"What Western non-Muslim man may think of as an act of good will, or generosity, or intelligent compromise, or even, in some cases, actual yielding of claims that are strong but that, in the interests of “Peace” that Western man is prepared to sacrifice, so important to him is the attainment of that “Peace,” is not taken in the same spirit by Muslims who may benefit from those abandoned claims, those unilateral surrenders, those compromises, those acts of generosity and good will by Infidels." "He [Imran Waheed] went on: 'There is only one solution to the occupation of Muslim lands, one solution to the cries of the widows and the orphans, one solution to avenge the death of the elderly and the children ... fight in the way of Allah those who fight you. Al-Jihad.' A leaflet available on the group's international website, dated Jan 19 2009, criticises the governments of Muslim countries which have attended peace summits as "shameful". '"Instead, it was their duty to eliminate the state of Jews that has usurped Palestine,' it added.” -- from this story
He -- Imran Waheed -- is correct. The good Muslim, the Muslim who takes Islam seriously, must fight what he calls the “occupation of Muslim lands”. Those who will do their duty and “fight in the way of Allah” -- Jihad fi sabil Allah -- must fight this fight forever, until final victory. Such people cannot be bought off by Western aid. Nor will they stop fighting “in the way of Allah,” except perhaps temporarily, to pocket the prize and then to take the time to build their forces for the next assault, through military or other means, on the Infidels.
What Western non-Muslim man may think of as an act of good will, or generosity, or intelligent compromise, or even, in some cases, actual yielding of claims that are strong but that, in the interests of “Peace” that Western man is prepared to sacrifice, so important to him is the attainment of that “Peace,” is not taken in the same spirit by Muslims who may benefit from those abandoned claims, those unilateral surrenders, those compromises, those acts of generosity and good will by Infidels. No, all of that is regarded as a sign of Infidel weakness, a sign that the people of Allah are on the right path and should continue their struggle wherever they must, to push forward the frontiers of Dar al-Islam and to remove all obstacles to the spread and then the dominance of Islam. It is this failure of Infidels (or in some cases of “moderate” Muslims) to keep steadily in mind the permanent goals of all Muslims who take Islam seriously, and to keep equally in mind the psychology of Islam, in which surrenders by the enemy, (whatever their motivation) whet rather than sate Muslim appetites, that leads to what we see in Swat today, or Samaria tomorrow, or south London the day after tomorrow.
The continued belief that a demonstrated willingness to compromise or even to abandon well-founded Infidel claims will elicit from the Muslim side something similar, has again and again been proven false. What keeps the peace, where it can be kept, is only the threat of overwhelming Infidel force. Deterrence in the Middle East and everywhere that Infidels are threatened by Muslims takes the name “Darura” – the Arabic word for “Necessity.” For if Darura demands that peace be kept, because the Infidels are too strong, it will be kept. There is no other reason for not making war on Infidels who do not yield, for the world belongs to Allah and to the Believers, “The Best of Peoples.”
No, this business of negotiations and peace treaties and what to Westerners amount to compromises are irrelevant to what Muslims believe, because of what Islam steadily inculcates. In the Muslim view, the world is divided in two: between Muslims and non-Muslims, or Believers, and Infidels. Between the two a permanent state of hostility must exist. The world’s land area, too, essentially is divided between that part which is dominated by Islam, where Muslims rule – the Dar al-Islam – and that part which is not yet a place where Islam dominates, not yet a place where Muslims rule. Instead, it is a place where Infidels rule, usually in Infidel nation-states. Their political systems, their legal institutions, their social arrangements all come out of the history of Infidel peoples, people who are ungrateful because they have refused to rightly receive the Message Of Islam brought by the Seal of the Prophets, that Messenger extraordinaire, Muhammad. And because of that, the continued power over any part of the world of non-Muslims is an affront to Muslims. For in the Muslim view, Infidels, because of their refusal to accept Islam, should – at best – be forced to accept (or as some Muslims might say, “enjoy”) the status of dhimmis.
What is a dhimmi? In the narrowest definition, a dhimmi is one of the “protected peoples” – that is Christians or Jews who need not be killed, nor even forcibly converted, but can practice their religion, as long as they strictly fulfill their duties toward their Muslim masters. Chief among those duties is the payment of the Jizyah, the tax on dhimmis that supported the Muslim state. But there are many other duties as well: not to ride a horse, but only a donkey (which is like, in the modern world, being told you can’t drive a car, but only a horse-and-buggy), to dismount whenever coming across a Muslim; to have one’s testimony worthless against that of a Muslim; to wear identifying garb – a zunnar or blue belt for Christians, and a yellow mark for Jews, so that there will be no confusing of people; to not be able to build new churches or synagogues, nor even to repair older ones unless specific permission is obtained from Muslim authorities; never to build a non-Muslim religious structure higher than any nearby mosque. To be a dhimmi is not to be a “second-class citizen,” as some carelessly put it, failing to recognize that the word “citizen” is not exactly fitting in the context of a Muslim polity.
It is an affront to Muslims that an Infidel nation-state should continue to exist anywhere in the world, if Muslims deem it to be an obstacle to the spread and then the dominance of Islam. And since the whole world belongs to Allah, and therefore to the “best of peoples” (that is, the Muslims), any Infidel nation-state, wherever it is located, is an affront to Muslims. Its continuance under non-Muslim rule, with non-Muslim legal and political institutions, must be corrected. But since in Islam the most unacceptable of situations is that of land once ruled by Muslims that is then lost to the Infidels, it is not surprising that Israel is such an affront to Muslims. The modern Jewish commonwealth was established after nearly 2000 years, after Roman, Byzantine, Arab and Turkish domination, and after the land had, according to all the reports of Western travelers (such as Volney, and Lamartine, and Mark Twain) fallen into ruin and desolation. Its population, by the mid-19th century, was at most 150,000 -- and even at the end of that century, after Zionist pioneers had begun in earnest to return to bring the land to life, the entire population, according to a report of 1898 from the American consul in Jerusalem, was only 200,000. That same beliefs about Islamic land mean that not only Israel, but almost all of Spain and Portugal, and other places where Muslims once ruled, are, in the Muslim view, part of the House of Islam: Greece, and the Balkan nations, and Bulgaria, and Rumania, and much of Hungary, and a great deal of Russia and Ukraine, and almost all of India, and Sicily.
Yet Israel is at the top of the To-Do List of Muslims. It is the most palpable affront presented by those Infidels who now dominate lands where Islam once dominated, where Muslims once ruled. Muslims are enraged that an ancient Jewish commonwealth has been resurrected despite nearly a century of Jihad that has been conducted with whatever means were available, first to prevent its establishment, and then to prevent its continued existence once it had been established, and now to force it ever back back back, into a condition of indefensible borders, where there is not even an extra few miles of strategic depth. This is being imposed by the American government, whose officials rule over a vast country bounded on two sides by the Atlantic and the Pacific Oceans, and by a benign vast Canada to the north, and a slightly less benign but not either hostile nor truly threatening Mexico to the south, while Israel is surrounded on three sides by enemies whose own strategic depth extends almost a thousand miles in each direction.
And he, Imran Waheed, is wrong to think that the smiling emirs and sheiks and kings and beglerbegs and pashas of Islam, in solemn but ultimately comical conclave assembled, were making "peace" with the infidel nation-state of Israel. They were not making peace. They were engaged in propaganda, and misrepresentation of their ultimate intentions -- intentions which do not differ one whit ideologically from those of him, Imran Waheed, but differ only in such matters as tactics and timing. Some Arabs and Muslims are more attuned to the need to placate parts of Western public opinion, or at least to provide a fig leaf for those Western policy-makers who, as a result of their almost willful refusal to learn what they must about the texts and tenets and attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, continue to pretend, as they did with a bit more justification in the past: that Islam itself is not a threat.
Those who continue to presume to be able to protect us and yet show, in every way, how ill-prepared they are to do so, keep allowing themselves to pretend to believe that "if only" this and "if only" that. "If only" the Infidel West provides billions and yet more billions, all will be well. What Donors' Conference for a Muslim state or people is scheduled for this week, as the West throws money at the problem, thinking that "prosperity" will solve what, in the end, is a problem of immutable ideology, and admits of no solution, though it can be handled adequately at this point by those who are well-prepared.
Imran Waheed can relax. There is no real difference between, say, the Slow Jihadists of Fatah and the Fast Jihadists of Hamas. There is only a cosmetic one, with the maquillage put on for the Western cameras. And there is, in the end, no real difference, in Western Europe, between the slyly hissing Tariq Ramadan and a more obvious bully-boy such as Abu Hamza. For Ramadan is in thrall as much as Imran Waheed to the texts and tenets of Islam. They are prompted by the same texts and tenets, and share, to the precise extent that they take Islam to heart and mind, the same attitudes of deep hostility to Infidels.
Unless such disaffected (disenchanted?) Muslims go further, and manage to attain the next moral and mental level, and allow themselves to recognize and then dare to abandon the filial or civilizational piety (Azar Nafisi? Fouad Ajami?) that keeps them from joining the empyrean of the completely fearless -- Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, and many others -- that is, unless they become open apostates, free at last to analyze what it is in Islam that accounts for its many political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures, then they will simply have to be regarded with a certain level of melancholy mistrust.
Only a clear-eyed and fearless defection from the Army of Islam, that is, an open apostate, should -- for Infidels -- relieve any misgivings and mistrust. Why? Well, because if Muslims who in effect do not really believe much of Islamic doctrine present themselves as if they were representative, and that their sweetness-and-light indeed represents Islam, they are fooling Infidels, and most of all, they are fooling themselves. And they surely know that, in the modern world, since the passing of the century of obvious Muslim weakness vis-a-vis the West, Islam's grip in Dar al-Islam has strengthened.
Islam, or its most faithful Believers, are undoing the fetters placed on Islam by Kemal Pasha in Turkey. In Pakistan there has been a steady descent into the real Islam, undiluted and un-nuanced, and now out of the control of the suave anglophone zamindars and Sandhurst-trained generals who for so long were presumed to represent the "real" Pakistan in the outside world. One has only to ask onself: would Mohammad Ali Jinnah, with his wine and his pork, and his attitudes, last a minute in Pakistan today? And real Islam is back in the mosques and madrasas of sub-Saharan Africa, or much of it, for the real Islam is now being financed by Arab money, and driving out the imams who permitted a syncretistic easygoing black African version of Islam. You can see this in northern Nigeria, in Niger, all over West and East Africa, and wherever Muslims, newly militant and aggressive, can be found.
One can observe the same phenomenon in the heart of the West, in the countries of Western Europe, among the Muslim populations allowed to settle deep behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb. Are the second and third generation of Muslims in Western Europe more "integrated" into Infidel societies, or are they far more militantly Muslim, far more hostile, and more dangerous, than the first generation of illiterate workers who came simply to make a living, and did not dare to think of changing the Western societies in which they had been permitted to settle?
Even seeming innocents, such as Muslim-for-identification-purposes Muslims, help strengthen the power of Muslims in the West, by swelling their perceived ranks. They do this without intending to. And possibly if they realized it they would be horrified to recognize this, but it is nonetheless true simply by the mere fact of their existence in the Western world, not as apostates but as "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims. Some of them also continue to present ever-more implausible presentations of an Islam that they would wish existed, and pretend to themselves exists, in the manner of the thoroughly-modern female Turkish architect who, on NPR the other day, claimed -- and perhaps really believes -- that "Islam gives full equality to women." What is she talking about? How can she allow herself to say such things, or believe such things? It may comfort her, but it is untrue. And when she utters this for a Western audience, she helps to protect and promote Islam. So she too, this "secular" Turkish woman, reveals herself to be part of the problem.
A plausible soft-spoken snake such as Tariq Ramadan is determined to make Western Europe a place where the Infidels will not discover what Islam is all about until it is entirely too late, when the demographic conquest cannot be halted or reversed. He -- Tariq Ramadan -- is as true a Believer in Islam and the rightness of the Shari'a, and the wrongness of the legal and political institutions and view of man to be found in the Infidel West, as the most ranting of Finsbury Park clerics. He disagrees with Imran Waheed not on creed (deen), but on their style of presentation of Muslim views and Muslim demands. Ramadan is cleverer than the likes of Imran Waheed. He is also far more dangerous.
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