One More Epicycle

The War didn’t begin six years ago today; that was merely the most successful attack in a long line of them. But that was the day that that most people woke up to the fact. Some are still sleeping, lost in a dreamworld holiday from history, and my scorn for them can’t quite mask my envy.

Some — Norman Podhoretz, most famously — have called this World War IV, in a classification where the Cold War was World War III. Others have gone further still, and called it World War Zero. To borrow a phrase: “At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe. We are in a new phase of a very old war.” A war that began in seventh-century Arabia, but soon spread across the Earth.

An old friend of mine is convinced that the real cause of the War is Western imperialism in the Middle East, by which he really means the existence of Israel as a nation — he’s not thinking of the ill-advised British habit of controlling a territory by establishing some available strongman as the leader. True, there were Jews and Christians and pagans living on the land hundreds of years before there were any Muslims anywhere, and the Jews and pagans have histories dating back centuries before that. However, for reasons I’ve never quite been able to follow, only the Muslim conquest of the land counts, and is permanent and irrevocable. All other claims to the land are invalid.

I’m in the WWIV=WW0 camp. The it’s-all-about-Israel analysis of my friend cannot explain over a thousand years of jihad. We did not live through the beginning of this war, which far predates every state now involved, and every institution I can think of except the Church, and we will not see its end. We can, however, hope to see victories.

I won’t forget the morning I woke up, expecting to hear goofy rock-radio banter, and learned that our long sleep was over. I also won’t forget that it only took a few calls on the radio for someone to venture that the Americans had it coming, or the images of the Palestinians dancing in the streets with an unholy glee. And on one terrible but revealing day earlier this year — at the Mayor of London’s debate with Daniel Pipes, a day I found too disheartening to write about — I learned firsthand how popular the jihad is here in London, and how great a challenge lies ahead.

We — and this “we” includes civilized people from every society, Eastern, Western, or otherwise — must not submit.