Book Review
Book Review
Solution to Anti-Americanism / Anti-Westernism: Live and let live on parity basis
:: A Review of “A War on Islam?” by Abid Ullah Jan ::
I read this book in early March, just before the United States launched its war of conquest on Iraq. It was certainly a revelation. In today’s largely liberal-secular world, people who take their religion seriously are regarded with derision or alarm. This is as true of Muslims in Afghanistan or Algeria as it is of Free Presbyterians in Ulster and Christian supporters of the pro-life movement in the US and Éire.
The author makes the case that the end of the Cold War left certain neo-conservative and liberal interventionist ideologues bereft of an enemy. “With the end of the Cold War, what we really need is an obvious ideological and threatening enemy, one worthy of our mettle, one that can unite us in opposition.” Irving Kristol, [Wall Street Journal, Aug 2nd 1996]. The Soviet threat had melted away. The latest deadly threat became ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ a worthy new Comintern. To such people a war on Islam will do nicely, thank you!
These people don’t like nations and old-fashioned notions like national sovereignty and independence in their New World Order. Any concept of an alternative civilization that does not share their ‘universal values’ is seen as an affront. They want to impose ‘liberal-democracy’ in every corner of the globe by installing their own compliant puppets – “Do things our way or we’ll kick the Shiite out of you.”
However, as the author states, authentic political institutions, “grow out of their: religion, moral habits, economy and literature; political ways are but part of an intricate web of civilization, into which the roots of social order are buried deep. Attempts to impose borrowed institutions upon an alien culture, however well-intentioned, generally are disastrous…”This is something the US may yet learn as Shi-ite Muslims declare their preference that an Islamic state ought to replace the toppled Saddam regime rather than the US-prescribed secular-liberal client state. It will be interesting to see if Iraq’s liberators will be prepared to allow an Islamic Party of Iraq to stand for election, win political power and establish an Islamic state. It seems unlikely, given the precedent in Bosnia where elected representatives, including the President of the Bosnian Serb republic, can be sacked by NWO pro-consul Paddy Ashdown – who has arbitrary power he could never dream of when he led the Liberal Democrats in Britain.
Leading academics and politicians have come to the belief that liberal-democracy is the ‘end of history’ – the universally valid best possible human society. The author scoffs at this hubristic nonsense. Not only is secular-liberal-democracy bad when it is imposed abroad by US military force, but it’s even bad for American society itself.
One foundation stone of this secular-liberalism is the modern American concept of the ‘separation of church and state’. Today, this has been twisted from the US Constitution to mean the exact opposite of what the Founding Fathers intended. “For most of American history, the principle purpose of the Establishment Clause has been understood as the protection of the religious world against the secular government.” Since 1962, the US Supreme Court has prevented any kind of religious expression in public schools – including voluntary prayer, Christmas carols, nativity scenes and Christmas trees. Similar bans have been extended to all public property in the US. An attempt in the UK, ironically by the Red Cross, to ban Christian imagery from its charity shops last winter indicates that such American liberal ‘politically-correct’ notions are spreading here too!
The author’s exposé of the true nature of liberal-democracy in the US itself is superb. It deserves to be quoted in full:
In simple words, it means to “liberate” Muslims from traditional religious authority.
Knowing that reasonable men do not want to be “forced to be freed,” liberalism has consistently followed the strategy of co-opting or seizing power of central governments in order to make war on countervailing institutions (family, marriage, representative assemblies, etc.) of that society and then to attack the very ideas of the revealed religion, objective truth and the immutability of God’s moral order.
Liberal democracy aims at an atomized society whose members accept moral anarchy in exchange for totalitarian control and the loss of all legitimate liberties that were once protected by traditional institutions in the East and West. Whatever the incidental benefits sometimes conferred by liberalism, its basic nature as a parasite within the American and European traditions means that its perniciousness becomes all the greater all the while and all the more evident as it saps the health from its host. To make it sugar coated for us, liberalism has been linked and made art and parcel of democracy in the post Cold War era, as if democracy can never survive if it does not follow the separation of church and state – then of course it will not be “liberal.”
To see the results of liberalism, we shall have to consider the state of American values and democracy, which has given way to a Leviathan, whose statutes, taxes, bureaucratic diktats and judicial whimsies would shock any medieval monarch by the depth of their reach into the lives of the American people.
The free market in goods and services of real value retreats before the regulations and management of government, while the purveyors of legalized infanticide, obscenity and nihilism receive the protection of the liberal government in the form of their “rights.” The church retains a precarious freedom until the day when the government uses “hate crimes” or some similar pretext to persecute its members and seize its assets. The individualism that once encouraged intellectual and moral excellence has been replaced by dreary homogeneity of a ‘dumbed down’ and decadent mass society. Is this ‘liberal’ democracy? And if it is, who needs it?
Are the Muslims ready and willing to live in a liberal democracy, where if a clergymen talks about any actual political controversy, he could wind up sharing a federal prison cell with a murderer or rapist? This is what happens in the liberal and secular United States of America. Kevin Hanson runs the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, dedicated to preventing the US federal government from suppressing people’s freedom of conscience. He complains, “for the first time in American history, priests, ministers, rabbis and imams are being told under threat of criminal prosecution how they must preach,”
The liberal administration in Washington has tried to deny charges of censorship on religious sermons, etc., by invoking a clever conceit: It defines partial birth abortions as a political rather than a moral or religious issue, because it comes up for a vote. So you cannot speak about it in religious terms. The interpretation forces every man or woman of cloth to take a vow of silence since liberal lawmakers feel compelled to meddle in every aspect of the lives of the American public.
No-one – particularly among the Islamic societies – would submit in living under such a liberal democratic state after realizing its true meanings and functions to the full extent. [pp126-128].
The author denounces this as ‘Cultural Marxism’ – the failed economic model transferred to culture and civilization. He certainly makes a good case for his arguments. At the heart of this fundamentally illiberal ‘liberal-democracy’ is the idea that an arbitrary self-appointed elite can determine what opinions may or may not be advocated, how language may be used and which ideas are welcome or not. Its end result is social disintegration and an easily cowed atomized decadent society as all ties of family, religion, nationality, culture and identity are finally broken down.
Anyone for Yankee liberal-democracy? No thanks! “No nation needs to be Americanized to be modern or to be liberalized to be democratic.” The nations of the West took centuries to develop from feudal tyrannies to democratic states. The Islamic world should likewise be allowed to develop its own institutions according to its own values in its own time. If Western secular liberalism really is the pinnacle of human achievement, the peoples of the Islamic world should eventually be able to realize this for themselves without external coercion. Leave well alone!
“The only solution eliminating anti-Americanism and the subsequent anti-Western and associated violence for the establishment in Washington is to live and let the Muslims live with the same right to liberty, independence, sovereignty and dignity as it wants to enjoy for itself.” The US and its client states should stop looking abroad for monsters to destroy, before they create one that will take us all with it. It’s still not too late!
Abid Ullah Jan, the author of “A War on Islam?,” is a regular contributor toMedia Monitors Network (MMN).
