Is World War inevitable?

Paul Weston writing at Gates of Vienna predicts a Third World War between Islam and the West within 20 years. The first ingredient for war, he writes, is an enemy, and that enemy, Islam, is within the West and growing. The second ingredient for war is “anger and resentment amongst a unified mass majority…. [T]he common thread that unites the people of the liberal West is no longer what we are, but what we are not. We are not Islamic, and—voluntarily—never will be.” He continues:

Despite the best efforts of the vast state-funded race relations industry, the glaring evidence suggests one stark, unpalatable fact; Islam and the liberal West are incompatible. The utopian multiculturalist view that we can all get along is belied by the fact that as Islam keeps on trying to blow us up, so “Islamophobia” continues, quite naturally, to grow.

The death and destruction wrought throughout the West in recent years is not because Islam, in some childlike, well-intentioned yet misguided way, wishes to assimilate with us, it is because Islam wishes to take us over. We, obviously, do not wish to be taken over, so we must be prepared to resist an enemy, or be prepared to submit to an enemy, the point being that there is, with absolute certainty, an enemy….

Just as Islam is intransigently opposed to Western liberal democracy, so Western liberal democracy is intransigently opposed to Islam.

But is it the case that Western liberal democracy is intransigently opposed to Islam? To the contrary, it is Western liberal democracy that allowed and invited Islam into the West. And it is the believers in Western liberal democracy who today are the principal champions of the idea that Islam is essentially moderate and that we can all get along, once we defeat the extremists.

So, it is not just leftist multiculturalism that made this happen, but Western liberal democracy itself—that same Western liberal democracy that Weston describes as uncompromisingly against Islam.

So I don’t see the anti-Islam West that Paul Weston sees. I devoutly hope it comes into existence, but it doesn’t exist yet. And as long as it doesn’t exist, the Western submission to Islam that Weston mentions as a possibility is just as likely as world war.

I do not want submission or world war. Separationism is an alternative to both. If we understand in time that Islam is a mortal danger to us, we could commence rolling it back from the West, by a steady and mostly civilized and peaceful process. We would then contain it within its historic lands, denying it the power and opportunity to harm us, but also letting it exist in peace so long as it doesn’t threaten us, and thus avoiding an annihilating war. But if we continue to allow Islam to grow in the West, then, yes, either there will be war, or Islam will take us over, not because it has the power to take us over, but because the liberal democratic West will surrender to it.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 04, 2007 05:21 PM | Send