Fitzgerald: Inter-faith Healers: It's the latest racket

"In 2006, Tufts' Hillel received part of a $1.6-million Department of Homeland Security (DHS) grant to promote 'inter-faith and intercultural dialogue.'" -- from this depressing article

Inter-faith Healers: it's the latest racket. Elmer-Gantries galore. Or worse. All Elmer Gantry wanted was money and women. . But Muslims, wherever they conquered in the early centuries of conquest, certainly seized women and loot (just like their Model of Conduct, their Perfect Man), while nowadays they don't want just that. They want to remove all obstacles to the spread of Islam. And that means everything that makes the West the West, beginning with such things as individualism and the guarantees of freedom of thought and speech, and equal treatment, legal equality for women and non-Muslims, and freedom of artistic expression, and the free and skeptical inquiry which is punished in Islam, and encouraged in the post-Enlightenment West, and without which the enterprise of science cannot continue.

No doubt the Hillel rabbi referred to in that article was quite proud of himself for his "broad-mindedness." Yes, moral preening. But that word can cover a wide variety of things.

Right now I fondly recall a scene from the first version -- the one with James Mason -- of "Lolita." There he was, living at the house of Charlotte Haze, and attending the school prom, and Jean Farlow is dancing with him. And she explains, endowing the phrase with a meaning that her partner, world-weary Humbert, chooses to ignore, that once he gets to know Jean and her husband, he will find, Humbert, that "we are extremely broad-minded."

Perhaps the Hillel-House rabbis from sea to shining sea should put down their latest handouts from some Interfaith group, or whatever it is they picked up at their last visit on Outreach Night at a local Mosque ("What Is Islam Really All About" or "Is Something The Matter With Islam?" or "Can't We All Just Get Along?") or possibly that last issue of Tikkun with that "hopeful" piece -- positively riveting, wasn't it? -- by Cornell West, and do something really unexpected. How about this? How about reading, sitting down and reading, Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and then reading the great Western scholars on Islam -- Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Henri Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall, and so many others who studied and wrote before the age of the Great Inhibition?

And then there is one more thing these eager Interfaith-Healers (Hillel Rabbis Division) might do. They just might read what Maimonides wrote about Islam and the treatment of Jews under Islam (see "Epistle to the Yemen"), and then, to really do something wild and crazy, they might actually reread, or possibly read for the first time, Rabbi Hillel.

You know, the one who wrote "If I am not for myself, then who will be?” What a crazy idea. What a wild idea. Maybe it’s time, it’s long past time, not only for the Hillel-House rabbi and his charges at Tufts, but for the denizens of the entire Western world, to start thinking about, and then taking, that excellent advice.

But of course this malady isn’t limited only to Hillel-House rabbis. "I would hope that in the future, the way of dialogue would in fact increase and make inroads in the other parts of Islam," said Cardinal Cormac Murphy-O'Connor, the archbishop of Westminster, England, some time ago.

How has the "way of dialogue" so far made things easier, in the Middle East or anywhere else, for Catholics, or Christians, or non-Muslims generally? It has not. One of the things Bernard Lewis has said that might be engraved in one's memory is that compromise does not exist for Muslims; all concessions and aid and smiles from the Infidels, and promises of understanding, will be pocketed, and exploited. But there will be nothing in return; far from it. Instead, the assurance that Islam will triumph, that if Muslims are patient, very patient, a good deal of the non-Muslim world will fall into their lap, will be confirmed.

This is not understood by those in the Western world. They lack the imaginative sympathy, the real imaginative sympathy, to comprehend the psychology of Muslims -- which means, of course, most Muslims. They take the becks and nods and smiles as meaning something -- well, so they do, but not what the leaders of the Western world think they do.

Since "Dialogue" with "the moderates" has been such a smashing failure, why not indeed extend it to the "fundamentalists"? Is this not the policy urged by Alastair Crooke and his fellow "consultants" at Conflicts Forum? Of course it is. But at least he is getting paid for his services. No one is paying those Cardinals and rabbis who think that "dialogue" is the way to proceed.

And in any case, the idiocy of some in the Western world will be paid for, in unpleasantness, in expense, in danger, and in death, by the entire Infidel world. "Dialogues of civilization" are now all the rage, the Muslim rage. They keep down the amount of critical scrutiny. They buy time to further entrench Muslim populations in the Western world, aggressive, insistent, ever-more demanding and hostile populations.

The ability of people to deny the evidence is disturbing. About smoking's link to cancer. Obesity's link to heart disease. The nature of Islam. Some things are matters of individual survival, while other things.....