Ann Coulter famously said “Kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”. Regrettably, all the versions of Christianity that once upon a time would have been capable of implementing such a program have replaced the worship of Christ the Redeemer with Jesus the community organizer.
The “Arab Spring” was the Cathedral deluding itself that it was installing progressive “Muslim” regimes in the Middle East – only to discover what was obvious to everyone else, that it was installing “progressive” Muslim regimes in the Middle East.
For a long time the Cathedral has been promoting a transformation of Islam, promoting progressive Islam, which I parody as “There is no God but Allah, and Mohammed is his prophet, and Mohammed, rightly understood, was a feminist and gay rights supporter who only commanded killing Zionists, not killing Jews as such, and furthermore opposed terrorism, except when conservatives and Jews who won’t get with the program get terrorized.”
They believe they are succeeding, but this belief is deluded. They think that they defeated Christianity by persuasion, by the self evident truth of progressivism, and don’t realize that they crushed Christianity by theocratic state power. (Any Christian commenters who think their Church is still doing fine, how is your church treating divorced women who want to remarry? If your church has yielded on several major points, it will soon be yielding on several more, until Christ the Redeemer becomes Jesus the community organizer, and the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost become the spiritual force, so as not to discriminate against parishioners who believe that Jesus gay married Buddha and visits earth from time to time in a flying saucer.)
Progressives gravely underestimate the amount of violence required convert Muslims to progressivism, because they gravely underestimate the amount of violence they used to convert Christians to progressivism.
Progressives think that sincere Muslim believers are rural rednecks, people living in mountain compounds, and that is where they send the drones to blow up terrorists. They think that people like themselves – urban, privileged, affluent, highly educated in all the correct elite schools – must be progressives and cannot possibly be terrorists, cannot possibly take religion seriously, but, in a Muslim country, that is exactly where you find the Muslims, aka “terror”. In a theocratic state, belief in the official theocratic beliefs is strongest among the products of the elite schools, and affluent people living close to the center of power, such as, for example, Barack Hussein Obama and Osama bin Laden. We are a progressive atheocracy, the Middle East is full of Muslim theocracies.
The reason that in America, the Christians tend to be in the backwoods and away from the center of power is that the official religion, progressivism, dominates and is more passionately believed, the closer you are to the center of power. Obviously, in a theocracy, faith is centered on the capital, the government bureaucracy, the elite schools, the privileged, the powerful, the wealthy. School attendance is church attendance at the official church.
There are moderate Muslims but there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Moderate Muslims are Muslims who don’t take Islam seriously. And you find them in the backwoods and rural areas, in the same sort of places as in America you find Americans who don’t take progressivism seriously.
If you want to make war on “terror”, you are going to have to make war on Islam, which means you are going to have to start by blowing up the leading schools and think tanks where the children of the privileged hang out. Progressives are losing against Islam because they are blowing up the wrong Muslims.
When Sunni Muslims are in power, they persecute Alawites in the same way they persecute Christians and Jews, since they don’t believe the Alawite claim to be Muslim. To avoid persecution, Alawites seized power in Syria. The Cathedral perceived this as soldiers snatching power from priests, or, as they phrased it, “undemocratic”, though Alawites are Muslim enough that the distinction between soldiers and priests is small, thus the distinction between democracy and military dictatorship is small. Alawites claim to be Shia Muslims, a claim barely tolerated by Shia Muslims and generally rejected by Sunni Muslims. Alawite ruled Syria allied itself with Shia Iran, allowing Iran to project force against Israel and hostile Sunni Muslim powers, whereupon Iran found it convenient to give credit to the Alawite claim to be Shia Muslims. Because Iranian aid to Hezbollah and such was channeled through Syria, the Cathedral defined the Syrian regime as “terror”.
And so, the Cathedral set to overthrowing the Syrian government, intending to replace “terror” with progressive “Islam”
The Alawites fought back with unexpected ferocity, knowing that if the Sunni majority gained power, they would be enslaved, and so the war went on inconclusively.
Syrian Christians support the Alawites, and are fighting beside them, which tells me that Alawites are less dreadful than most Muslims, which is probably the reason that Sunnis don’t count them as Muslims.
Indeed, the fact that there are a reasonable number of Syrian Christians still alive tells me that Alawites are less bad than most. America should not be fighting on the other side from middle eastern Christians.
After the murder of America’s Libyan ambassador, the Cathedral suddenly realized that in a genuinely free and fair Syrian election, an al-Qaeda franchisee would likely be elected.
Moderate, which is to say insincere, Muslims seem to be in short supply in Syria. So now, in Syria, we have a three cornered war, the Cathedral versus the Alawites versus the Sunnis, the Cathedral versus just about everyone in Syria.
Kissinger said of the Iran Iraq war
“It’s too bad they both can’t lose.”
Whereupon Reagan proceeded to make sure they both did lose.
I hope that in the Syrian war, all three of them will lose. Indeed, chances are, all three will lose. The Alawites have their backs against the wall, and no alternative but to hang on to power, so in the end, will probably do so, but pay a very high price for doing so. Everyone says that the Assad regime, which is to say Alawites, are on their last legs. Perhaps they are, but they have been on their last legs for a long time. The next most likely outcome is that Al Qaeda gets Syria, while progressives continue to piously pretend that progressivism is winning.
The Syrian government, which is to say the Alawites, agreed to hold free and fair elections, under supervision of China and Russia, but with the Alawites organizing the election. This was of course entirely unacceptable to the Cathedral, which wanted the Alawites to first be thoroughly removed from any power, and then elections held under the supervision of the Cathedral.
The Cathedral proposal resembles the “election” whereby it installed Aristide in Haiti. Not only are the Alawites unlikely to fall for that one, the Sunni majority are not going to fall for it either. If the Sunnis win, there is going to be a genuinely democratic election, one man, one vote, once, and then an Al Qaeda franchisee will be in charge, while New York Times optimistically rationalizes that Al Qaeda franchisees contain moderate elements.
