Are we at war with Islam?

Tuesday, May 10, 2005

Jihad Watch's Hugh Fitzgerald considers the common claim by Muslim leaders that the West is at war with Islam:

http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/006100.php#more

The more accurate formulation would be: the adherents of Islam, following correctly its tenets, as expressed in the Qur'an and Hadith, and in the example of Muhammad set out in the Sira, have been making war, whenever and wherever possible, and employing whatever instruments at the time are available (combat, wealth, "pen, tongue," and now demography) to spread Islam, to prevent non-Muslims from setting up any obstacles to the further spread and ultimate dominance of Islam, and to ensure that any non-Muslims permitted to remain alive without being forcibly converted will, nonetheless, have to live lives of deliberate humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity. During some long periods when Islam was weak, and the awareness of the outside world also feeble, the only kind of Jihad that was practiced against the outside world were expeditions by slavers and looters to Western Europe (a million whites seized, and many villages destroyed, over several centuries, Eastern Europe and Russia -- several million victims, including Circassian and Georgian and other Christian women seized for their noted beauty), and to Africa (tens of millions of black Africans, mostly young males castrated at the point of seizure, and then marched overland, and then taken often by sea for part of the journey, to the slave markets of Islam: Jeddah, Constantinople, Damascus, Cairo, Baghdad, Algiers, Constantinople, even as far as Ottoman-ruled Smyrna). The mortality rate was 90%.

That has been the history of Islam's relations to all non-Muslims. Conquest, destruction, slavery, demands from within the lands conquered for jizyah. It is little different today, though disguise is of the essence. The Bumiputra system used against Hindus and Chinese in Malaysia is simply a disguised jizya tax by the Malaysian Muslims. Yet Muslims now demand foreign aid from Infidel states, and act as if it is theirs by right and must not either be stopped or have any strings attached to it: see the fury of the P.A. over the American Congress's attempt to funnel aid through American aid agencies; see the Egyptian government's complacent belief that no matter what it did to help Iraqi weapons projects, no matter what nuclear projects it is up to itself, no matter how completely it ignores its solemn commitments under the Camp David Accords and has become a world center of antisemitism, no matter how much anti-Americanism its people display in that most hostile of countries, it will still continue to receive, for no conceivably sensible reason, some $2 billion a year from American taxpayers, apparently helpless to prevent their government from paying what has now become a jizyah tax, just like all the others we pay to every Muslim country that does not have oil revenues.

Islam is at war with Buddhists in Thailand and in Burma, and at war with Confucians and atheists in China. It is at war with Hindus in Bangladesh, and Pakistan, and Kashmir, and India itself. It is at war with Christians in the Philippines, and in Indonesia, and in Malaysia, and in Bangladesh, and in Pakistan, and in Iran, and in Saudi Arabia, and in Iraq, and in Lebanon, and in Egypt, and in Algeria. Islam is at war with whatever Jews can be found, in and out of Israel, since so very few remain, after years of persecution and murder, within the lands ruled by Muslim Arabs. Islam is at war with everyone, for Islam divides the world between Believer and Infidel. Anyone who reads and re-reads the Qur’an, and then reads the commentators, and the jurisconsults, and the muhaddithin, and then looks at the history of Islamic conquest -- reading, for example, "The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam" which is perhaps Bat Ye'or's greatest work of history -- and then looks at Muslim attitudes and behavior today, can come to only one conclusion: Muslims are at war with, and remain a permanent danger to, all non-Muslim societies. If some are not fervent in their Islam, we still do not know what might set off such fervency. Those who place such abstract principles as "tolerance" and "pluralism" above the reasonable need to preserve civilizations, such as our own, which first created and promoted such principles, against those who do not in truth believe in those principles and in the long run would destroy them and the civilization that developed them, are wrong. Lincoln was not the first, nor the last, to understand that in war-time, the same measures do not necessarily apply as during peace-time.

Those who see things aright, and who have taken the trouble to study Islam, know that this war can be contained, and that it need not involved large-scale military conflict. But that conflict can be avoided, across national borders, and within the borders of European nations, only if Muslim countries and groups are kept from acquiring major weaponry, or forced to disgorge what they have, and are kept from migrating in greater numbers to the West (they have little desire to go elsewhere), and those here limited in their sinister campaigns of Da'wa (in which Islam is not fully spelled out until, for the convert, he or she has already signed up for the Army of Islam), which are aimed first at the most marginal and therefore most vulnerable populations -- marginality defined as both economic and psychic.

Far from making war on Islam, the United States has repeatedly rescued Muslims in Kosovo and Bosnia, extended aid for decades to Turkey and Iran, always been prompt to offer other kinds of aid (the aid post-tsunami rushed to Aceh, the most Muslim part of Indonesia), protected Muslim Kuwait and even-more Muslim Saudi Arabia from Saddam Hussein (a choice that looks, in retrospect, not quite as obviously right as it once did), and continues to give aid, against its own best interests, to Pakistan (a recipient for decades of American military and political support), to Egypt, and to the "Palestinian" Authority. And of course tens of billions, even hundreds of billions, have been spent to rescue the Iraqis from their own latest Lord of Misrule, and to build up the country -- all the while taking casualties because of the inability of Iraqis to do the job themselves. They are unable to fight for their own country though there are 25 million of them. So very few of them capable of feeling, among the rumors and lies and crazed through-the-prism-of-Islam perceptions of the universe, any real or lasting gratitude.

Muslims make war, with or without military means, because Islam itself is suffused with a war-like and aggressive doctrine. Refusal to see this does not make the doctrine go away. Imaginary "Muslim moderates" who are then imagined to be a "majority" do not make the texts of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira change. They do not make the massacre of the Banu Qurayzah prisoners disappear. Or the assassination of Asma bint Marwan. Or the attack on the Khaybar Oasis. Or little Aisha. Or a hundred other events in Muhammad's life, Muhammad who is uswa hasana, in the Qur'anic phrase, the very model for all Muslims, for all time.
Islam makes war and calls it "peace" and "justice." From a Muslim perspective, of course, this is perfectly true. Islam brings with it a pax islamica, and the "justice" of Islam. Quite right. No Muslim should really disagree.

But those of us who have made the choice not to accept Islam, and who find that the more we discover about it, the more horrified we become (and let's face it: a few years ago, we knew almost nothing about it, and were prepared, for example, to assume that the last word on the subject might be, for the more naive, John Esposito, and at a slightly lesser level of naivete, Bernard Lewis). Now we have studied, and are trying as best we can to get others to study. It would even be nice if a few journalists, before offering their platitudes and plongitudes, at least admitted they knew little about Islam. It would be nice if the cheerleaders of the "Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations" Project in Iraq would stop to consider and even study the nature of Islam, and begin to ask themselves if Iraq is not in fact the obvious place, almost a god-given place, to exploit -- merely by leaving, for nothing more is called for -- the fissures between Arab and non-Arab Muslim, between Sunni and Shi'a. And then to concentrate on preventing the islamization of Europe -- not by throwing Israel to the wolves, which is the hollow and self-defeating strategy of the Alastair-Crooke-and-Patrick-Seale variety, urged on by the deplorable men now in charge of the E.U. bureaucracy and foreign policy, but by waking Europeans up to their betrayal, by their own elites in the government and the press, to the long-term interests of the indigenous Infidels.

Again, this sentence is either true or false:

"The large-scale presence of Muslims within Western Europe has already made the lives of the indigneous Infidels, and non-Muslim immigrants as well, far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than they would have been without such a large-scale Muslim presence."
No one, not even those who utter such silly phrases as "but what can we do? what can we do know?" can deny the truth of that easily verifiable remark.

Verify it yourself. Talk to Europeans. Walk around the streets of European cities. Find out the cost of monitoring Muslims, at train stations and bus stations, at metro stations and at airports, at chemical plants and at nuclear plants. At churches, and at synagogues, and at Hindu and Buddhist and Sikh temples. And parliaments. And city halls. And police stations. And fire stations. And schools, beginning with, but hardly limited to, the Jewish schools. And of course those spies in the mosques, those wire-taps, those agents who must be paid, and the police, and the security guards, and the lawyers, and the judges, and the whole apparatus that grows and grows, only to monitor a problem that need not ever have been allowed to be created, much less be permitted to continue to grow because leadership is lacking, the articulation of the problem is seldom to be heard.

And of course, the United States must watch Western Europe carefully, and its own Infidels learn from the unhappy experience of France, and Belgium, and Germany, and England, and Spain, and...well, fill in the names yourself.

And draw the right conclusions yourself.