(July 22, 2016 at 1:29 pm)Excited Penguin Wrote: Except it's not about humiliating them militarily, but ideologically. You have to fight their ideas first, discredit their warped worldview - that's how you win this fight first and foremost.
To me military victory and ideological victory must happen. Defeating the ideology is particularly thorny with Islam. I've grown very tired of hearing that "most Muslims are peaceful." That's a truth that only goes so far. To me that's irrelevant. I do business with many Muslim vendors. I doubt they are making bombs in their basements. At the same time it doesn't serve anyone's interest, including assimilated Muslims, to pretend that Islam the religion, as it is most commonly practiced worldwide, isn't a uniquely dangerous political threat.
How does a pluralistic Western culture, in which devout Muslims should feel welcome, reject just the political aspirations of Islam without being seen as a form of religious intolerance? I don't really know. It's hard to parse out the political proscriptions within Islam from religious mandates that apply only to believers. Some people seem to think this is something the adherents of Islam and their leaders need to work out from within. I'm pretty sure that is already quietly happening. That said, I'm not convinced that the rest of us can just assume that someday soon Islam will go through its own versions of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation.
