Islam: A religion of violence?

The Sonlight forums have had a fairly lengthy discussion that arose when someone posted the following thesis statement and invitation for response:

From the Mouths of American Muslims: Praising the Ft. Hood Shooter . . . Here is evidence that true Islam is a religion of violence (by CNN!):


Your comments?

It took several hours to wade through the entire "conversation" and to think about what it all meant, but I finally came to a conclusion:

As you may recall, back in May and June of '07 I brought up Mark Steyn's book, America Alone. I was very concerned about the problem that [the original poster in this thread] has attempted to bring up here. And I will admit that, at the end of that set of conversations, I was still not settled at all in my mind. Indeed, I was still perplexed that, it seemed, so many of my forum-mates . . . were so "relaxed" about violent Islam.

If you go to , you will find the ice almost melted through. But, obviously, not quite.

Today I think it did melt. The conversation here finally did the trick.

I wrote back then,

Mark Steyn notes in America Alone that too few of us in the West are aware of the different sects of Islam--Wahhabi, Deobandi, Sunni, Shiite, Sufi. . . .

Steyn points out that Saudi Arabia, the great exporter of Islam worldwide at this point in history, exports Wahhabi Islam--the most "radical" and violent version.

What I realized today, here, is that we must, indeed, distinguish these various sects . . . Just as those of us who are "way" on the "inside" of Christianity recognize there are huge differences between Pentecostals and Baptists, Roman Catholics and Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Eastern Orthodox, Charismatics and United Methodists, Mennonites and Christian Reconstructionists, Old-Earthers and Young-Earthers, Theistic Evolutionists and Six-24-hour-day Creationists, a-millennialists, pre-millennialists and post-millennialists [and so on and so forth] . . . so we who are on the outside of Islam need to recognize the differences between Wahhabis (who are, indeed, the most "radical" and violent) and Sufis (from south Asia, who tend to be way "laid back") and Sunnis and Shias and all the rest. And, yes, even within each sect, and among the members of each sect, we need to recognize that there are going to be individual differences.

I had not thought of that before.

Just as we, if we are of an Old-Earth persuasion, hate to have someone from the "outside" tell us what we "have to" believe about creation, or if we are of a Brethren/Mennonite or even an historical Baptistic perspective on law and politics don't want someone telling us we "must" follow the teachings of Christian Reconstruction, or if we are paedo-baptists (i.e., people who believe in infant baptism) we take issue with those who tell us we are completely ignoring biblical teaching on the subject [and so on and so forth], so, too, we need to be careful about telling Muslims--or speaking of Muslims--as "having" to believe one way or another . . . "because the Q'uran teaches _______."

YES, some Christians are convinced the Bible teaches six-24-hour-day creation about 6,000 years ago. But others among us believe very differently. So, too: YES, some Christians are convinced the Bible teaches that all of civil society should be conformed to the civil law as outlined in the Old Testament. But others among us believe very differently.

So, too, with Muslims.

I see that, now.

And I thank [certain participants in this thread] for pushing the issue far enough . . . and [and certain] others pushing back hard enough . . . that I now see the analogy and think I can understand where I--and, I believe, our society as a whole--needs to go.

My conclusion: Mark Steyn was correct; he is correct: we need to learn far more about Islam . . . 1) so we understand where different people are likely to be coming from and, then, 2) to delve deeper to understand each individual person's perspectives.

*******
Immediately after the above post, I then added the following:

I saw this cartoon in The Week:


I thought it provides a nice hat-tip to what I was trying to say up-thread. Personally, I think there is reason to do some "profiling"; at the same time, there is reason for discernment and caution.

Hope you can enjoy the cartoon!

Oh. And one last comment.

Somehow, what the Muslim guys in the video at the top of this post say reminds me of footage I've seen from (and of) certain demonstrators who claim to be the mouthpieces of the Christian God. Don't they do the same for you?

For example:


If you are reading this post in Facebook, you should know that the original is on my personal blog.

Beware the future of freedom

I was reading World, one of my favorite magazines, the other day and came across one of the most chilling articles I've ever read.

I have heard about these kinds of miscarriages of justice upon occasion, but, somehow, they have never chilled me as this one did:

Two years ago an excerpt from Steyn's book, America Alone, was published in Maclean's, one of Canada's leading news journals. The article, titled "The Future Belongs to Islam," expressed Steyn's view that at their current comparative birth rates, Islamic citizens of Europe will soon outnumber native Europeans-with, shall we say, troubling implications for Western tradition. [You can see my coverage of this part of Steyn's book in my post from June 1, 2007, Mark Steyn's America Alone, II--Part One (Prologue to Chapter 3).]

Actually, less than half of the article addressed Islamic ascendancy in Europe. An equal part dealt with declining birthrates in developed nations generally-such as Japan, where toy makers are producing talkative baby dolls for elderly citizens who miss the company of little children.

If Japanese-Canadians took offense, they kept it to themselves. But a trio of Muslim law students in Ontario demanded equal space in Maclean's to rebut Steyn's claims about Islam. When the editors refused to have their content dictated, the Canadian Islamic Congress filed a complaint with the CHRC [Canadian Human Rights Commission]--not only in Ontario but also a provincial tribunal in British Columbia, where commissioners were known to be especially sensitive to such grievances. . . .

A three-member panel convened in Vancouver early [in June] to hear the case. Maclean's editor Andrew Coyne, live-blogging the proceedings, reported that according to Section 7.J of the Human Rights Code, "innocent intent is not a defense, nor is truth, nor is fair comment or the public interest, nor is good faith or responsible journalism. In other words, there is no defense." Also no standard for conviction except the complainant's feelings--no wonder the national CHRC has never declared a defendant innocent.

Evidence by the complainants consisted mostly of blog comments, which may or may not have been inspired by Steyn's article. Witnesses included a Quran specialist, a media professor whose area of expertise is Bollywood films, and Dr. Naiyer Habib, co-complainant, who testified of his distress when he read some of the nasty blog posts. Other magazine articles and surveys were introduced, none of which had any connection with Mark Steyn or Maclean's, but because there were no rules about evidence, some were admitted and some not.

In final arguments on June 6, council for the complainants asserted that they had met a two-part test of hate speech, proving that Steyn had both encouraged hate in the readership, and expressed hate in his writing. Plus, he used sarcasm.

The defense introduced no evidence but appealed to Canada's tradition of freedom of the press--even though that tradition has lost its teeth. Only the week before, a CHRC panel in Alberta handed down a decision against Stephen Boissoin of the Concerned Christian Coalition, who published a letter critical of homosexuals in a local newspaper. For this offense, Boissoin and the coalition were directed to pay $5,000 to the complainant for "pain and suffering," to refrain in the future from publishing discriminatory letters, and to make no "disparaging remarks" about the case. These measures, according to the panel, are "remedial not punitive." Nice to know.

The Steyn decision is not expected for several weeks, and tribunal officials are probably aware that this case is loaded. It's a prominent national journal they're dealing with, not some puny pack of concerned Christians. Some speculate that the CHRC will give Maclean's a stern lecture and dismiss the case so it can continue wreaking havoc on Canadian civil rights in relative obscurity. A conviction might drag the commission's habit of overreach into the public glare, and possibly force reform.

Whatever the decision, Steyn and Maclean's promise to hang tough. We can hope so, because rights generally erode before they collapse. As the old caveat goes, "First they came for the sarcastic... ."

[All emphases mine in the above quoted section.--JAH]

I pray the commission will remain true to its habits and be exposed! May we frogs wake up to the water being rapidly heated around us!

Or perhaps those of us who are offended at the offense can begin to bring our complaints to the commission. . . .

Mark Steyn's America Alone, VII--So What Can We Do? Part 2

This post is brought to you thanks to input from a friend who was reading Steyn along with me and pulled "suggestions" that he didn't list quite so nicely in a numbered sequence.

Overall, Steyn said, we need to pursue a policy of decentralized self-reliance; refuse to embrace the siren song of more centralized government.

[We] embrace big government at [our] peril. The silliest thing Dick Cheney ever said was a couple of weeks after September 11: "One of the things that's changed so much since September 11 is the extent to which people do trust the government--big shift--and value it, and have high expectations for who we can do." Really? I'd say September 11 vindicated perfectly a decentralized, federalist, conservative view of the state: what worked that day was municipal government, small government, core government--the firemen, the NYPD cops, rescue workers. What flopped--big-time . . . --was federal government, the FBI, CIA, INS, FAA, and all the other hotshot, money-no-object, fancypants acronyms.

America Alone, 183-184

Steyn compares the U.S. immigration service to Amazon.

"Amazon is a more efficient data miner than U.S. Immigration. Is it to do with their respective budgets? No. Amazon's system is very cheap, but it's in the nature of government to do things worse, and slower."

On a morning when big government failed, the only good news came from private individuals. The first three planes were effectively an airborne European Union, where the rights of the citizens had been appropriated by the FAA's flying nanny state. Up there were the air is rarefied, all your liberties have been regulated away. . . . But, on the fourth plane, they . . . used their cell phones, discovered that FAA regulations weren’t going to save them, and then acted as free men, rising up against the terrorists and, at the cost of their own lives, preventing that flight carrying on to its target in Washington. . . . The Cult of Regulation failed, but the great American virtues of self-reliance and innovation saved the lives of thousands: "Let's roll!" as Mr. Beamer told his fellow passengers.

America Alone, 185

My friend summarized the specifics of Steyn's message as follows:

• Be PRO-active instead of RE-active.
• Act as free men and women. Take responsibility for yourself!
• Have the government enlist/hire/contract with private database-marketing firms like Amazon to perform INS functions--that way, no flight school would get a letter, two years after the students died from having flown a commercial jet into the World Trade Center, that said students are being granted student visas.
• "Restore the balance between the state and the citizen . . ." (pg. 188). That means we have to vote for candidates who will actively work and we ourselves must also actively work to "shrink the state" (p. 190) and take more personal responsibility for our lives.
• "[R]estore advantages to parenthood . . . " (p. 189).
• "We need to redirect the system to telescope education into a much shorter period" (p.191). --How about reworking the school-church nexus altogether?
• "[U]se [our] own judgment in assessing a situation . . . " (p. 188).

  [M]y basic rule of thumb since September 11: anything that shifts power from the individual judgment of free citizens to government is a bad thing, not just for the war on terror but for the national character in a more general sense.
  
  Charles Clarke, formerly Britain's home secretary, gave a revealing glimpse into the big-government mentality in a column for the Times defending the latest allegedly necessary security measure: "ID cards will potentially make a difference to any area of everyday life where you already have to prove your identity--such as opening a bank account, going abroad on holiday, claiming a benefit, buying goods on credit and renting a video."
  
  "Renting a video"? That sounds about right. When you go to Blockbuster, you'll need your national ID card. But if you're an Algerian terrorist cell coming in on the Eurostar from Paris to blow up Big Ben, you won't. And its requirement for the routine transactions of daily life--"opening a bank account . . . buying goods on credit"--will . . . relieve bank managers and store clerks of the need to use their own judgment in assessing the situation. You'd have to have an awful lot of faith in government to think that's a good thing.
  
  Britain's religious "hate crimes" law is another example of . . . attempt[ing] to supplant human judgment with government management: the multicultural state is working out so well that we can no longer be trusted to regulate our own interactions with our neighbors. Islam, unlike Anglicanism, is an explicitly political project: sharia is a legal system, but, unlike English Common Law or the Napoleonic Code, for the purposes of public debate it will henceforth enjoy the special protection of Her Majesty's Government. Given that the emerging Muslim lobby groups are already the McDonald's coffee plaintiff of ethno-cultural grievance-mongers, you can be certain they'll make full use of any new law. Political debate in Europe is already hedged in by excessive squeamishness: Holland's "immigration problem" is a Muslim problem, France's "youth problem" is a Muslim problem, the "terrorism threat" that necessitates those British ID cards is in reality an Islamic threat. How is preventing honest discussion of the issue going to make citizens any safer?
  
  The term "nanny state" hardly covers a society where you need retinal-scan ID in order to rent Mary Poppines but you're liable for prosecution if you express your feelings too strongly after the next bombing.

  America Alone, 187-188

And then this one final set of comments, from the very end of Steyn's book, on pp. 213-214:

It is absurd: how can the most advanced society in human history fall to a bunch of ignorant death cultists? Well, who do you think advanced societies do fall to? Something worse, something barbarous, something prepared to fight when you're not.

Steyn quotes from an 1898 Sir Arthur Conan Doyle--yes, that Conan Doyle, the author of Sherlock Holmes--novel, The Tragedy of the Korosko (otherwise known as A Desert Drama), "the story of a party of Anglo-American-French tourists on a trip up the Nile who wind up getting kidnapped by the al Qaeda of the day--the followers of the Mahdi."

"It's my opinion that we have been the policemen of the world long enough," says Cecil Brown, a Brit.

"We policed the seas for pirates and slavers. Now we police the land for Dervishes and brigands and every sort of danger to civilization. There is never a mad priest or a witch doctor, or a firebrand of any sort on this planet, who does not report his appearance by sniping the nearest British officer. One tires of it at last. If a Kurd breaks loose in Asia Minor, the world wants to know why Great Britain does not keep him in order. If there is a military mutiny in Egypt, or a Jihad in the Sudan, it is still Great Britain who has to set it right. And all to an accompaniment of curses such as the policeman gets when he seizes a ruffian among his pals. We get hard knocks and no thanks, and why should we do it? Let Europe do its own dirty work."

"Well," said Colonel Cochrane, crossing his legs and leaning forward with the decision of n man who has definite opinions, "I don't at all agree with you, Brown, and I think that to advocate such a course is to take a very limited view of our national duties. I think that behind national interests and diplomacy and all that there lies a great guiding force--a Providence, in fact--which is forever getting the best out of each nation and using it for the good of the whole. When a nation ceases to respond, it is time that she went into hospital for a few centuries, like Spain or Greece--the virtue has gone out of her. A man or a nation is not placed upon this earth to do merely what is pleasant and what is profitable. It is often called upon to carry out what is both unpleasant and unprofitable, but if it is obviously right it is mere shirking not to undertake it."

Will the West as a whole--and we in the United States, in particular, shirk our duty to do good?

Mark Steyn's America Alone, IV--Part Two (Chapters 4 through 6), Cont'd.

Steyn's book has really bothered me. Here's a sample of the things he's said that grabbed my attention:

Not long after September 11, I said, just as an aside, that these days whenever something goofy turns up on the news chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. It was a throwaway line, but if you want to compile chapter and verse, you can add to the list every week.

A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta.

A sniper starts killing gas station customers around Washington, D.C.? John Allen Muhammed.

A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri.

A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet.

A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed.

A British subject self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. . . .

A Canadian terror cell is arrested for plotting to bomb Ottawa and behead the prime minister? Mohammed Dirie, Amin Mohamed Durrani, and Yasim Abdi Mohamed.

These last three represent a "broad strata" of Canadian society, according to Mike McDonnell, assistant commissioner of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and a man who must have aced Sensitivity Training class. To the casual observer, the broad strata would seem to be a very singular stratum: in their first appearance in court, all twelve men arrested in that Ontario plot requested the Koran.

--America Alone, 63-64

[I]n 2003, Abdurahman Alamoudi was jailed for attempting to launder money from a Libyan terror-front "charity" into Syria via London. Who's Abdurahman Alamoudi? He's the guy who until 1998 certified Muslim chaplains for the United States military, under the aegis of his Saudi-funded American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council. In 1993, at an American military base, at a ceremony to install the first imam in the nation's armed forces, it was Mr. Alamoudi who presented him with his new insignia of a silver crescent star.

He's also the fellow who helped devise the three-week Islamic awareness course in California public schools, in the course of which students adopt Muslim names, wear Islamic garb, give up candy and TV for Ramadan, memorize suras from the Koran, learn that "jihad" means "internal personal strongly," profess the Muslim faith, and react prayers that begin "in the name of Allah," etc. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals--the same court that ruled the Pledge of Allegiance unconstitutional because of the words "under God"--decided in this case that making seventh graders play Muslim for two weeks was perfectly fine, just an interesting exposure to a fascinating "culture" from which every pupil can benefit. Separate of church and state? That may be, but nobody said nuthin' about separate of mosque and state.

Oh, and, aside from his sterling efforts on behalf of multicultural education, Mr. Alamoudi was also an advisor on Islamic matters to Hillary Rodham Clinton.And it turns out he's a bagman for terrorists.

Infiltration-wise, I would say that's pretty good. The arthritic desk jockeys at the CIA insist, oh no, it would be impossible for them to get any of their boys inside al Qaeda. Can't be done. But the other said has no difficulty setting their caps up in the heart of the U.S. military, and the U.S. education system, and the U.S. political establishment, and the offices of U.S. senators and former First Ladies.

--America Alone, 65-66

It was as a result of these and other comments in Steyn that I wrote to Bob, my friend who brought us to Iraq. He had sent me a copy of an article by Edward Luttwak, "The Middle of Nowhere."

Luttwak writes,

The operational mistake that middle east experts keep making is the failure to recognise that backward societies must be left alone, as the French now wisely leave Corsica to its own devices, as the Italians quietly learned to do in Sicily, once they recognised that maxi-trials merely handed over control to a newer and smarter mafia of doctors and lawyers. With neither invasions nor friendly engagements, the peoples of the middle east should finally be allowed to have their own history—the one thing that middle east experts of all stripes seem determined to deny them.

Just "leave them alone" and everything will be all right?

I don't think so!

I wrote to Bob: "I believe Steyn makes a strong case for the idea that 'they' can't be ignored or left alone. 'They' are already 'here' in the West. And 'they' are fast becoming a majority in the West. Moreover, 'they' are uninterested in leaving us alone."

In 1974, the oil industry accounted for 91 percent of Saudi exports. In 2000, it accounted for 91.4 percent. Two trillion dollars [had] poured into the House of Saud's treasury, and what did they do with it? Diversify the economy? Launch new industries? Open up the tourism sector? Not a thing. The country remained the same desert, literally and psychologically, it was a quarter century earlier. So where did all that money go? From the seventies onward, Saudi Arabia used their yanqui dollars to export their faith even more widely than the oil. Instead of diversifying their industrial exports, they honed their ideological one, financing Islamic centers, mosques, and schools in Morocco, Uzbekistan, Indonesia, Bosnia, Nigeria, Britain, and America.

--America Alone, 71-72

But what really bothers me is to realize how unaware I seem to be about the different types of Islam there are in the world. At this point in time, I'm not exactly sure how big a difference it would make, practically speaking, for me (or anyone else in the West) to know the differences. But for some reason, I sense it just might. And it might be good to know.

Steyn asks, "What gives the jihad its global reach?" He answers his question this way:

Wahhabism is the most militant form of Islam, the one followed by all nineteen of the September 11 terrorists and by Osama bin Laden. The Saudis, whose state religion is Wahhabism, export their faith and affiliated local strains in lavishly endowed schools and mosques all over the world and, as a result, traditionally moderate Muslim populations from the Balkans to South Asia have been dramatically radicalized. . . .

How could the federal government be so complacent as to subcontract the certification of chaplains in U.S. military bases to Wahhabist institutions?

Well, because they didn't notice it until it was too late. . . .

If your idea of globalization is a McDonald's in Belgrade or a Kentucky Fried Chicken in Lahore, who's running the imams in British and American jails doesn't seem terribly important. [But, as I noted above] . . . Oil isn't the principal Saudi export. Ideology is. Petroleum merely bankrolls it.

--America Alone, 68-69

What "burns me up" about reading this stuff in Steyn's book is the realization that I have been deeply involved in international Christian missions for 24 years. My wife is on the board of a leading mission to Muslims. And neither I nor she have any idea what Steyn is talking about. "Wahhabism"? . . . I think I may have heard the word once somewhere. But I had never been told I ought, actually to care what it means.

And there are other words, too, that Steyn discusses. Words that mean something. Apparently. Let's see. He speaks of Sufi Islam ("the Indian subcontinent's traditional moderate" form of Islam--p. 75) and Deobandi Islam ("essentially a local subsidiary of Wahhabism"--p. 76). I'd heard the word "Sufi" before (never undertook to understand what it actually means!). I'd never heard of Deobandi.

Steyn comments:

[C]ontemporary multiculturalism absolves one from knowing anything about other cultures as long as one feels warm and fluffy toward them. After all, if it's grossly judgmental to say one culture's better than another, why bother learning about the differences. "Celebrate diversity" with a uniformity of ignorance. . . .

In 2005, a twenty-three-year-old American citizen named Ahmed Omar Abu Ali was charged with plotting to assassinate the president. . . . [A]ccording to the Associated Press report in the New York Times, he "was born in Houston and moved to Falls Church, Va., where he was valedictorian of his high school class." . . .

Neither the Times nor the AP had space to mention that the . . . high school Mr. Abu Ali attended was the Islamic Saudi Academy, funded by the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. It's on American soil but it describes itself as "subject to the government of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia" and its classes are based on "the curriculum, syllabus, and materials established by the Saudi Ministry of Education." So what does it teach? No room for American history, but that's not so unusual in Virginia high schools these days. Instead, the school concentrates on Wahhabi history and "Islamic values and the Arabic language and culture," plus "the superiority of jihad." By the eleventh grade, students are taught that on the Day of Judgment Muslims will fight and kill the Jews, who will find that the very trees they're hiding behind will betray them by saying, "Oh Muslim, oh servant of God, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come here and kill him." Beats climate change and gay outreach, or whatever they do in the regular Falls Church high school.

Here is a standard Saudi Ministry of Education exercise, as taught in the first grade at that Virginia academy and at other Saudi-funded schools in the Western world:

Fill in the blanks with the appropriate words:
Every religion other than __________ is false.
Whoever dies outside of Islam enters _________.

Correct answers: Islam, hellfire.

And what do America's president and the secretary of state and the deputy secretary of this and the undersecretary of that say in return?

The Saudis are our ________.

. . . The Saudis are our friends. No matter how many of us they kill.

The Germans and Japanese had to make do with Lord Haw-Haw and Tokyo Rose. If only they could have had Third Reich Academies in every English city and Hirohito Highs from Alaska to Florida and St. Adolf's Parish Church in every medium-sized town around the world.

--America Alone, 72-73

Hmmm!

It's the news reporters' complicity in hiding the realities that bugs me, here.

But then, catch these . . . what I would call "cultural outrages." And our soft-hearted (soft-minded? uninformed?) "multi-cultural" leaders are unable (unwilling?) to speak out about the imbalanced perspectives:

Had the verdict [of a famous 2004 UK court case won by an adolescent schoolgirl named Shabina Begum] not been overturned on appeal in 2006, all British schools would have had to permit students to wear the full "jilbab"--Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. This triumph over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both Cherie Booth, the wife of Tony Blair, and of Hizb ut-Tahrir, a group that advocates violence in support of a worldwide caliphate and which (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people." What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for the wife of the British prime minister?

Ms. Booth hailed her initial court win as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry." It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of young Shabina Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? It is "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a [Western] female doctor in Bahrain?

[Oh. Incidentally, Miss Begum was not] "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her belated adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabization of South Asian (and African and European and North American) Islam that's at the root of so many current problems. Even as an honored Arab tradition, it dates all the way back to the seventies. Not the 1070s or 1570s, but the 1970s.

There is no evidence that any Muslim woman anywhere ever wore the jilbab before the disco era, when it was taken up by the Muslim Brotherhood and others in the Arab world. It is no more ancient and traditional than platform shoes, bell bottoms, and cheesecloth shirts. It's no more part of Shabina Begum's inherited identity than my little boy dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume. . . . It's not part of her Bangladeshi heritage, it's not part of British custom. It is equally alien in both the Indian subcontinent and the British Isles, and its appearance in both places is, in point of fact, political rather than spiritual: it's part of a movement explicitly hostile to what Tony blair calls "our way of life."

If it's too unreasonable to expect young Shabina Begum to choose a British identity, couldn't Mr. and Mrs. Blair at least encourage her to preserve her authentic Bangladeshi one?

--America Alone, 73

I have discussed pacifism with a number of devout Christians. They believe--I think, beyond all reason--that not just individuals, but governments, too, must forswear the use of violence.

Truly. I think such a position is crazy. But . . . ummm . . . it wouldn't take a lot of guns and violence to enforce a dress code!

So do Western courts have to undermine our [Western nations'] cultural identities?

******

Well. Then there is this observation:

During the cartoon jihad, . . . Kofi Annan [said], "The offensive caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad were first published in a European country which has recently acquired a significant Muslim population, and is not yet sure how to adjust to it." . . .

(B)ack when my Belgian grandparents emigrated to Canada, the idea was that the immigrants assimilated with the host country. As Kofi and co. see it, today the host country has to assimilate with the immigrants. But . . . the immigrant populations themselves are adjusting, developing an Islamic identity far more intense than anything practiced by their forbears.

Take Nada Farooq, a student at Meadowvale Secondary School in Mississauga, Ontario. In 2004 she started an Internet forum for Muslim teens in the area. One poster thought it would be fun if they had a thread explaining what made Canada unique, but Nada nixed that one in nothing flat: "Who cares? We hate Canada."

So what does grab her interest? Well, . . . she and her follow Meadowvale students were extremely partial to a very bloody video showing the beheading of an American hostage in Iraq.

Oh, well. Excitable teens often pass through a somewhat turbulent phase. But two years later Miss Farooq's husband and sixteen other men were arrested in a terrorist plot to blow up the Toronto Stock Exchange, seize Parliament in Ottawa, and kidnap and behead the prime minister.

I'm often damned as a "self-loathing Canadian" because I'm opposed to socialized health care and government-funded multiculturalism and whatnot. But in the self-loathing stakes I've got nothing on Nada Farooq. "We hate Canada." Yet no one calls her a self-loathing Canadian. Perhaps that's because she's not a gal you'd want to tangle with. . . . Or perhaps it's because, at heart, no one expects her to feel "Canadian," whatever that means these days.

--America Alone, 74-75

I read this story and I start to get some beginning inklings that, perhaps, social policy ought to change in the West. Maybe there is some call for at least a minimal attention to be paid to immigrant populations and/or, more particularly, Muslim immigrant populations and their offspring when they are "here among us"?

Maybe I'm going overboard. "Thought police," and all, y'know.

--Where was I reading, just yesterday, about this very issue? In western jurisprudence you can't arrest someone until they have actually committed a crime. . . . Oh, yes! On Jihad Watch--a story about terror suspects, under British "control orders," who had run away.

Someone whose UserID is "Leave Iraq Now" commented:

These control orders are used in the UK against "potential" criminals. They (control orders) attempt to restrict and contain behavior (aka "restrict the liberty") of some very potentially dangerous people where the government lacks sufficient evidence to convict and imprison. There is nothing analogous in U.S law that I know. The threat we face is going to require dramatic change to our legal system. . . .

One hundred jihadists can assemble on a street corner in downtown USA every day with signs and bull horns chanting and raging against us--"Death to America"; "Death to the Great Satan"; "Allah is Great"; "Kill all the Jews"--and we cannot do anything about it. We may believe they are dangerous and will commit great acts of violence against innocents when and if the opportunity presents itself. But until they commit some act in furtherance of a crime, they get to wail and rant all they want.
We may have to add an amendment to the constitution if we are to survive. . . . We should not have to wait for an avowed jihadist to commit his/her first atrocity before taking action to defend ourselves. [However, c]ontrol orders would not survive constitutional challenges in the U.S.

We need a constitutional amendment that recognizes Islam is a dangerous threat to our freedom the same way communism threatened it during the cold war years.
I am all for it, but constitutional amendments require enormous public support (ratification by the states). Unfortunately, that public support would only probably come after some other great tragedy(ies) such as 9/11.

Anyway.

Or, no. Not "anyway."

I think this is a big issue.

There is so much discussion of rights--Constitutional rights. --Are these jihadists American citizens? If not, then what rights do American citizens under the U.S. Constitution--or Christians, under Scripture-- . . . What rights are we required to grant them?

Mark Steyn's America Alone, III--Part Two (Chapters 4 through 6)

By the time I got to America Alone Part Two (Chapters 4 through 6), I think I was becoming upset that I knew so little about Islam. As the weeks have progressed since I first started reading the book, I have become more and more upset. Not because of America Alone, but because of additional resources to which I was directed by a friend who knew I was reading the book. She directed me to The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) by Robert Spencer and the two blogs that Spencer oversees: Dhimmi Watch and Jihad Watch. Both of the blogs carefully document ongoing (daily) offenses against non-Muslims by the ummah (the Muslim community) on account of its commitment to Allah and his prophet, Muhammad.

On its Why Jihad Watch? page, Jihad Watch explains:

JIHAD IS A CENTRAL DUTY of every Muslim. Modern Muslim theologians have spoken of many things as jihads: the struggle within the soul, defending the faith from critics, supporting its growth and defense financially, even migrating to non-Muslim lands for the purpose of spreading Islam. But in Islamic history and doctrine violent jihad is founded on numerous verses of the Qur'an — most notably, one known in Islamic theology as the "Verse of the Sword": "Then, when the sacred months have passed, slay the idolaters wherever ye find them, and take them (captive), and besiege them, and prepare for them each ambush. But if they repent and establish worship and pay the poor-due, then leave their way free. Lo! Allah is forgiving, merciful" (Sura 9:5). Establishing "regular worship" and paying the "poor-due" (zakat) means essentially that they will become Muslim, as these are two of the central responsibilities of every Muslim.

Sahih Bukhari, which Muslims regard as the most trustworthy of all the many collections of traditions of Muhammad, records this statement of the Prophet: "Allah assigns for a person who participates in (holy battles) in Allah's Cause and nothing causes him to do so except belief in Allah and in His Messengers, that he will be recompensed by Allah either with a reward, or booty (if he survives) or will be admitted to Paradise (if he is killed in the battle as a martyr)."

Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406), a pioneering historian and philosopher, was also a legal theorist. In his renowned Muqaddimah, the first work of historical theory, he notes that "in the Muslim community, the holy war is a religious duty, because of the universalism of the Muslim mission and (the obligation to) convert everybody to Islam either by persuasion or by force." In Islam, the person in charge of religious affairs is concerned with "power politics," because Islam is "under obligation to gain power over other nations."

Violent jihad is a constant of Islamic history. The passages quoted above and many others like them form a major element of the motivation of jihad warriors worldwide today. No major Muslim group has ever repudiated the doctrines of armed jihad. The theology of jihad, with all its assumptions about unbelievers‚ lack of human rights and dignity, is available today as a justification for anyone with the will and the means to bring it to life.

Jihad Watch is dedicated to bringing public attention to the role that jihad theology and ideology play in the modern world and to correcting popular misconceptions about the role of jihad and religion in modern-day conflicts. By shedding as much light as possible on these matters, we hope to alert people of good will to the true nature of the present global conflict.

And Dhimmi Watch, on its Why Dhimmi Watch? page, explains:

Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29). This denial of equality of rights and dignity remains part of the Sharia, and, as such, [is] part of the legal superstructure that global jihadists are laboring to restore everywhere in the Islamic world, and wish ultimately to impose on the entire human race.

If dhimmis complained about their inferior status, institutionalized humiliation, or poverty, their masters voided their contract and regarded them as enemies of Islam, fair game as objects of violence. Consequently, dhimmis were generally cowed into silence and worse. It was almost unheard-of to find dhimmis speaking out against their oppressors; to do so would have been suicide. For centuries dhimmi communities in the Islamic world learned to live in peace with their Muslim overlords by acquiescing to their subservience. Some even actively identified with the dominant class, and became strenuous advocates for it.

Spearheaded by dhimmi academics and self-serving advocacy groups, that same attitude of chastened subservience has entered into Western academic study of Islam, and from there into journalism, school textbooks, and the popular discourse. One must not point out the depredations of jihad and dhimmitude; to do so would offend the multiculturalist ethos that prevails everywhere today. To do so would endanger chances for peace and rapprochement between civilizations all too ready to clash.

But in this era of global terrorism it must be said: this silence, this distortion, has become deadly. Before 9/11 it was easy [in the West!--JAH] to ignore and whitewash dhimmitude, but the atrocities changed the situation forever. In jihads throughout history, untold millions have died. Tens of millions have been uprooted from their homes. Tens of millions have been stripped of their cultural identity. To continue to gloss over the destruction wrought by jihad ideology and its attendant evil of dhimmitude is today to play into the hands of jihadists, who have repeatedly vowed to dhimmify the West and destroy any recalcitrant elements. While jihadist groups, even with their global diffusion, are not strong enough to realize this goal by themselves, they have a potent and destructive ally, a genuine fifth column, in the dhimmi academics and dhimmi journalists they have recruited in the West. They have succeeded in confusing millions in the West into mistaking honesty and truthfulness for bigotry, and self-defense for oppression.

Before it's too late for Western Europe and the United States, which gave birth to the traditions of freedom and equality of rights for all that shine today as lights in the entire world, this must be stopped. Therefore Dhimmi Watch seeks to bring public attention to:

The plight of the dhimmis, an immense but almost completely ignored ongoing scandal that continues in Muslim countries today;

• The plight of women under Sharia provisions, similar to conditions imposed on dhimmis, in the denial of equal rights and dignity;
• Slavery in Islamic lands, which continues today, justified by Sharia-'s dhimmi codes;
• The integral role of jihad and dhimmitude ideology in global terrorism today;
• The license that academic and journalistic whitewashes of dhimmitude gives to radical jihadist enemies of human rights for all.

Dhimmi Watch fights to ensure that deeds done in the darkness for so long will not continue to be done. The light of world attention is anathema to the proponents of jihad and dhimmitude: we have seen in recent years that women sentenced to stoning for adultery, often victims of rape unjustly accused thanks to Sharia laws disallowing rape victims' testimony, were freed following international outcry. Dhimmi Watch will seek to provoke similar, continuous and increasing outcry wherever and whenever the Sharia's institutionalized injustices threaten dhimmis and women.

May the truth prevail.

Mark Steyn's America Alone, II--Part One (Prologue to Chapter 3)

Steyn gave me a bunch of bracing things to think about. Among them:

• September 11, 2001, was not "the day everything changed," but the day that revealed how much had already changed. --p. xv

  I don't know how many people use (or used) the phrase "the day everything changed," but it is my impression--especially after reading the rest of Steyn's book--that almost nothing has changed in the West. "We" have failed to wake up to the threat we face. Instead, we try to ignore it. Steyn doesn't quite use these terms, but I will, as a result of reading Steyn: Western society continues on its same somnambulant journey toward destruction, almost wholly unaware of the really large threats that face it.

• The "Western" nations' fertility statistics:

  Greece . . . just below 1.3 births per couple. . . . And Greece's fertility is the healthiest in Mediterranean Europe: Italy has a fertility rate of 1.2, Spain, 1.1. --p. xvii

  For a stable population--i.e., no growth, no decline . . . --you need a total fertility rate of 2.1 live births per woman. That's what America has: 2.1, give or take. Canada has 1.48. . . . Europe as a whole has 1.38; Japan, 1.32; Russia, 1.14. These countries--or, more precisely, these people--are going out of business. --p. 2

  The UN's most recent population report has revised the global fertility rate down from 2.1--i.e., replacement rate--to 1.85--i.e., eventual population decline. World population will peak in about 2050 (I'd hazard earlier) and then fall. --p. 13

  I had no idea! I've never heard these things before. Or if I have, I have never thought about their implications.

  Steyn's following analogy, however, caught my attention (p. 2):

  Picture the difference between a small northern mill town where the mill's closed down and the young poeple have moved away and a growing community in the Sun Belt. Which has the bigger range of stores and restaurants, more work opportunities, better school choice? Which problem would you rather have--managing growth or managing decline?

  So what happens when the whole nation--and in Europe the entire continent--has a profile closer to the decrepit mill town than to the Sun Belt suburb?

• The logic of the Islamic influx into Western society:
  1. The West has below replacement reproductive rates.
  2. The Western governments' social programs depend on--require--population growth. (pp. 2-3)
  3. THEREFORE the West imports the "excess" (young, restless, fertile) population from those parts of the world that have the greatest "excess" population--i.e. (based on fertility rates), the Islamic nations.

• How thoroughly Islamicized (or "infiltrated") Western Europe has already become:

  What's the Muslim population of Rotterdam? Forty percent. What's the most popular baby boy's name in Belgium? Mohammed. In Amsterdam? Mohammed. In Malmö, Sweden? Mohammed. By 2005, it was the fifth most popular baby boy's name in the United Kingdom.

  --America Alone, p. 6

  [W]hen it comes to those living in France aged twenty and under, about 30 percent are said to be Muslim, and in the major urban centers, about 45 percent. If it came down to street-by-street fighting, as Michel Gurfinkiel, the editor of Valeurs Actuelles, points out, "the combatant ratio in any ethnic war may thus be one to one"--already, right now.

  --America Alone, p. 34

• The social implications of Islamicization--not (as Western multiculturalists trumpet) a greater openness to and appreciation of "diversity" in society, but, instead, the subjugation of Western culture to Islamic culture in the West . . . at the behest of the Muslims. (Steyn presents shocking examples throughout the book, but in Part I, let me point you solely to pp. 38-39.)

• The foolishness of so many political aspirations in the West over the past several decades.

  Today, in your typical election campaign, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much every party in the rest of the West are all but exclusively about . . . secondary impulses [rights and entitlements from cradle to grave]: government health care . . ., government day care . . . , government paternity leave. . . . We've elevated the secondary impulses over the primary ones: national defense, self-reliance, family, and, most basic of all, reproductive activity.

  --America Alone, p. 43

  Unfortunately, as recent European election results demonstrate, nothing makes a citizen more selfish than socially equitable communitarianism: once a fellow-enjoying the fruits of government health care and all the rest, he couldn't give a hot about the general societal interest; he's got his, and if it's going to bankrupt the state a generation hence, well, as long as they can keep the checks coming till he's dead, it's fine by him. "Social democracy" is, as it turns out, explicitly anti-social. . . . And it leads, in Europe and elsewhere, to societal "indolence."

  --America Alone, p. 45

  Secondary-impulse states can be very agreeable--who wouldn't want to live in a world where the burning political priorities are government-subsidized day care, the celebration of one's sexual appetites, and whether mandatory paid vacation should be six or eight weeks? But they're agreeable only for the generation or two that they last. . . . Europes' belief that you can smooth off the rough edges of Anglo-American capitalism and still remain wealthy has trapped it in societal structures predicated on false arithmetic whose disastrous consequences can't be postponed much longer. Unchecked, government social programs are a security threat because they weaken the ultimate line of defense: the free-born citizen whose responsibilities are not subcontracted to the government.

  --America Alone, pp. 50-51

• American cultural exceptionalism . . . as a good thing.

  Chapter Three, honestly, modified my view of the United States and made me want to stand up and cheer for the "good old" U.S. of A.

  Wanting, always, to view the United States honestly, forthrightly, etc., within the world's "community of nations," I have been, I'm afraid, a bit blind to some of the uniquely positive aspects of America's contributions, and very blind to the uniquely selfish, destructive, or just plain silly, aspects of too many of the United States' ostensible "allies" in the West.

  A citizen of an advanced democracy expects to be able to choose from dozens of breakfast cereals at the supermarket, hundreds of movies at the video store, and millions of p*rno sites on the Internet, but when it comes to life-or-death decisions about his own body, he's happy to have the choice taken out of his hands and given to the government.

  --America Alone, p. 45

  It's the case that in a general population some people will neglect their elderly parents and leave their children alone at home while they go off gallivanting. However, by making the government the guarantor of a comfortable old age and supervised day care, you don't end such fecklessness. Rather, by relieving the individual of the need to have "private virtues," you'll ensure that they wither away to the edges of society.

  --America Alone, p. 48

  What . . . would happen if America were to follow Mr. [Will] Hutton's advice and "join the world"? Well, those "40 million Americans without health insurance" would enjoy the benefit of a new government health care system and, like their 250 million neighbors, would discover the charms of the health care "waiting list"--the one year, two years, or more Britons and others wait in pain for even routine operations; the six, twelve, eighteen months Canadians wait for an MRI scan, there being more such scanners in the city of Philadelphia than in the entire Great White North.

  --America Alone, p. 51

  • Steyn's example of the woman who had to give birth to her twin sons in Edmonton, Alberta, because her local maternity ward in British Columbia--and, indeed, all the maternity wards everywhere in British Columbia--were full. --p. 51

  • The example of SARS. "When SARS leapt from China to infect Toronto's hospitals in 2003, the principal contribution of the WHO (Wold Health Organization) was to issue a travel advisory warning visitors to steer clear of Ontario, leaving it to the [United States'] CDC [Centers for Disease Control] to provide advanced and practical analysis of the problem. . . . (I)f an infection shows up in an Atlanta hospital, no American doctor looks for guidance from a Canadian government agency. But if it shows up in a Toronto hospital, the Ontario health system takes it for granted that the best minds of the CDC in Atlanta will be staying late at the office trying to work out what's going on." --pp. 52-53

  • "When something goes awry, in a Sri Lankan beach resort or a Toronto hospital, it's the hyperpower who shows up. America doesn't need to 'join the world': it already provides a lot of the world's infrastructure." -p. 53

Kind of a wake-up call for me!

"They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free . . . "

I'm undergoing a conversion of sorts right now.

I just finished Mark Steyn's America Alone: The End of the World as We Know It.

Until I read that book, I was firmly in Ron Paul's libertarian/Republican camp. As he said during the Republican candidates' debate in South Carolina,

Ron Paul: They [Muslims] attack us [the United States] because we've been over there. We've been bombing Iraq for ten years. We've been in the Middle East.

I think Reagan was right. We don't understand the irrationality of Middle Eastern politics.

Right now we're building an embassy in Iraq that's bigger than the Vatican. We're building 14 permanent bases. What would we say here if China was doing this in our country or in the Gulf of Mexico? We would be objecting.

We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us.

Moderator: Are you suggesting we invited the 9/11 attacks, sir?

Paul: I'm suggesting that we listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it. And they are delighted that we are over there because Osama Bin Laden has said, "I am glad you're over on our sand because we can target you so much easier." . . .

The CIA is correct when they teach and they talk about "blowback."

When we went into Iran in 1953 and installed the shah, yes, there was blowback. The reaction to that was the taking of our hostages. . . . If we think we can do what we want around the world and not incite hatred then we have a problem.

They don't come here to attack us because we're rich and we're free. They come and attack us because we're over there.

He sounds so reasonable. And so "Christian." So "godly." "We need to look at what we do from the perspective of what would happen if somebody else did it to us." --Isn't that how Jesus taught us? "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you"?

But Steyn--and now others, as I have begun to read up on this issue--has opened my eyes to see that "fairness" and "reasonableness" and feelings of being "oppressed," etc., etc., have very little, if anything, to do with the kinds of behaviors we are seeing from the Muslim ummah, the Muslim community or "world."

As Brigitte Gabriel states in the long version of the title of her book, "Even after 9/11, there are those that say we must 'engage' our terrorist enemies, that we must 'address their grievances.' Their grievance is our freedom of religion. Their grievance is our democratic process. Islamic religious authorities and terrorist leaders repeatedly state that they will destroy the United States and Western civilization. Unless we take them at their word, and defend ourselves, they will succeed . . . Because They Hate."

Steyn's book has convinced me that Gabriel has a far better grasp of the truth than does Ron Paul. I hope to discuss some of these things in the days ahead.

My problem: I still believe in the Golden Rule. I still believe in non-intervention. But, apparently, I also believe that we ought to "listen to the people who attacked us and the reason they did it" much more closely than Ron Paul seems to have been listening.

As Steyn says, "There's a lot to be said for taking these chaps at their word and then seeing whether their behavior comports."

So what are they saying?

Five days before the slaughter in Bali in 2005, nine Islamists were arrested in Paris for reportedly plotting to attack the Metro. . . . So much for the sterling efforts of President Chirac and his prime minister, the two chief obstructionists to Bush-Blair-neocon-Zionist warmongering since 2001.

In the months after the Afghan campaign, France's foreign minister, Hubert Védrine, was deploring American "simplisme" on a daily basis, and Saddam understood from the get-go that the French veto was his best shot at torpedoing any meaningful UN action on Iraq. Yet the jihadists still blew up a French oil tanker.

If you were to pick only one Western nation not to blow up the oil tankers of, the French would surely be it.

But they got blown up anyway. And afterwards a spokesman for the Islamic Army of Aden said, "We would have preferred to hit a U.S. frigate, but no problem, because they are all infidels."

No problem. They are all infidels.

When people make certain statements and their acts conform to those statements, I tend to take them at their word. As Hussain Massawi, former leader of Hezbollah, neatly put it, "We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to eliminate you." --America Alone, 151; emphasis added


"We're the ones who will change you," Norwegian imam Mullah Krekar told the Oslo newspaper Dagbladet in 2006. "Just look at the development within Europe, where the number of Muslims is expanding like mosquitoes. Every Western woman in the EU is producing an average of 1.4 children. Every Muslim woman in the same countries is producing 3.5 children." As he summed it up: "our way of thinking will prove more powerful than yours." --ibid., 39-40; emphasis added


Back in February 2002, Robert Fisk, the veteran Middle East correspondent, . . . wrote a column headlined "Please Release My Friend Daniel Pearl." It followed a familiar line: please release Daniel, then you'll be able to tell your story, get your message out. Taking him hostage is "an own goal of the worst kind," as it ensures he won't be able to get your message out, the message being--Fisk presumed--"the suffering of tens of thousands of Afghan refugees," "the plight of Pakistan's millions of poor," etc.

Somehow, the apologists keep missing the point: the story did get out. Pearl's severed head is the message. That's why they filmed the decapitation, released it on video, circulated it through the bazaars and madrassas and distributed it worldwide via the Internet. It was a huge hit. The message got out very effectively. --ibid., 151


[T]he Islamists' most oft-stated goal is not infidel withdrawal from Iraq but the re-establishment of a Muslim caliphate, living under sharia, that extends to Europe. --ibid., 38

So if I were to summarize this post: At this time I am far more convinced of Ron Paul's viewpoint with respect to foreign entanglements and non-intervention than I am the majority of Republican politicians' viewpoints. But I am deeply dismayed at Paul's apparent lack of understanding concerning the real issues that confront us. . . .