The Knife At Our Throat

By Howard Bloom

The Western World is in a new war, a war for its heart, a war for its head, a war for its values, a war for its identity, and a war for its very right to be. This is not a war of bombs, munitions and military might. It is a War of Faith & Culture. A slew of separate Fundamentalist Islamic movements have come together with a common aim—to displace the U.S., Western Civilization, and Global Capitalism. These are the modern Jihadists, the makers of Holy War, Jihad. The warriors of Jihad are winning hearts and minds. They’re setting fire to the passions of adolescents and of young adults thirsting for something to believe in, for something to live and die for, for purity, faith, and ideals. Meanwhile we are in danger of defeating ourselves. We don’t know who we are and what we stand for. We fail to have a vision of our future possibilities.

This Holy War of competing faiths and cultures is not one we can fight with the old-time American strategy of walling ourselves off behind the Atlantic and Pacific Seas. The Jihadists are using our own infrastructure against us-bombing us with our passenger jets and our Rider Rent-a-Trucks, using our Constitutional freedoms to infiltrate our prisons, our slums, our middle-class districts, our universities, and our very minds. We’re facing the prospect of random terrorist body blows at the very time when the fundamental tenets of American-led Global Capitalism are experiencing a crisis of faith. Key corporations from Enron and WorldCom to Arthur Andersen are falling for a reason few perceive. America is being undone by those best able to save it, betrayed by the lack of something vital in its leadership elite.


Here’s the Death-of-Western-Civilization Report as of early 2003. Islam’s been crusading against Dar El Harb, the Land of the Unbeliever, since the first Mohammedan armies swept from the Arab Peninsula in roughly 634 A.D. Those conquering forces took Egypt, Libya, Algeria, Morocco, Spain, Syria, Turkey, Greece, the Balkans, India, Afghanistan, the Western edge of China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Central Asia, Somalia, the Sudan, Pakistan, and Bangladesh. For most of that time, Islam had the Western world penned in—keeping Europeans out of the vast Islamic Imperium, ruling Spain and Portugal, seizing control of Sicily, Sardinia, and entire regions of Italy, raiding England, Ireland, and the Caucasus Mountains for slaves, conquering lands in Bosnia, Sarajevo, and Albania, and repeatedly attacking Vienna.

Osama bin Laden, in nearly every speech, laments the day in 1922 when the West dissolved the Moslem Empire of the Turks and took Islam’s power to attack away. It is the fondest dream of Osama and of those who follow in his wake to return Islam to the offensive, but this time to do it with Western technology. 9/11 was sent as the merest foretaste of future deeds.

A proud symbol of the ancient Islamic empire: a Turkish harem guard…probably a slave seized in Africa and castrated to eliminate his interest in the women he helped imprison.

The Osamaites are something new doing something very old. They are wireless warriors, masters of the World Wide Web and of the Internet. They are the flower of modern Islam—its rich and privileged kids, its top university students, and its growing middle class. With laptops and airline tickets, they’ve invented a new World War—a global, cyber-based Jihad—one in which the attacking army can hide in the central cities of its enemies. The approach is a parallel-distributed conspiracy. It hangs together not because a central leader has command. It percolates independently in nooks and crannies, held together by common beliefs.

The Jihadists—the preachers of Holy War—want everything. The world! As Osama sees it, the boundaries of Islam’s nation-states are dividing lines that Westerners contrived to weaken the Ummah—the vast family of Islam. It is time, says Osama, for a global caliphate.

Mujahed (Holy Warrior) with rocket propelled grenade.

Can Jihadists win this new world war? You bet. Jihadist Islam has been winning for more than 1,350 years. It’s won an empire that spans the 10,000 miles from the Philippines to Nigeria.

A book sold on the website of the Islamic Society of North America, which brags about early Islam’s 7th Century “defeat of the most powerful empires of the era."

It’s won a third of the population of Africa. It’s won all up and down central Asia. Its biggest wins have been in three huge states—India (where Islam has held sway periodically from the 11th Century on), Indonesia, and Malaysia. Islam’s won more than fifty nations and is infiltrating Europe furiously. Islam is the second-biggest religion in Britain. There are six million Moslems in France, and many of them are kicking up a fuss. There are Islamic communities and Islamic terror centers in Belgium, Holland, Spain, Germany, and Denmark. And they’re growing rapidly. 1.2 billion Moslems are spread around the world. They are urged by a mass of worldwide Islamic websites to perform Dawa—to resist assimilation and to convert you and me—peacefully with words if possible, otherwise violently.

The logos of a World Wide Website that promotes violent Jihad. Jama’at ud Da’wa explains to the world’s Moslems that there is no choice in the matter. “ Allah made it binding on the Muslims to fight in His way. Warfare is ordained for you, though you dislike it. ”

One of Jama’at ud Da’wa’s many web pages is titled “Dr. Mohsin Farooqi takes a look at the history of Muslim rule in Europe to remind the Muslim Ummah of its glorious past.” Dr. Farooqi crows about the days when, “Muslims from North Africa ravaged the coasts of Spain, Italy and France and even occasionally of England and Ireland devastating the cities and villages and carrying away booty and captives. …The terror of Muslim invaders…hung over Europe for centuries.” Farooqi’s detailed history ends with an ominous phrase: “…… to be continued.”

Many of the Moslems in the West are peaceful and productive. Some of them are not. Do the militants among those in Europe and America want to eradicate the Western way of life? You bet. Do some of those militants see the Moslem communities of the United States, Britain, and Europe as beachheads and as launch pads for conquest? Yes.

So what do we have to lose? Everything. The current crisis of capitalism isn’t just a normal economic rise and fall. It’s part of a bigger picture. We are fighting for our very way of life.