The following is a slightly revised version of a reply Jillian Becker made to a British (and fatuously anti-American) commenter on the post Islam and “Islamism”, November 14, 2011.

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From time to time it’s necessary for us to state what we’re all about.

We are atheists. That is self-explanatory. We are conservatives in that our principles are those at the core of American conservatism: limited government, low taxes, strong defense, a free market economy, individual liberty.

Liberty is our highest value. We oppose collectivism, which is serfdom.

Collectivist ideologies are  of two kinds: egalitarian and inegalitarian. Marxism, Communism, Socialism, Stalinism, Maoism are examples of the egalitarian. Nazism, Islam, the Catholicism of the Middle Ages are examples of the inegalitarian.

Our chosen task is the critical examination of ideas, mainly political and religious. Our pages are are full of criticism of Catholicism, Calvinism, Judaism, Islam, and many more such systems of belief. They are sets of ideas, and as such need to be examined and criticized. Their histories and the crimes committed in their name need to be repeatedly exposed.

We fix our assessing eye on Islam more than on any other religion because it is waging war on the West. Our view of Islam is not prejudice, it is judgment. We have taken the trouble to inform ourselves. To be against subjugators, oppressors and mass murderers is not “bigotry”.  We quote Muslims who are regarded as authorities, sometimes showing them in videos expressing themselves directly. Islam’s defenders have the hospitality of our comment pages to explain why they like it.

We have never advocated, and never would, the harming of any person except criminals or those who declare an intention to commit a crime. In such cases we expect the law – not a mob – to deal with them. Or if they are terrorists held, say, at Guantanamo Bay, we want them to be brought before a military tribunal and if found guilty, executed.

Islam should become as abominated as Nazism and Maoism generally are at least in the West. It deserves nothing better. That it calls itself a religion in no way exonerates or excuses it. In any case, we respect no religion, no belief in the supernatural, no orthodoxy, no dogma.

To discredit Islam, constant public criticism of it is absolutely necessary. That is why no laws or resolutions protecting it from criticism must be passed by nation states or by the UN, which is currently trying to do just that (with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help).

Islam declared war on the non-Muslim world 1400 years ago. That war has become very hot of late. Since 9/11 there have been some 18,000 deadly terror attacks  carried out in the name of Islam (see our margin). Most of us can only fight the battle with words. Let’s not spare them.

Liberty is the highest value.

It is the ideal that the United States of America was founded upon and should always stand for.

Mark Steyn speaks about this in a discussion with Hugh Hewitt:

I think the United States should stand for liberty, simply because that’s the right thing to do. That’s the idealistic position. The United States should be, have a bias toward liberty. In a real politick sense, I think it’s also good to have a bias toward liberty, because it’s a good way of messing with dictators’ heads. I’m not a great fan of stability in the Middle East. I don’t think the Americans wound up with a lot to show for shoveling all this money at Mubarak for thirty years. So it’s one thing to have a philosophical predisposition toward liberty. And liberty’s the word here rather than democracy, rather than, you know, saying we’re going to have an election on Thursday, and the polling station open at eight, and you can all wave your purple fingers. That’s relatively easy to do. Actually establishing liberty is tough, hard work.

Hard work fighting off collectivism.

The collectivist ideologies of the last couple of hundred years, which so enchanted most Western intellectuals with an hallucination of equality, have a shabby, musty, weary, worn-out look about them now – though some nations are still enchained by them. Equality, other than before the law, is not possible. Any effort to impose economic equality has to be done by central governments which – therefore – instantly become totalitarian tyrannies, and yet still fail to achieve the impossible goal. The French Revolution motto of “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” is a piece of nonsense. “Fraternity” means nothing, and Liberty and Equality – in the sense that the revolutionaries meant it – are mutually exclusive.

That comunist/socialist ideals are rotting is another point which Mark Steyn makes, saying in the same interview when asked by Hugh Hewitt (referring to events in the Middle East), “What is your hope that the Team Obama is thinking through right now or doing?”:

Well, I don’t think they’re thinking at all, actually. I don’t think that’s something that the Obama team do a lot of. They’re mired in outmoded, polytechnic, Marxist claptrap that even before these recent events was the best part of half a century out of date.

But older, darker, and quite as nasty as the egalitarian type of collectivism is the inegalitarian type, such as Catholicism was in the Middle Ages and Islam is still. Islam, old as it is, remains all too athletically alive, and is a real and present threat to liberty in America.