Tearing Up The Last Half-Millennium

The events of 9/11, according to Michelle Malkin, awoke her from a slumber.

The mass murder nearly 3,000 innocent people on American soil forced open my eyes to the Islamic holy war against the West, freedom and modernity. The battle has raged not for years or decades, but for centuries -- well before the Crusades.

If you want to know how the holy war works, writes Malkin, just go down the list: Jihad, Infidels, Sharia, Caliphate, Taqiyya (deception), and Dhimmitude (inferiority of non-Muslims under Islam).

The striking thing about the Muslim agenda is how it hasn’t changed over the years. But the striking thing about the West is how much it has changed.

After the religious wars of the seventeenth century, a generation of thinkers tried to think up a society in which these poisonous conflicts over divine truth could be avoided. They came up with the separation of church and state and the idea of tolerance for people you didn’t agree with.

In the first demonstration of the Law of Unintended Consequences, something extraordinary happened that nobody had thought about. The market economy grew like topsy in the space afforded by the new, if imperfect, tolerance (which was good because it spread prosperity).

But this sudden explosion of markets and trading had a frightening effect. It seemed that it would utterly destroy the old and the familiar, the organic institutions that people had lived under for centuries. What should be done?

“What is to be done” is the watchword of the last two hundred years. Should the market be encouraged? Should it be eliminated? Should we build new institutions to bind people into a sense of belonging? Or should we let everyone just hang out and figure things out for themselves?

But this vast dialogue has not occurred in the Islamic world. There was no reformation, no Enlightenment, no centuries-long dialogue about what we do now. Yet now we see Islamic hot-heads saying that the West has got it all wrong and they are going to clear it all away with jihad, with sharia law, a new caliphate, and dhimmitude.

Sorry fellahs. An agenda like this just doesn’t sound like it will end happily.

It sounds more like a bunch of ignorant teenagers on the lookout for mischief. It sounds like the sort of project that adults put a stop to right now before it gets out of hand and people get hurt.

However flawed and corrupt the West, it must be agreed that real knowledge was gained in the last half-millennium about how to construct a global society.

Tearing it all up isn’t going to solve anything.

But hey, maybe all this mess would never have happened without President Bush and his war on terror.

Oh, I forgot. The war on terror came after 9/11.