June 23, 2006
World Net Daily

Needed: A New Policy on Islam

by Patrick J. Buchanan

In 1938, the year of Anschluss and Munich, a perceptive British Catholic looked beyond the continent over which war clouds hung and saw another cloud forming.

"It has always seemed to me ... probable," wrote Hilaire Belloc, "that there would be a resurrection of Islam and that our sons or our grandsons would see the renewal of that tremendous struggle between the Christian culture and what has been for more than a thousand years its greatest opponent."

Belloc was prophetic. Even as Christianity seems to be dying in Europe, Islam is rising to shake the 21st century as it did so many previous centuries.

Indeed, as one watches U.S. Armed Forces struggle against Sunni insurgents, Shia militias and jihadists in Iraq, and a resurgent Taliban, all invoking Allah, Victor Hugo's words return to mind: No army is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.

The idea for which many of our adversaries fight is a compelling one. They believe there is but one God, Allah, that Muhammad is his prophet, that Islam, or submission to the Quran, is the only path to paradise and that a godly society should be governed according to the Shariah, the law of Islam. Having tried other ways and failed, they are coming home to Islam.

What idea do we have to offer? . . .

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Michael Neumann, "Has Islam Failed?," The Wisdom Fund, May 15, 2003

[In a world far too often dominated by politicians imbued with religious fundamentalism of all flavors - Jewish, Christian, Muslim - we need the thoughtfulness, self-awareness and subtlety that comes from progressive religious expression.--Stephen Julius Stein, "Islam's Ann Coulter," Los Angeles Times, June 25, 2006]

[Gazing across what Zbigniew Brzezinski once called the "arc of crisis," U.S. foreign policy appears to be disintegrating.--Patrick J. Buchanan, "Time for an 'Agonizing Reappraisal'," American Conservative, July 3, 2006 Issue]

[Dean takes a sincere, well-considered look at how conservative politics in the U.S. is veering dangerously close to authoritarianism, offering a penetrating and highly disturbing portrait of many of the major players in Republican politics and power.--John Dean, "Conservatives Without Conscience," Viking Adult, July 11, 2006]

Cover Story: Mike Allen and Romesh Ratnesar, "The end of cowboy diplomacy," Time, July 17, 2006

[A cross-cultural group of 20 prominent world figures has called for urgent efforts to heal the growing divide between Muslim and Western societies.

They say the chief causes of the rift are not religion or history, but recent political developments, notably the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.--"Call to bridge West-Muslim divide," BBC News, November 13, 2006