The Only Effective ‘Counter Narrative’ to Islam Is Christianity

Matt Walsh:

A string of Islamic terrorist attacks in three different states over the weekend has given the media, Democrats and other leftists another chance to embarrass themselves. They’ve taken full advantage of the opportunity.

As you’ve heard by now, a Somali Muslim went on a stabbing spree in St. Cloud, Minnesota, shortly after bombs were detonated in neighborhoods in New York City and New Jersey. The terrorist in Minnesota, Dahir Adan, was shot dead by a good guy with a gun, and the terrorist responsible for the bombings, Ahmed Rahami, was captured by police Monday morning.

A few points about the reaction to these events:

1. The Godless Liberal West Does Not Have an Effective ‘Counter Narrative.’

Today, the White House proclaimed that we’re fighting a war of “narratives” with ISIS, and the key to defeating them is to craft a compelling “counter narrative.” One might suggest that the key to stopping ISIS is to kill them, not debate them, but I suppose that kind of language is distasteful. Instead, we must talk about narratives as if Islam and the West are locked in a global essay contest.

Of course, it is true that ISIS militants are motivated by a narrative, in the sense that a narrative is a story. But the story has a title, and the title is Islam. Therefore, the true counter narrative is Christianity. Indeed, Christianity is the only force that has shown the ability and willingness through the centuries to combat Islamic extremism. The West stood firm against the threat when the West was Christian. It has slowly folded and surrendered to it as it has become more secularized. That’s not a coincidence, by the way.

What we’re learning is that a godless, liberalized civilization does not have the energy or the strength to vanquish the barbarians at its gates, nor does it have any way to effectively compete with them on the battlefield of ideas. It’s true that we have to be able to not only kill the enemy but also win the hearts of those who might otherwise become the enemy. But modern liberalism is ill equipped for that challenge. It can’t win hearts because it doesn’t speak to the soul. It has no answers. It offers no direction. And that’s why cultures that adopt it have only drifted gradually into oblivion.

Islam offers answers, and it wins converts. They are the wrong answers, of course, but they are answers at least. Islam speaks about the soul, about eternity, about spirituality and about all of the other profound, transcendent things that liberalism denies or ignores, even though all human beings deeply hunger for them. Islam may not say the right things about those subjects, but because it says anything at all about them, it wins.

The West used to combat Islam’s answers with answers of its own. Christian answers. The Christian answer is the only one that could prevent the next potential suicide bomber from getting sucked into the lies of Islamic extremism. Outside of that, all we have to stop them are bombs and armies (both useful tools, to be sure).

If liberals think they can mitigate the necessity of bombs and armies by extolling the virtues of left-wing secularism, they are in for a rude awakening (or many additional rude awakenings, I should say). If you want to convert the enemy so you don’t have to kill him, Christianity is the only way. As we’ve discovered, a godless civilization cannot convert anyone to anything. All it has left, then, are the bombs and the armies. A Christian civilization can have bombs and armies too, but it also has the truth. And we’re finding out that it’s pretty hard to win a war of ideas when you’ve already given up on the truth.

2. The ‘Connection’ Is Impossible to Miss, Unless You’re Dumb or Dishonest.

For a couple of days afterwards, President Obama was too busy attending fundraisers to utter a single word about the rash of terror attacks on American soil. When he finally found the time to say something about them, he was careful to assure the nation that there is “no connection” between the stabbing assault and the bombings. Meanwhile, rational citizens can’t help but note at least one conspicuous relationship between the two: Islam.

If Adan had been Amish and Rahami a Baptist, it would make sense to say there’s nothing linking the two would-be mass murderers. Noticeably, however, the Amish and the Baptists aren’t often found setting bombs or stabbing random people in shopping malls.  Those are activities most often associated with Muslims for the rather compelling reason that Muslims are the ones most often doing them. At a certain point, it becomes impossible for an honest person to see a terrorist’s Islamism as some kind of irrelevant detail. And after approximately one and half millennia of Islamic violence, I would think we’ve reached that point by now. But perhaps we should give it another five centuries before we call it a pattern.

The Left is so desperate to separate Islamic terrorism from Islam that now they’ve apparently startedreferring to terrorist cells as “groups of lone wolves.” The idea that we face a coordinated and organized threat from people deeply fueled by a certain religion is unthinkable to them. Or at least it’s inconvenient to them, so they pretend it’s unthinkable.

They pretend they can’t see how Islamic teachings promote violence, although they have no problem seeing how certain kinds of “rhetoric” may lead to violence. In fact, Hillary Clinton investigated this weekend’s incidents and found the catalyst not in the Quran, but in the words of Donald Trump. According to Hillary and her ilk, terrorists are in no way motivated by commands in their own holy book to “strike off the heads” of unbelievers, but they may be motivated by the arbitrary ramblings of the Republican presidential candidate.

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