Winning Hearts and Minds – NOT!!

When will Britain get it? When will the free world get it?

The attempted bombings in London and the attack on Glasgow Airport underscore the continued and long-term Islamic terror threat that Britain and the world is facing.

Far from being affronted by this incursion, young British Muslims are increasingly likely to support domestic jihad. The radicalization of British Muslim youth proceeds apace. According to a recent poll by Populus, growing numbers of Muslims aged 16-30 subscribe to extreme versions of Islam, and almost 40 percent want to live under Shariah law. Britain faces the prospect of a whole new generation of young people embracing extremism and religious fanaticism.

So far, the government has refrained from introducing more Draconian legislation. Instead, Prime Minister Gordon Brown and his ministerial colleagues have promised to reinforce the government's campaign "to win the hearts and minds of the Muslim community."

That strategy didn’t work in Vietnam and it’s not going to work in the war against Islamism.

The litmus test for integration is whether Muslims are willing to be like "us." Unsurprisingly, many young Muslims are increasingly alienated by an aggressively secular culture that enforces liberal transgression of moral norms and taboos.

Crucially, current policies are not working because they fail to address the real cause of radicalization and fanaticism. Contemporary Islamic violence is religious in nature. Its origin lies in Islamic scripture and the destruction of the traditional medieval schools that dictated its interpretation.

Michael Douglas in the movie Wall Street said, “It’s not enough that I should win, but that others should lose”.

He knew the meaning of winning. Not so our current crop of leftist appeasers and apologists who believe that if we could only ‘understand’ those that want to kill us, we can somehow win their hearts and minds. But, as Douglas has said so eloquently, if one side wins, the other side must lose. That means to win over their hearts and minds means they would have to believe in what we believe. We would need to replace what they hold to be true with what we hold to be true.

In other words, we need to win.

Can the appeasers and apologist show us some common ground where the Islamists and the free world can share common hearts and minds? Let’s see.

How about freedom of expression? Nope. Nada. Simple example – and I mean really simple – the Mohammed cartoon Intifada. One of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

Then how about Western art and culture? Negatory. According to a Pew survey, in predominantly Muslim countries, it's not just that they don't approve of American culture; most plain don't like it. More than two-thirds of Bangladeshis (81%), Pakistanis (80%), Turks (68%), Palestinians (68%) and Indians (68%) said they do not like American music, movies and television."

Or modern entertainment? Nope.

Women’s rights? Yeah, right. Honor killings, forced marriages, clitoris mutilation.

How about Religious freedom? Paleeze.

Democracy? Fugetaboutit. It’s the ideology.

At its core, Islam is deeply skeptical of the idea of a secular state. There is no rendering unto Caesar because state and religion are believed to be inseparable. This idea then interacts with centuries-old edicts of Islamic jurists about how the land of Islam should interact with the world of unbelievers, known as dar ul-kufr. The modern radicals then take it further, declaring that since, with the exception perhaps of Pakistan and Iran, there are no Islamic states, the whole world is effectively the land of the unbelievers. As a result, some radicals believe waging war on the whole world is justified to re-create it as an Islamic state.

They go as far as reclassifying the globe as dar ul-harb, “land of war”, apparently allowing Muslims to destroy the sanctity of the five rights that every human is granted under Islam: life, wealth, land, mind and belief. In dar ul-harb, anything goes, including the killing of civilians.

It’s historical antipathy to the very possibility that reason can exist as separate from God.

The appeasers and apologists for Islam just don't get it. They are going through philosophical contortions trying to separate Islam form terror and the Islamist are laughing up their sleeves. If democratic freedoms are to survive this century, then the objective is not to win the hearts and minds of Islamists – but fight their hearts and minds.