The War We Are Afraid To Fight

... the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution late last year condemning the defamation of religions – but the only religion mentioned in the resolution was Islam ...

We are fighting a two-front war against the Islamists. The violence-prone jihadists, who consider the West the “far enemy” that must be destroyed in order to save the Islamic Ummah, are using all the technological tools they can muster to kill us en masse. This would include nuclear weapons as soon as they get their hands on them, which makes the fragile situation in Pakistan today so dangerous. The Cold War deterrence strategy of Mutually Assured Destruction does not work with an ideology that exalts death over life.

We are also facing a subversive war of ideas in which more moderate-seeming Islamists exploit the vocabulary of Western values in order to undermine those values slowly but surely from within.

We must fight back on both fronts by staying on offense and by using our technological superiority to render their source of wealth for funding terrorism and their propaganda obsolete. The development of alternative fuels to completely end our sole reliance on Middle Eastern oil should be an urgent priority for our next president immediately upon taking office.

We must also find better ways to expose the moral bankruptcy and ultimate futility of Islamic ideology to the masses drinking the Kool-Aid served to them by the Islamist extremists. Since there is no viable movement of true Muslim moderates willing to stand up for reconciling Islam and democracy, we have to stop pretending that Islam as it is practiced in its predominant form today is a moderate, peaceful religion. It is not.

Unless responsible leaders of a Muslim reformation come forward and lead a counter-charge against the extremists, we must completely destroy the radical Islamic infrastructure that forms the basis for indoctrination and intimidation.

Finally, we cannot compromise on our own core beliefs such as separation of church (or mosque) and state, equality, and freedom of expression. This means no appeasement of Islamic “sensibilities” in the name of multiculturalism. It means rejecting insidious ideas such as legislating against “defamation” of religions. It means refusing to subsidize the UN’s embrace of the radical Islamists’ agenda in whatever forum it appears.

As long as Islamists do not respect other peoples’ beliefs, we should not demean ourselves by coddling theirs to our own detriment.