i can say god but god is but a word...

Oh if only Frank Herbert had been right about Islam and Buddhism and the Sufis. In the Dune universe, while the eventual inheritors of the ZenSunni credo, "I can say god but god is but a word" are in fact still interested in complete and total domination, for the first ten thousand years or so, the ZenSunnis are known only as the "cowards who ran from the machines" (of course, I suppose this is really Brian Herbert's universe, but what the hell). If only somewhere in the wilds of the past Buddhism could have had a calming, Zen effect upon Islam's unwielding desire to make everyone part either the umma or the dhimmi. And my ass doesn't bow before anyone, so the buck pretty much stops right there. Instead, we're faced with the apparently unending possibility, no scratch that, some of us have become aware of the threat posed to the inherited cultural traditions of the West is the same threat that Sultan Suleiman posed when he stood at the gates of Vienna. A threat that can only be said to have been saved by an act of God, for had the mud not forced him to leave behind his heavy cannon, we wouldn't even be worried about any of this. History gave us a second chance then, and history is not often inclined to do so. Civilizations die, and ours is imperiled beyond belief.
Step back, take a breath. Breathing is the only autonomic function in our bodies that we can directly regulate and influence; there are two sets of nerves that control the regulation of our breathing. Go ahead take a breath. Now forget about it. Your body will keep breathing of its' own accord, unwilling to let you just lapse into unconsciousness from lack of oxygen. The West, scratch that, because there is no more West. The West's dead Zed. All that remains are pockets, our own oil spots, just waiting to be added to the growing area that is the umma. Paris is virtually surrounded by little Fallujah's, every major Germany city has it's own Turkville, the Netherlands, well, we don't have to go down the list, do we? What kind of people riot and kill in the name of a cartoon? What kind of people believe that the public and the private sphere are one in the same, that men may have the kind of judgment and sway that we leave to the true higher authorities, whomever they may be. One of my fundamental precepts is that anyone who says that they have knowledge of God is lying, flat out lying. It doesn't matter to me whether its' Ghandi or Mother Teresa of John Paul or Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton or any Reverend, Minister, Iman, Priest, Talmudic scholar, whatever. Yet here we see evidence that more than one billion people believe that their imans know precisely what the Prophet and Allah want and that they are willing to attack foreign embassies and kill each other accidentally and anyone else willfully.
People ask where are the voices of Muslim discontent? Where are the moderates? What is a moderate Muslim? Can there be any moderation when the word Islam means submission? Can there be any moderation when the Koran is the word of God breathed directly through his messneger, Mohammad? Can any Muslim in the world actually separate their "church" from their "state" or are ultimately going to be faced with the application of sharia law throughout the entirety of the Muslim world, a theocratic society, and more importantly, a theocracy that is of the people, by the people and for the people, people who are Muslims. For Muslims, the freedom to choose is itself the evil--the evil that one practices, that is forgiveable, the freedom to choose, the freedom that we don't even think about anymore when we live our lives according to our interests, that is what the Muslim world abhors. They don't want to choose, they're not interested in personal choices for themselves. They have submitted. There will is the will of Allah. Allah Akbar! God is truly great, but who are we to know God? Bin Laden and his cohorts believe that they are freedom fighters, that they are not only fighting a strategic war to undermine our power, but they are fighting to free the Muslim peoples of the world so that they can live, freely, having submitted to Allah in heaven and the iman of Earth. For them, there is state and no individual, there is only the umma, and Allah gave Mohammad the word and Mohammad gave Islam its fundamental form of government to this day: theocracy.
How does one battle a theocracy? More importantly, when do we recognize that Huntington was not only right, but that he had no idea just how right he was? When? After Hitler invaded Poland in August, the elites began to call World War II, the "false war". England and France had both declared war on Germany, yet the Wehrmacht and the divisions of Panzers and Tigers sat still, the Maginot line untouched, Britain's fleet unattacked. A few skirmishes here and there, but nothing sizeable. Nothing one would call World War II. We have been engaged in a longer version of the false war since September 11, 2001 and something's gotta give. Civilizational tensions are just like the fault lines of the continents: convergence zones are under tremendous pressure, and when the plates slip, the resulting energy does things like shake the planet of it's axis and alter our orbit. The friction between the umma, the community of Muslims who have submitted their personal autonomy for a religion that undermines their very humanity by making women second class citizens, by making choice a word that doesn't exist, for choice is to sin as the West is to choice--they see our choice, our freedom to choose and they resent it. They hate that we have the freedom to choose whatever we want, at the same time their religion tells them that they ought to see themselves as above that freedom, that freedom is a distraction from the pursuit of that which I'm telling is more important: Allah. Submit and all your troubles will just fade away. Submit you fools and we won't have to cut off your head. Submit infidel while there is still time.
But we still haven't answered the question: how we do we fight a religiously oriented society that has no other culture. Sure, there are groups of people who have withstood the harsher interpretations of Islam, the Kurds, for the most part the Turks, but these are people for whom Islam was merely the next religion of the newest conquerors. The fact that the next conquerors converted to Islam is telling though...Islam obscures all other aspects of culture. It supplants culture just as the federal government in the United States has supplanted the father in the black community. And look what that has wrought: the destruction of the black family, the ghettoization of black culture, the radicalization of hip-hop (Kanye West) and people who think they are entitled to something. Just like Islam. Muslims believe that they are entitled to what the West has to offer but that they don't have also accept modernity's values: the rule of law, sexual equality, market economies, separation of church and state, constitutional limited governments--oh no, they can enjoy KFC and Pizza Hut but not the benefits of the Enlightenment.
There is only way to fight a theocracy: destroy the theocracy, and to do so, we must begin the long demographic fight of conversion. Although I myself am not a practioner of religion, one must accept that religion is a potent political force, witness the reaction of both the cartoons and the Port deal: faith is a huge motivator. And while I may disagree with the events of Christianity, the teachings of Christ, the Golden Rule, the Beautitudes, the desire to help one another, those are ethical morays that I can agree to participate in because they have a deeper truth beyond whether or not Jesus was the son of God. I believe that to say God is to say but a word and what is word? Certainly it wouldn't help if our government was more ferverntly supportive of Christian missionaries in the Muslim world, forcing governments such as Saudi Arabia to allow Christianity to be practiced there, realizing along the way that Islam is America's fastest growing religion. It's either that or convince the Sunnis and Shiites to become Sufis, because nobody has ever heard of Sufi terrorist, they'd rather have you over for tea and hashish then a fight against the West.
And if that doesn't work, then the only option that remains is to defeat them, defeat them militarily, defeat them politically, defeat them humanitarianly, socially, and of course, religiously.