HIRSI Ali, a woman, has put out a book called Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. She says the West should not buy the line that Islam is a religion of peace and its violence is only at the fringe. Islam is all fringe, a bunch of atheists have said on TV, including the famous evolutionary scientist Richard Dawkins who has written a book purporting to prove the negative; i.e., that God does not exist.
Violence is the core of the Islamic religion, Ali says. She pointed to five teachings of Islam—that I will not repeat—which she says cry for reformation and removal.
Why bother, she’s wrong on
everything anyway. Her insight is not original, though she doesn’t know it because the last guys who read her were Henry Kissinger and myself. In his two-volume masterpiece, The Decline of the West, the proto-Nazi philosopher Oswald Spengler already described Islam as the Protestant reformation of Judaism, which is to say its simplification to plain and unquestioning submission to one God on all questions of belief and conduct, because who else would know better than the Almighty?
Reformations are earnest and therefore not good things because earnestness tends to get out of hand. Witness reformed Islam. And witness the Protestant reformation of Catholicism, which brought about the wars of religion in modern Europe—total wars without any limits, what, except the practical means to inflict pain and casualties.
The medieval Church had always moderated violence rather than encouraged it. The Protestant reformers killed more dissidents. The Inquisition put far fewer heretics on trial and even less to death by the state. Indeed, the Church never took a life.
It is presumptuous to judge, and barbarous to suppress a profession of faith, as Ali does in her book. What a man or a woman believes is beyond the reach of anything but their conscience. What they practice is something else.
Cannibalism is a legitimate belief so long as it stays speculative and never descends to practice in a stew pot. Judaism was as violent as Islam on parchment. No, let me correct that, it is more violent than Islam on paper because it goes into excruciating detail about how to go about killing. Perhaps the violence of the world where Torah and Koran appeared explains it. Only Christianity in its every word is a religion of peace. It is a miracle Christianity survived in a world dead set on its extinction.
That doesn’t make Christianity morally superior, only lucky, until it became a state religion under Constantine and then it had problems keeping emperors and kings from using religion for political ends and even dabbling in theology.
Indeed, the only way to survive and thrive is to return violence with violence.
The Crusades were launched to stop Muslim aggression into Europe. Remember Charles Martel who stopped it on the border with Spain? Remember Lepanto, which we celebrate in Baclaran. The violence of the Crusades moderated, and, the Saudi royals would say, weakened Islam; hence its reformed and militant version, which led to 9/11. American air strikes and Iranian ground forces—under a general as brilliant as Caesar and Petraeus—have and will have the same pacifying effect on radically reformed Islam. The rise of Islamic State coincides with the cessation of American carpet-bombing in Iraq.
Time softens sharp edges. Time wounds all heels and heals all wounds. The violence of Catholics was moderated by the worse violence of Protestants. The violence of Protestants was exhausted fighting Catholics. In the end, both submitted to the greater violence of the liberal state. The Holocaust did not happen under medieval or reformed Christianity, but when atheistic liberals took power all over the world and ordered the Christian churches to bless their crimes or get out of their way.
In Argentina, Pope Francis, when he was cardinal, was compelled [as all cardinals of Buenos Aires before him were compelled] to celebrate a Te Deum Mass on the election of every new crook as Argentine president; so Cardinal Bergoglio used the occasion to insult the winner from the pulpit. The legal obligation to say a Te Deum was repealed.
That’s just the way of the world. Only a stick can teach a dog. Only the back of the hand can teach a child to behave.