A Jihad Watch commenter recently asked: “A theoretical question or two, especially in light of Hugh’s many posts over the years that money extended to Muslim countries is not only wasted but is financial support which comes back to bite us in the butt many times. Imagine a world in which virtually all American largesse to every Muslim nation ceases (with, perhaps, very minor amounts of direct relief for very specific situations excepted). What then? Certainly not only one scenario can be imagined. How many then? Is it possible that, for America, things could even become worse?” Here’s The Long Answer:
No, of course not. Add up the sums expended on the Muslims and Arabs, trying to bring them here and there a semblance of prosperity and political decency. Let’s start with Iraq. So far the whole misguided venture, which attempts to undo or diminish or close up the very fissures, ethnic and sectarian, that we should do nothing to discourage but rather intelligently exploit, has cost, in past, present and fixed future costs (such as treatment of wounded veterans), about two trillion dollars. While the Americans made sure to collect money for the first Gulf War, they have done nothing to request, or to receive, any money from surrounding Arab states, even though it might be argued that Saddam Hussein had been a threat to them as well.
Add in the nearly $70 billion given to meretricious Egypt, in what started as a kind of completely unnecessary payoff to Egypt, a reward for having graciously deigned to receive back the entire Sinai (along with its oilfields Israel had developed, and the three main airbases Israel had built, and all the other infrastructure, valued at some $16 billion in 1979 dollars). That money keeps flowing, even though Egypt has violated all of the promises it made in the Camp David Accords, to cease hostile propaganda against Israel and to encourage, in every way, friendly relations. Nothing like that has occurred; Mubarak visited Israel only for Rabin’s funeral, and has constantly rebuffed Israeli invitations; the Egyptian media has carried on an antisemitic campaign -- including a series on the government-run television, based on The Protocols. Egypt consistently runs sly interference for the mass-murderers running the government of the Sudan, and Egypt keeps playing a double game, but the Americans continue to fall for it, in the so-called “peace processing.” Egypt, of course, is part of the Slow Jihad brigade. As for what happens inside Egypt, to Copts and to real (not phony) liberals, that by now should be clear even to those who are in the State Department.
Jordan remains, like Egypt, one of the countries with a population most hostile to the United States. Every survey confirms this. And Jordan has received billions in American aid and special trade treatment.
The same is true, of course, for the soi-disant “Palestinians” -- that is, the local Arabs who were renamed the “Palestinian people” (yes, and all kinds of “construction of the ‘Palestinian’ identity went on -- Build We Must -- after the Six-Day War. Just ask Rashid Khalidi -- it’s one of his favorite topics, though he wouldn’t exactly put the “construction of the “Palestinian identity” matter in the way I have done.
And then there are all the moneys that go to Pakistan, permanently manipulative double-game deceitful Pakistan. Oh, I admit some generals are better than others. Musharraf wasn’t as bad as Zia ul-Haq, the real Muslim fanatic, while Musharraf liked to think of himself as a kind of incipient Ataturk (his father was once stationed in Turkey), though he was very far from being so. And those anglophone zamindars, and their cossetted children, the ones who acquire the pinky-bhutto sheen at Harvard or Oxford, are only outwardly better. But what matters is that when it comes down to it, they can rant about Jihad (see Pinky Bhutto on YouTube calling for “jihad” in Kashmir, while a crowd roars its approval) as well as any mad mullah. They are, in any case, forced to conform to what the primitive Pakistani masses want, and they don’t want secularism; they want more and more Islam, and the more miserable they become because, precisely, of Islam, the more they call for more Islam. That is, they call for the disease for which they think they are requesting the cure.
How much has gone to Pakistan? About $30 billion in economic aid, cancelled debt, and military aid, since 9/11/2001 and before that, during all the years when American generals found so appealing the Pakistani generals, with those pleasing ramrod straight pukka-sahib terry-thomas moustachioed appearances, so... well, so confidence-building, just like a sociopathic ponzi schemer on Wall Street, fleecing his carefully-selected flock.
And Afghanistan, where that smooth man, with a corrupt regime (and his relatives at the top of the list), Hamid Karzai, with that flowing robe, who a few years ago managed to enchant all of us. But now we know he is part of the problem. He protects the corrupt. He denounces the NATO forces at every opportunity to win points with his people. He too is no Ataturk, not even close, and will go down. And we will be left, still shoveling the money into Afghanistan in the vain belief that something -- but what, exactly? -- can come of this expenditure. Yet fighting from afar, telemachy, through local warlords let loose and hang the murderous consequences, is surely the best way to go, along with drones, intermittent bombing of any camps that are deemed a danger, and without any more talk about “failed states” or a belief that somehow Afghanistan, just because Al Qaeda is located there, is special. The people who bombed the Atocha station in Madrid, or the busses and underground in London, or murdered Theo van Gogh and, through a weak-minded Dutch pawn, Pim Fortuyn in Amsterdam, or who have plotted to bomb Paris, and a Christmas market in Strasbourg, and from the mosque in viale Jenner in Milan planned all sorts of mass poisonings -- these people haven’t needed the “failed state” of Afghanistan to do what they do. Let’s get off this notion that Afghanistan is a very important place to Muslim terrorists. No one place, no particular places, are necessary for Muslim terrorists to do their stuff. What they most need are other Muslims to help them out, to provide the sea in which they swim. The more Muslims in a Western country, the wider and deeper that sea.
No, the huge sums transferred by Infidel taxpayers to Muslim states and peoples in Dar al-Islam is a complete waste. We need that money, we need it to defend ourselves against the Muslim threat.
Furthermore, we see all over Western Europe is an additional gigantic transfer of wealth from Infidel taxpayers to Muslims on the dole. Those Muslims have come to Europe and settled deep within it. They are uneducated. They do not allow their women to be educated but use them to produce families of six, eight, ten, twelve children apiece (and with plural wives, a man can have quite a family by the time he’s done). And every possible advantage is taken of the free medical care, the free education, the free or heavily subsidized housing (all of it far beyond what is possible, what is even conceivable, in any of the Muslim places from which these people come). See the figures that these governments allow to be made public, for most of it they do not dare to reveal, for fear of what it would mean, and what the scale of the fury would be. And if we add to these sums the amounts now expended to monitor Muslim populations, to watch mosques, to pay Muslims to report on their own communities and anything suspicious they see -- are they just taking the security services for a ride? -- to follow, for example, the “200 known terrorist groups” now admitted to be operating in Great Britain alone, and then, furthermore, to pay for enhanced security at churches and synagogues and Hindu temples, to pay for more security guards on planes, and at airports, and at bus and train stations, and at every major government office building, or at any site of historic or symbolic importance -- well, it does add up, surely, by now, in Western Europe, to another several hundred billion dollars a year. And this at a time of collapsing economies everywhere.
And that is not all.
The very best thing we can do is to encourage disunity within the Camp of Islam. I keep writing mostly about sectarian (Shia and Sunni) and ethnic (that is, Arab and non-Arab) fissures within the Camp of Islam. But that is because I have been focusing on Iraq. I have, however, noted the resentment, among the Arabs “of the north” -- Egypt, Syria, Jordan -- for the “desert Arabs of the peninsula,” whom the Syrians and Egyptians think of as bedu, primitives who nonetheless have unfairly somehow been given all that oil wealth, oil wealth that those “desert Arabs” have undeservedly received. Those “desert Arabs” are supposedly so much more uncivilized than the suave Syrians and Egyptians, but it’s no longer true, because some of those younger Qataris and Kuwaitis and Saudis have acquired a sheen from going to school in America or England. But if the Infidel funds are cut off, and if Egypt, Jordan, the “Palestinian” Arabs, and even the Pakistanis (who by such things as the Mumbai raid are, some of the annoyed Arabs realize, “harming the image of Islam” -- they care only about the p.r. aspect of the thing, they don’t disapprove of violent Jihad in the slightest) have to go hat in hand to the rich Arabs, and call the bluff of the whole “loyalty of the Umma” business, by demanding that that oil wealth be shared, really shared -- well, you can just imagine what would happen.
Talk about resentment. Talk about fury. Talk about the rottenness of those “rich Arabs” who won’t share the wealth, and it’s Allah’s wealth, for god’s sake. It has nothing to do with geology. Allah decides everything. And of course those rich Arabs are supposed to share those oil (and gas) revenues with their fellow members of the Umma. Why, it could almost make a young Muslim feel like setting off a bomb or two in Kuwait City, and Doha, and Riyadh, and Jiddah.
Go to it, boys. You’re right to be mad.
That’s the Long Answer to the question “Is it possible that, for America, things could even become worse?” -- if we stop supplying tens and hundreds of billions of dollars to Muslim lands and peoples.
No comments:
Post a Comment