Democratic Conversation

When will it stop?

Western governments and their societies continually stand down to Middle East fanatics who cloak themselves in religious ideology, talk of war and recriminations, and hold modernity and progress hostage to Iron Age superstitions and dogmatism. Their only real power: the ability to turn off the oil spigot. If this is not a wolf in sheep’s clothing, hypocrisy redone in Wildesque farce, then Western Society knows nothing of itself any longer. And so maybe Islam should prevail over the soft and spineless ideology of democracy. The West calls their actions part of diplomacy. Islam knows diplomacy only in the short term, staying civil even as they ever inch closer to taking more control over Western ideas, notions of open criticism, and law. We see this encroachment every day in the news: British Muslims demanding sharia law for its people (read that: women, the icons of Islamic misogyny); Western critics under the cloud of Islam’s hypocritical stances vis-á-vis religious criticism —Muslim’s attacking Jewish and Christian sacred symbols while advocating violence and murder for those who criticize Mohammad; this from the “religion of peace”; Muslim’s suing airlines for taking them off planes following suspicious activity, even suing passengers for pointing out those suspicious activities. And all the while, we see too few Muslim’s criticizing their Middle East brethren and fellow religious who are killing their own over religious hair-splitting.

And Western citizens are supposed to take these people seriously?

Since March 23, Iran has held hostage 15 British Royal Navy personnel. We all know the story. Strayed into Iranian waters, Iran says. Britain produced documents “proving” the sailors were well within Iraqi waters. Not exactly a classic he-said-she-said, but almost. Only, it has got worse: the Iranians now parade almost daily the Royal Marines on television, having somehow coerced a few to “admit” crossing the watery border line, apologizing for this act, and most recently, a released letter asking British Parliament to start withdrawing troops from Iraq. This is pure propaganda straight out of Joseph Goebbels or Karl Rove, naturally. It also serves three purposes: show the Iranian people its government has power, show the Middle East that Western powers aren’t all that powerful after all, and embarrass the Brits and the West.

What seems more and more obvious is Iran’s motive behind this: retaliation for America having captured in January five Iranian soldiers in an Iraqi town, their vehicle stuffed with illegal arms destined, likely, for one side or another in Iraq’s escalating civil war between Sunnis and Shia. Worse, these five Iranians are members of the elite Revolutionary Guard, an organization that today is more corporation than military corps. And Iran wants them back.

Hostage exchange? Hardly. The USA won’t go for that. This is not a tit-for-tat operation. The Iranians were captured red handed with illegal arms. The Royal Marines were captured “red handed” crossing some invisible line with just their boats—if you can believe this story of jumped borders at all.

So then a high Islamic cleric gets on the television and warns Britain (and by proxy, The West) that such actions have consequences, and they should not mess with Islam.

Isn’t enough enough, Britain? Isn’t it time to do something, Western Society? We are up against fanatics who want nothing more than to enslave women, discontinue critical and artistic thought, and make everyone cow to Allah and his “prophet” Muhammad, and convert to Islam, the most violent and democratically destructive of all religions invented by humans. The larger question behind this is, What is the West waiting for?

Britain, here’s a strategy straight out of your own history books. Play nice-nice with Iran over this “crisis”; get the diplomats to do what needs to be done; even save face and allow the Iranians to save face. Perhaps even apologize.

Afterwards, scare up a squadron of bombers and destroy Iran’s budding nuclear weapons manufacturing industry. Yes. This is the prudent response to fanatical actions. Playing nice-nice has got you nowhere. Not for a long time. It’s time for a strategy well studied and practiced in your history: teach these people a lesson. And while you’re at it, take away their trump card weapon we all know they want to have as a Sword of Damocles to use against its neighbors and the West so they may advance further and further against Western culture. These people are as vicious as they are brainwashed by religious dogmatism—blind arrogance and ambition that states quite clearly in the “Holy” Qu’ran that all infidels (i.e., anyone who does not bow to Islam) should die or be enslaved.

To America and the West, here’s a fact known for better than 30 years that will almost certainly eliminate Middle East problems becoming Western problems: cut down your oil consumption, find alternative fuels, and get the Middle East Oil Monkey off your backs. Two things will happen: first, the price of go-juice will increase (but then, it’s already ridiculous) and so you will have to practice conservation and industrial innovation; and second, the Middle East will recede into what it was before oil became its sugar daddy: a backwards group of waring tribes killing one person at a time—or a hundred—over blood feuds and religious sectarianism. Basically, exactly how they live now and have lived and murdered each other for nearly 2,000 years. In other words, if you take away their cash crop the Middle East will become the violent, ignorant nomads that history has relegated to their kind since words were put on paper. Of course, we’ll still give them their due for establishing an alphabet and the number zero.

Why do I advocate such destructive, incendiary action? It should be pretty simple to understand by now. The lines in the sand have been constantly redrawn. And those who are scratching those lines are Islamofascists and greedy Big Oil sheiks, who have taken far too many steps forward for half a century now, encroaching on Western Society’s systems of freedoms by constantly espousing and exporting a religion based on fealty under penalty of death. It must be said again that not all Muslims are fanatics or terrorists. Western Muslims live peaceable lives for the most part because they enjoy freedoms unknown in their national countries of origin. This is why they left those countries. But there is a problem here: religion.

There is little difference, one can argue, between the non-violent religious and the violent fanatic when those free, Western Muslims are cowed by Islam’s edicts that demand they not criticize their religion or its leaders (Islam does, after all, translate to “submission”); they likewise have no ability to take legal action, as Islamic law is stacked in favor of whomever sits on the court to make sure Islam prevails, regardless of its culpability in matters of riot, murder, war, and fanaticism. Likewise, Muslims haven’t even the right to believe any but the words their Imams use in the name of their religion. Yes, call Western Muslims non-violent, if you will, but do so at your peril, one day. If they are not continually fighting against the injustices perpetrated by their religion, through legal, ecumenical, and social means—right to the point of leaving the mosque on humanistic grounds, then what we have are silent abettors of those fanatics, and potential soldiers when the Imams demand they take up arms and fight the infidels (i.e., anyone not Muslim—or the right kind of Muslim, say Shia or Sunni). This is not hyperbole, but fact and prediction.
When is it that the West—and those members of its honored philosophies expounding freedom of thought, rights to criticize, critical arts, and systems of secular government based on natural and legislated law—will wake up and see what Islam has planned to do since it got its hands on the world’s oil? These people are playing for blood, and the stakes are the Western World’s freedom, to be replaced by religious law that is as outdated as it is pernicious.

Will Britain, France, The Netherlands, Germany, America and less powerful nations who enjoy universal freedoms give up these rights to religious fanatics and their drone followers? This is in fact a war of ideologies—regardless of what governments say, as they feel they must say this—it is a war between Middle East religious fanaticism and the West’s rule of law and freedom. It is a war between Islam and Western Free Thinking. If the West waits for the day when robed, sword-wielding Islamofascists knock on the doors of every citizen in its countries, that will be far too late to act prudently.