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

In these diasporas, the strengths of Islam are variously obnoxious to the racist, the hedonist and the libertarian. But these strengths are likely to be increasingly vindicated as the moral crisis of the ‘free society’ deepens. Indeed, it is hardly to be expected that the United States, any more than other Western liberal democracies, will come to terms with the fact that the ‘free market’ and the ‘right to choose’ have not got the beating of the Koran and the Muslim ethical code.

Those who retain a faith in the ‘force of reason’ may wish it otherwise. Yet just as unreason plainly marks many aspects of the creed of Islam, so it also vitiates the cause of the non-Muslim world. Among the latter’s irrationalities is the myopic belief — held by the non-Muslim Israelophobe and the firebreathing Islamist together — that Israel, the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the US and the actions of Jews in general stand at the heart of this third world war. This belief, akin to that of the Nazis in the second world war, is of the greatest significance in one respect above all; indeed, it could be said to be the West’s Achilles heel. For it is a belief which permits, and even invites, Islamists to play (to their own advantage) upon a favourite prejudice of non-Muslims of all political persuasions. With the other moral debilities that afflict us, it makes it more likely that this war with Islam will ultimately be lost.
David Selbourne’s latest book, The Losing Battle With Islam, was published in the United States by Prometheus Books in November 2005.