In the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris, I've heard many people worrying that radical Islamic terrorism is the greatest threat to the stability and future of our civilization. These fears certainly seem warranted, especially after watching a gang of armed Muslim invaders turn a major Western city into a war zone for several hours on a Friday night.

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You might feel even more anxious about the prospect of our society falling into the hands of the militant Muslim barbarians when you consider the way many of our "leaders" have responded to the incident. There's been, of course, the outrageous moral relativizing, illustrated most psychotically by a Minnesota Democrat, Dan Kimmel, who sent out a Tweet warning everyone not to be so dismissive and judgmental of the Islamic State. Kimmel theorized that "ISIS isn't necessarily evil," they're just "doing what they think is best for their community." Some people "do what's best for their communities" by, like, recycling and volunteering at soup kitchens and stuff, while others "do what's best for their communities" by massacring hundreds of innocent civilians in a town thousands of miles away from their communities. One strategy can't be judged more legitimate or worthwhile than the other, according to the brilliant Mr. Kimmel.

This undated file image posted on a militant website Jan. 14, 2014, shows fighters from the al Qaeda-linked Islamic State marching in Raqqa, Syria. (AP Photo/militant website, File)

Not to be out-dumbed, there's also been the "global warming is worse" shtick, advanced very forcefully by beloved Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders on Saturday. Bernie insisted that, although terrorists are blowing up planes and setting off bombs in crowded streets and laying siege to Western metropolises to execute women and children, the greatest threat to our security is still climate change. If we want to tackle terrorism, Bernie claims, we have to do something about the fact that it gets kind of hot over there in the Middle East. I suppose the sand and the heat might send even reasonable men over the edge.

He also mentioned joblessness as a factor. Warm temperatures and unemployment, in Bernie's estimation, explain the 1,400-year-long scourge of Islamic brutality. Naturally, many mainstream liberal publications came to Bernie's defense, fully endorsing the notion that we should fear the weather more than the jihadist army hoping to overthrow Western civilization and bring about the apocalypse.

Even dumber, there's been the "blame it on Bush/America/Islamophobia/the boogeyman" thing. Many leftists have spent the days after the attack whining that the real threat to the world are the mean folks who might be, at this point, a bit wary of Muslims. Because it's clearly unreasonable to feel at all uneasy about a group of human beings who've been waging violent Jihad against everyone since the year 600. Islamophobia, the liberals call it. Others might just call it an observation.

On social media, from what I've seen, leftists have been throwing random assortments of excuses at the wall just to see what will stick. Whatever happens, they can't admit that Muslim terrorists choose to do evil of their own free will, much less can they admit that perhaps the terrorists' religion has a way of encouraging such choices.

Dumbest of all, there's been the "let's stop terrorism by proving how nice we are by opening our doors to a flood of Third World Muslim migrants" spiel. After reiterating his reassurance that the Islamic State is "contained," Obama declared Monday that he still plans to invite an unchecked flow of potentially radicalized Muslim men through our borders, despite the fact that the Islamic State has already announced its intentions to smuggle terrorists into Western countries under the guise of refugees seeking asylum.

It wasn't enough for Obama to spend years fomenting instability and insurrection across the Middle East; it wasn't enough for him to actively arm and equip Muslim militants in Syria; it wasn't enough for him to stumble like a drunkard from one foreign policy blunder to another — now he wants to swing open the gates and invite the Middle East into our neighborhoods. To make matters worse, it seems to be particularly the Muslim Middle East that he wants. So far, there have been about 2,000 Muslims brought into the United States versus 50 Christians. But never mind, according to many liberals, if we emphasize our own national security when considering what to do about the refugees, we'll only be creating more terrorism. If we don't do what the Muslim world wants, they might kill us, and it will be our fault. But if we do what they want and they kill us anyway, it's still our fault.

It makes sense that someone might look at this sort of squishy, weak-willed cowardice on the part of our progressive culture and fret that we lack the collective spine and the resolve to stand up to Muslim aggression. Sure, our soldiers can, but do they fight for a people and a government who share their courage and fortitude? Not hardly. Many of our leaders — the Democrats, anyway — don't even have the guts to identify Islamic terrorism as Islamic terrorism. How can we trust them to defeat an evil they won't even acknowledge in the first place?

If a white cop kills a black criminal, Obama will not hesitate to link the (usually justified) killing to the entire white race. But when scores of radicalized savages shoot, stab, explode, burn, drown, decapitate, rape, lynch, stone, and otherwise butcher hundreds of innocents every day in the name of a particular religion, Obama will not name that religion, except to attack those who criticize it. Remember, this is the man who actually stood in front of the UN a couple of years ago and said, "The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam." To call this mere "political correctness" just doesn't cut it. It's quite a bit more insidious, more fearful and more traitorous than that.

A Twitter follower reminded me of a quote from the French poet Paul Valery:

Your ideas are terrifying and your hearts are faint. Your acts of pity and cruelty are absurd, committed with no calm, as if they were irresistible. Finally, you fear blood more and more. Blood and time.

Terrifying ideas and faint hearts. That is progressivism in a nutshell.

So should we see radical Islam as the greatest threat to our country, especially as we compare its vicious but focused cruelty to our culture's idiocy and apathy and shiftlessness? No. The situation is worse than that, I'm afraid. Indeed, I'd say we were in pretty good shape if the potential death and destruction of our civilization lurked only outside of it, plotting ways to infiltrate our ranks (which isn't difficult, considering the borders are wide open) and murder us all. There have always been external threats and there always will be. And when the external threat is a collection of primitive, desert-dwelling, archaic brutes who have machine guns and tanks only because Obama gave the weapons to them, we should be pretty confident that we can prevail.

But there's a problem. The great threat to our civilization, and the thing that primarily makes it susceptible to other threats like the Islamic State, comes from within: liberalism. Or leftism. Or secular satanism, as I've taken to calling it. Whatever label you use, this godless religion of self-worship and relativism, this culture of death, this ideology of falsehood and insanity, remains the first and most urgent menace we face as a society and a civilization.

It's killed far more people, too. Secular satanism might not propel people to murder the innocent with guns and knives (although sometimes it does have that effect), but it moves us, all the same, to justify, propagate, legalize, fund, promote, celebrate and commit the mass slaughter of over a million children every single year. These babies are not executed in spectacular, attention-grabbing style like the victims in Paris, but they are executed nonetheless. Right down the road from you, in fact, in that little nondescript building maybe attached to a shopping center, usually positioned strategically close to a high school or community college. Those murders are just as terrible, just as unjustified, just as terrifying, and the people who carry them out — the "doctors," we ironically call them — are morally indistinguishable from Islamic State operatives. If anything, the abortionist is worse. At least Muslim terrorists think they're doing the hideous will of a false god. Abortionists are just murdering humans because it gives them a paycheck and something to do. At any rate, one thing is for sure: The Islamic State hasn't come close to matching the abortion industry's body count in a given year, and I doubt it ever will.

Secular satanism doesn't theatrically announce its plans to destroy the West like Jihadists tend to do. Instead, it drives our civilization to suicide. The institution of the family is in shambles, marriage has been subverted, gender redefined, our education system rapidly turning the next generation into self-obsessed little melting snowflakes, bereft of human reason and incapable of critical thought. This is not the work of radical Islam, although I'm sure it would be pleased to take credit for these devastating victories.

This image made from a video released Feb. 15, 2015, by militants in Libya claiming loyalty to the Islamic State group shows Egyptian Coptic Christians in orange jumpsuits being led along a beach, each accompanied by a masked militant. Later in the video, the men are made to kneel and one militant addresses the camera in English before the men are simultaneously beheaded. (AP)

Christians here are not blown to pieces or burned alive for practicing their faith, yet many have been convinced to abandon their beliefs anyway. While the government begins its efforts to criminalize Christianity, it meets flimsy resistance because most of our Christians aren't, well, Christian. They weren't scared away from their churches under threat of torture and dismemberment — no, we're much too civilized for that; we treat only babies in that manner around here — but they were coaxed away with promises of greater comfort, more convenience and a more adventurous and liberating sex life.

Terrorists cannot separate the Christian from his Christianity in the Middle East no matter how hard they try. All they can do is kill him, and the Christian will annoy them right to the end by reciting the "Our Father" and staring at his executioners with steely and confident resolve while they load their rifles and take aim.

But here, different ideological forces have found a cleaner and more effective method. They say to the Christian, "Hey, drop your cross, come to this side, and you can watch porn, have sex outside of marriage and live how you want without feeling bad about it" — and millions of our pitiful faithful scamper over without a moment's hesitation.

In the end, the evil of the Islamic militant and the secular satanist is the same — in that it's evil either way. When it comes down to it, all evil is made up of some combination of selfishness, malice and greed, and ever since the death and resurrection of Christ, almost all evil ideological forces have been primarily motivated by a hatred for Christianity. Islam hates the West because it is (or used to be) Christian, and liberalism hates it for the same reason. This explains liberalism's odd admiration for fundamentalist Islam. They seem to agree on the most essential point.

My intention isn't to diminish the threat of radical Islam but to remind you that, even if you're rightly concerned about the barbarians at the gates, you shouldn't let that distract you from the spiritual cancer already in our bloodstream. One might cause significant damage to our body, but the other will eat our soul. America's soul has been under attack for many decades, and nowadays it's hard to tell if it has much of one left at all. Soulless empires are vulnerable to outside invasion — the Romans taught us that 1,500 years ago — but the invaders are invading only a shell. What's inside has already been destroyed and left to rot and die.

Liberalism has done to America what no Muslim terrorist army ever could. At some point we have to realize that, and then we can begin to fight the spiritual battle as well, which is where the war must (and will) ultimately be won.