As a civilization, it was brilliant, peaceful, progressive, scientific, and tolerant. It boasted astronomers, diplomats, and industrious traders, and such marvels as indoor plumbing, advanced medicine, lofty architecture, and sanitation.

Soon it would be destroyed.

In the centuries to come it would be under a consuming attack from primitive barbarians who justified atrocity through a perversion of their Christian faith. Of course, in seven hundred years even the barbarians learned to build nations, but for the Moslem civilizations of Moorish Spain and the Near East, the Dark Ages would soon come to them with a vengeance. Then, it was not a mullah that called the faithful to brutality and war, but the Pope. The Christian crusades erased the budding promise of a civilization, and sowed the seed of an animus that plagues us to this day.

The contagion of hatred, whether political or religious, is not inherent in race, ethnicity, or religion, but in social and political institutions that are manipulated by tyrants and the tyranny of ignorance. In the Second World War, regimes and peoples indoctrinated in and sustained by hatred were conquered and transformed by an American nation built on not western but universal human values. The tyrannies of the Middle East from Libya to Afghanistan must fall, lest their infection destroy us, but it must be remembered that although you can win victories by war, you can only build the peace by building nations. Of course, up to now we presumed that we could wait for economics and politics to sort it all out, as if this is a Darwinian thing that must span eons. But, as we so painfully know now, we cannot wait for ‘evolution’, and indeed cannot survive evolution.

The brilliance of Islam must be restored to Islam, and ironically it will take a non Islamic state to do it. For Islam, like Christianity and Judaism, is God’s gift to humanity. And as it was sixty years ago, the fate of humanity is again in American hands.

America will meet that responsibility.