Article62

Islam and the Clash of Civilizations

New Introduction 

Nearly a quarter century after September 11, 2001, the world still pretends not to know what hit it. The towers fell in a morning, but the refusal to name the enemy has lasted a generation. That evasion is the real monument we have built — not steel or stone, but denial.

The years since then have been a never-ending parade of failure. In 2008, Mumbai was paralyzed by ten men trained in Pakistan who murdered 166 people with trained precision. In 2015, the French declared “Je Suis Charlie” after Charlie Hebdo’s cartoonists were gunned down in their newsroom for the crime of drawing, only to weep that same year when jihadists with Kalashnikovs slaughtered concertgoers at the Bataclan. In 2021, the first move in the so-called War on Terror came to nothing as the Taliban returned in triumph to Afghanistan despite America’s tremendous expenditure of blood and treasure. In 2023, Hamas stormed into Israel, murdering over a thousand and dragging hundreds more into captivity; the Oct. 7, 2023, assault is now widely reported at roughly 1,200 Israeli dead and some 250 taken hostage, a shock that ignited the devastating Gaza war.

The reason for this is simple: the world refused to name the enemy. Leaders spoke of terror as if it were a nation with borders or an army with uniforms. But terror is only a method. The ideology behind it—political Islam—was never acknowledged honestly. Imagine calling Nazism a problem of violence or describing Bolshevism as an outbreak of extremism. As with those murderous regimes, the problem with Islam lies in its ideology. The essential difference between them is that the Islamic ideology wears a theological dress.
By refusing to identify the theology that animated 2001, as well as every subsequent attack, the West has been reduced to fighting shadows rather than substance. This refusal was shamefully directed by heirs of the Enlightenment, who should have known better. When jihadists announced that they killed for God, professors and journalists denied it or explained it away. No, they said, it was poverty, or alienation, or historical grievances, or social dysfunction which prompted barbaric acts. Worse, they painted any critique of Islamic ideology as “Islamophobia.”
The failures have only been compounded by disastrous public policy. Europe welcomed millions into its midst without demanding assimilation. Intellectuals transformed murderers into victims and victims into villains. Duplicitous allies such as Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar received billions in aid while exporting the very ideology the West was fighting against.
Far more important than the public policy mistakes is the fundamental philosophical error that lies behind all of this. The West deluded itself by approaching jihad as if it were a temporary fever like Fascism or Bolshevism. Whereas those ideologies rose and fell within a single lifetime, Islam has endured for fourteen centuries. It is no historical accident but a permanent feature of history.
Both Nazism and Communism were ultimately materialistic ideologies. In other words, they were capable of physical refutation; they could be destroyed. Nazism promised a racial utopia on earth, and when its tanks were smashed and its cities burned, the ideology behind it melted away. Communism promised heaven on earth through the dictatorship of the proletariat, and when its factories failed and the shelves were empty its gospel collapsed into cynicism.
Islam, on the other hand, has a metaphysics which can survive any battlefield defeat. You can bomb a capital, you can kill a caliph, you can topple a regime, but you cannot simply destroy a belief in the afterlife. For those who believe, death is no refutation. This is why Islamic imperialism has long outlived its secular equivalents.
It must be added that Islamic imperialism has an additional, and more sinister, quality in which it differs from the secular version: it is demographic. When Persia conquered the East, the Persians left the religions and cultures of the people who formed their empire largely intact. When Islam conquered Persia, it entirely remade the history and culture of its people. And when it conquered Egypt, North Africa, Central Asia, the Levant, and Iberia, it went so far as to remake the peoples themselves. Egypt today is about 90 percent Arabic, with only a portion of the remained being descended from Egypt’s original inhabitants.
Through faith and through birth rate, Islamic imperialism has perpetuated itself in ways that Nazism or Communism never could. But like those totalitarian states, it too dreams of world conquest. The difference is that it has the means and the staying power to make its dreams reality. Make no mistake: Islam is a theological-political empire that must be fought with an unrelenting unity of reason, will, and arms. Failure to understand this will mean nothing less than civilizational failure.

The simple fact is that the so-called War on Terror was always a lie. Terror is only a method. The jihadist does not sacrifice his life for a tactic; nobody blows himself up whispering “terror” as his final prayer. Terror is the weapon, yes, but theology is the cause. To declare war on terror is to ignore the fire and fight the smoke.
Against a metaphysics which promises eternity, military force is not enough. Bodies can be replaced, and any man who believes his death is a religious victory will not be swayed by tanks or bombs. It takes militant rationalism to combat such a thing. Every verse sanctifying martyrdom must be interrogated, every promise of paradise exposed, every divine command dismantled and stripped of authority.
This is the war that has never been fought. The reasons for this are partly ease and simplicity. It’s easier to topple a dictator than to confront scripture. And it’s certainly a simpler thing to bomb Raqqa than it is to interrogate the Hadith. But another factor is also in play: a refusal to admit that the source, the fire behind the smoke of terrorism is revelation itself.
All the Semitic religions—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—share the same lethal inheritance. They enthroned faith above reason and made revelation a decree to be obeyed rather than an argument to be tested. Judaism confined truth to the Torah. Christianity called the wisdom of the world nothing but folly compared to God. And Islam demanded submission to the Quran as beyond question. In each case faith was allowed to silence all doubt, crush all dissent, and end all arguments before they could begin. There is a darker logic behind this, too: monotheism implies imperialism. One God cannot coexist. A universal deity requires a universal empire.
History bears the scars of this imperial view. Crusades, jihads, inquisitions, witch-burnings, stoning of apostates, silencing of scientists, all has been justified by revelation. A prophet’s command becomes a title deed to land and wealth. God’s will was sufficient justification for imperial control of one’s own people as well as all others, a justification for slavery and abuse. Language itself was seized, and truth turned into divine decree. Faith became nothing other than surrender. The word God itself came to mean only one exclusive monopoly. The vast horizon of human imagination was shrunk into a single chain, a single word, and a single master.
One could go so far as to suggest that Islam is Judaism gone mad. The family resemblance is undeniable: the same patriarch Abraham, the same desert god who thunders commandments, the same disdain for idols, the same rituals of circumcision, fasting, and dietary prohibitions. Hebrew and Arabic are sibling languages. The legal systems of Halakha and Sharia are twins. Islam is Judaism’s mirror image and reflection, except that the reflection has slipped out of control and grown into a universal project of conquest.
Where Judaism confined its covenant to one people, one land, and one temple, Islam took that covenant and expanded into a global empire. Judaism tells its people they are chosen, but Islam tells all the peoples of the world that they must obey. Islam borrowed Judaism’s prophets, its stories, its laws, and then declared itself the correction and perfection of them. Jews await their Messiah, but Islam claims he has already arrived. The approach of the Jews has made them a people apart, surviving but not conquering. Islam demands that the covenant be expanded to all others—by force, if necessary.
Islam is in a way right when it claims to be the “final revelation,” but it is only final in the sense of being the final form of messianic imperialism. This ideology, which makes faith supreme over reason, is marked by its drive to subjugate all peoples and all systems of thought. This has long been the greatest tragedy of human civilization. It has shackled minds, divided peoples, and turned the complexity of the cosmos into the simplest of binaries: the believer and the infidel, the saved and the damned.
It is time to break this hierarchy. Reason must no longer kneel, and faith must no longer rule. If humanity is to survive in peace, we must restore what the Semitic creeds despise: the sovereignty of reason over revelation.

Religion in the old sense was a proliferation of gods. These were rites and myths and stories woven into the texture of people’s daily lives. Philosophers often understood this weft of narratives to be attempts to make sense of and deal with the natural phenomena of the world around us. Sometimes, the narratives attempted to answer fundamental questions such as what the origin of the world must be or what happens when we die. But all these systems could coexist as such because the fundamental understanding of the world behind them all was pluralistic. There were many gods because there were many truths.
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam differ because they declare that there is only one God. What’s more, that this is the God. Each of them holds that there is only one truth, one book, one prophet. Instead of many paths to spiritual awakening there is only one. And when such systems encounter others there must necessarily be conflict. After all, if the eternal soul is at stake, how can one choose to “live and let live”?
The logic of these monotheistic systems is irresistible. If God has spoken the final word, then every other word is false. Caliph Umar, who destroyed the Great Library of Alexandria, expressed it quite bluntly: “If those books are in agreement with the Quran, we have no need of them; and if these are opposed to the Quran, destroy them.” Furthermore, if God has revealed the truth, it must be true for all people. It must be spread to all people. There is a theological imperative to imperial conquest that becomes a permanent engine of conflict. Islamic theology makes this imperative clear in its division of the world into Dar al-Harb (the house of war, the non-Islamic world) and Dar al-Islam (the house of peace, the Islamic world).

The evidence of this imperial drive is written across history. The pagan temples of Europe smashed. The monasteries of Central Asia burned. The native religions of the Americas annihilated. India cut in two. Millions dead. The Middle East is a permanent powder keg. And always the same justification for it: the one God.
Monotheism is potent because it packages salvation as a product and promotes faith as a form of brand loyalty. It is marketing disguised as metaphysics. The promoters of monotheism become the ultimate monopolists, hawking eternal life with themselves as the only true way to it. Other gods become a threat to the monopoly and are dealt with as such. Churches, mosques, and missions act like franchises, repeating the same script across the world.
But this success comes at a cost. Marketing flattens reality into slogans. It simplifies the complex and demonizes the alternatives. Truth becomes something accepted blindly rather than arrived at through process, tested by reason, and lived in ritual. Hinduism and Buddhism do not act like monopolies in this way because they acknowledge diversity as reality rather than error. They are messy and contradictory, but their wisdom comes from embracing multiplicity rather than trying to erase it.
Islamic theology makes its imperial essence explicit. Muhammad himself is reported to have said the following:

I have been commanded to fight against people till they
testify that there is no god but Allah, that Muhammad is
the messenger of Allah, and they establish prayer, and
pay Zakat and if they do it, their blood and property are
guaranteed protection on my behalf except when justified
by law, and their affairs rest with Allah.

Accordingly, it is claimed by Islamic scholars that all lands conquered by Islam must remain eternally Islamic. Lands not yet conquered by Islam are destined to be. This means, by the way, that Spain must be taken as well as Eastern Europe. Religious doctrine in Islam is also a political imperative.
Fourteen centuries of Islamic conquest followed from these words. Today, Persians worship an alien religion. Turkey and North Africa are dominated by foreign peoples. The lands that formerly comprised India are shattered into multiple hostile nations. Afghanistan has destroyed its famous statues of the Buddha. Indonesians have lost their dharmic heritage. The nations of Europe are paralyzed by their growing Islamic populations, unable to act in their own defense. Islam conquers not just by the sword but by demographics. Today, all the world can see the consequences.
Wherever Islam is, its followers resurrect Muhammad’s religious logic with brutal clarity. The law was revealed to Muhammed and must be imposed upon everyone. This means women veiled, critics silenced, unbelievers persecuted or killed. Between Islam and the world there can be no compromise, and because the war between Islam and the world is perpetual everything is permitted to the believer fighting this war. But this is not “truth,” it is simply a conclusion drawn from unquestioning acceptance of scriptures.

The crucial point in the battle against Islamic imperialism lies in the realization that one must choose between reason or revelation as the source of truth. No compromise or synthesis between them is possible. Previous attempts have all come to the same result. Maimonides bent Aristotle to fit the Torah. Aquinas pressed philosophy into the service of Christ. Avicenna and Averroes tried to show that Islam could coexist with reason. But revelation always held the leash. Reason was never allowed to wander beyond the scriptural fence. Because in all cases the fundamental assumption was this: truth is something revealed which one must submit to.
In contrast, we believe that truth is found through a process of experimentation of consideration of evidence. It is arrived at through philosophical reasoning from clear principles. It must be tested rather than accepted. This is the view of truth which persists in Greek philosophy, in the traditions of India, and in the Chinese sages. Truth is something the mind apprehends only with the greatest of effort. It is not something handed down on clay tablets or through a bird whispering in a prophet’s ear.
Our model must be science and reason because these allow for evidence and correction. They allow for doubt. What’s more, they thrive on it, because doubt once tested may be proven wrong or right. If the facts change, the truth changes. By pursuing our understanding of the world, we gain in our understanding of truth and we increase our ability to survive in this world. By contrast, dogma is not truth, and we should stop referring to it as such. The difference between our model and theirs is the difference between a truth that liberates and a truth which enslaves.

Reason must become our sword. Not reason as a polite academic adornment, but reason as an epistemology of steel, forged in dialectics, relentless in exposing contradictions, and merciless against illusions. Dialectical rationalism is the weapon which cuts through the lies and exposes where theology collapses under its own absurdities. It reveals where revelation rests upon unfounded and unexamined premises. Theologies only survive because men fear to unmask them. We must cast off that fear.
We must think of ourselves not only as fighting against revelation but as inoculating against it. This inoculation begins in the classroom. Adolescents should be trained in argumentation, reasoning, source critique, and data literacy. Debate clubs and media literacy labs are not extra-curricular activities, they are national security musts. If students cannot weigh evidence, zealots will do it for them.
But reason alone will not suffice. Ideas without armies are whispers in a storm. A military unity of all those Islam proclaims as infidels is necessary. Hindu and Jew, Buddhist and Christian, atheist and agnostic, Slav and Saxon, Oriental and Occidental, all must recognize that they face the same enemy. To resist it piecemeal is to be crushed.
This unity must not be sentimental but strategic. The enemy fights with a metaphysics of eternity. He believes his cause is sanctified by God and guaranteed by destiny. To oppose such fanaticism requires cold steel, tight organization, vigilance of intelligence networks, and a solidarity of nations that otherwise distrust one another. The free peoples of the world must close ranks or they will be buried beneath the flag of conquest.
It is not merely warfare to which we are called: we also face the task of reconversion. Millions who now submit to theology must be led back to reason. This is no easy task, but history shows it is possible. Europe emerged from its theological prisons through the Renaissance and Enlightenment. India produced its own philosophers of doubt, Greece its dialecticians, and China its rationalists. Every civilization has within it the seeds of rebellion against priestly absolutism. Those seeds must be watered, cultivated, and honed with the tools of science, logic, and education.
Consider the cases of the United States, Europe, India, and Israel. All four civilizations boast great power—economic might, military prowess, cultural strength. Yet all four fail before men with books, zealots who rise from caves and slums, whose only wealth is their certainty. America marched into Afghanistan and toppled Saddam, only to create a playground for jihadists. Europe opened its gates and now finds its capitals awash in blood and its political class paralyzed to act. India sent soldiers into Kashmir only to hear the call of jihad echo again from its mosques. Israel flattens Gaza again and again only to find Hamas awaken each time stronger and more radical than before.
Modern civilization mistakenly believes that material power is ultimate. But jihad is not a mere political insurgency. It has a story, a narrative, and a self-justifying eschatology. It is spread through sermons, through YouTube videos, through WhatsApp messages, and through whispers on the playground. It cannot be patrolled or legislated away. It must be fought where it lives—inside the imaginations of the faithful. That requires not just armies but philosophy. It requires truth. It requires faith, but in one’s own civilization rather than in some God.
Thus, militant nationalism is also necessary in the fight against jihad. This must be based on empiricism rather than jingoist emotion, rooted in natural feelings for one’s own people rather than in hostile feelings toward others. Israel provides a useful model here. A nation of nine million, surrounded by hostile states, survives by fusing militant nationalism with scientific excellence. NATO provides another model. After centuries of bloodshed culminating in World War II, Europe united out of necessity. Anchored by American power, NATO created security through solidarity, deterring Soviet aggression for decades. Japan offers yet another lesson. Shattered by its defeat in 1945, it rose through the embracing of science, technology, and education, becoming the world’s third-largest economy within a generation. If Israel can survive against overwhelming odds, if Europe can unite after centuries of mutual slaughter, and if Japan can reinvent itself after total collapse, then surely the world as a whole can advance likewise.

The Islamic world comprises around a billion people. It includes some of the wealthiest nations on earth, such as Saudi Arabia. It is fractured politically but largely unified in its theology. In nations that are not yet controlled by Islam, every community is a sleeper cell gradually waiting for the time when its numbers will be sufficient to seize that control. Muslims understand that demographics is destiny. They siphon wealth from host countries in order to build large families and spread the faith through the womb far more than from the minaret. To combat the threat, nations cannot stand alone.
One may speak of a community of Dharmic nations. These are nations which are heirs to the traditions of India and China, rooted in conceptions of fundamental human duties (dharma). All the ancient civilizations of Asia—India, China, Japan, the Koreas, Thailand, Cambodia, Sri Lanka, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, Indonesia—are part of this dharmic world. Together, they represent half the world’s population and a civilizational weight that predates Islam by millennia. For centuries, many of these nations have endured waves of Islamic expansion, a deep colonialism of the mind which threatens to erase from history any peoples whom it subsumes.

Individually, these nations remain vulnerable. India is subject to ideological and demographic pressures both from without and within. China has restive borders in its west, with Islamic militancy on its periphery. Japan and Korea both depend on oil routes controlled by Islamic exporters. Southeast Asia feels the pressure of Saudi-funded clerics and transnational Islamic networks. Alone, they are weak. But together, they cannot be broken.
Unity of such nations is no dream but a necessity. A coordinated pact among these Dharmic, Buddhist, and Confucian states would allow for shared intelligence, common defense, and joint naval patrols. Outside powers would be unable to dictate terms. And economic unity among these nations could break the monopoly the Islamic world holds on oil, destroying its sole source of leverage.

But power is not only steel and silicon. It is story. Islamic glorifies monotheism and submission, but Asia can tell another story: one of balance, of reason, of pluralism, and of civilizational continuity that endures through the rise and fall of empires. Confucius and Buddha, Laozi and Shankara are all voices that form a counterweight to fanaticism and absolutism.
This is not unprecedented. The Silk Road once bound India to China, Korea to Japan, and Southeast Asia to the Himalayas. Trade and art flowed freely, weaving a civilizational fabric stronger than any empire. That past can be reborn in a modern dress. India must anchor such an alliance not as hegemon but as an equal. China must embrace partnership over rivalry. United, the Dharmic nations can shape the coming centuries. Divided, they all become prey.
The stakes are existential. Military unity ensures security. Economic unity ensures prosperity. Civilizational unity ensures identity. History rarely offers a second chance. Asia must seize this one to break free from centuries of monotheistic hegemony.

India is a monument to what happens when a civilization fails itself. Islam conquered India not with swords and scimitars alone but with persistence, intimidation, and demographic destruction. At every stage, Hindus responded not with steel but with softness, not with strategy, but surrender. Today, half of its traditional landmass is gone, and its sacred rivers now flow through alien states.
The partition of 1947 was not an accident of politics but the final fruit of centuries of cultural and demographic erosion. Sindh, Punjab, and Bengal were hollowed out until one day Hindus awoke to find themselves strangers in their own land, and instead of resisting and reversing they accepted compromise.
This failure is made all the more remarkable given the scale of Hindu potential. Around a billion strong, nuclear-armed, and commanding one of the largest armies and economies on Earth, Hindus still behave like a frightened minority. When one has endured destruction, looting, rape, and murder, there is no sense in speaking of restraint and tolerance. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation binds 50 countries into one bloc, one voice, one agenda. Yet the Hindus, inheritors of the richest subcontinent on Earth, cannot unite their own parliamentarians into a single civilizational statement.
More shameful still is the betrayal of the mind that has taken place. India was once a civilization of fearless inquiry. The Upanishads do not bark commandments; they speak in riddles: Who am I? What is reality? Debate and doubt were once the lifeblood of Hindu thought, but that has long passed into empty consumerism. Gurus pose as sages but behave like salesmen. Hindus who once mocked the papacy for demanding obedience now kneel before their own saffron-clad popes. They traded the fire of inquiry for the narcotic of guru-worship.

History is unforgiving of civilizational weakness. Buddhism disappeared from India because it lacked militant defense. The old Hindu kingdoms collapsed before invaders who marched united while their own people were divided by caste and ritual. Colonialism triumphed because Indians preferred gurus to generals. Gandhi’s saintly nonviolence may have thrilled the West, but it left India mutilated and bleeding. Saints do not save civilization—power does.
What India needs is not more religion but militant, secular nationalism. Narendra Modi builds temples rather than schools. Baba Ramdev peddles miracle cures while hospitals collapse. Astrologers make fortunes while scientists beg for funding. India needs steel mills, not temples; it needs protection squads for its ecology, not for its cows.

Nationalism itself must be remade not into chest-thumping rallies but into something disciplined, rational, and ecological. Like the September 11 attacks in America, the attacks on November 26, 2008, in Mumbai shattered more than skyscrapers. They shattered illusions. They exposed the world once again to the reality that Islam, despite its protests of spirituality, primarily functions as a political movement equipped with religious rhetoric. India’s tragedy is that it has endured this truth for over a millennium. The so-called “Muslim Question” in India is not about theology or interfaith dialogue but about a civilizational clash between a movement that claims to hold the sole truth and an older civilization that cannot be reduced to a single creed. Hinduism is not a religion in the Semitic sense of prophets and commandments; it is a civilization, a way of life, a broad and diverse continuum of inquiry, ritual, art, and philosophy. To mistake it for a “religion” like Islam or Christianity is to misdiagnose India’s very soul.
Islam in India has never been merely a private faith. It has historically been a political project, beginning with invaders who destroyed temples and kingdoms, continuing through sultanates and empires, and persisting in modern times through separatist politics and demands for special treatment. To see Islam as just a spiritual path is naïve; it is, and always has been, a political ideology cloaked in divine legitimacy.

 The Mumbai terrorist attacks were not an anomaly but a reminder of this fusion of power and piety. More recently, the massacre of tourists in Pahalgam, Jammu and Kashmir — in which gunmen killed 26 civilians, many of them Hindu pilgrims — exposed that the old wounds in the subcontinent remain raw and that theocratic violence still targets the most vulnerable.

It must be recognized that Islamic terrorism, wherever it is found, is not a law-enforcement problem. It is a civilizational challenge. Police, courts, intelligence agencies, all these can stop individual plots, but they cannot stop the ideological fire which produces them. That fire is lit by an idea—that Islam is not simply a religion but a political project which divides the world into believers and infidels and sanctifies violence in pursuit of political dominion. Every bombing, every stabbing, every truck attack whether it is in Paris or London, New York or New Delhi, demonstrates that these are not random incidents but the direct pathology of a political theology that is armed with scriptures and financed by petrodollars.
To stop Islamic terrorism, we must first attain intellectual clarity. We must reject the comforting delusion that all religions are the same, that jihad is merely an inner struggle, or that Islamism is a distortion of a peaceful tradition. These are anesthetic platitudes which permit terror to thrive. Only truth, spoken without apology, can be a foundation for our defense. And the truth is that Islam is at war with the fundamental principles of Western life: freedom of thought, freedom of conscience, equality of men and women, and the placement of secular law above divine commands. We must recognize that practices such as wearing the hijab are not symbols of choice but visible markers of separation and banning them in public squares is a necessary defense of a secular republic.
Second, the West must embrace militant secularism and reason as its shield. It must stop outsourcing its survival to self-appointed gurus of tolerance who preach accommodation while terrorists preach annihilation. The defense of the West must be rooted not in appeasement but in militant nationalism. In the insistence that Western civilization is worth defending, that its freedoms are not negotiable, and that its borders and values are not bargaining chips in a theological game. That means denaturalizing and deporting Islamic radicals and refusing immigration to those who reject secular law in favor of religious supremacy. This is not prejudice; it is caution. If radicals belong anywhere, it is in their own societies where secular Muslims—who exist and must be supported—can battle them directly. Europe and America cannot be the dumping ground for other people’s holy wars.
Third, the West must export not religion but reason. It must never back Jewish or Islamic theocracy in the Middle East but support secular Jews and secular Muslims who alone can create peace. It must promote secular education, democratic institutions, women’s emancipation, and the vigorous defense of rational inquiry wherever it can. Reason triumphed once before in places like Iran, Turkey, and the Arab world during the early twentieth century, when modernity, secular nationalism, and science briefly pushed back the tides of fundamentalism. It can triumph again, but only if the West exports secularism, not theology.
Fourth, economic independence must be developed. As long as the West depends on Arab oil, it subsidizes the very ideology that seeks its destruction. The answer is to invest in nuclear, wind, hydrogen, and fuel-cell technologies, and if crude oil is necessary, turn to non-Islamic producers like Venezuela or Russia. No Western dollar should fund a madrasa or a terrorist preacher. No Islamist theocracy should hold in its hands the power to blackmail the West through energy markets.
Fifth, migration must be treated with realism, not sentimentality. Potential refugees should be held safely in neutral African states, funded by the West, until they can be properly vetted. Immigration from Muslim-majority countries must be regulated with extreme caution, not as an act of bigotry but as a rational defense of civilization. Secular Muslims, not radicals, can find a home in the West, but only if they accept its laws and values without reservation. The West must never confuse compassion with suicide.
Finally, the West must recover its cultural confidence. For too long it has apologized for its own history, its own civilization, its own achievements, as if prosperity and liberty were crimes. Terrorism feeds on this self-hatred like a parasite. To stop Islamic terrorism is to declare that the West is not ashamed of itself. It will not trade Socrates for suicide bombers, Mozart for martyrdom videos, or the Enlightenment for the darkness of the caliphate. The choice is not between liberty and security, but between civilization and its enemies. And the only answer to an enemy who worships death is a people who believe unflinchingly in life, reason, and the nation that protects both. Reason—not Christianity, not Judaism, not Hinduism, not Buddhism—is the most potent weapon against Islamic supremacism. The failure to defend reason has been the failure that opened the door to terror. The task now is to slam that door shut with unapologetic force.

The West once defeated fascism and communism because it had the courage to see them for what they were. Today the same choice stands before us. The enemy is not “terror,” it is a theology armed with politics. Our survival depends on saying so and acting as if we believe it.

Panini

October 1, 2025