Reverend Peter Marshall's Commentary Archive

The Global War Against Islam - Part Two

"Why do you not know how to interpret the present time?" (Luke 12:5)

Continued from last week's commentary:

     "Moderate" Muslims can find no formal and recognized Islamic authority to support their moderation. There are none. Islam itself, in regard to the way it has spread through the centuries, is anything but moderate. Islam does not spread by missionary efforts, but by conquest, by taking over societies and making them Islamic. Wahabi Islam is a pan-global ideology that has no boundaries; it trumps all claims of nationality or citizenship. It is a political movement that is fueled by a religion, or better said, the religion itself is a political movement. There is no separation of Mosque and State in Islam - the Mosque is the State. It does not have a common allegiance to compassion for humanity with other religions - it has one agenda, and one agenda only - and that is to conquer. The whole world must submit to the rule of Allah.

And it will go to any lengths to accomplish its aims. Steyn tells the story of the supposedly moderate mullah, Yusuf al-Qaradawi, (who was the favorite imam of London mayor Ken Livingstone) was invited to speak at a 2004 "Our Children Our Future" conference sponsored by Metropolitan Police and Britain's Department for Work and Pensions. Here's the imam's quote on how he thinks their children should be used for the future: "Israelis might have their nuclear bombs but we have the children bomb, and these human bombs must continue until liberation." That remark probably put a bit of a damper on the evening.

We are in a different world now - far removed from the old Cold War, and the struggle against Soviet Communism. This is a truly Satanic cold-bloodedness that trumps in horror the worst practices of the Soviet gulags (concentration camps).

So far, the primary response of the West to this new global onslaught of Wahabi Islam is -- appeasement. In Seville, King Ferdinand III, before whom Columbus knelt, has been rejected as the patron saint of the city's annual fiesta because continuing to recognize his defeat of the Moors in 1492 is deemed insensitive to Muslims. Ten percent of southern Thailand's Buddhist population was forced out of their homes in early 2005 because of Muslim violence against them. That was a more extensive disruption than the tsunami! In Linz, Austria, Muslims had the cheek to insist that all female teachers, whether they are Muslims or not, wear headscarves in the schools. Here in America, there has been a flap over whether Muslim women can have their faces covered for their driving license pictures. In London, a trail judge agreed to the removal of Jews and Hindus from a jury because the Muslim defendant's attorney argued that he couldn't get a fair trial from them. This, my friends, is plain and simple religious discrimination! But the worst news on this score out of Britain, as reported by Mark Steyn in America Alone, is that the Church of England is considering the removal of St. George as the country's patron saint because some of the Anglican clergy feel that he is just too "militaristic" and offensive to Muslims. Apparently, his replacement would be St. Alban. In the place of St. George's cross in the Union flag would appear St. Alban's cross as a thin yellow line. The choice of color is horribly appropriate. The Church of England seems determined to totally defang the British lion, and turn it into a tame pussycat. And get this: the prison service in Wales and England spent the money to have every single toilet in their prisons repositioned so that they don't face Mecca! The poor mistreated Muslim prisoners had to sit sideways beforehand, so as not to violate some arcane religious sensibility. I wonder where the toilets are facing now - Buckingham Palace? The British Drivers and Vehicles Licensing Agency has banned the English flag from its offices, lest Muslims be offended. So also has Heathrow Airport.

We seem to have held the line pretty well in America against these outrageous cultural attacks of Islam. In September of 2007 a Florida appeals court judge upheld a lower court ruling that a Muslim woman was required to show her face in order to get a license (Florida reversed its previously permissive policy on this, and rightly so, after the 9/11 attacks). After about 4900 situations over a period of two years where Muslim cab drivers (mostly Somalis) in Minneapolis refused to take passengers who were carrying alcohol, the Airport Commission finally cracked down, and threatened the cabbies with a loss of license if they refused passengers. We can only hope and pray that American resolve stiffens, and that we refuse to submit to intimidation or threatened lawsuits.

These all too frequent absurd cultural capitulations ars seen by Muslims as signs of weakness. In trying to accommodate Muslim religious demands in the Western world we are simply proving to them that we are spineless. Every time we appease them, they are encouraged to push harder and make even more outrageous demands. Osama bin Laden himself said after 9/11 that when people see a weak horse and a strong horse, they will go with the strong horse. Perhaps in personal relationships Muslims will see acts of compassion for what they are, but radical Muslims have a totalitarian mindset, and thus they will always perceive acts of compassion and accommodation as weakness. Dictatorships, whether of a political or religious nature, only understand force, and cannot be dealt with on any other basis. The world learned that with Neville Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler at Munich in 1938, but sad to say, it seems to be a lesson that every generation of Western civilization leaders has to learn all over again.

A case in point is the absurd and wrong Supreme Court decision to allow the Guantanamo Bay prisoners to be tried as criminals in domestic courts of law, instead of being tried as terrorists before military tribunals. Historically, non-uniformed terrorist types of combatants have always been tried by the military, and have never been granted access to the U.S. legal system. This refusal to promptly try, convict, and execute captured terrorists simply encourages them to further attack us. Zacarias Moussaoui, the so-called "twentieth hijacker," was in our legal system for more years than we fought WWII, and in the end, nine out of twelve jurors agreed that the "emotional abuse" that he had supposedly suffered was a mitigating factor in his sentence of life imprisonment. He should have been executed. This kind of softness is seen by the Muslim world as proof of the West's weakness and decadence.

If the Western world continues down this pathway of cultural accommodation the inevitable result will be the eventual triumph of Islam in our societies. Its victory will not come suddenly, as if an Islamic dagger had been stabbed into the heart, but slowly, from the bleeding of a thousand cultural cuts inflicted over the years. Simeon Howard stated it well, in a sermon preached about the threat of British tyranny to the Ancient and Honorable Artillery Company in Boston in 1773:

"An incautious people may submit to these demands, one after another, till its liberty is irrevocably gone, before they saw the danger. Injuries small in themselves, may in their consequences be fatal to those who submit to them, especially if they are persisted in. The first unjust demands of an encroaching power should be firmly withstood, when there appears a disposition to repeat and increase such demands. And oftentimes it may be both the right and duty of a people to engage in war, rather than give up to the demands of such a power, what they could, without any inconveniency, spare in the way of charity. War, though a great evil, is ever preferable to such concessions, as are likely to be fatal to public liberty."

America's Founding Fathers staked their lives on that belief, and it may well be that the threat of Islam to our nation presents us, or will soon present us, with a similar situation.

There is no negotiating with these people, because they are committed to victory over us. Their policy is conquest and subjugation. Hussein Massawi, a former leader of Hezbollah, could not have said it any more clearly: "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you."

We don't understand this kind of mind-set in the West. We tend to think of all this like the classic cops-n-robbers movie scene, where our poor-disadvantaged-raised-by-his-mother-who-now-is-dying-of-cancer-criminal has taken the female bank teller hostage and is holed up in the bank while the surrounding SWAT team is trying to negotiate him into surrender by offering him a chance to "get his message out" by sending in a news crew to put him on television. This is precisely what columnist Robert Fisk wrote in February, 2002, in a column entitled "Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl." His plea to the Muslim terrorists was that if they released Pearl they could tell their story, and the world would listen. But they didn't have some other story to tell - about Muslim poverty in Pakistan, or squalid Palestinian refugee camps - Daniel Pearl was the story. They beheaded Pearl, filmed it while they were doing it, and sent the video around the world on the Internet. The beheading of this American journalist was the message, and it was a huge hit among Muslims worldwide.

Four years ago the Times of London fingered the stark difference in worldviews between radical Islam and the West when they reported that "mobile phones are being used by young Muslims living in Britain to watch videos of hostages being beheaded by militants in Iraq." A young 30-something Algerian told the paper that "this is the best use of the phone." He has personally collected an entire set of these murder videos on his cell phone. "Most of the people in this country are using it to download pictures of naked women," he offered. "For us the jihad is alive in our hands as we watch American infidels get their heads chopped off. Within a few minutes of the Americans dying last week I was watching them on my phone."

In the final analysis, the global war against Islam can only be won by a resurgence of the superior values of Western civilization. This war is between cultures, and the heart of every culture is its religion. The global power of Western civilization in general and of American civilization in particular, is due to Christianity. The Christian faith and the employment of Biblical principles gave rise to modern science, the free enterprise system, and a system of government based on the God-given inalienable rights of human beings. Over the last half-century, we have seen a steady erosion of the Biblical foundations of Western culture, and the subsequent rise of probing attacks by radical Islam. As an old Arabic proverb goes, "A falling camel attracts many knives." Indeed.

We must recover the firm reliance on our Bible-based system of values that is illustrated by the British response in colonial India to the Hindu practice of "suttee" - the tradition of burning widows alive on the funeral pyres of their dead husbands. General Sir Charles Napier dealt with the situation straightforwardly: "You say that it is your custom to burn widows. Very well. We also have a custom: when men burn a woman alive, we tie a rope around their necks and we hang them. Build your funeral pyre; beside it, my carpenters will build a gallows. You may follow your custom, And then we will follow ours."

In the West we have the cultural superiority, because of our Biblical foundations and values. A revealing fact is that the vast majority of the occupants in Britain's shelters for battered women are Muslims. Jesus valued women as much as men, and treated the women as such. This is the kind of strong message we must send to the world's Muslims.

Therefore, in order to assert our cultural edge, and win the struggle against the dedicated Muslim jihadists, we must have a strong resurgence of the Christian faith on the Continent, in Great Britain, and in America. If this happens, we will see come along as part of that a revival of the Bible-based values that made our nation the strongest in the world: self-government, individual initiative, ingenuity; and the rejection of big government solutions and programs in favor of voluntary local associations of Americans helping each other solve problems.

We have seen some flashes of this in recent years. It's still in the hearts of the American people to rise up and solve problems this way - witness the incredible surge of voluntary church relief efforts launched from all over the country to the devastated communities of the Gulf after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita.

One of the greatest examples of this took place on 9/11. The true heroes of that day took matters into their own hands, and gave themselves for other people. The big government agencies, the FBI, the CIA, the FAA, failed to perform that day; it was the local governments - the NYPD, the NYFD - and individual rescue workers that rose to the occasion. Big government programs rob people of initiative; they create dependency and stultify creativity. Self-government and reliance on God, co-operation with other people to work out solutions on grass-roots, local levels - that's the American way - and that is historically what has made us strong.

Mark Steyn suggests that the difference between the fate of Flight 93 and the flights that crashed into the World Trade Center towers and the Pentagon may be that the New York and Pentagon flights seemed to have followed the FAA regulations for dealing with hijacking situations, whereas the passengers on Flight 93 used their cell phones, found out that following government regulations wasn't going to save them, and took matters into their own hands. I believe that it is not at all coincidental that the strongest leader among the Flight 93 heroes, Todd Beamer, was a Christian. He led those around him in the Lord's Prayer just before he said, "Let's roll," and then they charged the terrorists. That's the spirit that made this nation great, God made sure that we got a good look at it on 9/11.

But a re-awakening of this kind of problem-solving can only come as a byproduct of a spiritual revival. Only another national Great Awakening of society-changing proportions can generate a cultural resurgence of American values. And that is never going to come out of the old historic mainline Protestant denominations. A kind of trendy "I don't really believe in anything very strongly except that it's not possible to believe in anything very strongly" pseudo-religion is worthless. All that remains in the majority of the ruins of the traditional mainline Protestant churches of America is an institutionally fossilized, Bible rejecting shell of Christianity that is completely impotent against militant Islam. And I certainly don't expect nation-wide  revival to come from the Catholic churches.

Only a virile Holy Spirit-empowered witness to a Risen and Miracle-working Savior can defeat Islam. Pray for revival.

Copyright, 2008, Peter J. Marshall.  All rights reserved.

If you would like to read or copy additional commentaries, they are available on the commentary section of our website.  Please note: If your spam filter is blocking the reception of the commentaries, you need to enter my email address (petermarshallministries.com) into your filter software, or if necessary, call you Internet Service Provider to get their help in telling you how to make the necessary adjustment so that your computer will receive the commentary.

Anyone wishing information about Mr. Marshall's availability to preach or speak at your church or event, donating to the ministry, or purchasing any of the products in the store, is invited to call the office (800-879-3298) or to visit and explore the web site: petermarshallministries.com.

You have received this message because you are currently subscribed to the Peter Marshall Ministries Commentary list.

Return to commentary Archive