Fitzgerald: Why don’t Muslims integrate into Western societies?

2) Inshallah-fatalism. The deep belief in the will of Allah, of Allah ta'ala (Allah Knows Best), of references in every greeting, paragraph, sentence,

3) The habit of submission -- of mental submission -- does not encourage skepticism, liveliness, "thinking outside the silly box" and so on. The habit of mental submission encourages -- the habit of mental submission. This can limit entrepreneurial activity, just as the sullen dislike of one's status, of the status of Muslims who do not lord it over non-Muslims but must adjust, can help to explain the difficulty of employing Muslims in a non-Muslim workplace.

4) Why should Infidels wish to employ Muslims? Why should they wish to create an unpleasant work environment for themselves? Fetish-worshippers of diversity may wish to do so: a newspaper, say, that thinks the "best way" to cover Muslims is to hire a Muslim (which is, in fact, probably the worst way, if it amounts to the usual apologetics and misinformation). Sometimes, of course, one is dealing with those who either hide very well, or may in fact not feel -- as "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims -- the hostility toward non-Muslims that Islam inculcates. But even those who never go to a mosque may at times engage in a sudden flaring-up, a sudden note of hysteria, when the subject of Islam is even tangentially raised -- as if it is simply a subject completely off-limits for Infidels. And nowadays, how can one discuss anything in the world's news without discussing Islam? One sees this reaction even in some of the seemingly most Westernized, most sophisticated, and suavest of Muslims -- a sudden rage, a sudden rush of furious defensiveness that overcomes the truth, that makes even someone who a minute ago was so calm, so rational, so seemingly part of the smae moral and intellectual universe -- and who a minute before might have been attacking aspects of Islam himself -- will, if an Infidel agrees with the attack, or dares to add his own two-cents' worth to the discussion, will withdraw into a circling-the-wagons mode.

5) Muslims through time and space lived in the lands they conquered through the loot acquired from non-Muslims, and they continued to exploit those non-Muslims thorugh the jizyah, and in other ways. As historians of India well know, the Hindus were initially subject to mass execution and mass enslavement. Some of those enslaved converted. Others did not wait to be enslaved, but converted after witnessing the realities of life under Muslim rule. But the Mughal -- and even the earliest Muslim rulers from the initial conquests -- realized that if the only possible choices open to Hindus -- as non-People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), they were not permitted to live and practice openly their religion -- were death or conversion, then there would ultimately be no non-Muslims left to be exploited economically for the purposes of the Muslim state. This could end the fabled Mughal luxury, the famed Mughal magnificence that so entrances certain writers (as the upscale, and more scholarly, Barbara Cartland of Mughal India, William Dalrymple). Hindus were accorded "honorary" status as dhimmis, not because of Muslim mercy, but because by so doing, the ruling Muslims could economically exploit them through the jizyah (which the tolerant, syncretistic Akbar managed to temporarily suspend -- one more reason why Akbar is remembered fondly by Hindus, and despised by Muslims).

Another way of finding loot, or slaves to exploit, were the constant series of slaving raids. Islam created slave societies -- slaves on horseback, slaves in the harem, slaves to build the palace of Moulay Hasan or the Taj Mahal. Everywhere, slaves from non-Muslim lands -- from black Africa by the tens of millions, slaves from the Slavic lands and Georgia and Circassia, by the many millions, and slaves taken over centuries by raiding parties that landed, destroyed villages, and seized villagers up and down the coasts of Western Europe. This too was a source of wealth, and in fact the corsairs that left ports in North Africa, especially Algiers, continued to raid Christian shipping until two things -- the American military response to the Barbary Pirates, and then the seizure, by the exasperated French, of Algiers in 1830, which put an end to the corsairs and their officially-sanctioned raids on Christian cargoes and enslavement of Infidel sailors.

The corsair-piracy has stopped, or found new means of expression, but the jizyah, in disguised forms, has continued. Arab and Muslim states have economies that depend heavily on one of two things:

1. The oil and gas-rich Muslim states depend on this manna from Allah -- which is exactly how they see it. They do not regard this accident of geology as an accident of geology, but as a sign of Allah's favor -- why else should so much of the oil lie under the lands of dar al-Islam?

2. The Arab and Muslim states that do not possess oil wealth, instead of having the oil-rich Muslim states share that wealth, have managed to get on the Infidel list of countries deserving of foreign aid. Suddenly that supposed loyalty of the umma al-islamiyya seems to disappear when it comes to oil money, save for the sums given to reward suicide bombers among the "Palestinians," and of course for any significant arms projects. No matter how corrupt, how full of anti-Americanism and antisemitism these societies may be, Western money keeps pouring in: to Egypt ($60 billion from America alone), to Pakistan, to Jordan, and to the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, the local Arabs who after 1967 were carefully renamed as the "Palestinian people" so as to disguise the essential nature, and ultimate aims (not exactly concealed, by the way) of the Arab war on Israel, an Infidel sovereign state in the midst of dar al-Islam that must, in Arab and Muslim eyes, go -- sooner or later. It is a matter of pride. It is a matter of self-esteem. It is a matter of how the Arabs and the Muslims see themselves. What else could possibly matter?

The $9 billion pledged by the G-8 at Gleneagles to keep afloat a non-viable state, or a state that will only be viable at the expense of tiny Israel, because for some reason everyone has ignored the real history of that area, the demographics, the nature of land ownership, and as well has decided to apply rules about territory either captured from an aggressor, or if not captured directly, assigned to one of the winning members in a coalition -- rules that have been applied after every war. For how else did Italy acquire the Alto Adige, which when it was handed over had a population that was 97% German-speaking and ethnically part of Deutschtum? Yet who among us thinks Italy was not entitled to, and should return to Austria, the Sudtirol it possesses? And what of all the changes in borders after World War II, and the expulsion of ethnic Germans from Czechoslovakia (3 million Sudeteners), from Poland, and elsewhere, not to mention land taken (Kaliningrad was once Kant's Koenigsberg)?

Yet the Americans and Europeans pay the jizyah to the "Palestinians" and are fearful of stopping, just as they continue to pay Pakistan, the supporter and promoter of the Taliban, the supporter and promoter of Dr. A. Q. Khan (without whom North Korea would not be the problem it is today). We continue to engage in bribery instead of reading Pakistan the riot-act, threatening to destroy not only its military (withholding all parts, all future deliveries) but also its economy (no one has to buy the child-labor textiles and rugs of Pakistan, and while that economy -- that is, while its zamindars -- are prospering, that can be ended in a minute).

Within Europe, the Muslims have the same attitude. The property and women of the Infidels belongs to them. There is nothing wrong with taking Infidel property. There is nothing wrong with raping Infidel women. It is not an accident that 70% of the prison population in France is Muslim; that 70% of the rapes of women in Scandinavia are by Muslims; that the drug traffickers in Holland, and the spacciatori di droga in Italy, are Muslims -- no, this should not surprise.

What does surprise is the failure of the non-Musli world to understand that this all fits into, and can be explained by, a coherent ideology that makes it virtually impossible for Muslims -- to the extent that they remain full believers, or turn into full believers -- to ever comfortably fit into, or ever accept, Western or other non-Muslim societies, mores, manners, laws, or ever to accept the idea of living in a society where the Infidel ways, the Infidel understandings, are to be permanent. This rankles Muslims. This is not right. The world belongs in the end to Allah, and to his people. It is to them that the property and women of others belongs. Not every Believer feels this, but in the canonical texts, and the tenets logically derived from them, and in the attitudes and atmospherics to which those tenets and the whole system of Islam gives rise, these views are not strange but natural and familiar.

And then there is another problem: the problem of the "moderate" Muslim -- which is to say, the relaxed, or unobservant Muslim, the Muslim who may not act according to the tenets of Islam today, but may suddenly acquire a deep psychic need to return to Islam, for whatever reasons. When one is in mental disarray, and happens to be a Muslim, provided with a Total Explanation of the Universe, and a Complete Regulation of existence, one can quite easily come to view the universe through the prism of islam.

And it need be nothing political -- nothing in the newspapers -- that sets one off. A death in the family, the loss of a job, the failure to get into a certain school, the perception that others do not share one's worldview and see no reason to accommodate themselves, and of course the depression that can come upon so many of us, Muslim and non-Muslim, at any time -- are all cause for alarm. But non-Muslims provide their own answers, their own home remedies, as they can, and those answers, and their affixing of blame for their problems, can be as various as their parents, their spouses, their children, their siblings, their employer, The System, the stars, Fate, their cholesterol level, their serotonin level, even -- at times -- themselves. Muslims have only to look to the one thing that always presents itself to be blamed: the Infidels. Their wiles, their whisperings of Shaytan, their decadence, their indifference, their whateveritis of which Infidels are guilty. And once a non-Muslim Muslim, a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslim, begins to redsicover Islam, to return to Islam, he can turn into that other thing -- a Muslim Muslim. And that is the problem, the permanent problem for Infidels, who have done nothing to deserve this ever-ready, this omnipresent blame.

There is no solution. Reducing Muslim numbers, and Muslim power, and ensuring that the Infidel lands do not engage in some kind of attempt to win Muslims by changing their own laws and customs, but remain implacably themselves, or perhaps deliberately Islam-hostile rather than Islam-friendly, so that those who now claim that they are "thinking of leaving" really do leave -- would anyone wish to stop them -- should be the goal of Infidels, engaged only in defending themselves against the carriers of Jihad, all over the world.