Wilders brief film, FITNA, is a vital opportunity badly squandered, more by what it totally omits, or virtually denies, than what it actually covers. The enemy is not, and never was, all Muslims, nor all versions of Islam, but only the toxic version, and its ruthless Jihadi followers. Wilders touches on the problem, a threat which challenges Muslims as much as anyone else, but is completely blind to the comprehensive solution needed, which must include the central and vital presence of not a de-formed but a re-formed Islam - drawing on the best of its own history and present - whether his blindness is due to ignorance of history, or malice, or bigotry, matters little. We need a strong, principled unity against the common enemy, not to be further divided. All who resist that real Jihadi treat are my brothers, whatever their own faith or ethnic background. -- from this post by Tom Carew of Dublin at Israel News All those tom-carews of this world have been attacking Fitna because they wish to retain the support, as they see it, of some “moderate” Muslims, which “moderate” Muslims are simultaneously our “allies” in “this struggle.” But why? Shouldn’t they too wish Infidels to be apprised of what is in the Qur’an and, indeed, in other canonical texts of Islam? Isn’t that the best way to ensure that Infidels will cease to assume the posture of the “pre-emptive cringe” -- in J. B. Kelly’s phrase -- and, in recognizing what is wrong with those texts, be firmer and therefore more steadfast in dealing with what Tom Carew devoutly hopes and wishes to believe is merely the “bad” version of Islam as opposed to the “good” one about which he, Tom Carew of Dublin, is knowledgeable, and which he, Tom Carew of Dublin, finds so impressive and its existence so comforting?
There is the confusion between some pleasant, plausible, adept-at-pleasing people, some of them insistent that “Islam is not this” or “Islam is not that,” and those who have left Islam, and know better. For "Islam is not this" and "Islam is not that" is exactly what Magdi Allam and other celebrated apostates kept telling themselves, in their initial desire, having found Islam so troublesome, not to abandon the faith, as they saw it, of their fathers, including parents whom they remember fondly, and an atmosphere -- a blend of smells and sounds and colors -- that is really a nostalgia for childhood, or a simpler past. But they confused all that with Islam, and gave that Total Belief-System the benefit of every doubt, until, in the free West, they could do so no longer.
There are so many different things wrong with Carew’s letter that only a few can be dealt with here.
In the first place, there is again the postulating of “moderate” Muslims without discussion of what that word “moderate” may mean, or does mean, and what it should mean if it is to have any value, anything on which non-Muslims can rely -- or even anything on which, as the tom-carews of this world have it, bet their entire civilizations and their lives. See "Ten Things To Think When Thinking About Moderate Muslims" at this website. The usefulness of the concept of the “moderate Muslim” much diminishes in light of the fact that jihadist Muslims, well-versed in deception ("war is deception," said Muhammad), well understand that what Infidels might do if they are alerted and given a clear understanding of the meaning, and menace, of Islam. Islam, of course, can be distinguished from Muslims -- "There are moderate Muslims. But Islam itself is not moderate" -- though a bit too much is made of the "moderation" of those supposedly "moderate" Muslims.
Moderate Muslims are essentially those who do not steep themselves in Islam, the Islam of the immutable texts, and the tenets of Islam that long ago were fashioned from those texts. And once that was done, the gates of ijtihad slammed shut, and no amount of claiming noisily that they can somehow be swung open anytime soon is likely to make that happen. These claims are made by the impassioned but most limited likes of Mustafa Akyol, who when not busily defending Erdogan and the Return-to-Islam-Step-By-Stealthy-Step Party in Turkey, also promotes Qur’an-only Islam -- “sola scriptura” he likes to call it, wrapping himself in a Calvin -Zwingli mantle -- as the way forward for Islam, and as a way to comfort and reassure Infidels. Yet the Qur’an itself is, as Fitna begins to show, quite enough to send permanent shivers down Infidel spines.
The tom-carews of this world would like Infidels to keep up the pretense, or still worse, to believe, that Islam itself is not a problem, not a threat. But it is. Not “extremist” Islam. Not “radical” Islam. Not “radical extremist” Islam or, still worse, “Islamism.” Islam itself, if fully and faithfully followed, is a problem: its immutable texts, its tenets as derived and set in stone long ago by Qur’anic scholars and jurisconsults, based on those texts, its attitudes, its atmospherics, and the renewed and revivified sense among hundreds of millions, that the duty of Jihad, fallen into desuetude during the centuries of Muslim decline, can again be met. And the sense that this duty can be met comes not because of any change in those texts for the (as Infidels see it) for the worse, but because of a perceived change in the power of Muslims to engage in Jihad with the likelihood of success, that is, a change in the world, as they see it, for the better.
That change has consisted of three elements. And those elements are, to repeat:
1) The trillions of dollars -- some ten trillion since 1973 alone -- received by Muslim oil states because of an accident of geology.
2) The millions of Muslims allowed in to the countries of Western Europe by heedless elites, unaware of, uncomprehending of, the meaning and menace of Islam, and fully prepared to believe that Muslim immigrants might be “integrated” just as, say, Hindus or Buddhists or Confucians might be integrated. For there was no understanding that while others might come with alien creeds, Islam alone was an alien and a permanently hostile creed, a triumphalist creed, one without limits in its view of where Islam should spread and dominate and Muslims rule, as rule by right they must.
3) The technological advancements made by Infidels (in both the West and in East Asia) that have been appropriated by Muslims and used with effect to disseminate their propaganda. Khomeini taped speeches in his exile in France, and had them reproduced and sent all over Iran, whipping up the rural poor and the urban disaffected. You could buy them from the bazaris, you could have them given to you for free. And Al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and a thousand other groups and groupuscules and individuals who fancy themselves martyrs, have gone far beyond audiocassettes, to videocassettes (sold in souks from Morocco to Afghanistan), and satellite television (Al-Manar, Al-Jazeera, Al-this and Al-that), and of course the Internet, where Muslim tapes on YouTube, either of the Da’wa kind, or of the whipping up those who are already Muslims kind, are an important tool of Jihad. And while all of it -- YouTube, computers, the very Internet itself -- is a product of the West, those who wish that West ill, make use of it to further that end. They also wish an end to the kind of free and skeptical inquiry without which the enterprise of science, and hence technology, would be impossible. Muslims don’t realize this, for they think one can have technology without encouraging an end to mental submission, for their view is that of Cargo-Cultists, receiving manna from the Big Birds in the sky, and wanting merely to figure out how to keep those Big Birds dropping those cargoes, or even perhaps how to magically create those Big Birds for themselves.
All of these developments have allowed Jihad, that had never gone away but was only, in a sense, like the Hidden Imam of Shi’a Islam, occulted for a while, to come back, and to stride across the world, as it does, in a thousand guises, with a thousand ways of fooling us or a thousand ways for Infidels to fool themselves about Jihad and about Islam.
The last word, by way of reply to the tom-carews of this world, should be given to Magdi Allam. For years in Italy Magdi Allam worried and wrestled, inwardly, as he continued to call himself, and even to think of himself, as a Muslim. This was primarily an act of filial piety. He recalled his modest parents -- his father was a driver -- who were Muslims, who derived comfort from the daily rituals of Islam. He even accompanied his mother when she wished to perform the hajj. But those same parents had carefully sent him to a school run by Catholics, by the Comboni sisters, the comboniane. That had its effect, as did his friendship, at a tender age (15), with a Jewish girl, possibly one of the last remaining in Egypt. Later, he left for Italy, ready to repeat -- and indeed repeating on the Italian streets -- all of the slogans about the “Palestinians” and the perfidy of Israel, which he discusses in his Viva Israele.
He took issue with Oriana Fallaci’s uninhibited remarks about the behavior of Muslim immigrants in Italy, in Tuscany, in his “Open Letter to Oriana Fallaci.” And he continued to take in the world of Islam, and the world of the West, to contrast and to compare.
And in the West, last week, after years of wrestling with the question of Islam, just as Ayaan Hirsi Ali had done, and Wafa Sultan, and Ibn Warraq -- none of them suddenly saw the light, none of them jettisoned Islam overnight -- the highly intelligent, morally advanced Magdi Allam summed up his experience of Islam thus:
The darkness in which the preaching of hatred and intolerance in the face of the “different,” uncritically condemned as “enemy,” were privileged over love and respect of “neighbor”….my mind was freed from the obscurantism of an ideology that legitimates lies and deception, violent death that leads to murder and suicide, the blind submission to tyranny…
Has Magdi Allam, in his years of thought about the matter, both in Egypt and in Italy, misunderstood Islam? Has Ayaan Hirsi Ali, with her experience of Somalia, and Kenya, and Saudi Arabia, and the Netherlands? What about Wafa Sultan who came from Syria and has lived in the United States? What abut Ibn Warraq from Pakistan? Ali Sina from Iran? Have all of those apostates, from so many different Muslim countries and presumably different life experiences -- but in societies suffused with Islam -- those apostates, whose names we now know, whose measure we have taken, all of them simply those whose names we know, and whose measure we have taken, misunderstood Islam? What about the scholars of Islam? What about Joseph Schacht and Snouck Hurgronje? What about Arthur Jeffrey? Henri Lammens? Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq? Samuel Zwemer? Have they all misunderstood Islam? What about John Quincy Adams, the most learned of all of our Presidents, with a wide experience of men and events as well as with books -- did he misunderstand Islam in his celebrated analysis of it? What about Tocqueville, who had observed Islam in North Africa -- was he, Tocqueville, an acute observer of reality? See Democracy in America. Or was he wildly misguided? What about Winston Churchill, and his comments in The River War? Was he misguided? Did he misunderstand the meaning, and menace, of Islam?
Were they all, all of them wrong, and espositos and armstrongs and ernsts and feldmans right? And is it Tom Carew who convinces you, with his reasons for not applauding Fitna and other such efforts at alerting and educating Infidels, more convincing in your view than Magdi Allam?
Posted first in Dhimmi Watch
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