Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses the new French Prime Minister, Dominique de Villepin:
Born in Sale, jeek-by-jowl to Rabat, Dominique de Villepin has always believed that having spent the first few years of his life in Morocco has given him great understanding of Islam. He knows nothing about it. He persists in believing that there is a “good” Islam, and that the teachings of that “good” Islam must be supported. What there really is, as Ataturk understood, is a “sanitized” Islam that can, with the army and the police ready to enforce it, be monitored in the mosques. This is not the “real” Islam. All of the texts, of Qur’an and hadith, and all of the commentators and jurisconsults, come down on the side of the real, “bad” Islam. But as long as police and army, as in Turkey, are willing to monitor the khutbas (sermons at Friday Prayers), to censor the radio and television and newspapers in Arabic, to have agents (probably Berbers) constantly reporting on what is going on with the boys in the banlieue, with their bullets and bombs, then things can be kept under control.
But as in Turkey, eternal vigilance is the price of liberty from real Islam. Secularist supporters of Kemalism in Turkey know that the army is the final guarantor of Kemalism, and that the attempts of the non-secularists to gain power, in schools, in the police, in the government, are unceasing and extremely cunning, and the survival of Kemalism can never be assumed. Is this the future of France?
Even if that preening poseur and poetaster, D. de V., were suddenly to have had a change of heart, which is scarcely to be believed, his insistence that there is a “good” Islam and that the “bad” Islam is an aberration simply prolongs the confusion, and the day of intellectual reckoning.
And what will be the cost, to French taxpayers, of all that monitoring, all that paying for the interception of phone calls, all those agents in the mosques, all those security forces everywhere — and with only the hope of sweeping back, as Kemalism sweeps back, the tide of Islam? Vaste programme, monsieur.
Will D. de V. solve France’s problem? The idea that there is a “problem” and that there must therefore be a “solution” is, dare one say it, a very naive notion, betraying a worldview that is often ascribed to Americans — you know, we’ll just pitch right in and fix things up.
There is a “problem” but as there is no solution, so it might better be described simply as a situation. Islam owes its origins to the need by pagan Arabs — perhaps prompted by others, either a Jewish or a Christian sect attempting to convert them with things going awry — to have, while conquering other, far more advanced, wealthy, settled populations of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians and others (in the initial centuries of conquest), to possess their “own religion” which might emphasize the superiority of the Arabs — hence the need to read the Qur’an only in Arabic, which book has been handed to the “best of people” and in their own language, and all the other features of the Arab supremacist ideology contained within a supposedly universalist religion.
The emphasis in the Western press and Western governments on terrorism is foolish, for terrorism is only one tactic, one instrument of the Jihad to spread Islam, or rather to create the conditions in which Islam may spread unopposed. Terrorism is not even the most effective tactic — just as at present military force generally is not the best way to spread Islam across the globe The wherewithal to conduct this Jihad with greater force today has depended on several things — but most of all, on the money that has flowed from an accident of geology. This money has been used most effectively, as the “wealth” weapon, to pay for all sorts of things: bribing diplomats (votes in the U.N.) and government officials (recycling petrodollars for their own benefit, and that of their friends), and businessmen (ditto), and journalists on the take. It has been used to pay for mosques and madrasas all over the world, both within the Islamic lands and in the Western world, thus helping to entrench Islam in countries whose political, economic, and social arrangements and whose peoples the adherents of Islam, cannot — to the extent that they remain Believers (if they are silent dissenters from Islam, or open defectors–i.e., apostates — it is another thing), possibly wish well.
The money weapon coincided with an event unheard-of in history: admission by one group of countries of large numbers of people who possessed a belief-system, an ideology, that inculcated hostility, often murderous hostility, toward the indigenous inhabitants of the lands they were permitted to come and settle among. This happened for various reasons, none of them attractive. The German and French need for manodopera, workers, led in the first case to the admission of Turkish “guest-workers” whom, it was dreamily believed, would carry with them the supposed “secularism” of Kemalist Turkey, and in any case they would be returning home. Neither assumption proved correct; the guest-workers came, but came to stay. And while a very few in the second and third generations have jettisoned Islam altogether, most have become more fervent in their faith.
In France the miscalculation was based on arrogant negligence of Islam, the psychology of Muslims, and the tenets of Islam. The works of French experts on the theory and practice of Islam — Huart, Fagnan, Vajda, Dufourcq, Levi-Provencal, and many others — simply were ignored, while johnny-jump-ups such as Olivier Roy and Gilles Kepel, who continue to be wrong about almost everything, were listened to. A preening poseur such as Dominique de Villepin, a crook such as Chirac, have not made matters better. There was, of course, the fateful decision by Giscard d’Estaing to “reunite families” in order to diminish criminal or sociopathic behavior by maghrebins. That led to many wives, and even more children — and to birth rates four or five times higher than that of the non-Muslims. The results are there for all to see.
Islam and not-Islam are immiscible. Try as one might, if one is Tariq Ramadan, to keep up the mountebank’s patter, the jig is up — as even Dominique de Villepin may be beginning to realize. The nonsense cannot continue for much longer; too many people are, on their own, studying Islam — and refusing to accept what a small army of apologists, Muslim and non-Muslim, have attempted, not without success until now, to convince them that, despite all the mounting evidence in word, and in deed, they have nothing to fear from Islam. But they do.
And the best strategy of all is to have as little to do with the Muslim world as possible, so that, on their own, a sufficient number of Muslims may become aware that the political, economic, social, and intellectual ills of the Muslim peoples and polities is a direct result of Islam itself. No foreign aid, no attempts to play to Muslim demands that the West remold itself for Muslim sojourners, no rewriting of history to accommodate Muslim “self-esteem” by exaggerating intellectual or other achievements. And work steadily, even though the largest transfer of wealth in human history has already occurred (and much of it wasted) from the oil consumers to Arab and Muslim oil producers, to diminish that revenue, the value of those reserves that, if their true cost to Infidels were to be properly internalized, would shoot into the stratosphere.
Don’t expect any of this from Dominique de Villepin.