I usually don’t try to summarize three page articles, but this one is important, so after you read this post, please follow the link to the original article.  It is worth your time.

On Saturday, Andrew McCarthy posted an article at National Review entitled, “The OIC and the Caliphate.”  The OIC is the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a group of 57 members (56 nations and the Palestinian authority) formed to pursue the interests of the world’s Muslims. 

Mr. McCarthy quotes some of the statements by the OIC leaders:

“Muslims are taught to think of themselves as a community, a single Muslim Nation. “I say let this land burn. I say let this land go up in smoke,” Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini famously said of his own country in 1980, even as he consolidated his power there, even as he made Iran the point of his revolutionary spear. “We do not worship Iran, we worship Allah.” Muslims were not interested in maintaining the Westphalian system of nation states. According to Khomeini, who was then regarded by East and West as Islam’s most consequential voice, any country, including his own, could be sacrificed in service of the doctrinal imperative that “Islam emerges triumphant in the rest of the world.””

The OIC for all intents and purposes is a caliphate–a religious state comprised of many states.  A caliphate functions under Sharia law.  Today the caliphate is an ideal, historically it was an actual state:

“The caliphate is an ideal now, much like the competing ideal of a freedom said to be the yearning of every human heart. Unlike the latter ideal, the caliphate had, for centuries, a concrete existence. It was formally dissolved in 1924, a signal step in Kemal Atatürk’s purge of Islam from public life in Turkey. Atatürk, too, thought he had an early line on the End of History. One wonders what he’d make of Erdogan’s rising Islamist Turkey.”

Again Mr. McCarthy reminds us of the history of Islam:

“”Individual Muslims,” Churchill wrote at the turn of the century, demonstrated many “splendid qualities.” That, however, did not mean Islam was splendid or that its principles were consonant with Western principles. To the contrary, Churchill opined, “No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.” Boxed in by rigid sharia, Islam could only “paralyse the social development of those who follow it.” Reason had evolved the West, but Islam had revoked reason’s license in the tenth century, closing its “gates of ijtihad” — its short-lived tradition of introspection. Yet, sharia’s rigidity did not render Islam “moribund.” Churchill recognized the power of the caliphate, of the hegemonic vision. “Mohammedanism,” he concluded, remained “a militant and proselytising faith.””

Islam is not interesting in co-existing with other religious or political systems:

“…The Cairo Declaration boasts that Allah has made the Islamic ummah “the best community . . . which gave humanity a universal and well-balanced civilization.” It is the “historical role” of the ummah to “civilize” the rest of the world — not the other way around.”

Those who believe that the west can make peace with Islam are sadly mistaken.  Please read the entire article for a better understanding of the historic conflict we now find ourselves engaged in.