Faith, Reason, and the War Against Jihadism

Liberal apologists should quit pussyfooting around and recognize the inherent corruption of Islam. So says Weigel (God’s Choice: Pope Benedict XVI and the Future of the Catholic Church, 2005, etc.), who finds America besieged from the outside by terrorists looking to take over the country and from within by secularists seemingly content to let them. In other words, readers looking for a nuanced, balanced analysis of current world affairs will be disappointed. Weigel divides his book into 15 lessons, presumably learned during the time he spent in right-wing think tanks rather than, say, traveling to the Middle East or speaking with Arab or Islamic scholars. The book is devoid of depictions of Muslims as anything other than people bent on the wholesale destruction of all Americans hold dear. If the goal is to understand Islamic terrorism, surely Weigel could come up with better sources than Pope Benedict XVI or neo-conservative scholars Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, three people from whom he borrows so much material that they should get ink in the acknowledgements. His “lessons” can be easily summarized: Islam is corrupt, Christianity is naturally better and unless Americans realize this and develop the required “cultural self-confidence,” they will lose and the Arabs will win. Any contrary evidence, from the Crusades to Abu Ghraib, is summarily dismissed as bellyaching from the blame-America crowd. Weigel’s analysis of the energy crisis is cogent, but too often he is blinded by narrow-minded parochialism. He is a natural prose stylist, and the book is pretty snappy—perhaps because his ideas are so simplistic. A slim, easy-to-read volume that will appeal to readers of the National Review.