Why the West Won't Win Against Islam

We all know that we will win the war against Islamic fascism. Or will we? Author David Selbourne sets out ten reasons why, as things stand, Islam will not be defeated. Selbourne is author of the book The Losing Battle with Islam.

1. Disagreement in the non-Muslim world about what is really going on.
   
2. The nature of Islam is misunderstood. It is not a religion. “It is a transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems.”
   
3. “[T]he low level of Western leadership, in particular in the United States.
   
4. “[T]he egotistical competitiveness... of “experts” and commentators on Islam, from “Islamophobes” to “academic apologists.”
   
5. “[T]he confusion of ‘progressives’ about the Islamic advance,” viewing Muslims through the lens of colonialism and multiculturalism.
   
6. “[T]he vicarious satisfaction felt by many non-Muslims at America’s reverses.”
   
7. “[T]he moral poverty of the West’s, and especially America’s, own value system.” Obedience to Allah will beat freedom and liberty.
   
8. The skill and effectiveness of Muslim media and propaganda.
   
9. The dependency of the West on the Middle East’s oil resources.
   
10. The notion that “technology-driven modernity and market-driven progress are innately superior to the ideals of ‘backward’ Islam.”
    

The clarity and the forcefulness of these ideas are helpful in thinking about what the West must do to counter the Muslim threat.

But the biggest thing to think about is the lesson of the Enlightenment.

The great Enlightenment thinkers in the eighteenth century were trying to find a path out of the brutal religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Their solution was to back off from the search for the good, the true, and the beautiful. They proposed instead a society in which these absolutes were removed from the public square into the private realm. In politics we would be content with the fairly good, the true enough, and the merely pretty.

The result, of course, was the staggering prosperity revolution of global capitalism. It was when the West abandoned the Islamic notion of a “transnational political and ethical movement that believes that it holds the solution to mankind’s problems” that it began its breathtaking climb to world domination.