In recent years, a growing focus of my concern has been the staggering ignorance of millions of young Americans when it comes to certain fundamental and crucially important matters. One of those matters is the evil of Communism: just the other day came news of a report showing that roughly half of young Americans would prefer to live under that system, a clear indication that their history teachers have entirely misinformed them on the topic. Another, related matter is the greatness of America: again, history teachers are at fault, having played up the horrors of slavery, the mistreatment American Indians, and the debacle of Vietnam (so that some kids actually think America is uniquely evil) while soft-pedaling our nation’s role as a revolutionary beacon of freedom, fortress of democracy, and guarantor of world order.
Then there’s Islam. As 9/11 has receded year by year into history, kids who weren’t even born at the time, or who were just infants, have grown into young adults. And during all these years, while America has fought wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Muslim terrorists have created chaos and taken lives in major cities around the world, what have these kids learned about Islam? With relatively few exceptions, they’ve been told over and over, by teachers and the media and our presidents (first Bush, then Obama), that Islam is a Religion of Peace, that Muslims who commit acts of terrorism in the name of Allah have misunderstood the faith, and that the overwhelming majority of Muslims love peace and freedom and entirely acts of terror.
They don’t know that Islam means submission. They don’t see the hijab as a symbol of female oppression. They either don’t know the word jihad or have been told that it’s a benign concept, referring to inner moral struggle. They don’t know about the caliphate. If they’ve ever read anything from the Koran in school, they’ve read one or two of the innocuous-sounding tidbits, pulled entirely out of context; they’ve never read any of the hateful stuff that makes up most of the book. They don’t know about the more than a million Europeans who were taken into slavery by Muslims from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries. They don’t understand that Islam has, from its very birth, been a religion of conquest; that its followers had to be beaten back again and again in their ruthless attempts to take over Europe, attempts which, if successful, had resulted in the slaughter, enslavement, or forcible conversion of everyone on the continent; that the Crusades were attempts to regain conquered Christian lands, not wars of unprovoked aggression.