Donald Trump made a claim during an interview with CNN that he thinks “Islam hates us,” meaning by “us” the West.

COOPER: Do you think Islam is at war with the west?

TRUIMP: I think Islam hates us. There is something — there is something there that is a tremendous hatred there. There’s a tremendous hatred. We have to get to the bottom of it. There’s an unbelievable hatred of us.

The claim is in a way obviously absurd, since a religion is not a living thing with feelings of its own.  A religion is a collection of doctrines, and doctrines do not feel hate.  At the most a religion might be said to be a collection of the people who structure their lives around the doctrines, and it is certainly true that not all Muslims hate the United States.  Some, as members of the media have been quick to point out, have died in the service of the United States.

If the claim is read generously, however, it does point to something important about the clash between Islam and the West.  It is not the feelings of Muslims but the structure of Islam itself that is the root of the clash.  It is in a strange way more correct to say the absurd thing, that “Islam hates us,” than it would be to say the obvious thing, that “Muslims hate us.”

As Jim Hanson, Executive Vice President for the Center for Security Policy said at the recent CPAC conference’s panel on radical Islam, Muslims are not at war with the West.  “The problem is Muslims who believe that sharia, the Islamic totalitarian ideology… is their calling, and they must spread it around the world.”  Sharia, the religious law that governs all aspects of life in the name of Islam, is what roots the conflict with the West.  Sharia argues that democracy is fundamentally invalid because it is a form of man-made law, when sharia adherents believe that only God can make laws.  That is another way of saying that only the revealed laws of sharia may be applied as laws to human beings.  The West’s democratic forms of government are anathema to this understanding of legal legitimacy.  As Hanson says, this same legal tradition requires its adherents to attempt to spread this form of government across the world.

Front Page Magazine recently did an interview with eight leading figures in the Counter Jihad movement.  The author points out that many Muslims of her acquaintance ignore Ramadan or drink alcohol.  Americans, she documents, have not traditionally had any concerns about Islam.  “It is primarily terrorists and Islam-apologists, people like Obama, Zuckerberg, Moore and Hawkins, who are in fact responsible for the current tension. Politically Correct speech codes suppress and demonize necessary conversations about Islam.”  As Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed out at the same CPAC panel mentioned above, refusals to have those conversations in Holland prevented the assimilation of Islamic immigrants and the addressing of the problematic aspects of Islam itself — of Islam, not of Muslims.

We have to address the fact that Islam, not all Muslims but Islam itself, insists in its legal code that equality under the law is forbidden and sinful.  Women are degraded.  Sexual minorities, and some religious minorities, face the death penalty.  Freedom of conscience is outlawed, and former Muslims who exercise it by conversion must be killed if the law is to be satisfied.  It is not all Muslims who hate us, but Islam has at its core values that conflict with the West’s in a way that can readily spring into hate.