From its humble beginnings until the 12th century (the 1139 Second Lateran Council) -- the golden years of Catholicism -- celibacy wasn’t a condition for the priesthood. Since then more than a million children (conservative estimate) have been sexually abused by pedophile priests. Pope Francis was alleged to have said that 2% of all priests (the leprosy within the church) are pedophiles.

With all due respect to the sum of facts and arguments eloquently laid out by the cherry-picker, the very existence of jihadism and ISIS tells more about human nature than the Quran. The real issue driving the clash of civilizations is power. Islam is on the wane, and the old guard, comprised of literalists and androcentrics, are desperately trying to cling to power: the Em-pyre Strikes Back.

Does it not reflect poorly on the cognitively challenged West if it can’t distinguish between good and bad Muslims, between ally and enemy? We are not at war with the world’s billion Muslims, but with a fringe group of frustrated, renegade misfits looking for a cause. The ISIS declaration of establishing a world wide Caliphate is fatuous if not outright delusional, and the witless West has bought into this narrative, into ISIS’s megalomaniacal terms of reference even though not an inch of western territory has been ceded, and never will. Empowered by the Internet and social media (western inventions), ISIS fomented terrorism is doubtlessly lethal, costly and psychologically destabilizing but it is not waging war in any real sense.

If the pleasure principle remains the great predictor of human behaviour, Islam cannot compete with secularism, western hedonism. With instant electronic access to the pleasure zones of the world, fewer and fewer Muslims are there for their holy texts. Holy writs and rules notwithstanding, freedom is the pain no one can refuse, and once enjoyed cannot be wished away. “Although everybody knew it as freedom from the laws of Islam, no one was quite sure what else Westernization was good for,” writes Ohran Pamuk in Istanbul: Memories and the City.

With secularism in full ascendency (all toll roads lead to the bacchanalia), this turning away from God to the gods, for the Muslim and not the Christian, will be necessarily fraught with peril, and there will be casualties, some of whom will be vulnerable to radicalization. In the West, this turning away -- that began with the separation of Church and state -- was very gradual, when authority was incrementally devolved from God to “the law,” at which point if there was no hiding from God you could always circumvent or rewrite the law. In Islam, religion and law have always been intricately intertwined, and there is no avoiding the inner turmoil and dislocation that ensue when abruptly confronted with (by consent) a radically dissimilar value system. In the wake of this tectonic collision between East and West, a huge nowhere zone must arise, where the nowhere men (the rootless and disenfranchised) gather, sandwiched between the past and modernity, torn between the call of the muezzin during the day and Happy Hour at night. Coming to their rescue, their succour, providing them with purpose, self-esteem and community, is the cherry-picking jihadist for whom the Quran is merely a means to an end, the birth of nation, the noble struggle for survival in the face of insurmountable odds.

Be chary of cherry-pickers from both sides of the aisle; 82% of all terrorist victims are Muslims .



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