no butter in hell

Bad News and More Bad News

Mark Steyn aptly explains the critical difference between Islam and Christianity but concludes with:

The bad news is that Islam will soon be able to enforce submission-conversion at the point of a nuke. The good news is that any religion that needs to do that is, by definition, a weak one. More than that, the fierce faith of the 8th century Muslim warrior has been mostly replaced by a lot of hastily cobbled-together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies ... if Washington had half the psy-ops spooks the movies like to think we have, the spiritual neglect in latter-day Islam is a big Achilles' heel just ripe for exploiting.

What is this supposed spiritual lacuna in Islam? It seems a devout Muslim finds all the "spiritual" fulfillment he desires precisely in faithful adherence to the dictates of Allah and His Messenger, which include the forced submission-conversion of infidels. It seems it is the uncompromising view of God and of the absolute inferiority of infidels (which thus requires their submission) that makes Islam, in the eyes of its devout followers if not our own, a strong, not a weak, faith.

Also, describing the faith of today's jihadists, in contradistinction to that of the old-school jihadists, as "a lot of hastily cobbled together flimflam bought wholesale from clapped out European totalitarian pathologies" makes for a nice rhetorical flourish but is this entirely accurate? Do not today's jihadists share the exact same "fierce" faith as those 8th century Muslim warriors that very nearly conquered Europe?

Moreover, if any spiritual neglect has existed in Islam, one would think that that would have already been made apparent, whether by outside exploitation or just through plain self-awareness, and that that would have led to a gradual diminution of the appeal of Islam. Nearly 1,400 years and a billion believers later, that hasn't happened. So much for spiritual neglect.

And finally, while I would not gainsay the value of any "psy-ops" campaign in this war, even if we assume a deficiency of the spiritual within Islam, isn't giving Washington the task of essentially appealing to or redirecting a spiritual need misplaced?

So where is the "Achilles' heel" and where the good news?

(Where I do think a weakness may lie, one that might successfully be exploited to the detriment of the world-wide Jihad - but not neccesarily by Washington, is in Islam's misongyny. More on that another time).

posted by PseudoSav @ 7:42 PM