We need to stop with this equating Islam with evil and Satan, and this war mongering towards all Muslims. I sense a great deal of hatred towards Muslims from all these comments and it does not help our cause.
Even though everything in Ibrahim’s articles are no doubt true and Islam is indeed a warlike and xenophobic religion, outright saying these things and accusing Islam of being a illegitimate religion and evil simply crystallizes western hatred of muslims and muslim hatred of westerners.
This in turn makes the clash of civilizations inevitable. Why is that bad? Because we in the modern west do not have the unity or capacity to win such a war. We will not unite together with the liberals and the Europeans to destroy Mecca, attack 1 billion people, and basically fight World War II against all the Muslims of the world. This will simply not happen because we are not all conservative Christians in the west. There are agnostics, not so conservative Christians, Jews, Atheists, liberals, Hindus, Buddhists, etc. who will not be united by the idea of Islam as a monolithic Satanist religion. The Muslims will ultimately wear us down while winning the hearts and minds of various marginalized peoples.
This fight does not have to be the West vs. Islam. Rather it can be a fight of Modern Islam vs. Medieval Islam. Medieval Islam is the true nature of Islam that everyone has been talking about in the comments that is deceitful in war and xenophobic. Worse, it is the Islam that is practiced by a large proportion of Muslims, but that does not mean that it cannot be defeated by ways other than outright war. Modern Islam is weak and powerless, but it does exist in some sects (Ismaeli Shia, Sufism, and another sect which I cannot recall right now). The existence (no matter how small a number) of modern, tolerant, integrated Muslims suggests that we may propel it to prosperity through socioeconomic and hearts and minds operations. Determined military resistance against Medieval Islam combined with strong support for Modern Islam can succeed in convincing Muslims to join more successful modern sects. Oh, and somehow fixing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict would probably deprive radical Islam of many recruits (this is obviously a very difficult, but necessary part of this effort)
We should not allow Islamic xenophobia to trigger a similar medieval hatred of Muslims in ourselves (this would be victory of Islamic medievalism over us). After all, we live in the modern west. We must utilize our modernity to our strength and not fight a medieval style war against medievalists.
-Parthicus
