The Clash of Civilizations

Chuck Colson has an absolutely must read article today on the clash of civilizations. He speaks rather broadly about the clash of cultures here in the United States toward the end of the article, the postmodern denial of truth in favor of cultural deconstruction, but a major portion is devoted to radical Islam. I simply offer the following excerpt.

"We say there is one God in three. The Trinity. They see the Trinity as blasphemy. We understand grace, that God loves us. They don’t. They understand Allah’s forbidding law. We understand that we are responsible for the sin in the world. They don’t. They believe that people are basically good, corrupted only by Western decadence. So that once Islam takes over by jihad, there will be peace forever.

"We believe in redemption. There is no redemption for the Muslim. He walks across the sword of judgment and can fall off on one side or the other. He may make it, or he may not make it.

"And we believe in religious liberty, because we believe the truth will always win out. The Muslim doesn’t. The Muslim believes in theocracy. Not just a state church, but a church state. What you have to understand about the Islamo-fascist movement is that what they are looking at is a war that started in the seventh century and is continuing today. We don’t think that way. We think it’s September 11 to today. “Oh, man! Four years of this is terrible!” That’s what Americans are saying. Muslims are thinking about this as centuries old.

"You have to understand that many Muslims are still smarting over the fact that their armies were defeated just short of Paris at Poitiers in 732 (halting Islam’s advance in Europe). Crusades, then counter-Crusades, and so on until eventually the armies of the Ottoman Empire got as far as Vienna in 1683. Bear this in mind: It was a decisive battle when the Polish and German infantry turned back the Turks at Vienna. Do you know what day it was in 1683? September 11. If you tell me that bin Laden just picked that date out of the air, I’ve got some costume jewelry to sell you later on.

"...The war, this clash of civilizations, is a war that will last for generations. Your grandkids will have to deal with it. It isn’t going to go away. All the solutions to it are long-term solutions. All the solutions are painful and will require incredible perseverance on the part of people in the West. We Christians can understand that, because we can take a longer view of history. But today’s instant-gratification culture doesn’t get it, doesn’t want to get it, and will fall for the notion that this war will go away once we find bin Laden in the mountains of Pakistan. Once we get this immediate threat out of the way, life will go back to normal. No, it will not. It can’t. It can’t, because we understand that this is a struggle between two fundamental ways of looking at reality."