Our war against Islam

What is the common thread connecting the renewed struggle at Temple Mount, the criminal murderousness displayed by the Palestinian driver who ran a red light at the Plugot Junction and killed three people, and the repeated thefts at the southern farm of Shai Dromi, who is now facing trial after shooting a Bedouin robber to death?

These three sites are only three out of many thousands of battle grounds where the third world war we've been facing in recent years is taking place. This war is at its base a global war of civilizations between Western culture and the culture of Islam.

The war is as cruel and bloody as all other wars, yet as opposed to earlier ones where millions of soldiers fought each other in relatively few battles, this one is a guerilla war based on millions of battles pitting a handful of Muslim fighters against the Western enemy.

These Muslim fighters are not organized in an orderly military structure, and do not even wear uniforms. Most of them are active in small independent cells that know who the enemy is, where it is, and what should be done to it – without any need for a central command that would order it.

The current war between Islam and the West is over the most fundamental cultural values of the two civilizations.

Followers of Western culture believe in the supreme value of human life, civilian rights, complete freedom of thought and human spirit, genuine pluralism of beliefs and views coexisting side by side, equal status of men and women, and a free economic and intellectual market that is constantly improving as a result of competition and the individual's right to advance.

Western culture also believes in the power of words and persuasion, the use of force as a last resort only, individualsism, limitless self-criticism and public criticism, and all other values of freedom and equality.

On the other hand, followers of the Islamic culture believe in one religion and one opinion meant to overtake the world through a Muslim crusade of blood and infidel bodies.

The well known duty of spreading Islam by the sword reflects the essence of this belligerent, murderous culture, which is willing to sacrifice millions of human beings (both Muslims and infidels) whose value is insignificant on the altar of the Muslim ideal of conquest and force.

In such a belligerent, violent society, there's of course no room for civil rights or any status for women, or any aspiration for education that is not zealously religious.

Indeed, this dichotomous division to civiliazations that deals with hundreds of millions of people does an injustice to many millions of Muslims who espouse a culture of freedom and equality with all their hearts. However, as is the case with any global social phenomenon, a certain degree of generalization is required.

One cannot ignore Muslim murderousness in Afghanistan and the Twin Towers, in Jerusalem and on Bali, in London, Barcelona, Cairo, Iraq, and almost anywhere around the globe.

Zealotry unrelated to economic status

It's difficult to point to a significant social movement by Muslims that espouses the values of education, freedom, equality, and peace. On the other hand, millions of Muslims are quick to avenge and destroy and kill and burn over any caricature or utterance they do not like.

Muslims are almost completely absent from the scientific and academic world, not to mention the Muslim woman.

This religious zealotry is unrelated to economic and social status, and is true for residents of luxurious palaces in Saudi Arabia as it is for residents of refugee camps in Gaza and Lebanon.

It is to be expected that merely presenting this war of civilizations will immediately elicit the regular derogatory insults of racism and fascism that are so much liked by Muslim fanatics and their innocent supporters in the West.

The Western world's great openness created a situation whereby the blatant, anti-democratic racism and inequality that is built into Muslim culture receives the same status and legitimacy as other Western cultural values.

Under this cover, the violent and fanatic aggressor allows itself to fight Western culture in its own home by demanding rights of equality and freedom that it doesn't believe in, but is glad to utilize in order to achieve its own destructive objectives.

Journalist Oriana Fallaci, who dared to openly write about this war of civilizations in her book "The Rage and the Pride," where she condemned the inferiority of Muslim culture and Western obsequiousness towards it, ended her life accused at an Italian court of smearing Islam.

This lawsuit is the most absurd and painful testament to the Western culture's legal, political, and moral establishments' failure to grasp the state of war the West finds itself in.

The understood revulsion in the face of using force, the sense of guilt of successful Westerners in the face of lagging Islam, and the moral blur of post-modernism – all of these led too many Westerners to close their eyes in the face of the war we're facing and instead believe that any incident is a one-time event and that we're only talking about private expressions of Muslim fury but not an all-out campaign.

As long as the fact that the criminal contempt towards the property and lives of people on the part of Muslims in Israel and abroad require a comprehensive political, military and legal response is not understood and internalized, the West will continue to roll down into the abyss of defeat.

The realization that a democracy must defend itself against those threatening to ruin it, even at the price of undermining the rights of those fighting against it, is a required condition for a victory by the sons of light against the sons of darkness – a war faced by the entire world, and particularly in Israel.