The Two Crises

[Valin]

The Weekly Standard:

WILLIAM KRISTOL

Jan 19, 2015, Vol. 20, No. 18

 

It did not take the attack on Charlie Hebdo to reveal that the Islamic world has a terrible problem. For quite some time, that’s been clearer than day. This is not an assertion made from outside Islam or against Islam. On New Year’s Day, the president of Egypt, in a major speech, called for a “religious revolution” in Islam that would replace an embrace of violent jihad with “a more enlightened perspective.” “We have to think hard about what we are facing,” President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi told the clerics of Al-Azhar University in Cairo. He continued: “It’s inconceivable that the thinking that we hold most sacred should cause the entire Islamic world to be a source of anxiety, danger, killing, and destruction for the rest of the world. Impossible.”

 

(Snip)

 

The jihadist threat is real, and it must, obviously, be fought and defeated. But that raises another problem—not a problem with Islam, but a problem with the West.

 

We have lost our nerve. In recent years, the attitude of Barack Obama has prevailed over the spirit of Charlie Hebdo. The claims of sensitivity have trumped the attachment to freedom. Appeasement of jihad has supplanted the war on terror. Most fundamentally—let’s be honest—fear has overwhelmed courage.

 

(Snip)