[By Daniel Greenfield, crossposted from Sultan Knish.]

At the start of the new year, the Governor of Punjab was murdered because he had opposed the call by Pakistan's Islamists to execute a Christian woman on false blasphemy charges arising out of her harassment by her Muslim neighbors. The murderer was one of his own security personnel. Around the same time in Egypt, security forces withdrew from a Coptic church, and an hour later a car bomb went off killing 21 and injuring a 100 more. And this was not the first time security forces had pulled back before an attack on a church.

The first order of business was to muddy the waters. The Egyptian government treated it as a national attack on Egypt by foreigners. The Obama White House issued statements falsely claiming that both Christians and Muslims were casualties of the Alexandria attack. Both avoided clearly identifying either the victims of the perpetrators or addressing the Muslim mobs chanting Allah Akbar while the dead burned. When the Burqa is lifted long enough to identify the attackers as Muslims, it will be only to describe them as "extremists". But it also clear that these "extremists" are represented in the security forces of both countries. Which once again raises the question of just what is an extremist anyway.

Much as the left likes to believe that Islamic terrorism is the work of traumatized starving teenagers, it's actually conducted by the sons of the middle and upper classes of the Muslim world. Osama bin Laden was a very wealthy man, the scion of one of the region's most powerful families who had been adopted into the Saudi royal family. Anwar Al-Awlaki is the son of one the most powerful families in Yemen. Yasser Arafat was part of the Husseini clan, again the most prominent area family, whose leading member was the Nazi affiliated Mufti of Jerusalem. The leaders of the "extremists" turn out to be local regional leaders as well. Calling them extremists makes as little sense as calling Hitler and the Nazi party extremists. On some political scale, they might be extremists, but that doesn't mean that their views were unrepresentative regionally. If that were the case, their cause would have been doomed from the start.

Muslim terrorists are not a small bunch of loonies with a plan that can't possibly succeed, though the opponents of the War on Terror love to characterize them that way. They're a loosely affiliated global coalition of Muslim leaders, warlords, preachers, politicians, generals and tribes who are fighting to set up a global theocracy. Like the Nazis, their perfect social system is ultimately doomed to fall apart from its own unworkability, but by the time that happens, there may be no one left to rebuild civilization from the ruins of the Caliphate.

Within the Muslim world, terrorism is not a fringe event, but an inside job. Muslim terrorists are the 'privateers' of their culture. Raiders who carry out attacks, with the explicit or implicit support and permission of states and political factions. That support is not given haphazardly, it's a quid pro quo arrangement. Terrorist attacks serve the purposes of the leaders who finance them and provide space for their training camps and operations.

Like it or not, Osama bin Laden has more in common with Sir Francis Drake, than he does with Charles Manson. His caliphate is not cavebound nuttery, it's the vision of every Muslim leader since Mohammed. A merger of religion and politics into a divine right of rulers, a movement that will sweep the world and put everyone under a single Islamic social system. It might seem ridiculously backward, if it were not for the fact that Europe and Russia are scheduled to turn Muslim before the century is up. And when that happens, the pillars of what we think of as civilization will come toppling down. And America will remain alone like the Byzantine splinter of the Roman empire staring down the bellicose throat of Islam.

The West has run out of frontiers of its own, but the West is now the frontier of the East. The new colonists aren't coming from England, Holland and France-- they're coming to England, Holland and France. Their names are more likely to begin with Mohammad, than Christopher. But the process is the same. And this time around, we're the Incas, the great civilization divided by internal rivalries, hiding among our vast cities and towering monuments, and offering our rooms of gold to the barbarous invaders in exchange for our lives. Only to find that they intend to take our lives anyway.

To us Mohammed Atta may be a monster, but to the Muslim world he's a religious martyr and from the secular standpoint, another Francisco Pizarro, a bastard who plunged those subhuman people across the sea into ruin. This isn't moral equivalence, it's the clash of civilizations. And we're on the wrong end of it. Like many collapsing civilizations we could save ourselves, so easily that it's almost laughable. But instead we choose to bargain, beg and even side with the plunderers and murderers cutting our throats.

This has all happened before. Now it's happening again.

The Little Mogadishus and Little Lebanons and Little Moroccos popping up in our cities are not signs of cultural vitality, they're colonies. Europe is slowly figuring that out, but the multicultural narrative is too strong in America, for that thought to penetrate beyond a small informed layer of society. The Muslim violence that follows Muslim immigration will not be tamed by accommodation and interfaith seminars. And why would it? The violence is a symptom of the clash of civilizations. It isn't driven by a Muslim desire for acceptance into a multicultural society, but by the imposition of a mandate that we accept the supremacy of their values, their culture and their religion.

It's of course easy to shout 'racist' at anyone who speaks that way. Easier than shouting it at Muslims who are bombing synagogues. Safer certainly. Never mind that we are not speaking of races, but beliefs. (And even the Nazi idea of race was an absurd construct that claimed a German with a single Jewish grandparent was non-Aryan, but all of Japan was Aryan.) Beliefs come with a purpose. As do religions. And when a religion claims primacy over civil law as a matter of course, then not investigating it is foolish at best. Treasonous at worst.

Anyone who did not expect violence and supremacism to swim to the surface, when the sewage of Kuwait, Algeria, Pakistan, Jordan and Somalia were poured into the pond of Europe and the North American bay, could not have been paying attention. Islam has never existed as a minority religion for very long, without either being repressed or cut off from the rest of the Muslim world. Where Judaism has been a minority religion for over 2000 years, and Christianity has had centuries of being a minority religion (even longer for some denominations), Mohammed ended Islam's minority status not long after he invented it, by the simple virtue of killing and expelling all non-Muslims. That is not an accident of history-- it is the bloody and brutal template of Islam.

Unsurprisingly Muslims are trying to end Islam's minority status in the West by the same means. And they are conducting a deranged war against Israel, while massacring Christians from Sudan to Egypt to Pakistan. Many of the Muslim groups and states responsible for these actions don't get along with one another. Sometimes violently so. What unites them is not so much a formal alliance, but a common worldview derived from the Koran. A worldview that we dare not speak about, because criticizing a 7th century genocidal text and the illiterate warlord who dictated it, have become crimes or acts that may cost you your life. Not in Pakistan, whose governor was murdered for trying to defend a Christian woman accused of blasphemy against Islam-- but right here. But in the Western world, of all places, which once placed freedom of speech above all else.

Are we conquerors or are we the conquered? That is ultimately up to us. Our leadership may try to bribe the Muslim world with rooms of gold, but if we fancy our descendants being something more than second-class and third-class peasants and tradesmen in the culture of our conquerors, then it's time to stop listening to them.

Islamic terrorism is not some minor fringe threat, it's the leading of a wave that is sweeping across the world. The bombs are the least of it. They are only points of friction, sparks that show us a fraction of the kinetic energy at work in the clash of civilizations. It's the inside job of Muslim states who are feeling their strength and their Western appeasers who are too afraid to do anything, but play Atahualpa to the Muslim Pizarros, gleefully looting our civilization for all they can take. It is not the discontent of the oppressed, but the greed and lust of the oppressors. We are not the oppressors, but if this goes on... we will surely become the oppressed.