, “Separationism, restated,” in which I lay out in 570 words—most of them from the Koran—what the essential Islam problem is, and what we need to do about it.
Richard W. writes:
Excellent article, well worth revisiting. There is an alternative strategy to your call for Separationism we should consider.
That is attacking Islam explicitly, as a religion, and causing a mass falling away among its believers.
The problem with separation is that it likely only puts off the day of reckoning with Islam. At some point it is likely that the Muslim world will have strengthened itself enough to attack us from their isolation. The situation that Israel faces is a clear example that isolation alone may not be sufficient.
The alternative proposal I offer is that the entire West set out as a civilization to destroy the religion and culture of Islam, until it is mostly a memory, like ancient Paganism today.
Indeed separation can be a supreme tactic in the Destruction of the Evil Ideology of Islam.
At first it would seem the idea of destroying a religion and the culture is abhorrent to civilized people. But, of course, on second thought, it is really second nature to our liberal cultural establishment at this point. They have been “deconstructing” every aspect of our European Christian heritage for 50 years now.
Think of the amazing success they have had! Blacks, who were considered by even the more forward thinkers in the era before WW2 as a lesser race unsuited to many difficult professions and positions of leadership, are now celebrated for their achievements in every aspect of our society, and we have a black President. Homosexuality which was a scandal, a crime and a sin, is now cause for celebration.
Surely the same mechanisms that have been deployed against tradition in the West are now well honed and can be deployed in the Middle East to carry out the complete deconstruction of their culture, with an emphasis on the stupidity of their religion, the foolishness of their religious leaders, and the importance of breaking free of the stifling culture of Islam.
There could be multiple fronts in the war to destroy Islam. Christian organizations should formulate a set of simple slogans that debunk Islam and propagate them widely. Ideas such as “Mohammed was a false prophet” “Allah is a false God.”
(If the story of Jesus is true, then he was the last prophet of God. All others are therefore fakes and frauds. Mohammed claimed that God sent the Angel Gabriel and dictated the Koran to him. For the believing Christian there are really only two interpretations of this: Mohammed was making the whole thing up or some supernatural entity did speak to him. In either case it is a terrible lie. It’s maddening to see Christian leaders of the age acquiesce to this heresy.)
Hard core atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens can form their own Corp of Islamic Deconstruction and tighten up their arguments and rhetoric to focus it like a laser on Islam.
Key goals must be to inject seemingly harmless cultural artifacts into their civilization that slowly dissolve the beliefs of the masses in Islam. Cartoons, comic characters, a slow but steady deluge that subtlety depicts Islam as old fashioned superstition must be introduced.
Youth movements were key in destroying tradition in the West. The covert branches of the U.S. Intelligence community should set out to inculcate a “summer of love” in the Moslem world. Just as the hippies did pull an entire generation away from the traditions of their forefathers, so the Islamic Counterculture will do the same. The messages: be free man. Religion is a drag. Be spiritual, not religious. Hare Krishna. The goal must be to fundamentally alienate the young from the old, to cause a break in the chain of control that Islam holds over it’s adherents.
Or course we can not admit publicly what we are doing. Groups like the CIA may discuss and plan this strategy, but the methods used to make it happen must continue to look spontaneous. Funding for films, getting access to airways in Muslim lands, breaking off the weakest links first (like Malaysia and Indonesia), all of this should be undertaken.
Even the massive influx of recreational drugs into these nations should be considered. The 1960s countercultural break with tradition was fueled by powerful psychoactive chemicals, particularly LSD. LSD may be used to melt Islam, just as it melted the West during its heyday of the late ’60s and ’70s.
Ideally we would like to bring the Islamic world forward to being moderate Protestant conservatives. Sadly, we don’t have a good model for how to accomplish that. In contrast the model for how to melt Islam is all around us
While this is an extremely harsh proposal, failing to destroy Islam is even more harsh. That condemns millions of future humans in Muslim countries to continue to be engulfed in the terrible ideology that condones everything from suicide bombings to female genital mutilation.
Compared to this, a generation of alienated, de-cultured, atheist, zonked out, Arab world isn’t such a terrible alternative.