The leadership of the West is desperate to avoid naming or recognizing our obvious, declared enemy: Islam. Why?

The instant that the essentially secular West admits that Islam is its implacable foe – which obviously it is, since Islam is implacably inimical to every other system of thought or action whatever – it admits that there is a religion that it cannot admit without committing cultural suicide.

To admit Islam is to delete the West. It is to reject the Enlightenment, and Christianity, and our Classical heritage, and indeed everything else whatever, other than Islam.

But then, to reject Islam is to reject the Enlightenment notion of religious tolerance, which has for the last three centuries or so seemed – seemed, I emphasize – to characterize the West essentially. It is thus to reject the Enlightenment altogether, and to return again to an established religion, somehow defined. Given the history of the West, that established religion is bound to be Orthodox Catholic Christianity (with, perhaps, other Christian and quasi-Christian sects tolerated and discouraged (and encouraged to just throw in the towel, for Heaven’s sake, and perhaps to be welcomed as a distinct but not separate rite) rather than actively persecuted).

Islam is the death of liberalism, one way or another. Either liberalism dies with the West and the embrace of Islam, or it dies with the rejection of Islam and the embrace of the Christian Tradition of the West.

The logic of this choice is quite digital. There is no escaping it. Either way, the West qua secular is doomed. No wonder it wants to avoid confronting the quandary as long as possible.