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Does Hizbullah Have a Time Machine We Don’t Know About?

But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds […]

But what is lost sight of is the central moral issue of our times: a humane democracy mired in an asymmetrical war is trying to protect itself against terrorists from the 7th century, while under the scrutiny of a corrupt world that needs oil, is largely anti-Semitic and deathly afraid of Islamic terrorists, and finds psychic enjoyment in seeing successful Western societies under duress.

In short, if we wish to learn what was going on in Europe in 1938, just look around. ~Victor Davis Hanson

Via Rod Dreher

Pardon the flip question in the title, but as someone who studies the seventh century in particular I do sometimes grow tired of hearing how we are fighting people from the middle ages or from the seventh century.  They are actually from our own time, as hard as it may be to believe.  I suppose I know what people who say this are trying to say: they are backwards, they have values from “the dark ages,” etc. 

But even when I realise that they are trying (and failing) to say this, I am unimpressed, because there is nothing more modern than guerrilla insurgents and ideological terrorism.  While Islam has been violent since its inception, and violence is written into its genes, so to speak, it is obscure at best to say that Israel or anyone else is fighting people from the seventh century, as if Muhammad himself were firing off the Katyushas (to a Muslim audience, this would make Hizbullah look even better than it already does!).  In fact, most Islamic revival movements desperately seek to restore the “purity” and “nobility” of the original Islam of the seventh century, so referring to Hizbullah as being from the seventh century is probably unwittingly a compliment of the highest order.  (That this sort of rhetoric about the medievalism of our enemies is often followed by invocations of the glories of Cordoba and the wonders of the Islamic Golden Age, which were nothing if not medieval, only makes things worse.)  

If it were literally true that the terrorists were from the seventh century, the modern folks ought to have a notable military advantage over people who would have to be getting up there in years and who would still not have figured out gunpowder.  It is a sloppy, stupid expression, the sort that I have come to expect from Mr. Hanson and many of his colleagues, because it betrays the sloppy thinking that leads them to conclude that we are re-living 1938 or 636 or whichever year is most convenient for scaring thinking people into quiet submission and acquiescence to an excessive military campaign.  This campaign has done nothing so much as to renew in the eyes of the Arab world Hizbullah’s hitherto defunct claim to be a resistance movement, thus doing more long-term damage to the interests of the “humane democracy” and more long-term good for those time-travelling terrorists than any “appeasement” (the word Mr. Hanson and many associates use for any policy that does not involve bombing someone) could have done.  Indeed, the deaths of approximately 900 civilians and the displacement of perhaps as many as one million Lebanese is so startling an example of overkill and overreaction to the kidnapping of two soldiers that Hanson must have recourse to the old remedy of shouting appeasement, because even he must know that the cause for which he is shilling has lost what honour it had.

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