Today, Hizbullah has risen up against Israel. Tomorrow, radical Islam will rise up against the rest of the non-believers, the kafir. Civilization – democratic values, economic progress, rational inquiry, coexistence – has already tasted terrorism. In Bali, Breslav, Buenos Aires, Baghdad and Brazil; in Darfur, Calcutta, Turkey, Morocco and London; in Sharm el-Sheikh, Saudi Arabia, New York City, Amman, and Madrid. And the civilized world will taste more because the success of extremism by definition spells the death of moderation.
So how did we come to this? What are radical Islam’s “grievances”?
Its grievance is the refusal, thus far, of much of the Muslim world to succumb to radical Islam’s prostitution of Mohammedism.
Its grievance is the threat of progressive values that challenge radical Islam’s medieval and tyrannical objectives.
Its grievance is Jewish self-determination, because radical Islam espouses that Muslims must be sovereign everywhere and the Jews nowhere at all.
Its grievance is the blurring of distinctions between the Muslim and non-Muslim worlds, where democratic mores carry with it love for life, aspirations for individual happiness, and the replacement of the ubiquitous external threat (read: “the Great Satan”) with a popular insistence on domestic success.
If the world is to remain civilized, it must grasp what every free generation has learned: freedom is not free.
Radical Islam is an aggressor, yet the Hizbullah-Israel war is not its only front. The civilized world – ordinary Palestinians, Lebanese and Israelis included – must awaken to this reality because if the civilized world cannot defend its freedom, then it does not deserve it.