Fitzgerald: Caliphate? Pah

In truth the "worldwide caliphate" will not happen because for two reasons. One, they is just simply too many divisions in Isalm to ever even bring it about, ( sunni, shia, ete. ), and two, because of the massive growth of the Christian faith in the global south. As said in the famous HBO tv show, "The Sopranos", "forget about it".

However, that is not the main worry, because it seems so unlikely. What does worry, what is realistic to worry about, are the gains to be made on the path to attaining that seemingly unattainable goal.

Hitler also had some grand and unrealistic plans for a world wide thousand year Reich.

It didn't happen, but except for a few major blunders it almost happened; and he had nowhere near the following that the islamists have.

And there, what is happening in Western Europe is most disturbing, and most in need of attention.

And what ever happened to Bridgett Bardot? Has she been silenced for speaking out?

I'd like to see Hugh's analysis of the rest of the linked article. It seems that Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV of National Defense University urge that we in the West not use the terms "jihad", "jihadist", and "mujahad" as perjorative synonyms for Islamic terrorists and terrorism.

Instead, Streusand and Tunnell 'asked Muslim scholars what the correct term for Islamic extremists would be and they came up with "hirabah." This word specifically refers to those engaged in sinful warfare, warfare contrary to Islamic law. "We should describe the Islamic totalitarian movement as the global hirabah, not the global jihad," they wrote'.

I'd say that's a mistake as we would then accept the myth that the historical reality of "jihad", "jihadist", and "mujahad" was some sort of Musilim chivalry.

It's as if we had been asked in the 1960's not to use the term "Soviets" to refer to our cold war opponents but to instead use some Stalinist word such as "wreckers".

Actually, I am not sure how being in denial of the goals or ultimate call to action (i.e. Caliphate) of islam is of any practical utility.

If such a goal is delusional; it would be sure to discredit the movement. It hasn't in some 1400 years.

However, the Caliphate in whatever form, is one of the adhesives that keeps all the sects within islam bound irrespective of many different superficial fissures.

It's like the Arab shop-keeper in Paris who says "I am not an Arab, I am a muslim; I am from the Cresant region."

You however, happen to know that is was born in Egypt; has a wife there; in addition to the truth that he tells you at the moment.

witness,

I think Bridgett Bardot could still be alive, but she could have gone into hiding for her own safety's sake.

henry:

Thanks for reminding me to take my meds.

I'm very glad to see the renewed focus on pedagogy at this site. Another excellent post.

"I'd like to see Hugh's analysis of the rest of the linked article. It seems that Dr. Douglas E. Streusand and Army Lt. Col. Harry D. Tunnell IV of National Defense University urge that we in the West not use the terms "jihad", "jihadist", and "mujahad" as perjorative synonyms for Islamic terrorists and terrorism."
-- from a posting above

The piece above is part of a longer posting the other day, which perhaps I should re-post below. Most of that post (and indeed, I put up another one on the same theme but I can't remember where) was devoted to this word "hibarah," and why its use, as recommended by Streusand and Tunnell, is dangerous because the word itself misleads.

It is not hard to figure out where the word comes from. It comes from Muslim regimes and their apologists, eager to protect certain regimes that are attacked by local "truer" Muslims for their corruption and misrule. The obvious example is Saudi Arabia, where a family, the Al-Saud, has for decades been stealing, not merely skimming off the top, large amounts of the nation's oil wealth. Those who dislike this, naturally, cannot raise a revolt against the ruler for mere appropriation of wealth; in Islam, the despot is owed submission. He (or his family, or his family-and-friends plan) can be opposed, in the moral and mental universe that Islam posits, only if he is not a Muslim, if he is an "Infidel."

The assorted terrorists or would-be terrorists captured or killed in Saudi Arabia need to be described. They, those enemies of the Al-Saud, and even greaeter Protectors of the Faith, think of themselves as engaged in Jihad against the false Muslims, the pretend Muslims, the so-corrupt-and-terrible-they-must-be-called-Infidels Muslims. Their word is "Jihad." This, of course, cannot be permitted; it is a danger to the Al-Saud, a danger to all the corrupt ruling families, a danger to Mubarak in Egypt (with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ikhwan al-islamiyya, a permanent worry). So the Saudi rulers, and other threatened rulers, now employ the word "hibarah."

And of course, they are quick to suggest, these ever-helpful people, and Muslim apologists of the slyest variety with contacts in the American civilian and military, that the same word should be used by the Americans. And some Americans, not thinking through the matter, apparently agree. They think the avoidance of the word "Jihad" and adoption of the word "hibarah" is just the thing.

But it isn't. For the Americans have needs, have interests, quite different from those friendly would-be advisers who are Muslim, whether in the diplomatic corps, or American citizens now possibly employed by the Americna military. For they want to avoid at all costs the word "Jihad," knowing perfectly well that that word is central to Islam, and if they can persuade the American government to think of the world-wide Jihad (that is, the Greater Jihad that is merely the sum of all the Lesser Jihads)not as part of Islam, not a duty of Muslims, but instead as "sinful warfare," the kind that is not permitted, that is not legitimate. The Saudi rulers spend great time and effort trying to de-program, as they see it, captured Saudi terrorists. No doubt they will do the same with Saudi citizens sent back from Guantanamo. They do not object -- why should they? -- to attacks on bona fide Infidels, the Americans, Israelis, Europeans of every kind. But they want to make sure that these people, before being released back into society, have had drummed into their skulls the idea that violence against those hardworking, good Muslims, the Guardians of the Two Noble Sanctuaries, the promoters of Islam all over the world, the Al-Saud, and their hangers-on at court, are opposed only by those who have been led astray, led to commit the crime of "sinful warfare" or "hibarah."

But it is not "sinful warfare" to make war on the real Infidels -- that is, us. The word "hibarah" will not do. Use of the word, as Streusand and Tunnell recommend, would get in the way of American comprehension. It would merely deepen the misunderstanding of what the origin and scope of the menace of Jihad is, a mistunderstanding that largely explains the topsy-turvy farce of tarbaby Iraq, where the stated goals of the Adminstration (Sunni Arabs and Shi'a Arabs and Kurds all getting along in a nation-state made prosperous by lots of help from America, best of allies to these presumably "moderate" Muslims as they march forward to create that Light Unto the Muslim Nations) will do nothing to weaken the camp of Islam, but instead will be an attempt to prevent the very outcome that ultimately will come to pass (but after how many more American resources squandered in Tarbaby Iraq?)and that is likely to establish as the fault line between Sunni and Shi'a in the Middle East a line running slightly off-center thorugh Iraq.

The word "hibarah" applies to situations within Muslim-ruled lands, a word used to denounce the fomenters of revolt against the (often cruel and corrupt) rulers. Useful to them. And since the word is applied to Muslim countries, it refers to "warfare" in the classic sense -- qital, or combat, that is violence of all kinds. The word "hibarah" does not include the main instruments of Jihad today -- the use of the "money weapon" (to pay for the spread of Islam through mosque-and-madrasa building and upkeep, propaganda, armies of apologists, including non-Muslim apologists), Da'wa campaigns, and demographic conquest.

But if the American government, and its military, cannot see that this "war" is far more than mere tanks and guns and bombs, and that in particular, the most dangerous theatre of this war is now Western Europe, where through those largely non-violent means -- Da'wa, demographic conquest, and the money weapon -- the forces of Islam become ever stronger when they should be held up to close and criticla scrutiny, their moves constrained, their gains reversed, by Infidel peoples and polities intent on defending their own laws, customs, understandings, and civilizational legacy.

The word "Jihad" however, is not limited to the instrument of violence. Muslims write all the time about the varied instruments of "Jihad" to spread Islam: "pen, speech" (propaganda, or Da'wa), "wealth" (the money weapon, from boycotts and bribes, to the building of mosques, to the buying of armaments that Muslims cannot produce, to the buying up of Western hirelings to promote the goals of Muslims, both in Dar al-Islam and in Dar al-Harb). And, most recently,over the past 30 years, all the discussion about the weapon of demographic conquest, openly mentioned by Boumeddienne at the U.N. in 1974 ("we will conquer you through the bellies of our women" or words to that effect).

The word "Jihad" is the correct word, the word that does not hide, but helps reveal, all the instruments being used to spread Islam until it everywhere dominates, and Muslims rule. The word "hibarah" hides this from view. It diminishes, rather than increases, the likelihood of understanding among a still largely ignorant, and confused, Infidel public. Not as ignorant, however, and not as confused, as many of those in the government who are wedded to earlier constructs that they have difficulty in shedding, and who, by their very positions, come into contact with the most plausible, clever, smiling representatives of the Muslim world who frame things as artfully as they can, offer their own spin, in order to obtain what they want from people whom, to most of those Arabs and Muslims, seem limitlessly gullible.

The example of this I like best is not that of Carter (and Brzezinski, and Gary Sick) failing completely to comprehend Khomeini (a "fellow man of faith" for Carter, who felt they therefore must have so much in common). Nor Carter a few years earlier, when he took the side completely of Saint Sadat against homely, sentimental Begin, who insisted "they [Sadat and Carter] really like me" as he gave away the store, day by day by day, during those hideous sessions at Camp David. No, nor is it those successive Treasury Secretaries who through the 1970s and 1980s kept rushing off to Saudi Arabia to obtain the "cooperation" of our "staunch Saudi allies. Nor the various Presidents who started the tradition of paying the Jizyah of foreign aid to any Arab or Muslim country that forgot to be born rich with oil -- Egypt, Jordan, the PLO as "representative" of the "Palestinain people" in its, and their, various embodiments, Pakistan (that started long ago, with the love affair between American generals and those ramrod-straight Terry-Thomas mustachioed Pakistani generals, so straight-talking, so pukka-sahib, so...so "just like us." No, nor is it Eisenhower, puppet of John Foster Dulles in foreign policy, the Dulles who believed in CENTO (the curtain came down on that farce in 1958, when Nuri al-Said's mutilated body was dragged through the streets of Baghdad -- "strongman" Nuri al-Said, "pro-Western" Nuri al-Said). No, it is not Carter, not Eisenhower, not Nixon, not any of them who stand out as absolutely the worst in their failure to begin to have a glimmer of what Islam is all about. No, the answer is that they all must share the prize.

Nothing extenuate? No, let's extenuate. Let's make their case. After all, in the midst of the Cold War, who knew abou t the belief-system of Islam except that it should be called a "religion" and that it was somehow, for some reason we were never offered in detail, a particularly strong "bulwark against Communism" even if Nasser and others in the Arab and Muslim world apparently found the Soviet Union far more to their liking than they did any of the liberal democracies of the West.

Those CIA agents, who thought they were doing god's work in Afghanistan during the Soviet period, who proudly remember their deeds of derring-do in helping the local mujahedin, appear not even now to begin to consider the possibility that possibly they were not doing something in the long-term interests of the United States or the rest of the Western world, by supplying money, weapons including thousands of Stinger missiles, and looking on benighly as the Saudis also provided aid, and then just as benignly, looking on as the Taliban were raised up in Pakistani madrasas, and then, again with Pakistani and Saudi support, and then diplomatic recognition, establishing their rule all over Afghanistan. Meanwhile, who was paying attention in Washington, or elsewhere in the West, to the sinister I.S.I.[i.e., Pakistani intelligence services]-supported Dr. A. Q. Khan? Who noticed what he was doing in Western nuclear laboratories in Holland. The Soviet Union was within a decade of collapse, whatever happened in Afghanistan. Gdansk workers in Solidarity, decades of programming from Radio Liberty and Radio Free Europe, those in Hungary who reamained true to Imre Nagy and Pal Demeter, in Czechoslovakia who remembered Dubcek, in East Germany who could look over the border and see what goods and services capitalist Germans could produce, and of course the Russian nomenklatura itself, now having its doubts, and more doubts, and that hardly required the Americans to hand support the mujahedin in Afghanistan to exist. The Soviet forces might have installed a regime that would necessarily have been antipathetic to Islam, and might have constrained it, or tried to, as Ataturk had done in the 1920s in Turkey. It might have been a start. But surely the aid extended to the Mujahedin, military and financial, was not the unalloyed triumph that the CIA officials involved in it complacently still allow themselves to believe. They, like their civilian bosses then and today, did not know enough about the longer-lasting (1350 years), and much more powerful (because Communism failed on its own terms; Islam can never fail in that way -- it can only be seen to have failed politically, economically, socially, intellectually, in this sublunary world, not in the dream-world of the Muslim paradise promised to those who march in lockstep on the path of Allah, by that selfsame Allah.

If anyone ever succeeds in getting us to remove the term "jihad" from our descriptives for this war, then we are done as a culture. Over. Kaput. Sell the farm, call the fat lady to sing. Bye-bye.

"Talk about the "caliphate," however, should be limited because it fails to convince. It seems so crazy, so far-fetched. And it is crazy, and it is far-fetched."

It's not whether a project is realizable; it's whether its zealous promoters think it's realizable. Or do you guys think Muslims are operating with a full deck? Now suddenly you ascribe to them the same rationality that allows you to see how ridiculous a Caliphate is?

As has usually been the case with horribly tragic episodes of political pathology in history, the problem is not in the realization of a pathological & fantastic desire, but in the attempt to realize it.

Hugh's point about the caliphate could easily be made about Hitler's vision of a Fourth Reich, or Napoleon's vision of a Roman Empire Redux, or Lenin's and Stalin's vision of the World Revolution that would usher in an immanentized paradise; and so forth.

All of these visions were also crazy and far-fetched; does that mean they did not inspire and galvanize people to attempt to realize them, in the process wreaking widespread havoc, misery and mass murder?

The dream of a caliphate as the proper and just expression of Islam is part of the psychology of most Muslims, and it is one factor among many inspiring their overall project that is threatening the world now. Whether that one factor, or even their overall project, is realizable or not, fanciful or not, is perfectly beside the point.

Hugh-

And don't forget the drive for the "Imamate", as well. The Shi'ites don't accept the idea of a "caliph" (Sunni "successor" to Mohammad), but want a global Imam.

Utopian fantasies, such as the Communists longed for in their "dictatorship of the proletariat" where "the state will wither away" -

(for a newer retread SEE:)

http://www.www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/dictp.html

-may seem absurd, but "Credo quia absurdum est" ("I believe it because it is absurd") never stopped anybody in the past from laboring under, and fighting for, a delusion.

Let the Imamate battle the Caliphate!

Sorry, somehow the www's in the "Maoist International Movement" link above doubled(?);

TRY:

http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/faq/dictp.html

(Nifty little image of a movie projector at bottom of page, to show the true believers' technological level.)

It's a stated aim of British Moslems. Channel 4 ran a series of Islamic current affairs programmes called Sharia UK a while back, whose guests openly advocated the NEED for a caliphate to put an end to the terrorism... (C4=dhimmi twits)

But most people are incredulous to the suggestion, in part because of the double-talking taqiyah-meisters. Perhaps, when mentioned, it should be emphasised as a guiding principle of the overall Islamic - and certainly jihadist - ideology, if not an imminent threat.

Subtle.

Animus:

This looks like the worst kind of Stalinist revisionism happening right now in the UK and elsewhere.

Hugh,

Thanks for the expanded commentary.

With or without the return of a Caliphate, the intent of most Muslims is to live in a Muslim society, under Muslim law as mandated in the Koran, which could be achieved without the establishment of an official Caliphate. In either case, life for non-Muslims will be a hell on earth.

You're welcome, Andre Szara.

Say, didn't we first meet when I was vainly trying to warn General Miller about Skoblin and La Plevitskaya back in 1937? I know we met in December of 1944, when unbeknownst to each other we both attended the same performance of Leo Tepper and His Red Orchestra at the Prince of Wales in London, and someone doing an uncanny impersonation of the late Mr. Memory came on stage during the intermission to announce something, when the sudden sound of gunshots caused the entire audience to panic and run out into the street, even though the sirens were going and the sinister whine of the V-2s could be heard, and you and I hastened to the same air raid shelter, the one connoisseurs called "The Sett" -- making allusion to L'affaire Blaireau, n'est-ce pas? -- and we happened to find ourselves sitting beside each other and chatted amiably about the Skryabin girl whom we had both known well, until the all-clear sounded, and you went your way, and I went mine. And the last time we met, you remember, was in 1962, this time over a lunch of gigot d'agneau with a bottle of nuits st.-georges at that restaurant on Place Stalingrad in Meudon, just a few minutes away from Petit-Clamart where later we had a rendezvous we could not miss, a meal which we both thought might be our last, and the other person with us, Alain de la Tocnaye, was making us both very nervous, because it turned out he had forgotten to bring the cable from Mrozovski in Caracas, and was otherwise, as we found out later, not fully unprepared for the task at hand. Well, Andrey Edmundovich, glad to hear from you, at long last.

On fait son petit Furst without having read him. We work in the dark. We do what we can.

Truth is folks, this includes henry, that the caliphate cannot be brought back to life and in truth from history, the one that was there did not last long because the Muslims end up fighting among themselves. Plus today, unlike the Middle Ages, Christanity has now gone global, so with the booming Christian south, the missionaries from there will and are being sent to the west. So the caliphate is only in the dreams of the jihadists. Dream on.

To Ronin,

Oh most rightly-guided Caliph, I make this humble request: May I have my virgins now? I don't need all seventy-two, just a half-dozen or so will be sufficient. But please, no nine-year-olds. I'm not a pervert.

Oops... I'm not a pervert. I guess that means I can't be a good Muslim.

As usual islam is its own worst enemy. We have been giving them the rope in which they are hanging themselves day after day after day. This is good, real good, for us. Even if we were to listen to the rubbish they spout, we would soon realize we were dealing with an insane or degenerative mind. I see no room for dialogue. You simply cannot argue with nutjobs, period.

the highest human culture?
I suppose it all depends on what your definition of culture is. My personal favorites are the cultures that allow others to go about their daily activities unmolested and without fear that their children will be slaughtered while they are at work or on vacation. This is not a cultural popularity contest. It is a battle for the future of our grandchildren. Culture be ......, well you know what I mean.

henry,

Saladin, he was Muslim troll who ran out of steam when he realized that the posters here was able to get to the pit stop and respond to his pesty comments over the past few days. Is he still here posting? He is nowhere to be found. He could not stand the heat, so he got out of the hot kitchen. This board kicked him good.

Since I am responding to two posts; as far as my faith is, it is still there and I do want it to get stronger as far as faith in God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit is concern this summer and beyond. But what I am saying is that unlike the middle ages, the Christian faith has gone global. Sub-saharra Africa is going through a boom time as far as Christian faith goes, the evangelicals in a special way, with the Catholics and Anglicans not far behind. The Muslims are in a panties twist all over this development. Even there have been Muslims leaving to become Christians. The global south is the new face of Christianity and so that has produced a barrier to any Muslim attempts to pull off a caliphate. This is also a conservitive Christianity this global south Christianity. Even the Catholic faith under B16 is starting to go back to its Biblical and Latin roots. The American bishops made some changes to the Mass in order to align it with both the Biblical and Latin wordings. In Nigeria there is a new evangelical church called the Church of the Redemmed which is now sending missionaries even to the USA to evangelize. I have done my internet research. So the Christian Church global is one big wall to any possible caliphate.

Also the different Muslim sects just do not have a full deck of cards to pull it off. Besides the infighting, two nations, Afganistan and Iraq are building democratic nations. Also Lebanon has had its pro-democratic revolution last year. Also the non-Arab Muslims want nothing to do with a caliphate. They view it as being an Arab thing. Also people in the west are starting to wake up to the truth of what Islam is all about, since the famous "Muhammed cartoons " bruhaha of this past February. So even the west is begining to wise up. So I would not write off the west.

I hope this response will be of much help to you. Thank - you for your response.

Hugh,

You wrote: "Talk about the "caliphate," however, should be limited because it fails to convince. It seems so crazy, so far-fetched. And it is crazy, and it is far-fetched."

You certainly have a point, in general, but that point does not apply in all cases. I would mostly agree with you, when discussing or distributing literature anonymously. But some individuals may respond more to talk of long term future goals of the muslims, than to a particular current event. for example, CAIR's ibrahim hooper's 1993 quote, "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future," is very telling, and at least somewhat convincing to some people, about the expansionist-imperialist nature of islam. And what is behind that quote, in hooper's mind is probably something along the lines of a whole planet ruled by islam -- a caliphate.

saladin,saludin,salhudim,
He’s over on another thread irritating all who will listen. I tend to scroll down when I see a lengthy post to check out the author. If it is a mo I immediately disregard it as bologna.

Boehmond_1069-

Don't let Cathy Young hear you!

There once was a girl who could see
All the mileage she'd get from a pee,
So she bothered Sir Spencer
With quibbles no denser
Than the usual stuff Islam-y.

There once was a person named mo.
Who thought we would go with the flow.
But he was mistaken,
Cause we were just fakin.
And now there aint no mo any mo.

Apparently some posters did not read attentively enough what I wrote. I did not deny that some, perhaps many, Muslims dream, at some point, of establishing a caliphate. I made a different point, that I repeat here: when Cheney or someone else warns darkly about those who "want to establish a world-wide calipihate," this fails to convince many Infidels, and in fact invites, and encourages skepticism about other, far more important things. It is enough to put it this way: Islam is a belief-system whose adherents are inculcated with the idea that Islam must dominate the globe, and that Muslims everywhere must ultimately rule. That is the same thing, but the way it is said can be accepted; warnings about "the world-wide caliphate" just won't.

One then goes on to say, by way of demonstrating one's sweet reason, that the problem is not the remoteness of the ultimate goal, but that right here, right now, within the next few decades, there could be such a further islamization of certain countries in Western Countries that their commitment to the West, to remaining part of the West, would be in doubt, and their indigenous Infidel civilization imperilled in many respects, and of course whatever armories they possess might fall into the hands of a government that a unfied and determined Muslim minority (even 30% might do it), if hardly opposed by a confused and demoralized Infidel majority (just look at what is happening now) could control.

It is a question of keeping one's audience firmly in mind, of how to put it. The maddening thing about the Administration is that it shows no signs of knowing how to put things. While some will mention this damn "caliphate" business, inviting ridicule, all of them want to avoid using the word "Jihad" properly (not as in "jihadist" but as in "We have nothing against Islam, but just against all those who favor the Jihad to spread Islam until it dominates everywhere.")

Things that could not be said five years ago can now be said, and understood. It is a question of timing.

Hugh,
They have yet to confront the predominant and I might add superior ideology of hardcore westerners. They have so far played games of death with the weak and the young. Now it is time to see if they can play against the vicious and diabolical Americans and other westerners that join our cause. We don’t have the same criteria
that the mos do. We embrace anyone of any race or religion as long as they believe in the dignity of their fellow man. Something islam will never be able to do. So 1.5 billion muslims against how many trilions others? Bring it on.

"It is a question of keeping one's audience firmly in mind, of how to put it."

Yes, exactly.

Hugh-

Agreed.

And, also, the "Caliphate" sounds vaguely romantic to those who remain stubbornly uneducated about Islamic Imperialism's millennial, war-mongering aims. (After 9/11, it is almost a derelection of duty.)

I prefer to say that militant Muslims seek "a global gulag of theocratic tyranny".

Because the people who most need convincing- essentially the folks on the far, anti-America Left- have learned (from Dick Durbin, etc.) that a "gulag" is a knee-jerk "bad thing" (most having failed to read the 3 huge volumes by Solzhenitisyn, and think only soldiers at Gitmo have ever run such a thing), "globalism", to the same mindset, is also anathema, and who among them likes anything "theocratic"? While "tyranny" hits the same anti-capitalist hot button.

The audience determines the motto.

Those most seduced by the multi-cultural myths ("peaceful, all-tolerant al-Andalus" versus "Europe sunk in the Dark Ages"- forgetting Charlemagne, Boethius, Alcuin, Boniface, etc.) need their own buzzwords turned back upon them.

They fear unrestrained despots ("evil dictator Bush"), religious intolerance ("Christian fundamentalists"), government intrusions ("warrent-less NSA eavesdropping") and a supra-national-government ("the neo-con's New World Order").

Each of these (mostly hysterically-overblown and myopically-misplaced) anxieties can be turned against the far more dangerous versions that Imperialistic Islam intends for us.

We need to demonstrate that their fears are correct, but that their target for them is relatively delusional.

They strain for a gnat and miss the camel.

Time to work on redirecting their angst.

It's the jihad, stupid! T-shirts, comparing imams to "Super Jerry Faldwells who don't just want to ban gay marriage but throw homosexuals off buildings to their deaths", etc., would be better positive propaganda than any mention of a "Caliphate". ("Is that what you put on poison ivy?")

There'll probably be a rapper named "Caliph 8", soon, anyway, to confuse the issue beyond redemption.

"Islam hates gays" would have more cachet.

You are right profitsbeard,
Lets start really giving it to them from all sides. An onslaught they cant endure, Truth, coming from all sides and unrelenting. That will get it done. Don’t stop until they say uncle. And beyond.

I agree with Hugh's clarification, which to my comprehension was not sufficiently explicit in the original piece.

Perhaps President Cheney and Vice-President Bush should just come right out and say what's on their advisors' minds:

"There are forces out there who dream of reviving the wonderful Golden Age of Andalusia..."

tsuga-

I 'look like' I should agree with those whom I most disagree with, so it zaps their minds when they hear the polar viewpoint coming from my mouth. And hurts their heads (ruling theoretical framework) even more when I also happen to understand their 'history' (the disturbingly dis-embodied, non-judgmental wish for pure justice, sublime brotherly understanding, complete compassion for all peoples, etc.) well enough to point out its fatal flaws, in execution, both philosophically and psychologically. And from the core angle of animal-survival/enlightened self-interest.

As americaningermany notes: "Our politicians and lawmakers are as much jihadis as are the muslims."

And those who think they oppose the ruling group of politicians (caricatured as corrupt oil-loving WTO plutocrats and oppressors of Third world sweatshop serfs who are really noble organic farmers-in-embryo) are sadly performing an unconscious, unintentional jihad against what they presume they are defending (freedom, personal privacy, etc.), by witlessly aiding the actual Islamic jihadis. Because these homegrown Utopianists undermine the defensive engines of our republic in their rush to blindly disarm their political opponents. For staggeringly short-sighted, somnambulistically short-term "gains" of mere personal power.

The folly of the pacifist movement, that castrated the U.S. (and Europe) in the 1920's and '30's, has its equivalent dreamers-at-large in the American "War Is Not The Answer" mentality. (Had George Washington thought this way, we would still be the minions of some corrupt, "divine right" king.)

This two-front campaign is interesting, at least.

(Maybe why we evolved with bi-cameral brains?)

i do not think you will see canada become a isllamic country in the next 20 years while we do get a fair # of moslems imagrating we get more
east indians who are sike and hindue and budidist
and the moslems seam to congagare in vancouver bc and toronto ont.

americaningermany,

Responding to the most recent post you posted asking a new poster, I hope that va7gpd is not another troll. I get the felling we are in for a summer of "summertime visits" by the trolls. Take care.

henry,

Thank - you with love in Christ Jesus for your posting response. I do try to do my research, online and offline. I am a person of hope as well as faith and love, without these one can go crazy. I do have hope that like the major communist threat(s) that went away at the end of the 80's and early 90's, that in time Islamism will go by the wayside when peaceful Muslims will have about "enough" of living in the dark ages and start to get with the 21st century. But like America during the Reagan era, when it came towards the end of the Soviet era, we have got to be on vigil guard against an Islamism that in its final days will try to last out bigtime agains the west. So what you say also makes sense too. Hang tough. Take care henry.
God Bless.

The message of the unacceptability of a world wide caliphate can also be seen as a line in the sand, a red flag warning to the Muslims in the West, the ME, and the Saudi/Sunni/Wahhabi Lobby. Outfits like CAIR can no longer advocate for this eventuality without crossing a line, or associating themselves with Al Qaida. This is one way to draw a noose around the neck of Western Muslim organizations: Identify specific aspects of their agenda, identify them as being beyond the pale in the West. I'd like to see Western leaders in Canada, the US, and Europe identify the drive by Muslims to inject Sharia guidelines into Western domains as another line in the sand. John Howard, to his everlasting credit, has already said this resoundingly in Australia. Muslims know they are not welcome there if they advocate for such. We need that to happen here as well.

I think many of the comments above ignore the fact that Western Muslim outfits are more or less impotent to fight such announcements in any effective way. If they do so they lose the ability to speak in the broad inexact manner we are now accustomed to, and are forced to defend specific aspects of their agenda -- This can't be done without then associating their movement with the most extreme aspects of Al Qaida's agenda. This is a subtle but effective way to squarely place them on the defensive without coming out and attacking their entire agenda.
Seen this way, such announcements are great.

"The message of the unacceptability of a world wide caliphate can also be seen as a line in the sand, a red flag warning to the Muslims in the West, the ME, and the Saudi/Sunni/Wahhabi Lobby. Outfits like CAIR can no longer advocate for this eventuality without crossing a line..."
-- from a posting above

If the "red line" is only to be drawn through the end point, the world-wide caliphate, then we are all goners. Surely the point is that there is no one red line. There is only, day after day, month after month, year after year, steadily increasing Muslim demands, steadily increasing Infidel appeasement, and the creation, all over the Western and large parts of the non-Western but also non-Muslim world, of a situation that grows ever more unpleasant, ever more expensive, ever more physically dangerous.

This is not the kind of thing where a "Red Line" is usefully drawn. This "Red Line" business would actually allow far more advances to be made by Muslims, if all they have to do is shut up about wanting a "world-wide caliphate." That's not so hard to do, to buy another ten or twenty years of the appeasement mixture as before.

The only place where a "red line" notion would make sense is in what weaponry will be permitted to Muslim forces. Whether through unaided production (no Muslim state has proven itself yet capable, but one might), or aided production, or production-aided-through-theft (the Pakistani example), or production aided by those who benefited from production-aided-through-theft (the Iranian example), they can't be allowed to acquire, or once acquired, possess the means of delivery, any such weaponry. That is the place for the "red line" business.

So the pronouncements by John Howard's government stating that the Muslim's Sharia agenda isn't welcome in Australia, and that Muslims advocating for such should leave "would actually allow far more advances to be made by Muslims ..."?

Explain the logic of such a formulation. Was Mr. Howard's statement a step forward or a step backward in the fight against slamic Jihad? Please stop reducing what I say to minimalist positions and then attacking the straw man thus created.

It would be wonderful to jump ahead and finally arrive magically at the point where "The only place where a "red line" notion would make sense is in what weaponry will be permitted to Muslim forces."

But this is a real world in which we live. Things happen incrementally, by degress, and as frustrating as that may seem to those who already know, or think they already know the right answers, this is the way the world works. It's complicated. We are very far from such a wonderful and magical point with the Muslim world --- Such unitary parameters ignore the steps and processes necessary for getting from here to there, and red lines, red flags, and red markers need to be laid immediately by our side.

Further, was it useful for the President and VP to drop the palaver about "religion of peace" and begin to use terminology (albeit woefully late and still inadequate) such as "Jihad" and "Islamist"? Or were those also enablers for more Muslim shenanigans?

"Identify specific aspects of their agenda, identify them as being beyond the pale in the West. " isn't the same as "the "red line" is only to be drawn through the end point, the world-wide caliphate".

Please be fair when you characterize my posts. This is the same technique you've used before when I've attempted to explore your theses -- Are we not to disagree with you? Is that one of the rules now at JihadWatch?

In your latest posting you carefully quote from your own prior posting the following:

"Identify specific aspects of their agenda, identify them as being beyond the pale in the West."

But just before that, at the very beginning of that prior posting, you wrote this (which you choose for some reason to omit in your second posting):

"The message of the unacceptability of a world wide caliphate can also be seen as a line in the sand, a red flag warning to the Muslims in the West, the ME, and the Saudi/Sunni/Wahhabi Lobby. Outfits like CAIR can no longer advocate for this eventuality without crossing a line, or associating themselves with Al Qaida."

You then go on to talk about "another line in the sand" -- in addition to the one about the "unnaceptabiliy of a world wide caliphate" --that you think should be offered. But that only is further proof that you meant exactly what you wrote in the first two sentences -- that this "world-wide caliphate" business should be made "a line in the sand." Or as I called it, in a trivial error, a "red line."

I repeat: for someone to think that "red lines" or "lines in the sand" help Infidels, make things clearer, is flatly wrong. There are no "red lines" but something far more dangerous -- the slow and steady pot boiling under us, the lobsters or frogs of the West. What you clearly suggested was that we should "draw a line in the sand" at this "world-wide caliphate" and then, in addition, draw some other lines in the sand.

And I say that kind of thinking keeps people from realizing that every single day that goes by, as Da'wa and demographic conquest increase the Muslim population in France, in England, in Germany, everywhere in Western Europe, in Russia, in Canada, and here in the United States, the situation worsens, inevitably, for all Infidels, without any clear "line in the sand" being crossed.

Let those who think that proclaiming the "unacceptability: of a "world-wide caliphate" by Infidel leaders, who hardly know what's what, and have hardly figured out how to begin even to talk semi-truthfully or coherently about Islam, much less figure out how to instruct large numbers of people, is a useful exercise, are free to continue to do so.

I don't. And I presented my objections clearly, without selective quotation. As for this business of my refusing to permit dissent, this is an absurd charge. You have it exactly reversed. You made a point. I disagreed. I stated the grounds for my disagreement. You then, through selective self-quotation, attempted to rebut. I replied to that attempted rebuttal.

End of story.

"A" line in the sand -- not "THE" line. You choose to construe it as "THE" and not "A". Why?

OK. You deplore my semantics. But "line in the sand" was followed by "red flag" -- a marker -- Surely you'd agree that it's high time for our leaders to actually begin to articulate what the West stands and then to identify the exact ways Islamic tenets contradict our own. The ummah craves the caliphate. When Western leaders suggest this is a plank with which they fundamentally disagree, and one which they intend to thwart -- I fail to see such a thing as being wholey bad as you do. We need more of this, not less.

It changes nothing.
Any "line in the sand," or somewhat implausibly, a "series of lines" (how exactly does one draw, on the same stretch of beach, first a "line in the sand" about the world-wide caliphate, and then another "line in the sand" about the "imposition of the shari'a" into the Western world (would that "line in the sand" about Shari'a " be in front of, or behind that other "line in the sand" about the world-wide caliphate?) would be a bad idea. The problem is incorrectly presented as one of lines, red lines, lines in the sand, tripwires, and so on. The problem is, I repeat, the slow and steeady increase in the Muslim presence, and then, if we allow it, the Muslim power to change our own societies, incrementally, slowly, and that has to be opposed long before any "world-wide caliphate" or demands for the "sharia" come into play. They might never come into play. They might simply be left as a goal to be achieved sometime in the future.

The focus on such a thing takes attention away from the real problem. And it takes attention away, and dims comprehension of the nature and scope of the problem, whether it is "a" line in the damned sand, so there may be more than one of those lines (see the parenthetical remark on ensuing geometrical complications above) to take a stand at, or "the" line in the sand. How does that affect my point that discussion of such "lines" or "line" is unhelpful, gets in the way?

I definitely agree with Television's comments above. Many people make the mistake of thinking that because an individual's or group's ultimate goal is ludicrous or unattainable means that there is no danger from them and that they need not be taken seriously.

This is not just true with national and huge group movevements such as the Third Reich and international Communism but also with individuals and small groups.

The Virginia snipers, Mohammed Allen and Lee Boyd Malvo, were essensially homeless guys living out of their car. Among their grandious plans was a hostage and blackmail scheme that would lead to establishing a camp for homeless youth to train as assassins of world leaders. A lot of commentators have talked about how absurd and impractical these plans were, and of course they are right. However, these two did manage to terrorize several states for months. It is still not clear just how many people they shot to death during their spree.

Similarly, there has been some mirth over the impractical plans of the terrorist suspects arrested in Toronto and Miami. It has been suggested that these groups lacked the expertise to blow up the Canadian Parliament or the Sears Tower, and this may be so. But like with the snipers, it is foolish to dismiss these groups just because they may not achieve their ultimate goals--they can do a great deal of damage along the way.