When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in February 1979, Jimmy Carter and Zbigniew Brzezinski decided to supply arms to the Afghan mujahideen. Years later the Soviet army was forced to retreat. U.S. intelligence did not report that the Muslim world interpreted the expulsion of the Soviet army as a victory of Islam over the infidels (thanks to the support of Allah and the weapons of the infidels). It is normal to have different perceptions of the same events, but the difficulty of understanding that different people can interpret the same events very differently can have tragic and long-lasting consequences.
For Muslims, it was the first major victory over infidels in centuries and gave impetus to a rapid rise of political Islam striving for a world caliphate. Then came the coup in Iran in 1979 which led (with the enthusiastic support of the infidels) to the creation of the Islamic Republic of Iran, whose constitution stated:
"The Constitution provides the necessary basis for the continuation of the revolution at home and abroad. In particular, in the development of international relations, the Constitution [states that the Islamic Republic of Iran] will strive together with other Islamic and popular movements to prepare the way for the creation of a single world community."
Ayatollah Khomeini said: "We will export our revolution all over the world. As long as the cry There is no god but Allah will not resound throughout the world, there will be a struggle."
According to many Western thinkers, "Muslims want the same things as we do: security, peace, and prosperity." President Obama and his entourage assured us of this.
There is no doubt that there are Muslims who want security, peace, and prosperity, but many, especially representatives of religious institutions and pious dictators of Muslim countries, see it differently.
The clash of civilizations is a fact, but different people look at it differently. After the collapse of the USSR, Samuel Huntington wrote about the religious and cultural conflicts that awaited the world, about the decline of Western civilization.
His critics thought he was contrasting Christianity with Islam, but in my humble opinion, he was more concerned with a decline in interest in parliamentary democracy and a return to an interest in totalitarian ideas, so often dressed up in ideas underpinned by religion and militant nationalism. In other words, Huntington was announcing an attack of barbarism on the civilization of dialogue and respect for individual rights.
Long before the publication of Huntington's theses, the French philosopher Jean-François Revel wrote a book called Neither Marx nor Jesus, which was one great praise of America as the country that had created a political system based on the ideas of the Enlightenment that Europe should emulate. Meanwhile, Europe abandoned the Enlightenment, remained faithful to Christian and Marxist totalitarianism with democratic embellishment; convinced that it constitutes the model and light for humanity, while wallowing in anti-American sentiment and having difficulty with understanding parliamentary democracy.
Jean-François Revel published this book in 1972, but for the rest of his life (he died in 2006) he was horrified by the anti-American obsession of Europeans. (His last book, published in 2002, was titled L'Obsession anti-américaine.)
An interesting protest against the idea of a clash of civilizations was the statement of the Egyptian philosopher Murad Wahba, who claims that there is only one civilization, and its opposite is barbarism. Time and time again, barbarians attack civilization, which is saved from final destruction by lone heroes such as Avicenna (Ibn Sina), and destroyed again by fanatics such as Al Ghazali (the Muslim thinker who put a stop to the Muslim Renaissance at the turn of the eleventh and twelfth centuries). The dissidents of the Islamic world have saved for Europe and others the heritage of the Greeks, destroyed by (mainly Christian) religious fanatics, and the Europeans have saved the heritage of Islamic culture for the world. The world is developing, and the barbarians are constantly renewing their attempts to destroy a civilization based on development, innovation, and dialogue, not on conquest and plunder.
Barbarians come from the left and the right. It is almost amusing to declare oneself as left or right, if we remember how murky this division is, how much both concepts are intertwined with totalitarian ideas and inhuman crimes. The revolutionary romanticism of the left and the right is invariably the promise of a glorious future built on a mountain of corpses of those who are ready to settle disputes in parliament and to advance civilization.
The clash of civilizations may seem like a nebulous concept, suitable only for academic disputes that are a waste of time. In our quest for security, peace and prosperity, we are ready to turn our eyes away from anything that disturbs the image of a peaceful tomorrow.
And yet, if we call barbarism civilization, then the clash of civilizations is taking place before our eyes and threatens the security of our tomorrow. When bombs fall on Kharkiv, Kiev, Odessa, Lviv and other Ukrainian cities, the word barbarism comes to mind. When China threatens to invade Taiwan, we feel uneasy, when the Turks drop bombs on the Kurds, only a few people notice, Sudan is off our radar, just like Nigeria or many other places where barbarism is rampant and civilization has no chance.
Not so with Gaza. Gaza is of interest to everyone. Moreover, the concept of barbarism is suddenly redefined. Here, many call barbarians those who desire security, peace, and prosperity. What is most astonishing is the alliance of the Western left with the barbaric patriarchy, with a theocratic totalitarianism that openly declares not only its desire to exterminate the Jews, but also openly seeks to destroy democratic societies based on individual rights, equality before the law, property rights and democratic institutions. What's more, the anti-American (or anti-Enlightenment, if you prefer) obsession has jumped across the ocean and made itself at home in America itself, in Canada and in Australia.
Is it the result of great population movements and the disintegration of traditional social bonds? The Great Migration is one of the most important causes, but it is certainly not the only one. Perhaps in second place we should mention the fact that human rights, one of the greatest achievements of the Enlightenment, became a weapon in the hands of barbarians. Rightly convinced that we will adhere to humane principles, the barbarians use the hard won liberties in their war against all freedom, using every trick.
A good illustration of this art can be found in a sermon delivered by an imam on January 5, 2024 in the relatively small town of Warren, adjacent to Detroit. Taking advantage of the freedom of speech protected by the U.S. Constitution, in a sermon broadcast via YouTube, the imam said, among other things:
"One Jewish man in New York was talking to a Palestinian businessman. First, the [Palestinian] said: 'Don't worry, Jewish man. One day will come, and we will slaughter you like a sheep and the stone and the tree will work undercover with us. They will tell us: Hey Muslim, come. Somebody is hiding here, get up and kill him.'
Adding:
“Oh Allah, make us soldiers for You. Every way you want us to be – with the tank, with the eye, with the money, with the hand, make us soldiers for Islam. Make us die the way you want us to die."
We might think that this was some isolated pathological case that caused a storm of condemnation from American Muslims, the media and the authorities. On the contrary, this is just one of hundreds of examples that no one pays attention to.
Not surprisingly, University of California lecturer Osman Umarji went much further in exercising his constitutionally protected freedom of speech. In a sermon at the Islamic Center in San Gabriel Valley, also broadcast via YouTube, the American academic said:
"We see the images [from Gaza] and we see the headlines and it makes many Muslims now question and ask from the depths of their heart: Was October 7 worth it, should the Muslims have resisted on October 7? Because it looks like the Palestinians are losing.
[...]
"So we can begin to change our perspective and not analyze things from a worldly perspective alone, but also drawing in a way of analyzing politics from the lessons of the Quran and the Sunna of the Prophet Muhammad.
[...]
"The only way we can do this is if we analyze and go back to the raids of the Prophet Muhammad, a genre of the biography of the Prophet Muhammad, which has been largely forgotten by American Muslims in a post 9/11 world. This makes us incapable of addressing war, assessing conflict, when we no longer have knowledge of how the Prophet Muhammad was a warrior.”
The American Muslim spoke of the hope of "dissolving the Zionist state" based on the October 7 model and "erecting a Palestinian state, or Islamic State."
What is the difference between the Islamic dream and the American dream? The American dream is about democracy, equality, and freedom. The Islamic dream is about conquering Jerusalem, Rome, Barcelona and Washington. A slight difference, but the Islamic dream cannot be fulfilled without the help of infidels.
Comrades, will you help?
At Berkeley's U.S. Elementary School, students were asked by a teacher to write an anti-hate message on sticky notes and past them in the school hallway. One of the students wrote: "Stop bombing babies", others followed in his footsteps, then the whole group went and stuck their notes on the door of the classroom where the Jewish teacher taught.
And again the question – an isolated incident or a fragmentary image showing the phenomenon? What phenomenon? America's return to Europe's worst, most barbaric tradition? Are we witnessing an alliance between the barbarian left and the barbarian right?
Retired Israeli politician Natan Sharansky, originally from the USSR, says:
“The most important struggle in America is not between Left and Right but between liberals and progressives. Progressives are not allies; they are enemies of liberalism. And it was very difficult for many organizations, especially Jewish liberal organizations, to accept this.”
Why especially Jewish? Since the Jews are the first target in the struggle between the barbarians and civilization, it is here that it is easiest to mobilize one's own and gain support in the societies of the enemy. When it’s done, the rest will be easier. At least, that's what the strategists of the barbarian armies believe. The real goal is to end the anomaly that is Western democracy.
Israel today is the canary in a mine that is a war between totalitarianism and democracy. A large part of the democratic world is torn, does not really understand what is at stake, or even sides with the forces of totalitarianism.
China and Russia are sympathetic to fundamentalist Islam's war against the West. For the time being, the goal is shared, the proper order will be established later. Hamas is merely the vanguard of the forces representing the Islamic dream. As two U.S. analysts of the strategy of the Islamic war against the West write:
“Westerners clearly misperceive Hamas when they imagine that their actions on October 7 were spontaneous and opportunistic; rather, it appears that the strategy of atrocity was theoretically informed, well designed, and then executed to elicit an overwhelming Israeli response and to put the Gazans at peril.
Why is a strategy of atrocity even more dangerous that might appear? Because it is an attack on the central ideas underlying the laws of war and the Westphalian order.”
According to the authors of this article, the civilized laws of war are a Western innovation that is being used brilliantly by the enemies of the West. They do not respect these rights, they hide behind their own civilians, they attack enemy civilians, they take civilians hostage, they attack merchant ships, they use rape and other forms of extreme terror as a weapon against the infidels. They demand that the other side respect their rights, knowing that these appeals will fall on fertile ground.
"When one state that subscribes to the concept of human rights and military restraint is at war with an organization that recognizes no such restraint, the balance of advantage flows to the party who recognizes no limits."
Islam is not alone on the front lines of the fight against the West. "Russia," the article reads, “in their invasion of Ukraine, has committed a never-ending series of atrocities and war crimes, and has deliberately targeted civilians. Russian aims seem to include terrorizing the civilian population into submission and erasing Ukrainian identity in the areas they occupy.”
The war for minds is as important as military action. Who knows, maybe it's even more important. Without demoralization in the ranks of the enemy, victory over liberalism is not possible. In democratic societies, some consciously and deliberately enter into an alliance with barbarism, others allow themselves to be persuaded by the romantic ideas of "compassion for the underdog", and still others are driven by fear and the desire for security, peace and prosperity, even if only until tomorrow.
Newcomers from barbaric lands are fleeing poverty, chaos, and terror. Most seek prosperity (without giving up the dream of greatness instilled in childhood), for a few freedom is more important than prosperity. The latter watch in amazement as the inhabitants of the free world voluntarily renounce their freedom, refusing to fight for the preservation of a civilization based on individual freedoms, law, and dialogue.
The left and the right seem to be mired in the same fearful gibberish. Among the defenders of old-fashioned liberalism, we are increasingly seeing the faces of newcomers born into tyrannies who understand better than others that Israel is a canary in a mine, that its destruction will mean that the fumes of poison are so strong that they are killing civilization.
Translation: Małgorzata Koraszewska and Sarah Lawson
