It's called "triumphalism."

It's an ideology that places the world's nations into one of two categories -- either those who have been (previously)conquered, or those who have yet to be conquered. Even though a minority of Islam's 1.5 billion adherents hold this view, the zeal of just ten percent still presents a major force to be reckoned with. Clearly militant Islam is engaged in a global "zero-sum game," where East and West cannot peacefully co-exist. And their commitment to this struggle will not end, until they prevail.

The Bush administration understands this threat, and has been prosecuting global terrorism with a national defense strategy versus just law enforcement tactics. The horrific attacks on 9/11 were nothing short of an attempt to decapitate our leadership by striking at the symbols of American commerce, defense, and government. And while the term "regime change" shocks and appalls diplomats, the choice presented by "asymmetrical warfare" boils down to this -- we either fight them on their turf, or face them on the streets of America.

It is critical then, that as a nation, we either come to terms with the commitment required to protect Western civilization, or accept their terms for our surrender. This month we feature four articles, from both secular and Christian perspectives, that arrive at a consensus regarding the threat posed by militant Islam.

It is my hope, for those who grasp the spiritual dimension of this global menace, that we be found faithful to call upon God's protection and provision, as we raise a righteous standard against the forces that seek to oppress.



Up against fanaticism
By Phil Lucas
Executive Editor
The News Herald

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you.

We published pictures of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims.

Some readers didn't like it. Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them.

Well, we sure don't want to frighten, offend or endanger anybody, do we? That's just too much diversity to handle. I mean, somebody might get hurt.

We could fill the newspaper every morning with mobs of fanatical Muslims. They can't get along with their neighbors on much of the planet: France,Chechnya, Bosnia, Indonesia, Spain, Morocco, India, Tunisia, Somalia, etc.etc. etc. Can anybody name three ongoing world conflicts in which Muslims are not involved? Today, where there is war, there are fanatical Muslims. We might quibble about who started what conflicts, but look at the sheer number of them.

One thing is sure. Muslim killers started the one we are in now when they slaughtered more than 3,000 people, including fellow Muslims, in New York City.

Madeline Albright, the former secretary of state and feckless appeaser who helped get us into this mess, said last week Muslims still resented the Crusades. Well, Madame Albright, if Westerners were not such a forgiving people, we might resent them too.

Let's recap the Crusades. Muslims invaded Europe and when they reached sufficient numbers they imposed their intolerant religion upon Westerners by force. Christian monarchs drove them back and took the battle to their homeland. The fight lasted a couple of centuries, and we bottled them up for 1,000 years.

Now, a millennium later, Muslims have expanded forth again. Ask France. Ask England. Ask Manhattan. Two-and-a-half years ago fanatical Muslims laid siege to us. We woke up to the obvious. Our president announced it would be a very long war, then took the battle to the Islamic homeland. Sound familiar?

Let's consider the concept of a "long war." Last time it was 200 years, give or take.

Anybody catch Lord of the Rings? You know, the good part, the part that wasn't fiction, the part that drew us to the books and movies because it was the truest part: the titanic struggle between good and evil, between freedom and enslavement, between the individual and the state, between the celebration of life and the worshipping of death.

That's the fight we are in, and it never ends. It just has peaks and valleys.

There may be a silent majority of peaceful Muslims - some live here - but that did not save 3,000 people in the World Trade Centers, the millions gassed and butchered in the Middle East, the tens of thousands slain in Eastern Europe and Asia, the hundreds blown to bits in the West Bank and Spain, or the four Americans shot, burned and hung like sausage over the Euphrates as a fanatical minority of Muslims did the joyful dance of death.

Maybe we are so tolerant, we are so bent on "diversity," we are so nonjudgmental, we are so wrapped up in our six-packs and ballgames that our brains have drained to our bulbous behinds. Maybe we're so addled on Ritalin we wouldn't know which end of a gun to hold. Maybe we need a new drug advertised on TV every three minutes, one that would help us grow a backbone.

It doesn't take a Darwin to figure out that in this world the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, and the most committed always win. No exceptions.

Look at your spouse and children. Look at yourself in the mirror. Then look at the pictures from the paper last Thursday. You better look at them. Those are the people out to kill you.

Who do you think will win? You? Or them? Think you can take your ball and go home and they will leave you alone? Read a little history. Start with last week, last month, last year, and every other year back for half a century. Then go back a thousand years. Nobody hides from this fight.

Like it or not, that's the way it was and that's the way it is.

But many Americans don't get it. That's why we published those pictures.

If they jarred you off the sofa, if they offended you, if they scared your children and sent you into a rage at mass murderers or heartless editors, then I say, it's a start.



The Culture of Death
Commentary on the News
Tuesday, April 20, 2004
Jack Kinsella - Omega Letter Editor

Much has been written regarding the true nature of Islam, especially since 9/11. Until the attacks, most Americans knew little or nothing about it and what they did know was probably incorrect.

One of the major failings of the Bush administration has been to minimize Islam's role in the war against terror, repeating the mantra that "Islam is a religion of peace hijacked by a few murderers" instead of investigating its core teachings first.

Before a gathering of ambassadors in the East Room on the 1st anniversary of the Iraq War, Bush noted; "On a tape claiming responsibility for the atrocities in Madrid, a man is heard to say, 'We choose death, while you choose life'."

But not once in the speech did he mention the reason for the terror. The reason is Islam itself. It is Islam that requires all faithful Muslims to conquer the world for Islam, either by voluntary conversion or submission under the sword.

Islam is first of all at war with itself, and secondarily with the rest of the world.

Within Islam are two major sects, the Sunnis and the Shia. Sunnis claim Islam descended directly from Mohammed, while the Shia say the true succession of Islam came through Ali, married to the prophet's daughter,Fatima.

The eight-year-war between Iran and Iraq during the 1980's was essentially a war between Sunni Islam and the Shia Republic of Iran. When US forces got inside Iraq, they found hundreds of mass graves containing the bodies of tens of thousands of Shi'ite Iraqis murdered by Saddam's Sunni-dominated military.

Judaism, and by extension, Christianity, claim their spiritual heritage is descended from Abraham, through the line of Isaac and Jacob.

Islam claims its heritage through Abraham's elder son, Ishmael. Of Ishmael, Genesis 16:12 tells us, "And he will be a wild man; his hand will be against every man, and every man's hand against him; and he shall dwell in the presence of all his brethren."

Islam is a religion born out of blood and the sword, not peace. The secular Muslim scholar Ibn Warraq, author of 'Why I Am Not a Muslim' and 'The Quest for the Historical Muhammed', points out that, from the approved holy books on the life of Mohammed that the prophet and his band of followers participated in 80 political assassinations in their consolidation of power.

During the 8th century, Islam conquered a wide swath of territory from the Arabian Peninsula all the way to the Iberian Peninsula, which it called "Andalusia." Today, it is called 'Spain'.

To Muslims this entire area is called "Dar al Islam" which means, the Zone of Submission. It is a received doctrine of the Koran that no part of the Dar al-Islam ever can be ceded permanently to the infidel. The Moors were kicked out of the Andalusian caliphate in 1493 by the Spanish Reconquest.

But Islam has a long memory.

On Oct. 7, 2001, the day the United States began bombing Afghanistan, bin Laden appeared in a videotape, stating, "Let the whole world know that we shall never accept that the tragedy of al-Andalus would be repeated."
While areas conquered by Islam are known as Dar al Islam, areas unconquered by Islam also have an Islamic religious name; "Dar al-Harb" or, the Zone of War. Islam demands an armed struggle to bring the rest of the world under the Dar al Islam, offering conversion or the sword. That is a basic principle of the 'religion of peace'.
We get our word 'assassin' from a twelve century Islamic forerunner of Osama bin-Laden named Hasan-i Sabbah. His terrorist group was called 'the Ismalis'and al-Qaeda's secret society was modeled on i-Sabbah's.

Called the "Old Man in the Mountain" he attracted hundreds of young men by offering training in religious doctrine, devotional discipline and terrorism. i-Sabba singled out for attack those rulers he judged to have been corrupted by power and luxury or who, in his view, were insufficiently dedicated to the principles of Islam.

His followers would steal into palaces in the dead of night and slit the throats of their victims, knowing they would be caught and killed. This disadvantage was offset by a carefully taught theological conviction that, when slain, they would be rewarded instantly with the joys of paradise. These terrorists were called assassins, the Hashishiyyin, because they used hashhish to bolster their courage.

According to accounts brought back by the Crusaders, the Old Man in the Mountain had such control over his followers that he would amuse and terrorize visitors to his castle by ordering a few of his young men to jump off a cliff to demonstrate that they would obey his slightest whim.

Islam is first and foremost, a culture of death. Attorney General John Ashcroft once famously observed that, "Islam is a religion in which God expects your son to die for him. Christianity is a religion in which God sent His Son to die for you."

The efforts by the Bush administration to separate Islam from terrorism is understandable, given that there are 1.9 billion Muslims in the world and we don't want to have to fight all of them at once. I don't for one second believe that Bush believes Islam, at its core, is a religion of peace.

He has advisors, among whom is presumably John Ashcroft, who clearly DOES understand Islam's true nature.

Disconnecting Islam from terrorism is deemed by the administration to be a political necessity, but it is wrongly being applied to a wartime scenario. The Clinton administration did exactly the same thing, appeasing Islam to the degree that it invaded Serbia in 1999 to install an Islamist government in Kosovo. It treated terrorism as a law enforcement problem, instead of a military one. It didn't bring peace, either to America or to Kosovo.

It is unlikely that the current administration's efforts to pretend Islam is a religion of peace hijacked by a few terrorists will bring peace, either. While Crusader America is absent from the prophetic record, the Bible mentions Islam for the first time all the way back in Genesis.

And Daniel says of the antichrist that, while he (the antichrist) personally has no regard for any god himself, "in his estate shall he honour the god of forces: and a god WHOM HIS FATHERS KNEW NOT shall he honour with gold, and silver, and with precious stones, and pleasant things." (Daniel 11:38, emphasis mine)

In his efforts to settle the ongoing conflict between the Arabs and Jews over Israel, Daniel says the antichrist will ally himself with the forces of Islam; "Thus shall he do in the most strong holds with a strange god, whom he shall acknowledge and increase with glory: and he shall cause them to rule over many, and shall DIVIDE THE LAND FOR GAIN." (Daniel 11:39)

Europe is already attempting to insinuate itself into the Arab-Israeli 'peace process' and its anti-Israeli bias is the subject of endless secular commentaries and analyses. Islam has a role to play in the last days, as does Europe. America does not.

It is hard to view the whole picture without feeling a bit like a purveyor of gloom and doom. It looks like the writing may truly be on the wall for America sometime within the next few years, both from the predictions of the Holy Writ, and from the headlines of the daily news.

But it is NOT 'gloom and doom' -- it is proof positive that what appears to be chaos and terror from the perspective of the world, is actually a Divine Plan that has been in motion since Abraham had two sons, Isaac and Jacob. The fact the Plan is coming to fruition in our day means that the Lord of Hosts remains firmly in control of human events. The Bible painstakingly records the details of our current geopolitical world for a purpose.

So that, when we see these things beginning to come to pass, we can have assurance that the same God Who promised chaos and judgment to the world promised He would return for His Church.

"For this we say unto you BY THE WORD OF THE LORD, that we which are alive and remain unto the coming of the Lord shall not prevent them which are asleep. For the Lord himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the dead in Christ shall rise first: Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air: and so shall we ever be with the Lord." (1st Thessalonians 4:15-17)

What terrifies the world, is, for the Church, the Promise of the Blessed Hope.

"Wherefore, comfort one another with these words." (1 Thessalonians 4:18)



Is it a religious war yet?

Posted: April 8, 2004
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2004 WorldNetDaily.com

On Nov. 6, 2003, prior to Saddam Hussein's capture, I told you what was necessary to end the conflict in Iraq and establish a democratic government. I also told you the price of failure ("Break them now!").

It is a sad fact that men and women can become so blinded by hatred and rage that they become, as Jesus' half-brother, Jude, described: "brute beasts ...twice dead, plucked up by the roots; Raging waves of the sea, foaming out their own shame; wandering stars, to whom is reserved the blackness of darkness forever (Jude 1:10-13).

The Arab world's hatred for Israel has been nourished from childbirth for generations. The victims of that hatred are now well beyond rational human thought and debate - they have become one with their hatred, embracing death as the only remaining road to an imagined paradise. Increasingly, children themselves are being offered up to kill Jews. The worship of Molech is alive and well.

Europe and America functioned as the willfully blind enablers of this hatred. We turned a blind eye during its infancy. We did it for the oil. Browbeaten with taunts of colonialism, our foreign-policy elites deluded themselves that by paying dictators and despots for the liquified, dead dinosaurs nature had deposited beneath the arbitrary national borders of Middle Eastern deserts, we would one day awake from our slumber to find functioning nation-states that had educated their people, industrialized their economy, and embraced the democratic model of government.

It would have been better for the world - and for the people of the Middle East - had we sent them our tanks instead of our petrodollars and simply taken the oil. At least we would have been forced to set up the infrastructure of democracy. Generations of Arab children would not have learned the lies of anti-Semitism now taught from birth by demented Arab despots, their imams and their abused and abased parents.

The Mideast is a colossal failure of leftist European and American pandering, self-loathing and moral insufficiency. The bill has come due and this generation is going to pay. Whether we stay or withdraw, as Spain learned on March 11, will have little bearing on the final cost.

Not only did we fail to appease our guilt-ridden consciences over the oil, we demanded that Israel, the only democracy in the Mideast, fail as well. Generations of Israelis have been sold the Chamberlandish lie that terrorism and appeasement is the price of existence in the Middle East. The West's "solution" has been "containment." What rubbish! Terrorism is the product of self-loathing and vacillation in the face of evil. Terrorism will end when the terrorists are dead.

World opinion is a fool's errand. It is a club that the weak fashion and then use to browbeat and extract favors from the powerful. It is a paper-mache tiger, as the USSR showed when it shot down a civilian Korean airliner for straying into communist airspace. The world's hat-in-hand dictators and tyrants, ever ready to line their pockets with another subsidy they can slip into some offshore bank account, safe from their citizens, never uttered a word of condemnation. But let the U.S. defend itself from the emissaries of the "religion of peace," and all hell breaks loose in the court of world opinion.

Europe is now a Muslim enclave, as Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci has detailed in her new book, "The Strength of Reason" (La Forza della Ragione). European society, such as it was, is in its demographic death-throes. It is a victim of the socialist pyramid scheme that depends on passing the bills to the next generation, but refuses to pay the cost of childbearing.

They desire that we should join the party. We must politely decline.

Craige McMillan is a commentator for WorldNetDaily. He is the founder of CC&M, an exciting new initiative to reshape the way America looks at and interacts with people of faith.



Crusade II: The sequel

Posted: November 21, 2002
1:00 a.m. Eastern
© 2002 WorldNetDaily.com

"And I saw the heaven opened, and behold, a white horse, and one sitting on it, called Faithful and True, and he judges and makes war in righteousness."
-Revelation 19:11

Much of the world does not yet know it, but mankind has entered into one of those long-forgotten periods from our past. We are in the beginning stages of a religious war. The West in particular, which has either atrophied or progressed (depending upon your point of view) from its Christian heritage to a secular society, has no concept of what this means.

Secularists view all religions as equal - and equally valid. They are merely expressions of human spirituality. Many today in the West hold this view because to secularists, all religions are nonsense. The universe exists as a byproduct of the "big bang," a cosmic accident, and human beings evolved from the chemicals splattered over rock and debris as it hurtled through space to its present destination. Tomorrow the universe will be different, we will be gone, and something else - or nothing - will take our place.

Seen from such a worldview, the idea that anyone would be willing to lift a finger, let alone detonate explosives wrapped around his body or fly planeloads of people into buildings to promote one brand of human spirituality over another, is to secular individuals, simply inconceivable. They are therefore unable to grasp the nature of the conflict. They imagine that militant Islam can be bought off with a few square miles of Palestinian "homeland," by more financial and food aid to the impoverished, and by the promise of democratically elected governments among the Islamic states exporting terror.

So prevalent is the West's secular worldview that our news services do not even bother to report the repeated demands that accompany Islamic terrorist claims of responsibility for mass human slaughter, and warnings of more to come unless we, the secularized and once Christian West, "abandon Israel and convert to Islam." Read the transcript of bin Laden's latest audiotape missive.

Religious people, whatever their faith, are better equipped to understand the nature and implications of worldwide religious warfare. Most religions share the common view that the universe was created by a powerful being, and that events in an unseen spiritual world can and do affect human beings in this world.

The late Francis Schaeffer once said that as a Christian he shared more in common with the Hindu seated next to him on a transatlantic flight than with the secular Western pilot of the aircraft - because the Hindu at least understood there was an unseen spiritual world. It necessarily follows that the truth or falsehood of what explains the unseen spiritual world is of paramount importance to believers. A religious conflict is over the truth or falsehood of those claims.

The Christian West once understood those claims and the nature of religious conflict. The Christian crusades were a widespread response to forced Islamic conversion through war and violence of large parts of the then-known world. The history of Islamic society and the West since then vindicates that response.

Islamic societies live under despotic regimes, men treat women as property, children are raised to become homicide bombers, and much of the population lives in unimaginable misery with little hope of anything better. The West, pursuing a vision built upon the unseen and seen worlds as revealed in the Bible has grown prosperous and free, which further ignites Islamic hatred.

Power abhors a vacuum, and religious power is no exception. Religious worldviews are powerful. As Islam has watched the Christian West disintegrate into battling secular enclaves, its adherents have sensed an opportunity to regain ground lost centuries ago.

The loose nukes and mutated petri dishes developed by the fractured, secularized West to deter one another are now within the grip of Islamic fanatics reliving the Middle
Ages. This is Islam's chance to conquer the developed world and force its people to pledge allegiance to Allah - or be slaughtered.

Much like secularists, Islamists actually believe they can appropriate the technological and human benefits of Western civilization for themselves, while changing the underlying structure of the society to Islam - or in the case of secularists - nothing. Both fail to understand that the benefits they seek to appropriate grew out of the Christian culture underlying them. Without the supporting understructure, the benefits collapse.

The Christian worldview teaches that we are near the point when God's patience with all this nonsense is due to expire. The Apostle John describes the encounter between a Holy God and his unrighteous creation this way:

"And I saw a great white throne, and him that sat on it, from whose face the earth and the heaven fled away; and there was found no place for them." - Rev. 20:11

But perhaps your righteousness exceeds that of the rest of creation, and you have no need of "religious crutches." Go ahead and plead your case - everyone gets their chance. I know my failures, and I'm trusting that Jesus Christ is who he said he was. "Yes, guilty as charged, God, and sorry. But Jesus has already paid, and I'm coming home."

Craige McMillan is a commentator for WorldNetDaily. He is the founder of CC&M, an exciting new initiative to reshape the way America looks at and interacts with people of faith.