The Islamists are winning

19 July 2006

The philosopher David Selbourne says that Israel’s battle with Hezbollah is a microcosm of a worldwide struggle. While the West is in moral crisis, Islam is seizing its chance to become the Church Militant of the 21st century

Above all, the weapons aimed at Israel are not merely the Katyusha, the Raad 2 and 3, the Iranian Fajr and the Zelzal. Rather, they are the weapons of the Ummah — the community of resurgent Islam, the Church Militant of the 21st century — weapons which are now deployed across the globe. Or, as Hezbollah’s leader put it last weekend, ‘Hezbollah is not fighting a battle for Hezbollah, or even for Lebanon. We are now fighting a battle for the [Islamic] nation.’ Even allowing for the self-inflaming fever of Muslim rhetoric, with its language of blood, fire and sword, Nasrallah’s assertion dwarfs all others, despite the (apparent) disowning of such rhetoric by ‘moderate Muslims’.

Indeed, it makes no great odds from a larger and longer perspective that Israel is bombing Beirut, or that it thinks it has set its own conditions for a ceasefire. It makes no great odds, either, that the Arab League has declared the bogus ‘peace process’ at an end; or that the Spanish Prime Minister, speaking for tens of millions across the non-Muslim world, has repeated the tired mantra that Israel’s current offensive is ‘fuelling fanaticism’, as if inaction in war were the better part of valour.

Instead, the greater truth — as the confidence of Nasrallah and of other fire-breathing ‘clerics’ in Islam makes clear — is that the advance of the ‘Islamic nation’ has got the non-Muslim world, and above all the United States, in growing trouble. Anti-Americans, who can be numbered in tens of millions in Western Europe alone, cheer the fact that America’s interests and purposes in the world are facing ever harder times. The forces which oppose its interests and purposes, including within the US itself, include ‘liberals’ and ‘leftists’, radical Islamists and their non-Muslim sympathisers, and the massed ranks of common-or-garden anti-Yankees who see the US as the root of all evil.