"Bringing America Home" is a message that is long overdue, but Tom Hauken's warning that "Militant Islam is a greater threat to Western civilization than that posed by the Soviet Union in the 20th century" reveals either the author's bias, or lack of knowledge about Islam.
Following the collapse of the Soviet Union former Defense Secretary McNamara, in his 1989 testimony before the Senate Budget Committee, stated that defense spending could safely be cut in half over five years. For the Pentagon it was a simple choice: either find new enemies, or cut defense spending.
It became a choice between the Green Peril or the Yellow Peril -- Islam or China. Successive presidents chose to define that threat as Islamic fundamentalism (an oxymoron like militant Islam), rogue states and nuclear outlaws, axis of evil, war on terror, etc.
Mr. Hauken's repetition of the Islamic threat , that for two decades has served to justify America's recent wars, makes bringing "Bringing America Home" a goal more difficult to achieve.
And Islamic civilization is not mounting an assault on either America or Europe -- it's been here for a long time.
In his October 27,1993 speech titled 'Islam and the West,' HRH The Prince of Wales stated: "Not only did Muslim Spain gather and preserve the intellectual content of ancient Greek and Roman civilisation, it also interpreted and expanded upon that civilization, and made a vital contribution of its own in so many fields of human endeavour - in science, astronomy, mathematics, algebra (itself an Arabic word), law, history, medicine, pharmacology, optics, agriculture, architecture, theology, music.
"The surprise, ladies and gentlemen," says "is the extent to which Islam has been a part of Europe for so long, first in Spain, then in the Balkans, and the extent to which it has contributed so much towards the civilization which we all too often think of, wrongly, as entirely Western. Islam is part of our past and our present, in all fields of human endeavour. It has helped to create modern Europe. It is part of our own inheritance, not a thing apart."
The real treat is the military-industrial complex that we were warned about by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, and in more colorful fashion by General Smedley Darlington Butler, the recipient of two Congressional Medals of Honor, in a speech given in 1933.
