Viewpoint
October 11, 2006

Apocalyptic vsions
By Earl H. Tilford Jr.

“If the trumpet does not sound a clear call, who will get ready for battle?”
I Corinthians 14: 8

Five years ago nineteen Islamist Jihadists murdered nearly 3,000 Americans in New York, Washington, D.C., and Pennsylvania. In carrying out their “martyrdom missions” the Jihadists joyously embraced death confident that, obedient to Allah, paradise awaited them.

Over the last five years, even as American forces took the fight to Afghanistan and Iraq, the Bush administration struggled to name this war. The War on Terror morphed into the Global War on Terrorism in the summer of 2005 before President Bush only recently spoke of a war with “Islamofascists”. Nevertheless, the imprecision of that moniker prompted Muslims to protest that the term unfairly painted all Muslims with the same pejorative brush. Perhaps it does. After all, back in 1963 when five Christian Ku Klux Klansmen planted a bomb in the Sixteenth Avenue Baptist Church in Birmingham killing seven little black girls, no one tagged them as Christianofascists,” even if the term fit.

Civilization is at war with Islamist Jihadists who know their war is fundamentally religious.

The United States suffers from a cultural hangover induced by overindulgence in the intellectual and spiritual liquor of multi-culturalism. Western Europe, for its part, has already succumbed to “cultural cirrhosis.” While America is not yet the anti-religious secular wasteland that France and the Netherlands have become (Britain may soon join them), whenever voices are raised concerning the clash of civilizations involved in the global jihad, Western leaders too often respond with paeans confirming the goodness of the “religion of peace.” Instead of a certain trumpet calling the people to battle, flutes tweet “Kum by Ya.”

Meanwhile, the Jihadists grow bolder. In Western Europe death threats await politicians, artists, and writers who criticize the religion of peace. Indeed, some have been murdered. It is naïve to think that this will not happen in America. Sleeper cells are already embedded in New York, Chicago, Flint and Detroit Michigan and many other major cities. In northern Virginia a Madrassah teaches Muslim children to hate and kill Infidels while Mosques across the country implement Sharia laws for their local Islamic communities. In Western Europe, Islamic portions of major cities already operate under the auspices of Sharia law.

Truth is not always a pleasant thing but we are fast approaching a moment of truth both for ourselves and the rest of the civilized world.

Unlike Lenin, the Islamist Jihadists do not want to build a brave new world. Rather their mission is to take the world back to a civilization anchored in Medieval Islam. In this world, our the choice will be either to convert or live as “Dhimmis,” slaves enthralled to Muslim masters or be exterminated as Infidels irreconcilable with the global Islamist Caliphate.

Al Qaeda typifies terrorist groups embracing Sunni Islamism. Shi’a Islam in its most virulent form has Iran firmly in its grasp. The ayatollahs in Tehran, led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, are dedicated to obtaining nuclear weapons. If they get them, they will embark on an apocalyptic war with Israel and the West to bring about “the end of days” with the arrival of the last Imam to establish a global Islamic caliphate. Believing that an apocalypse renders paradise, death is inconsequential. Indeed, for the Jihadists death is the gateway to heaven. In our culture Christians who speak of apocalyptic events are scorned as religious crackpots. It is fashionable for the media, academics and Christian liberals to warn of the dangers posed by Bible-thumping, right-wing Christian fundamentalists. Well, their Islamists counterparts are working on nukes.

Too many Americans, led by secularist “progressive” liberal Christians, protest that Islam is a peaceful religion posing no threat to Christianity, Judaism or any other religion. Believing little, Christian progressives remain oblivious to Jihadists whose beliefs put us all in their crosshairs.

This is more than a battle between the Judeo-Christian West and Islamic radicals. It is a life or death struggle between civilization—including Islamic civilization—and barbarism. If the Islamist Jihadists win, the most primitive form of Islamic fundamentalism will plunge the globe into a dark night of barbarism far more horrific than anything Adolph Hitler envisioned for a world dominated by the Third Reich.