There is no more important issue facing the West than Islamism, Islamofascism or — to use yet another label — radical Islam. And there is no more necessary precondition to countering that threat than understanding it: where it springs from, how it is expressed and the ways in which it is spreading. But before we do any of that, we have to agree that the threat exists.
For the United States, the danger so far has taken the form of terror, as 9/11 so clearly demonstrated. In Europe, terror is real too, but a more insidious problem has now taken hold: many liberals and others on the European left are making common cause with radical Islam and then brazenly and bizarrely denying both the existence of that alliance and in fact the existence of any Islamist threat whatever.
I dunno, Phil ... when I was growing up, we were told the great danger to the West was Communism. What actually happened, in the event, is that Communism burned itself out and turned out not to be a threat at all. So when I hear people warn that radical Islam or global warming or whatever is the next big threat, I take what they say with a pinch of salt. It's remarkably difficult to predict the future -- much more difficult than people think. If these "experts" could really predict what would turn out to be dangerous, they would have warned us all in advance about Collateralized Debt Obligations and Credit Default Swaps.
Posts: 1035 | Location: Canada | Registered: 03 April 2009
Derek, I think your take on what happened to the USSR doesn't give U.S. policies during the Cold War period nearly enough credit for "burning out communism." Reagan, especially, upped the ante, and Gorbachev cried "uncle" when he saw they couldn't keep up. Going back further, if the U.S. and NATO hadn't beefed up security along the "iron curtain" the rest of Europe might well have been over=run.
Radical Islam: one need only research their stated goals and review their past terrorist activities to see the danger they pose. That they haven't done much since 9/11 is more a credit to interventions by many countries than the absence of a serious threat.
