CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS?

David Warren, writing for RealClearPolitics, has done us the service of bringing us the courageous words of Muslims who dare to call the Islamists out.

Sometimes I am brought up short by the clarity and courage with which someone else -- with more to lose than I have -- states a truth. I am a Catholic Christian, who often dismisses “secular humanists”. But I’m in awe of people like Canada’s Irshad Manji, the “Muslim refusenik”, who had the courage in her book The Trouble with Islam to directly confront the horrors done in Allah’s name -- in, as she put it, “Pick a country, any Muslim country.”

Another is Wafa Sultan, an Arab woman practising psychology, now living in the States. A self-professed “disbeliever in the supernatural”, she has posted essays on the Internet in Arabic, including research into the fate of women under various Islamic regimes. She has willingly and ably confronted Muslim fanatics on Arab TV, most recently on Feb. 21st, when she debated Dr Ibrahim Al-Khouli on Al-Jazeera. A transcript and video clips with English subtitles were made available this week by the Middle East Media Research Institute (“Memri”) -- an indispensable institution, based in Israel, that distributes hard information and accurate translations of documents from the Arab world. (It is useless to condemn it as “Zionist” -- everything Memri publishes is sourced and checkable.)

With great bravery, Dr Sultan confronts the “tu quoque” (“you too”) arguments of the apologists for Islamic terror -- refusing to let them change the subject from what they have done, said, and approved, to misty rhetoric against Zionists, Yankees, Imperialists, Crusaders. Boldly on Al-Jazeera, last week, she said what our Western politicians, media flaks, and academic celebrities won’t say, from cowardice in its many forms. Excerpt:

“The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. ... It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on the other. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.”

The sparkling TV host interrupts to ask if Dr Sultan insinuates the clash is, “between the culture of the West, and the backwardness and ignorance of the Muslims”. Dr Sultan replies, “Yes, that is what I mean.”

Please read the whole thing. Also, check out this blog, where you can find a map of all the terrorist attacks since 9/11. On the day after a Muslim suicide bomber sets off a nuclear device in the heart of a major American city, do you think the American people will be in the mood to make fine distinctions between "good" Muslims and "bad" Muslims? We are already seeing (and the Dubai Ports World fiasco illustrates it perfectly) a significant anti-Arab and anti-Muslim feeling in the country (exacerbated almost every day by the images of Arab/Muslim brutality towards their own people, as well as Americans, Jews and others). When Americans see images of a blasted U.S. city, and hear about the 100,000 dead, the 500,000 injured, the untold numbers who are facing a slow death by radiation sickness, then the spirit that sent young American men on missions to fire bomb Japanese cities in 1945 (nearly every major Japanese city was burned to the ground in a four-month period) will rise again. It may not be fair, it may not be right, but it will be very real. This is the nightmare I see so clearly, that can only be prevented if the Muslim world will finally reject the savagery from within and root it out. For if they do not, then the power of the West will truly be unleashed against them, as it has not been thus far. Then, only biblical descriptions will do justice to the fury that follows.