Last week, Israel’s Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times asking the question, “What were Hamas’s leaders hoping for, and what are Iran’s leaders seeking to achieve?” The answer began with a conversation that revealed the central problem with the West’s understanding of Islamic jihadism, one that still vitiates our foreign policy and plans for dealing with Muslim aggressors: our modernist inability to take religion seriously.

“What the Israeli military and political establishment failed to understand,” Gantz writes, “in part, was the extent to which Hamas was driven by the goal of waging religious war. ‘The intel was there, but I underestimated the jihadi component of Hamas’s and Sinwar’s calculus,’ a senior Israel Defense Forces intelligence commander told me early in the war, referring to Yahya Sinwar, Hamas’s leader.”

This mistake in divining the motives of militant Islam marks the U.S. conflict with Iran and its revolution and “goal of waging religious war.” For example, in 1979 when the Ayatollah Khomeini returned to Iran to direct the revolution, Jimmy Carter’s National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, as David Farber reported, in a meeting with Carter “soft-pedaled the specific threat of ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ to American interests.” Brzezinski also viewed the revolution with Western eyes. The religious revolution would falter, he argued, and require secular technocrats and experts, which would dilute and marginalize the clerics.

In an even greater failure of imagination and projection of Western principles, Brzezinski advised that the U.S. should “pursue relations with individual Muslim countries on the basis of shared interests, but our emphasis on moral as well as material values, our support for a world of diversity, and our commitment to social justice should place us in a strong position to deepen our dialogue with the Muslim world.”

These sentiments are an object lesson in the dangers of reducing other cultures’ beliefs and understanding to our own. No one with any knowledge of Islam’s doctrines and history would counsel establishing a “meeting of the minds” with orthodox Muslims––followers of a faith guided by sharia law bestowed by Allah–– by bringing up a liberal Western idea like “social justice,” or our foundational principle of the separation of church and state. The wages of such naïveté are glaringly obvious in the current ghastly mayhem and aggression wielded by Iran and its jihadist proxies.

Other features of Islam alien to the West have likewise been serially ignored or distorted by Western foreign policy mavens. Most important is the role of orthodox Islam in explaining the global ummah’s subjection to the West and its culture that the faithful see as heathenish and hedonistic. As Bernard Lewis points out, “From the beginning of Western penetration in the world of Islam, until our own day, the most characteristic, significant, and original political and intellectual responses to that penetration have been Islamic. They have been concerned with the problems of the faith and community overwhelmed by infidels.”

The solution is a renewal of traditional Islamic doctrines, and waging jihad to recover the faith’s lost glory. This response includes restoring the Islamic faith’s lost dominance. Thus, the Ayatollah Khomeini warned, “We shall export our revolution to the whole world,” and jihad will be waged “[u]ntil the cry ‘There is no God but Allah’ resounds over the whole world.” Decades earlier, Hassan al Banna, who founded the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood in 1928, wrote, “It is the nature of Islam to dominate, not to be dominated, to impose its laws on all nations, and to extend its power to the entire planet.”

Fellow Muslim Brother Sayyid Qutb––whom writer Lee Smith called “Osama bin Laden’s intellectual godfather” –– fleshes out al Banna’s vision of Islam’s purpose: “Islam came into this world to establish Allah’s rule on Allah’s earth, to invite all people toward the worship of Allah. . .This Islam has a right to remove all those obstacles which are in its path so that it may address human reason and intuition with no interference and opposition from political systems,” an obvious rationale for jihad, conquest, and occupation.

Today’s Western nations who ignore these motives, or prioritize instead Western ideas––like national self-determination, individual rights, education, equality of the sexes, or religious tolerance––will reap the wages of our arrogance starkly obvious in the depredations of Iran and its proxies.

Moreover, Muslims’ mission to make Islam triumph throughout the world is frankly imperialistic, a smear for jihadists only when used against the West, whose cognitive elites consider the word an expletive. It’s one of the most toxic examples of Western oikophobia, its fashionable self-loathing and pretensions to intellectual sophistication when denigrating their own civilizations. But as historian Ephraim Karsh writes, Muslim conquerors and occupiers for centuries “acted in a typically imperialist fashion from the start, subjugating indigenous populations, colonizing their lands, and expropriating their wealth, resources, and labor.”

Next, unlike in the West, where two centuries of secularization has left our institutions and politics nearly bereft of religious passions or ideas, “In most Islamic countries,” Bernard Lewis writes, “religion remains a major political factor,” for “most Muslim countries are still profoundly Muslim, in a way and in a sense that most Christian countries are no longer Christian . . . in no Christian country at the present time, can religious leaders count on the degree of belief and participation that remains normal in the Muslim lands . . . Christian clergy do not exercise or even claim the kind of public authority that is still normal and accepted in most Muslim countries.”

This contrast reveals the danger of secularism in the conflict between the West and Islam, particularly as an impediment to understanding our adversary’s spiritual motives and aims. Instead, we look to material causes or psychological explanations whose roots lie in the material world, and reduce spiritual causes to neuroses.

Factors other than secularism have contributed to the West’s willful blindness to Islam’s doctrines that animate jihadist aggression. By the early 20^th Century, Islam, the faith that dominated the West for centuries, was now subordinated to the West and its superior technologies and weapons. Islam faded in importance, and did not occupy the West’s attention as it once did when for a thousand years it invaded, conquered, plundered, and occupied large tracts of European territory.

In the Thirties, Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc wrote about this amnesia: “Millions of modern people . . . have forgotten all about Islam. They have never come in contact with it. They take for granted that it is decaying, and that, anyway, it is just a foreign religion which will not concern them. It is, as a fact, the most formidable and persistent enemy which our civilization has had, and may at any moment become as large a menace in the future as it has been in the past. . . The final fruit of this tenacity, the second period of Islamic power, may be delayed —but I doubt whether it can be permanently postponed.”

The vacuum of our historical memory of Islam, its doctrines, and its domination of the Mediterranean littoral, has been filled with interpretations and distortions of Islam that reflect our secularism and goods like political freedom and equality, concepts that have a different meaning in Islamic cultures, which is why jihadist theorists like Qutb called them “the debris of the man-made traditions of several generations,” and the Muslim community has been “crushed under the weight of those false laws and customs which are not even remotely related to the Islamic teachings.”

It is a testimony to Israel’s status as a Western nation that, as some Israelis think, such amnesia about the nature of Islam has led to the current war against Iran and its proxies. Despite the jihadist success on 9/11, we Americans still appease the jihadists, supported and financed by Iran, who are continuing to pursue our destruction––which Iran’s imminent possession of nuclear weapons will certainly make possible. Let’s hope we don’t have to learn that lesson the way Israel has–– by horrific experience.