capitol, though holy to Christians and to Muslims.

The harsh reality is that you cannot negotiate with people who want to kill you. This is the lesson of the Holocaust that cost the lives of six million European Jews in the last century. It is a lesson that neither America, Europe, nor other nations around the world have absorbed.

Ever since the advent of Islam, the invention of Muhammad, in 622 A.D., this alleged religion has waged a war of conquest to impose a universal caliphate on the world.

Islam is not a religion of tolerance. It is not a religion of peace. It is opposed to all Western concepts of public and private conduct. It is incompatible with democracy. By all standards of modern thought and behavior it is barbaric.

America has been dealing out retribution to Muslims since the days of Thomas Jefferson and the Barbary pirates. In the modern era, Arabs and Persians have been nursing grudges going back to the Crusades, to being driven out of Spain in 1502. Thereafter in the last century the Middle East was subject to the colonialist designs of England and France after World War One.

The discovery of vast reserves of oil transformed the history of the Middle East, not so much that the lives of its people improved, nor that its monarchs and despots were any less brutal, but that the West had an essential stake there based on its need for oil.

Since 9/11 the United States has spent billions waging war in Iraq because Hussein Saddam threatened Kuwait as well as sharing a long border with Saudi Arabia. It did so in the term of George H.W. Bush and his son, George W. It was always about oil, essential to the U.S. and the West, and there is no good reason to think otherwise.

The irony of this and the current conflict in Afghanistan where no oil exists is that America has now set up an Islamic republic in Iraq and is striving to maintain the semblance of one in Afghanistan. So far the score is one less despot in Iraq and a score of mujahadin calling themselves Taliban or al Qaeda. We are engaged in “nation building” but we are simply rebuilding Islamic nations.

Despite this, the Arabs and the Persians continue to see themselves as the “victims” of America and the West. They would have no oil industry were it not for the West. They would not have the illusion of representative governments were it not for the West. They would have had no hope of joining the march of history were it not for the West.

These “victims” killed nearly 3,000 Americans who were not at war with them on September 11, 2001. They had been waging war against America and American interests from World War Two and all the years since then. They raised the level of bloodletting in the 1980s, in the 1990s, and in the first decade of the new century.

They have killed “infidels” in London, in Bali, in Beirut, in Mumbai, our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and they kill their fellow Muslims with abandon in Iraq, Pakistan, Lebanon, Somalia, and elsewhere throughout the Middle East and Africa.

In 2007, Professor Bernard Lewis of Princeton University said, “There are many religions in the world, but as far as I know there are only two that have claimed that their truths are not only universal—--all religions claim that—--but also exclusive; that they—the Christians in one case, the Muslims in the other—are the fortunate recipients of God’s final message to humanity, which is their duty not to keep selfishly to themselves—--like the Jews or the Hindus—--but to bring to the rest of humanity, removing whatever obstacles there may be on the way.”

“This self-perception, shared between Christendom and Islam, led to the long struggle that has been going on for more than fourteen centuries and which is now entering a new phase.”

If the escalating threat of an Iran with nuclear weapons worries you, remember, it is a new phase of a very long struggle. People who behead other people, who routinely take hostages, who send their children to die as suicide bombers, and who hold women in virtual bondage are not like us, despite the “diversity” rubbish taught in our schools and preached as political correct everywhere else.

Some cultures—-ours—-are manifestly superior to others. America is proof of that.

(c) Alan Caruba, 2010