EDITORIAL: The Islamic tsunami

OPINION:

Is an Islamic tidal wave coming? “There is a plan to take over Western civilization,” warns David Rubin, “and we need to recognize it for what it is.” Mr. Rubin is a native New Yorker who served as mayor of the Israeli town of Shiloh. He spoke to The Washington Times about his new book, “The Islamic Tsunami: Israel and America in the Age of Obama” (2010, Shiloh Israel Press).

According to Mr. Rubin, the first wave of the tsunami is Islamic terrorism, which he says is “a strategy intended to intimidate people so they won’t speak out when the second wave hits.” Mr. Rubin has firsthand experience with terrorist violence; he and his 3-year-old son, “Ruby” Rubin, were wounded in a Dec. 18, 2001, terrorist attack in Jerusalem. Afterward, he established the Shiloh Israel Children’s Fund dedicated to helping relieve the trauma suffered by child victims of terrorism.

The second and more threatening wave is the creeping takeover of Western political and social institutions, something Mr. Rubin calls the “silent tsunami.” The spearhead of this movement is “collusion between Islamic ideologues and the far left to promote the idea of moral relativism,” he said, “that all values and ideologies are equal. But they are not. Americans have never believed this.”

One dangerous manifestation of this viewpoint is the fashionable intellectual movement to infiltrate Shariah law interpretations into American jurisprudence, something for which there is no need and no precedent and which is antithetical to American norms and traditions. The notion of creating a “Shariah compliant” U.S. Constitution is really a way of ending the American ideal.

Confronting the growing threat to Western civilization first involves admitting the problem exists, something President Obama not only refuses to do but strongly denies. The administration has censored any discussion of the problem in these terms within the government, preferring to focus on ill-defined “violent extremism” when the real extremist threat is only partly violent and wholly Islamicist. Mr. Rubin notes that Mr. Obama’s vaunted outreach effort to the world’s Muslims has been “a total failure in generating respect for the Judeo-Christian world.” The president keeps reaching out, but Islam is not reaching back.

Instead of pandering to Islam in hopes that somehow the threat will go away, Mr. Rubin says the United States needs to rediscover its roots. “The United States is a country built on Biblical foundations,” he said. “The United States needs to cease apologizing for what it is and where it comes from.” That America is a pluralistic nation in which people from many cultures may live, work and flourish doesn’t overshadow the fact that the country was founded on a specific set of ideals that enabled this pluralistic culture to take root. Islamism constitutes a mortal threat to those ideals, just as fascism and communism did for previous generations.

Despite what moral relativists believe, all belief systems are not created equal. A moral defense of the American ideal is possible and increasingly necessary. Mr. Rubin believes Americans “do not have to be ashamed” of the religious basis of the country’s founding. “America is built on freedom of worship, but of a particular religious root,” he says. The United States has to reclaim and defend the civilization on which it is based or risk declining into second-rate status and being overwhelmed by the tsunami steadily building on the horizon.