Now that President George W. Bush has significantly upgraded his ‘War on Terror’, from simply a "clash of civilisations" to a war for "civilisation" itself, it is time to reflect on just what sort of a civilisation we are defending. By any standard, and whether or not the war is regarded as a struggle for land or ideas, western civilisation—or at least, American civilisation—is losing in the Middle East, in Asia, Africa, and in a good deal of Europe.
According to his speechwriter, “the sight of an old man pulling the election lever [except in Florida, we assume], girls enrolling in schools, or families worshipping God in their own traditions… the way of life enjoyed by free nations… for the possibility that good and decent people across the Middle East can raise up societies based on freedom and tolerance and personal dignity.”
I'm all for these things too, as well as apple pie, home ownership, private enterprise and the right to follow whatever football code one likes. But it's the increasing disconnection between what we say we are fighting for and what we actually seem to be fighting for, not to mention the increasing hysteria of those who insist that the price of maintaining our freedoms is the truncation of those very freedoms, which make me, and lots of others, wonder whether this is a war from which we should abstain.
“They form,” he says, “a global network of extremists who are driven by a perverted vision of Islam—a totalitarian ideology that hates freedom, rejects tolerance, and despises all dissent… their goal is to build a radical Islamist empire where women are prisoners in their homes, men are beaten for missing prayer meetings, and terrorists have a safe haven to plan and launch attacks on America and other civilised nations.”
Yet the evidence of our civilisation teetering on the brink is not very great, while the evidence against those on "our side" who would brutalise our culture and our freedoms, unconcerned about the means we use to defend our remaining freedoms, is getting increasingly substantial.
This is not to deny that there are terrorists in our midst, or a real threat of terrorist incidents, even in Australia. It is still of the essence of our society that the overwhelming proportion of Australians, including the overwhelming proportion of our Muslim Australians, reject and repudiate the ideology of our terrorists, and that