Interesting New Blog

Just came across this new blog recently that looks intriguing. It's examining in very clear terms the basis of Western civilization -- things everyone should be taught early, but aren't -- and how it relates to current events.



For example:

Jews brought the Law to the West, and with the Law came the idea of a man standing in relation to his God, with Whom he had a covenant, and Whose ordinances he was bound to obey. In that sense, the individual is the smallest unit of our human race to be judged by God on the basis of the Law.



The Greek innovation is reason, which looks to the world as an object separate from the self, an object that can be analyzed and understood by rational means. The Analyzer and Ratiocinator is the individual.



But the force which combined these two threads was Christianity, which brought the Law to Aristotle. In the teachings of Christ it becomes clear that the individual and his conscience are distinct in the eyes of God (Matthew 6:5-6 KJV)...



This individual, in unmediated communion with God, possesses those natural rights which were recognized in the Declaration of Independence. He is granted these rights by his Creator, and they cannot be taken away by men.



The individual is the cornerstone of the West, on whom the structure of its civilization depends. The great experiment in Iraq depends for its success on the emergence of something similar in Mesopotamia.

This is the "neoconservative" solution to the "root cause" of Islamic Jihad, aka "terror".



Ok. Maybe it sounds crazy, or at the very least improbable and daunting. But what, you got a better solution?



And no, pixie dust that makes the whole globe suddenly develop a magical hydrogen economy isn't a realistic answer. Something doable in the next 10-20 years, please. Wake me if we decide to build 1,000 new nuclear reactors.



The blog begins with the observation:

From our perspective at the dawn of the 21st century it is hard to realize that a little more than three centuries ago the whole of Christian civilization was threatened. When the Turks stood at the Gates of Vienna it seemed that all of Europe would be overrun by the legions of the Prophet.



This war never ended. While many individual treaties were made between various states over the centuries, no truce was ever declared between Islam and the infidels, and no permanent peace was established (as General Gordon discovered at Khartoum in 1885).

The authors identify the current GWOT as actually the Third Wave of Islamic Jihad:

The thesis of this blog is that, like it or not, we are in a religious war.

Might as well get used to it.



Check out the rest at "Gates of Vienna".