David Solway
Human history has always been marked by major population shifts, from earliest hominid times over the Horn of Africa to the present moment when what social scientists and historians define as a “demographic transition [1]” is occurring. Whether as a result of military campaigns and their attendant population dislocations or great migrations owing to plague, material deprivation, the lure of new settlements or economic factors, what we might call the “demography of exodus” is one of the great drivers of historical change. In the current age, there can be little doubt that a kind of volkswanderung [2] (German for “migrations of peoples”) or, perhaps more shockingly, a return to the “Dark Ages” is taking place before our eyes. As professor Judith Klinghoffer of Rutgers University writes, in an article titled “Dark Ages Redux [3]” dealing with the influx of immigrants into the West from Muslim countries, “with each and every passing day the price for defeating the forces of darkness is getting higher and higher and ultimate victory less and less certain.”
In effect, what is taking place is an invasion by other means. The Muslims are coming, and not as members of a comedy troupe [4] of that name. Terrorism, as we know, can cause serious damage, both psychological and physical, and is an excellent means of softening up its target. That is why we have long lines at airports, pat-down searches, confiscation of innocuous items. That is why many people flinch with anxiety when they see bearded Muslims and burka’d women among the passengers, though few will admit it for fear of being condemned as racists or bigots — the fruit of political correctness. That is why stray backpacks and suitcases can bring in the bomb squad. That is why events in which large numbers of people are massed together can cause nervous glances cast over shoulders. That is why gays, women, Christians and Jews — and let’s not forget dog owners — may find themselves in danger in neighborhoods with a growing Muslim presence, as is the case in many European cities and now in some of ours. That is why there is a chill on the meaningful and honest discussion of Islamic subjects in the press and the publishing industry. That is why only a vanishingly small number of printed sources reproduced the Danish cartoons. That is why anti-Islamic authors and film-makers are murdered in the streets, arrested or driven into hiding. That is why art exhibits focusing on provocative issues, especially Islamic themes — such as, most recently, the London-based Passion For Freedom [5] — are forced to cancel. That is why our intelligence agencies are working overtime. The jihadists of the sword have succeeded in creating a climate of fear — let’s call it an atmosfear — that has changed our way of life for the worse, turning us into a society of cringers and invertebrates. The target has been softened up so that the jihadists of the pen can advance the labor of colonization.
We have reached the point at which, even if by some miracle every last Muslim terrorist could be eliminated, the situation would not alter appreciably. For the real onslaught is occurring peacefully, via unstinted Muslim immigration into the West, burgeoning demographics outpacing Western population replacement ratios, infiltration of the civil apparatus including the judiciary, the legal profession, the legacy media, the educational curriculum from top to bottom, the interfaith community, and the various levels of government, municipal, state and national.
Add to this the concerted effort of the extremely powerful 57-state Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) at the United Nations to criminalize the chimera of “Islamophobia” as hate speech. As Deborah Weiss writes [6], “It is attempting to pass the equivalent of Islamic blasphemy codes,” launching “a campaign to provide disinformation to the public, delinking all Islam from…undesirable traits, and attack[ing] all who insist on [unflattering] truths as bigots, racists and Islamophobes.” The OIC delegates and their allies at the U.S. State Department that have signed on to a variant of the original draft (called Resolution 16/18) have absorbed the significance of Proverbs 18:21: “Death and life are in the power of the tongue.”
The operation of “stealth jihad” coupled with the “rule of numbers [7]” — predicated on the unwillingness of Western leaders to recognize the enormity of what is transpiring, and the self-delusion or ignorance of the majority of ordinary citizens — together render the coming hegemony of triumphalist Islam entirely probable. Many of its communicants are suave, cultivated and educated in the professions, such as law, medicine and engineering; others, to quote [8] blogger Miroslav Marinov, are like the “millions of uneducated fanatical Muslims [who] don’t work and strain the welfare system,” resulting in “the quick Islamization of the country.” Marinov is speaking primarily of Britain, but his strictures apply to Europe in general and to “the creeping Islamization of North America.”
On a personal level, I mourn for my home city of Montreal with its large number of French-speaking, North African, Syrian and Lebanese, generally Hezbollah-supporting Muslims, who bring old-country animosities, systemic Jew-hatred and civic disruption in their wake. Violent demonstrations, disturbances on city transit networks, and verbal and physical assaults in cafés, such as this one in the embedded video [9], are becoming increasingly frequent. The situation has not yet deteriorated to the extent that it has, for example, in Norwegian cities, where the latest atrocity [10] involved a Sudanese Muslim who killed three people on a bus, including a 19-year-old girl. But then, one remembers the young Muslim who murdered [11] a firefighter in a Toronto pub, a complete stranger to him. What, we may reasonably ask, are such people doing among us? The incidents I have flagged are merely isolated instances, a microcosm, of a pervasive crisis spreading through the entire West. The world we have taken for granted is metamorphosing gradually but ineluctably, and the day is relentlessly approaching when it may no longer be recognizable.
Many will consider such a prognosis as unduly alarmist and put their trust in the peaceful and productive assimilation of so-called “moderate” Muslims into mainstream society. On this theory, the moderates will eventually adapt to Western norms, comforts, amenities and folkways while preserving the best parts of their own cultural and religious patrimony. The customs and precepts of Islam and the West, as Tariq Ramadan contends in Western Muslims and the Future of Islam [12], will marry happily and produce a vigorous progeny. True, the extremists will continue to foment trouble for a while, but not to worry. In the cheery words [13] of Daniel Pipes, “Radical Islam is the problem; moderate Islam is the solution.” The argument is blinkered and disingenuous, if not downright contrafactual.
The problem is that the “moderates,” or munafiqs (munafiqoon, “hypocrites,” in Arabic, who only give lip service to Islam), have a distressing habit of renouncing their neutrality when jihad comes to our neighborhoods. Writing for the online journal Political Islam [14], Kenneth Roberts gives instance after instance of the way in which munafiqs “sit back and look the other way, while jihadists fight the Kafirs and subdue them….A munafiq is silent when the jihadists knock on their non-Muslim neighbor’s door. The reason for this silence is the Koran (28.86): ‘never be a supporter of disbelievers.’” Roberts concludes: “We Western people need to reexamine our political correctness….Otherwise, we will continue to have attacks against Kafir civilians like those at the Westgate Mall, Trolley Square Mall and the Boston Marathon. Muslims who attack civilians are imitating what Mohammed did in Medina in 627 AD.” We see how the Koran is supplemented and reinforced by the power of the Sunnah, “the perfect example of Mohammed.”
Ultimately, the distinction between “extremists” and “moderates” does not hold up to scrutiny. There are only Muslims, who can be divided into three groups: violent jihadists, stealth jihadists, and munafiqs. The latter may be peaceable and decent citizens, but as Roberts points out, marshaling reams of evidence from every quarter of the globe, when jihad comes to our part of town they cannot be relied on to oppose their barbarous co-religionists, to resist activation, to assemble in protests and demonstrations against the violence done in the name of their confession, to speak, write and march in solidarity with their targeted neighbors, or to reject outright the many passages in the Koran, Hadith and Sunnah that call for acts of blatant savagery. Time and time again, “the munafiqs acted on the side of jihad,” either by collaborating or by refusing to intervene. Such collusion seems plausible since, as Daniel Greenfield comments [15], “Jihad isn’t an act of violence; it’s an act of faith.”
And the munafiqs certainly have done little or nothing to parry the insidious thrust of their furtive counterparts who have infiltrated the body politic, the legal profession, the social networks, the media, the academy and the culture at large in the interest of a supremacist imperium that seeks to curtail free speech, disarm critical thought and impose sharia law upon an unsuspecting West. The distinction between “bad Muslims” and “good Muslims,” “radicals” and “moderates,” which our pundits and talking heads implicitly or explicitly fall back upon in delivering their wisdom to the multitudes, is a will o’ the wisp and a derailment of thought. It is wholly beside the point.
Similarly with those who claim that Islam is a “religion of peace” — as if 9/11 had never happened and the approximately 22,000 [16] deadly terrorist attacks since then were the product of anti-Muslim propaganda; as if Muslim organizations were not funneling “charity” to Hamas; as if rabid anti-Semitism were not an integral part of the faith [17], dating back to the compilation of the Koran and other canonical texts written between the 9th and 12th centuries; as if Iran were not racing toward a nuclear bomb it has already threatened to use against Israel; and, on the local scene, as if recruitment mosques did not exist and imamcraft were universally benign. Some religion of peace!
Writing for ClashDaily.com [18], Pete Parker states the glaringly obvious in the simplest of terms:
Truth is — Islamic law (Sharia) denies [full civil rights] to all women and non-Muslims in every Islamic dominated country around the globe. Whether it’s Iran, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Iraq, Sudan, Afghanistan or Yemen – women, as well as ‘infidels’ are treated as subhuman. To claim that a religion whose central dogma demands violent subjugation and supremacy is peaceful — is to tear at the very moral fabric that has made America “a shining city on a hill.”
It is, in fact, to dismantle the very structure of the Western Enlightenment: the impartial rule of law, freedom of belief and expression, individual autonomy, personal accountability, rejection of superstition and dogma, rational inquiry and the application of scientific method — although it could be argued, persuasively, that Western societies have done Islam’s preliminary work on their own initiative and that Islam now finds a field ready to be reaped and harvested. The blades and rotors of the Islamic combine are now cutting their swath as jihad gathers momentum with every passing day.
True, the munafiqs do not bear weapons and do not engage in lawfare. They are not members of suicide brigades or of potent Islamic organizations enacting the dictates of their Saudi masters, Qatari funders or Brotherhood puppeteers. They practice the standard cultural usages and rituals, are proud of their heritage, and celebrate what they esteem as the splendors of an ancestral civilization. But when non-Muslims find themselves in court, often in well-publicized cases, being hounded for everything and nothing by wealthy Islamic institutions initiating predatory defamation suits, they are nowhere to be found. When violence is inflicted in their name upon innocent civilians, they are not in the streets bearing placards against Islamic spoliations and vociferously denouncing the carnage that Islam brings with it to this very day.
The only large Muslim demonstrations I have noted over the years are gangs of protestors shouting obscenities at Israeli embassies or trashing university buildings to prevent Israeli officials from speaking, as at Concordia University in Montreal in 2002; traffic-jamming Muslim Brotherhood pageants, including children and burka’d matrons, waving the yellow, four-fingered flag and chanting anti-Western slogans; or al-Quds rallies thronged with participants in public parks calling for death to Jews — but never anything resembling a respectable gathering of moderate Muslims marching for an end to Islamic violence. A counter-protest [19] of “progressive Muslims” against the al-Quds levee attracted only about thirty people, most of whom [8] were Christians and Jews.
Polls [20] indicate that when it comes to obeying some of the more brutal imperatives of traditional culture, such as female genital mutilation, honor killing, punishment for homosexuality, criminal prosecution for insulting Islam, etc., too many of these “peaceable” munafiqs suddenly reveal their true colors. No less disturbing, they seem increasingly unable to manage their own offspring, who tend to embrace a far more radical and intransigent attitude toward the pitiless commands inherent in the Koran and the cultural muniments — again, polls [20] show that the most radicalized among Western Muslim are those in the 16-24 age bracket. The scenario is pre-scripted, with parents and relatives professing disbelief or denial when a son or a nephew joins al-Qaeda or al-Shabaab or commits a heinous crime against “unbelievers.” After all, he was such a good boy.
This leads us to the pivotal question, implied above, which remains generally unaddressed by the champions of “moderation.” What does the term “moderate” actually signify in an Islamic context? Do we know what we mean when we bandy about the word with such casual disregard, as if it denoted a single, coherent block concept? As Janice Fiamengo asks, in an article [21] for Freedom Press Canada Journal, “Is a Muslim a moderate if he does not approve of suicide bombing, but thinks that apostates from Islam deserve the death penalty? Or is a Muslim a moderate if he does not support the death penalty for apostates but believes in jail sentences or fines for ‘insulting’ Islam? What about the Muslim who is willing to tolerate blasphemy but believes that a girl who dishonors her family deserves to be physically disciplined? Or how about the Muslim who would not beat a wayward daughter but believes that homosexuality should be outlawed? Or can we say that a Muslim is a moderate who does not rage against homosexuals but nonetheless believes in the goal of establishing a worldwide Islamic Caliphate?” Fiamengo sums up: “Poll after poll of Muslims worldwide” (which include those who have settled in the West) “finds shockingly high levels of support for what most [Westerners] would consider illiberal and immoderate beliefs and practices, including harsh punishments…polygamy, 9/11 conspiracy theories, and disbelief in the Holocaust.”
In an article [22] dating back to 2003 (with a 2006 update), Daniel Pipes attempts to lay down the attributes that constitute that much sought-after entity, the “moderate” Muslim. The list, presented in the form of an overlapping questionnaire, is dauntingly substantial. In order to make the cut as a “moderate,” a Muslim would have to satisfy a veritable lather of criteria. He would need to reject violence, accept gender equality, be open to the West, eschew jihad, approve of non-Muslim civil rights and of intermarriage, pledge allegiance to his adopted country even if it conflicts with certain tenets of his faith and jurisprudential literature, be self-critical, support pluralism (which plainly does not mean multiple wives), condone security measures even if his person is scrutinized, disown Sharia law in the West, cooperate with the authorities, respect religions other than Islam and accept majority Christian and secular values, and agree with institutional revision of the militant passages in the Koran, among many other such desiderata.
The problem with Pipes’ questionnaire is palpable: any Muslim who answers Pipes’ queries positively may qualify as a model citizen but he is no longer a believing Muslim. The articles that define his faith and his culture have been decisively abrogated, especially with respect to the redaction of the Koran. The results of the German Gallup Coexist Index 2009 [23], which reveals that 80 percent of Muslims living in Germany “completely agree” that the Koran is Allah’s true word, are differentially applicable across the Western spectrum. But following Pipes’ surgical excisions, nothing remains to identify a Muslim as a Muslim except, perhaps, a preference for certain foods. Regrettably, Pipes’ ideal “moderate” is a figment of his imagination, a theoretical chimera, a creature of myth like a unicorn or wyvern or firedrake — in effect, an empty category. But its hollowness remains unperceived since it is a heavily paradigm-laden phenomenon, a collective assumption imposed upon a vacancy.
In other words, the term “moderate” applied to Muslims is a nebulous placeholder for a concept that resists definition but which appeals to a conciliatory mentality that does not want to look too deeply into a problematic reality. It means everything and nothing. It sheds a warm, narcoleptic glow upon a disturbing issue that should properly invite unsparing inquiry, and it thus enables us to preserve a comfortable sense of faux open-mindedness. “Moderate” in this usage is a numbing synonym for “good,” “benevolent,” “unoffending,” “peaceable,” etc., while pretending to be a descriptor for a “signified” without observable shape or precise content. Its chief function is to muddy the waters, that is, to close off debate and analysis. It is also an ego-massage for our cultural meliorists and multiculti preachers who preen themselves on their ecumenical bona fides.
The “moderates,” then, are neither a consolation nor a solution. They are an inchoate assembly of indefinables that provide the groundwork on which their jihadist brethren of all stripes raise their totalitarian structures and pursue their ideological objectives, aided by the blindness and all too often the compliance of those they wish to destroy. And this is why the invasion (aka the “demographic transition”) being carried out by the sultans of chaos and conquest is more than likely to succeed. The exceptions to the general rule are so few and so ethereal as to be statistically insignificant. Turkish PM Erdogan [24] (“There is no moderate or immoderate Islam. Islam is Islam and that’s it.”) and Anjem Choudary [25], head of the radical al-Muhajiroun movement in Britain (the division between moderates and extremists is a “classification [that] does not exist in Islam.”) are right. There is, indeed, only Islam.
Yet Muslim immigration proceeds unabated; the Islamic fact continues to be consecrated (see, for example, Canada’s lugubrious Islamic History Month); the non-existent pathology of “Islamophobia” (a locution invented by the Muslim Brotherhood to silence its critics) is brandished like a weapon beneath which the politically correct cower in apprehension; the term “moderate” with its freight of vagueness is applied as a panacea or alibi to temper our anxieties and justify our illusion that a seamless integration of the Muslim world into the modern world is possible; Islamic thuggery is whitewashed as legitimate resentment and payback for presumed Western depredations or explained away as the result of poverty, oppression and social stigmatization; the multiculti love of “diversity” generates a rigid uniformity of thought, characterized by the swirling convection of false sentiment and defective ideas, that benefits those who seek to impose a single-slayer theo-political system upon their adopted countries; and Islamic civilization, despite its almost unrelieved sanguinary record, is praised as an unequivocal boon to mankind. As a good friend of mine, a Lebanese Christian whose family fled the country during Yasser Arafat’s reign of terror, said to me the other day: “We must close the door before they Muslim this country too.” For him, the word “Muslim” has become a verb.
His remark puts me in mind of Dr. Nicolai Sennels, a psychologist in a Danish youth prison in which 70 percent of young offenders are Muslim. Given a “unique chance to study the mentality of Muslims,” Sennels comes to the conclusion [26] that Islam is immiscible with Western values and culture, like oil and water. “The Muslim mentality,” he affirms, “makes it impossible for most Muslims to integrate into our democratic, secular and civilized Western culture.” Islam, he writes, is distinguished by a “psychological cocktail of anger, low self-esteem, victim mentality, a willingness to be blindly guided by outer authorities, and an aggressive and discriminatory view toward non-Muslims, forced upon Muslims through pain, intimidation and mind-numbing repetitions of the Quran’s almost countless verses promoting hate and violence against non-Muslims.” This “is the reason,” he adds, “why Islam creates monsters.” Not a nice thing to say, but that is Sennels’ professional assessment.
We know not what we have done — although some of us know only too well what they have done. One way or another, the game appears to be lost. A tectonic drift on the human scale is changing the face of continents. For better or worse, such immense displacements of peoples and cultures are historically inevitable, and it may be that these vast nomadic transits cannot be prevented, or can be defended against only with insight, knowledge, fortitude and determination — qualities we appear to lack. As Sennels explains [27], “we in the West have a longstanding tradition of tolerance and openness, together with the multicultural agenda pushed by the Left, the Media, EU and UN. The cultural osmosis can therefore go only one way: Islam…drags the West back into medieval darkness, with its limitation of free speech and pre-enlightenment-style acceptance of religious dogmas and sensitivities.” Sennels does not mince words, uncomfortable as they may make us feel. He is unsparing in his analysis, based upon years of practice, observation and close study.
We may agree or disagree, but at the present juncture, there can be little doubt that an Islamic volkswanderung is well on the way to completing its mission of Musliming our teetering democracies, and a new “Dark Age” is looming on the western horizon.
(Artwork created using multiple Shutterstock.com [28] images.)
Article printed from PJ Media: http://pjmedia.com
URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/blog/is-the-game-lost/
URLs in this post:
[1] demographic transition: http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_briefs/RB5044/index1.html
[2] volkswanderung: http://arcana.wikidot.com/middle-ages
[3] Dark Ages Redux: http://hnn.us/article/40678
[4] comedy troupe: http://themuslimsarecoming.com/
[5] Passion For Freedom: http://www.passionforfreedom.co.uk/
[6] writes: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/deborah-weiss/geneva-conference-moves-toward-criminalizing-islamophobic-speech/
[7] rule of numbers: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/frontpagemag-com/raymond-ibrahim-exposes-islams-rule-of-numbers-on-fox-news/
[8] quote: http://www.blogwrath.com/canada-islam/anatomy-of-a-muslim-blackmail-the-case-of-pamela-geller-and-robert-spencer/4778/
[9] video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTyi-23YfFk&desktop_uri=%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DrTyi-23YfFk&app=desktop
[10] latest atrocity: http://www.thesundaily.my/news/873832
[11] murdered: http://patdollard.com/2013/09/firefighter-dies-after-muslim-jihadi-attempts-to-behead-him-without-provocation-in-toronto-cafe/
[12] Western Muslims and the Future of Islam: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00556DXY4/ref=as_li_ss_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=B00556DXY4&linkCode=as2&tag=pjmedia-20
[13] words: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/12/is-islam-the-problem-is-it-the-solution
[14] Political Islam: http://www.politicalislam.com/blog/when-the-jihad-comes-whose-side-will-you-be-on
[15] comments: http://frontpagemag.com/2013/dgreenfield/extremist-muslim-moderates-and-moderate-muslim-extremists/
[16] 22,000: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/Pages/TheList.htm
[17] integral part of the faith: http://www.andrewbostom.org/blog/2013/11/05/cover-design-of-my-forthcoming-monograph-the-muftis-islamic-jew-hatred-what-the-nazis-learned-from-the-muslim-pope/
[18] ClashDaily.com: http://clashdaily.com/2013/11/believe-islam-religion-peace-unpatriotic/
[19] counter-protest: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CUbnAiPZmc&feature=youtu.be
[20] Polls: http://www.thereligionofpeace.com/pages/opinion-polls.htm
[21] article: http://www.freedompress.ca/11072013_More-Reasons-Why-the-Moderates-Are-No-the-Answer.php
[22] article: http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2005/10/finding-moderate-muslims-more-questions
[23] German Gallup Coexist Index 2009: http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0CCkQFjAA&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.olir.it%2Fareetematiche%2Fpagine%2Fdocuments%2FNews_2150_Gallup2009.pdf&ei=I0x8Uvr9BouqqQG404GQCw&usg=AFQjCNHcNstdB-RySXE7OLevYV0SaC1G7w
[24] Erdogan: http://fellowshipoftheminds.com/2011/08/22/there-is-no-radical-or-moderate-islam-there-is-only-islam/
[25] Anjem Choudary: http://tinyurl.com/p3a8uqu
[26] conclusion: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/09/nicolai-sennels-psychology-why-islam-creates-monsters.html
[27] explains: http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/10/cultural-psychology-how-islam-managed-to-stay-medieval-for-1400-years.html
[28] Shutterstock.com: http://www.shutterstock.com/
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