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By Daniel Greenfield, Frontpage Magazine
For the first time since the aftermath of September 11, American troops are not officially engaged in the War on Terror. We have left behind Afghanistan to the Taliban and Iraq to Iran.
And are we at peace? Not in the least.
Hardly a month passes without an Islamic terrorist plot. American ships are under fire and Americans are being held hostage around the world.
The appeasers blame our support for Israel, just as they earlier blamed the War on Terror, but if we end our support for the Jewish State, as Biden is trying to do, will the Islamic terrorists leave us alone to live in peace?
Some argue just that.
Influential voices in politics and on social media tell us that we can have quiet if we cut and run from everywhere, end freedom of speech and make other changes to our way of life so that we no longer offend the hordes overrunning the world. And our country.
‘Dear Infidels’, a compelling new short documentary from PragerU, offers a dash of ice cold water from those who have been there, former Muslims and soldiers who have seen the enemy from the inside offer a timely warning that we have fundamentally misunderstood Islam.
Our response to Islamic terrorism has been defined by a Marxist binary of oppressors and oppressed. When we are attacked, the binary that pervades politics and the media, teaches us, it is because we are oppressors and the Jihadists are a liberation movement.
Rather than defeating the terrorists, we must end our colonialism, capitalism and oppressive ‘whiteness’. The Jihadists must be allowed to win as many times as it takes until they are fully empowered.
The Marxist binary is just as much of a lie when it comes to Islamic terrorists as it is when applied to BLM, the Bolshevik revolution, Castro’s Cuba, the Paris Commune or the Weathermen.
Islamism is not a reaction of the helplessly oppressed, suffering from ‘Islamophobia’: it’s an ancient totalitarian movement seeking to dominate all of mankind.
“You will kill Israelis, you will kill Americans,” an ex-Muslim recalls being told as a child in ‘Dear Infidels’. “Why should we kill Americans? They are not Muslim.”
It’s as simple as that. The Jihad against us is a primal mission that the PragerU documentary distills into its purest form.
“I’ve had these conversations with a high ranking Al Qaeda guy, and this guy lived in America,” Jason Tuschen, who had served on Seal Team 7, describes in ‘Dear Infidels’.
“And he was explaining it to me, we want to kill you, you’re either gonna convert or you’re gonna die.”
That stark binary choice is inescapable in the Muslim world where Christians, Jews, Hindus and Buddhists live in fear.
The tidal flows of migration have brought terror to western nations as well, and yet many of these nations continue to believe that they need to win hearts and minds, rather than learn basic history, secure their borders and expel those who won’t live in peace.
The false Marxist binary that Islamic terrorism is a response to oppression rather than a form of oppression has crippled our understanding and our responsiveness.
In the binary, Muslims are reacting to what we do, rather than acting. Islam is not an ideology that spent over a thousand years conquering much of the world, but a woeful minority.
To believe otherwise is to be accused of ‘Islamophobia’. And yet, for all that Americans are accused of this invented ‘bigotry’ after every Islamic terrorist attack, the real hatred is on the other side.
And it’s a hatred motivated by a conviction that Islam is the final answer.
And that those who reject Islam are contemptible and evil, ‘infidels’ who obstruct the new Islamic order.
“Serving in Iraq, I never saw hatred like that, they had this belief in this greater cause, to install a Caliphate, return to the greater glory of Islam,” Tuschen describes in ‘Dear Infidels’.
Islam has its own vision of an ideal world order based on the imposition of sharia law. And some of the military men in PragerU’s documentary had come face to face with its ugliest side.
“We came into this village and there was blood everywhere. They had just finished stoning this little girl,” Omar Vieira, formerly of SEAL Team 4, described. “Whether you’re Muslim or not, you have to abide by Sharia law.”
“Islam is to govern all aspects, social, political, private, that affects everybody’s life.”
Appeasement, often held up as the solution by the Left and now by some influencers who claim to be conservative, is doomed because the root of Islamic grievances is not our foreign policy, it’s our beliefs and values, it’s our Constitution and our insistence on not being Muslim.
No amount of surrenders will ever be enough until we surrender our country and ourselves.
The long march of retreats that began with Obama have not brought peace, only more war.
The territories controlled by Islamic theocratic movements have grown sharply since September 11 and at the peak of the Arab Spring, they ruled much of North Africa and the Middle East, and as the war against Hamas continues in Gaza, they have much of the world behind them.
Europe, apart from a few outliers like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, has made peace with Islam, and many American political leaders, including some on the right, are not far behind.
And that’s not new.
There was a time in the twentieth century when Communism and Nazism seemed inevitable.
The intellectual elites had abandoned the idea of America and had fallen to arguing over which totalitarian system to replace the Constitution with.
The Soviet Union, Germany and Italy appeared to be vital. They had radical new ideas for the elimination of personal freedom and feeding the individual into a relentless collectivist machine stamping out a new world order.
And now it’s happening all over again. The Islamist mobs chanting or praying en masse on campuses and streets, seizing control of public spaces and imposing their will, appear inevitable.
That is why ‘Dear Infidels’ is so vital.
The new PragerU documentary challenges the appeasement and defeatism that has taken over so much of the civilized world.
It reminds us that Islam is not a reaction, but an action, and that rather than blaming ourselves, we must understand that we are in a clash of civilizations over the fundamental issue of freedom.
Islam, like the Left, promises an ideal new world order in exchange for our freedoms. Appeasement is not an option. Our only choices are defiance or submission.
The men and women interviewed in ‘Dear Infidels’ faced those choices and reacted to them in their own ways, whether in their personal lives or on the battlefield, with courage and integrity.
But it’s not a choice that only they face.
As the power and violence of Islam grows in America, we will sooner or later all face that choice, whether to fly our flags and live free, to speak out and stay true, or to sell out our friends, neighbors and allies in the hopes of winning a reprieve.
PragerU’s ‘Dear Infidels’ is a warning and a challenge to a political and cultural leadership seeking an accommodation with a totalitarian ideology.
In a time of universal lies, it tells the truth. Men and women have been killed all over the world for telling that truth. They have been stoned, stabbed, bombed and beheaded for it. They have been censored, canceled and blacklisted for it.
And yet despite and because of that, it is vital that the truth must be heard.
Dear Infidels is currently free to stream at PragerU.
