The war of Ideas in the West

The American Thinker:

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As has been documented scores of times by The American Thinker, the homeland battle of ideas is an attempt by the mainstream media, the academic world, government schools, textbook publishers, establishment churches, wealthy foundations, city governments, Hollywood liberals, State Department bureaucrats, the Ivy League playpen at the CIA, pop stars, rap artists, civil libertarians, and other assorted noisemakers to mislead the public about the nature of the enemy, an attempt repeatedly frustrated by the enemy himself, who reveals his nature with every attack.

The “war on terrorism” is thus a shooting war with Islamofascist terrorists and a battle of ideas with respectable society, which, for its own truly perverse reasons, at best exhibits a dull-witted indifference to the terrorist threat to our lives and way of life.

It is a war that we could lose—and with it everything. Which is harder, publishing a false story about Koran abuse or undoing the damage a false story causes? There is one Condoleeza Rice; there are countless Michael Isikoffs.

Since the war is a two-front war, a shooting war and a war of truth against falsehood, it is a war that our armed forces cannot win by themselves. Every American has a responsibility to the truth. Abdicating this responsibility and forcing the military to fight alone is stupid, selfish, self-defeating, shortsighted, and immoral.

If we do not fulfill our responsibility on the homefront, we will lose the war, no matter how brave our soldiers are. Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness will be no more.

The enormous pressure to hide the truth about Islam can be seen from the fact that our most stalwart champion in the shooting war, the President of the United States, who, thank God, is not fully respectable in certain quarters, has repeatedly made the preposterous statement that Islam is a “religion of peace” and the only slightly less preposterous claim that the terrorists have hijacked this religion for their own purposes, as if the deliberate murder of civilians were a rare event in Islamic history. If such a determined opponent of the terrorists is willing to make excuses for a religion that will never cease its attempts at world conquest and has no scruples about the means it employs, how can we expect opponents of the shooting war to condemn it?

The President does not want to fight the entire Islamic world, which is only prudent; "respectable" society does not want to fight any part of it, which is cowardice. Each characterizes Islam in such a way as to justify itself: the President justifies his prudence; respectable society justifies its cowardice. Both mislead the public. Neither has found a way both to tell the truth about Islam and to take the desired action. There must be a way for the President to analyze the threat soberly without provoking war with more than a few Islamic nations at a time; there is no way for respectable society to justify surrender.

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The most important of these changes is the recognition that we are in a war that we cannot run away from or win in our lifetimes. No strategy, no combination of policies, no leadership, can change the ugly facts. We will suffer no matter what we do. If we blame our inescapable suffering on President Bush or on any other president, we will suffer much more than we have to.


There is much more to think about in the piece.

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