Understanding What Drives An Enemy

Here's a simple thought: why do Islamists so desperately want the West to surrender, to submit to Sharia and make Islam ascendent?


It's because they cannot concieve, at all, of co-existence.

I was reading this when it dawned on me. This is the key:

In truth, Islam's actual meaning is submission and not peace, or to use Ms. Armstrong's own words, "the perfect surrender (in Arabic the word for 'surrender' is islam) that every human being should make to the divine." And it is to achieve this goal and subordinate the Arabian peninsula to his rule that Muhammad fought almost incessantly for the last 10 years of his life, having fled from his hometown of Mecca to Medina in 622 to become a political and military leader rather than a private preacher: not to bring peace to a war-torn country, let alone to eliminate "greed, injustice, and arrogance."

The key is understanding that the word for surrender is islam, and that in order to become a political and military leader, that is what must be demanded. We in the West are unwilling combatants in a war to establish not a religion, but rather the attempt of those exploiting religion to become political and military leaders in the footpath of Muhammad. The Islamists exploit the tenets of the religion to justify their war, beautified as a holy war, as jihad.

Their problem, of course, is that once they've taken this path, they themselves do not see any alternative for themselves as to defeat us or that they themselves must surrender. For them it is a zero-sum game; we ceased seeing zero-sum games of this kind by the end of the cold war at the latest, and generally well before that as well...


They do not understand surrender as we understand it: rather, they understand that their surrender must be that of submission, submission to the kind of vulgar capitalistic society that they percieve as being the West. Which they reject. But we don't care if they reject it, saying instead "to each his own," which for them is incomprehensible.

That makes it easier to understand them. Now we have perhaps a choice: either we kill them all as they throw themselves against us, or we persuade them that co-existence isn't merely possible, but really the best of all possible worlds. After all, even they see Christians and Jews as People of the Book: we can see them as People of the Book, so to speak, as well. But how do we get Islamists to understand that they don't have to surrender their own beliefs when we don't let the Islamists win?