Huntington and Islam's bloody borders
Here's one of yesterday's gorier headlines: "Female suicide bomber kills 35 at Baghdad shrine". Was this murderous fanatic a Christian? Or Buddhist? Or Jewish? No. And neither was she an atheist or an environmentalist. She was Muslim and so were her victims. Although its adherents call Islam the "religion of peace", the daily news suggests quite the opposite, and those in need of a reality check should also note that the genocidal 1988 covenant/constitution of Hamas proclaims that "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it."
All this is by way of a belated remembrance of Samuel Huntington, who died on Christmas Eve. In the current issue of The Economist, Lexington notes that "Huntington came as close as anybody to predicting September 11th and the 'war on terror' with his strictures about Islam's 'bloody borders'", but in a more nuanced tribute, Christopher Caldwell pointed out in the weekend Financial Times that "this was an empirical statement, not a judgment on Islam's merits as a civilisation and still less an argument for western meddling."
Caldwell then adds a zinger that should be noted by the hordes of self-hating apologists for cutthroat "militants" in the Western academy and media: "Anyway, the west's increasing entanglement with Islam has not been the result of an increasing enmity. On the contrary. Viewed from Orthodox Christian civilisation, in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo the west took the Muslims' side. It is curious that the west has shown so little inclination to ask whether it did not perhaps back the wrong horse. Western policy towards Islam did considerably more to produce Vladimir Putin than it did to produce Osama bin Laden."
The next time you see filmmakers, feminists and journalists throwing their shoes at No. 10 Downing Street, ask them to read the 1988 Hamas covenant, because the freedoms these spoiled brats despise are equally despised by those who would think nothing of obliterating us, and they spelt it out in black and white 20 years ago. If the shoeless ones give you any lip, quote from the introduction to "The Clash of Civilizations?", which appeared in the Summer 1993 edition of Foreign Affairs: "With alien civilizations the West must be accommodating if possible, but confrontational if necessary. In the final analysis, however, all civilizations will have to learn to tolerate each other." In December, we lost two great champions of culture: Conor Cruise O'Brien and Samuel Huntington. The best thing we can do now is read their writings and continue their civilizing missions.
