Born Muslim, Part Three

August 26, 2010 1:35 PM

There are a lot of Muslims out there, probably over a billion and a half. There is no magic that will make them disappear, and even with some manner of "divine intervention," they will not all be converted to Hinduism, Christianity, or any other religion. (In fact, one might ask why such divine intervention has not already happened during the Crusades, or the Moghul Empire, or any other historical period.) The only remaining way that Americans can deal with Muslims, then, is through the power of ideas. (I know that many, perhaps even most Americans do not take the power of ideas as seriously as they should. If they did, we would not, at the very moment I am writing this, be engaging in nation-building of an Islamic Republic in Afghanistan. But we don't, and we are.)

I must, therefore, write about ideas, if I want to find a solution to the war that many Muslims, led by Iran, are waging against us. The first idea I shall write about is anti-Americanism. The mullahs who hijacked the former Persian Empire, now the great nation of Iran, hate America. Never mind why, I will deal with that later. They just do, as do their allies, Al-Qa'eda, Hezbollah, Hamas, and others. They are anti-American Muslims.

There has big much fuss in the press and the blogosphere about what to call our Muslim enemies: Islamofascists, Islamists, Islamo-Nazis, Islamic fundamentalists, Jihadist, Jihadis, militants, radicals, and so forth. There is equally a lot of fuss about what to call those Muslims who are not our enemies: "moderate Muslims" is the most common phrase they come up with. I do not like that vague, misleading term. What does it mean? Does a moderate Muslim only want a moderate amount of Sharia law to replace the US Constitution? Does a moderate Muslim only want to behead a moderate number of Muslims who converted to Christianity, reserving lesser punishments for the rest? Does a moderate Muslim want to amputate only a finger, rather than a whole hand, for theft under Sharia law?

Forget "moderate." I prefer "anti-American." There are those Muslims who are, and those who are not. The anti-American Muslims are our enemies. Those of them who attack us must receive that treatment earned by enemies, which means, in military language, that they must be sought and destroyed. Even Obama knows that, and even Obama is doing that! It is under his orders that Taliban Muslims in Pakistan and Afghanistan are being blown to pieces by missiles from drone aircraft.

Therefore, the formula changes: rather than "Muslim good vs. Muslim bad," it becomes "pro-American Muslim sometimes good, anti-American Muslim bad."

Of course you can see right through the flaw in this approach. What does it mean to be anti-American? Does pro-American mean absolutely no criticism of Americans? Does that mean anyone, such as Nancy Pelosi, who claims to be pro-American, is indeed pro-American? I will begin to address such questions in Part Four. Meanwhile, a few words about where all those Muslims are.

Take a look at this map, from Wikipedia. It will come as no surprise that many of the Muslims are in the Middle East. Perhaps it will come as a small surprise how much the northern part of Africa is Muslim. Perhaps it will be a larger surprise to see how many Muslims there are all over the world, as shown by the light blue and medium blue areas on the map. No, even if the USA was as determined to perpetrate genocide as was the Third German Reich, we could not kill all of them. (Hitler was unable to kill all the Jews, much to the regret of many of today's Muslims.) Even if every last citizen of the USA became a missionary, we could not convert all of the Muslims to Christianity or to any other religion. For these reasons, the only power we have to protect ourselves is the power of ideas.