I love people like Diana West who stand vigorously for individual freedom, Western values, and speak frankly about the things in Islam that many Westerners are too fearful or embarassed to confront.  Yet I have never appreciated the passionate opposition that many on our side have towards the terms "war on terror(ism)" and "Islamism".

The "war on terror" spoke, it seems to me, to a need to recognize a new kind of  enemy who is not a state entity (for the most part, though sometimes admittedly he acts as a proxy for state actors) but who is motivated by an ideology in which the means (terrorism) and the ends are highly conflated, since he holds the view that the only way to achieve the global Islamic Caliphate is by a radical demolition of much of the existing world, including the governments (and no doubt much of the population) of Islamic countries.  There is no way the present global population can be sustained by anything other than something like our present economic and scientific system, a modernity that is fundamentally at odds with the enemy's existential vision. Consequently terror must almost become a permanent end in itself if he is to have any faith in bringing about the conditions for the Islamic "Utopia" that can only be vaguely imagined at present.  Wouldn't it put things in the proper moral perspective if we could better communicate that the enemy doesn't simply want Islam, but wants/needs the vast majority of  humanity to be dead or terrorized so as to participate in the killing?

It may be the case that Diana West wants us to think of ourselves as being in a war against all of Islam, though she seems to give more emphasis to the idea that we need to separate ourselves and keep as much distance as possible from it. In any case, one can hardly argue that it was George Bush's intent to war with all of Islam. Now I know that the Global War on Terror, as articulated, did not serve to encourage people to study and worry about Islam as a political-legal-religious whole and it thus became a target for those distressed about Western submission, whether in fear or fatuity, to the multicultural other. But if our goal is to better understand the enemy, then it would be useful to know that the term "Islamism" came into existence (within Islamic discourse) to serve a legitimate need to understand a novel situation.  As Diana West recognizes, the "Islamists" are not offering some obviously queer mis-reading of the Islamic texts.  But what is new and radical about the situation is that they are reading the Islamic texts.  In a context where literacy has become more the norm than the exception,  the high cultural traditions of textual analysis have been taken over by a mass political movement at the expense (not so much intellectually, as politically and socioeconomically) of the traditional Ulema elite. The old divide between folk and high Islam has come to an end with the folk capturing the texts and losing much of their old folk traditions. In short, al-Azhar counts for less, the engineers and doctors and web preachers of the Muslim Brotherhood for more.  While Islam has a long tradition of violent tribesmen coming down from the hills to re-institute the "true faith" in the corrupted centres of power, there has never been anything quite like the Muslim Brotherhood seeking to establish a popular global political movement, one that wars with many of the states in the Islamic world on behalf of a revolutionary ideology that is contested among Muslims who, if at all pragmatic, cannot but question its Utopian character in the context of the modern world and its established powers.

If we are best to explore the question of Islam's incompatibility with Western modernity we need not simply to assert Islam's premodern (high cultural) traditions as somehow eternal, but also recognize its most modern aspects - Islamism - in order to show how these reactions to modernity are adaptations that cannot stand that to which they adapt and hence move towards making terrorism an end in itself.

We keep talking loftily and with conviction about the few vanquishing the many, David defeating Goliath, but we seem to have forgotten why. The West is stronger than Islam in terms of economy and armaments but it has already surrendered in spirit. Just as its media in WWII led the way to victory, this media has spearheaded its rout today. While the parents and grandparents are looking the other way - if not themselves zombied - their progeny is brainwashed at schools and universities into the politically correct defeatism. If our civilization survives, it'll be thanks to people like Ms West, courageous fighters with sharp analytical minds.