At The American Conservative, Rod Dreher pokes some holes in the rubric used by London’s police force to determine if a person is “Islamophobic.”
I believe that the Islamic religion is inferior to Christianity because it is not true, in my view….
If people conclude that Islam is engaged in a “clash of civilizations,” so what? Seriously, so what? That is a debatable thesis. Would the London Met have arrested the late Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington for holding this view?
What the police force of a major Western capital city is doing is making it a crime to think and speak critically about Islam. People who hate Muslims because they are Muslim are bigoted, and those who treat Muslims unjustly are wrong, and quite possibly are lawbreakers too. But they are not lawbreakers because they hold bigoted opinions. And holding negative opinions of Islam — or Christianity, or any other religion — does not by itself make one a bigot.
Dreher’s references Samuel Huntington’s Clash of Civilizations, a seminal work on the world order and how it may change. If you haven’t read the book, pick up a copy today to gain a greater understanding of where the world has been, and where it is headed. The Amazon description of the book reads:
The classic study of post-Cold War international relations, more relevant than ever in the post-9/11 world, with a new foreword by Zbigniew Brzezinski.
Since its initial publication, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order has become a classic work of international relations and one of the most influential books ever written about foreign affairs. An insightful and powerful analysis of the forces driving global politics, it is as indispensable to our understanding of American foreign policy today as the day it was published. As former National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski says in his new foreword to the book, it “has earned a place on the shelf of only about a dozen or so truly enduring works that provide the quintessential insights necessary for a broad understanding of world affairs in our time.”
Samuel Huntington explains how clashes between civilizations are the greatest threat to world peace but also how an international order based on civilizations is the best safeguard against war. Events since the publication of the book have proved the wisdom of that analysis. The 9/11 attacks and wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have demonstrated the threat of civilizations but have also shown how vital international cross-civilization cooperation is to restoring peace. As ideological distinctions among nations have been replaced by cultural differences, world politics has been reconfigured. Across the globe, new conflicts—and new cooperation—have replaced the old order of the Cold War era.
The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order explains how the population explosion in Muslim countries and the economic rise of East Asia are changing global politics. These developments challenge Western dominance, promote opposition to supposedly “universal” Western ideals, and intensify intercivilization conflict over such issues as nuclear proliferation, immigration, human rights, and democracy. The Muslim population surge has led to many small wars throughout Eurasia, and the rise of China could lead to a global war of civilizations. Huntington offers a strategy for the West to preserve its unique culture and emphasizes the need for people everywhere to learn to coexist in a complex, multipolar, muliticivilizational world.
Read more about Huntington, the Clash of Civilizations, and about Pat Buchanan’s warning that the ultimate goal of Islam is to be imposed on all of mankind here.
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