The American Spectator

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Empires have come and gone. Rome, Portugal, France, Holland, Germany and even in our time, Great Britain, have seen their moment of world dominance -- have seen it flicker, and then, extinguish. And yet, they accepted it as part of the panorama of history, and have moved on. Not so with Islam.

It is not by accident that our enemies call the coalition forces in Iraq the Crusaders. To Islam the war, which they lost centuries ago, continues.* The enemy is not really the United States, nor even Israel. The enemy is modernity itself and the forces of change that have made them irrelevant. The West has persevered and they have lost. They are the have-nots, and to the degree that they have the economic power of oil, even this has been denied to them as a society by the corruption of their own despotic rulers. They are the past in a present and future that belongs to the West. There is a chord that joins them with other losers like Lee Harvey Oswald and Lee Boyd Malvo, devoid of any distinction or ability to even control their own lives, who strike out in spasms of hate-filled rage.

Muslims, married to a failed past, offer little hope for integration into modern society. Israel giving them land to which they are not entitled, or the United States not punishing them for criminal acts, will not assuage their rage. America must learn it cannot negotiate or reason with people who consider us infidels. It must recognize that the enemy is often among us and all the exposure available to them in Western civilization with its tolerances and respect for individual rights will not affect their seething anger at imagined wrongs, injustices, and illogical sense of entitlement.

Historically, use of strength, swift and certain punishment, and resolve of purpose are all that is left us to effectively deal with their primitive madness. And until we recognize this, there will be many more beheadings and September elevenths.

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