During the 1930s, Winston Churchill, a seemingly failed politican, repeatedly warned his British countrymen against the growing menace of Nazi Germany.

The leaders of Britain, France and the United States–the three great victors of World War 1–hoped that if they simply ignored the increasingly aggressive behavior of Adolf Hitler, they could somehow escape catastrophe.

Winston Churchill

When, in the early 1930s, Hitler began re-building a powerful German army (Whermacht) in open defiance of the Versallies Treaty that had ended World War 1, Churchill gave warning–and was ignored.

When Hitler ordered his army to occupy his native Austria in 1938, Churchill warned that the Nazis would not be content with the conquest of one nation.  And was ignored.

In 1938, Hitler demanded that Czechoslavakia cede the Sudetenland, its northern, southwest and western regions, which were inhabited mostly by ethnic Germans.

Adolf Hitler

When British Prime Minister Nveille Chamberlain surrendered to Hitler’s demands at the infamous “Munich conference,” his fellow Britons were ecstatic.  He returned to England as a hero.

Churchill knew better: “Britain and France had to choose between war and dishonor.  They chose dishonor.  They will have war.”

In March, 1939, the German army occupied the rest of Czechoslovakia.

Hitler next turned his attention to Poland–which he invaded on September 1, unintentionally triggering World War II.

In time, historians and statesmen would regard Munich as an object lesson in the futility—and danger—in appeasing evil and aggression.

It is a lesson that current world leaders have forgotten as Islamic fundamentalists increasingly flex their military and economic muscles–and demand that Western nations bow to their demands.

• In Iran, scientists continue to fashion a nuclear weapons program–while insisting they intend to use the atom only for “peaceful purposes.”
• In Pakistan–which has 90-110 nuclear warheads–Osama bin Laden lived less than a mile from the Pakistan Military Academy, the country’s West Point.  So much for America’s “ally” in the “war on terror.”
• The rising tide of Muslim population growth spells deadly challenges for non-Islamic nations.

Winston Churchill’s warnings fell on deaf ears until other world leaders–most notably Franklin Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin–were forced by events to take action.

So did the warnings of Harvard political science professor Samuel P. Huntington.

In 1993, he published an essay in Foreign Affairs called “The Clash of Civilizations?”  In this, he argued that the post-Cold War would be marked by civilizational conflict.  Among his assertions:

• People are divided along religious and cultural lines.
• Islamic civilization do not share the general ideals of the Western world–such as individualism and democracy.
• Their primary attachment is to their religion, not to their nation-state.
• When the Muslim world conflicts with other civilizations, tensions and wars result.
• Arab dictatorships were fragile and could be overturned by the masses of unemployed young men. But even if they fell, the new regimes would not modernize along Western lines.
• A fundamental clash of civilizations between Islam and the West is inevitable.
• Relations between Muslims and non-Muslims–such as Catholics, Protestants, Hindus, Buddhists and Jews–have been marked by Islamic antagonism and violence.
• Western nations should distance themselves from Islamic ones.  The more both civilizations interact, the greater tensions between them will be.

Huntington’s critique of Islamic civilizations ignited a firestorm of controversey–especially his statement: “Islam has bloody borders.”

In 1996, Huntington expanded his thesis into a book–also called The Clash of Civilizations.  Once again, he minced no words:

“Some Westerners, including President Bill Clinton, have argued that the West does not have problems with Islam but only with violent Islamist extremists.  Fourteen hundred years of history demonstrate otherwise.”

Huntington cited British scholar Barry Buzan as giving several reasons for an inevitable war between the West and Islam:

• Western secular vs. Islamic religious values.
• Past historical rivalry between Christianity and Islam.
• Jealousy of Western power by Islamic nations.
• Islamic resentments of Western domination during the post-colonial restructuring of the Middle East.
• Islamic bitterness and humiliation at the achiveements of Western civilization over the last 200 years.

Much of the fury Muslims were directing toward the West, wrote Huntington, was aimed at its embrace of secularism.  Westerners were attacked not for being Christian but “for not adhering to any religion at all.”

Following the 1979 Iranian Revolution, a quasi-war developed between some Islamic nations and some Western ones.  On the Islamic side: Iran, Sudan, Iraq, Libya and Syria.  On the Western side: The United States and Britain.

“In this quasi war,” wrote Huntington, “each side has capitalized on its own strengths and the other side’s weaknesses.”  For example:

• Muslim terrorists exploited the openness of Western societies to plant car bombs at selected targets.
• Western powers used their superior air power to bomb selected targets in Islamic countries.
• Islamics plotted the assassination of Western leaders.
• The United States plotted the overthrow of hostile Islamic regimes.

Writing at a time before the United States directed its full military power at conquering Afghanistan and Iraq, Huntington ominously noted:

“During the 15 years between 1980 and 1995…the United States engaged in 17 military operations in the Middle East, all of them directed against Muslims.   No comparable pattern of U.S. military operations occurred against the people of any other civilization.”

The war that Huntington warned was coming and was, in fact, already in progress, has since erupted into full-scale conflict, with no end in sight.

There is a famous joke about racial profiling that’s long made the rounds of the Internet. It appears in the guise of a “history test,” and offers such multiple-choice questions as:

In 1972 at the Munich Olympics, athletes were kidnapped and massacred by:

• Olga Korbut
• Sitting Bull
• Arnold Schwarzenegger
• Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

In 1979, the US embassy in Iran was taken over by:

• Lost Norwegians
• Elvis
• A tour bus full of 80-year-old women
• Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

During the 1980s a number of Americans were kidnapped in Lebanon by:

• John Dillinger
• The King of Sweden
• The Boy Scouts
• Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

In 1983, the US Marine barracks in Beirut was blown up by:

• A pizza delivery boy
• Pee Wee Herman
• Geraldo Rivera
• Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

On September 11, 2001, four airliners were hijacked. Two were used as missiles to take out the World Trade Center; one crashed into the Pentagon; and the other was diverted and crashed by the passengers. Thousands of people were killed by:

• Bugs Bunny, Wiley E. Coyote, Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd
• The Supreme Court of Florida
• Mr. Bean
• Muslim male extremists mostly between the ages of 17 and 40

It’s well to remember the bitter truth behind this joke, especially in light of the latest Islamic atrocities:

• On April 15, two pressure-cooker bombs exploded at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, killing 3 people and injuring 264.  The culprits: Two Muslim brothers, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev and Tamerlan  Tsarnaev, who had emigrated to the United States from the former Soviet Union.
• On May 22, two Islamic terrorists, wielding machetes and shouting “Allahu Akbar!” (“God is Great!”)  hacked a British soldier to death on a London street.

Writing in the British newspaper, The Spectator, Douglas Murray issued a warning to his fellow Britons: “Over recent years, those who have warned that such attacks would come here have been attacked as ‘racists’, ‘fascists’ and, most commonly, ‘Islamophobes.’

“A refusal to recognise the actual threat (a growingly radicalised Islam) has dominated most of our media and nearly all our political class.”

One man who did foresee the present conflicts with stunning clarity–and had the courage to say what has since become Politically Incorrect–was Samuel P. Huntington.

Samuel P. Huntington

A political scientist, Huntington taught government at Harvard University (1950-1959, then at Columbia University (1959-1962).  He returned to Harvard in 1963, and remained there until his death in 2008.

The author of nine books, in 1996 he published his most influential one: The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order.  Its thesis was that, in the post-Cold War world, people’s cultural and religious identities would be the primary sources of conflict.

Among the points he makes:

• Modernization does not mean Westernization.
• Economic progress has come with a revival of religion.
• Post-Cold War politics emphasize ethnic nationalism over ideology.
• Civilizations are fundamentally differentiated from each other by centuries-old history, language, culture, tradition, and, most important, religion.
• As the world becomes smaller, different civilizations increasingly interact.  These intensify civilization consciousness and the awareness of differences between civilizations.
• Economic modernization and social change separate people from age-old identities (such as hometowns and familiar neighbors).  Religion has replaced this gap, providing a basis for identity, socialization and commitment that transcends national boundaries and unites civilizations.
• The West, at the peak of its power, is confronting non-Western countries that increasingly have the desire, will and resources to shape the world in non-Western ways.
• Cultural characteristics and differences are less mutable and hence less easily compromised and resolved than political and economic ones.

The most controversial part of The Clash of Civilizations focuses on Islam.  Huntington points out, for example, that Muslim countries are involved in far more intergroup violence than others.

And he warns that the West’s future conflcts with Islamic nations will be rooted in the Islamic religion:

“Islam’s borders are bloody and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilisation whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”

Huntington argues that civilizational conflicts are “particularly prevalent between Muslims and non-Muslims.”  Among the reasons for these conflicts: Both Islam and Christianity have similarities which heighten conflicts between their followers:

• Both seek to convert others.
• Both are “all-or-nothing” religions; each side believes that only its faith is the correct one.
• The followers of both Islam and Christianity believe that people who violate the base principles of their religion are idolators and thus damned.

Other reasons for the Western-Islamic clash are:

• The Islamic revival, which began in the 1970s and is manifested in greater religious piety and in a growing adoption of Islamic culture, values, dress, separation of the sexes, speech and media censorship.
• Western universalism–the belief that all civilizations should adopt Western values–infuriates Islamic fundamentalists.

These are not differences that will disappear–overnight or even over the span of several centuries.  Nor will they be sweet-talked away by Politically Correct politicians, however well-meaning.