Equating Islamist savagery with Christendom

Writing at FrontPage Magazine, Mark Goldblatt, while sounding some similar themes to my own recent article on jihad, lays down the liberal line of blaming jihadist terrorism, not on the core teachings of Islam, but on the failure of the Islamic world to follow the modern Western path of Enlightenment. The fact is that jihad with its terrors and oppressions was practiced for a thousand years before the Enlightenment. By blaming jihad on a “return to the Middle Ages,” with its “cultural wastelands,” Goldblatt disastrously equates the West’s own Christian Middle Ages, when our Western civilization took form, with the savagery of jihad. I can think of no more destructive error than to put Islamic jihadism on a par with Christian civilization. But some people—Michael Lind and Andrew Sullivan are two other examples of this—want to define the war on terror not as a war between the West and Islamism, but as war between secularism and religion. They thus lump the West’s historic Christianity with Islam as a primitive throwback we must eliminate, a message that alienates Westerners from our own spiritual and historical roots, and thereby weakens our ability to resist our Islamic adversaries.

Goldblatt wrote:

“The war on terror … represents the culmination of events set in motion centuries ago, back when the social evolution of humanity hit a fork in the road. Down one path lay the Enlightenment … and beyond it the goods and, yes, even the excesses of modernity. That path was taken by predominantly Judeo-Christian peoples. Down the other path lay a return to the Middle Ages, to stagnant theocracies and cultural wastelands in which the only relevant question became Who did this to us? That path was taken by predominantly Islamic peoples. They are history’s abject losers. And they’re not happy about it.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 18, 2004 01:14 PM | Send