There is one thing that the Jihad has reliably depended on in the late 20th century, it isn't a technological or a strategic factor, but us. Because the Jihad could not be what it is without the passive collaboration and active cooperation of the civilized world.
When the West left the Middle East it left behind the tools of its own undoing, the oil industry that would funnel untold billions into the Jihadi war chest, the engineering and military training to wage war and the open borders that permit the terrorists easy access and even residency in our countries, but worst of all was what the West took along, guilt.
When the Arab world got done rummaging through ash heaps of Nazism and Communism for ideologies their dictators could adapt to suit their needs, the old way of Mohammed was still waiting there ready to be embraced. And they embraced it with a vengeance even as the West had come down with a fever that was one part Rousseau, one part Marx and one part Gandhi, rolling the noble savage's rejection of civilization, socialist tyranny and pacifism into one toxic bundle.
Where the Jihadis were happy enough to use our systems of technology and organizations, we were busy learning to get in touch with our feelings, hug the whales and sing Kumbaya. And we're singing it still even in the face of decades of terrorism, reaching out to find the human face underneath the Keffiyah certain that the right tone rather than the right bullet is what it will take to end the violence. Having embraced guilt and a sense of morality and futility we have yet to even relearn how to fight for our lives.
9/11 was a slap in the face for the West, a slap it reeled from and then reeled right back into the same patterns, the soothing embrace of bureaucracy and consumerism and of course self-righteous pacifism on one side and guilt ridden socialism on the other. Some woke up on that day and are still awake, but most have gone to sleep again forgetting that 9/11 was not a catastrophe but a warning shot of what is yet to come.
While the West drowsed, the East armed. The Western oil companies that had served as the tools of colonialism were nationalized, oil money flowed but it flowed into limited hands. Population pressures combined with economic limitations created a population of frustrated and angry young men who had the potential to overthrow their governments. Instead their governments directed them at us, while putting on their best innocent faces when our diplomats came calling. What could they be expected to do? Extremism was a problem, of course it was only a problem when it was directed at them.
The West had left the Middle East and like Prometheus had given fire to those who should not have it, and then came the vultures flying jet planes and bearing bombs, Western technology jury rigged clumsily to serve their needs. While the West was busy marinating in its own guilt over colonialism, it had forgotten that colonialism was the extension of a thousand year long struggle between civilizations, and that not more than half a millennium ago it had not been so securely on the winning side of the equation. And that is the problem with history, it has a way of coming around again.
While the Children of the West cultivated short memories, the Children of the East cultivated long ones, looking up from the heaps of rubble and the oil wells, the slums of Cairo and the palaces of Ridyah to imagine a glorious past and envision a glorious future, one with no room in it for Kumbayah singers except as slaves. But it is not a future they could hope to achieve except with their complacent help.
It takes a great deal of apathy, corruption and loss of morale for the barbarians to not only reach the gates but walk through them and set up shop in the main plaza. That is the Jihad we have made, with oil money and guest workers, with liberal platitudes and an unwillingness to pass judgment even on the killers of our fellow citizens, with the technology and training we put in their hands and the power we have given them and continue giving them day after day to kill us.
It is doubtful that even a single terrorist attack has occurred except through the complacency and weakness of civilized country after country which has refused to take the threat seriously and put it down for good. Yesterday the terrorists set off bombs, today they import their beliefs and make them superior to ours, tomorrow they run for President. It's a simple straight line, an arrow pointing directly at the heart of not simply buildings or physical structures, but the values of a Republic. A people that are taught to tolerate Jihad have already become slaves and all but in name are willing to submit.
Tolerance has become another name for submission, the way of the liberal as the way of the Dhimmi and acceptance has become well, acceptance. This is the Jihad we made while we shopped for consumer electronics, worried about the regulations that the socialist bureaucracies had enmeshed every part of our daily lives and drove back and forth dropping endless coins into the Haram piggy banks of the Sheikhs and Imams who would send forth their dispossessed sons from the East to the West in a bid to slaughter us and rule over us.
This is the war we fight now and the question is not yet whether we can win it, but whether we can even learn to fight.
