Apuleius Books

The Saudis always play a complex game. They are allowing anti ISIL bases on their territory while funding extremist madrases in northern Pakistan in order to buy off their clergy at home. They maintain an ultra conservative religion in their capitol but many princes are known to party in the desert or in Europe. Their wealthy are Western educated but find it expedient to never question Islam as Christians question Christianity. These are Muslim not out of deeply held belief but because they have everything to lose by even examining other religions or atheism. Their real gods are, and always have been: oil, the dollar, and never changing anything which might upset their good life. They will allow anti ISIL training camps because they need the West, but should fundamentalist Islam succeed in forming a caliphate that might please many of their religious leaders, the princes would, as always, survive by cutting a deal.

President Obama admits that the USA has no policy in place regarding ISIS. That’s unusually frank, true and, regrettably, as things must be. ISIS is a hydra or whack a mole. Knock it down and the fundamentalists will just pop up in another guise. The only way to obliterate these militants is to eliminate the fundamentalist mentality preached worldwide by extremist mullahs. These are more or less free to spread their doctrine of anti secularism in the West, protected by European law, and in the Islamic world because even those governments which hate them are afraid to take on the challenge. A few decades ago it was nearly mandatory to denigrate the crusaders and the later colonialism of the Western countries. Fact is however, that at least the first crusade was a response to Muslims killing any Christian pilgrim who dared to visit his holy places. Whatever the faults of colonialism, Christianity did not teach that one should simply be grateful to God for whatever miserable existence you had been born to and thank him five times a day for it. What’s to be done? As Obama realizes but dare not say. there is no answer, no policy, but time. Meanwhile we can only respond here and there to punish those who actually threaten us. I firmly believe that in time education in the widest sense of that term will have some effect. It is popular television and the internet, not governments, which will marginalize the fundamentalist Muslims just as it is marginalizing fundamentalist Christianity in the West.