Islam vs. The West: Conflict Unfortunately Seems Inevitable
by Drieu Godefridi • November 23, 2023 at 5:00 am
To many on the so-called "Left", it sometimes appears as if there is no insurmountable conflict between Islam and the West, or between any differing cultures, just old bits of conflict inherited from an obscure past, which will eventually be overcome by greater material equality.
This thesis, which is in fact Marxist — wherein any conflict is always caused by unequal material situations — also is based more on wishful thinking than on historical evidence. Muslims do not massacre Christians, Jews and Hindus because they are richer, but because they are non-Muslims. At least, that is what many mass murderers have been stating for more than ten centuries...
The "clash of civilizations" seems to be about religion, a topic that many in the West thought had been put to bed ages ago.
The "no-go" Islamic zones in Europe, the attacks on 9/11, London's 7/7 attacks... the murder of Theo Van Gogh, the massacre at the Bataclan, the constant censorship (blasphemy laws), and more: a brief look at recent history of the immigrants bears witness to what seems a pervasive inability, or lack of desire, to adapt to the values of their new host countries.
That, sadly, may be one of the reasons multiculturalism in the West has been such a failure -- a failure of the West. When westerners stopped having children, they started importing people en masse, indiscriminately, as if people were all the same. People are not all the same. Many Muslims, or at least a significant proportion of them, seem to have no intention of integrating, or of discarding the values they brought with them, which they appear to prefer to Western values.
Samuel Huntington's insight into the clash of civilizations is brilliant and true, but a few details in his thesis might benefit from a bit of updating. Moreover, some of his critics, especially on the "Left", might wish to rethink a few of their "conclusions".
According to Huntington, since 1989 the clash between civilizations has been essentially cultural, rather than economic or political. The collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 marked the transition from a world dominated by ideological oppositions -- between communism and capitalism, imperialism and its counter-movement -- to an era of cultural divergence, with the international political scene simultaneously verging on the multipolar and multicultural.
