From the beginning, others have seen Americans not as a people who sought ordered stability but as persistent disturbers of the status quo.

That's not a bug, it's a feature.

--Jefferson foresaw a vast "empire of liberty" spreading west, north, and south across the continent.--

At that time, did they really understand how big the continent was??????

Me thinks not.

The moral superiority I've seen touted around here most often is that of the Islamic model.

Well Paul, if you are talking about morality in public life and common culture, what is your take?

Islam's morality is surely superior to atheistic nihilism, but it is an alien system and will never be "ours." Its arrival will be by conquest and tyranny.

I regard atheism and Islam has implacable enemies; and they are already working in concert in some theaters.

I trust it will never be "ours". It certainly won't be mine. However, nature abhors a vacuum and we seem to be having quite the difficult time deciding what "ours" is. I don't think a rough-tough determination to beat them up and call them names will do it, do you?

It's the same morality. The politics differ.

Anyone who can't figure out how to use atheists for their own purposes isn't trying very hard.

OJ, your intransigent ecumenism is first-rate amusement, but it is also an enervating heresy. It must be opposed, I'm afraid.

Peter:

I am not calling them names; but I will not hestitate to call certain of their doctrines by the names they deserve. Jihad (lesser jihad for you pedants) is an evil doctrine. It adds to massacre, pillage and enslavement the glow of piety. If we have any allegiance left to the truth, we must not cringe from saying so.

How this declaration (supposing we can do it, as we did with doctrines in Communism, Nazism, polygamy, Jacobinism, etc.) will show against Islam as such is another question. My hope is that proscribing the wicked doctrines in question might push Islam toward the reformation (repentance would be even better) OJ pines for; but it is a wane hope, not an expectation.

The jihadis will never catch up to our Evangelist body count. It's not much of a fight, but we are waging it and winning in embarrassingly easy fashion.

OJ:

Like the Leftists who facilely compare serial killers on death row to infants aborted, you have removed all elements of morality and judgment, of intention and ordering of the will, from your comparison.

The only question is whether Islam or Christianity is going to be imposed. It'll be Christianity because it comes with the workable political/economic system. The morality is the same either way, we just do a better job of applying it to other spheres of life than the religious.

Paul:

I shall await your book. Certainly the jihad we are faced with must be fought, but I have an awfully hard time with those who talk about how "intrinsic" it is to their 1400 year history. If that were true, dhimmi would be gooey ecumenical apostasy.

Anyway, we agree jihad is a noxious, scary concept. I'm sure glad we never believed in anything like that.

If that is what you think is "the only question," well, then there is no sense in even a veneer of fairness toward Islam.

Fortunately, that is not the only question.

To carry your point that only Christianity has a workable political/economic system, you have to discount the entire history of Islamic suzerainty; and before that, the entire history of the famed "oriental despotism." The endurance of these forms is testament to their workability, if not their nobility.

Paul:

They fell to the imperialists of Christendom with barely a whimper. You point that our war with them has gone on for 1400 years because they're so warlike is especially hilarious. Cellaworld, where it takes one to tango....

Peter:

Come now, let us reason together. Jihad is not a blanket term for any martial religious movement. We need not oppose it with pacifism. We need only oppose it with justice. Under jihad, a just war is any war waged against unbelievers. Those who have heard the call to submission, and yet fail to submit (either convert or submit as dhimmis), are in rebellion against Allah; their rebellion purges them of any claim to being innocent. Thus under jihad there can be no innocents among unbelievers.

These are the classical principles of jihad. We need not take any position on whether jihad is "true" Islam or merely a perversion of it, order to recognize that it is evil.

As for this question of the "instrinsic" nature of jihad -- well, it is indeed a difficult one. One huge problem for us, in my view, is the catastrophic ignorance in the West of Byzantine history. Even a brief acquiantance with the history of the Second Rome, and the great Christian Empire of which she was the capital, would be an extremely salutary thing. In my view no one who feels in his very bones the greatness of that long-despise Greek Christian civilization, can return from such a study unchanged. And one of the largest things that will change him is the menace of Islam that the Orthodox Christians stood against for a thousand years while the West developed into what she was to be.

Paul:

The point of course is that we don't just oppose it. Christianity was on the march long before there was an Islam. We are holy warriors par excellence and will win what is merely a holy war between two eager opponents.

OJ:

Who fell with barely a whimper? The Eastern provinces of Byzantium, that's who. Egypt and Syria, their integrity shaken by heresies, fell with astonishing rapidity to the Muslim Revolution. Latin civilization in north Africa (which produced such obscurities as Augustine of Hippo) was extinguished in a generation. Islam was at the gates of Constantinople by the early 8th century, and they beseiged her repeatedly. In this conquest, accompished in less than a century, some of the greatest of Christian cities -- Ephesus, Antioch, Alexandria -- were conquered and held for centuries upon centuries. Some have never been delivered from the yoke of this despotism.

Later, the Turks surged forth and shattered what remained of the Byzantine Empire, conquering the great city and most of the European provinces of the Empire. They were masters of the southern Mediterranean, and feared throughout the world.

Yes, there were Christian counterattacks, thank God, including the wild explosion of creativity and vigor of the Crusading Age; and the Byzantines fought fiercely and bravely for most this; but just looking at a map will show you that the lands of Christian antiquity are by and large Islamic today, as they have been since Islam conquered them.

Our tropps are there, dictating terms. Theirs are nowhere to be found. We won the Crusades.

In answer to your last comment, I repeat: the Latin civilization of north Africa (home of the author of Just War, St. Augustine) produced so many holy warriors that it fell Islam in a single generation, and vanished off the face of the earth.

Our troops are there, alright, presiding over the exodus of Iraqi Christians to Syria. 40,000 at recent count. There will be no Christians left in Iraq when our "crusade" is through.

"We won the Crusades." Please Google "the Battle of Hattin".

Paul:

This is your area of expertise and, as I said, I will await you book before opining on what jihad is and isn't. However, I do know that dhimmi was imposed by Christian kings in Al-Andalus Spain on their Muslim subjects as a complement to what was going on in the Muslim kingdoms. It appears they had a fairly effective reciprocal modus vivendi for a couple of hundred years---good for business all around. There were problems of course, such as when the Christian fanatics tried to martyr themselves by rushing into mosques and blaspheming Allah. The initial reaction was embarassment by the Muslims, who tried to reason with them to smarten them up. They even passed a lot of resolutions condemning it (ok, ok, let me have my fun). Alas, to no avail, so they were ultimately obliged with a sword. It finally died out when the neighbouring Christian kings told them to stop causing trouble, persumably at the behest of the Muslims.

But look, sure there are warnings from history, but there are limits to its usefulness too. I'm all for standing up to jihad and Islamicism, but today's problem is that our raw power is matched by their moral resiliency, which seems to me to be growing. As, in the words of Fr. Neuhaus, we no longer believe it is the will of God that we kill each other over our differences with respect to the will of God, we have to do better than just hurl epithets at every custom and tradition they wish to preserve, because there is much to respect in them as countless Westerners have believed throughout the ages. Raoul's charge of Islamophilia is nonsense. It's his plaintive cry to be left alone to enjoy his decadence that is worrisome.

Also, Paul, it's one thing to worry about jihad in Iraq and Iran, quite another to try to get me all fevered about it with each and every one of my Muslim-Canadian neighbours and colleagues.

Peter:

There were plenty of examples of Christians emulating the Islamic institutions. From a purely materialistic perspective (as Lee Harris will argue, with typical verve and originality, in a forthcoming book) the institutions of jihad and dhimmia are spectacularly successful ones, perhaps the most successful imperial institutions ever conceived. Any ruler with a Machiavellian mind would be well-served to employ them.

I'm not hurling epithets at every religious custom Muslims have. I would be happy to admire some of them -- from afar.

But neither am I prepared to tolerate the rise of another totalitarian movement under our noses. A good book to read (which is hardly without flaws) is Paul Sperry's Infiltration. He argues, in what seems hyperbole even to me, that the penetration of our government by radical Islam exceeds in scope and depth the penetration by Commies in the 30s and 40s. The book is well documented.

In any case, the example of Britain (and a lesser extent your own Canada) is enough to make me look askance upon the latter-day apologists for the latter-day Alger Hisses. A faction of Islam, embracing millions upon millions of people (and for whatever reason seemingly concentrated in the West) has set itself on organized sedition of a religious character.

In short I am more interested in the domestic threat than the foreign one.

that the penetration of our government by radical Islam exceeds in scope...

Well boy, that'll give those Zionists pause, won't it?

Paul, you can't be serious. Communism, fascism, etc. had widespread support among indigenous Americans, particularly the well-heeled and well-connected. It still does. Who is promoting Islamism? Islamic infiltration of the U.S. government? By whom, your average Yale grad? That's about as plausible as somebody opposing Chinese immigration a century ago because he believed the State Department was secretly working for ancestor worship.

They are what, 2% of the total population at most? None of the indigenous population is converting to them outside of prisons, which is a seperate deal. Hispanic Catholics are swarming them. Do the math.

Terrorists aside, what exactly do you fear?

We roam North Africa, Arabia, etc., at will, you just can't get Christians to stay in the desert. As why would they?

Peter:

I figured you'd pounce on that one. I'd encourage you to check out the book.

I fear what's happening in Europe: dhimmitude. I fear what the world will look like for my children when all these problems have advanced by leaps and bounds: when, for instance, all the technical might of Europe (which only appears weak to us because of the spiritual weakness of Europeans) is being brought into the service of the Jihad. The Turks quite effectively exploited the vast resources of Greek civilization (the Sultan usually descended from a Greek slave taken into the harem; his best troops were Greeks taken in the terrible devshirme; his naval technicians were often Italian renegades) and made themselves a superpower.

OJ thinks the Islamization of Europe will be a good thing. I think it will mean merely the spectacular material advance of the arms of Islam.

The terrorists are surrounded by a sizeable network of supporters, abettors, sympathizers, etc. This community of sedition will only grow as the numbers of Muslims on our shores grow. That is what I fear.

The arms of Islam? Are you hallucinating? If they were any easier to defeat in a war they'd be native Frenchmen.

As Belloc put it,

"That story [of Islamic victory in the Crusades] must not be neglected by any modern, who may think, in error, that the East has finally fallen before the West, that Islam is now enslaved — to our political and economic power at any rate if not to our philosophy. It is not so. Islam essentially survives . . . Its religion is intact; therefore its material strength may return. Our religion is in peril and who can be confident in the continued skill, let alone the continued obedience, of those who make and work our machines?"

Europe and Islam have both fallen to Christendom--which endures only in the Anglosphere.