A constant refrain when discussing issues of radical Islam is that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not radicalized. I agree completely. The vast majority of Muslim men and women are people who just want to live their lives, bring up their families and make the most out of the short time they have available to them.
Almost all Western intelligence agencies are unanimous in their estimates that anywhere between 15-25 percent of Muslims worldwide are radicalized. That means there are between 180-300 million radicalized Muslim men and women in the world today. It is quite right to point out that this therefore means there are 75 percent of the Muslim Uma who are not radicalized. (An overwhelming majority.)
The problem is though that this majority is completely irrelevant.
During the 1930s in Germany only a small minority of people were fully signed up members of the Nazi Party. Only a small number of disenfranchised ex-soldiers were with Hitler from the very beginning of his ascension to power, whilst he was agitating in the Beer Halls of Munich. Only a tiny minority of men such as Hess, Himmler and Goering followed him and watched his every move from the very beginning.
The overwhelming majority of Germans were unaware of Hitler in the early 1920s and were even repulsed by him. After all, Germany was, despite its crushing defeat and humiliation at the end of the First World War, an intellectually sophisticated country, with a rich history of academic endeavor.
In 1933, after Hitler swept to power, even then, the majority of Germans did not fully support Hitler and his policies. The overwhelming majority thought he was an extremist and a bigot.
But they remained silent. The overwhelming majority became completely irrelevant and a tiny minority of individuals were allowed to set the agenda in Germany over the following twelve years. This ended with the Jewish Holocaust and the additional deaths of anywhere between 75 to 100 million war dead by 1945.
Equally, in the Soviet Union a small minority of people in 1917 were aligned to Lenin and Marxist Communism. The overwhelming majority of people just wanted to carry on with their lives and watched these people from the periphery, as they fundamentally changed Russia and the Soviet Union. This led to Stalin and his infamous “purges” whereby he was responsible for the deaths of an estimated nine million of his own people.
The overwhelming majority of Soviets allowed themselves to be swept along by this tiny minority. The overwhelming majority had become completely irrelevant.
So with Islam, the overwhelming majority have become irrelevant and Islam’s very future is being cut out by a small minority of people. The majority are standing by and because their active opposition is limited, they have become irrelevant.
However, the disturbing reality is that we are in exactly the same position and are acting in exactly the same way.
Barack Obama is fundamentally altering America. He is systematically and methodically carrying out the changes he promised from his earliest public days. He is aided by a small minority of like-minded but highly motivated and capable people, and he is being true to his word. Barak Obama is bringing change to America.
The majority have stood by while Obama actively rewrites the rules on immigration, allowing America to become swamped by people that it cannot afford. Obama has allowed the Southern border to become so porous that literally anybody, with any intent, can just walk across it without so much as a verbal challenge. One or two individuals have taken issue with this, but the majority have remained silent.
Obama is changing the very nature of the presidency itself. The system of checks and balances built into the Constitution specifically to prevent abuses is being eroded and done away with; expressly so he can perpetrate abuses of power, effectively ruling by presidential edict. He is trying, successfully, to rule by decree from the White House beyond the will and limitations of an impotent Congress, who bluster but mainly just stand idly by.
Obama promised to unify this nation. He said he would heal the differences and the divisions. Yet division is exactly what he has wrought. Conflict and division between one group and another epitomize America in 2015. A divided America is one of its current defining characteristics and so divided has it become that many commentators are openly voicing the concern that this next two years may be the most dangerous for America since the Civil War era.
Yet the overwhelming majority of Americans are either unaware or are simply standing by and watching, apathetic, uninterested.
As with radical Islam, as with America. The overwhelming majority may oppose these things coming on the world, but they are proving to be completely irrelevant.
And Europe is a direct mirror of the changes taking place in America.
The Bible tells us that at some point in the near future there will be a one world economic system with a single, one world government presiding over it. Sitting at the helm of this system will be the final world dictator, the man of sin, the lawless one, the Antichrist. He will rule with a very small group of individuals who will ruthlessly dominate and subjugate the majority in the world. Opposition by this point will be irrelevant.
“He causes all, both small and great, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hand or on their foreheads, and that no one may buy or sell except one who has the mark or the name of the beast, or the number of his name.” (Revelation 13:16-17).
When we look around ourselves in 2015, this is not such a stretch of the imagination anymore. The consequences of this will be terrible beyond imagination.
“When the Lamb broke the fifth seal, I saw underneath the altar the souls of those who had been slain because of the word of God, and because of the testimony which they had maintained; and they cried out with a loud voice, saying, ‘How long, O Lord, holy and true, will You refrain from judging and avenging our blood on those who dwell on the earth?’ And there was given to each of them a white robe; and they were told that they should rest for a little while longer, until the number of their fellow servants and their brethren who were to be killed even as they had been, would be completed also.” (Revelation 6:9-11)
Pastor Martin Niemöller, the German Lutheran anti-Nazi theologian, aptly summed up the dangers of passivity in his famous post World War II poem:
“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”