The more I read, the more I watch television and follow the news, the more convinced I am that we will not be free of the scourge of terror in my lifetime—and probably not in yours, either. The only thing that will dampen terror down is the natural tendency of human beings to adapt. We all know that a certain number of people are going to be killed by lightning every year, and yet we still go out in the rain. We lose more lives to homicides in this country than we do to terrorist acts. We lose more lives to murder every year, in any one of our major cities, than we lost in the entire Iraq war to date. People will keep on flying. Cancellations of flights due to terror are minuscule compared to cancellations from weather and equipment failure.
As time goes by, Americans will adapt their lives and go on about their business, realizing that there are more ways to get killed than terrorism. We will become a little more observant. We will become a little more efficient at catching terrorists. We will tire of seeing terror lead off the news and it will drift back in the pages of the newspapers. But terror will not go away, because it never has.
As we enter the 21st century, we should realize that the century just past was perhaps the worst in the history of man in terms of lives lost to terror. We had two world wars, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, the Gulf War, and various other skirmishes that cost millions of lives. Even more lives were lost as governments killed and starved their own populations, while most of the world was blissfully unaware. From China to Russia to Germany to Africa, genocide has come close to wiping out whole populations. The toll in human life and suffering is enough to make your mind reel.
People used to say that more people had been killed in religious wars than any other kind. That is no longer true, if it ever was. The utopian ideas of totalitarian regimes have killed people in their millions, trying to improve the race. Even discounting wars, the hard, cold fact is that, in the last 100 years, a number close to the population of the United States died who need not have died at all. They died because of the stupidity or rank evil of the people who took control of their governments. There is a spirit of insanity abroad in the world. It has been here for a very long time and will still be here tomorrow, and the day after that. It is a destructive, life-hating spirit. How far back does it go? It started with Cain. It is staggering when you realize that the first man ever born of a woman, turned out to be a murderer. We’ll find the story in Genesis, chapter 4.
==============
Every time an airliner goes down, the first thing we want to know is: Was it a bomb? You can visualize the press conference and the questions from reporters. "Was it a bomb?" If not, "Was it a missile?" And, of course, the unsaid question: "Was it an Arab terrorist that caused the crash?" I think it would be fair to say that the Islamic fundamentalists in this world have gotten our attention. But who are these people? What do they want and why are they mad at us?
Gerald Seib, in the Wall Street Journal writes, "the U.S. is a target not because of something that it has or hasn’t done, but simply because it exists." He’s right, but not many people understand that—and even fewer seem to understand why it would be so.
On this program, we’ve been talking about the Arab people, their religion, and why it is that we are on a collision course with some of those people. In the West, we’re accustomed to separating religion and politics—religion is over here and politics over there. They are two different parts of our lives, compartmentalized. Some people even seem to be a little offended by the idea that religious people should attempt to exercise influence in the political arena. "Keep your church out of politics", they say. The separation of church and state are fundamental values in our constitutional system.
Islam is not like that at all. Islam draws no distinction between the religious and temporal areas of life and therefore, by definition, the Islamic state is a religious state. Hard to get your mind around, isn’t it, when you’re used to living in a secular state—where religion is out there somewhere—to think in terms of a religious state. Muslims, in general, do not believe that men can be made righteous just by moral example or intellectual persuasion. They consider that force may also be necessary. Individual conversions are a by-product that occurs when the power structure passes into the hands of the Islamic community.
Classical Islamic doctrine holds that the world is divisible into three parts: the zone of Islam, the zone of peace (that is, those countries with whom they have peace treaties), and the zone of war—that’s the rest of the world. Most of us have heard the word jihad, but not that many understand precisely what it means. Jihad is the holy struggle of Islam to gain political control over the affairs of society. They intend to run society according to the holy principles of Islamic law. What we Christians, I think, fail to understand about Islam is that its concerned not only with regulating man’s relationship with God through conscience, but with regulating human relationships in society, as well. The dual religious and social character of Islam sees itself as commissioned by God to bring its value system to the world through the jihad. And we, my friends, are part of that "rest of the world" which is the object of jihad.
