The Islamists are winning

22 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

In relation to this largest of all truths — that America itself is on the ropes — particular or local conflicts in the war with Islam are merely elements in the immense crisis which faces the West as a whole. It is the present condition of the US to which the closest attention should therefore be paid. It is a condition of increasing bewilderment and internal division, often bordering on mutual hatred and reciprocated paranoia, among its political elite, its competing ‘experts’ on Islam, its media and its general population. The divisions within the Republican and Democrat parties, and the bitter differences over which way the US should turn, are expressions not merely of the normal political disagreements in a democracy, but of profound national disarray.

For America’s leaders themselves are unable to decide who and what they are fighting — whether it is Islam, ‘Islamic radicalism’ or ‘terror’. They are equally uncertain whether the security of the nation is a higher priority than safeguarding the rights of the individual; uncertain whether the ‘democratisation’ of the Arab and Muslim worlds is or is not a viable undertaking; uncertain, and for good reason, whether their notional allies in Europe are or are not to be relied upon; uncertain, for even better reason, whether ostensible ‘friends’ in the Muslim world, such as Saudi Arabia, Pakistan and the Gulf sheikhdoms, are or are not wolves in sheep’s clothing.

In consequence, it is the American ‘don’t knows’, the unsure, who are the most numerous in the prevailing confusion. The US is a nation at war but one which has lost its sense of direction, and which is therefore at war with itself. In contrast, Islam’s new-found sense of purpose, in its third great historical advance, increases with each new conflict that its jihadist ethic and strategy provoke. This is so, whether such conflict is conducted with battlefield armaments or by means of ever-widening Muslim claims — legal, cultural, political and other — upon the societies in which their diasporas are found throughout the world.