Whose Side Is God On?

"Never go to a religious war without your religion." – Tom Kratman

The national news media are largely ignoring the largest and most ominous development of the past fifty years: the escalating religious war in the Middle East, which has outcroppings in such out-of-the-way places as Britain and Canada. Your Curmudgeon is, of course, unsurprised. After the recent display of "puppet fellatio" by the Mainstream Media toward The Won, the notion that they might ever report candidly on something that so dramatically contradicts the Obamunist narrative is absurd.

And it is a religious war. Disabuse yourself of any contrary notion. Islam is only "one more Abrahamic religion" in the minds of the uncritical. Its ludicrous theology is mere window dressing for a program of military expansion and totalitarian dominance of the world. Muslims are leaguing against Israel because it's a non-Muslim nation in the midst of what they regard as their Waqf. Incidentally, they regard Spain the same way. Fancy that.

Israel, as doughty as she is, cannot withstand the combined assault of all the Muslims in the Middle East without the assistance of the United States. Given Obama's demonstrated hostility toward Israel these past four years, would you be willing to bet that such assistance is forthcoming?

Now ask yourself why Obama would jettison America's most reliable Middle Eastern ally, and the only democratic state in that region. Might there be an influence, from somewhere in Obama's past, that has prejudiced him against the Jews? Might there be more than one?

Not much of a puzzler, this one.

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An unfortunate consequence of the secularization of the West is a propensity to see religious controversies as weightless and inconsequential. This is not the case, has never been the case, and will never be the case. For the atheists and agnostics in the audience:

• Every religion represents itself as the Divine Will for Mankind.
• Every religion includes an ethos: a set of rules that define mandatory and prohibited acts.
• To go against the ethos is to condemn oneself to Hell.
• Cancer of the genitals is nasty, but Hell is worse and lasts much longer.
• Some religions (e.g., Islam) attach extra afterlife rewards to particular deeds in life.

Thus, for those who adhere to one, there is no more potent motivating force than their religion -- and if their religion commands them to "do unto others until the rubble glows in the dark," that's what they'll do.

That the war in the Middle East is religiously animated principally on one side is particularly ominous. The Israelis have been secularized almost as thoroughly as the rest of the West. Many of them see themselves not as Jews defending their ancient and honorable faith, but merely as persons struggling to survive an onslaught from inexplicably hostile neighbors. What did we ever do to them? is a reasonable precis of the prevalent mentality. For combatants in a religious war, it is not enough.

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"Soldiers in a holy war win or die. They do not seek new wars." -- Larry Niven

Your Curmudgeon will forbear to elaborate further about the religious character of the assaults on Israel. But he will note that the Muslim mindset is as hostile toward Christianity as it is toward Judaism.

Imagine, if you prefer and are sufficiently depraved, that the United States could buy itself a few years of relative peace by throwing Israel to the Islamic wolves. Imagine further, though it takes little imagination at this juncture, that the Obama Administration is willing to do so. What would follow in that train?

There are more Jews in the United States and Canada than there are in Israel.
Muslims have flowed into North America in large numbers these past thirty years.
And it is a religious war.

You will find very few mosques in this nation where hatred of the Jews is not preached continually and assiduously. You will find copious hate literature at every one of them, naming the Jews as "descendants of apes and pigs," as drinkers of the blood of Muslim children, as the architects of a scheme of world conquest of their own. You will find recorded sermons, in Arabic and English, from "respected" Islamic authorities in many lands, denouncing the Jews, the "Zionist entity," and the United States for the support it has lent Israel. Is it possible to believe, should Islamic madness succeed in destroying the Jewish state, that it wouldn't swiftly retarget onto Jews in Europe and North America?

You cannot argue a man out of the dictates of his religion without changing his religion. The only force that can countervail Islamic hatred of the Jews -- indeed, of everything not utterly conformant to Islam -- is force itself: the taste of defeat; the sting of the lash. You must not deceive yourself that persons whose convictions are in no way the fruits of reason or evidence can be persuaded by those things to change their ways. This is a religious war, and unless you're willing to see it that way, you will lose.

And you will not succeed in achieving the required mindset until you agree to "make war against a religion."

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The ideas expressed in this afterword to John Ringo and Tom Kratman's novel The Tuloriad are congruent with the ones above.