A provocative column from a European observer named Wolfgang Bruno, who also sends in this introduction:
My name is Wolfgang Bruno. I am European, and I am engaged in writing a book about the movement of ex-Muslims. It is my belief that modern communication technology such as the Internet may become a turning point for the Islamic world comparable to how the introduction of the printing press helped facilitate the Christian Reformation in Europe. The question is: Can Islam be reformed? And what will happen if it can’t?I will, every few weeks, write some articles about topics related to Islam. The essays I will write will all be offered free of charge to anybody who wants them. However, I will always send each new article to Mr. Robert Spencer, and if he likes it, you will read it first at Jihad Watch.
Despite of the fact that Bat Ye’or believes Eurabia is Europe’s inevitable future, I hope to prove her wrong, and that underneath the rubble that is Jacques Chirac, Jack Straw and José Zapatero, there is still something alive of the spirit that once gave birth to Western civilization. A Europe that remembers that it has managed to hold the line against Islamic aggression several times before. It may do so again.
Economic Aid to Muslims: Marshall Plan or Jizya?
France, where a growing Muslim minority is in effective control of parts of the country , is launching a £8.7 billion programme to tackle disaffection and increasing religious extremism in its Muslim-dominated ghettos. The labour minister, Jean-Louis Borloo aims to create a million jobs and 500,000 new homes in what has been called a "Marshall Plan for towns" . Under the Borloo plan, the youngsters would be enlisted for public service training projects.It sounds positive to call the initiative a “Marshall Plan”. After all, the Marshall Aid, provided by the USA to support a democratic Europe following the devastations during World War 2, is viewed as one of the most successful such initiatives in modern history. However, it is important to remember that the Marshall Aid was given to help rebuild societies after our ideological enemy had been crushed, not before. If somebody had killed Hitler in the late 1930s, should we then have provided financial assistance to Germany to win the hearts and minds of “more moderate” Nazis? As longs as the Fascist ideology behind Hitler remained alive and received general support, this would have been both futile and dangerous. Our enemies would have viewed it as tribute paid by a weak opponent, and would perhaps have used it to finance weapons aimed to kill us. The situation today is similar to this. As long as Islam remains strong and unreformed, any attempts to “buy off” Muslims will produce little results, only more contempt for our “softness” and lack of spine.
Jizya is a punishment tax that non-Muslim dhimmis according to the Koran 9,29 are supposed to pay for “protection”, “in willing submission”, as a sign of their inferior status to their Islamic rulers. Muslims will thus show little gratitude if non-Muslims give them money. This is Allah’s will and is only to be expected from the infidels. The French or other Europeans who give welfare money and support to Muslims and hope this will somehow buy them goodwill do not understand what they are dealing with. Muslims will think this is a sign that you accept having been defeated and being subjugated to Islam’s might. As a result, they will become more aggressive and demanding, not less. The problem in France’s immigrant ghettos is too much Islam, not too little money. Would sharia-style stonings in the suburbs cease if you raised the unemployment payments? Would the gang rapes in the ghettos? If so, then why isn’t a person like Abu “The Hook” Hamza peaceful? He does live on the dole in the UK.
We are told to find ways to win the hearts and minds of Muslims. Very few care to ask whether or not this feat is possible at all. What if the hearts and minds of Muslims are already occupied by Allah and Muhammad, and the only way to get their approval is by converting to Islam, or submitting to their rule as second – or third class citizens in a religious apartheid system? If that is the case, it means that all the projects aimed at giving financial assistance to Muslims are at best a waste of money, at worst outright counterproductive.
Welfare payments are not the only way transfer of money to Muslims from Western pockets takes place. There were many arguments presented by those who opposed the Iraq war. Most of them were poor. Yes, war is justified if it is for deposing tyrants that constitute a threat to both their own population as well as that of other nations. Saddam Hussein clearly fits that description. However, as reports keep ticking in about Iraqi women being harassed and subject to sharia laws and Christian churches being burnt , we need to ask ourselves a difficult question: Are we supporting the establishment of an Islamic state in Iraq, paid for by Western blood and money? And maybe in Afghanistan, too? As Mr. Robert Spencer writes, this illustrates one of the downsides of this War on Terror. This isn’t a war on “Terror”, and it is confusing and pointless to label it as such. Terrorism is just a method. Our adversary is an ideology, and that ideology is called Islam. Perhaps we should, as Hugh Fitzgerald has suggested, name it a “War on Radical Islamism”, “War on Political Islam” or a “War against Jihad”, to avoid the issue of identifying the very religion of Islam as the problem. However, we should always keep the real enemy closely identified in our minds.
Western civilization is now engaged in a battle for its very survival. Not only do our leaders refuse to name the enemy, as large parts of our populations are unaware of the fact that there is a struggle going on at all. We are still busy paying our enemies to destroy us, through buying billions of dollars of their oil, providing aid to their countries or giving them welfare money they use to build more mosques and support Jihadist activities in our lands. This has to change, or we will lose. This struggle could last for decades, if not generations. Our enemies want to bleed us dry, both literally and economically.
While Yassir Arafat’s wife has received hundreds of millions of dollars from Europeans taxpayers to buy Gucci purses, and billions and billions of dollars are spent on supporting Iraqis who clearly have their own Islamic agendas, the people who are risking their lives every day in challenging this ideology are penniless and more or less ignored. It is no exaggeration to say that Muslims fear ex-Muslims like Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Anwar Shaikh, Walid Shoebat and Azam Kamguian at least as much as, if not more than our nuclear arsenals. Islamist don’t fear war or death. On the contrary, they relish it and the opportunities it provides for martyrdom and safe passage to Paradise. Islam is a warrior creed, a very good one. As an intellectual construct, on the other hand, Islam is brittle, and will collapse if sufficiently challenged. That is why Islamists are so desperate to kill critics like Theo van Gogh. And that is why this is precisely an area were we should put much more resources at work. Ibn Warraq’s books and others made by former Muslims should be translated by professionals into every major language known to man, made freely available on the Internet and broadcasted on radio to Muslims everywhere. With due and generous compensation paid to the authors, of course. Their websites should receive funding for the upgrades needed to reach a mainstream audience, as should the best websites by non-Muslims such as Jihad Watch. All of this will cost only a tiny fraction of the money now wasted on misguided schemes for “dialogue” with Muslims, and will yield far greater results. In the era of the suicide bomber, we cannot afford not to do it. If not, our children and grandchildren could be paying a much heavier price tomorrow.
Wolgang B.,
Well said.
And, agreed: the money poured down these ratholes of 'mutlicultural understanding' (read: 'protection racket') are laughable stop-gaps, like throwing buckets of champagne ice into the hole torn in the side of the Titanic and hoping it will miraculous freeeze solid and plug the leak- in some 'mysterious sympathy' with the iceberg that cause the calamity.
Religious misunderstanding of the Koran (hadiths, etc.) are the root of the disaster in the Western world's incredbibly stupid reaction to the threat from radical fundamentalist Islam.
Reading books by ex-Muslims may be interesting, but is unnecessary. Reading the Qu'ran itself(and hadiths) is more to the point.
We know that their imams and mullahs issue fatwas against those who leave their charming 'faith', and that should be reason enough to oppose their 7th century despotic mind-death. Where else do people, who disagree with the proclamations of a religious tract, have to die for their skepticism. (Outside of 13th century France, 14th century Germany, 15th century England or 16th century Spain, that is?)
Islam is self-exposed by its current extremists, who are merely taking its illogical tenets to their logical conclusion.
The more of their true face that is seen by the world, the sooner the delusion of buying them off with pharoah-style 'works projects and bread' will fade like the appeasement of Chamberlain and his fellow-sleepwalking-travellers in France ("The Last Time I Saw Paris" is a revelation of the mindset that led to the Vichy collaboration) and the U.S. in 1939.
Good work, again, WB, but what I really wish for is that the fanatical Muslim sh*t will hit the Western fan, sooner than later. And bring this fight out in the open.
No more mealy-mouthed, abstractions like "The War On Terror", but an honest "Clash of Secular Freedom Versus Radical Islamic Global Tyranny".
And, if they slaughter a few more of their own ex-members along the way, that will only stiffen the spine of the West- and its allies. Especially if they were brilliant artists and writers and thinkers.
Islam may have some sweetness in its dogma, but it only coats a poison pill.
Foreign aid to Muslim Countries is a TAX disguised in compasion,Christian nation appear to be buying off terrorists with money to avoid being
attacked at home here in the West.
Christians pay a TAX in Islamic Countries and
the best way to TAX Christians on soil that hasn't been claimed for Allah is to extort money through the threat of being murdered for Allah's cause.
profitsbeard:
Didn't see your posting as I composed mine,I do agree in the poison pill and it's like chocolate coated Mothballs.
I just don't trust any of them anymore,the denial and paranoia make it futile to attempt a intelligent,sane,honest debate about islam.
NO ISLAM - KNOW A FREE HOLLAND
The main problem with Western foreign aid is that it merely prolongs conditions which prevent Muslims from coming to understand, however dimly and fitfully, that the real cause of their economic failures, as of their political, social, and intellectual failures (and these are all interrelated, and mutually reinforcing), is Islam itself.
Since 1973 (and before then there was also plenty of money coming in, but not quite so much)5-6 trillion dollars have gone from consuming nations to producing nations, almost all of them Muslim countries. They have certainly enjoyed all the money, but failed to create modern economies. Those Muslim states that have little or no such energy revenues, because they have to fend for themselves, cannot contribute to the world-wide support of mosques and madrasas and to the buying of arms, the way the Saudis and other Arabs and Iranians do. Had Iraq not had the oil money, it would not have been able to buy the arms that have made Iraq one vast armaments heap.
Why should the United States, for example, have poured more than $60 billion into Egypt, a world center of anti-American propaganda, and antisemitism, a country 98% of whose citizens claim that they hate America? What have we gained? Would we not have gained far more, by denying Egypt that aid? Would not the corruption of the Mubarak government have been diminished -- and remember, wherever there is foreign in these countries, the well-connected skim much of it, and the resentment this causes is directed, or carefully redirected, at the "Infidels" so that it will not be aimed at the corrupt themselves. Or, the corrupt officials are denounced -- but not for their corruption, but for their "Infidel" corruption (Sadat, for example, or the Al-Saud family). Whatever the outrage, or perceived injustice, in Muslim countries it will always be interpreted through a Muslim grid, or viewed through a Muslim prism.
When the United States withdrew from Somalia, this was seen as a defeat. But it was not. It was not a defeat, and not a failure, but an intelligent response to what, it was realized by those making policy, was and is a hopeless situation. Is Somalia poor, weak, riven by warlord violence? You bet. And so what? It is no threat to us, not now. Let the Somalis frighten and kill each other. Eventually, someone will grab enough power, and even decide that-- hmmm -- perhaps there is something to that Infidel world after all. Who knows? Are dozens of little Ataturks impossible?
In Libya, what got Khaddafy's attention was not only the invasion of Iraq, but the failure of his arms programs (transparently hidden behind that Great Man-Made River Project), and the failure to modernize his oil industry. No Infidel people or polity should be in the business of disguising from the Muslims themselves their own failures. It was only when Turkey lost its empire, and was in danger of being dismembered or shrunk still further, that Ataturk was able to instigate his reforms to constrain Islam. That should be the goal.
A Marshall Plan makes sense if those being aided are on your side -- or can potentially be on your side. But that is not true with Islam. Can that get through the thick heads of people in Washington, London, Paris, Bonn? That Iraq is not "Germany or Japan" after World War II should be clear -- Nazism and militarist Kodo were crushed and discredited. But only Saddam Hussein has been discredited, and his regime -- not Islam. And Islam in Iraq explains the hostility even to people who have gotten rid of a monster, and fixed up schools, roads, hospitals. And it will remain the problem. A handful of Iraqis may admit it to themselves. None will admit it to the outside world of Infidels. We have to figure it out, and act accordingly.
There is no Infidel Man's Burden -- not now, not ever. There is the Infidel Man's Debt of Gratitude, to those in the past who produced the civilization of which he (or she) is a beneficiary. And that is why, however uneasy or discomfited one may be by the present condition of that civilization, one owes a duty to the past, and to posterity, to preserve it, coute que coute, from islamization.
Wolfgang Bruno, Hugh,
I rarely come accross such a deeply-thought collection of on-the-mark assessments as the ones contained in this page. I especially like the one giving the advice to knock them mussies hard and only when they give proof of having understood the inadequacies of their age old jihad ways and the right assisting others to pay back in kind, give a helping hand to the ones who remain after the purge.
Hugh's last paragraph condenses all we Westerners need to keep in mind to just pass to the offensive and deny those barbarians of our age the initiative. If only because of it, the presence of the American Army in Iraq is more that justified. Shame on the ones who in Old Europe not only do not recognize in them the brave warriors who defend the stockade but who oppose Mr. Bush and what he is doing.
Bloody idiots they are! Dhimmi fodder indeed.
Maybe if the Muslims returned to the custom of knocking the infidels upside their heads when they paid their jizya it would wake the Euro-dhimmis up(?).
Would the dignity of the generous French politicians be slighted if they understood their state welfare policies are viewed by the recipients as nothing more than Jizya?
Or, has the word, dignity, now taken on a secondary meaning: (2) the result of an ingratiating majority desperately trying to appease an ingrate minority through bribes and allurement?
Before we consign the cradle of Western Civilization, i.e. Europe to the grave, let's consider another potential outcome.
As the muslim population increases the demands for muslim holidays, partial Shariah, etc rise. Europeans become increasingly restive about their future.
There are growing demands for a ban on further immigration by muslims. This leads to muslim protests in the streets. Tempers flare. Terror attacks occur here and there.
As the police begin to crack down on radical jihadists, there are muslim riots and protests against such actions. The native Europeans begin to wake up en masse.
Now the demand for the expulsion of muslims is heard. Governments appear paralyzed. Sporadic violence growns.
One European country moves to deport muslims. This leads to armed insurrection by muslims across Europe. Europeans unite in common cause against islamic cultural fascism. Governments that fail to respond are threatened with civil war.
Eastern Europe becomes a bulwark of the new European renaissance. Europeans wake up and take hold of their communality. The USA is called upon for help and, again, intervenes to save the day. A majority of American muslims emerge as the forefront of an islamic reformation. Those that don't are deported, stripped of their citizenship and sent back to the wasteland of the Middle East.
America now makes a determined effort to rid itself of dependence upon the oil economy. An Apollo Project for energy independence not only frees us from foreign oil dependency, it also allows us to literally dismantle at will the oil infrastructure in fundamentalist islamic countries. The loss of oil income sends these fundamentalist muslim countries into a tailspin.
The dream of a truly United Europe is achieved in the struggle against the islamic threat. The European Union emerges in fact after the islamic threat has been vanquished. The islamic world enters a period of deep soul-searching and is wracked by civil wars in its own Reformation.
Mike H
Mike H,
I have no doubt that the politically correct Europeans will resort to nationialistic tendencies.
They brought the whole problem upon themselves and will have to deal with it accordingly.
A week or so after 9/11, Congressman Tom Tancredo made a statement that the war would end sooner if we called it by its correct name - the war against Islam. He was vilified by the press, but recently relected to his second term in congress.
You know, the issue of whether or not we send aid is not the best question. To my mind, we are sending aid to the wrong people. We should only send aid to those people who appreciate it and share similar goals for the future. I am sure there are some "moderates," Ok I know they are few and far in between, that we could send financial aid to; and, for those that don't share our goals, we need to only assist them marginally, say in times of complete and absolute necessity - say after an earthquake, or during a famine.
However, we should absolutely NOT enable the Muslim regimes that create the madness we are facing today.
Actually, for the most part, we need to let them work out their own problems.
No aid. No help. No Asylum seekers. No welfare. No mosques. No "Clerics". No child support.
Return ticket per cattle train: One way! Back to the Sahara...
I have just written to Mr. Tancredo:
Dear Mr. Tancredo, first of all I'm not a member of the US Armed Forces but a European who travels to the US regularly.
I just read about you on the jihadwatch.org website. As a German / Western European with a Christian background and a black girlfriend in the USA I find it important that you keep warning about the dangers of Islam. I have read a lot of online articles about this so-called religion recently that I worry about our safety if we keep allowing unrestricted immigration of muslims.
When I visited my girlfriend this October I got grilled by immigration at Cincinnati Airport (which is fair enough because I am totally for enhanced checks on people trying to enter the US). What I was surprised to see was a family of appx. 12 or so muslims (women and girls wearing the hajib) entering the US via the US citizens checkpoint.
I was wondering if we Europeans who arrived on the same plane from Frankfurt were considered a bigger danger to the United States than these people. I hope more people will realise that Islam isn't a peaceful religion but the contrary. People like Kurt Eckhardt and you need to be seen in the media moreoften.
Thanks for listening and all the best. Stay strong and focussed.
Kind regards
(full name obviously withheld here)
Desperate situations calls for desperate measures. Am always hoping the next big-bang terror attack will wake up the west. Somewhere, someplace tipping point will be reached. And then what? A 1000 Srebenica all across euroland? Is history gonna repat itself? I'd rather the good and the honest and the sensible among themuzzie mases be given one last chance - 'leave islam or fight to the death' before the gullitone of western civilizational superiority falls on islamism.