Obama's High Horse and Fuzzy History

Old Gadfly:  Since the Orlando shooting incident, do we now see Obama using a bully pulpit or simply riding a high horse?  He accuses Trump of violating American values by wanting to ban Muslim immigration to America and that using the term, “radical Islam,” serves no purpose.  Obama seems to have created a meme that Trump is anti-Muslim and anti-immigration by extension—you know, one of those leftist labels called xenophobia.  With a complicit media, he expects others will imitate the meme. 

IM:  My understanding is that Trump is against illegal immigration (he’s married to a legal immigrant after all) and especially concerned about not being able to vet a swarm of Muslim refugees into America from an Islamic region that is far from peaceful.  This is a completely different mental frame than “anti-Muslim.”  I would say that Trump strikes me as an individual who believes that a just society is based on a system of laws and that America welcomes immigrants of all backgrounds through a legal process.

AM:  Obama’s message is crystal clear.  He believes his angry oration via a bully pulpit, where he, the self-righteous preacher with good public approval ratings (thanks to a horrific media slant and spineless Republicans who seem to have lost a grip on reality), rebukes the presumptive Republican presidential candidate for sinfully warning the public that there was a radical Islamist connection to the shooting.  Obama counts on an incredibly naïve public to swallow what he says on face value.  As we discussed in the last conversation, he has a colluding and fully complicit media to amplify the message.  Just this morning, I marveled at how George Stephanopoulos, on ABC Good Morning America, facilitated clips of Obama, Clinton, and Trump, shaping the message in favor of Obama and Clinton.  This is the same man who served as a senior advisor in the Clinton Administration, and then later donated $75,000 to the Clinton Foundation.  I’ll say more about connections later.

IM:  Sadly, at last year’s national prayer breakfast he sat on a high horse while accusing others of sitting on a high horse because an increasing number of Americans (and Europeans) are concerned about the increasing death toll stemming from radical Islam.  He lectured us about Christian violence in the name of Christ but refused to suggest there might be violence in the name of Muhammad.

Old Gadfly:  I remember he mentioned the Crusades.

IM:  He counts on fuzzy history.  Our progressive public education has done a great job in creating a mental frame that blames Christians for the Crusades.  A deeper look shows that the Crusades spawned in defense of Muslim aggression.  And when he sanctimoniously mentioned Jim Crow laws, he failed to mention that these were Democrat policies that are similar to much of the progressive inspired regulatory regime and rulings that pick winners and losers as we speak.

AM:  In the current Foreign Policy Magazine, Moscow-born Julia Ioffee wrote an article with this title:  “If Islam Is a Religion of Violence, So Is Christianity.”  Leftists are already pushing similar themes (see Dr. Paul Kengor’s excellent analysis here).  Let’s just stick to the current issue and I’ll ask, during high horse Obama’s reign, how many Christian-associated casualties have we recorded?  Aside from the thousands of casualties, to include many on American soil, and the millions of refugees stemming from radical-Islam, politically correct imitators like Ioffee want us to play make believe; just as George Lakoff advises all progressives, “if the facts don’t fit the frame, then they are irrelevant” (Read Lakoff’s Thinking Points, a Handbook for Progressives, here).  I think Mitt Romney may have received the Lakoff training based on his “trickle down racism” assertion the other day.  And, I’m sure Barry Goldwater would assure Trump to stay the course despite Mitt’s father, George Romney, going to great lengths to undermine Goldwater after his nomination by suggesting he was unfit to be president (jumping on the bandwagon of leftist efforts along these lines).  The major issue here was that Goldwater believed the issue of civil rights exceeded federal authority and belonged within the realm of the states.  George Romney, showing progressive colors, wanted the federal government to take on extraconstitutional authority. 

IM:  Back to Ioffee, politically correct imitators like Ioffee, who also wrote the GQ hit piece on Melania Trump, do not like their frame being challenged.

Old Gadfly:  Obama seems angry that the presumptive Republican nominee is personally challenging him on this topic.

IM:  God forbid anyone should challenge Obama because any such sacrilegious act would clearly be racist.  Ironic, isn’t it?  I remember a Democrat presidential nominee saying very derogatory things about his predecessor.  In fact, I recall that he did this to rally his political base, to get them angry and hungry for his special antidote of “hope and change.”

Old Gadfly:  So, what do you think he had in mind for change?

AM:  You mean more specifically than his vision to “fundamentally change America” ?  Wayne Allyn Root, a Columbia University classmate of Obama’s told us what the change was in 2010.  Here is an excerpt from an article he penned:

Rahm Emanuel cynically said, "You never want a crisis to go to waste." It is now becoming clear that the crisis he was referring to is Barack Obama's presidency.

Obama is no fool. He is not incompetent. To the contrary, he is brilliant. He knows exactly what he's doing. He is purposely overwhelming the U.S. economy to create systemic failure, economic crisis and social chaos — thereby destroying capitalism and our country from within.

Barack Obama is my college classmate (Columbia University, class of '83). As Glenn Beck correctly predicted from day one, Obama is following the plan of Cloward & Piven, two professors at Columbia University. They outlined a plan to socialize America by overwhelming the system with government spending and entitlement demands. Add up the clues below. Taken individually they're alarming. Taken as a whole, it is a brilliant, Machiavellian game plan to turn the United States into a socialist/Marxist state with a permanent majority that desperately needs government for survival ... and can be counted on to always vote for bigger government. Why not? They have no responsibility to pay for it.

Old Gadfly:  I remember reading about this strategy in the 60s, going into Johnson’s Great Society agenda.  Later in graduate school, I read Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward’s book, Regulating the Poor:  The Functions of Public Welfare.  Notice the action described:  regulating; not elevating or empowering, or some other uplifting strategy.  The authors described the importance of “stabilizing” the masses as a function of the welfare state.  This is very consistent with the growing administrative state that we now have, where a powerful central government continues to expand a regulatory regime that is becoming more and more coercive, controlling the centers of wealth production and significantly chipping away at individual liberty.

AM:  Which brings us to motivations for “hope and change” and the connections I mentioned earlier.  First, let’s start with Obama’s connections:  besides his mentoring by communist Frank Marshall, Obama’s key advisors, Valerie Jarrett and David Axelrod have their own direct connections with communist mentors.  See, for example, the evidence provided by Dr. Paul Kengor.  In his recent book, Takedown:  From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, Kengor explains (with powerful evidence) how important it was to destroy the traditional institutions of family and marriage to allow communism to flourish.  This is the fundamental change Obama had in store for America.

IM:  Just like V. I. Lenin, Obama knew that he needed to grow a Bolshevik-style grassroots to imitate his “vision” for a transformed America.  To achieve this, he instituted an initiative called “Organizing for America.”  Here is the video he released on January 15, 2009 announcing this grassroots initiative.  Today, his organizing machine is now named BarackObama.com.  At this renamed site, Obama imitators/followers can watch over 30,000 videos.

Old Gadfly:  In terms of “connections,” are there any concerns about Hillary Clinton?

AM:  Aside from the apparent corruption associated with the sleazy pay-to-play connections at the Clinton Foundation, a more sinister set of connections--especially in light of what happened in Orlando--begins with Huma Abedin, Hillary’s former aide at the State Department with access to Top Secret information and now vice-chair for her presidential campaign.  A recent expose’ by Roger Stone is very troubling!  According to Stone, Huma Abedin, a Muslim (ironically married to former, penis-texting Jewish Congressman Anthony Weiner), was the assistant editor for 12 years of the Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs, an academic journal published by the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs, a family business founded in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with the patronage of Abdullah Omar Naseef of the Muslim World League.  Naseef’s connections go beyond this.  Naseef was involved in creating Rabita Trust in 1988.  Here is an important excerpt from Stone’s article:

Just a month after the 9/11 jihadist attack left thousands dead and brought down the World Trade Center, President George W. Bush’s Executive Order designated the Rabita Trust as a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity and the Treasury Department froze its assets on October 12, 2001.

Naseef founded the Rabita Trust and remains involved with it to this day.  A Treasury Department press release issued when Rabita Trust’s assets were frozen indicated that Rabita Trust is headed by Wa’el Hamza Jalaidan, one of the founders of al-Qaida with bin Laden.  He was the logistics chief of bin Laden’s organization and fought on bin Laden’s side in Afghanistan.  Jalaidan himself was branded a Specially Designated Global Terrorist Entity by the United States Treasury Department, and his assets have been frozen, as well.

But the connections between Abedin’s Saudi benefactor, the Muslim World League, and al-Qaeda don’t end there.   (To read more, see here).

IM:  The Washington Post assigned 20 journalists to scrutinize Trump.  When do you think they might consider doing the same for Hillary Clinton?

Old Gadfly:  Not likely.  Fuzzy history is an asset for the left.  I realized this last year when a USAF Academy cadet admitted to me that he had no idea what communism is.  We need a modern Max Eastman to refresh people of real history. 

Eastman was a socialist activist in his early years and a close associate of John Reed, a fellow intellectual, Greenwich Village Bohemian who tried to bring socialism to America in the early 1900s.  You may have watched Warren Beatty’s movie, Reds.  Beatty wrote the screenplay and played the role of Reed in the movie.  I saw it when it was first released in the 80s and mostly treated it as fiction.  Then I watched it again last month.  After serving over 34 years defending America against the threat of communism, I truly understood the message of this biographical and historical movie this time.  In his book, The Road to Serfdom, F.A. Hayek relied heavily upon Max Eastman observations.  Here is Hayek’s opening paragraph in Chapter 11, “The End of Truth”:

The most effective way of making everybody serve the single system of ends toward which the social plan is directed is to make everybody believe in those ends.  To make a totalitarian system function efficiently, it is not enough that everybody should be forced to work for the same ends.  It is essential that the people should come to regard them as their own ends.  Although the beliefs must be chosen for the people and imposed upon them, they must become their beliefs, a generally accepted creed which makes the individuals as far as possible act spontaneously in the way the planner wants.  If the feeling of oppression in totalitarian countries is in general less acute than most people in liberal countries imagine, this is because the totalitarian governments succeed to a high degree in making people think as they want them to.

AM:  Obama, the planner, must be pleased because even Republicans are acting “spontaneously in the way the planner wants.”

Old Gadfly:  Yes.  About 35 years after Hayek’s warning, in the 1983 edition of George Orwell’s 1984, the venerable Walter Cronkite provided the Preface.  Here is an excerpt:

If not prophecy, what was 1984?  It was, as many have noticed, a warning:  a warning about the future of human freedom in a world where political organization and technology can manufacture power in dimensions that would have stunned the imaginations of earlier ages.

Orwell drew upon the technology (and perhaps some of the science fiction) of the day in drawing his picture of 1984.  But it was not a work of science fiction he was writing.  It was a novelistic essay on power, how it is acquired and maintained, how those who seek it or seek to keep it tend to sacrifice anything and everything in its name.

IM:  Pretty powerful observation from a respected journalist.

Old Gadfly:   Are there any living American journalists worthy of the title?  They seem to have lost their sense of duty and their soul.  And they have good company with imitating Democrats and spineless Republicans who lack the courage to support Trump, who clearly understand what Hayek and Cronkite warned us about.  Trump has a realistic understanding of history and is not on a high horse—he’s out front leading Americans who refuse to relinquish their God-given liberty.  

ISIS Is Islam

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, explain to me why the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS, is considered an extremist or radical version of Islam.

IM:  Do you doubt this assertion?

Old Gadfly:  I consistently hear this characterization in the news and in casual conversations.  When I ask what makes this group extreme or radical, I typically get an outraged response such as “Islam is a religion of peace.”  When I further pulse an individual with a question such as, “can you give me authoritative examples to support the claim?” I am usually met with silence and a disgruntled facial expression.

IM:  I did a key word search of a digital version of the Qur’an (also called the Koran, as revealed by the Angel Gabriel to Muhammad, the greatest of all prophets according to Muhammad and his followers) and found the word “peace” used 49 times.

Old Gadfly:  And what did you learn from the context within which “peace” was used?

IM:  Early, in the second chapter, “The Cow” (2:11) believers of Islam are instructed:  “And when it is said to them, Do not make mischief in the land, they say: We are but peace-makers.”  The mischief-makers are non-believers.  Frankly, the word “peace” was used throughout the Qur’an more as a “greeting” like “good morning.”  There is no explanation as to what the word peace actually means or even how to strive for it.  For example, in “The Distinction” (25.63), “believers” are told:   "And the servants of the Beneficent God are they who walk on the earth in humbleness, and when the ignorant address them, they say: Peace.”  In other words, this is a greeting from those who are believers to those who are not.

Old Gadfly:  Then, are we to infer that Islamic peace is possible only among believers of the Islamic Allah?  Yet, look at the turmoil and bloodshed in a region of the world with the greatest concentration of Islamic believers. 

AM:  Gadfly, getting back to your question about ISIS, in relation to the Qur’an and other authoritative texts such as the Hadith, I can find no contradictions or even contrary notions of what ISIS has established as an Islamic state.      

Old Gadfly:  Explain.

AM:  I can present many arguments, but let me offer just a couple.  Like IM, I did a key word search for “punishment” and, unlike the greeting nature of peace used only 49 times, punishment is used 171 times.  For example, in the fifth chapter, “The Dinner” (5:33), believers are instructed in this manner:  “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement.”  This clearly explains the murders and crucifixions carried out by ISIS—acts that are congruent with Islamic doctrine.

Old Gadfly:  How about the women taken captive by ISIS?

AM:  This is my second argument.  I did another search, this time with the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement at the University of Southern California.  I looked up “marriage,” then “to slave.”  I learned that it is permissible to enslave and marry captured women, even if the women were already married before capture.  Specifically, in the Qur'an's fourth chapter, “The Women” (4:24), Islamic believers are instructed:  “And all married women except those whom your right hands possess (this is) Allah's ordinance to you, and lawful for you are (all women) besides those, provided that you seek (them) with your property, taking (them) in marriage not committing fornication. Then as to those whom you profit by, give them their dowries as appointed; and there is no blame on you about what you mutually agree after what is appointed; surely Allah is Knowing, Wise.” 

Old Gadfly:  The Hadith may have clarified what this meant in real life.

AM:  It reinforced it.  In “The Book of Marriage (Kitab Al-Nikab),” this particular behavior is further justified:

Chapter 29: IT IS PERMISSIBLE TO HAVE SEXUAL INTERCOURSE WITH A CAPTIVE WOMAN AFTER SHE IS PURIFIED (OF MENSES OR DELIVERY) IN CASE SHE HAS A HUSBAND, HER MARRIAGE IS ABROGATED AFTER SHE BECOMES CAPTIVE

Abu Sa'id al-Khudri (Allah her pleased with him) reported that at the Battle of Hanain Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) sent an army to Autas and encountered the enemy and fought with them. Having overcome them and taken them captives, the Companions of Allah's Messenger (may peace be upon him) seemed to refrain from having intercourse with captive women because of their husbands being polytheists. Then Allah, Most High, sent down regarding that:" And women already married, except those whom your right hands possess (iv. 24)" (i. e. they were lawful for them when their 'Idda period came to an end).

Old Gadfly:  What is meant by “right hands possess”?

AM:  It refers to female slavery.  In the Qur’an and the Hadith, women slaves and free men are the natural order of things, ordained by Allah.  For example, under Muhammad’s direction, Muslims executed between 600 and 900 male members of a Jewish tribe known as Banu Qurayza[1] and took all the women and children as slaves.[2]  In another historical account, Muhammad took Rayhana as his slave.[3]  Rayhana was from the Jewish Banu Nadir tribe, who had married a man from the Jewish Banu Qurayza tribe before it was vanquished by Muhammad.  Several accounts report that Muhammad had as many as 13 wives.   

IM:  Islamic apologists would argue that Leviticus was similarly harsh with its prescriptions for ritual, legal and moral practices.  Yet, Leviticus was written sometime in the period 538–332 BCE, nearly a millennium before Muhammad apparently served as the medium for his self-proclaimed divinely inspired teachings that became the Qur’an.  And, in between Leviticus and the verses known as the Qur’an, the New Testament appeared with a far more coherent and congruent set of teachings about love and forgiveness, such as the Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew.

Old Gadfly:  What does the Qur’an say about terror?

AM:  A word search produced five passages about the relevance of terror.  For example, in the eighth chapter “The Accessions” (8:21), Muhammad said, “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Old Gadfly:  How about war?

AM:  The term “war” is used 20 times, but it is obscured by 137 “warning” entries.  For example, in the eighth chapter, “The Accessions” (8:65), The Qur’an states, “O Prophet! urge the believers to war; if there are twenty patient ones of you they shall overcome two hundred, and if there are a hundred of you they shall overcome a thousand of those who disbelieve, because they are a people who do not understand.”  This aggressive, coercive perspective is consistent with the actual meaning of the word Islam, which means submission.

Old Gadfly:  How about jihad?

AM:   The Qur’an does not use the word jihad, per se.  Jihad is a term that includes “fighting,” “striving,” “struggling,” and “endeavoring.”  The index for the Qur’an at the Center for Muslim-Jewish Engagement provides 24 instances of the use of these terms.  So, technically, those engaged in jihad, that is, terrorist acts against the enemies of Islam—especially Israel and the Western world--are very consistent with the teachings of Islam.  This may explain why for years now, especially since the loss of over 3,000 innocents on September 11, 2001 on American soil and many other terrorist activities since then, there has been no public outrage from Muslim communities, both in the Middle East and within the various Muslim conclaves embedded within Western cultures.

Old Gadfly:  How about love?

AM:  The word “love” is used 83 times.  For example, in Chapter 61, “The Ranks” (61:4), The Qur’an states, “Surely Allah loves those who fight in His way in ranks as if they were a firm and compact wall.”  The prevailing notion, however, does not include believers loving others; it is used in reference to Allah—whether Allah loves or not.  This is very consistent with the notion of submission:  do as Allah commands and be loved by Allah, or disobey Allah and, not only lose his love, but expect to be punished.   Compare this with the liberating notions of the Christian New Testament, exemplified by the Son of God suffering crucifixion and death to free us from the bondage of sin.

Old Gadfly:  Now, let’s tie these concepts from the Qur’an into the justification of ISIS as an Islamic State.  Is there foundational support for such an entity, or is it a perversion of the Islamic doctrine?

IM:  As we know, Iran is an Islamic state—a theocracy based on Islam and governed by Sharia law.  Iran’s arrangement and the justification for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria are based on doctrine published in the Hadith, complementary authoritative texts (or reports).  For example, "The Book on Government (Kitab Al-Imara)," a translation of Sahih Muslim, Book 20, unambiguously states, “. . . the Islamic State is not an end in itself, but a means to an end, the end being development of a community of people who stand up for equity and justice, for rights against wrong or, to phrase it differently, for the creation of such conditions as would enable the greatest possible number of human beings to live spiritually, morally and physically in accordance with the teachings of Islam.”  Islam is intended to be universal.  There is no tolerance for other religions.  The late Samuel P. Huntington warned us about these inevitable dynamics in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order in the 1990s.  His thesis and arguments were roundly rejected by the progressive, intellectual left.

Old Gadfly:  When ISIS first emerged the leaders of this entity called themselves the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.  The Obama Administration insists on calling the entity the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, or ISIL.  What can we infer from this?

AM:  The Levant primarily referred to Syria-Palestine but has more recently been used to accommodate a broader area that includes Israel.  The notion that the Obama Administration, not the head of ISIS, modified the original ISIS terminology to ISIL, combined with the recent deal with Iran, releasing somewhere between $100 and $150 billion (that can be used to further fund Hamas and Hezbollah), implies to me a concerted effort to squeeze Jews out of “the Levant.”  When the President snubbed the head of state from Israel on more than one occasion and bowed to the King of Saudi Arabia, what other message could possibly be intended?

IM:  Compare the effects of these two religious perspectives:  Judeo-Christian principles brought to the modern world hospitals, universities, western-style law, and a sense of sacredness for all human life.[4]  Islam brought tribal submissiveness to a people who are mere instruments, imitating what they have been taught through Muhammad and his acolytes, in order to facilitate the establishment of a world caliphate.   Compare the relative prosperity and peace of the Western world with the chaos in the Islamic Middle East.  The current Muslim diaspora flows out of this brutal abyss.  Sadly, they escape what Islam has wrought only to spread it elsewhere as loyal servants.  Muslims do not assimilate.

AM:  The teachings of Islam appear to start with a worldview similar to that when Leviticus appeared and never modernized.  Do you find it ironic that America’s progressive, secular humanists are more wary of our Judeo-Christian teachings than they are of modern manifestations of the actual teachings of the Islamic religion? 

          IM:  There is an old Arab proverb that originated about the same time as Leviticus, “the enemy of my enemy is my friend.”  Do American progressives and universal Muslims have this much in common?  In other words, if progressives distance themselves from our Judeo-Christian teachings while tolerating and accepting Islam, they also tolerate and accept ISIS, even though ISIS and other believers are totally committed to eliminating nonbelievers.
         
         Old Gadfly:  Yet, there are many who do want peace.  The dilemma is to what degree they are prepared to evangelize a set of teachings that may be contrary to peace.  In his book, Fatal Conceit:  The Errors of Socialism, Hayek observed “mind is not a guide but a product of cultural evolution, and is based more on imitation than on insight or reason.”  Thus, the fundamental contest here is between imitation and reason.  This is our only hope to minimize Huntington’s clash between civilizations.

---

[1] Alfred Guillaume, The Life of Muhammad: A Translation of Ibn Ishaq's Sirat Rasul Allah, (Cambridge, UK:  Oxford University Press, 2002), pp. 461–464.

[2] William Muir, The Life of Mahomet, Volume 3, Chapter 17, (London, UK:  Smith, Elder, & Co., 1861); p.276

[3] Maxine Rodinson, Muhammad: Prophet of Islam, (Norwalk, CT:  Easton Press, 1980), p. 213.

[4] See for example, Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, (Washington, D.C.:  Regnery Publishing, Inc., 2005).

Ideology and Conflict

Old Gadfly:  Gentlemen, have you read George Friedman’s geopolitical assessment of the Paris shootings? 

Dr. Friedman reinforced my own understanding that religion and secularism (e.g., the progressive movement) are forms of ideology.  I hope we will be able to discuss the implications of Dr. Friedman’s assessment in future conversations.  Meanwhile, with permission from Stratfor, Dr. Friedman’s assessment is republished below:

A War Between Two Worlds

by

George Friedman

January 13, 2015

Stratfor Geopolitical Weekly

The murders of cartoonists who made fun of Islam and of Jews shopping for their Sabbath meals by Islamists in Paris last week have galvanized the world. A galvanized world is always dangerous. Galvanized people can do careless things. It is in the extreme and emotion-laden moments that distance and coolness are most required. I am tempted to howl in rage. It is not my place to do so. My job is to try to dissect the event, place it in context and try to understand what has happened and why. From that, after the rage cools, plans for action can be made. Rage has its place, but actions must be taken with discipline and thought.

I have found that in thinking about things geopolitically, I can cool my own rage and find, if not meaning, at least explanation for events such as these. As it happens, my new book will be published on Jan. 27. Titled Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, it is about the unfolding failure of the great European experiment, the European Union, and the resurgence of European nationalism. It discusses the re-emerging borderlands and flashpoints of Europe and raises the possibility that Europe's attempt to abolish conflict will fail. I mention this book because one chapter is on the Mediterranean borderland and the very old conflict between Islam and Christianity. Obviously this is a matter I have given some thought to, and I will draw on Flashpoints to begin making sense of the murderers and murdered, when I think of things in this way.

Let me begin by quoting from that chapter:

We've spoken of borderlands, and how they are both linked and divided. Here is a border sea, differing in many ways but sharing the basic characteristic of the borderland. Proximity separates as much as it divides. It facilitates trade, but also war. For Europe this is another frontier both familiar and profoundly alien.

Islam invaded Europe twice from the Mediterranean — first in Iberia, the second time in southeastern Europe, as well as nibbling at Sicily and elsewhere. Christianity invaded Islam multiple times, the first time in the Crusades and in the battle to expel the Muslims from Iberia. Then it forced the Turks back from central Europe. The Christians finally crossed the Mediterranean in the 19th century, taking control of large parts of North Africa. Each of these two religions wanted to dominate the other. Each seemed close to its goal. Neither was successful. What remains true is that Islam and Christianity were obsessed with each other from the first encounter. Like Rome and Egypt they traded with each other and made war on each other.

Christians and Muslims have been bitter enemies, battling for control of Iberia. Yet, lest we forget, they also have been allies: In the 16th century, Ottoman Turkey and Venice allied to control the Mediterranean. No single phrase can summarize the relationship between the two save perhaps this: It is rare that two religions might be so obsessed with each other and at the same time so ambivalent. This is an explosive mixture.

Migration, Multiculturalism and Ghettoization

The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans' need for cheap labor. As a result of the way in which they ended their imperial relations, they were bound to allow the migration of Muslims into Europe, and the permeable borders of the European Union enabled them to settle where they chose. The Muslims, for their part, did not come to join in a cultural transformation. They came for work, and money, and for the simplest reasons. The Europeans' appetite for cheap labor and the Muslims' appetite for work combined to generate a massive movement of populations.

The matter was complicated by the fact that Europe was no longer simply Christian. Christianity had lost its hegemonic control over European culture over the previous centuries and had been joined, if not replaced, by a new doctrine of secularism. Secularism drew a radical distinction between public and private life, in which religion, in any traditional sense, was relegated to the private sphere with no hold over public life. There are many charms in secularism, in particular the freedom to believe what you will in private. But secularism also poses a public problem. There are those whose beliefs are so different from others' beliefs that finding common ground in the public space is impossible. And then there are those for whom the very distinction between private and public is either meaningless or unacceptable. The complex contrivances of secularism have their charm, but not everyone is charmed.

Europe solved the problem with the weakening of Christianity that made the ancient battles between Christian factions meaningless. But they had invited in people who not only did not share the core doctrines of secularism, they rejected them. What Christianity had come to see as progress away from sectarian conflict, Muslims (and some Christians) may see as simply decadence, a weakening of faith and the loss of conviction.

There is here a question of what we mean when we speak of things like Christianity, Islam and secularism. There are more than a billion Christians and more than a billion Muslims and uncountable secularists who mix all things. It is difficult to decide what you mean when you say any of these words and easy to claim that anyone else's meaning is (or is not) the right one. There is a built-in indeterminacy in our use of language that allows us to shift responsibility for actions in Paris away from a religion to a minor strand in a religion, or to the actions of only those who pulled the trigger. This is the universal problem of secularism, which eschews stereotyping. It leaves unclear who is to be held responsible for what. By devolving all responsibility on the individual, secularism tends to absolve nations and religions from responsibility.

This is not necessarily wrong, but it creates a tremendous practical problem. If no one but the gunmen and their immediate supporters are responsible for the action, and all others who share their faith are guiltless, you have made a defensible moral judgment. But as a practical matter, you have paralyzed your ability to defend yourselves. It is impossible to defend against random violence and impermissible to impose collective responsibility. As Europe has been for so long, its moral complexity has posed for it a problem it cannot easily solve. Not all Muslims — not even most Muslims — are responsible for this. But all who committed these acts were Muslims claiming to speak for Muslims. One might say this is a Muslim problem and then hold the Muslims responsible for solving it. But what happens if they don't? And so the moral debate spins endlessly.

This dilemma is compounded by Europe's hidden secret: The Europeans do not see Muslims from North Africa or Turkey as Europeans, nor do they intend to allow them to be Europeans. The European solution to their isolation is the concept of multiculturalism — on the surface a most liberal notion, and in practice, a movement for both cultural fragmentation and ghettoization. But behind this there is another problem, and it is also geopolitical. I say in Flashpoints that:

Multiculturalism and the entire immigrant enterprise faced another challenge. Europe was crowded. Unlike the United States, it didn't have the room to incorporate millions of immigrants — certainly not on a permanent basis. Even with population numbers slowly declining, the increase in population, particularly in the more populous countries, was difficult to manage. The doctrine of multiculturalism naturally encouraged a degree of separatism. Culture implies a desire to live with your own people. Given the economic status of immigrants the world over, the inevitable exclusion that is perhaps unintentionally incorporated in multiculturalism and the desire of like to live with like, the Muslims found themselves living in extraordinarily crowded and squalid conditions. All around Paris there are high-rise apartment buildings housing and separating Muslims from the French, who live elsewhere.

These killings have nothing to do with poverty, of course. Newly arrived immigrants are always poor. That's why they immigrate. And until they learn the language and customs of their new homes, they are always ghettoized and alien. It is the next generation that flows into the dominant culture. But the dirty secret of multiculturalism was that its consequence was to perpetuate Muslim isolation. And it was not the intention of Muslims to become Europeans, even if they could. They came to make money, not become French. The shallowness of the European postwar values system thereby becomes the horror show that occurred in Paris last week. 

The Role of Ideology

But while the Europeans have particular issues with Islam, and have had them for more than 1,000 years, there is a more generalizable problem. Christianity has been sapped of its evangelical zeal and no longer uses the sword to kill and convert its enemies. At least parts of Islam retain that zeal. And saying that not all Muslims share this vision does not solve the problem. Enough Muslims share that fervency to endanger the lives of those they despise, and this tendency toward violence cannot be tolerated by either their Western targets or by Muslims who refuse to subscribe to a jihadist ideology. And there is no way to distinguish those who might kill from those who won't. The Muslim community might be able to make this distinction, but a 25-year-old European or American policeman cannot. And the Muslims either can't or won't police themselves. Therefore, we are left in a state of war. French Prime Minister Manuel Valls has called this a war on radical Islam. If only they wore uniforms or bore distinctive birthmarks, then fighting only the radical Islamists would not be a problem. But Valls' distinctions notwithstanding, the world can either accept periodic attacks, or see the entire Muslim community as a potential threat until proven otherwise. These are terrible choices, but history is filled with them. Calling for a war on radical Islamists is like calling for war on the followers of Jean-Paul Sartre. Exactly what do they look like?

The European inability to come to terms with the reality it has created for itself in this and other matters does not preclude the realization that wars involving troops are occurring in many Muslim countries. The situation is complex, and morality is merely another weapon for proving the other guilty and oneself guiltless. The geopolitical dimensions of Islam's relationship with Europe, or India, or Thailand, or the United States, do not yield to moralizing.

Something must be done. I don't know what needs to be done, but I suspect I know what is coming. First, if it is true that Islam is merely responding to crimes against it, those crimes are not new and certainly didn't originate in the creation of Israel, the invasion of Iraq or recent events. This has been going on far longer than that. For instance, the Assassins were a secret Islamic order to make war on individuals they saw as Muslim heretics. There is nothing new in what is going on, and it will not end if peace comes to Iraq, Muslims occupy Kashmir or Israel is destroyed. Nor is secularism about to sweep the Islamic world. The Arab Spring was a Western fantasy that the collapse of communism in 1989 was repeating itself in the Islamic world with the same results. There are certainly Muslim liberals and secularists. However, they do not control events — no single group does — and it is the events, not the theory, that shape our lives.

Europe's sense of nation is rooted in shared history, language, ethnicity and yes, in Christianity or its heir, secularism. Europe has no concept of the nation except for these things, and Muslims share in none of them. It is difficult to imagine another outcome save for another round of ghettoization and deportation. This is repulsive to the European sensibility now, but certainly not alien to European history. Unable to distinguish radical Muslims from other Muslims, Europe will increasingly and unintentionally move in this direction.

Paradoxically, this will be exactly what the radical Muslims want because it will strengthen their position in the Islamic world in general, and North Africa and Turkey in particular. But the alternative to not strengthening the radical Islamists is living with the threat of death if they are offended. And that is not going to be endured in Europe.

Perhaps a magic device will be found that will enable us to read the minds of people to determine what their ideology actually is. But given the offense many in the West have taken to governments reading emails, I doubt that they would allow this, particularly a few months from now when the murders and murderers are forgotten, and Europeans will convince themselves that the security apparatus is simply trying to oppress everyone. And of course, never minimize the oppressive potential of security forces.

The United States is different in this sense. It is an artificial regime, not a natural one. It was invented by our founders on certain principles and is open to anyone who embraces those principles. Europe's nationalism is romantic, naturalistic. It depends on bonds that stretch back through time and cannot be easily broken. But the idea of shared principles other than their own is offensive to the religious everywhere, and at this moment in history, this aversion is most commonly present among Muslims. This is a truth that must be faced.

The Mediterranean borderland was a place of conflict well before Christianity and Islam existed. It will remain a place of conflict even if both lose their vigorous love of their own beliefs. It is an illusion to believe that conflicts rooted in geography can be abolished. It is also a mistake to be so philosophical as to disengage from the human fear of being killed at your desk for your ideas. We are entering a place that has no solutions. Such a place does have decisions, and all of the choices will be bad. What has to be done will be done, and those who refused to make choices will see themselves as more moral than those who did. There is a war, and like all wars, this one is very different from the last in the way it is prosecuted. But it is war nonetheless, and denying that is denying the obvious.

Note: “A War Between Two Worlds” is republished with permission of Stratfor.
The newest book by Stratfor chairman and founder George Friedman, Flashpoints: The Emerging Crisis in Europe, will be released Jan. 27. It is now available for pre-order.