Will the West surrender to this?

Muslim cleric Abu Hamza al-Masri is the former imam of London’s Finsbury Park mosque. And he appears headed for jail. Like so many of his ilk he used his pulpit to preach murder and terrorism. A jury in England found his guilty of seven counts of soliciting murder.

Under his preaching his mosque was linked to several terrorists suspects including the inept “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and the 9/11 plotter Zacarias Moussaoui.

The cleric, who says he lost his hands in Afghanistan fighting the Soviets, is also wanted on charges in the United States. Born in Egypt the cleric is wanted in the US for his attempts to set up a terrorist training camp among other terror related charges.

In a previous posting we mentioned that one of the Islamic demonstrators, who attended the London mass meeting calling for more terrorist attacks, was dressed as a suicide bomber. He has now been identified. He is Omar Khayam, 22, who lives in Bedford. This fine, upstanding Muslim, was recently sentenced to five-and-a-half years in prison for being a heroin and cocaine dealer. According to the BBC, he “was free from jail on license at the time of the protest.”

Realizing that his actions put him in legal jeopardy especially given his tenuous state over his drug dealing he said his actions were “un-Islamic” but compared his actions to those of the cartoonists who drew Mohammed. His mosque also said his actions here “totally un-Islamic.” Now if dressing like a suicide bomber is “totally un-Islamic” then what is being a suicide bomber? And if it is “totally un-Islamic” why do so many Islamic states support the practice? Why do hundreds of millions of Muslims approve of the tactic? What of the hundreds of Muslims who marched with Khayam and carried the disgusting signs shown below? And why are Muslim clerics so regularly promoting terrorism?

But is this intolerance “totally un-Islamic?” European states want to convince themselves this is the case. Robert Spencer, editor of The Myth of Islamic Tolerance, notes: “Sclerotic European states eyeing the rapid growth of their Muslim populations console themselves with tale of old al-Andalus, reassuring one another that Islamic hegemony not only wasn’t all that bad——it was a veritable golden age. Investigators in Europe and America are discouraged from monitoring activity in mosques. After all, goes the dogma, terrorism isn’t an Islamic problem. Islam is a supremely tolerant faith. No, terrorism is a problem of political grievances or socio-economic imbalances.”

But what if that is wrong? What if the faith itself is responsible? What if all faith has this effect to one degree or another?

The West has long adopted a Marxist interpretation of life. The poor of the world are never responsible for their poverty. It is always the West that rapes them. Never does their own culture or religious values lead to destructive results only capitalism does that. And so the problem continues to grow and grow. And the West caves in repeatedly. And inch by inch the Mullahs and the Islamists gain territory while the intellectually emaciated West has no ability to resist.

Please note that none of this warrants US troops in the Middle East. It was clear from the start that Bush’s invasion of Iraq would only fan the flames. In fact it has done worse than that. The Bush administration has bent over backwards to push the idea that Islam is actually tolerant.

Islam is a predominantly fundamentalist faith. And no fundamentalist faith is tolerant. But since Bush is a fundamentalist himself he can not acknowledge the inherent intolerance of fundamentalism without offending his own power base. And this is where it gets really scary.

The West is broken into two camps. The Europeans are weak advocates of Enlightenment values. They are intellectually emaciated. The US, on the other hand, is willing to fight back but not in the ways that are effective but only in ways that are ineffective. And worse yet the US is becoming a fundamentalist state as well ruled by Christian fanatics.

With two anti-freedom forces fighting for global domination and with Europe refusing to defend the values of the Age of Enlightenment freedom is truly in danger as it has never been before.

In spite of the military policies of Bush this is not a war of guns and weapons. This is an intellectual battle. On the one side is Europe which clings to its old values with weak hands. The other two main warriors are Islam and the United States. And under Bush the US has joined the same camp as the Islamists. They have embraced the revival of intolerance whole-heartedly. Bin Laden and his cronies want to destroy American freedom. George Bush and his cronies do too.