Opened new blog

I registered another blog a few days ago on wordpress. Check it out!

Would would Byzantine do? by Edward Luttwak

http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2010/01/what-would-byzantium-do/

Excellent article on Afghanistan strategy.

How Wars are Won and the Gaelic Wars (a second look)

I am currently re-reading Bevin Alexander’s “How War’s are Won”, As well as Julius Caesar’s “The Battle for Gaul”. I read both of these books about three years ago, and I’m slightly surprised with how my view and thinking on warfare has changed. I don’t think I was aware of the extent which Bill Lind and John Robb had influenced my thinking until I reread these books, and then my reviews of them. Let’s start with “How War’s are Won”

Mr. Alexander’s (probably my favorite military historian) view of future wars is distorted. When I first read the book three years ago I agreed with everything he said, I have since changed my mind. First, where Mr. Alexander erred in his thinking:

*Terrorism – Mr. Alexander said that terrorism would be ultimatly defeated, somwhat dismissing them as an illogical fringe group who are out of their minds and have no real hope of ever accomplishing anything.

**What I think now – they aren’t some psycho fringe group and they do stand a good chance of accomplishing their actual aims.

*American superiority – Mr. Alexander somewhat assumes that America will be at the front and will ultimatly succeed in every attempt as if we were predistined.

**What I think now – I’m glad for his patriotism, but it’s irrational to assume that we will be the top dog indefinitely, see point below

*State control – Mr. Alexander also assumes that states will be at the front, and maintain their control, and will continue to function as the main arbitator in society

**What I think now – Here’s where my thinking has changed most – states are losing control, “tribes” will be the main social organization in the future, the state system is decaying (economically, socially, militarily and just about every other way imaginable).

Now having said all that, it’s a good reread and I’m getting alot more out of it than the first go ’round. Here’s where I think Mr. Alexander got his thinking right:

*Swarming – Mr. Alexander is a advocate of swarming as the dominant form of future warfare.

*History – Mr. Alexander identifies (not perfectly I think, but very well) key principles of war throughout history. I agree that war has always been, and always will be the same at the most fundamental level, and that military history should be studied rigorously. (A point where I think I difir slightly with most 4GW theorists).

*Look at Battles – The thing I love about Mr. Alexander’s writings is that he makes sense. When he takes a look at the battle, he tells what happened, why it happened, and how it could have happened differently without going overboard on details. I think he is also correct in most of his opinions about historical events.

As I read through Mr. Alexander’s thirteen rules, and his historical examples I see new opportunities for each one. Although his view of current events is a bit shallow, his historical view and perspective on warfare are why the book is worth reading.

Now, Caesar’s the Battle for Gaul. Without going into detail, it’s the battle memoirs of the great Gaius Julius Caesar on the Gaelic war. Gaul was inhabitted by several distinct factions, and the way that Caesar subdued them is worth a close look. The reason is that Islam is currently split in a similar fashion. If we (the western world) can use the same methods that Caesar used to remove the Islamic threat, it might work. I might write a later post about this looking into more detail. For now I will just note that Caesar exploited the fault lines between the factions, and destroyed them one at a time without allowing them to unite (which is probably what would have happened if he had just marched in like most men would have). It’s just a thought……..

Original Oratory: Entrepreneurship in the Modern World

The below is a speech I wrote for Competition for this season in NCFCA.

“Jason Drummond is richer than all of the Spice Girls put together and virtually unknown. At 30 he is a relative old-timer – the youngest on the list is just 21. Many have set up companies in the past 12 months and are now millionaires. Welcome to a new generation of Young Rich Entrepreneurs” This quote, from an article written in 2000 from the Observer demonstrates a turning point in business. We have now entered an age when the individual can compete with a multi-million dollar corporation. In the midst of a dismal economy and falling job market I believe that entrepreneurship is the most viable option for the future and that it is the key to success in the modern world. The reasons for this are more than can be fit into a single speech, but I will examine some of the larger reasons why this is the case. We’re going to look at how modern technology gives the entrepreneur unprecedented opportunity, we’re going to look at how entrepreneurship promotes personal freedom, and last we’re going to look at how it’s beneficial to the overall economy, and why it is the key to success in the modern world.

Once upon a time there was a country full of patriots, a nation where everyone believed in life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. In this nation, virtually all of these patriots owned their own farms, shops, restaurants, stores and services. In this country, almost everyone was an entrepreneur. This country was America before the mid 1800s and the rise of industrialization.

When industrialization came this spirit of the entrepreneur, every man living his own American dream began to die out as people began to become employees instead of employers, and the middle class began to become controlled by massive companies. This trend has continued to the present day. However, recently there has been growing potential for those who do not wish to continue to work for large corporations who have a gained a monopoly on the world economy. The driving factor behind this counter trend has been the technology developed in the last twenty years.

The development of the internet has been the single most important event since the invention of the printing press. This can hardly be an understatement. The internet allows people from opposite ends of the earth to come together in real time. The effects of this are many and far reaching. To the business world, it spells the beginning of the end of massive centralized corporations and the rise of motivated individuals: the entrepreneur. The Internet has allowed for the buyer to connect to the seller – regardless of distance, language or nationality. The internet has also allowed these motivated individuals to network and develop products and services much faster than centralized corporations can. This means that the individual, the entrepreneur, can compete globally, just as well (and often better) than any large business.

It also means that an entrepreneur can order parts, look up design plans, read books and articles on business and get advice from those who have already succeeded. This last point, being able to contact successful entrepreneurs is an important one. Knowledge is power, and listening and learning from others is more valuable than investors, partnerships, or even receiving a large inheritance. Now, you might not be able to contact Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, but there are literally hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, many of who will be happy to reply to your e-mail’s. One of these men is John Robb. Mr. Robb has started several businesses growing many of them to multi-million dollar proportions in under a year. I’ve e-mailed him on several occasions and Mr. Robb has been kind enough to answer. His advice to me has been clear: “Learn how to make things…learn how to sell…be a one man company.” Mr. Robb served in Air Force special operations units along with SEAL and Commando units. He was one of the pioneers in RSS feeds and blogging software. Currently he is preparing to begin developing a software to help the growth of what he calls Resilient Communities. I have volunteered my services for the project as soon as Mr. Robb gets the project funding in order. Now Robb wouldn’t have been able to get volunteers (many of whom are much more talented than myself) without the internet. I consider him to be one of the most successful entrepreneur’s of our day, in spite of the fact relatively few people have heard of him.

So, now that we know that it is possible for these undertakers to not only compete, but compete globally, the question now is why? Entrepreneurship still means taking risks, sometimes big ones, so what are the advantages? This brings me to my second point: that Entrepreneurship promotes individual freedom. When you own your own business, you are in control of your own and your business’ destiny. You are not dependent on whether or not your company will go bankrupt because of the decisions of some far distant CEO. Instead if your company goes bankrupt, it gets to be your fault!

Another benefit of not being under the direct control of a company is the fact that it can be decidedly family friendly. Children can often become assets instead of liabilities aka slave labor, the wife becomes a senior executive and more distant family connections become marketers. This strengthens the bonds of not only your individual family, but the entire fabric of society. It utilizes the things that people have used for thousands of years and only recently forgotten about. When it comes to entrepreneurship, family becomes one of your biggest assets.

John Robb said that “One of the best ways you can prepare for the future is to train yourself to become an entrepreneur — essentially a person that makes their own economic opportunities.  It’s going to become a major differentiator between those that succeed and those that fail in a harsh global system” When your in charge, your job doesn’t get outsourced.

Now the question arises, what is the effect of such things on the economy and business world? Which are the external factors influencing one’s business. As it turns out, entrepreneurship actually is beneficial to both economy and innovation. As we saw with the big business failures in the past few years, large corporations are more of a threat, to both the job market and the overall economy. Entrepreneurship also has more potential to grow new markets and innovate faster. The prime examples of this are of course, Wal-Mart, Microsoft and Apple. Each one found a need and filled it, and grew to unimaginable sizes. Entrepreneurship is good for economy, it’s good for business.

The director of the US patent office said that everything that could be invented already had been invented. The year was 1899. Virtually everything we use today was unimaginable in 1899, and entrepreneur’s made it happen. From airplanes to I-pod’s entrepreneurs have been at the forefront of innovation, invention and industry. Without entrepreneurs an economy is inevitably doomed.

Look at all of the things we use today. The lights in this room were made possible by Thomas Edison. The cars that you drove here were made possible by Henry Ford. The computers that we use were made possible by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. These men were entrepreneurs who drove innovation and technology to places that no one ever thought possible.

So in conclusion, entrepreneurship now has greater opportunity than it has for nearly two hundred years, it’s good for the family and society, and is good for the economy. Entrepreneurship is the key to success in the modern world. If you’re willing to take a risk, you can reap the rewards. As J. Paul Getty, Former oil tycoon and once the richest man in America said, “There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.” And this is more true now than ever before. Thank you.

TEE SHIRTS!!!!

BUY MY TEE SHIRTS! HELP A STUDENT PAY FOR COLLEGE!!!!! I recently opened a Cafe Press shop, you might want to check it out! (especially if you like blonde jokes….. )
http://www.cafepress.com/garenbragg

PS: I don’t think you’ll ever find such a direct method of adversising than the above. LOL!

Opened Cafe Press shop

In my persuit of a way to pay for college I’ve opened a Cafe Press shop here. It’s certainly nothing spectacular, but it’s a start.

The six simple principles of viral marketing by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson

The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson, E-Commerce Consultant
Web Marketing Today, February 1, 2005. Originally published 2/1/2000
Easy Transfer Copy

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I admit it. The term “viral marketing” is offensive. Call yourself a Viral Marketer and people will take two steps back. I would. “Do they have a vaccine for that yet?” you wonder. A sinister thing, the simple virus is fraught with doom, not quite dead yet not fully alive, it exists in that nether genre somewhere between disaster movies and horror flicks.

But you have to admire the virus. He has a way of living in secrecy until he is so numerous that he wins by sheer weight of numbers. He piggybacks on other hosts and uses their resources to increase his tribe. And in the right environment, he grows exponentially. A virus doesn’t even have to mate — he just replicates, again and again with geometrically increasing power, doubling with each iteration:

1
11
1111
11111111
1111111111111111
11111111111111111111111111111111
1111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111

In a few short generations, a virus population can explode.

Viral Marketing Defined

What does a virus have to do with marketing? Viral marketing describes any strategy that encourages individuals to pass on a marketing message to others, creating the potential for exponential growth in the message’s exposure and influence. Like viruses, such strategies take advantage of rapid multiplication to explode the message to thousands, to millions.

Off the Internet, viral marketing has been referred to as “word-of-mouth,” “creating a buzz,” “leveraging the media,” “network marketing.” But on the Internet, for better or worse, it’s called “viral marketing.” While others smarter than I have attempted to rename it, to somehow domesticate and tame it, I won’t try. The term “viral marketing” has stuck.

The Classic Hotmail.com Example

The classic example of viral marketing is Hotmail.com, one of the first free Web-based e-mail services. The strategy is simple:

1. Give away free e-mail addresses and services,
2. Attach a simple tag at the bottom of every free message sent out: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com” and,
3. Then stand back while people e-mail to their own network of friends and associates,
4. Who see the message,
5. Sign up for their own free e-mail service, and then
6. Propel the message still wider to their own ever-increasing circles of friends and associates.

Like tiny waves spreading ever farther from a single pebble dropped into a pond, a carefully designed viral marketing strategy ripples outward extremely rapidly.

Elements of a Viral Marketing Strategy

Accept this fact. Some viral marketing strategies work better than others, and few work as well as the simple Hotmail.com strategy. But below are the six basic elements you hope to include in your strategy. A viral marketing strategy need not contain ALL these elements, but the more elements it embraces, the more powerful the results are likely to be. An effective viral marketing strategy:

1. Gives away products or services
2. Provides for effortless transfer to others
3. Scales easily from small to very large
4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors
5. Utilizes existing communication networks
6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

Let’s examine at each of these elements briefly.

1. Gives away valuable products or services

“Free” is the most powerful word in a marketer’s vocabulary. Most viral marketing programs give away valuable products or services to attract attention. Free e-mail services, free information, free “cool” buttons, free software programs that perform powerful functions but not as much as you get in the “pro” version. Wilson’s Second Law of Web Marketing is “The Law of Giving and Selling” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmta/basic-principles.htm). “Cheap” or “inexpensive” may generate a wave of interest, but “free” will usually do it much faster. Viral marketers practice delayed gratification. They may not profit today, or tomorrow, but if they can generate a groundswell of interest from something free, they know they will profit “soon and for the rest of their lives” (with apologies to “Casablanca”). Patience, my friends. Free attracts eyeballs. Eyeballs then see other desirable things that you are selling, and, presto! you earn money. Eyeballs bring valuable e-mail addresses, advertising revenue, and e-commerce sales opportunities. Give away something, sell something.

2. Provides for effortless transfer to others

Public health nurses offer sage advice at flu season: stay away from people who cough, wash your hands often, and don’t touch your eyes, nose, or mouth. Viruses only spread when they’re easy to transmit. The medium that carries your marketing message must be easy to transfer and replicate: e-mail, website, graphic, software download. Viral marketing works famously on the Internet because instant communication has become so easy and inexpensive. Digital format make copying simple. From a marketing standpoint, you must simplify your marketing message so it can be transmitted easily and without degradation. Short is better. The classic is: “Get your private, free email at http://www.hotmail.com.” The message is compelling, compressed, and copied at the bottom of every free e-mail message.

3. Scales easily from small to very large

To spread like wildfire the transmission method must be rapidly scalable from small to very large. The weakness of the Hotmail model is that a free e-mail service requires its own mailservers to transmit the message. If the strategy is wildly successful, mailservers must be added very quickly or the rapid growth will bog down and die. If the virus multiplies only to kill the host before spreading, nothing is accomplished. So long as you have planned ahead of time how you can add mailservers rapidly you’re okay. You must build in scalability to your viral model.

4. Exploits common motivations and behaviors

Clever viral marketing plans take advantage of common human motivations. What proliferated “Netscape Now” buttons in the early days of the Web? The desire to be cool. Greed drives people. So does the hunger to be popular, loved, and understood. The resulting urge to communicate produces millions of websites and billions of e-mail messages. Design a marketing strategy that builds on common motivations and behaviors for its transmission, and you have a winner.

5. Utilizes existing communication networks

Most people are social. Nerdy, basement-dwelling computer science grad students are the exception. Social scientists tell us that each person has a network of 8 to 12 people in their close network of friends, family, and associates. A person’s broader network may consist of scores, hundreds, or thousands of people, depending upon her position in society. A waitress, for example, may communicate regularly with hundreds of customers in a given week. Network marketers have long understood the power of these human networks, both the strong, close networks as well as the weaker networked relationships. People on the Internet develop networks of relationships, too. They collect e-mail addresses and favorite website URLs. Affiliate programs exploit such networks, as do permission e-mail lists. Learn to place your message into existing communications between people, and you rapidly multiply its dispersion.

6. Takes advantage of others’ resources

The most creative viral marketing plans use others’ resources to get the word out. Affiliate programs, for example, place text or graphic links on others’ websites. Authors who give away free articles, seek to position their articles on others’ webpages. A news release can be picked up by hundreds of periodicals and form the basis of articles seen by hundreds of thousands of readers. Now someone else’s newsprint or webpage is relaying your marketing message. Someone else’s resources are depleted rather than your own.

Put into practice

Viral marketing is (fairly) easy to define, but very difficult to accomplish successfully. MarketingSherpa’s How to Viral Market toolkit is the best book available on the nuts and bolts of developing a successful viral marketing campaign. Strongly recommended for serious marketers. Dr. Wilson’s review Buy the book.

I grant permission for every reader to reproduce on your website the article you are now reading — “The Six Simple Principles of Viral Marketing” (see http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-principles-clean.htm for an HTML version you can copy). But copy this article ONLY, without any alteration whatsoever. Include the copyright statement, too, please. If you have a marketing or small business website, it’ll provide great content and help your visitors learn important strategies. (NOTE: I am giving permission to host on your website this article AND NO OTHERS. Reprinting or hosting my articles without express written permission is illegal, immoral, and a violation of my copyright.)

When I first offered this to my readers in February 2000, many took me up on it. Six months later a received a phone call:

“I want to speak to the King of Viral Marketing!”

“Well, I’m not the King,” I demurred. “I wrote an article about viral marketing a few months ago, but that’s all.”

“I’ve searched all over the Internet about viral marketing,” he said, “and your name keeps showing up. You must be the King!.”

It worked! Even five years later this webpage is ranked #1 for “viral marketing.”

To one degree or another, all successful viral marketing strategies use most of the six principles outlined above. In the next article in this series, “Viral Marketing Techniques the Typical Business Website Can Deploy Now” (http://www.wilsonweb.com/wmt5/viral-deploy.htm), we’ll move from theory to practice. But first learn these six foundational principles of viral marketing. Master them and wealth will flow your direction.

“Copyright © 2000, 2005, Ralph F. Wilson, E-Mail Marketing and Online Marketing editor, Web Marketing Today. All rights reserved. Permission granted to reprint this article on your website without alteration if you include this copyright statement and leave the hyperlinks live and in place.”

RFID Zapper

I just thought this was cool. It’s a device for zapping radio frequency ID tags. http://www.engadget.com/2009/12/24/rfiddler-zapper-kills-rfid-tags-dead-the-hard-way/

Geert Wilders speech April 2009

Geert Wilders gives a speech on Islamization in California. Wilders is a Dutch politician in the Netherlands, and is probably the formost European fighting against the spread of Islam.

From the Vault: Turning back Islam’s 1,300 year assault on Western Civilization

Turning Back Islam’s 1,300-year Assault on Western Civilization

By Bevin Alexander, May 30, 2008

There has been nothing in history like the war of annihilation that Islam has waged and continues to wage against all other religions and cultures, but especially against the Christian West, its most formidable opponent. Present-day Islamic attacks are identical in concept to past attempts, only different in tactics. But they can be stopped by resolute action.

The West’s historic position has been to contain Islam, not to destroy it. Islam’s historic position has been the opposite: to wipe Western Civilization off the face of the earth. The West, for example, is trying to influence events the Middle East, but not settle it with Westerners. Fundamentalist Islamic imams or leaders have precisely the goal of populating Europe with Muslims, converting it to Islam, then using Europe as a launching pad to move against the United States.

The true war between Islam and the West is being fought in Western Europe.

Fundamentalist imams have chosen Western Europe for their battleground because they do not have sufficient leverage in the U.S. to open a new front, since there are many fewer Muslims in the U.S. than in Western Europe. Accordingly, the United States can defend itself best by joining with our European allies to stop the advance of Islam in Western Europe.

The U.S. will have to take the lead. Europe is divided and lacking in resolve. For example, only a minority of NATO countries are permitting their forces to fight the Taliban in Afghanistan. One Dutch unit has a policy of withdrawing every time the Taliban fires on it.

In Western Europe today, Muslim imams are trying to force governments to apply Islamic laws and customs to Muslims. Western governments must resist this effort, and insist that only European laws be applied to all people, including Muslims. If the governments of Western Europe allow Muslims to be judged by their own laws and customs, the imams will insist that Islamic laws and customs be applied to all the people. There already have been efforts to bring this about.

In 1988, for example, the Iranian Ayatollah Khomeini issued a death warrant against the English author Salmon Rushdie because his book, Satanic Verses, was critical of the Prophet Mohammed. Khomeini’s pronouncement set off wild protests in Muslim lands and forced Rushdie to go into hiding for years. In 2006, Islamists all over the world rioted, demanding that Western newspapers and stations not show Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, thereby challenging press freedom and freedom of expression everywhere in the West. Islam is a religion of extreme intolerance. The history of Islam shows that subdued populations either accept Islam, or they die. Christians and Jews, being considered people of “the Book,” can be accorded a degree of tolerance—but not equality.

Despite these threats, the West has great strength, and can turn back Islam’s advance.

The West should reduce its presence in the Middle East drastically, and concentrate on thwarting the Muslim advance in Europe. We can do little to change conditions in the Middle East anyway. The people of Iraq will stop killing each other only when they decide to do so themselves. Western military forces cannot influence this decision, and they should be withdrawn. The West should focus on reducing its imprint on Muslim lands, not increasing it.

We should abandon our efforts to bring democracy to the Middle East. Muslims have a world view that sees the Koran and the teachings of the Prophet Mohammed as the source of all laws and all actions. Muslims deny people individual choice. They repress their women. They believe that Allah, speaking through their imams, is the only authority they should respect.  Democracy, like a lot of other Western values, is alien to Islamic thinking and Western efforts to change it are useless.

The aim of Western policy in the Middle East should be to stop threatening Muslim efforts aimed at the West, but otherwise to allow Muslims to live as they wish within their existing territorial bounds.

The resurgence of Islamic attacks in Europe is only a continuation of a drive that started with the rush of converts to Islam out of the Arabian peninsula on the death of Mohammed in 632 a.d. Islam’s aim has always been to destroy all other religions and societies, especially the West, which has been the main barrier to Islamic advances, and against which Islam has directed its greatest efforts and animus.

Islam experienced a meteoric expansion in its early centuries primarily because of the fanaticism engendered by the charismatic leadership of Mohammed, and by his teachings that promised everlasting pleasure in heaven to those who died in holy war against the infidel. No other religion has been able to inspire so many persons to be heedless of death and of personal danger in battle. Although this spirit was suppressed or lay dormant during the century and a half of Western imperial dominance of Islam that ended after World War II, it motivates a renewed assault on the West by Islamic fundamentalists and inspires suicide bombers today.

Muslims blame the West—not their own anti-democratic, anti-rational, repressive and misogynistic impulses—for their failure to advance economically, or to provide more than a small minority of their people with the standards of living enjoyed by most Westerners.

No encounter of Western Civilization with any other culture or civilization has come close to the threat posed by Islam. Western Civilization has never faced another opponent with Islam’s relentless hostility and drive to destroy it. Muslims want no peace treaty or modus vivendi with the West. They want total submission. They believe theirs is the only true society and their goal is to eradicate all false societies.

In 1993 Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington said that there are deep divisions between civilizations and predicted: “The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.” The collision of the Christian West with Islam commenced well before either had even become a civilization, and it has been ongoing. The conflicts between the two did much to shape both civilizations and to distinguish one from the other. Each hostile encounter threw up examples of what one was and the other did not want to be.

Muslims state flatly that Islam is the religion of Allah and needs no justification. Thus, it is superior to all other religions, and the Koran states that Muslims, when they gain control, can tolerate Christians and Jews only under limited terms and conditions. The Islamic faith is based on the concept that sharia, or Islamic law, must be observed by all people. Sharia—which calls for punishing persons with 50 to 100 lashes for small offenses, cutting off the hand of a thief, and stoning adulterers to death—encompasses every sphere of human activity and supersedes all governments, economies, and moral and spiritual institutions.

The laws and rules of secular Muslim states, such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and Tunisia, do not fully implement sharia, because to do so would mean their extinction. Sharia does not recognize secular states. It would require the abolishment of states and the establishment of a caliph (or successor to Mohammed) who would impose a religious dictatorship and sharia law on everyone.A caliphate would be a universal society based on rigid religious rules of behavior and thought. Fundamentalists regard secular Muslim states as defenders of Western society and as alien bodies imposed on Islam by the West. The basic Islamic viewpoint was expressed by the Ayatollah Khomeini, who set up an Islamic state in Iran in 1979: “If laws are needed, Islam has established them all. There is no need after establishing a government to sit down and draw up laws.”

Fundamentalists, therefore, are fighting two separate battles. One is to destroy the states that encompass the Muslim world—Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and the rest. The other is to attack all aspects of Western society, which they consider to be sinful.

The chances of the fundamentalists abolishing all Muslim states and establishing a caliphate are small, because the kings, emirs, and dictators of the Muslim world have great power, and because large numbers of the populace would oppose living in a rigid religious society. Resolution of this issue should remain an all-Muslim affair. The West should not take sides, except to prevent disorder from spreading beyond the region.

The West should concentrate on preventing terrorist attacks on our cities and on stopping fundamentalist imams from trying to force Islamic ideas on Western societies. Governments in Europe have been slow to respond. Among the Muslim methods being used is insistence not only that nothing disrespectful of Mohammed be printed or broadcast, but that women cover their heads or even more of their bodies in public.

Imams are pushing for Muslims to be ruled by sharia, not Western law, as the first step in imposing sharia on all Europeans.  In March 2007 a German judge refused a quick divorce to a Muslim woman on the grounds of abuse by her husband. The judge concluded that the Koran says that “men are in charge of women” and are allowed to beat their wives if they are disobedient. Although the judge was removed from the case, her willingness to apply Islamic law in a German court shows the extent to which Islamic thought has penetrated into Western Europe.

More than half a million immigrants are coming into Spain (and thus into the European Union) annually, mostly illegally, and mostly from Islamic west and north Africa. A major reevaluation is going on in Europe today to decide how to reverse the penetration of Islam into the continent. The entire West needs to launch a full-scale war to protect traditional Western rights of free speech and free expression. Europe and the U.S. cannot continue to crumple to Muslim protests, as they did over Danish newspaper cartoons of the Prophet.

European states are realizing that a large percentage of resident Muslims, under the influence of fundamentalist imams, have not become part of the culture and are unwilling to live under the laws and customs of the West. In Britain, for example, many Muslim women are wearing the niqab, a form of dress that covers the body from head to toe in flowing black gowns and allows only a slit for their eyes.

The Muslim world view is at the opposite pole from the Western world view.  Muslims believe in polygamy, subordination of women, and the death penalty for apostates and gays. They suppress any conduct they do not like. For example, the Iranian Supreme Court exonerated six persons in April 2007 for killing five people they considered “morally corrupt.”  A young couple engaged to be married were selected among the victims because they were walking together in public.

The Princeton Islamic scholar Bernard Lewis calls the Muslim approach to religion “triumphalist,” in that Muslims consider their views entirely right and all other views entirely wrong. Christianity also originally possessed a triumphalist approach, but in recent centuries it has become much more relativist, defined by Lewis as: “I have my god, you have your god, and others have theirs.”

The collision between the West and Islam has been marked by war and conquest.  The conflict has been continuous since the first encounters in the Mediterranean in the seventh century. The first Arab-Islamic invasions conquered the then-Christian lands of Syria, Palestine, Egypt, North Africa, and Spain, and surged into France, to be stopped by Charles Martel and the Franks at Tours in 732. The Arabs were thwarted from overrunning the Byzantine Empire by the walls of Constantinople and by Greek fire in 672 and on later occasions.

But in the eleventh century the Muslim Seljuk Turks conquered Byzantine territories in Anatolia. Byzantium and Eastern Orthodox Christianity retreated slowly before the Ottoman Turks, the successor regime to the Seljuks. The Islamic advance in the West, however, generated Roman Catholic rejoinders: the Reconquista in Spain, and the Crusades into the Levant. The Crusades ultimately failed to hold the Holy Land for Christianity, but they did succeed to some extent in opening the Mediterranean to Western trade.

The Spanish threw out the last Muslim kingdom, Granada, in 1492. The Ottoman Turks continued to press into southeastern Europe, capturing Constantinople in 1453, and driving to the gates of Vienna, where they suffered a culminating defeat in 1683. Thereafter the Islamic flood receded, to be followed in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by a great European counterattack into the lands of Islam, an assault that usually goes by the name of imperialism.

The last major imperialist imposition on Islam occurred in 1948, when the West established a Jewish state on half of the territory of Palestine, and then armed this state with modern weapons. The creation of Israel is analogous to the establishment of Christian kingdoms in the Holy Land during the Crusades. That is, Western power was inserted into the heart of the Muslim world. Opposition to Israel set off an upheaval among Middle Easterners in general and among Arabs in particular that has accelerated in recent decades.

Islamic fundamentalists have taken the leadership in assaults on Israel. Attacks there and elsewhere represent an Islamic form of Reconquista, exemplified today in al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and the al Aqsa Brigades—but also in the deep penetration of Muslims into Western Europe.

In Europe we have the means to stop the Islamic advance. What we are lacking in sufficient degree is the will. This must change.

The war against the Islamic advance in the West has been complicated by the attacks of fundamentalist terrorists. They have launched a guerrilla-like campaign in Europe and America. Such a war is characterized by sneak attacks against ill-defended or undefended targets, as for example the efforts to blow up two cars near Piccadilly Circus in central London in June 2007.

We may seem to be unable to prevent such attacks, except by fortuitous chance. But this is not so. Guerrilla attacks can be sustained indefinitely only in a country where guerrillas have a large base of support among the native population. Although there is a large Muslim population in Western Europe, most Europeans are scandalized by sneak attacks and support the governments in their efforts to locate terrorist cells and destroy them. We can never entirely prevent suicide bombers, but strong public opposition and firm police intelligence work can reduce their occurrence to a minimum. Terrorist strikes into Europe and the United States, while not impossible, are much harder to pull off than strikes against American and NATO forces within Iraq or Afghanistan.

The West has never possessed a goal to destroy Islam. The West has generally warded off Muslim attacks, in the hope that Muslims and Westerners could live in peace.

Only rarely has the West advanced into Muslim territory on a permanent basis. In the majority of cases, the West’s aggressions were only to recover territories that had been seized by Muslims—examples include the Reconquista in Spain, the Crusades, reoccupation of Sicily, and the long effort to reclaim southeastern Europe from the Turkish Ottoman Empire after its defeat at Vienna in 1683. Only in the imperial period did European powers seek to control Muslim lands. The collapse of imperialism after World War II resulted in withdrawal from Muslim lands other than for temporary military operations. The only exception was the West’s establishment of Israel in 1948, and its support of Israel thereafter.

The West’s refusal to embark on a war of annihilation is a valid strategy, and the West’s best defense is to withdraw as much as possible from the Middle East, but to resist strongly all attempts by Muslims to impose their views and their laws in the West.

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