© 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
I was fascinated to read a report in the London Financial Times explaining why it is that our erstwhile European allies seem to be on the opposite side of any equation in which the United States is a factor.
Like most Americans, I am perplexed by the inexplicably predictable opposition most of our European allies have to all things American even if opposing the U.S. runs contrary to their own best national interests. Even Canada often fits into this category.
Take the war on terror, for example. Osama bin Laden has made no secret of the fact he is just as happy to kill Europeans or Canadians as he is Americans. To bin Laden and his ilk, there is essentially no difference between us.
We are all infidel nations and we all must either convert to Islam or die.
But to the Europeans, it isn't a war against terrorism, but rather a fight against individual terrorists. While it may seem like a distinction without a difference, it isn't. There is a vast difference between a "fight" against individual terrorists and a "war" against the religiously based ideology that drives them.
In a fight, once the individuals are defeated, it's over. In a war, it isn't over until the ideology that spawned the fight in the first place is vanquished.
According to Javier Solana, Europe's foreign policy chief, Europe's fight is with the individual al-Qaida network, and only to the extent necessary to hold them at bay.
Solana told the Financial Times that the shared values of America and Europe are really little more than a political myth.
In point of fact, Solana says the two sides are growing further apart. And the reason isn't political differences, but rather the result of what he calls the "cultural phenomenon" of religion.
Specifically, he feels, America has "far too much religion." And the American view of religion is just too rigid. In this day and age when America is a post-Christian society, that is truly an amazing point of view. But it does show that America is living with at least a memory of Christian ethics.
Solana believes that in the American religiously shaped worldview, "It is all or nothing. For us Europeans, it is difficult to deal with because we are secular. We do not see the world in such black and white terms."
To back up his contention, Solana points to the American reaction to Sept. 11. For the Bush administration, he says, the Sept. 11 attacks were an act of war and an expression of an evil ideology. (Thank God for a Christian president.)
Europeans, who unreservedly condemned them, saw the attacks through a different lens: as the most extreme and reprehensible symptom of political dysfunction, operating from within failed states such as Afghanistan.
In Solana's "more sophisticated European view of morality," what the U.S. sees as a war against terrorism and the religious ideology that spawned it, he sees as simply a fight against "politically misguided terrorists."
What is the difference? To Europeans, those who hijack airplanes filled with innocent people for the express purpose of using them as living weapons to kill thousands of other innocent people were not acting out "evil."
But to "the superstitious Americans," such activities are evil. In Solana's view of European morality, there are no absolutes because God is irrelevant, if he exists at all. Therefore, there is no good or evil. Everything is relative. The notions of "good" and "evil" are simply religious superstitions that the "mature societies" of Europe have long since abandoned.
Solana pooh-poohs the Bush administration notion that terrorism is the overriding threat to international security and order. He scoffs at the Bush administration's refusal to deal directly with Yasser Arafat, for example, simply because Arafat is a terrorist.
It is because of Bush's religiosity, together with the influence of the Jewish lobby that keeps America from solving the Middle East peace question. "We just have a very different political analysis over how to deal with Arafat where we try to pursue engagement rather than isolation," says Solana.
Solana's political solution is to view Arab terrorism as a cry for political legitimacy. Israel's unwillingness to allow the Arabs to be "legitimate" by destroying them is based in religion, not survival. It is truly amazing that some 6 million Israelis are able to deny approximately 120 million Arabs political legitimacy.
Where is Solana's head when al-Qaida states openly that it is really an Islamic war against Christians and Jews? Is he completely ignorant of at least the last 100 years of Middle East history?
Solana and all of his sophisticated Europeans need to remember that it was "the religiously driven American morality" that caused us three times in the last century to come to their aid and save their bacon World War I, World War II and the "Cold War."
In any case, it goes a long way toward explaining why America and Israel find themselves increasingly isolated in an increasingly hostile world.
Israel and America are the only two nations on earth who claim their right to exist was granted them by God. That offends the secular humanist architects of the European superstate.
Apparently, it offends them even more than the terrorists' claim that their right to threaten their very existence was granted them by Allah.
It isn't all religion that Solana finds offensive. Only the superstitious American Christians and the evil Zionist Jews.
Just as the Bible prophets predicted would happen, Europe is perfectly prepared for the Antichrist to come and take them over.
