As Americans we are steeped in republican values such as limited government, individual rights, and a separation of church and state. We traditionally view our neighbor with a live and let live attitude and, while we may not always approve, more often than not we tolerate our differences. This is why, with all our imperfections, and God knows we have many, we somehow hold together as the most genuinely diverse society ever known to man.As a result, we seem to have this almost myopic view of the rest of the world. We assume that all faiths, political as well as religious, are like ours, which tends to involve a personal relationship with a God whom we look to as the creator of our natural sovereign rights. We have trouble imagining a nation under the direct rule of clerics, or commissars, who interpret the will of God, or science, and use the muscular force of the state to carry out their interpretations.
Our nation was born after a bloody revolution against a tyrannical British monarch, King George III. This experience imbued our founding generation with a respect for the sovereign rights of nations. America has often championed the cause of independence from Latin America in the nineteenth century to Europe during the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and Kuwait. We instinctively loathed European colonialism with its attempt to physically dominate the world. Likewise, we as a people rejected the maniacal new world order visions of both Nazism and Communism.
While we’ve certainly had our share of imperialists operating in the inner reaches of our government and amongst a small segment of our most wealthy establishment, the American people have been notoriously opposed to world dominating schemes. It has never been an element of our religious or political faith. Our idea of utopia has always been to live in peace, under our proverbial fig tree, and leave our neighbor alone to peruse the same. Jefferson expressed this best when he noted in the Declaration of Independence that the truths we hold to be self-evident are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”
The vast majority of Muslims who have settled in America have, thank God, adopted the same peaceful American faith that most of the rest of us have regardless of individual means of worshiping God or not worshiping as the case may be. The same cannot be said of the nations of the world which are presently dominated by religious Muslims. The religious Muslim movement, like Nazism and left-wing Communism before it, has seized the reigns of power in several sovereign states. Like the Nazi’s and Communists, they are using that power to spread terror across the planet.
The citizens of these Islamic states chafe under the same type of brutal authoritarianism and one party religious dictatorship as Europeans suffered under Nazism or that Chinese, Cubans or North Koreans under the brutal jackboot of left-wing Communism. The mobs coursing through the streets of Islamic cities chanting anti-American slogans are the same as the Nazi brown shirts looting Jewish businesses during Kristalnacht or Communists burning and looting American inner cities during the summer of love.
Even though we may be loath to admit it, religious Islam clearly does contain seeds of violence of a type similar to that of its Nazi and Communist counterparts. Like their counterparts, Islam advocates war, or Jihad, as a means of conquering the non-Islamic world. Moderate Muslims have westernized the meaning of Jihad to mean peaceful personal struggle and this is a genuinely progressive development. Like the Nazis and Communists, however, the religious Muslims believe that world peace and happiness will be obtained under what they maintain is the only true faith. Like the Nazis and Communists, they believe that anything is permissible in the pursuit of this glorious goal including total subjugation of peoples and mass murder.