A spectre is at large in the West. It is a spectre that is stalking every media outlet, obliging us to go back in time, to question history again. It is a cruel spectre, one that to our mind fails to disclose the real reasons for a cruelty that appears to exceed every limit, every measure, every possible objective, however perverse. The name of this spectre is Islam.
But are we truly at war? First, it is vital that we begin to understand who the real enemy is and who, instead, are its allies. Next we must establish whether all its allies are genuine, even among themselves, or whether they are instead engaged in a dangerous double-cross.
Islamic terrorism, episodes of anti-Christian persecution, and the flow of ‘migrants’ to Europe are the three elements that have triggered widespread Islamophobia, whose flames are being fanned by politicians as cynical as they are ill-equipped, and by media outlets in pursuit of news headlines. Many today claim or just think that Islam is a threat. But is it really likely that one and a half billion people are out to subjugate five and a half billion other human beings? And if this were their intention – to date proclaimed only by several thousand Isis militants or their leaders – what means could be at their disposal? Is it true that the migrants flowing into Europe will soon transform the continent into Eurabia?
Franco Cardini explores the Muslim world in clear-eyed prose: a complex, polymorphous, and contradictory reality that today seems suspended between Jihad and Coca-Cola, the Koran and business, between evocations of the power of the Caliphate and online instigation, between the nijab and Gucci. The data and figures are unequivocal: young Muslims dream of the West, its material goods, the American way of life, and even many Jihad militants in reality partake of this same imaginary world inspired by consumerism. In the meantime, in the West the fear of Islam has become the new opium of the people, exploited too often in order to distract public opinion from the problems of a world in which the brutal finance of turbo-capitalism dominates, spreading injustice and misery in its wake. Because it is not Islam that threatens us, despite the undoubtedly bellicose and even violent elements of its culture which are, however, just that –elements. It is against the unfair organization of this world, against the absurd imbalance of a humanity divided between the affluent few and masses of poor people, that we must take arms. That is the enemy to be vanquished.