New Ways of Responding to Extremist Islam
by Giulio Meotti
April 10, 2017 at 5:00 am
https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10178/responding-to-extremist-islam "According to one estimate, 10−15 percent of the world's Muslims are Islamists. Out of well over 1.6 billion, or 23 percent of the globe's population, that implies more than 160 million individuals." – Ayaan Hirsi Ali, in her new book, The Challenge of Dawa.
That was Ronald Reagan's major achievement in his long war against the Soviet Union: presenting communism as a joke -- exposing the lies of the Soviet regime, exposing the misery under which its people were living, and explaining why Western values were preferable to Communist ones. This is exactly what the West, Hirsi Ali explains, should be doing with radical Islam.
Western civilization is a humanist vision in which Christianity integrated Jewish wisdom, Greek philosophy and Roman law, thereby giving Western culture its distinctive character: freedom of speech and of the press, equal justice under law, the primacy of the individual, separation of religion and state, freedom of religion and from religion, property rights, sexual equality, an independent judiciary, and independent education, among other values. This is what radical Islam wants to destroy. That is why terrorists are attacking our churches, the State of Israel and why they are subverting democracy to turn it into Islamic law, sharia.
