Last week, Matt Duss took to the pages of NRO to accuse Robert Spencer and David Horowitz of “Islamophobia” and ask that they essentially be ejected from polite society. Both Robert and David have responded ably, but the entire exchange triggered in my mind a thought experiment, one that I think shows the demonstrable absurdity of the Islamophobia slur:
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania — This morning marked a grim milestone in the fight against Christian terror in North America. Work crews cleaned up the remains of a suicide bomber and his victims after his self-detonation marked the 10,000th terrorist attack in ten years within the continental United States. The Camden, New Jersey–based Army of the Messiah immediately claimed responsibility. The bomber screamed the now-familiar “Praise Jesus!” just before he pressed the button, detonating his explosive vest while in a McDonald’s breakfast line.
At present, the United States government lists five states as “Crusader-dominated” in whole or in part. The Army of the Messiah rules New Jersey, the Knights Templar dominate Rhode Island, and the so-called “Crusader Regions” of mountainous Montana, Wyoming, Utah, and Colorado are utterly beyond federal control. In those regions, anti-blasphemy laws are enforced at rifle point, and Crusader militias have established training camps to support the California insurgency. These privately financed militias, often supported through Texas oil money and supplemented by Baptist telethons, are believed to number in the tens of thousands and are supported by the FBI as a counterweight to Mexican Catholicism.
In the meantime, hopes of a “Christian Spring” in Michigan were crushed when revolutionary Christian mobs attacked Muslims in Dearborn, and National Guard troops called in to keep the peace responded by crushing Muslim protestors beneath the wheels of their Humvees. Crusader parties were doing well in early polling in Ohio, Tennessee, and Kentucky, and in Florida a lonely protest marked the closing of the last synagogue — a once-thriving Jewish population having been completely expelled.
Overseas, the majority of the Christian diaspora is peaceful, but the Knights Templar are making significant inroads in British and French churches, and the Gulf States are still reeling from the destruction of the Burj Khalifa, formerly the world’s tallest building. Almost ten years after the coordinated truck bombing that took 3,000 lives and launched a decade of sustained combat, reconstruction is still not complete.
Honestly, we can scarcely imagine such a horror. In the United States, if a Tea Party member so much as makes an angry or obscene sign, we see the Left establishment denounce an entire alleged culture of hate. Yet this same establishment will turn with a vengeance on anyone who calls out an actual culture of hate, who warns our society of the danger presented by the spreading jihadist ideology that motivates thousands upon thousands of terrorist attacks.
The work of a “few extremists,” you say? Look again at the picture I paint above. Would you say that a “few extremists” could throw our own society into such chaos? No, it would take a mass movement, and a mass movement is exactly what we face in jihadist Islam.