The Menacing Nature of Islam

Soon enough, the media chatterboxes had an answer: the suicide bombers had been Muslim fundamentalists. This label was repeated thousands of times in the mistaken belief that repeating it often enough would convey something meaningful to the average American.What’s a Muslim fundamentalist? There are as many Muslims in America as there are Jews, but few Americans have even a vague notion of what motivates them. They are just sort of exotic. Different from the rest of us. Like most media labels it was meant to be bland. “Muslim fundamentalists”. It made them sound studious, like the righteous, observant adherents of some worthy doctrine. Whatever happens, the media people know how to play nice. They call this morally vacant evenhandedness “professionalism”. Well, the flying fuel bombers slaughtered thousands of our fellow countrymen. At the very least we should be calling these bastards fanatics. Muslim fanatics.

The media folks have spared no opportunity to remind us that most Muslims are kind and pacific people. Maybe so. The jury is still out. But if there really are a billion Muslims on this planet, and if only one-tenth of one percent of them are fanatics, or the fellow travellers of fanatics, then there are at least a million Muslim troublemakers loose in the world. To understand what we are up against we must put the Muslim fanatic under a microscope. Fanatics are as old as humanity. Muslim fanatics first appeared in the Seventh Century with the birth of Islam. So, what is Islam?

Islam 101: An Irreverent Crash Course.
It isn’t easy to start a new world religion, but Muhammad pulled it off. At age 40, well past middle age in the Seventh Century, this Bedouin trader decided to give it a go. Starting from scratch would have been far too arduous, so he took a clever shortcut. After pouring over the sacred texts of Judaism and Christianity like a lawyer with a mission, he finally saw his opening: the Bible tells us that Abraham, the patriarch of the Jewish people, wanted a son and heir but could not have one because his wife, Sarah, was barren. Sarah sent her Egyptian maid, Hagar, to sleep with Abraham. Hagar bore Abraham his first son, Ishmael. Later Sarah became pregnant and bore Abraham his second son, Isaac. In a fit of jealousy Sarah had Hagar and Ishmael cast out into the wilderness to die. As the story continues, God saves the two outcasts by guiding them to a well at Beer-sheba. Ishmael grows to manhood in the wilderness under God’s protection and, the Bible tells us, “he will be a wildman; his hand will be against every man and every man’s hand will be against him”.

According to Muhammad, who first began chatting with the Archangel Gabriel in 610 AD, Ishmael was the first Arab. According to the Bible, God promised that Ishmael “shall be the father of twelve princes, and I will make him a great nation”. (Gen.17:20). So, Muhammad declared, a forthcoming flowering of Islamic faith on the Arabian peninsula would be God’s perfect expression of his promise to Ishmael. Not long after Muhammad began offering up his divine revelations, later transcribed as the Quran (Koran), Islam’s holy text, the fraternal blood feud between Islam (claiming descent from Ishmael) and Judaism and Christianity (claiming descent from Isaac) began in earnest.

Most of the Quran is just a retelling of stories from the Old and New Testaments, which are lifted wholesale from the Bible and then given an Islamic spin. According to Muhammad, Abraham was the first Muslim, and Moses and Jesus were prophets, as was Alexander the Great. Muhammad declared himself to be the last person to carry Allah’s divine word to Man. Allah is in; Yahweh is out in the trashcan of history.The Quran has little to say about ethical behavior. For such guidance Muslims turn to the Hadith, which is purported to be the collected sayings of Muhammad. As such, most scholars believe the Hadith to be totally bogus. The Quran itself was written in a rhythmic sort of Arabic which is beyond all attempts at translation. Fully three quarters of the world’s Muslims cannot read their own Scriptures in any meaningful way. It’s lucky for them that Islam is the world’s most simple religion.

There are only five easy steps to Islam, (the word means “submission”). You can get your foot in the door in under five minutes. No baptism is required and your mother doesn’t have to be a Muslim (the word means “one who submits”). Step One: Say these words with conviction: “There is no God but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet”. Only Allah will know if you’re faking it. Step Two: Pray five times a day while facing Mecca. Americans will need a prayer rug, a map, and a compass. Step Three: Eat nothing from sun up ‘til sundown during the month of Ramadan. You can pig out all night long. Step Four: You must make a hajj, or pilgimage, to Muhammad’s hometown of Mecca. Ever since those clever infidels invented air-conditioned jet-powered aviation this one has been a slide on ice. Step Five: Give alms to the poor unless you yourself are a poor beggar. If you choose to die in a jihad, or holy war, then you get to jump the line waiting to enter Heaven. That’s all there is to it. There are no priests or elaborate rituals to learn. Islam is a religion tailored to the disposition of the average man, and I do mean man. Islam involves clear and limited demands and has no expectation of a deep reformation of character, as does Christianity. Just stick to the Five Easy Steps to Islam and no one will call you a bad Muslim. You must also foreswear all alcohol and pork, so you can forget about washing down that chili dog with a cold brew.

To the Muslim the Quran is his religion. It is co-eternal with God. It is also his law book, his social and commercial code, and his military guidebook. No other sacred text of any other religion has so all-encompassing a hold on the lives of its adherents. No other book offers such extravagant claims or promises such sensual pleasures. Muhammad claimed to have personally received the Quran from Archangel Gabriel, but Muhammad never took the time to write any of it down. That was left to his followers who took notes on sheep bones, bits of leather, stones and palm leaves. As a complete work it’s rather cockeyed. Carlyle described the Quran as “A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite, endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement, most crude, insupportable stupidity in short! Nothing but a sense of duty would carry any European through the Koran.”

The entire teaching of Islam is in the Quran. Children are required to commit it to memory. In many Muslim schools it is the only text. When European visitors recently asked school children in Afganistan if men had ever walked on the moon, the children blinked and asked how such a thing could be. How, indeed. Infidels on the moon? Nonsense!

So, to be a Muslim in good standing you must perform the Five Duties: recital of the creed, recital of the set prayers, the fast of Ramadan, almsgiving, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. Muslim prayers are never petitions to the Almighty; they tend to be formulaic words of praise to God and requests for forgiveness. The purpose of the pilgrimage is to visit the Kabah (cube) which is a stone building 12 yards long, 10 yards wide, and 15 yards high. Tucked away in one corner of this building is the object of your long journey, a black stone, the Black Stone, which is only seven inches in diameter. It’s almost certainly a meteorite. The pilgrims kiss the meteorite. Both the Kabah and the little black stone pre-date Islam. Muhammad cleverly encapsulated a pre-existing primative animistic Arab custom and made it a centerpiece of his new homegrown religion.

Did I mention that gambling is taboo? Stay the hell out of Reno. But divorce is easier than a trip to Las Vegas. . .if you’re a man. Just say the formulaic divorce words and you’re unhitched. If you change your mind, you can take the little filly back. A gent can have as many as four legal wives at one time. Slaves and concubines are okay also. The Prophet gave himself special dispensation so that he could have more than four wives, and so that he could marry the divorced wife of his adopted son, and so that he could break his oath not to get close to his concubine Mary, and so on, and so forth. Wow! And you thought Jesse Jackson had a colorful love life.

The religion that Muhammad dictated was tailored to suit the temperament of the fierce desert Arabs and the land they inhabited. Arabia is a world of barren mountains and grim tractless sunblasted windswept wastelands of sand which are punctuated here and there with water-fed patches of intense flourishing verdure. Caravan routes criss-crossed Arabia and fortunes were made by trading or by raiding the caravans. Mecca and Medina were important trading centers.

Muhammad’s gift to these violent and primative people was a religious reformation that would unify the Arab people and consolidate them into an aggressive, expansive military force. His religious doctrines, little more than a stew of Judaism, Christianity and Zoroastrianism, were unoriginal and contributed absolutely nothing new to religious thought. It is to Muhammad’s organizing talent and political leadership that Islam owes everything. Muhammad (aka the Prophet) must have had exceptional human qualities, such as political judgement and the ability to judge the character of others. The word prophet, as the Semitic peoples use it, suggests someone possessed by a flaming conviction, whose utterances usually have a rhapsodic, symbolic and poetic quality. He need not be clairvoyant. His dream had always been to organize a politico-religious brotherhood that would transcend the ancient feuds of the Arab tribesmen. To achieve his chosen ends he elected to use force and trickery; he abandoned principle in favor of expediency. His forces attacked caravans during a sacred month when war was forbidden throughout Arabia; he captured Medina by acts of low cunning. In his sunset years he envisioned a Universal Empire and a universal faith. Or, as the avatars of Islamic fanaticism so often put it: “One prophet, one faith, for all the world.”

The god of the Muslims is stark, absolute and arbitrary. Islam is a doctrine of fate and predestination. The duty of all Mankind is Islam, which means submission. The faithful Muslim expects to go to a wondrous sensual paradise. All non-Muslims are condemned to eternal punishment in the fires of Hell. Hell itself is divided into several compartments with specially designated areas for Christians, for Jews, for idolaters, etc. On Judgement Day the true Muslim believer has his body restored to him and henceforth lives a glorious life in eternal youth, a life of unspeakable joy, drinking buckets of wine with no ill effect, and revelling with gorgeous and willing women who somehow remain virgins forever. In other words, if he gets through life without popping a cork and dies in Allah’s good graces, then it’s Miller-time for all eternity. This is the ultimate “guy” religion. Feminists need not apply.

The individual spiritual leaders who succeeded Muhammad after his death were called Caliphs. These successors chose to spread Islam by armed force. Within a decade all Syria, Palestine, Mesopotamia and Egypt had fallen to Islam. The third Caliph was murdered in 656, at which time he was succeeded by Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, Ali. Muhammad’s widow, A’isha, opposed Ali’s ascension to the caliphate. In the ensuing power struggle Ali was assassinated and his son was killed and to this day the slain son is revered as a martyr by a branch of Islam known as the Shia. This sect is found today in Iraq (Mesopotamia) and Iran (Persia) and in modern Pakistan. These Shi’ites believe in rule by imams, or spiritual leaders. The ayatollahs may be thought of as a sort of spiritual middle-management team.

The Muslim world was always meant to be a theocracy. Local culture and sectarianism determines just how nervous Muslims will make their neighbors. About ninety percent of Muslims are Sunnis. They tend to be conservative, quiet and traditional. There are four schools of Sunni observance: the strict Maliki school, the Hanefi “free-interpretation” school, and the Safis who advocate a middle path between these two, and finally the Wahhabis of Central Arabia. The remaining ten percent of Muslims are the Shi’ites, who tend to think that things are going all to hell all the time. They are very big on strict proscriptions, dire proclamations, and the lopping off of various body parts as an expression of Islamic “justice”.

Though Islam had nothing new to offer Christians and Jews, it proved to be more popular among confused animists and polytheists in sun-blasted, arid, impoverished regions where the natives already had a marked affinity for blood feuding, sword-brandishing, and shrill shouting and ululating. According to Muhammad, the infidels (all non-Muslims) were headed straight for Hell anyway, so killing them in a good cause (jihad) was hardly a sin. Which brings us to today’s second crash course.

The Role of Jihad in Shaping Our World

Once Muhammad had gathered a following, the bloodshed began almost immediately. As early as 627 AD, Muslim forces massacred the Jewish Qurayza tribe. Eight hundred men were beheaded. The women and children were enslaved. The Quran recommends beheading and presupposes the enslavement of captives. It also suggests that Muslims can enrich themselves by holding hostages for ransom. With such a guidebook, it’s not surprising that massacres were commonplace. Within a century of its creation, Islam conquered Syria, Egypt and Persia. Muslim rule invaded India and China and then Spain in 709. Muslim penetration of Europe was finally halted by Charles Martel, whose Christian army saved Gaul by defeating the Muslims at Poitiers. Muslim forces occupied Sicily in 827 and threatened to invade Italy. All of North Africa fell to Muslim forces. Muslim warriors seized Constantinople in 1453. They overran Greece and punched up into South East Europe. By the Sixteenth Century the Christian nations were in constant fear of Muslim invasions. The westward expansion of Islam was only halted at the outskirts of Vienna in 1683. Western leaders remain fearful of aggressive Islamic fanaticism to this day. I have long suspected that Saddam Hussein was allowed to live and carry on his business within his own borders because his brutal brand of non-sectarian nationalism stood as a bulwark which prevented the westward expansion of Islamic fanaticism that was then seething in Iran. The last thing the Europeans wanted was the establishment of a radical Iraqi theocracy.

The Christian response to all of this expansive, aggressive Islamic triumphalism were the Crusades, which were motivated by a desire to rescue the Christian holy places in Palestine, a desire to defend the Byzantine Empire from the Turks, and the desire to restore unity between the eastern and western communities of the Christian church. It was the Crusades, fought to further what Augustine called the City of God, that reversed the attitude of the early Christians regarding the morality of war making.

Muslim conquests were followed by forced conversions to Islam. Non-Muslims were always subject to enslavement, so a person could prevent his own enslavement by a hasty conversion. Non-Muslims were also subject to burdensome taxation, consequently many people were forced to convert to Islam to avoid financial ruin. The building of churches and temples was forbidden. Only in Malaysia and Indonesia did Islam become dominant without the generous application of violence, terror and other forms of coercion. It was jihad that shaped and expanded the religious map of Islam.

The technique if jihad has been perfected through centuries of diligent practice. It bears no resemblance whatsoever to the friendly persuasion favored by Christian missionaries. Within a century of its inception, Islam had conquered the Middle East, North Africa and most of the Iberian peninsula. The only thought system to spread faster then Islam was Marxism in the Twentieth Century using the very same methods. First a ruthless army would seize control of a territory, then the official state-sponsored ideology would be taught in the schools and disseminated in the media. Heretics, political or religious, would be imprisoned, banished, or executed. This technique worked very well for Marxists in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Empire, China, Mongolia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Cuba, as it did for Islam throughout its history.

The suffocating oppression of Islam is felt by millions of non-Muslims the world over. Balkan Christians (Serbs, Greeks, Bulgarians,etc.), suffered centuries of ruthless Turkish rule. To this day they resent the Muslim enclaves established in their midst by the Ottoman Empire. From the Fourteenth Century to the Seventeenth Century the Turks legally kidnapped one out of every four Christian boys and sent them away to Istanbul to undergo forced conversion to Islam. These boys would later be employed in the civil service or in elite units of the Sultan’s army where they would do service slapping the Christian communities around. Christian girls were taken for the Sultan’s harem because a Muslim can’t possibly do spiritual harm to a Christian girl because, as Christians, they were already counted among the damned. To this day Muslim men use this excuse to justify their sexual relations with non-Muslim women. They are saying, in effect, that these women only appear to be truly human. It was virtual slavery for the Christians, who suffered for centuries. The Christians, for good reason, to this day consider the Muslim Albanians and Bosnians to be “Turks”. When ancient resentments flared in the defunct Yugoslavia between Christians and Muslims, the Great Ignoramous, Bill Clinton, blundered in with American troops to disarm the Christians. After that, well-armed Muslims began to slaughter the Christians wholesale.

In 1915, the Ottoman Turks uprooted 1,750,000 Armenian Christians from their homes and force-marched them into the arid wastelands of Syria and Mesopotamia where at least 600,000 of them died. One third of the Armenian people were exterminated in the cause of Muslim unity and purity. This mass extermination inspired the anti-religious Adolf Hitler to have a go at the Jews. When asked if mass murder would bring lasting shame on the Germans, Hitler replied: “Who remembers the Armenians?” Perhaps it would help if you thought of these Muslim religious bigots as proto-Nazis.

More recently, Muslim enthusiasts have taken to butchering Christians in East Timor. Indonesian Muslims invaded in 1976 and to date have slaughtered at least 200,000 Christians. Only the intervention of the Australian military in 1999 stopped the bloodbath.

Even now, the nation of Sudan, a major sponsor of violent jihad, is waging a war of persecution against Christians and animists in that country. The Arab-Muslim dictatorship in Khartoum, which is dominated by members of the National Islamic Front, wants to be rid of all the Christians and animists in the southern part of the Sudan. Their jihad stinks of both religious bigotry and racial hatred. The Arabs want the black Africans dead or gone. Since the imposition of Islamic law in 1983, 2 million Africans have been slain or starved to death. Another 4 million civilians have been driven from their homes. Worse yet, Arab militias, supported by Khartoum, have taken to enriching themselves by selling black African Christian men, women and children into slavery. The women may become sex slaves to the Muslims. Well, why not? Doesn’t the infallible Quran endorse bloodshed, slavery and holding hostages for ransom? Of course it does, if the cause is the ever-popular jihad.

The spirit of jihad permeats all of history since the inception of Islam. It has remained a constant threat to non-Muslims the world over. Rome itself was occupied by Saracens (Turks and Arabs) in 846. They spent their time in Rome desecrating many of the Christian holy places. The Muslims also forcibly occupied Constantinople, seat of the Eastern Orthodox church, and Christians are still unhappy about it. Now imagine how Muslims would feel if the Jews forcibly occupied Mecca and flushed their sacred little seven-inch-wide black meteorite down the nearest toilet? Wouldn’t they scream and whine and ululate? Well, that’s how jihad feels when you’re on the receiving end.

Now imagine that the Muslim invaders had remained in Rome. Most of Europe was evangelized from Rome. A permanent Muslim occupation in the Ninth Century would have ended all of that, thereby changing the religious map of Europe forever. Christendom would have been reduced to a few struggling communities trying to survive amid oppressive Muslim theocracies. There would have been no Protestant Reformation, no Christian New World. The dream of one Universal Muslim Planet would have been well on its way.

The New Testament speaks of only a single act of violence by a Christian: Peter cut off the ear of a man who came to arrest Jesus. Jesus rebuked Peter and healed the man’s ear. The lesson is clear: one should not use violence in His name. By contrast, the Quran is a guidebook on how to slice and dice humans for all manner of infractions. No true Christian theological equivalent to Islamic jihad exists. With the exception of the Thirty Years War, all violent Christian movements have occured under the shadow of an Islamic jihad. No Muslim disavows jihad as un-Islamic the way Christians repudiate the Thirty Years War. On the contrary, they proclaim it in the name of Islam. Muhammad himself led warring armies against the victims of bloody Islam. Islam owes its success to jihad, to the ready use of violence and terror. Without jihad Islam would have remained an Arabian curiosity. Jihad is not an occasional aberration of Islam, it is a leg upon which Islam is accustomed to standing.

The Muslim who dies for his faith goes straight to Heaven which, as it is described in the Quran, sounds like a cross between the English countryside and a Las Vegas hotel, with lots of fountains, green rolling hills, gardens, fruit trees, food and drink, gold ornaments, silver dwellings, and a harem of sexy babes called houris who remain virgins no matter how many times our hero plays hide the salami. It’s spring break. . .forever: gaudy, mindless, and totally unspirtual. As the Quran says: “God has purchased of the faithful their lives and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for the cause, slay, and be slain.”

Our word assassin comes directly from a sect of Islamic killers who terrorized Middle East Christians. The Assassin sect drugged themselves with hashish to induce ecstatic trances and then committed murders as a religious duty. If the Assassin died while doing his bloody duty, then he went straight to Islamic Heaven and the eternally virginal playmates. Today the word assassin perfectly describes the sort of cold-blooded, amoral killers they were. What should hold our attention is the fact that the Assassin sect continued to function for almost two centuries because the larger Muslim community saw nothing wrong with their behavior. They were killing infidels; they were furthering the faith in ways that were approved by the Quran. The Assassins would have continued their reign of terror indefinately but for the fact that Hulagu Khan, grandson of the Great Khan, Genghis, got fed up with their crap and sent his army to wipe them out in 1258 AD. The Mongols sacked the Assassin forts and castles and killed everyone who resisted. Hulagu understood that the Muslim fanatics were beyond persuasion. The only hope for peace was to kill them all.

Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terror organization are the direct spiritual descendants of the Assassins. So are dozens of other Islamic terror groups. In their eyes, the death of thousands of infidels in the World Trade Center massacre was just a more glorious assassination in the name of Islam. Osama bin Laden himself has called this atrocity “a good thing.” He has millions of sympathizers the world over. Islamic governments and news agencies took pains to conceal the joy of Muslim demonstrators upon hearing of the attack. Muslims were dancing in the streets in Paterson, New Jersey. Their joy shouldn’t surprise anyone. It’s traditional “family” behavior in the greater Muslim family. They are taught from infancy to obey the Quran and “Make war on them until idolatry is no more and God’s religion reigns supreme.” To those who saw the World Trade Towers as temples of commerce, the attack on the Towers was an attack on idolatry and, therefore, justified. The sacred texts of Buddhism and Christianity do not include the kinds of numerous angry passages that are riddled throughout the Quran and which encourage an Assassin-like theology. Those Muslims who insist that violence is alien to “true” Islam are simply relying on the ignorance of non-Muslims to lay down a protective smokescreen. The truth is that Islam grew to its present dimensions because of violent jihad. Every copy of the Quran contains incitements to violence. These passages are sacred scripture and will endure as long as Islam endures.

The Quran endorses terrorizing, beheading, maiming, ambushing, crucifying, killing and warring against unbelievers. Quote: “. . .you may strike terror into the enemies of God and the faithful and others besides.” Or, “I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, maim them in every limb.” Or, “When the sacred months are over slay the idolaters wherever you find them. Arrest them, besiege them, and lie in ambush everywhere for them.” And so on, and on, and on, with justifications for executions, mutilations, and torture. The Quran also justifies revenge and bloody vendettas with such admonitions as: “Retaliation is decreed for you in bloodshed,” “Let evil be rewarded with like evil,” “Those who avenge themselves when wronged incur no guilt,” and so forth.

The Quran considers idolatry an unforgivable sin and it considers all Christians to be idolaters. The idea of Jesus’ divinity is called “a monstrous blasphemy” and a “monstrous falsehood at which the very heavens might crack, the earth break asunder, and the mountains crumble to dust.” Christians and Jews are specifically targeted in the Quran as perverters of the true Scriptures. The sacred book of the Muslims rarely mentions love or peace, but is riddled with references of hellfire and jihad.

Muhammad was born an orphan. The sort of god whom Muhammad describes is just the sort of god an orphaned child born into a harsh world would imagine. Allah is majestic, stark, remote and arbitrary. The duty of the Muslim is to submit to this god in all things. The very word Muslim means one who submits. In a world of all-powerful, loveless adults, the orphan child must obey or perish. Only rarely does the word love appear in the Quran.

Because the concept of jihad is imbedded in Islam, any Muslim community, no matter how peaceful, can produce fanatics and bigots. The Quran has a powerful bias against Christians and Jews as exemplified by this passage: “Believers, take neither Jews or Christians for your friends. They are friends with one another. Whoever seeks their friendship shall become one of their number.”

Islam strives to create a hermetic world in which the Muslim submits totally to the rambling ideas of Muhammad of Mecca. The Quran repeatedly condemns the Christian belief in Jesus’ divinity. Young Muslims grow into adulthood believing that Christians are polytheists who practice idolatry by worshiping three gods. Quranic passages accuse Christianity of polytheism and idolatry. The Quran also says that Jesus predicted the coming of Muhammad. No such prediction exists in the New Testament, but because Muslims are enjoined from reading the New Testament, they have no way of knowing that Muhammad was just flim-flamming the congregation. Here’s the passage: “Tell of Jesus , who said to the Israelites: I am sent forth to you by God to confirm the Torah, already revealed and to give news of an apostle who will come after me whose name is Ahmed (‘the praised one’, another name for Muhammed.” In other words, Jesus was on earth to announce the coming of Muhammad the Messenger from Mecca. Muhammad, ever the self promoter, simply anointed himself. Then he bade farewell to his many wives, concubines and slaves and rode off, sword in hand, to hack off the head of anyone who did not consider him God’s holy messenger.

The Big Jihad in Your Future

When I was young and living at home with my parents, my parents subscribed to one of the most subversive publications ever printed. It arrived in our mailbox every month. It wasn’t published by Marxists, or Nazis, or even Hugh Hefner. It was published by optimists. This subversive magazine, with its distinctive yellow cover, is still published today. It’s called The National Geographic Magazine. In addition to the issues that came in the mail, I collected at least a hundred more from an elderly neighbor lady. There were always copies at the dentist’s office.

They were so soothing. Every article followed the same comforting formula. First you were shown exotic looking people wearing exotic clothing or, more exotically, no clothing at all. Then you were told a little something about their exotic culture and habits. Then came the comforting conclusion wherein you were assured that underneath all of these exotic appearances and social expressions, these people were really just like us.

The one thing the ubiquitous National Geographic Magazine never showed Americans was an implacable enemy. Not one of its countless sweet colorful picture bouquets about the cultures of the Middle East included even a mention of their deeply rooted belief that Christian Americans are polytheists, idolaters, perverters of sacred Scripture, enemies of the One True God, and the walking damned who are on the highway to Hell. The Geographic was silent on the subject of the one billion minds that were shaped by cultures that were never touched by notions of chivalry, or the Rights of Man, or the Enlightenment, cultures that do not respect the dignity of the individual, cultures that revere authority and encourage submission and blind obedience.

Americans are, by nature, optimists with short memories. It’s the one thing about us that our former enemies find most charming. We are, by nature, suckers for the optimistic Geographic picture-postcard vision of the world that suggests that cultural differences are, more or less, only skin deep. Well, on September eleventh America received a nasty sucker punch and a wake-up call from the Seventh Century announcing that the sword arm of Islam is alive and well and spoiling for a fight. Surprise, America! The Assassins are back and they have computers, and pilot’s licenses, and fat bank accounts. They have the clandestine support of foreign governments. They have a vision of a supreme over-arching Islam. They hate our guts.

We were lulled by our own best tendencies to believe that we could always work out our differences with other cultures. We are perplexed by fanaticism. It’s so un-American; it’s so un-cool; it’s so yesterday. But the truth is now before us: for millions of foreigners fanaticism is in fashion. The Quran, with its degrading and pessimistic vision of all non-Muslims, is a constant incitement to hostility. The followers of Muhammad, the self-anointed Messenger of God-turned-Field Marshal, have blood in their eye and they’re looking our way. Brace yourselves. It’s going to be a long and nasty struggle.