Wolfgang Bruno

Closing of Blog

2008-08-12T19:32:00.000-07:00

This blog has not been updated for a very long time and has served its purpose. I will soon close it, but will leave it online for a couple of weeks more before I remove it.

The Special Cases: The Ahmadiyya

2006-12-13T15:15:00.000-08:00

There are movements within Islam, or groups of people who at least identify themselves as Muslims, that are indeed somewhat more tolerant and less violent that mainstream Muslims. One such movement is the Ahmadiyya community.

The Ahmadiyya movement was founded by Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in 1889. He taught that jihad “by the sword” had been replaced by jihad “of the pen,” and wanted to synthesize all religions under the banner of Islam. He claimed to be the "Reformer of the age" but did not bring any new revelation. After a schism in 1914, his followers split into two groups: The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community and the Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, with its center in Lahore in what is today Pakistan. The main body, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community (sometimes called the Qadiani after the village where the founder was born) claimed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet, although he didn't bring any new laws. The Lahore Ahmadiyya Movement, on the other hand, presented themselves as an Islamic reform movement and maintained the normal Muslim view that Muhammad was "the seal of the prophets" and that there would be no new prophet after him. Both branches, however, agree that Ghulam Ahmad was the Mahdi and the Messiah. They also believe that the Koran contains no abrogations.

Ahmadis still follow traditional Muslim rituals such as prayer and fasting, but among mainstream Muslims there is deep suspicion towards them, chiefly because the main body of Ahmadiyyas have affirmed that Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was a prophet, a claim that is considered heretical by most Muslims. The largest concentration of Ahmadiyyas is found in the Indian subcontinent, in Pakistan and Bangladesh. Both groups are viewed as heretical by Saudi authorities, and are thus not allowed to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and Medina.

At alislam.org, their official website, the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community says about themselves:

“The Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam is a religious organization, international in its scope, with branches in over 178 countries in Africa, North America, South America, Asia, Australasia, and Europe. At present, its total membership exceeds 200 million worldwide [note: it is impossible to verify this number, which is almost certainly inflated], and the numbers are increasing day by day. This is the most dynamic denomination of Islam in modern history. The Ahmadiyya Movement was established in 1889 by Hadhrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad (1835-1908) in a small and remote village, Qadian, in the Punjab, India. He claimed to be the expected reformer of the latter days, the Awaited One of the world community of religions (The Mahdi and Messiah). It [the movement] advocates peace, tolerance, love and understanding among followers of different faiths. It firmly believes in and acts upon the Qur'anic teaching: "There is no compulsion in religion." (2:257) It strongly rejects violence and terrorism [emphasis in the original] in any form and for any reason. After the demise of its founder, the Ahmadiyya Movement has been headed by his elected successors - Khalifas.”

Precisely because they champion an unorthodox and somewhat more peaceful version of Islam, Ahmadis are frequently persecuted by traditional Muslims in both Pakistan and Bangladesh. Under Pakistan's strict blasphemy laws the Ahmadiyya are not allowed to preach, nor even to call themselves Muslims.

Under the Bangladesh National Party (BNP) -led government, discrimination and violence against the Ahmadis has intensified. "It's a dangerous moment in Bangladesh when the government becomes complicit in religious violence," said Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch's Asia Division. "The authorities have emboldened extremists by failing to prosecute those engaged in anti-Ahmadi violence and by banning Ahmadiyya publications."

In October 2004 Muslim fanatics razed an Ahmadiyya mosque. The mob vandalized and robbed Ahmadiyya houses, injuring at least 11. One of the injured, Shabju Mia, 52, imam of the mosque, ended up in hospital. Witnesses said local BNP leader led the raiders.

In July 2006, the Bangladeshi newspaper the Daily Star carried a story on Ahmadis who had been victimized, but the article was later removed, probably following pressures from powerful anti-Ahmadiyya forces. The police had accused four Ahmadis of preaching publicly in a village in the Punjab. The villagers protested against "unabated preaching" of the Ahmadiyya faith in their village, and urged the police to ensure the arrest of those accused. The minority sect condemned law enforcers for being reluctant to act in two assault incidents on Ahmadis that same summer. The movement believed this encouraged the bigots to be more aggressive. The Ahmadiyyas had become confined to their houses and refrained from going to work after fanatics threatened to attack them.

The irony is that although Ahmadis are hardly even considered Muslims by other Muslims, the first and so far only Muslim to be awarded a Nobel Prize for science was an Ahmadi. According to Hugh Fitzgerald:

“Among the nearly 1000 recipients of Nobel Prizes in science (Physics, Chemistry, Medicine), only one appears to have gone to a ‘Muslim’ - Abdus Salam. Trained partly at the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge, and dying in Oxford (to which he had retired), Abdus Salam shared the prize with Sheldon Glashow and Steven Weinberg. One presumes that Abdus Salam deserved his 1/3 of the 1979 prize. But his entire career depended upon access to Western education. And while he wrote on the ‘Wisdom of Islam’ (just the kind of thing to win a Templeton Prize) he was both claimed, in Pakistan, as a ‘Muslim’ and yet belonged, as ah Ahmadiyya, to a sect regarded by many Muslims in Pakistan, Bangladesh, and elsewhere as not a real Muslim at all. It was a case of claiming not him, but rather his Nobel, for Islam, and then not discussing if just possibly, the reason he was the only Muslim Nobel-winner in science might have something to do with, precisely, the relatively greater mental freedom that Adhamiddya Islam may offer its adherents, compared to that available to those in orthodox Islam.”

The Ahmadis do in some ways represent an interesting case of a “reformed” Islam, but it is in my view unlikely whether their version of Islam could ever form a viable alternative to the majority of the world’s Muslims. They are simply too far removed from Islamic orthodoxy, especially the largest branch which considers their founder a prophet.

Islamic Dictionary for Infidels

2006-07-27T22:18:00.000-07:00

Andrew G. Bostom, author of “The Legacy of Jihad,” notes that President Bush has repeatedly stressed the paramount importance of promoting freedom in the Middle East. However, Bostom points out that Hurriyya, the Arabic for “freedom,” and the uniquely Western concept of freedom “are completely at odds.” Hurriyya - “freedom” - is – as Ibn Arabi (d. 1240) the lionized “Greatest Sufi Master,” expressed it -“perfect slavery” under the will of Allah. Bernard Lewis, in his analysis of hurriyya for the venerated Encyclopedia of Islam, maintains that:

“…there is still no idea that the subjects have any right to share in the formation or conduct of government—to political freedom, or citizenship, in the sense which underlies the development of political thought in the West.”

Meanwhile, the German- Syrian scholar Bassam Tibi, a Muslim reformist, is warning the West against wishful thinking in its “dialogue” with Muslims. "The dialogue is not proceeding well because of the two-facedness of most Muslim interlocutors on the one hand and the gullibility of well-meaning Western idealists on the other."

Muslims frequently claim, to obscure the realities of the war against non-Muslims, that “Islam means peace.” The word “Islam” does indeed come from the same three-letter Arabic root (s-l-m) as the word “salaam,” peace. “Islam,” however, means “submission,” not peace. “Peace” in Islam equals submission to the will of Allah through his divine and eternal law, sharia. The absence of sharia is the absence of peace. Bassam Tibi explains:

"First, both sides should acknowledge candidly that although they might use identical terms these mean different things to each of them. The word 'peace,' for example, implies to a Muslim the extension of the Dar al-Islam – or 'House of Islam' – to the entire world," explained Tibi. "This is completely different from the Enlightenment concept of eternal peace that dominates Western thought, a concept developed by Immanuel Kant," an 18th-century philosopher. "Similarly, when Muslims and the Western heirs of the Enlightenment speak of tolerance they have different things in mind. In Islamic terminology, this term implies abiding non-Islamic monotheists, such as Christians, Jews and Zoroastrians, as second-class believers. They are 'dhimmi,' a protected but politically immature minority." According to Tibi, the quest of converting the entire world to Islam is an immutable fixture of the Muslim worldview. Only if this task is accomplished, if the world has become a "Dar al-Islam," will it also be a "Dar a-Salam," or a house of peace.”

This strategy of deceiving non-Muslims by twisting words to conceal the real, Islamic agenda while Muslims are not yet strong enough to impose their will is sanctioned by Islamic texts. IslamOnline quotes Sheikh `Atiyyah Saqr, former head of Al-Azhar Fatwa Committee, in stating:

“Lying is forbidden unless it is for necessity. In that case, the principle “necessity makes the unlawful permissible” applies. (…) Some of these acceptable lies is what we call connotation, a word carrying a double meaning. The Muslim may use the positive not the negative interpretation of the word.”

Robert Spencer, who gives examples of this in his book “Onward Muslim Soldiers,” confirms this:

“Religious deception of unbelievers is indeed taught by the Qur’an itself: “Let not the believers take for friends or helpers unbelievers rather than believers. If any do that, in nothing will there be help from Allah; except by way of precaution, that ye may guard yourselves from them” (Qur’an 3:28). In other words, don’t make friends with unbelievers except to “guard yourselves from them”: pretend to be their friends so that you can strengthen yourself against them. The distinguished Qur’anic commentator Ibn Kathir explains that this verse teaches that if “believers who in some areas or times fear for their safety from the disbelievers,” they may “show friendship to the disbelievers outwardly, but never inwardly.”

This strategy seems to be working quite well with the dhimmis of the European Union, who are now promoting an official dictionary to use when writing about matters related to Islam. "Jihad means something for you and me, it means something else for a Muslim. Jihad is a perfectly positive concept of trying to fight evil within yourself," said an EU official. Really? Writing over six decades ago, Arthur Jeffery belittled as "the sheerest sophistry" such attempts to rewrite the bloody reality of Jihad:

".. .the early Arabic sources quite plainly and frankly describe the expeditions as military expeditions, and it would never have occurred to anyone at that day to interpret them as anything else…”

Armed Jihad is not just a thing of the past. Observers of school textbooks in Egypt of the present age note that "[the] concept of jihad is interpreted in the Egyptian school curriculum almost exclusively as a military endeavour.” Majid Khadduri, a Muslim scholar, whose 1955 treatise on Jihad remains one of the most respected analyses of this institution, summarized these consensus views, as follows:

“The Prophet Muhammad is reported to have declared ‘some of my people will continue to fight victoriously for the sake of the truth until the last one of them will combat the anti-Christ.’ Until that moment is reached the jihad, in one form or another will remain as a permanent obligation upon the entire Muslim community. It follows that the existence of a dar al-harb is ultimately outlawed under the Islamic jural order; that the dar al-Islam is permanently under jihad obligation until the dar al-harb is reduced to non-existence (…) The universality of Islam, in its all embracing creed, is imposed on the believers as a continuous process of warfare, psychological and political if not strictly military."

An observer of Egyptian schoolbooks notes that: “Peace in general is exalted in the Egyptian school textbooks, both as a human and as an Islamic value. It is declared to be Egypt's goal. But when examined more deeply, it turns out to be a conditional value, both on the political and religious levels. On the political level peace is made conditional upon reciprocity on the part of the enemy, which is interpreted as acceptance of the Arabs' demands. On the religious level, peace is conditional upon the interests of the Muslims at any given moment. If the Muslims are stronger than the enemy, peace may be legally rejected. The meaning of peace in itself – as presented to the Egyptian students – does not exclude war, and this reaches the point, in several cases, of advocating war in the name of peace.”

In 2006, Iraqi religious scholar Ayatollah Ahmad Husseini Al-Baghdadi explained that Jihad, from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, is of two types: Not just defensive warfare if somebody attacks Muslims in their own lands, but also “Jihad initiated by the Muslims, which means raiding the world in order to spread the word that “there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah” throughout the world.” In other words: The ultimate objective of Jihad isn’t merely to preserve Islam at home, but to spread it throughout the world when Muslims are in a position to do so: “If the objective and subjective circumstances materialize, and there are soldiers, weapons, and money - even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial weapons - we will conquer the world, so that “There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah” will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris.”

Contemporary Muslim theologians such as Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, “spiritual” leader of the Muslim Brotherhood and popular Al-Jazeera television personality, hailed as a moderate voice by some in the West, sanction bombings against all Israeli citizens using Jihad criteria completely in line with those by classical jurists. He argues that in modern war there are no civilians, as all sectors of society aid the efforts if the country is involved in confrontation with Muslims in some way. Which also means that all non-Muslim citizens become legitimate targets of Islamic attacks. Qaradawi says:

“It has been determined by Islamic law that the blood and property of people of Dar Al-Harb [the Domain of Disbelief where the battle for the domination of Islam should be waged] is not protected…in modern war, all of society, with all its classes and ethnic groups, is mobilized to participate in the war, to aid its continuation, and to provide it with the material and human fuel required for it to assure the victory of the state fighting its enemies.”

Needless to say, this line of thinking could easily be used by Islamic groups to justify terror attacks such as the ones on the World Trade Center in New York City. In their eyes, they didn’t kill innocent civilians since there are no innocent civilians in the USA. This should be kept in mind when listening to “moderate” Muslim leaders smiling and declaring that Islam is strongly against killing innocent civilians. Indeed, there are some Muslims who would argue that ALL non-Muslims, at least those who have on some point heard the Islamic message and still failed to convert, are guilty of rebellion against Allah and thus fair game.

An undercover investigation caught leaders of a radical Islamic group in the UK inciting young British Muslims to become terrorists. One of their leaders declared it was imperative for Muslims to “instil terror into the hearts of the kuffar” and added: “I am a terrorist. As a Muslim of course I am a terrorist.” In public interviews the same man had condemned the killing of all innocent civilians. Later when he addressed his own followers he explained that he had in fact been referring only to Muslims as only they were innocent: “Yes I condemn killing any innocent people, but not any kuffar (infidels).”

A group of American Islamic leaders announced a fatwa, or Islamic religious ruling, against “terrorism and extremism.” An organization called the Fiqh Council of North America (FCNA) issued the fatwa, and the Council on American - Islamic Relations (CAIR) organized the press conference, stating that several major U.S. Muslim groups endorsed the fatwa. However, according to terrorism expert Steven Emerson, the fatwa was bogus: “It does not renounce nor even acknowledge the existence of an Islamic jihadist culture that has permeated mosques and young Muslims around the world. It does not renounce Jihad let alone admit that it has been used to justify Islamic terrorist acts.”

After the terror bombings in London in July 2005, perpetrated by Muslims, the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC) declared that "Islam considers the use of terrorism to be unacceptable for any purpose," There’s only one problem with this: It’s not true. Muhammad himself said that “I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy)” (Bukhari, 4, 52, 220). The Koran, too, repeatedly calls for the use of this tactics, such as in verse 8, 12: “When your Lord revealed to the angels: I am with you, therefore make firm those who believe. I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them.”

Andrew Bostom, who has studied the history of Jihad on three continents for more than one thousand years, says that “terrorism was often a prelude to conquest.” Terrorism is psychological warfare, to make the non-Muslims scared of Muslims, soften their resistance and prevent them from mounting a real defense of their lands when Muslims later wage a full-scale war to colonize and subdue them. Physical attacks such as the terror bombings in Madrid or London, but also the great frenzy whipped up over the rather innocent cartoons of Muhammad in Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, should all be viewed in this light.

According to scholar Bassam Tibi, “at its core, Islam is a religious mission to all humanity. Muslims are religiously obliged to disseminate the Islamic faith throughout the world. "We have sent you forth to all mankind" (Q. 34:28). If non-Muslims submit to conversion or subjugation, this call (da’wa) can be pursued peacefully. If they do not, Muslims are obliged to wage war against them. In Islam, peace requires that non-Muslims submit to the call of Islam, either by converting or by accepting the status of a religious minority (dhimmi) and paying the imposed poll tax, jizya.”

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, Hassam El-Masalmeh from Palestinian Jihadist organization Hamas confirmed the organization’s plan to re-institute the humiliating jizya, a blood ransom poll-tax (based on Qur’an sura 9, verse 29), levied traditionally on non-Muslims vanquished by Jihad. Arabic lexicographer E.W. Lane, based on a careful analysis of the term, states that: “The tax that is taken from the free non-Muslim subjects of a Muslim government whereby they ratify the compact that assures them protection, as though it were compensation for not being slain.”

This subjugation of non-Muslims to religious apartheid and second class citizenship in their own country is part and parcel of sharia, Islamic law. And this option is only available to Christians and Jews, not Hindus, Buddhists or others, who have only the choice between embracing Islam or death. Muslims feel ”oppressed” when they can’t fully practice their religious laws in the West. But since these laws ultimately require the subjugation of non-Muslims, “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially means the freedom to make others unfree.

According to Tibi, “world peace, the final stage of the da’wa (call to embrace Islam), is reached only with the conversion or submission of all mankind to Islam…Muslims believe that expansion through war is not aggression but a fulfillment of the Qur’anic command to spread Islam as a way to peace. The resort to force to disseminate Islam is not war (harb), a word that is used only to describe the use of force by non-Muslims. Islamic wars are not hurub (the plural of harb) but rather futuhat, acts of "opening" the world to Islam and expressing Islamic jihad. Relations between dar al-Islam, the home of peace, and dar al-harb, the world of unbelievers, nevertheless take place in a state of war, according to the Qur’an and to the authoritative commentaries of Islamic jurists. Unbelievers who stand in the way, creating obstacles for the da’wa, are blamed for this state of war, for the da’wa can be pursued peacefully if others submit to it. In other words, those who resist Islam cause wars and are responsible for them. Only when Muslim power is weak is "temporary truce" (hudna) allowed (Islamic jurists differ on the definition of "temporary").”

These words are mirrored in the ideas of many Islamic groups today. "[President] Bush says that we want to enslave people and oppress their freedom of speech," says Abu Abdullah, a senior member of Hizb ut-Tahrir, the Party of Liberation. "But we want to free all people from being slaves of men and make them slaves of Allah." "Islam obliges Muslims to possess power so that they can intimidate - I would not say terrorize - the enemies of Islam," says Abu Mohammed, a Hizb ut-Tahrir activist. "And if after all discussions and negotiations they still refuse, then the last resort will be a jihad to spread the spirit of Islam and the rule of Islam," he says, smiling. "This is done in the interests of all people to get them out of darkness and into light."

A schoolbook, in use in public schools in Saudi Arabia as late as 2006, stated that "Jihad in the path of God -- which consists of battling against unbelief, oppression, injustice, and those who perpetrate it -- is the summit of Islam. This religion arose through jihad and through jihad was its banner raised high. It is one of the noblest acts, which brings one closer to God."

Notice how the terms “unbelief, oppression and injustice” are used synonymously. Islamic apologists in the West keep repeating the mantra that “Jihad isn’t a fight against non-Muslims, but a struggle against tyranny and injustice.” Again, the problem is that seen with Islamic eyes, there isn’t too much of a difference between these various terms. It’s “oppression” when Muslim immigrants in the West must live by the same, secular laws as the native infidels, not sharia, and “injustice” in the end refers to pretty much all societies not subjugated to obedience to the will of Allah. “Injustice” can thus be used to describe all non-Islamic systems, for instance Western democracy.

The Saudi deputy minister of religious endowments, Abd Al-Rahman Al-Matroudi, stated in an interview on Saudi TV in July 2005 that “the definition of terrorism that concerns us is that it is any act or statement that contradicts the Koran or Sunna, whether in thought or action.” He also said that Muslims should “impose their culture,” and that peaceful ways should be pursued only when they were not strong enough to do this: “If you are strong enough to defend yourself, you must do so...Host: and impose your culture...Al-Matroudi: Yes, and impose your culture. Host: Great. Al-Matroudi: And if you have no such strength, you should do whatever you can to get what you want in peaceful and diplomatic ways.”

Aggression is something only infidels do. The Crusades were a brief and isolated episode in European history, whereas Jihad has been a constant feature of the Islamic world for more than 1300 years, fixed in the Koran and Islamic core texts. Still, Muslims want Europeans to apologize for the Crusades, although they were, as Bernard Lewis and other have pointed out, a belated, defensive reaction against centuries of Islamic aggression. This is because, as Tibi has demonstrated, it is not seen as aggression or war when Muslims attack non-Muslims. On the contrary, it is seen as aggression when non-Muslims resist the Islamization of their lands and thus “place obstacles in the way” of the spread of Islam. They are defying the will of Allah. Since subjugation to Islam alone can bring peace, Muslims consider themselves to be “spreading peace” when they raid, maim and kill from Europe to Central Asia.

According to Yusuf Al-Qaradawi, the Muslim community “has been exposed to horrendous invasions and aggressive attacks, one of which is the missionary invasion that aims at uprooting the Muslim community altogether. (…) One of its goals is to entice Muslims to convert to Christianity.” He thus considers verbal, non-violent efforts to convert Muslims to other religions a form of aggression, This is also the reason why countries such as Algeria have passed laws banning the call to embrace other religions than Islam. Qaradawi also seems to support the traditional Islamic view that those leaving Islam should be executed. The curious thing is, Muslims in infidel countries consider it an act of aggression if they don’t get to convert non-Muslims.

As I’ve stated in previous essays, Jihad is, simply put, anything undertaken to advance the spread of Islam, peaceful or not. Which means that Jihad is always present, even if there should be a temporary absence of violence because Muslims are too weak to use force. On the other hand, “aggression” is anything undertaken by non-Muslims to obstruct the advance of Islam, non-violent or not.

Based on this information, maybe we could make a sketch of a dictionary to explain what many Muslims actually think when they use various terms Westerners and infidels understand very differently:

Peace: “Peace” in Islam equals submission to the will of Allah through his divine and eternal law, sharia, and the extension of the Dar al-Islam – or 'House of Islam' – to cover the entire world. The absence of sharia is the absence of peace. Since it is the will of Allah that Islam will rule the entire planet, entering non-Muslim lands to subjugate the population and wipe out their corrupt, infidel culture is not seen by Muslims as "waging war," but as spreading peace.

Freedom: Hurriyya, freedom, means freeing all people from being slaves of the laws of men and making them live in perfect slavery, in submission to the will of Allah and his laws.

Religious freedom: Subjugation of non-Muslims to religious apartheid and second class citizenship in their own country under Islamic rule. This option is only available to Christians and Jews, not Hindus, Buddhists or others, who have only the choice between embracing Islam or death. Muslims should practice sharia. Since these laws require the subjugation of non-Muslims, “freedom of religion” for Muslims essentially means the freedom to make others unfree.

Jihad: Peaceful, inner struggle that has killed up to 80 million people in the Indian subcontinent alone, and enslaved or killed tens of millions, perhaps hundreds of millions of people on three continents for 1350 years. It can also be violent, but only for defensive purposes, such as the Muslims who defended their way from the Arabian Peninsula to the borders of China, wiping out the indigenous cultures along the way.

Aggression: When non-Muslims do anything to preserve their culture and resist the Islamization of their country. Even when this “aggression” is non-violent, such as publishing a cartoon critical of Islam, this intolerable insult to Islamic supremacy on earth can be answered with violence by Muslims. Since a refusal to submit to sharia is a rebellion against Allah, the very existence of non-Muslim communities can be viewed as an act of aggression.

Do We Need Religion? Part 2

2006-05-05T02:06:00.000-07:00

Iranian ex-Muslim Ali Sina writes the following in his book about the Islamic threat: “When you embrace Islam, from what to wear to what to eat, from how to run the government to toilet manners are already decided for you. For those who have never had any control in their lives, Islam is godsend. In fact the more a society is devoid of morality, the more attractive prudish and non-permissive doctrines look. This war has to be fought in two fronts: One is to fight Islam itself ideologically – directly and frontally. But there is also another front that has nothing to do with Islam and has to be fought at home. This fight is against immorality and decadence that has characterized America and the West since the 1960s.” Yes, but isn’t Christianity just as bad, as many non-religious people claim? Sina disagrees: “Christianity, despite its excesses and errors and despite plunging the Europe into centuries of darkness, has eventually managed to pull itself out of obscurantism and give birth to the Judeo-Christian civilization – one of the greatest that world has seen. If Islam takes over, it means the death of civilization. It is no exaggeration to say that mankind may never recover again.” “We are running against time. If we don’t destroy Islam soon, Islam will destroy the world.“

However, later on Ali Sina contradicts himself. After having denounced not just religions, but all forms of ideologies, he then goes on to say that most people need to be told what to do, as they can’t figure this out by themselves. Well, how do you tell them what to do without religions or ideologies? “Masses are not strong enough to do the right thing and are unable to chart their own destiny. Most people are not mature enough to take full control of their lives. They want to be TOLD what to do. Even though they are smart enough to know the difference between right and wrong, they won’t choose the right unless they are told to.”

Most significant human civilizations throughout history have been deeply religious. Some have argued that Chinese civilization is an exception to this rule. This is only partially true, as both Buddhism and Taoism have exercised a strong influence on Chinese thinking. But it is true that religion is not as crucial for the understanding the Chinese have of their own history as it is for many others. The Cambridge Illustrated History of China writes the following: “Unlike other peoples who pointed to gods as their creators or progenitors, the Chinese attributed to a series of extraordinarily brilliant human beings the inventions that step by step transformed the Chinese from a primitive people to a highly civilized one. Fu Xi, the Ox-tamer, domesticated animals and invented the family. Shen Nong, the Divine Farmer, invented the plough and hoe. Huang Di, the Yellow Lord, invented the bow and the arrow, boats, carts, ceramics, writing and silk.” (...) “These legends reveal how educated Chinese from the time of Confucius (c. 500 BC) onwards constructed “China.” To them China was defined by technology and statecraft – agriculture, writing, flood control, monarchy combining virtue and hereditary succession, and so on.”

Although China is thus not quite as tied to a specific religion as the West is, this space has been occupied by the belief-system of Confucianism. Chinese civilization has been one of the most powerful and influential in human history, and undoubtedly has many great qualities, but it also has its flaws. Confucian philosophy instills many virtues such as a strong work ethic, but it is an authoritarian world view, with emphasis in the individuals to know their place in a fixed hierarchy. The individual is first and foremost a Western concept, and one of the reasons why Europe became powerful and surpassed China in recent history.

One of the persons who understand this is the Chinese American writer Ohmyrus, one of the most intelligent contributors to Ali Sina’s website next to Sina himself. In an essay entitled “Bring Back That Old Time Religion,” Ohmyrus describes how Christianity has been an invaluable part of what made the West into what it is. According to him, “secularism promotes a more short term and hedonistic attitude towards life. Since secular people have little faith in God or an after life, the tendency is for them to adopt the attitude of “Eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die”. Their time horizon is therefore their own lifetime. “Religious people on the other hand have their eyes are on eternity. If you go to Europe, you will come across many Cathedrals that took centuries to build. For example, Cologne Cathedral took more than 300 years to complete.”

Ohmyrus also shows that religious people have an advantage simply because they tend to have more children than non-religious people. This same point has been made repeatedly by writer Spengler at the Asia Times Online, such as in the essay “Death by secularism: Some statistical evidence:” “By far the strongest predictor of population growth rates is adult literacy. (...)Nonetheless, religious belief remains a strong predictor even when adult literacy is introduced as a control variable. Wealth, that is, per capita GDP, shows no significance in the equation.” According to Spengler, “underlying the demographic crisis of the industrial world, I believe, is a spiritual crisis. If the above analysis has any merit, the issue is not wealth, but rather the desire of men to continue to inhabit this planet."

Ohmyrus also argues that, contrary to what many critics claim, Christianity has in fact been good for science. “When our ancestors invented the wheel, the benefits were immediate. As time went on, all or most of the "easy" inventions were made."“Roman civilization lasted 1,000 years and did not make the scientific revolution. Neither did the Egyptian nor Chinese nor Indian civilizations which have been around for even longer time than did the Romans." According to Ohmyrus, you need a critical mass of accumulated scientific knowledge before the Scientific Revolution could be ignited. “Rene Descartes (1596 - 1650) said that rational laws must exist because God is perfect and therefore acts in a manner as constant and immutable as possible except for miracles which occur rarely. Other scientists during the Age of Enlightenment who also shared this view of a rational Creator God who created the universe according to rational laws were Newton, Kepler and even Galileo. Thus you have a group of people eager to discover what these scientific laws are in order to glorify God even though they may not yield any immediate benefits.” Thus scientific discoveries can accumulate for years, decades and even centuries without any practical use for them. Eventually, of course these scientific discoveries yielded new inventions and other benefits. This permitted the eventual breakthrough which became the Scientific Revolution.

Ohmyrus sums up his argument by saying that “in the current war against terrorism, secularism is a hindrance. It encourages political correctness, low birth rates, self-doubts and apathy. The West, especially Europe, is in a deep spiritual crisis. Secularism could be a fatal weakness in its body politic against a resurgent Islam as polytheism probably was in 7th century Mecca. Modern Europeans are the lucky heirs of Christian civilization which has contributed so much to human progress. It has brought on the scientific revolution, abolition of slavery and human rights. The separation of Church and State also created the space for democracy to take root. (...) But for it to be useful, Christianity needs to be revived, particularly in very secular Europe which was once part of Christendom. Bring back that Old Time Religion.”

Now, I don’t disagree with the fact that Christianity does have its flaws. Monotheism’s inherent potential for intolerance is one of them. But so is the opposite, the potential for naïve pacifism and turn-the-other-cheek mentality when confronted with Islamic aggression, a flaw which is too frequently displayed by many Christian leaders. As Bat Ye’or has pointed out in “Islam and Dhimmitude,” Christian leader have frequently participated in selling out their own in Muslim majority countries. The church needs to understand that Islam is an enemy and can never be an ally, otherwise the church may die and will deserve to die. Both these potential flaws in Christianity have been balanced out in the modern West by the worldly institution of the nation state, made possible precisely because of the separation between the spiritual and the temporal inherent in Christian teachings. This is what has made individual choice and modern democracy possible. Contrast this with Islam, where the individual hardly exists except as a cell of a larger organism, the Ummah.

For example, in Islam, if a man and a woman are left alone with each other in a room, it is normal for many Muslims to assume that they have had sexual relations. The rational behind Islamic thinking is that it is the responsibility of society to remove the possibilities for temptations. The logic behind the modern, Judeo-Christian West is that society does bear some responsibility, but that ultimately, individuals need to take responsibility for their own actions. This is why democracy, in which the whole point is the possibility of individual choice, is so difficult to establish in Islamic countries, in which the thinking is to remove any possibilities of making a “wrong” choice. Muslims thus hate our freedom because it permits people to think and decide for themselves. The Muhammad cartoons affair is a good example of this. The protesting Muslims see countries as collective entities in which governments are to be held responsible for the acts of individual citizens. The concept that what matters in Western nations are individuals is alien to them.

What made Europe strong and dynamic earlier was the power of the individual, but still an individual that felt part of something larger than himself, his nation and his religion. At the beginning of the 21st century, Europe is weak. We are weak both because we have lost our religion and subdued our nation states, as embodied in the Eurabian Union, and because we have been weakened by collectivist ideologies. The USA, the most individualistic of the Western nations, but also the most religious and the most patriotic, has retained some of this Western dynamism, even though the same weaknesses are very much present there, too. At the same time as Islam is advancing in Europe, individualism is spreading in other parts of the world. Unless Europe returns to her roots, we could get a situation where notions of the individual, which have been previously championed by Europe, will slowly die in Europe while they are advancing in parts of Asia.

The traditional, Western idea is that not everything we consider to be immoral can be punished, at least not in this life. What we have done wrong now is Egalitarianism, the concept that all choices and viewpoints are equally valid and equally worthy of respect. Islam creates an extremely inflexible society where the autonomous individual hardly exists. On the other hand, we have Western Multiculturalism and nihilism, where there is no right or wrong and where the individual is so autonomous that the country and the civilization largely is left defenseless, because nobody any longer identifies with it any longer, and because short term gratification of individual desires is the only thing left. We need a balance between the two. For Europe, that means ditching the European Union, or the Evil Empire as some of us call it, and a return to our traditional, Judeo-Christian religion. Since religious people have more children than non-religious people, Europe in a couple of generations from now will be much more religious than now. The only question is what religion this will be. If the current Islamic advances continue, anything that can be remotely described as European culture will die. The alternative is a revival of our own religious heritage. I agree with Ohmyrus: Bring back that old time religion.

Do We Need Religion? Part 1

2006-04-16T21:45:00.000-07:00

Ali Sina is the Iranian ex-Muslim behind the website www.faithfreedom.org. Along with other former Muslims such as Ibn Warraq, Sina is spearheading what may be the first organized movement of ex-Muslims in Islamic history, made possible during the past ten to fifteen years by Muslim immigration to the West and the growth of the Internet. Publishing rational criticism of Islam, reaching hundreds of thousands of people and potentially hundreds of millions of people across the world, has never been done before until a few years ago. This is also part of the inspiration for my own suggestion of creating an Online Infidel Library, with dozens of books critical of Islam being made available online. It is no exaggeration to say that if the likes of Ali Sina, Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan prevail in the face of the traditional death penalty for leaving Islam, then Islam will never again be the same. Ibn Warraq has estimated that 10- 15% of the Muslims in the UK are actually apostates. If that percentage reflects the Islamic world as a whole, we are talking about a number of people the equivalent of a country the size of Japan. Even half of this is a country the size of Britain. This is the soft underbelly of Islam.

I am fortunate enough to have read Ali Sina’s excellent, upcoming book, which, sadly enough, hasn’t found a publisher yet. I agree with Sina on most important points, especially the fact that Islam probably can’t be reformed and that we are very close to a new world war triggered by Islamic fanaticism. Sina writes a lot about reclaiming the West's morality and what's wrong with the West. This closely mirrors what I am doing in my own book, which so far has the working title: "Reformation Impossible: What’s Wrong With Islam and What’s Wrong With the West?” According to Ali Sina, the West is now a moral relativistic society, where the vacuum created by religion is sorely felt. But at the same time, Sina questions whether a return to religion is the way to go. In an email to me, Sina writes the following: “But is religion the answer? How can we go back to religions when we know they are based on lies? I think our challenge is to find a way to salvage morality and family values without the burden of religion. Maybe I am asking too much. But there must be a way. There must be more choices than either believing in lies or becoming immoral. There must be a middle ground. This point is fundamental to the survival of the western civilization. We must find an answer to it.”

This is where Sina and I part ways. As this is probably one of the most important issues of our age, it could make for an interesting discussion. Can you have morality without religion? I’m not so sure, which is why I will recommend a strengthening of the traditional Judeo-Christian religion of the West. When I first thought of writing my book, I imagined myself concluding it with some short recommendations for how Westerners should deal with Islam and Muslim immigration. The more I have looked into the matter, the more I have discovered that the really interesting issue is not what's wrong with Islam, but what's wrong with the West, which is why I will devote up to one third of the book to answering this question.

Europe has been threatened by Islam several times before, but has managed to withstand it. Why not now? If we want to mount a defense of Western civilization, then we first need to define exactly what Western civilization is. I have found that the West at the beginning of the 21st century is mired in an internal cultural battle, an ideological civil war over the purpose of the West that is sometimes so severe that combined with Muslim immigration it could even trigger physical civil wars in several Western nations in the near future. One of the contenders is what I will label the ideology of Egalitarianism, of which Multiculturalism is the most prominent component. If you analyze the ideology of Egalitarianism, is has Marxist roots in ideas about forced equality. Basically, it says that all cultures are more or less equal, and that there is nothing particular about Western civilization that makes it worth preserving. It may even be worse than all other cultures. To display attachment to your own culture is considered racism and frowned upon. As is to be expected with its Marxist roots, it has its stronghold of support in the political Left. However, what makes Egalitarianism and Multiculturalism particularly dangerous is that its support transcends that of the traditional Left and has penetrated deep into the traditional Right, too. As long as large parts of our elites adhere to the notion that all cultures are equal, it will be impossible to mount any defense of the West. Which means that Multiculturalism and Egalitarianism need to be discredited if Europe is to have any chance of surviving.

In defining what Western civilization means, we will sooner or later face the question of how closely it is tied to Christianity. I would define myself as a Christian Atheist, the way Oriana Fallaci does. I am not personally religious, but I have gradually grown more positive towards Christianity, especially after I started studying Islam. I now think that defining Western civilization without its Judeo-Christian religious component simply doesn't make sense from a historical or philosophical point of view. I thus disagree with people such as atheist Richard Dawkins, in viewing religion as all bad. We also have to ask what will replace the traditional religions if we remove them. I have been puzzled by the seemingly cozy relationship between European Socialists, who in theory should be anti-religious, and Muslims. I have found that this can be explained if you postulate that the difference between religious and political ideologies is not always clear-cut, but should be more accurately described as a gliding scale. The defining difference is not the belief in God, but the belief in the rights of the individual vs. the rights of the collective group. As Ibn Warraq puts it: The fight is not between Muslims and non-Muslims, but between those who value freedom and those who do not.

Socialists frequently mock Christians for basing their worldview in belief in something that cannot be proven and has never been seen. But since Marxism cannot be proven and no successful Marxist society has ever been seen, don't Socialists also base their worldview on belief in something that cannot be proven and has never been seen? And don't they follow their ideology with religious fervour and denounce their critics as evil? German sociologist Max Weber has stated that the modern, capitalist economy in Europe was based upon the Protestant work ethic. If capitalism is based upon Christianity, doesn't it become logical for anti-capitalists to undermine capitalism by attacking its religious base? Is Socialism a religion disguised as a political ideology, and is Islam a political ideology disguised as a religion?

Maybe we should abandon the common distinction between religious and non-religious ideologies. I will postulate that it is sometimes more useful to think of them as religions with God and religions without God, Marxism being a religion without God. Philosopher Eric Hoffer has written a book called “The True Believer, ” where he tracks mass movements throughout history. He includes some critical words about Christianity, but perhaps the most striking feature of his book is that he shows how religious and seemingly non-religious movement share many traits, and may sometimes be interchangeable: “Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.” I have myself heard Leftist Multiculturalists describe themselves as “the forces of Light,” “the forces of Darkness” being all those evil racists who oppose Muslim immigration. This is in fact a deeply religious world view, which could have been shared by members of the Spanish Inquisition. “We are the forces of Good. Those who disagree with us are not just wrong, but Evil, and we have a perfect moral right, even duty, to suppress their views by any means necessary.”

This line of thought seems to be shared by many Leftists, which is why they feel perfectly justified in stifling the freedom of speech of their opponents, even by violent means. A Marxist is a person who doesn’t believe in God, but still thinks he is God’s representative on earth. As Eric Hoffer says: “Passionate hatred can give meaning and purpose to an empty life. Thus people haunted by the purposelessness of their lives try to find a new content not only by dedicating themselves to a holy cause but also by nursing a fanatical grievance. A mass movement offers them unlimited opportunities for both.” Perhaps what we are seeing in Europe is a coalition between two religions, Socialism and Islam, united not in the belief in the same God but in hatred towards the same Devil: The capitalist and Judeo-Christian West. The attacks Western Leftists mount on Christianity have little to do with “tolerance” and a lot more to do with discrediting a troublesome rival creed that stubbornly keeps blocking the road to Utopia.

One of the reasons why so many intellectuals in the West accept the idea that Islam has been “misunderstood” is because this is the same excuse they use for their own favorite: Marxism. Famed historian Eric Hobsbawm has for instance argued that Marx was misunderstood, and that the Communism of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union wasn’t “real Marxism.” It certainly was real for the tens of millions of people whose lives it destroyed. If an ideology results in devastating failures everywhere it is tried out then there is not something wrong with the interpretation, there is something with the ideology itself. What good is a “guide” that leads people to shipwreck every single time?

Although weekly magazine “The Economist” can be plain awful when dealing with issues related to Islam or Muslim immigration, they can still be sensible on other subjects. In an article called “Marx after communism,” they demonstrate how Leftism is in fact a new religion:

It is striking that today's militant critics of globalisation proceed in much the same way (as Marx himself). They present no worked-out alternative to the present economic order. Instead, they invoke a Utopia free of (…) social injustice, harking back to a pre-industrial golden age that did not actually exist. Never is this alternative future given clear shape or offered up for examination. And anti-globalists have inherited more from Marx besides this. Note the self-righteous anger, the violent rhetoric, the willing resort to actual violence (in response to the “violence” of the other side), the demonisation of big business, the division of the world into exploiters and victims, the contempt for piecemeal reform, the zeal for activism, the impatience with democracy, the disdain for liberal “rights” and “freedoms”, the suspicion of compromise. (…) Anti-globalism has been aptly described as a secular religion. So is Marxism: a creed complete with prophet, sacred texts and the promise of a heaven shrouded in mystery. Marx was not a scientist, as he claimed. He founded a faith. The economic and political systems he inspired are dead or dying. But his religion is a broad church, and lives on.

Claire Berlinski, author of the book "Menace in Europe: Why the Continent’s Crisis Is America’s, Too" also notes how many Europeans, when asked, will declare themselves more alarmed by American imperialism than by Islamic radicalism. According to her, Europeans have in recent memory suffered two great losses, that of their religious faith and that of its replacements—ideologies involving the idea of human perfectibility, leaving Europeans paralyzed by shame and self-doubt. They have retreated into a kind of cocoon of technological and physical comfort. Americans are much more hopeful for the future than Europeans, partly because they are more religious in a conventional sense. But Americans also have an idea of what it is to be American. “America’s sense of itself doesn’t include the memories of the Somme and Passchendaele; it doesn’t include the memories of Auschwitz and Dachau. It is still possible for Americans to revere their own nation without irony, to revisit its past without despair.” Berlinski connects the death of Christianity in Europe with Europe’s anti-Americanism, which can reach such passionate heights that it strays from anything that can be remotely described as rational and approaches the status of quasi-religion:

What I’ve noticed is a quasi-religious and messianic character to this anti-Americanism, particularly in the way it seems inevitably to be linked to anti-modernism and anti-Semitism. It is this mystical element of the anti-American movement that is both most interesting and alarming. Anti-Americanism, particularly as it is expressed in Europe, seems to me more than an expression of simple inanity, nostalgic yearning for greatness past, or an external projection of failed social programs. The critical question, I think, is what kind of spiritual void, what kind of existential emptiness, does anti-Americanism serve to fill?

Ali Sina is not a stupid man. He sees this, too. In order to subdue people and impose on them your Marxist ethos, Sina says, you have to rob them from their own identity, their own culture, heritage, mores, government and religion. Once you rob them from their identity and selfhood, you can shape them in any way you like. “The society can live without religion but it can't live without morality. We must not throw the baby with the bathwater. Judeo-Christianity has done a lot of harm, but it has done also a lot of good. It has given birth to the greatest civilization that mankind has ever known. Let us not be biased. This democracy that has brought to the world this much progress in the last couple of centuries, could not have been born in any other culture.” Later, however, Ali Sina says that: “I admit that Judeo-Christianity has outlived its utility.” Then he goes on to criticize ALL ideologies, not just religious ones: “Ideology is evil. It robs one from rational thinking and once one loses that ability, he become like an animal. To the degree that you subscribe to an ideology, any ideology, you become dehumanized. Man is noble because he is capable of independent thought. You lose that through beliefs and ideologies.”

Sina’s motto is “Don’t be a follower, be your own Prophet.” But is this feasible? I would argue that most human beings are neither willing nor able to come up with their own set of moral values, and even if this was possible, I’m not sure whether it would always be desirable. Don’t we then wander into the territory of moral relativism, Multiculturalism and “to every man his own truth,” precisely what Ali Sina himself warns against?

As somebody once put it: “When people stop believing in God, they don’t believe in nothing, they believe in anything.” The retreat of the traditional, Judeo-Christian religion in Europe during the 20th century left the door open to a new set of “religions without God” that in many ways proved at least as harmful as the “intolerance” they were supposed to replace. Marxism killed more than 100 million people during a few generations. The negative argument against removing the Judeo-Christian religious base of the West could thus be that whatever flaws might exist in the old system, what will replace it could well turn out to be worse. There are also more positive arguments in support of it, which I will discuss in the second part of this essay.

Creating the Online Infidel Library

2006-03-28T19:51:00.000-08:00

Fatima Houda-Pepin, raised a Muslim and active in the struggle against the use of sharia in Canada, warns that the public should make an effort to get to know those in the Muslim community who are lobbying for application of Shari‘a: “One of the strengths of Islamists is that they know you very well. They know our history, they know our culture, they know our justice system.” The reason why so many Westerners reacted with defeatism and despair over the Muhammad cartoons affair is because we are mentally on the defensive. We are reacting more than acting, waiting passively for the next Islamic move. We haven’t even named the enemy yet. The attacks of 9/11, the London and Madrid bombings were reduced to the work of “evildoers who had hijacked a great religion,” not Islam itself. Muslims have been carefully studying our weak points for decades, to find ways to exploit them. Meanwhile, we have largely been ignoring them, first because we didn’t take them seriously, and later because we would not want to get involved in a global clash with the Islamic world. Get real: This is a world war, at least a cold one. War has already been declared upon us, and it is irrelevant whether Westerners and infidels like this or not. We need to recognize this and start fighting back, before we lose this fight without ever having admitted that we were in it.

It’s time to turn the tables. We’re the most powerful civilization in human history. We’ve split the atom and sent men to the moon. We can deal with a cult from 7th century Arabia, if we put our minds to it. Yes, they have a head start, but they have weak points, too. Many of them, and sometimes huge ones. Find a pressure point and squeeze. As philosopher Eric Hoffer has said, you can discover what your enemy fears most by observing the means he uses to frighten you. If we had some basic understanding of our enemy and watched him closely, we would see that he made at least two major mistakes during these recent cartoon events that we could exploit. First, he showed us his hand and his true intentions, thereby waking up millions of infidels just a little bit too early. Second: He also clearly demonstrated some of his weak points, both the extreme arrogance and the ridiculous hypersensitivity to even the slightest criticism. During the Muhammad cartoon affair, the Islamic world might as well have worn a gigantic neon sign saying: “We fear freedom of speech above all else. Give us bombs, just don’t send us rational criticism or mockery.” They scream “We love death,” yet cringe like shivering Christmas puddings in front of a few cartoons. If this is what they fear most, then this is where we should push harder.

Jihadist Muslims are war fetishists. Their obsession with orgies with virgins in the heavenly Islamic brothel and the close connection between death and orgasm borders on necrophilia. You don’t frighten a war fetishist with war, and you don’ scare a death cult with death. Although the use of force will sometimes be necessary to win this fight, it is important to understand that this is not Islam’s weak point. Islam is a warrior creed, a very good one. War, death and mayhem are its home ground. Free speech is ours. We should draw the enemy away from his home ground by teasing his arrogance, lure him out into the open and over to our home ground, where we have the natural advantage.

Now is the perfect time to launch an ideological counter-offensive, using the Internet. Internet censorship is still less effective in most Muslim countries than in China, and there is now a critical mass of ordinary Westerners who understand that Islam constitutes a mortal threat to their freedom. Many of them could be mobilized, if somebody leads them and shows them how. The key to winning this struggle is not to engage the silent majority in the Islamic world, but to mobilize the silent majority in the West and in the infidel world, and perhaps the minority of ex-Muslims within the Islamic world.

The idea of using the Internet to spread critical thinking isn’t new, although it is not always directly linked to Islam:

In Arabic, "Internet" Means "Freedom"

Somewhere in Baghdad a man is working in secrecy to edit new Arabic versions of liberal classics. He has made Arabic translations of more than two dozen articles and nine books and booklets. Sponsored by the Cato Institute, he joins a small but growing assortment of Arabic-language blogs promulgating liberal ideas. "No more than 10,000 books were translated into Arabic over the entire past millennium," says the U.N., "equivalent to the number translated into Spanish each year." "The Internet is a historical opportunity for Arab liberalism," Pierre Akel, the Lebanese host of one such site, metransparent.com, said. "In the Arab world, much more than in the West, we can genuinely talk of a blog revolution." The U.N. report notes that in the Arab world—a region of 284 million—a book that sells 5,000 copies qualifies as a best-seller. The Internet, in contrast, makes possible worldwide, instant distribution, at a nearly negligible cost.

However, some books critical of Islam are already available online, and more will probably be added:

Call for Internet Publication of Sex, Sharia and Women in the History of Islam.

This is a call for the Internet publication (and eventual translation) of the book Sex, Sharia and Women in the History of Islam by Marywan Halabjaye. The book concerns how Islam is allegedly used to oppress women. Halabjaye’s book is based on an analysis of the Qur’an as well as recognized Sunnah and Hadith. This call for Internet publication is based on the belief that the best response to those who would suppress publication of a book is to increase publication, promotion and distribution of that book. The most efficient way to do that is on the Internet. This request is also based on the belief that it would be a powerful and timely lesson if the only thing accomplished by those who seek to suppress publication of the book Sex, Sharia and Women in the History of Islam is to cause it to be published to the entire world.

I have advocated the idea of creating an organized network to promote Islam-critical books in cyberspace. Maybe a dozen or more blogs and websites could form the global backbone of this network, the cyberspace version of Radio Free Europe. This to make it more difficult for hackers to block the efforts, and to disseminate the books as much as possible. The websites should preferably be based in the USA, since it has the strongest protection of freedom of speech, or at least outside of the jurisdiction of the Eurabian Union. Start with those who are already in the business, for instance Jihad Watch, Faith Freedom International, Little Green Footballs, Michelle Malkin and others. These “backbone” websites should receive financial compensation for this task. Anybody, anywhere should be able to download the books or republish them at their own websites. This would bypass media censorship and create an Online Infidel Library. It would mirror the online library Google is trying to create now, but with books about Islam only. The information would spread around the planet faster than CAIR can say “Islamophobia”. The genie would be out of the bottle, and no amount of intimidation, hacker attacks or “hate speech” lawsuits could return it to the bottle.

I have been contacted by at least one person who was pondering the possibility of financing and hosting critical books on Islam on the Internet, and wondered whether this was feasible. To publish in English a handful of these books on the Internet isn’t too complicated, it just requires some private individual or group of people with sufficient means to buy the copyrights and support the backbone websites and it could be done quickly. I don't know all of the practical details of how much such an operation would cost. But since the entire text of these books would be put online for free, I reckon one would have to pay significant sums to buy the copyrights. The good thing about starting out with private citizens is that we would directly engage the silent masses who are fed-up with Islam and Islamic demands. If our so-called leaders won’t lead this fight, then we will have to push them and force their hand. They only feel pressured by Muslims now, it’s time they feel some pressure from infidels, too. That goes for European politicians in particular.

However, when you increase the number of books and thus costs, and certainly when you start with translations into multiple languages, it probably becomes too complicated and time-consuming for private citizens to undertake. I have suggested publishing Bat Ye’or’s book “Eurabia” online, both in the full version and in abridged versions, translated into multiple European languages. Some of the most important Islam-critical books should also be translated to major non-Western languages, Chinese, Hindi, Arabic, Persian, Turkish and so on. I envisioned this to receive clandestine support of, for instance, the US government. It is unlikely whether they can or want to do so openly, but the amount of money it would cost would be peanuts compared to what the Iraq campaign costs on a single day and could be provided secretly. This could be called Operation Theo van Gogh, or perhaps Operation Asma bint Marwan, after the poetess who was murdered by Muhammad’s thugs for mocking Islam.

NOTE: The following list of books is based solely on my own subjective views. The authors have not been consulted about whether they would agree to publish their books on the Internet, and it is quite possible that some of them might object to this. However, it is likely that several of them would agree to this, provided that they get adequate financial compensation for this. The number of suggested titles could easily be doubled, but any such Online Infidel Library would probably include some of the books I have listed here. I have read most of these books myself, but include some by reputation or recommendations from people I trust:

Group 1:

"Leaving Islam - Apostates Speak Out" edited by Ibn Warraq

“The Islam Threat” by Ali Sina from www.faithfreedom.org, whenever it gets published. I have had the pleasure of reading it, and it is good.

“The Legacy of Jihad” by Andrew G Bostom

"Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" by Bat Ye'or

"Onward Muslim Soldiers" by Robert Spencer

“The Force of Reason” by Oriana Fallaci

"Jihad in the West: Muslim Conquests from the 7th to the 21st Centuries" by Paul Fregosi

“While Europe Slept : How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within” by Bruce Bawer

"Mohammed and the Rise of Islam" by David S. Margoliouth

“American Jihad: The Terrorists Living Among Us” by Steven Emerson

Group 2:

"Why I am not a Muslim" by Ibn Warraq

"What the Koran Really Says" edited by Ibn Warraq

“The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam And the Crusades” by Robert Spencer

“Beyond Belief: Islamic Excursions Among the Converted Peoples” by V.S. Naipaul

“Militant Islam Reaches America” by Daniel Pipes

“Islam and Dhimmitude” by Bat Yeor

“The Sword of the Prophet” by Serge Trifkovic

“Rage Against the Veil” by Parvin Darabi

"Women and the Koran" by Anwar Hekmat

“View from the Eye of the Storm: Terror and Reason in the Middle East” by Haim Harari

Group 3:

“The Quest for the Historical Muhammad” by Ibn Warraq

”Twenty Three Years” by Ali Dashti

“The West's Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations?” by Tony Blankley

“The West and the Rest: Globalization and the Terrorist Threat” by Roger Scruton

"Muhammad" by Maxime Rodinson

"Among the Believers" by V. S. Naipaul

“The Closed Circle: An Interpretation of the Arabs” by David Pryce-Jones

“Menace in Europe : Why the Continent's Crisis Is America's, Too” by Claire Berlinski

Will the Internet Slay Islam?

2006-03-28T19:20:00.000-08:00

A remarkable testimony to the power of the modern mass media revolution was noted in the complaints of an Egyptian cleric in 2005:

Leading Egypt Cleric Wants Fewer Frivolous Edicts

The chief Muslim cleric in Egypt wants tighter controls on who may issue religious edicts, or fatwas. Egypt's Grand Mufti says more fatwas have been issued in the past 10 years than in the previous 1400 years. Modern technology has made it easier than ever to issue or receive a fatwa, one of the religious edicts that guide Muslims' interpretations of Islamic law. Someone with a specific question about what Islam allows can get a personalized fatwa on the matter over the Internet, through television or via cellphone. The number of religious edicts keeps growing, and because Islam has no central authority there is no set system for governing who is allowed to issue them.

This explosion of unorthodox religious activity can only be compared to that of Christian Europe in the early 16th century. Just as Gutenberg’s invention marked the first mass media revolution in the West, the Internet and satellite TV are now doing the same thing in the Islamic world. However, the outcome may be very different, and the parallels between the Protestant Reformation and what is happening in the Islamic world now shouldn’t be pushed too far. The introduction of the printing press was delayed by several centuries in the Islamic world because of religious resistance and never had the same effect there as it did in the Christian West, which should strongly indicate that although technology is important, it isn’t everything. Culture matters. Islam does not have quite the same centralized hierarchy as the Catholic Church had in Europe, which means that the change cannot be linked to a specific date as it did with Martin Luther’s 95 theses. Although it did ultimately have consequences far beyond the borders of Europe, and although it did happen at a time of Ottoman Muslim expansion in the Mediterranean, the Reformation was primarily an internal, Christian and European affair. The turmoil in he Islamic world now affects more or less the entire world, and many of the critics are based in rival civilizations. And last, but not least: The religions are entirely different. Christianity was reformable, whereas Islam probably isn’t.

Does this mean that the current information revolution will destroy Islam? That is the view of David Wood:

Islam Beheaded

The truth about Muhammad has been one of the world's best-kept secrets. For centuries, it has been virtually impossible to raise objections about the character of Muhammad in Muslim countries, for anyone who raised such objections would (following the example set by Muhammad himself) immediately be killed. Outside the Muslim world, there has been little interest in Islam. But things have changed. Now many people are interested in Islam, and Muslims aren't able to silence everyone. Moreover, with the advent of the Internet, it is now impossible to keep Muhammad's life a secret. The facts about the founder of Islam are spreading very rapidly, and Muslims are frantically scurrying to defend their faith. But the information superhighway is paving over the ignorance that has for centuries been the stronghold of Islamic dogma. In the end, Islam will fall, for the entire structure is built upon the belief that Muhammad was the greatest moral example in history, and this belief is demonstrably false.

This optimistic view ignores several important facts. Many of the worst Islamists have above average education, as did many supporters of Communism in the West. Which shows that, unfortunately, increased knowledge does not always translate into increased wisdom. The second catch is that Muslims do not view the world in the same way as Westerners of infidels do. In his book The Lawful and Prohibited in Islam, renowned cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi explains how Islam has restricted the authority to legislate the haram and the halal (forbidden and permitted), taking it out of the hands of human beings and reserving it for the Allah alone through explicit verses of the Qur'an and from clear ahadith of the Prophet Muhammad. The jurists' task does not go beyond explaining what Allah has decreed to be halal or haram. Prohibiting something which is halal is similar to committing shirk (idolatry).

According to traditional Islamic law, and confirmed by leading scholars today, it is perfectly allowed for a Muslim man to have forced sex with the infidel concubines he just captured by massacring their relatives in front of their eyes. Muhammad himself did this several times. You just shouldn’t wear a silk tie while doing it. Likewise, it is perfectly permissible, halal, to behead a Buddhist schoolteacher in southern Thailand, but haraam to wear a gold ring at the same time. This thinking is why slavery was eventually abandoned and forbidden by the Judeo-Christian West, where the emphasis is on what’s moral or immoral, but only banned through external pressure by the same West in the Islamic world, where the emphasis is on what’s permitted or forbidden. It also explains why Qaradawi himself is reputed to be married to a girl in her pre-teens, 60 years his junior. He is perfectly aware of the fact that Muhammad had sex with a 9-year-old child, and has confirmed, in Arabic, but not in English, that this is allowed even today. To say that “Muhammad was immoral” just won’t wash with a truly devout Muslim, who is trapped in a circular thinking where the very concept of “morality” begins and ends with the example of Muhammad, his Sunna.

The website Islam Q&A gives an explanation of why it is forbidden for Muslim men to wear silk in this life, but permitted in Paradise, just as the case is with wine, which is also forbidden on Earth but exists in abundance in the afterlife. Islam is adept at taking something away from its Believers, but promising lots of it to them after death. Again, it doesn’t matter to a true Believer whether this makes any sense. Islam means “submission,” so you should simply submit to the wisdom of Allah:

Why are men not allowed to wear silk?

It is not right to make following a command or prohibition dependent upon knowing the wisdom behind it; rather we should hasten to carry out the commands of sharee’ah, regardless of whether the wisdom behind it is clear to us or not. If it is clear, then praise be to Allaah, and if it is not, then the Muslim should not let the fact that he does not know it prevent him from acting in accordance with the ruling of sharee’ah. Islam means submission to Allaah, may He be exalted, and obeying Him. If a person makes his actions dependent on understanding matters which may or may not convince him, he is in effect following his own thoughts and desires, not his Lord and Master. (….) (silk) was basically created for women, as is the case with gold jewellery, so it was forbidden for men because it can corrupt them by making them resemble women. (…) when it touches the body, it makes a man effeminate and goes against his masculinity and manliness, so if he wears it his heart gains the characteristics of femininity and softness. There is no doubt that wearing silk will diminish manly characteristics(…) Whoever is too dense to understand this should just submit to the Wise Lawmaker.”

Yes, the Internet is important in this struggle, but it is at least as important for informing non-Muslims about the true nature of Islam as enlightening Muslims, many of whom will be mentally immune to criticism of Islam. Some of them, however, can be reached. There are approximately one billion nominal Muslims in the world. How many of these are secret ex-Muslims? Ibn Warraq has estimated that 10- 15% of the Muslims in the UK are actually apostates. If that percentage reflects the Islamic world as a whole, we are talking about a number of people the equivalent of a country the size of Japan. Even half of this is a country the size of Britain. Although only a (fast-growing) minority of Muslims around the world have access to the Internet, simple mathematics indicate that there are already hundreds of thousands, probably millions or maybe even tens of millions of ex-Muslims in cyberspace. This, as well as additional tens of millions of Muslims who already have at least some doubts, is the soft underbelly of Islam.

We’re now stuck in a race against time, and Muslims know it. That’s why they are working so hard to shut down freedom of speech and any “mockery” or rational criticism targeting Islam in infidel countries. Will Muslims bomb away freedom of speech in the West before we detonate this unexploded bomb underneath Islam’s feet? Every time they hit us with a terrorist attack, we should respond by increasing the volume of criticism of Islam in circulation on the Internet. Some would claim that this isn’t our fight. It is now. Ernest Renan has said that if there ever was something like a Reformation in the Islamic world, the West should gracefully stay out of it. However, he lived in the 19th century and could not have imagined that we would be stupid enough to let millions of Muslims settle in our major cities. We are implicated now, whether we want to or not. We are no longer just fighting against Islam but for our own freedom of speech, and thus democracy itself. Maybe we cannot slay this dragon, but we can certainly help the people who can.

Muhammad and his thugs went to great lengths already in the early days of Islam to shut up critics. The punishment for leaving Islam is death, a fact which has largely kept organized groups of ex-Muslims from forming. Until now. With a significant Muslim presence in the West, we see elements of such groups forming for the first time in history. Secret ex-Muslims around the world are quietly watching these developments. Some are stepping forward.

Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles until she blasted Islam on Aljazeera. TV is a powerful medium, and has a stronger immediate impact than the Internet. However, many ex-Muslims will probably prefer to hide on the Internet rather than showing their face in front of millions of Muslims, many of whom think they deserve to die. It takes the extraordinary courage of someone like Wafa Sultan to do so, and it takes a TV station to air these views in the first place. For these reasons, this movement may best be nurtured and spearheaded through the Internet, the way Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq are doing now, and let the ripples spread to other media.

I have earlier stated that Islam is a “dinosaur in the age of mammals.” I believe this is true. However, it is still a big and bad beast, even more dangerous and angry now precisely because it is wounded. We cannot allow such a creature to roam the streets where our children are growing up. We need to cage it, and hope that rational criticism, which its immune system cannot in the long run withstand, will slowly wear it down. This is a world war, and the best thing we can hope for is a prolonged “cold” war, with many minor clashes but no huge, cataclysmic hot war. This will require a global containment of the Islamic world, the expulsion of any Muslims in the West deemed to be a security threat and strong support to the movement of ex-Muslims. All of these steps will have to be implemented soon, or we will have no other options left but a full-scale war, with massive casualties. We will probably win such a war if it comes to it, but the death toll will exceed that of any other war in human history, and leave scars for generations to come. Time is growing short. Are we up to the job?

Defeating Defeatism - The End of the Phony War

2006-03-01T22:52:00.000-08:00

I have stated before that we in the West need to face down our internal enemies, the twin trolls of Denial and Defeatism, before we can have any chance of dealing with Islam. Yes, the Islamic threat is very real and could lead to a cataclysmic world war unless stopped. No, it’s not too late to win this. Not yet. Writer Mark Steyn does a good job at devouring the former troll, but insists on feeding the latter. As Lawrence Auster demonstrates, Steyn continues to claim that we have in fact already lost, and must settle for "a Muslim majority world.” He talks as if he is the Churchill of our age, yet displays a resigned defeatism that would have made even Neville Chamberlain blush. Contrary to the views expressed by many, the madness of the Muhammad cartoons issue can in hindsight turn out to have been a blessing in disguise. Eurabia’s legions of spin doctors were quite successful in placing the blame for 9/11, the Madrid and the London bombings on US and Israeli foreign policies. These attacks may actually have strengthened Eurabia. Not so this time. The first cracks in this wall came with the murder of Theo van Gogh. With the Danish cartoon case, these cracks have now grown into a chasm.

The Phony War was a phase in early WW2 marked by few military operations in Continental Europe, in the months following the German invasion of Poland. What we have witnessed during these past few months is the end of the Phony War against Islamic Jihad. The election of hard-line president Ahmadinejad in Iran and of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, the Muslim riots in France and the international unrest triggered by the Muhammad cartoons case mark a watershed in this battle. After having carefully, and one must admit skilfully, built up the mythology of Islamic tolerance for decades, Muslims now blew their own cover. This is end of taqiyya, and from the Muslim point of view, it probably came too soon. It is indeed possible for Muslims to win this, but it would have made more sense for them to lay low for another couple of decades, and quietly continue the demographic Jihad through migration conquest. Of course, being Muslims, they have to boast and brag all the time, and haven’t got the patience to wait that long. This critical character flaw, more than infidel strength, is why they will most likely lose. Just like the Japanese during WW2, who hailed the attack on Pearl Harbor as a great victory, the sheer arrogance of their creed blinds them from realizing when they make huge mistakes that could eventually cost them victory. There is now a critical mass of Europeans who see clearly that Islam and Muslim immigration constitute a mortal danger to their freedom and their civilization. They feel confused and scared, but first of all angry. If this is the true face of Islam, doesn’t that mean that our academic elites, our media and our political leaders have lied to us systematically for decades? Muslims misunderstand the mentality and potential response from the infidels because they see mainly the appeasement of the political class. What they don’t see is the simmering defiance that is growing at the grassroots level.

What we need now is not another column by Mark Steyn telling us that all I lost and we might as well surrender pre-emptively. What we need now is anger. Anger gives you energy, instead of the resigned passivity bred by defeatism. However, we should be careful not direct this anger towards that favorite Eurabian boogeyman, the USA and Israel, nor should we resort to the time-tested European tradition of targeting random “foreigners.” It wasn’t the Americans or the Israelis who brought us into this mess, and it certainly wasn’t the Indian dentist or the Chinese shopkeeper down the corner. It was in fact our very own EU elites.

Americans tend to consider the EU as a joke. It’s not, because it’s not funny. Apart from a few vague statements, the EU has largely abandoned Denmark during the cartoon incident. “European unity” only exists whenever Brussels wants to subvert the democratic process in individual member states and force more Islam down our throats, selling us out behind our backs through the intricate networks of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The Danish embassies had hardly burnt down before Javier Solana, the “Foreign Minister” of the European Union, promised his real masters the Saudis that the EU would henceforth work to limit freedom of speech for half a billion people. And he can’t be held responsible for this by the European public, since he doesn’t answer to any democratically elected government. The EU is not a joke, the EU is evil, destroying freedom across an entire continent and spreading instability far beyond the borders of Europe. The Cold War was won when Ronal Reagan publicly labelled the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” A generation later, we are witnessing the rise of another Evil Empire. Not the Soviet Union, but the European Union. It’s time to bring this one down, too. The European Union, not the USA and definitely not Israel, is the greatest threat to world peace today. It is appeasement by the EU that has emboldened the Islamic Jihad, and not just in the West. The EU is an increasingly totalitarian entity that is post-democratic and neo-feudalist. The buildings of the European Commission should be turned into a museum of the history of dhimmitude and Jihad across the world. Parts of it could be torn down and displayed next to pieces of the Berlin Wall, symbols of past tyranny and oppression and the ultimate triumph of freedom. Javier Solana, Chris Patten and their ilk should be tried for treason in public trials to reveal the full scale of the Eurabian project.

There is a growing estrangement between the peoples of Europe and their elites. People sense that they are not being told the truth, and feel betrayed. Somebody needs to show them just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Publish Bat Ye’or’s book “Eurabia” online, both in the full version and in abridged versions of 50 and 5 pages. Pay the author whatever she wants for the copyrights, and encourage the translation of the book into multiple European languages. Store it online on websites such as Faith Freedom International and Jihad Watch, as well as major blogs based outside of Eurabian jurisdiction, and encourage visitors to download the text or display it on their own websites. This principle could be repeated with a number of books critical of Islam, creating a flood of information bypassing politically correct media and official censorship. Such an operation could receive clandestine support of the Bush administration. It would cost a fraction of the war in Iraq, and achieve a lot more, both in the West and in the world in general.

Perhaps in stead of pinning our hopes on an Islamic Reformation that will probably never materialize, Westerners should rather focus on an Enlightenment and a new Renaissance. Not in the Islamic world, but in Europe and the West. Wishful thinking, you say? Well, although the situation is now very serious, it is in fact not impossible to imagine such an outcome. Moreover, it is important that somebody formulates an alternative, positive vision to rival that of Islam and Eurabia, or the only alternatives ordinary Europeans will be stuck with are extremist political movements. And then we will end up with a Clash of Fascisms and the death of European democracy. Hope is important. Without formulating a positive vision of hope we can never win this.

Muslims always claim that the West owes much to Islam, and that Islamic influences triggered the Renaissance. That’s not true. But maybe it will be this time. It is true that the West in general and Europe in particular has lost its way at the beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps this life-and-death struggle with Islam is precisely the slap in the face that we need to regroup and revitalize our civilization. Europe will now be forced to rethink her culture and the entire basis of Western civilization, if she is going to cure the weaknesses that are currently making her vulnerable to Islamic infiltration. We need to rebuild a stronger sense of Western unity, much fractured by the Eurabian Union and the anti-Western, pre-Enlightenment ideology of Multiculturalism. If so, Islam would indeed be responsible for triggering a Western Renaissance, the Second Renaissance. Ironically, Islam itself would be critically, perhaps mortally wounded by this struggle, and Bernard Lewis would be proved wrong. Europe, or at least most of Europe, will not be Islamic by the end of his century. It is more likely that Islam itself will have ceased to be a global force of any significance by that point. But it is important to realize that such a result will not come by itself. It will require Europeans, Westerners and infidels in general to grow some backbone, end appeasement and openly confront the very real Islamic threat we are now facing. If we do so, I remain confident that we will prevail. We just have to listen a bit less to the defeatist siren song of Mark Steyn.

The European Case for Israel

2006-02-08T12:54:00.000-08:00

The victory of Hamas in the Palestinian elections follows the election of a hard line president in Iran and the Jihad riots in France. Hamas is not part of a struggle for "national liberation," it is a part of a global anti-democratic movement that is now threatening to plunge the world into a devastating war. The Jihad has been simmering for years, but is now entering a phase of much more open hostility towards the infidels. Hamas is right: There is no peace process in the Middle East. There probably never was, but at least Israel is now faced with enemies, both among Palestinians and the Islamic regime in Iran, who state this quite openly. As Hugh Fitzgerald writes: Though very few would recognize it, the infidels of Europe in fact owe the Israelis a debt. For it is the Israelis who, like a lightning rod, have until recently borne the brunt of Arab and Muslim hatred and attention. The Lesser Jihad against Israel is simply part of the Greater Jihad against all non-Muslims.

Europeans should support Israel for several reasons. The first one is moral: It is immoral for Europeans to sit back and watch threats of a new Holocaust, which the Iranian president has repeatedly suggested. It is especially immoral because it is our appeasing "dialogue" with the mullahs that has enabled them to progress this far with their nuclear program. We simply have an historical obligation to oppose forces spreading anti-Semitism into the mainstream once again.

The second reason is cultural. A stronger stance in solidarity with Israel would send a message to Muslims and Multiculturalists: The West isn't a Christian club, it's a Judeo-Christian club. And no, the Jewish component is not a cliché. The fact that such a statement would also be in direct opposition to the thinking behind the current version of the Eurabian Union is a welcome side effect. We need to assert our cultural identity to be able to defend ourselves against Islam.

The third reason is ideological. Bat Ye'or has demonstrated convincingly in her book "Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis" how closely linked the rise of Eurabia and the ongoing Islamization of the continent are to the institutionalized Euro-Arab dialogue that has been going on for several decades. The same goes for the growth of European anti-Israeli attitudes that this has ensued. If the growth of anti-Israeli sentiments is indeed linked to Eurabia, creeping dhimmitude and European submission to Arab-Islamic demands, showing a pro-Israeli point of view becomes an act of defiance and a symbol of resistance to the Eurabian establishment. Being European and pro-Israeli is a statement that: "I'm not a dhimmi, but a proud defender of the Judeo-Christian Western civilization." It can be used to demonstrate that the European Union in reality is the Eurabian Union.

The fourth reason for supporting Israel is plain self-interest. WW2 started with the persecution of Jews, one of the smallest and most vulnerable ethnic groups. Once the Nazis got away with that, they were strong enough to intimidate everybody else, too. The result was a world war. Those who burned Jewish stores eventually burned down much of the European continent. History is about to repeat itself. This world war seems to start with threats to attack and annihilate the Jews, just as the previous one did. Europeans turned a blind eye to Islamic suicide bombers and the Jihad ideology they represented as long as they targeted only Jews in Israel. Now Europeans themselves live in fear of the same suicide bombers in Paris, London and Madrid. We should have learnt our lesson by now. If we don't, we will soon have to pay the price for this mistake.

The most important task in the immediate future is preventing the mullahs in Iran from getting nuclear weapons. A strike against Iran should be combined with steps to weaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic, and encourage the people to overthrow their oppressors. Ironically, the election of hardliner Ahmadinejad for president just made this easier. Ahmadinejad is a brute who has killed off the illusion of "reform" and the deceptive "good cop - bad cop" game his predecessor Khatami kept alive for eight years. The right thing for Europeans to do is to help Iranians get rid of that barbaric and oppressive regime. This also happens to be in our own best interest. The current wave of Islamic radicalism has been closely tied to the history of the Islamic Republic in Iran. Bringing down the regime installed by Khomeini will deal a severe blow to the international movement of political Islam, and thus to the very forces that are increasingly threatening Europe itself. Most Europeans don't seem to understand the implications of the fact that Iran now has nuclear-capable missiles that can reach parts of Europe. A regime with this mentality cannot under any circumstances be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. This must be prevented at all costs, including the option of armed strikes against nuke facilities inside Iran. Iranians may not be happy about the idea, but the brutal truth is that unless this is done, the Islamic regime may very well drag their nation into a nuclear war, with Israel or some other nation. The new president of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, is questioning the reality of the Holocaust, threatening to wipe Israel of the face of the earth, and urging that a Jewish state be relocated thousands of miles away. Some have suggested that the United States should propose the quick admission of Israel into NATO as a full member, an idea that deserves some consideration.

Binyamin Netanyahu has stated that Muslims don't hate the West because of Israel, they hate Israel because of the West. And he's right. If Muslims manage to overrun and subdue the Little Satan, that means that the Great Satan is weaker than he appears. The Great Satan here is usually referring to the USA, but it really is the West in general, and very much includes Europe, the cradle of Western civilization. How would the Danish cartoon issue have looked like if Iran used its nuclear umbrella to "protect Europe's Muslims?" Does anybody in Europe want to find out?

EU claims to superpower status ring rather hollow. When the time comes to face a real challenge, Europe does not have the will, perhaps not even the means, to defeat it. An entire continent is now hiding behind a few million Jews, the descendants of a people we almost decimated, to defeat an enemy we have been feeding for years. The EU isn't a soft superpower, the EU is just soft, and incapable of disarming a threat it has by itself participated in creating. Israel is the Constantinople of our time, and Israelis have been at the front line of the battle against Islamic Fascism for years. Israel should finally be allowed to defend herself. It's time Europe stops laying obstacles in her way.

The Fight against Jihad: Dealing with India and China

2005-10-09T12:38:00.000-07:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

The most important task in the fight against Islamic Jihad is to reunite the West in the defense of its own civilization, which can only happen by derailing Europe’s path to Eurabia. Raphael Israeli has suggested an Alliance of Western and Democratic States, at the center of which will be the US, Canada, Israel, Australia and Western Europe. This system may sidetrack the chaotic situation in the UN today, where Islamic countries and dictatorships have too much influence. It would probably also presuppose scrapping the EU in its present form. This alliance should maintain amiable relations with the Russians. Russia under Putin is hardly a model democracy, and its own Great Power ambitions may sometimes make it an unpredictable ally. However, the Russians will probably end up on the right side in the struggle against Islam, in the interest of self-preservation if nothing else. With collapsing non-Muslim birth rates and significant Muslim minorities, the survival of Russian culture is at stake. The alliance should also forge ties with non-Western democracies.

Robert Spencer has called India our partner against Jihad, and suggests that India can and should be working side-by-side with us in this great struggle for freedom and human rights. Democratic India, which has suffered from Jihad for centuries, is in many ways our natural ally. It does, however, also have its problems. Historian N.S. Rajaram has explained how the wounds inflicted by centuries of Islamic rule on a large segment of the Indian intelligentsia and the political class have been so debilitating that they continue to live in a state of constant fear. Muslims in India make up about 150 million people, and their growth rate exceeds those of Hindus and Sikhs. Combined with the populations of Bangladesh and Pakistan, non-Muslims could be a minority on the Indian subcontinent by mid-century. Muslims still consider India to be “unfinished business”, which is why the Saudi royal family has cleared plans to construct 4,500 Islamic madrasas in South Asia. This dhimmi-fear of Islamic unrest explains why non-Muslim India was the first country to ban Salman Rushdie’s book “the Satanic Verses.” It is important that Indians get to know the full scale of Islamic atrocities on their continent, through books such as "Negationism in India - Concealing the record of Islam" by Koenraad Elst and "Indian Muslims - Who Are They" by K.S. Lal.

Another complicating factor in this alliance is the sometimes significant cultural differences between Indians and Westerners. Many Indians harbor some suspicion towards Judeo-Christian monotheism as well as Islam. They should listen to V. S. Naipaul, hardly a soft man in his treatment of Islam, who is a defender of Western civilization and says that the advent of Christianity did not damage India the way Islam did. Quite a few also still hold grudges for European colonialism. There are even those, and not just Indians, who say that Europeans deserve to become colonized by Muslims, after colonizing other nations themselves. This line of thinking is both wrong and dangerous. Non-Muslims should never support Muslim advances elsewhere. Indians should know this better than most. While Pakistan for decades remained a hub of Islamic extremism, Western powers usually ignored it as a “regional” or “Indian” problem. Now, terrorists trained at Pakistani madrasas hit London, and threaten other Western nations. Indians should not make the same mistake. There is no such thing as “local” or “regional” struggles against Islam, only different front lines of the same, global Jihad. There is ample evidence of widespread international cooperation between Jihadis. In the longer term, a Muslim Europe would become just another overpopulated Islamic failure. In the short to medium term, however, Europe’s accumulated economic and technological resources would be used to fuel Islamic aggression from Kashmir to Thailand and the Philippines. Most Europeans today are genuinely embarrassed by their colonial past, which is ironically one of the causes of the weakness presently displayed towards Muslim demands. This would not be the case with an Islamic Europe, which with the fresh zeal of the newly convert could seize the mantle of Islam’s cause worldwide, the way the Turks once did.

Whereas democratic India is our natural ally, authoritarian China is a more complicated matter. Through its long-standing partnership with Pakistan, China is partly responsible for that country’s nuclear capability, which is now threatening to spread to other Islamic countries or even terrorist networks. China’s increasing ties with Iran should thus be a matter of some concern for the West. With its’ growing economy, China, and India, too, is faced with a soaring need for energy, which brings it into the arms of the Iranians, the Saudis and even the Sudanese. In Asia, Japan has been a long-standing American ally. In the war against Islamic Jihad, China will thus be faced by an alliance that includes present superpower USA, former colonial power the UK, Asian rival India and the much-hated Japanese. Even without the Chinese Communist Party, it is not certain that all Chinese will be thrilled at the prospect of joining hands with these nations. On top of this, there is a powerful undercurrent of Chinese nationalism in the country, the feeling of belonging to a glorious, but slighted civilization that will now reassert itself and regain the prominence that is its due. The Chinese populace have been spoon-fed anti-Western propaganda for decades, yet have much less intimate knowledge of Islamic aggression than their Indian neighbors. This explains the occasional outbursts of gloating following 9/11 in the USA, by some Chinese viewed as a humbling blow against an arrogant nation. Yes, Chinese authorities are ruthless in suppressing militant Muslim Uighurs in its Western provinces, but this alone does not mean that China has joined the global fight against Islam. It just means that the CCP does not tolerate any kind of dissent, be that Muslims, Tibetan monks or pro-democracy activists.

However, the Chinese are above all pragmatic people. They may need relations with Muslim countries to fill their need for energy, but the Islamic world has little else to offer them. The growth in China’s economy, without which the country could disintegrate from internal unrest, is tied to markets and capital in the West and other infidel nations. And even though Chinese nationalism is a given, it may perhaps be redirected towards Islamic targets. Distribute stories of ethnic Chinese who are discriminated against and exploited in Malaysia, even to the point where they are not allowed to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Or of Chinese women being beaten and gang-raped in Indonesia by Muslims shouting "Allah Hu Akbar" and "Kill Chinese." Spread literature explaining that the Chinese, who are largely Buddhists, Taoists or non-religious, are in fact viewed as even lower by Muslim than Westerners of Judeo-Christian stock. Chinese women are seen as infidel whores, and Chinese men as pig-eating barbarians. The mentality of Islamic supremacy is an insult to 5000 years of Chinese civilization, and a giant slap in the face of the proud Chinese nation. Even though Muslims will want you as allies against other infidels today, they will come for you too, eventually. Your large population mass and ruthless pride may defend you for a while, but even China won’t be immune to an entire Eurasian landmass dominated by Islam.

As Hugh Fitzgerald says, this is not about a “Clash of Civilizations” or “East vs. West,” it is about infidels vs. Islam. We should have an agreement between Europeans, Americans, Indians and everybody else to deal with Islam today, and then the rest of us can haggle about trade quotas and currency rates tomorrow. That’s what civilized people do.

Europe -The Manic-Depressive Continent

2005-10-06T03:41:00.000-07:00

by Wolfgang Bruno

Everybody experiences their ups and downs. The unhealthy mood swings of people suffering from manic depression are far more extreme than those experienced by average people. Europe is probably the only case where an entire continent suffers from this condition.

At the beginning of the 20th century, Europe was the most influential civilization in human history. It had the most dynamic economies on the planet, and had self-confidence sometimes reaching levels of extreme arrogance. At the beginning of the 21st century, Europe is in serious economic decline, its populations being replaced in its own major cities, it is the most pessimistic region in the world and its media, its universities and its intellectuals keep reminding their countrymen that their culture is worthless and evil. In part, this reads like the story of the rise and fall of any civilization, but there is something special about Europe, something almost pathological. Europe is a continent of extremes, sometimes changing in rapid succession. Unless this pattern is changed, the pendulum could soon swing back towards aggressive Fascism, partly triggered by Muslim immigration.

Anthony Browne asks why Britain became "the first country in the developed world to produce its own suicide bombers." The answer is that Britain hates itself. Schools refuse to teach history that risks making pupils proud, and use it instead as a means of instilling liberal guilt. London's internationalism is the only thing Brits are licensed to be proud of -- in other words, a characteristic of which there is little British left about it.

We need to find a middle way, and regain some of our cultural confidence. Being arrogant is definitely a character flaw, but self-loathing doesn’t make you good, it just makes you look weak and pathetic. A certain amount of self-confidence is a necessary precondition to achieve anything in life. That goes for nations as well as individuals. If you don’t respect yourself, then nobody else is going to respect you either. Those who do not have some pride in their own culture will sooner or later end up being proud of somebody else’s. Yes, Europe has a sometimes dark and violent history, but that is hardly unique to us. Yes, Europe was engaged in slavery, as have been most other cultures throughout human history. However, Europe also gave rise to the abolitionist movement, pushing to end slavery on an international basis, not the least in the Islamic world. Move on! Our culture is worth keeping, despite the incessant claims to the contrary from parts of our intelligentsia. Non-Europeans who visit our lands come to visit our great cathedrals, see our arts and enjoy some of the quaint little quirks and bad habits we have acquired over the centuries. If they want to see burkas and sharia they go to Baghdad or Karachi, not to Rome, Amsterdam or Dublin. Should Europe be reduced to an appendix of the Arab world, this would be a tragedy for world cultural heritage, not just for Europe.

If we could use a little more confidence in the cultural field, we need a bit more humility in the economic field. Europe had dynamic economies once, but we didn’t have six hour work days and five weeks holidays when we did. We’ve grown lazy and complacent, and get our collective behinds kicked every day by Chinese, Americans, Indians and pretty much everybody else. The welfare state is dead, long live the welfare state! Our demographic challenges, on the other hand, cannot be solved by immigration alone, but by a change of our cultural and religious values. The problems created by declining birth rates are not nearly as big as the problems created by the cure, Muslim immigration.

As Melanie Phillips says, the great mistake the EU makes is to confuse attachments to nation with isolationism. The desire for self-government is not isolationist. It is simply the precondition for democracy. The elements of the transnational Utopia, such as the EU, European Court of Human Rights, the UN and the International Criminal Court, are therefore nothing less than an assault on democracy, freedom and the attachments that make us into functioning communities founded on a shared sense of identity and interests. And the only way to defend ourselves against this new threat is for nations to have a strong sense of and belief in themselves. Yet it is that sense of national identification that the EU has been busily destroying, thus dangerously weakening the ability of European nations to fight in their own defence.

The political class thinks that the problem with the people is that they do not know what's in their best interest. This sentiment is particularly widespread among liberal and left-wing activists and thinkers. In Brussels, a demagogue is anyone who is critical of the EU project. The word “populism” used to mean democracy: that is, the readiness of politicians to recognise the wishes of their constituents. To many Eurocrats, however, public opposition is merely an obstacle to be overcome – a bump on the road to European integration. And the response of our elite is not to affirm national identity but to repudiate it. The loyalty that people need in their daily lives is constantly ridiculed or even demonised by the dominant media. As Roger Scruton points out, Western civilization depends on an idea of citizenship that is not global at all, but rooted in territorial jurisdiction and national loyalty. People in the West live in a public space in which each person is surrounded and protected by his rights, and where all behavior that poses no obvious physical threat is permitted. But people in Muslim countries live in a space that is shared but private, where nobody is shielded by his rights from communal judgment, and where communal judgment is experienced as the judgment of God.

Europe seems so scared of its own real or perceived demons that it doesn’t understand that demons can come from the outside, too. From the Islamic world, for instance. There is no particular reason why nationalism should be dangerous. It might be or it might not be. Communism was transnational, and responsible for the deaths of tens of millions of people. It is true that aggressive nationalism has been a problem for Europe in the past, but that does not mean that any allegiance to the nation state by itself has to be bad. What threatens to plunge the continent into war now is not nationalism but rather anti-nationalism, the deliberate weakening of the nation state. The sense of belonging to a shared community, a nation, is undermined both at the micro-level, through massive immigration, and at the macro-level, through faceless bureaucrats in Brussels. Many of Europe’s problems predate the EU and are not caused by it, but the EU has reinforced some of them and added a few more. We may need some kind of European solidarity and cultural alliance faced with the ongoing Islamic aggression, but it has to be based on the cooperation between independent nations that are defensible both from an identity and from a practical point of view. Perhaps the question of Turkey’s membership in the EU can be resolved by getting rid of the EU altogether. If so, Eurabia would be buried together with the institution that created it in the first place.

Immigration or Invasion?

2005-10-05T03:17:00.000-07:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

“America is now threatened less by conquering states than we are by failing ones.” That is the conclusion of the 2002 U.S. National Security Strategy. The problem is that weak states export some of their population growth to stronger countries, destabilizing these nations, too.

The current Mexican immigration to the USA is historically unprecedented. In 1920, the two largest immigrant groups—Germans and Italians—totalled only 24 percent of the immigrant population. Among men, about one in 20 U.S. workers is now a Mexican immigrant; in 1970, that was less than one in 100. In the past, immigrants could not call home, e-mail relatives, fly back and forth, wire money, and maintain connections to their native land to extent they can today. They did not have education and social services in their native language. Liberal economists swear that legal immigrants to the USA bring in $25 billion in net revenue annually. More skeptical statisticians conclude that aliens cost the United States over $40 billion a year. Other studies suggest that the average California household must contribute at least $1,200 each year to subsidize the deficit between what immigrants cost in services and pay in taxes. New reports suggest that there may be not 8 million, but almost 20 million illegal aliens in the United States.

The USA has the most powerful armed forces in the history of mankind. What’s the point of that, if millions of people can simply walk across the border and colonize entire regions? Isn’t the idea behind a military defense to uphold national integrity and sovereignty? More concerning is the fact that Islamic terrorists are taking advantage of this situation, and bypass increased airport security by entering from Mexico. The lax border control is thus a major security risk, as the terrorists are trying to obtain WMD to smuggle into the country's vast unprotected borders. Legislation developed as a result of the 9/11 Commission called for an additional 2,000 Border Patrol agents, but the Bush Administration's 2006 budget asked for just 210 new agents.

Although illegal immigration is causing frictions in the US, the situation in Europe is much more volatile. The USA is a nation of immigrants in a sense that Europe is not. When Europeans dig into the ground for archaeological remains, they find traces of their own ancestors. Europeans are in a sense their own Indians, and live in distinct nation states. This makes Europe less suited to absorb large amounts of immigrants. On top of this, Europe also receives a kind of immigrants who are not at all interested in fitting in: Muslims.

Anthony Browne of the London Times claims that almost all arguments used to justify mass immigration don’t add up. Britain doesn’t have a declining workforce, and immigration is no solution to an aging society since migrants age too. There is no shortage of unskilled labour, with four million people out of work wanting to work. It may boost the economy, but doesn’t boost GDP per capita. While the economic benefits are marginal, the costs are great: it leads to massive overcrowding and congestion, overstretched public services, imports poverty, crime, increases social tension and creates parallel communities. It is hypocritical to profess belief in democracy, then deny people any democratic control over immigration policy. The pro-immigrationists are effectively trying to abolish nationhood, denying a country the right to sustain its own culture.

In 2000, the then president of Bangladesh, Sheikh Hasina, was asked by the Los Angeles Times how the country was going to feed, clothe, house and employ the expected doubling of her population by 2050. She replied: “We’ll send them to America. Globalisation in its purest form should not have any boundaries, so small countries with big populations should be able to send population to countries with big boundaries and small populations.” This isn’t migration at all, it should rather be labelled “population dumping”.

Tory leader Michael Howard wants to pull Britain out of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention as well as certain commitments in the European Convention on Human Rights: "Immigration has more than doubled since Mr Blair came to power. Britain's population will grow by six million over the next 30 years of which five million will be due to immigration." Sir Andrew Green, Chairman of Migration Watch UK, supports the idea of withdrawing from the Convention on Human Rights. Western states, which are bound by their own laws, are forced to admit hundreds of thousands of unwanted immigrants every year, simply because well-briefed lawyers invoke the convention on asylum on their behalf. Most of these immigrants stay even when their claims to asylum are exposed as bogus. The result is a demographic crisis in Europe that threatens to rock the foundations of its society.

The Spanish government has launched a programme granting legal amnesty to up to 800,000 undocumented immigrants. Spain's 3.5 million immigrants now represent 8 percent of the population, coming largely from Africa. The number of immigrants in Spain has tripled to almost three million in less than five years. Appeasement PM Zapatero came to power after an Islamic attack on his country, and only months later he issued residency permits to hundreds of thousands of Muslims. When Spain decided to regularise illegal workers, other European countries were worried that this policy would affect them, too. The EU is an open market, with free movement of people and goods. Once immigrants are accepted into one nation, in this case Spain, they have the right to move anywhere within the EU. Schengen is a border-control system under which incoming travellers are checked by officials only at an outer frontier of the EU. A Ukrainian family travelling west by car would be checked by Polish officials at the border. Then they can drive unhindered across nearly all Western Europe, and nobody will ask for their passports. This makes it a monumental task to control drug smuggling, human trafficking, and illegal immigration. To the southeast and southwest, outer border countries like Greece, Italy, and Spain have an almost impossible task in controlling their sea borders. Monitoring the new external border of the EU which stretches over 5,000 kilometres from Kaliningrad to Croatia, passing through Belarus, Ukraine and Serbia-Montenegro, will not become any easier.

Simply put, the EU has weakened border controls in Europe at the same time as a population explosion in Muslim neighbor regions is threatening to spill over, potentially causing a succession of civil wars in Western European nations. It is an act of criminal negligence of political leaders on both sides of the Atlantic to maintain such porous borders while Islamic groups are waging a war against our civilization and are working to obtain the worst weapons known to man. The combination of multiculturalism and massive immigration threatens to undermine the cohesion of Western nations to the point that they will no longer have the ability to withstand the Islamic aggression. Unless this problem is dealt with, and soon, we could be in more trouble than we realize.

Cultural War by Proxy

2005-10-04T03:50:00.000-07:00

by Wolfgang Bruno

In our clash with Islam, our opponents have at least one major advantage over us: At the beginning of the 21st century, the West has indeed lost its way and sense of purpose. We want to defend “Western civilization”, but are we even sure what that is anymore, or was it lost in the multicultural fog somewhere? Is the West primarily defined by its Judeo-Christian religious heritage, or is it something else?

The Western Left has a clear goal: The destruction of the society that vanquished its dreams fifteen years ago. But it does not have, as in the old days of the Soviet Union, the hard power to accomplish this by itself. Their bets are now on Islam. Religious people in the West tend to view secularists as anti-Christian hypocrites, and not without some justification. Devout Catholic Italian Rocco Buttiglione was rejected as the European Union’s justice commissioner because of his conservative, religious views. At the same time, the EU has extensive relations with the brutal theocracy in Iran, and few Islamic organizations, not even terrorist group Hamas, ever seem to be too extremist for the EU to cooperate with them. In the USA, the ACLU makes sure that prayer in public schools is just fine for Muslims, but banned for everybody else.

Even though left-wingers may usually be the worst offenders in appeasing Islam, that does not mean that right-wingers are blameless in this either. Economic liberalists are frequently naïve when it comes to cultural and religious differences. Theirs is the blind belief that immigration will always be “good for the economy”, ignoring the troubling aspects of Muslim immigration. More pronounced is the fact that many members of the religious Right are even more skeptical of the secular Left than they are of Islam. Quite a few of them tend to view Islam as a potential ally against secularists, and want to cooperate with Muslims in a misguided attempt to revive “religious values” in their own societies. This line of thinking may be the Achilles heel of the Bush Administration.

As Hugh Fitzgerald says, the Faith-Based Initiative put forward by President Bush will turn out to be a fund for fate-based Muslims, a nice supplement to Saudi money, and will help support Islam in the USA. In other words, American taxpayers will be supporting a system that in every single one of its canonical texts inculcates hostility to infidels, and further mandates Jihad as a duty for all Muslims, in order to ensure that Islam comes to dominate the entire globe. At the same time, rumor has it that individuals associated with the Bush administration think that people such as Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina are “no longer in the game”, since they have abandoned Islam completely and are not religious. This is a serious miscalculation, and yet another indication that the Bush administration has no idea what they are doing regarding Islam.

Muslim immigration to the West has enabled groups of Jihadis to use modern technology against Western society itself. Less talked about is the fact that it has also created the first, organized international groups of dissidents challenging the very foundations of Islamic teachings. Nobody has ever before published a book similar to “Leaving Islam”, the anthology of testimonies by ex-Muslims edited by Ibn Warraq. And only with the advent of the Internet did it become possible for Ali Sina to make a movement such as Faith Freedom International, exposing the intolerance of Islam in real time, with people from all over the world being able to read it. It is highly unlikely that Islam can be reformed, but if it should, then a litmus test of real change would be whether Muslims could freely leave Islam. Ex-Muslims thus hold the key to one of the most important questions of our age. It is gross negligence of Western leaders to overlook this, but spend hundreds of billions of dollars on propping up what could become an Islamic state in Iraq.

Religious groups claim that only religion gives people the backbone and moral clarity needed to stand up to Islam. There may be some truth in this, as Europe managed to stop and even scale back Islamic aggression in days when it took its religion seriously. Indeed, today’s post-Christian Europe does appear weaker. But again, reality is not always as simple as this. Who has more moral clarity: Atheists such as Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina, who risk their lives every day by challenging Islam, or the Pope John Paul, kissing the Koran? The biggest weakness of the West right now is our inclination to blame ourselves for whatever happens, and for reaching out to “win the hearts and minds” of people who profess to kill us and destroy our civilization. Isn’t guilt, the idea of being a sinner, paying for your sins and asking for forgiveness, a deeply Christian concept? Guilt is no stranger to Jewish thinking, either. This obsession with blaming ourselves does not have to be in opposition to religion and need not be cured by it. Some would even claim that it is a quintessentially Christian or Judeo-Christian concept. The idea of compassion, of personal responsibility, sets Christianity apart from Islam, and makes it infinitely superior to it. Non-religious people should take heed of this. The notion of reaching out to your enemies is usually a positive one, but can in an Islamic context also make some Christians perfect dhimmi material.

The West is mired in a cultural war by proxy, where the secular Left and the religious Right battle it out, using Islam as a tool to defeat the other. But Islam is not a tool, and has no master other than Allah and his Prophet. Any “alliances” non-Muslims make with Muslims are only temporary, until Muslims feel confident enough to do without them. It doesn’t matter whether you define the West primarily in religious or non-religious terms. Islam is an enemy of both, and will strive relentlessly to subdue them both. At least Christians and Jews are allowed to live in an Islamic state. Non-religious people have only the choice between conversion to Islam or death.

We can't begin to do anything, until we in the West come together in agreement about basic principles concerning the value of Western Civilization. Until this is done, we will not be able to recognize and fight the danger of Islam. The most interesting and promising development is the alliance between non-religions persons such as Ali Sina and devout religious persons such as Robert Spencer. This is where the dynamic heart of the Islam-critical movement is today. And if the Bush administration were smart, they would support them in every way they can, including financially. Italian writer Oriana Fallaci has labeled herself a ”Catholic Atheist”. Not a believer herself, but still deeply attached to the religious heritage that makes up an important part of her culture. Maybe the end definition of the West will be a society similar to what the USA is today: Secular by form, but religious by nature.

Multiculturalism – Tribalism Recycled

2005-10-03T03:14:00.000-07:00

by Wolfgang Bruno

The bombings in London have finally put the multicultural ideal under closer scrutiny. As Mark Steyn points out, you can't assimilate with a nullity. Helmut Schmidt, the former German chancellor, asserted that multiculturalism can only work under authoritarian regimes, not in democratic ones. At its deepest level, multiculturalism represents a denial of all Western claims to truth. The purpose of multiculturalism is to extirpate the truly free cultures by asserting that they are equivalent to primitive, Islamic cultures. The idea is kept alive by repeating myths about the “tolerant” Islamic rule in Spain. If all cultures and religions are equally worthy of respect, why didn’t the West remain in the age when we burned witches and held slaves? We progressed and left Islam behind because we possessed the ability to criticize ourselves and move on. The only cultures worthy of respect are those who can withstand scrutiny. If yours is too weak to survive this treatment, then you do not belong in a Western society.

The West is a revolutionary civilization in our emphasis on the individual. As former Bosnian President Izetbegovic wrote, “…a Muslim generally does not exist as an individual.” This is one of the reasons why Muslims hate and fear the West more than traditional civilizations such as China. However, even though the West gave birth to the idea of the individual, it also gave rise to its anti-thesis, collectivist ideologies such as Communism and Fascism. Europe thrived and remained dynamic as long as it stuck to individualism. It has slowly declined ever since Utopian; collectivist ideologies poisoned its bloodstream.

In multiculturalism, the individual is reduced to being a member of a “tribe", be that of the black tribe vs. the white tribe, the Catholic tribe vs. the Protestant tribe, or the Muslim tribe vs. all the other tribes. Islam, with its Muslim community or “Ummah” roughly being an enlarged Arab tribe of old, is well suited for this line of thinking. Some claim that multiculturalism works just fine as long as you keep Islam out of the equation. That’s not the case. One of the reasons why the insanity of using sharia law has been seriously considered in Canada is that Canada was from the outset a weak nation. Canadians have for so long pandered to their French-speaking community that appeasing ethnic minorities has become something of a national habit. This proves the maxim that although being bilingual can be a great advantage for an individual, it is a tragedy for a country.

Kenan Malik has demonstrated how multiculturalism and racism share similar traits - both ideologies separate and define groups of people in terms of skin color. The motto of the multicultural crowd could thus be “separate, but equal.” As every American school kid knows, there is no such thing. Multiculturalism is apartheid with lip gloss, tribalism recycled. It is the bastard child of the other collectivist ideologies of the 20th century: Fascism and communism. Which helps explain why Western groups on both the extreme left and the extreme right frequently have a cozy relationship with Islam: It is a marriage of convenience between a pre-modern culture and modern totalitarian ideologies based on mutual disdain for Western individualism. The entire leftist worldview is based upon the idea that certain groups of people oppress other groups of people. Leftists need oppressed groups, and Muslims need to explain away their own failures by claiming to be oppressed. It’s a perfect match. Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who has stated that “the left is exactly like the Muslims,” disappointed her Socialist party by insisting on being an individual, rather than a mere representative of the oppressed group. This is one of the reasons why quotas for different ethnic groups are dangerous. They cement the notion of belonging to a specific “tribe” opposed to other “tribes.” This could prove lethal for a country as diverse as the United States:

In the tribal culture, the emphasis is on the tribe or on a collective entity. Individuals exist only in relation to the tribe or to a subset of the tribe. In a modern culture the emphasis is on the individual - as in the US Constitution, "...each is endowed..." "Honor killings" are an outgrowth of a tribal culture, in that a woman's life is of secondary importance in comparison with her family's "honor." "Romantic love" is a very early symptom of modern culture, in that a person would act on a feeling of emotional attraction for another person, regardless of the impact on his/her family's status. Because of this change in emphasis, many tribal cultures cannot survive - there is not enough benefit to the individual (newly aware of his/her individuality) to call him/her back into the fold.

Maybe some of the high regard for the concept stems from mixing up the word “multicultural” with “multiracial”. If you want to run a successful business in the 21st century, it could mean hiring an Indian IT manager, a Chinese engineer, an American accountant, an Italian designer and a South African salesman. Refusing to hire people because of their skin color maybe makes you a bad person, but first of all, it makes you a bad capitalist. The USA can remain a powerful, multiracial country of dynamic individuals, or it can disintegrate into a multicultural chaos of clashing tribes. Western civilization is sometimes presented, both by people attacking it and by people claiming to defend it, as something “white”. It is true that many of its greatest thinkers were of European origin. They should be honored, not reviled as “dead, white males." But the West has long since moved beyond this. One of the greatest defenders of Western values in Europe today is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an African woman. One of the toughest intellectuals defending Western liberal democracy is Ibn Warraq, a Pakistani man. Contrast this with the actions of London Mayor Ken Livingstone or the books of Karen Armstrong. On one hand, this should make people of European stock proud: There are people who risk their lives and choose our culture over that of their ancestors simply because they think it is worth defending. Perhaps we should treat it less carelessly, then? On the other hand, it should put us to shame: Are we really so decadent that we need to import people to defend our own civilization? Maybe we deserve some of the contempt Muslims heap upon us?

Diana West points out that renouncing the multicultural creed “…in the West, that's the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death, the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs.” She’s wrong. Pim Fortuyn was killed by a Left-wing activist who claimed to be defending Dutch Muslims. Fortuyn was essentially executed for being a multicultural heretic. Which is another trait Islam and multiculturalism have in common: Their apostates risk losing their jobs, their reputations and, yes, sometimes even their lives. Multiculturalism is a medieval concept. Unless defeated, it may well generate medieval results. We cannot win the fight against Islam unless we dismantle the ideology that rolls out the red carpet for it. It is no exaggeration to state that this is the most important battle of our age.

Advice to President Bush

2005-07-11T00:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Mr. Bush: I was one of the Europeans who supported your re-election the past fall. In my view, a good leader needs at least two basic qualities: The courage to do the right thing, and the wisdom to understand what the right thing is. John Kerry didn’t have an ounce of either and would have been a disaster as president. I still believe, or at least hope, that you possess the spine necessary to do the job. But I’m not equally convinced you fully understand the nature of your enemy. For you, a devout Christian, religion is something inherently positive. Perhaps that makes you misjudge Islam. Perhaps you view it as a religion currently beset by many problems and aggressive groups, but still one that can offer comfort and moral guidance to millions of people. That is a fundamental mistake. Islam is not an addition to the American diversity rainbow. In fact, it wants to scrap the diversity rainbow and replace it with an Islamic cave. Ataturk’s Turkey has tried for generations to enforce Western-style democracy and secularism, and the experiment is failing. You should listen more to the likes of Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina and Robert Spencer, and less to Bernard Lewis.

The most important military task in the immediate future is preventing the mullahs in Iran from getting nuclear weapons. This has to be done at all cost, even if it means armed strikes against Iranian nuke facilities. Such a move will meet stiff international opposition, but it is of critical importance. The downside is that we may risk ordinary Iranians rallying behind otherwise disliked leaders. A strike against Iran should be combined with steps to weaken the foundations of the Islamic Republic, and encourage the people to overthrow their oppressors. Ironically, the election of hardliner Ahmadinejad for president just made this easier. Rafsanjani is more cunning and could have fooled both Europeans and Iranians for a few more years. Ahmadinejad is a brute who will kill off the illusion of "reform" and the deceptive "good cop - bad cop" game his predecessor Khatami kept alive for eight years. The time is now right for toppling the mullahs.

However, in the ideological battle against Islam, little has happened in the four years since 9/11. We are treading water, and as the London bombings demonstrated, we don't have time to do that. If anything, it has become even more difficult to openly criticize Islam in infidel nations. The Islamic world, supported by Saudi petrodollars, is working tirelessly to subvert our freedom of speech. It is understandable that a person as powerful as the US President cannot and should not say everything, even when it’s true. But you should quietly start preparing people and open their eyes to what we are facing. If the traditional media hesitate to deal in a straightforward manner with Islamic issues, then we have to bypass them and bring the message directly to the people. Concentrate on the Western nations first, and Europe in particular.

Many Americans are tired of watching the back of a continent that always seems to get itself into more trouble. Given the bad press President Bush receives in European media, any open efforts on your behalf could anyway prove to be counterproductive. If done in more subtle ways, it is not as impossible as some people think. The referendums about the proposed EU constitution in France and Holland demonstrated that there are now two powerful and sometimes contradictory currents at work in Europe: Anti-Americanism, partly a reflection of Socialist instincts, but also carefully nurtured by the elites as glue in their Euro-federalist project. The other is increasing disillusionment with European political leaders. Instead of a Europe united against the USA, the elites are creating a Europe united in common opposition to their neo-feudalist leaders and the oligarchs in Brussels. Americans can play these two impulses against each other. There are many Europeans who are more negative towards their own leaders than the USA. Hook up with some of them. Encourage them as a counterweight to the biased Eurabian media. This is also important for what we might label as “civilization awareness”. Multiculturalism and anti-Americanism have greatly weakened the sense of belonging to a shared Western civilization. It needs to be rebuilt, by establishing ties between Americans and groups of Europeans ordinary Americans can relate to.

Show Europeans that their elites are indeed selling them out. Buy the copyrights to Bat Ye’or’s book “Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis”. Translate it into as many European languages as possible, and make sure that many websites have it available for free online, both in the full version and in a summarized version. Since American media are hardly much better when it comes to writing about Islam, many Americans would benefit from this, too. Europe still has a window of opportunity to act, but it is closing fast. A decade from now, the combined forces of neo-feudalism, resurgent nationalism and right-wing extremism, Marxism, and Islam could be too strong for level-headed Europeans to withstand. Either Europe’s home-grown totalitarian impulses will fuse with Islam, completing Europe’s transformation into Eurabia, or they will compete for the spoils, tearing the continent apart. Europe will burn again, for the third time in a century.

Give stipends and all the library resources needed to people such as Ali Sina and Ibn Warraq, to write about Islam. You should also encourage websites by ex-Muslims, and the best websites by non-Muslims. Make a selection of the best critical books written about Islam. The books in their full length should be made available on the Internet in major languages. They can also be downloaded and reprinted in countries where the reach of the Internet is still limited. Start with supporting those who are already in the business. Give them grants to do their work on a semi-professional basis, and help increase their reach. The websites could be in English or bilingual, catering to both national and international audiences. Jihad Watch and Faith Freedom International should be used as the cyberspace version of Radio Free Europe, and the cornerstones in a global network of similar websites.

I am not saying that the Internet alone will do the trick. But it is the least censored medium and still largely outside the control of the politically correct elites. It can and should be spearheading the efforts. The entire operation could be done quietly and unofficially without spending too much money. Freedom of speech is the lifeblood of Western civilization. It doesn’t matter if we capture Al-Qaeda operatives in Iraq and Afghanistan if Islam strangles our freedom at home. Likewise, we can’t win a fight against Islam unless people are made aware of the true nature of Islamic teachings. This part of the struggle has been neglected so far. It is my hope that you, Mr. Bush, can help in dealing with this during your second term. Much depends upon it.

Lemmings on Prozac - an Eurabian Tale

2005-05-19T17:50:00.000-07:00

The leaders of the European Union have put together a proposal for a European Constitution. Already today, 80% of new laws passed in Europe are “federal” European laws made in Brussels. If passed by all member states, this Constitution will intensify EU integration in the direction of statehood. How do you unite 500 million people who have fought each other for a thousand years? The obvious model is Otto von Bismarck, who united the fractious German states in 1870: You need a common enemy. For Germany the necessary enemy was France. Today, European elites are trying to cast the USA in that role.

Robert Spengler thinks the founders of the US broke away from Western civilization to found something quite different, a throwback to the Hebraic notion of a Chosen People. That is overstating the differences between Europe and the USA. It is true that the United States is not made up of European impulses alone. However, the foundation and creation of the Union was done by people of European descent. They wanted to create a nation based upon the best of Europe’s cultural, philosophical and scientific traditions, but without its religious intolerance and political instability. A Europe without Europe’s flaws. From a European point of view, the USA thus isn’t “the Other”, it is an improved version of ourselves. What logic is there in rallying against an improved version of yourself? Practically and geopolitically, it is extremely dangerous. The Islamic world knows it can never defeat a united and confident West. What they need is a fractured West, and the EU elites seem hellbent on giving them just that. By playing the appeasement-instinct in Europe and the isolationist instinct in the US, both internally weakened by the ideology of multiculturalism, Muslims can go on the offensive and assert their own agenda. By forwarding the idea of the EU opposed to the USA, the EU Constitution is thus playing into the hands of the Jihadis.

Massive immigration, too, plays an important role in this set-up. It is necessary in order to break down the old structures, to replace them with a new, pan-European identity. The nationalities of Europe are being dissolved in a historically meaningless collectivity, united neither by language, nor by religion, nor by customs, nor by inherited sovereignty and law. This is much to the dismay of British thinker Roger Scruton, who argues that the nation state is the best guarantee we have of peace, prosperity and respect for human rights. He coins the term 'oikophobia', or 'hatred of home', to describe intellectuals who hate nations or regard them as outdated. Oikophobia can reach absurd levels. A senior European Commissioner accused those skeptical of the EU Constitution of risking a new Holocaust. Europe seems so scared of its own demons that it doesn’t comprehend that demons can come from the outside, too. The Islamic world senses the weakness and goes for the kill.

The old identification with nation and culture has become subdued and discredited, although by no means erased. But there is still nothing new to replace it. Europe is left in limbo, unsure of itself and drifting in a cultural and religious vacuum. Is that why we hate the Americans and the Israelis so much? Because they dare to express pride in their nations and their religious culture, something we are no longer allowed to do? All we are left with is some talk about creating a “new superpower”. But a superpower by any definition is one that projects its influence far outside its own borders. Europe these days has a hard time influencing even its own Islamic suburbs. The EU elites are lemmings on Prozac, happily jumping off the multicultural cliff while Muslims chase them out of their own cities. Europe should worry less about rivaling the Unites States and more about not rivaling Kosovo.

We do need European cooperation and solidarity, now more than ever. The murder of Theo van Gogh wasn’t just an attack on Holland, it was a declaration of war against Europe. By some, this will be used as an argument in favor of further EU integration. That is a mistake. This new Constitution embodies an utopian project. The goal is not just to create a new European superstate, but a New Man to go with it, free of the constraints of the past. The New European Man, just like the New Soviet Man, is bound to fail. The text contains no reference to Europe’s Judeo – Christian heritage, after strong insistence by the French. Symptomatically, the French Justice Minister has called the EU Constitution "an enlarged France." That makes absolutely no sense. It was its cultural and religious roots that enabled the continent to repel earlier Islamic invasions, and thus ensured the very survival of European and Western civilization. What is required now is cold realism and courage, to fight the twin trolls of Defeatism and Denial. Yes, Muslim immigration is a real threat that will destroy the continent if allowed to continue. No, Europe isn’t lost yet. Europeans in the past sometimes managed to put their national differences aside, to hold the line against Islamic aggression. This may be needed once more. We must ignore the American mock enemy our media are putting up, and concentrate on creating European unity in the face of the real enemy: Islam.

The American Constitution consists of 12 pages, plus another nine pages of amendments added over the past two centuries. The proposed European Constitution is 511 pages long, or 800 including various additions. At best, it is unnecessary complicated and unsuited as the foundation for any democratic system. At worst, it is deliberately made to be that way. The more incomprehensible it is to the common man, the more leverage it leaves to the specialists and the ruling elites. Former Belgian Prime Minister Jean-Luc Dehaene openly admitted this: “We know that nine out of 10 people will not have read the Constitution and will vote on the basis of what politicians and journalists say. More than that, if the answer is No, the vote will probably have to be done again, because it absolutely has to be Yes."

The EU elites are basically smiling to European citizens and saying: “Trust us, and let us think for you”. Thanks, but no thanks. First of all, we greatly dislike being treated with the same condescending contempt medieval peasants were subject to by their feudal overlords. Second of all: We don’t trust you. This Constitution will give even more power to the Hamas-kissers and the mullah-appeasers. And to the groupings that want the enlarged EU to include Turkey, and thus 100 million Muslims and counting. This is a Constitution written by bureaucrats for bureaucrats. It gives enhanced powers to the elites who alienate our best friends, the Americans, and court our worst enemies, the Islamic world. It is a marriage made in hell between the Eurocrat oligarchy and the latest utopian fads. It will further weaken European democracy at a time when detachment between the people and their leaders is already reaching dangerous levels, and while Islamists are watching from the sidelines, like hungry kids outside a candy store.

That’s why the Constitution proposal has to be rejected. If the French don’t do so in the upcoming referendum, then the British, the Dutch and the Danes need to do so in theirs. It is absolutely crucial if Europe should remain a civilized, democratic continent. The struggle to derail Europe’s path to Eurabia starts with blocking the latest schemes from Brussels and Paris.

The Clash of Fascisms

2005-05-03T11:03:00.000-07:00

by Wolfgang Bruno

Historian Bat Ye'or fears that it may already be too late to save Europe from Islam, and that the continent will be transformed into Eurabia. Should this come to pass, Eurabia will either slowly decline into just another overpopulated Islamic failure, or it will be used as a staging ground for Islamic aggression against the rest of the infidel world. With Europe’s nuclear weapons and accumulated resources at disposal, Eurabia would be so dangerous that the Americans, the Israelis, the Indians, the Russians and maybe even the Chinese would be forced to crush it. According to this scenario, Islam will fall, but it will drag Europe down with it. This is not, however, the only possibility.

Some Americans have a stereotypical view of Europeans as being appeasers. There is definitely an appeasement instinct in Europe, but it is first and foremost a continent of extremes, sometimes changing in rapid succession. The nations that only a few generations ago tried to impose their culture on large parts of the planet are now afraid of enforcing their cultural values even in their own lands. The ruthless nationalism of the past has been subdued and replaced with anemic multiculturalism and naïve pacifism. It won’t last. The pendulum will swing back. If it appears as if the mainstream authorities are incapable of taking action to stop the ongoing Islamic invasion of the continent, faith in the entire democratic system could break down. Europe right now has all the ingredients needed for the rise of something akin to a new Nazi movement. It is an extremely dangerous mix of suppressed nationalism, high unemployment and failed economies, democratic detachment and a widespread sense of being betrayed by the ruling elites. Tens of millions of immigrants pour into Europe, changing the face of the continent forever without any real debate about the issue. People feel like strangers in their own cities, but are being silenced as "racists" if they object to this.

There is a widespread feeling that Europe is descending into chaos, and that the governments are unwilling or incapable of stopping this. If this situation continues, some people will cry out for a Strong Man to “cleanse Europe of foreigners" and restore its honour and wounded pride. And He will step forward. There is never any shortage of self-proclaimed Strong Men once you call for them. By then, you won’t have a “Clash of Civilizations” in Europe, but rather a Clash of Fascisms: Euro-Fascism vs. Islamo-Fascism. Ayaan Hirsi Ali fears that if we don't take effective measures, now, ''the Netherlands could be torn between two extreme rights'': an Islamic one and a non-Islamic one.” She’s right. MP Geert Wilders in Holland has proposed a moratorium on all non-Western immigration to the Netherlands for some years. Perhaps that is an approach that should be adopted by other European nations, too. Major cities across the continent are now powder kegs of ethnic and religious tensions, built up after decades of failed immigration policies and an absence of a genuine debate. Common sense says that when you have a powder keg waiting to explode, adding even more powder is not the smartest thing to do.

How will the other Europeans and the Americans react if or when the first EU nation breaks down in civil war because of Muslim immigration? Will they sacrifice the non-Muslims out of fear of a widening conflict, bomb the infidels into submission and establish a de facto Muslim state in a vain attempt to save themselves? Some would argue that is what happened in the Balkans in the 1990s. The answer probably depends upon which nation breaks down first. If it turns out to be nuclear armed France, the reactions may be different from what it would be with Holland, Belgium or Sweden. If Jihadis get their hands on French nukes, they will then use these weapons as a nuclear umbrella with which to establish sharia in different parts of Europe. This cannot be allowed to happen.

Some would argue that this bleaker picture does not fit my prediction that Islam will not survive this century as a force of any significance. That’s not necessarily true. We should remain confident that in the battle of Islam against Humanity, civilization will eventually triumph. I will again postulate that Islam will have faded off the world stage by the end of this century, and that the process should be apparent by mid-century, or even before. Seen in a historical perspective, this is a fast demise for a religion that has existed for 1400 years. But it still means that the Islamic world will remain extremely volatile and unstable for decades or even generations to come. It is highly unlikely that there will be an Islamic Reformation. Islam does not have a natural separation between the temporal and the spiritual as Christianity does, nor the non-violent personal example of Jesus, nor the ethical teachings of the Bible. In the unlikely event that somebody should manage to reform Islam, this process will take time and probably be quite bloody. The Christian Reformation was hardly peaceful while it was going on. There is no reason to expect an Islamic Reformation to be, either.

The good news is that Islam is not capable of achieving the world dominance it desires. The bad news is that it may well be capable of achieving a world war. Perhaps Islam will not “go quietly into the night”, but push for a final, decisive confrontation. Islam has lived by the sword, and may die by it. We need to brace ourselves for decades of turbulence ahead. This is unavoidable by now, as the Islamic world will struggle, and probably fail, to come to terms with the modern world. We have to concentrate on trying to avoid that the new “Cold War” turns into a hot, cataclysmic world war. We can perhaps speed up the process, by translating a selection of the best Islam-critical literature available to major languages, spread them across the Internet and encourage downloading and free reprinting of the books to reach those without Internet connection. Other spending on Muslims should be avoided as much as possible. We cannot buy Muslim goodwill, even if we try. Economic aid to Muslims will be viewed as Jizya, the tributary tax non-Muslim dhimmis should pay as a sign of submission to Islamic rule.

Continued Muslim immigration will eventually lead to the demise of European democracy, either by the establishment of a Muslim-lead totalitarian entity, Eurabia, or disintegration of Europe, with different fascist groups competing for the spoils. The only way we can avoid this is by separation, by ending and reversing Muslim immigration. Muslim immigration is equivalent to playing Russian roulette with your own children. The worst case scenario is that the current trends continue unabated, triggering civil wars in several nations as the Muslim population reaches critical mass for an armed Jihad. A Balkanization of the continent would ensue. It may already be too late for the worst hit areas of Europe, but still not for the continent as whole. If we get an Islamic nuclear attack against an American city on top of this, events could spiral out of control. We still have a window of opportunity to prevent this from happening, but swift action needs to be taken as soon as possible. It is unclear whether our politicians have the foresight and the courage to do what is necessary to avoid the impending disaster. Time is sadly not on our side.

Dinosaur in the Age of Mammals

2005-04-09T19:46:00.000-07:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

Tariq Ramadan, the famed "moderate” Muslim who has made deception of non-Muslims into an art form, says the 21st century will see a second role reversal between Islam and the West: The West will begin its new decline, and the Arab-Islamic world its renewal and ascent to centuries of world domination. Princeton historian Bernard Lewis told Die Welt that Europe would be Islamic by the end of this century "at the very latest". Robert Spengler of the Asia Times agrees. What if they are all wrong? What if we state that Europe won’t be Islamic at the end of the 21st century because Islam itself won’t be a force of any significance a century from now?

There are few people of any stature who dare venture such a bold assertion. Ali Sina, the Iranian ex-Muslim and founder of faithfreedom.org, is one of the few who do. Sina has consistently claimed that Islam is “a house of cards that will collapse if sufficiently pushed”, and that we may see the end of Islam within the next few decades. He has compared Islam both to Communism and Nazism, claiming that it will either collapse as the former or be crushed as the latter. These analogies are imperfect, and have rightly been criticized by some. Communism was a recent invention, and a European, materialist ideology not concerned with the hereafter. Islam carries 1400 years of history with it, and is deeply tied to the cultural identity of hundreds of millions of people in a way Communism or Nazism never were. However, Ali Sina may be on to something. I have earlier predicted that what we are witnessing now is an era no less crucial to Islam than the Protestant Reformation was to Christianity. The difference is that Islam may not be flexible enough to handle the challenge, and will disintegrate as a result. For instance, the entire foundation of Islam is based upon female subjugation and male dominance. The movement to grant equality to females will essentially destroy Islam. Islam is quite simply too rigid to survive in a modern world.

It is true that the West at the onset of the 21st century shows signs of weakness and lack of direction. However, it is likely that the USA in particular will retain its leading position for a very long time. Europe does have deeper lying problems, and considering its many Muslim immigrants may indeed face a turbulent and violent period. But even Europe is far from incapable of renewal in the longer run. Perhaps this Islamic threat is precisely the slap in the face we need to regenerate and regain our sense of purpose. It is also true that our status as the leading civilization is not given by nature. We will be challenged during this century, but not by Islam. Our contenders are not Muslims, but Asian non-Muslims, who display a dynamism far beyond anything the Ummah can produce. The total nonfossil fuel exports from the entire Arab world amount to less than the total exports of Finland, a tiny infidel country of only 5 million inhabitants. A United Nations report warns that a majority of Arab young people want to leave their homelands in favor of the West. Is that the hallmark of a culture at the brink of world dominance, Mr. Ramadan?

Besides oil, the only thing Islam has going for it is extremely high birth rates. This can be seen as an advantage as long as Muslims are allowed to dump this excess population in non-Muslim countries and dominate these through demographic jihad. If the non-Muslims should decide to curb Muslim immigration, even the high birth rates would turn into a curse. Islamic nations are already falling apart. At the time when the oil revenues run out for Muslims states, India and China may have had missions to the moon. The 21st century will not be an Islamic century. Most likely, it will continue with a Western lead. The alternative is some sort of power sharing between Western and Eastern infidels. The Islamic world, stripped of its oil revenues and no longer able to export its population growth to non-Muslims countries, will hardly be a blip on the radar screen.

Ohmyrus, a member of faithfreedom.org, has given a good description of the Islamic predicament in his essay “Once were warriors: Why Islam failed Muslims”. Islam is a warrior’s creed that served its early followers well. It prospered because its ethos makes it very successful as a medieval war machine when men fought with swords, bows and spears. From impoverished desert tribes, they rose to forge an empire in a short time that stretched from Spain to India. The ethos it engendered – brotherhood for believers, contempt and hatred for non-believers, belief in heavenly rewards for fallen warriors, a high fertility rate (which requires the subordination of women), blind obedience – created formidable warriors. But these same qualities are handicaps for Muslims in the age of the microchip. Islam’s ritualistic practices inculcate blind obedience among its followers and not questioning inquisitive minds. The way the Koran is taught in traditional Madrassahs is by memorization. This leaves no room for asking questions. Asking questions risks the student of being accused of blasphemy or unbelief. Great scientists and philosophers do not come from such a passive environment. Islam is specialized and tailor-made for a society that no longer exists, and instinctively wants to drag the rest of the world back to these “glory days”. It used to be excellent for breeding soldiers, to plunder the lands of non-Muslims. But even this gets increasingly difficult, in a world of advanced technology.

Of course, even if Islam is collapsing as we speak, that does not mean that it is nothing to worry about. On the contrary. There are few things more lethal than a wounded beast, trapped in a corner. And that is exactly what Islam is now. Worst case, it could be a very violent collapse, if Islamic radicals manage to ignite a global war. Islam is the Tyrannosaurus Rex of the 21st century. Once king and feared by all, now sidelined by smarter and faster-adapting creatures in a world it no longer understands. The old giant can still be dangerous, lashing out with a vengeance against the new breed. Mammals, they call them, these upstarters. It makes a lot of noise and may even succeed in killing some of the ones unlucky enough to be standing in its way. But terrifying as it may seem, it is destined to fail. This is the age for big brains, not big but slow limbs. It will end its days in museums, scaring kids of the future hearing tales about this big monster which ones roamed the earth. Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida are but the last roar of a dying beast, a dinosaur in the age of mammals.

The Stages of Jihad

2005-03-13T05:36:00.000-08:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

When Dutch Islam critic Theo van Gogh was murdered, comments were made that “jihad had arrived” in the Netherlands. Physical fighting is indeed the primary meaning of the concept jihad, and should be undertaken if one is able. Jihad as Holy War is the geographical expansion of Islamic rule by force of arms. It does not always mean killing those who are conquered, but it does mean the acknowledgment of Islam's supremacy. However, if that is not yet possible then jihad should be with one's tongue, by speaking out. Simply put, jihad is anything undertaken to advance the spread of Islam, peaceful or not. Which means that jihad is always present, even if there should be an absence of violence. Da’wah, missionary work and calling to Islam, is also part of jihad, and is utilized until such a time that physical jihad is made possible through greater numbers. Until then, it is important to make sure that non-Muslims are not fully aware of the real Islamic agenda. This is where deception comes in.

Islam allows deception in war in order to attain victory, and Muhammad himself said "War is deceit". "Taqiyya", with origins in Shi’a Islam but now practiced by non-Shi’a as well, is deliberate dissimulation to protect Islam. “Kitman” consists in telling only a part of the truth. A good example of the use of “kitman” is when a Muslim maintains that “jihad” really means “an inner, spiritual struggle,” and fails to add that this definition is based on one single, “weak” hadith of doubtful authenticity. There are nearly 200 references to jihad in the most standard collection of hadith, Sahih al-Bukhari, and all assume that jihad means warfare. Muhammad himself gave the best example of kitman in the early days of Islam, when the number of Muslims was still small. The command to fight the infidels openly was delayed until the Muslims become strong, but when they were weak they were commanded to endure and be patient.

Allah changed his instructions over time according to this principle. A good example is the case of alcohol consumption. Early on, the consumption of alcohol was permitted (2:219), then restricted (4:43) and eventually banned (5:90). There is no disagreement among Muslims that the latter revelation cancels out the earlier ones (2:106), rendering them invalid, and alcohol is thus prohibited. The Koran includes many such abrogated verses. The early Koran of the Mecca period presented religious tolerance as a divine command simply because Muslims had not yet acquired the physical power to compel conversion. But when Islam became more powerful after the flight to Medina, the "verses of the sword" were conveniently revealed to the Prophet, verses that sanction and indeed command violence, historically Islam's preferred method of expansion.

Calls to "fight and slay the idolaters wherever you find them" (9:5), "smite at their necks" (47:4), "make war on the unbeliever in Allah, until they pay tribute" (9:29), "Fight until the religion be all of it Allah's" (8:39) or "announce painful punishment to those who disbelieve" (9:3) all contradict "There is no compulsion in religion" (2:256). Note that sura 9 was the last or second last chapter to be revealed to Muhammad. It is also the most aggressive and intolerant sura in the Koran, replacing all the peaceful ones made at times of Muslim weakness. Offensive jihad, attacking, is now fully permissible in Sunni Islam.

Mark Gabriel, now Christian, is an ex-Muslim and former professor of Islamic history at Al-Azhar University in Egypt. His books can give an easy and basic introduction to Islamic concepts, also for those who don’t share his religion. In "Islam and Terrorism" he divides jihad into three stages: The weakened stage, when Muslims are a small minority, the preparation stage and the jihad stage, when Muslims are a large minority with real power. Notice that full-scale, armed jihad can be launched even when Muslim are a minority. They can then wage a jihad to cut off a part of the country for themselves. This is what happened to India when the Muslim minority created Pakistan. And this is what may happen to nations such as France in the not too distant future. Muslims make up 10% of the population in France today, but one in three of newborn babies. When their proportion reaches 15, 20 or 30 percent, France may break down in civil war, as Lebanon did. French Muslims have so far accepted the banning of the veil in schools. This indicates that they still don’t feel strong enough to wage armed rebellion against the state. It probably also means that they judge time to be on their side, demographically speaking. The clashes in Holland recently could be viewed as passing from the weak stage to the preparation stage, with more open Muslim assertiveness. The fact that this happens already when they make up 6% of the population may be due to what Muslim perceive to be a weak response from the Dutch.

However, even when Muslims make up only a very small part of the population, they can affect discourse about Islam. One of the first things Muhammad and his companions did in Medina was to launch an assassination campaign against people such as Asma bint Marwan and Abu Afak, to intimidate critics into submission. Muslims now follow the pattern of their prophet from 1400 years ago, his sunna. Both the Italian translator and the Norwegian publisher of Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses” were nearly killed for taking part in “blasphemy” against Islam. The Japanese translator of the book was stabbed to death in July 1991. In the USA, Steven Emerson received death threats for his work “Jihad in America”, whereas the controversial Islamic reformer Rashid Khalifa was declared an apostate and murdered in 1990 in Tuscon, Arizona. In all of these countries, Muslim made up 1- 2 % of the population, or even less. The more recent example of Theo van Gogh further demonstrates how toxic even a minor Muslim presence can be.

As ex-Muslim Muhammad bin Abdulla puts it in the book "Leaving Islam”: “Islam has two sets of teeth, like elephants. One is ivory. The other set of teeth is hidden inside its jaws and is used to chew and crush. All those sweet peace talks of Islam relate to the time and place of weak Islam in early years. But whenever and wherever Muslims were and are strong, they have another set of cruel laws and conduct”. Today, in the West, we are witnessing the Islamic stage of weakness, but the stage of violent jihad is coming sooner or later. The reality is exactly the opposite of what multiculturalists claim, who think clashes with Muslims will diminish in time as we “get used to” each other. They won’t. They will become more dangerous, as Muslims grow bolder and work to silence the media and moderates while supporting terrorism. If we fail to understand this, the War against political Islam in 2020 won’t be in Tehran, Riyadh or Baghdad. It will be in Paris, London and Amsterdam, and maybe in Montreal, Sydney, Detroit and New Jersey, too.

The Electronic Gutenberg

2005-03-13T05:32:00.000-08:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

Works such as ”The Coming of the Book” or "The Printing Press as an Agent of Change" have documented the monumental changes to Europe and Western civilization triggered by the introduction of printed books. Printing, already used in China for centuries, was reinvented in Europe by people like Johann Gutenberg. Its effects were immediate and profound. Perhaps 15 – 20 million copies of different books were printed even before the year 1500. Conservative estimates indicate that at least 150 – 200 million books were made in Europe during the 16th century. When Martin Luther put up his Theses in Wittenberg in Germany in 31st October, 1517, within 15 days they had been translated into German and summarised, printed as flysheets and distributed throughout every part of the country. Orders by Rome to burn books made by Luther and other Protestant heretics only served to trigger the curiosity of the masses. Attempts to silence the critics and re-impose strict censorship were futile. Banned books circulated in France in ever greater numbers despite all the regulations forbidding them. The tide of the first mass media revolution could not be held back.

To claim that the invention of the printing press alone created the Christian Reformation would be too simplistic. The Renaissance and a slowly expanding educated audience had created new forces and needs. Political backers such as Frederick the Wise of Saxony saved Luther’s life long enough for him to finish his work. Still, it is hard to see how the Reformation could have taken place in this manner without the printing press. The fates of other critics such as Jan Hus might have been very different had they had Gutenberg’s invention at their disposal. At the very least, the printing press served as an important catalyst for and facilitated changes already underway.

Many have made comparisons between the Islamic world today and Christian Europe in the 16th century. As some like Robert Spencer have suggested, there may be closer analogies to the Wahhabi movement. However, it is possible that in hindsight, modern communication technology such as the Internet may prove a turning point no less crucial to Islam today than the printing press was to Christianity. The global number of Internet users is approaching one billion and growing fast. Now, the Internet may not be the magic vessel for unrestricted freedom of speech as was once hoped for, but it can still retain just enough flexibility to represent a potent challenge to authoritarian regimes and ideologies.

Mass communication and education will lead to contradictory results, and could even be imagined to strengthen Islam. The Islamic Umma, or community, can be viewed as an old-fashioned Arab tribe in its aggressive dealings with outsiders, and the demand of absolute loyalty within the community. With the introduction of Islam, a new “super-tribe” was born, directing Arab tribal aggression outwards instead of inwards, and what ex-Muslim Anwar Shaikh has called the Arab National Movement was created. Later, the Umma was taken to include all Muslims. Although this concept of a global community of Muslims supporting each other against the infidels has always been a central part of the Muslim world view, it has for the most part remained a theoretical construct. With globalization and even the spread of the infidel English language as the world’s lingua franca, Islamic communities across the planet can keep in closer contact than they have ever done before. Islamists immigrants in the West can take advantage of Western freedoms to mount an effective propaganda machine. Individual PC users now have more capacity at their fingertips than NASA had during its first moon launches, and setting up your own website is cheap and easy.

The new technology will give Islam a chance to realize its original aim of global universalism, and thus increase the clashes with the non-Muslim world. The revival of Muslim identity is spreading outside the Middle East, including Southeast Asia, Central Asia and Europe, where religious identity has traditionally not been as strong. This revival has been accompanied by a deepening solidarity among Muslims caught up in separatist struggles in Chechnya, Iraq, Kashmir and southern Thailand. Jihadist groups on the Internet are multiplying, as can be testified by the Internet Haganah. One can argue effectively that the current Islamic tensions have much more to do with long-term communications changes, combined with high birth rates and Saudi petrodollars, than with the policies of any specific countries like the USA or Israel.

Even if new media may in the short run actually assist Islamic extremism, it is conceivable that in the longer run, new media will challenge the very existence of Islam as we know it. The Internet and Muslim exposure to Western society has also created the first organized networks of ex-Muslims in history, the counterpart to the Jihadist websites. These ex-Muslim sites may still be of marginal importance, but it is hard to overestimate the monumental threat they pose to Islamic orthodoxy. Infidels should make use of this combination of ex-Muslims, the Internet and greater Western freedom of speech in a deliberate effort to copy the example of 16th century Europe. We should make a selection of, say, 20 or 30 of the best critical books written about Islam by ex-Muslims and non-Muslims. Pay the authors a substantial amount of money for the manuscripts, or buy the copyrights from whomever owns it. Make sure they understand that they receive a one-time sum in return for sharing their work with humanity. After this, the books in their full length should be made available in English on the Internet, perhaps later in translations into other major languages. From then on, anybody who wants to can freely download, copy, republish and reprint the books. This would trigger a chain reaction, as the printing press did with Luther’s pamphlets. The information would spread around the planet faster than CAIR can say “Islamophobia”. The genie would be out of the bottle, and no amount of intimidation, hacker attacks or “hate speech” lawsuits could return it to the bottle. In combination with funding and support to websites by ex-Muslims and some others like Jihad Watch, we would basically present Islam with a “sink or swim”-ultimatum: Islam will have to reform if it can, or Islam will die. The entire operation would cost some hundreds of millions of dollars, not more than what can be done quietly and unofficially. We can spend this small amount of money on a “Gutenberg Fund”, or we can use hundreds of billions of dollars on defensive measures that will do little to change Islam.

Since Islamists with the murder of Theo van Gogh demonstrated their fear of Western free speech and their desire to curb it, giving them such a hefty dose of it seems like a sweet and fitting reply. This initiative would not mark the end of the struggle, of course, but we would already have won a crucial, if not decisive victory. Christianity was up to the challenge presented by modern education and mass media. It’s time to find out whether Islam is similarly up to the challenge.

The Return of the Ents

2005-03-13T05:30:00.000-08:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

The always eminent writer and historian Victor Davis Hanson compares modern Europe to the Middle Earth of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic “The Lord of the Rings”, recently turned into one of the most successful movie trilogies in history by New Zealand director Peter Jackson. Like the inhabitants of Tolkien’s imaginary world, Europeans are accustomed to living in peace and prosperity. But their sedate way of life is starting to come under threat, although not all of them have noticed it yet. The shadow of an ancient foe is rising in the East, an enemy that has not threatened us for so long that we had almost forgotten about it, and how dangerous it can be. Memories of past battles have become dim, to the point where we treat them almost as Fairytales. The enemy was defeated last time, but not destroyed. It has been lying low since then, retreated into its heartland and waited for the next opportunity to strike. And now, it senses weakness.

The One Ring, the Ring of Power, which triggers a major war deciding the future of freedom in Middle Earth, is a great analogy for Islam. Many men have become enticed by the undeniable power of the Ring, hoping to use it for their own gain in the vain belief that they can control it. But the Ring of Power has a will of its own, and is inherently evil. It cannot be used for anything good. It will slowly corrupt the ones using it, replacing whatever was noble and positive with darkness, leaving nothing but an empty shell. Like the Nazgûl or Ring Wraiths, once great kings of men, now soulless tools at the hands of evil. A long time ago, the area from Egypt via Syria to Iraq, Iran and Pakistan was the seat of the earliest civilizations known to man. Today, Islam has long since consumed these vibrant cultures, and replaced them with Islamic backwardness, terrorism and hate, with no other purpose in life than to be at the service of the Ummah. This is the fate of France, too, unless the French wake up and change their ways. The French elite are on an insane quest: The primary enemy for them is not Islam, but the Anglo-American rivals they have been fighting a loosing battle for supremacy against since the age of Napoleon, if not before. They think they can ride the tiger, and “use” Islam to regain some of their former glory. The equivalent of Saruman, the traitorous wizard, would have to be Jacques Chirac and the French political elite behind the Eurabia project. They are the enemy within, pretending to be on our side while having joined the forces of darkness a long time ago, and they may drag others with them when they fall.

Outsiders have been puzzled that a fantasy tale such as the Lord of the Rings could spellbind generation after generation. Perhaps the answer to the riddle is that despite being full of Elves, Trolls and strange beasts, it is essentially a very human story, a tale of cowardice, treachery and death, but also of hope, new beginnings and unexpected courage. Above all, it is a story about the quiet people, the little people, like the Hobbits or the Ents, suddenly rising to the occasion and showing bravery and zeal nobody had expected from them, not the least themselves. People who are ripped out of their daily lives to face a mounting evil gathering outside the gates, threatening to destroy everything they hold dear. Many of the individuals who are there to protect us and our civilization shrink in front of the challenges facing them. Some, like Saruman or the Eurabian elites, hope to increase their own power. Others, like Denethor, Steward of Gondor, are paralyzed by indecisiveness, overcome by defeatism and their own personal delusions, leaving their nations defenseless while the enemy is about to attack. Yet some, like Théoden King of Rohan, have had blinders drawn before their eyes by the likes of Grima Wormtongue, the John Espositos, the Tariq Ramadans and the multicultural Islam-apologists of the world. They can still be redeemed in the 12th hour, and return to lead the defenses.

It is easy to watch many of our leaders fail in standing up to or even identifying our adversary, witness the sheer numerical size of the enemy, and conclude that we have lost the fight. It is also wrong. As Tolkien shows us, some of those in power will inevitably fail to handle their responsibilities. But others, who had not been taken into the calculation by either friend or foe, will rise up to the occasion at the last moment and tip the scales in favor of the forces of good. If the big people prove too small for the task at hand, then the little people will have to grow and carry the load. The real will to identify the Islamic enemy and his weak points today is not found in the media, in the overpaid think-tanks and certainly not in our “progressive” universities or among most of the politicians. It is found in small websites by ex-Muslims, such as SecularIslam.org, KnowIslam.info, FaithFreedom.org, ApostatesOfIslam.com and IslamReview.org, and some others by non-Muslims like JihadWatch.org. It is picked up and its message carried throughout the world by the blogosphere, the global community of weblogs and private websites that is increasingly asserting its influence and challenging the major networks. Big Media will have to follow their lead, or decline in trust and significance as more and more people contrast their apologist stance with better arguments and analyses given elsewhere.

It is not for us to decide the time we live in. All there is for us is to decide what to do with the time that is given to us. This task has been appointed to us. And if we do not find a way, than no one will. Perhaps it is time to throw evil back where it came from, be that the fires of Mordor or the glowing sands of Arabia. Much hangs in the balance, maybe even civilization itself. Only time will tell if we are up to the challenge.

Iran - Europe’s "blood for oil"

2005-03-13T05:25:00.000-08:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

Before and during the recent Iraq war, many Europeans demonstrated against the US-led war, under the slogan “No blood for oil.” There were legitimate reasons for questioning the war, especially the well-founded fear that it would enable the establishment of an Iraqi Islamic theocracy, using Western blood and money. What few of these protesting Europeans were willing to talk about, however, was that their own nations are dealing in “blood for oil” every single day. Europe is in fact more dependent upon Middle Eastern oil than the USA is. Disgracefully, Europe is engaged in a continuing “dialog” with the Islamic clerics in Iran, continuing despite all the suffering that brutal regime has caused and is still causing. As long as this “dialog” continues, the European Union’s claims of being a champion of humanitarian rights ring hollow, and she begins to resemble a prostitute who busily plies her trade while lecturing everyone else on virtue and chastity. European leaders defend their dealings with the mullahs by saying that they hope to improve Iran’s human rights situation by engaging with reformist elements in Iran. However, if this strategy gives little effect, it is essentially nothing more than appeasement.

Let’s face it: There are no “reformists” in the Iranian establishment. Despite Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi’s claims, the problem in Iran is essentially Islam itself. Ayathollah Khomeini was merely following the example set by Muhammad himself when Khomeini stated that the “Quran says: kill, imprison! Why are you only clinging to the part that talks about mercy? Mercy is against God”; and, “We need a Khalifa (leader of Islamic state) who would chop hands, cut throat, stone people.” Khomeini was not an “extremist”; he was an honest Muslim. The much-talked-about power struggle between “Modernist” President Khatami, who received a large majority of the votes in both previous elections, and “Hardliners” such as the Supreme Leader and real power holder Khamenei, is a hoax. Genuine reformists, secularists and modernists are not allowed to run for President in Iran at all, as all candidates have to be screened and approved for their Islamic credentials and their commitment to the Islamic Republic by the conservative Guardian Council. The “struggle” should be best viewed as a “Good cop, bad cop” taqiyya game, intended to fool both Western and Iranian audiences. As such, the scheme has had some success. It has so far prevented a counter-revolution, and has provided European nations with an excuse for dealing with the mullahs. Perhaps it’s time we realize that some things are beyond repair. The Islamic Regime in Iran cannot be reformed, it can only be removed. Can the EU’s External Relations Commissioner Chris Patten explain to the parents of the 16 year old girl who was hanged in public for her "sharp tongue" what tangible results his “dialog” has produced so far? Or the 14 year old boy who died after receiving 85 lashes for breaking his Ramadan fast? Reporters Without Borders calls Iran “the biggest prison for journalists in the Middle East”.

It must be frustrating for Iranians to watch while Europe is dealing with their oppressors, and easy for them to become resentful and angry. Like the Israelis, though, they shouldn’t waste too much time and energy on anger at Europe. “Eurabia” will eventually pay for her sins. It is perfectly conceivable that Europe a generation or two from now may have greater trouble with Islamic extremism than Iran, and almost certain that suicide bombers and terrorism will be as common in Paris, London and Berlin as they are in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem today. In Indian religions it’s called “karma”, meaning that the fruits of your actions will sooner or later catch up with you. Westerners more familiar with a Judeo-Christian way of thinking might say that if you make a deal with the devil, don’t be too surprised when he comes to collect his due. Europeans seem set to learn this the hard way, unless we finally decide to grow some spine. Sometimes it is easy to ignore what is morally right, and do what is best for your wallet and your own selfish interests. There may, however, be occasions where these two perspectives overlap. From a moral point of view, the right thing for Europeans to do is to help Iranians get rid of that barbaric and oppressive regime. This also happens to be in our own best interest. The current wave of Islamic radicalism has been closely tied to the history of the Islamic Republic in Iran, and the Iranians have been funding foreign terror groups from Hamas and Hezbollah to Iraqi Jihadis. Bringing down the regime installed by Khomeini will deal a severe blow to the international movement of political Islam, and thus to the very forces that are increasingly threatening Europe itself. At the very least, we should cut of all diplomatic and trade relations with the Iranian regime.

Sanctions may work in certain conditions, but they take time to produce results. Sadly, this is time that we may no longer have. With Iran’s nuclear weapon’s program continuing at full speed while EU leaders such as Javier Solana are bending over in appeasement or even considering security cooperation with Iran, the situation becomes a lot more volatile. A nuclear war with the Soviet Union was averted because the Communist ideology of our enemy, despite being flawed and utopian, was about creating a better society here on earth, and the fact that the Russians loved their children, too, to paraphrase pop artist Sting. Islamists in Iran or elsewhere do not fit into this pattern. Leading mullahs like Rafsanjani have repeatedly made it clear that they are willing to sacrifice huge numbers of their own people, as long as they can hit their enemies. Most Europeans don’t seem to understand the implications of the fact that Iran now has nuclear-capable missiles that can reach parts of Europe. A regime that shows such a callous disregard for its own children certainly won’t spare too many thoughts for the lives of others. Therefore, a regime with this mentality cannot under any circumstances be allowed to acquire nuclear weapons. This must be prevented at all costs, including the option of armed strikes against nuke facilities inside Iran. Iranians may not be happy about the idea, but the brutal truth is that unless this is done, the Islamic regime may very well drag their nation into a nuclear war, with Israel or some other nation.

In an age where dark clouds are gathering over what looks like a global ideological battle lasting for decades, the future of Western democracy is closely tied to the future of the Islamic Republic in Iran. The good news is that large segments of the Iranian population have become deeply disillusioned with Islamism, or indeed with Islam itself. Iran now could prove much more fertile ground for liberal democracy than Iraq. A secular Iran, experiencing a post-Islamic Renaissance, could tip the scales in favor of freedom in other nations, too. And Iranians will remember who stood by them -- and who, in contrast, made deals with their oppressors. The time has come for Europeans to choose sides, and reject appeasement of Islamists both in Tehran and in Europe itself. Failing to do so could cost our own children dearly.

Economic Aid to Muslims – Marshall Plan or Jizya?

2005-03-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

By Wolfgang Bruno

France, where a growing Muslim minority is in effective control of parts of the country , is launching a £8.7 billion programme to tackle disaffection and increasing religious extremism in its Muslim-dominated ghettos. The labour minister, Jean-Louis Borloo aims to create a million jobs and 500,000 new homes in what has been called a "Marshall Plan for the towns" . Under the Borloo plan, the youngsters would be enlisted for public service training projects.
It sounds positive to call the initiative a “Marshall Plan”. After all, the Marshall Aid, provided by the USA to support a democratic Europe following the devastations during World War 2, is viewed as one of the most successful such initiatives in modern history. However, it is important to remember that the Marshall Aid was given to help rebuild societies after our ideological enemy had been crushed, not before. If somebody had killed Hitler in the late 1930s, should we then have provided financial assistance to Germany to win the hearts and minds of “more moderate” Nazis? As longs as the Fascist ideology behind Hitler remained alive and received general support, this would have been both futile and dangerous. Our enemies would have viewed it as tribute paid by a weak opponent, and would perhaps have used it to finance weapons aimed to kill us. The situation today is similar to this. As long as Islam remains strong and unreformed, any attempts to “buy off” Muslims will produce little results, only more contempt for our “softness” and lack of spine.

Jizya is a punishment tax that non-Muslim dhimmis according to the Koran 9,29 are supposed to pay for “protection”, “in willing submission”, as a sign of their inferior status to their Islamic rulers. Muslims will thus show little gratitude if non-Muslims give them money. This is Allah’s will and is only to be expected from the infidels. The French or other Europeans who give welfare money and support to Muslims and hope this will somehow buy them goodwill do not understand what they are dealing with. Muslims will think this is a sign that you accept having been defeated and being subjugated to Islam’s might. As a result, they will become more aggressive and demanding, not less. The problem in France’s immigrant ghettos is too much Islam, not too little money. Would sharia-style stonings in the suburbs cease if you raised the unemployment payments? Would the gang rapes in the ghettos? If so, then why isn’t a person like Abu “The Hook” Hamza peaceful? He does live on the dole in the UK.

We are told to find ways to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. Very few care to ask whether or not this feat is possible at all. What if the hearts and minds of Muslims are already occupied by Allah and Muhammad, and the only way to get their approval is by converting to Islam, or submitting to their rule as second – or third class citizens in a religious apartheid system? If that is the case, it means that all the projects aimed at giving financial assistance to Muslims are at best a waste of money, at worst outright counterproductive.

Welfare payments are not the only way transfer of money to Muslims from Western pockets takes place. There were many arguments presented by those who opposed the Iraq war. Most of them were poor. Yes, war is justified if it is for deposing tyrants that constitute a threat to both their own population as well as that of other nations. Saddam Hussein clearly fits that description. However, as reports keep ticking in about Iraqi women being harassed and subject to sharia laws and Christian churches being burnt , we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: Are we supporting the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq, paid for by Western blood and money? And maybe in Afghanistan, too? As Mr. Robert Spencer writes, this illustrates one of the downsides of this War on Terror. This isn’t a war on “Terror”, and it is confusing and pointless to label it as such. Terrorism is just a method. Our adversary is an ideology, and that ideology is called Islam. Perhaps we should, as Hugh Fitzgerald has suggested, name it a “War on Radical Islamism”, “War on Political Islam” or a “War against Jihad”, to avoid the issue of identifying the very religion of Islam as the problem. However, we should always keep the real enemy closely identified in our minds.

Western civilization is now engaged in a battle for its very survival. Not only do our leaders refuse to name the enemy, as large parts of our populations are unaware of the fact that there is a struggle going on at all. We are still busy paying our enemies to destroy us, through buying billions of dollars of their oil, providing aid to their countries or giving them welfare money they use to build more mosques and support Jihadist activities in our lands. This has to change, or we will lose. This struggle could last for decades, if not generations. Our enemies want to bleed us dry, both literally and economically.

While Yassir Arafat’s wife has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Europeans taxpayers to buy Gucci purses, and billions and billions of dollars are spent on supporting Iraqis who clearly have their own Islamic agendas, the people who are risking their lives every day in challenging this ideology are penniless and more or less ignored. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslims fear ex-Muslims like Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Anwar Shaikh, Walid Shoebat and Azam Kamguian at least as much as, if not more than our nuclear arsenals. Islamist don’t fear war or death. On the contrary, they relish it and the opportunities it provides for martyrdom and safe passage to Paradise. Islam is a warrior creed, a very good one. As an intellectual construct, on the other hand, Islam is brittle, and will collapse if sufficiently challenged. That is why Islamists are so desperate to kill critics like Theo van Gogh. And that is why this is precisely an area were we should put much more resources at work. Ibn Warraq’s books and others made by former Muslims should be translated by professionals into every major language know to man, made freely available on the Internet and broadcasted on radio to Muslims everywhere. With due and generous compensation paid to the authors, of course. Their websites should receive funding for the upgrades needed to reach a mainstream audience, as should the best websites by non-Muslims such as Jihad Watch. All of this will cost only a tiny fraction of the money now wasted on misguided schemes for “dialogue” with Muslims, and will yield far greater results. In the era of the suicide bomber, we cannot afford not to do it. If not, our children and grandchildren could be paying a much heavier price tomorrow.