As Robert Spencer says, there is no "effective theological response to Muslims" who take their Islam seriously. That is, there is no effective Islamic theological response to Muslims who take their Islam seriously enough to want to individually participate in the Jihad. But what is most troubling to the Pakistani authorities is not the fact of Jihad.
After all, Parvez Musharraf, the other generals, and the I.S.I. have all been waging Jihad in any way that they could. These many and various ways have included surreptitious support for terrorists in Jammu and Kashmir and India for many decades. They have also helped bring up the baby of the Taliban and then, when it was ready, sent it back to Afghanistan -- not on spring break but to stay and to bring "stability" through murder and mayhem, just the way that Hitler did, or to a lesser degree, Mussolini. Stability, stability.
No, what worries the Pakistani authorities about the jihad-preaching madrasa in Islamabad are two things:
1) The open declaration of Jihad demonstrates to Infidels by the silence of the other Pakistanis that indeed, there is NO effective theological response to the jihadist version of Islam, none whatsoever. For those who are learning about jihad in this mosque are good Muslims, believing and perhaps acting on orthodox teachings of mainstream Islam. And this is embarrassing, for eventually even the stupidest or most blind of Infidel governments and reporters might begin to figure out the realities of this situation. Why, even some people in the 1930s figured Mr. Hitler out -- and told the world exactly what he was about. But few listened, until events made it impossible any longer for them to stop up their ears and minds.
Unfortunately, the progress of Islam, and of the worldwide Jihad, has at this point a great many agents in place. Those agents have the ability to confuse and bring lawsuits and distract and act aggrieved. And so many local Infidels seem to be altogether willing to act as helpmeets in this effort, out of stupidity, or cupidity (there is a whole lot of Arab money being spread around), or timidity (can you imagine rulers in the E.U., or in North America, openly identifying the menace of Islam and listing the various instruments of Jihad, or the goals of Jihad, which is a central duty imposed on all Muslims?). Some Infidels, of course, suffer on the other hand from rigidity (we can't change our policies, we can't see things afresh, we can't analyze things anew. It would take too much effort, and we're just too busy).
2) Authorities in Pakistan, as in other Muslim countries, are also worried that open jihad preaching such as what goes on in this madrasa will ultimately manifest itself as opposition to the government, whether to the illegal arrogation of power by Parvez Musharraf (who remains both President and head of the army, which violates the Pakistani Constitution), or the corruption that is such a noticeable feature of almost every Muslim country, where inshallah-fatalism prevents real economic development -- so the road to riches is to seize and retain control over the state, and then to help themselves to whatever wealth may be available.
Such wealth comes from two sources, oil and Infidel aid:
1) The oil money. Think of the Al-Saud grabbing large amounts of the oil revenues for the princes, princelings, and princelettes of one particular family, a family that even named the whole country after itself. Or on a lesser scale, think of those grandiose sheiklets of the Gulf sheikdoms.
2) The disguised Jizyah of aid given by Infidel donors. How do you think Arafat, or his henchmen including Abbas, have the apartments and villas and bank accounts they all do? Or how do you think Mubarak pays for his Family-and-Friends Plan? Who pays for Queen Noor, or Abdullah's mediagenic wife's dresses, or their stays in hotels around the globe? (Abdullah, to be fair, does not have his father's tastes, and doesn't quite run up the "hotel-or-residence" call-girl tab that, through the C.I.A., American taxpayers were paying for for decades, as they also did for Sukarno and others, all in order to please the "plucky little king" Hussein of Jordan.)
Hussein’s proclivities may have been embarrassing, but they never embarrassed Jordanian officials the way this madrasa embarrasses those in Pakistan. For Hussein’s call-girls never threatened the whole deceptive edifice. This madrasa does.
It is good to recognize that there is no way to deter or negotiate your rights with "true Muslims" because they only follow Allah and Islamic Law.
"Moderate Muslims" vs "True Muslims" = no hope for the wafflers, would-be secularists, cultural Muslims and wannabe-apostates.
That leaves a very slim chance for peace in our time. And fear is a tool that is working far too well for the Muslims to give up. Jizya is preferable to hard work.
We have known about the entrenched stupidity of the blind Westerners for years, the Chucky Schumers and the Chucky Hegels, or the vicious pinhead Catta.
Which is why it is so gratifying to know that the kill ratio of jihadis in Iraq is so much in our favor.
Years from now the West will applaud G.W.B.'s resolve and decry those who would seek to demean him by facile ridicule, or supercilious dismissal.
He has taken the war to the enemy and God bless him.
Now is the time for all good people to come to the aid and support of the West.
Sometimes I wonder if it is better for Musharraf to be taken out and for Pakistan to end up with a purely Islamic government, as in Iran. Sometimes I wonder if it is better to have an unvarnished enemy, someone who openly admits they want to kill the American (and even Indian) infidels. Like Israel having Hamas to deal with. Because while Musharraf is just practicing somewhat slow jihad, he keeps the even worse Islamic parties like the MMA at bay.
I don't know, but I think it's easier to have an enemy who may be worse than the slick jihadists but are more truthful in their aims. Perhaps only then will the American government have a good excuse to destroy Pakistan like it destroyed Afghanistan under Taliban rule.
wrathofasma,
the same can be said of saudi arabia
Let's hope special ops teams are ready to drop in and secure all Paki nukes should Mushie fall.
And bring A.Q. "Father (AKA-thief-of-Western technology-thanks-to-lax-security-in-the-Netherlands) of the Islamic Bomb" Khan to Gitmo in the bargain.
Wrathofasma
Fully agree with you. Which is why I'm rooting for the MMA to take over Pakistan at some point, and openly support the Taliban - after all, the MMA is Pakistan's Taliban, and runs NWFP and Baluchistan. Once Pakistan gets such a regime and openly becomes an enemy, the US would have no choice but to take out their nuke sites like Chaagai with nuclear ICBM's - don't risk any pilots in the bargain.
That's the only way Pakistan can be de-fanged.
The effective theological response is the Gospel.
"The open declaration of Jihad demonstrates to Infidels by the silence of the other Pakistanis that indeed, there is NO effective theological response to the jihadist version of Islam, none whatsoever. For those who are learning about jihad in this mosque are good Muslims, believing and perhaps acting on orthodox teachings of mainstream Islam. And this is embarrassing, for eventually even the stupidest or most blind of Infidel governments and reporters might begin to figure out the realities of this situation. Why, even some people in the 1930s figured Mr. Hitler out -- and told the world exactly what he was about. But few listened, until events made it impossible any longer for them to stop up their ears and minds."
"Such wealth comes from two sources, oil and Infidel aid:
2) The disguised Jizyah of aid given by Infidel donors. How do you think Arafat, or his henchmen including Abbas, have the apartments and villas and bank accounts they all do? Or how do you think Mubarak pays for his Family-and-Friends Plan? Who pays for Queen Noor, or Abdullah's mediagenic wife's dresses, or their stays in hotels around the globe? (Abdullah, to be fair, does not have his father's tastes, and doesn't quite run up the "hotel-or-residence" call-girl tab that, through the C.I.A., American taxpayers were paying for for decades, as they also did for Sukarno and others, all in order to please the "plucky little king" Hussein of Jordan.)"
Posted by Hugh at March 29, 2007 09:44 AM
I can’t believe how accurate and deep this hidden-truth projection was! It’s one of those facts that lay right in front of you for decades, and you never actually see them.
How could Kings like Hussein or Abdullah, and presidents like Parvez Musharraf or Saddam Hussein manage to stay this long on their thrones? How come the west supports them in every way possible? Moreover, how come their nations stay silent, or even (occasionally) support them for all this time regardless of the persecution they undergo? I believe that those leaders play a game very exposed yet not understood or deliberately overlooked – due to what Fitzgerald already tackled about the oil money threat:
1. When nations grow tired of them, they threaten them with American aggression and invasion. They could always refer them to Iraq as an example of “Western failure in instituting democracy”. So “give up your rights, stay with me, and I’ll talk to my American and western friends about not turning your country into a battle field. You’ve seen what happened to Iraq when they’ve let Saddam go”.
2. When the west is deeply concerned about human rights violations, or how inactive those leaders have been against global- Jihad-preaching coming out of such countries, they play the role of the western interests’ preserver! “If you get rid of me, then what would you do about Jihad? Don’t you see how successful Saddam’s been all this time in holding them back until you got rid of him?! What would you do without me? You get rid of me and I promise you that Jihadists would start targeting you all around the globe. I’m your only choice”.
Now they’re worried that the west is actually looking deeply into the real problem: Islamic teachings. In such case, the sophistry and the contradiction between the two parts of that plot becomes more evident. The west is becoming aware of the fact that Jihad preaching isn’t just an individual act, it’s in the core of the religion, and the answer is not in a president that fights it at any costs. And the nation is also aware that the west is becoming informed and that the president’s / King’s good relations with the west is not going to stop that awareness, so he’s useless. This game is starting to show it’s deficiencies! You can’t balance both sides of the plot. If you over-please the west, you’d be a Zionist infidel who supports the enemies of Allah. And if you over-please an angry nation that wants to struggle in the name of Allah, the west would start looking at the real problem: Islamic teachings. So they’re slowly slipping out of control and their time is due. They can only hope that the waves of those Madrassas ebbs by some miracle! I don’t see that happening any time soon.
Parvez Musharraf will run of lives, l think a cat has nine, but the hand he fed to attack the Hindus will come back and bite him! once you set those killers off, those same islamist killers no know control and will come back to kill their own (Parvez Musharraf, and his henchemen).
Keep pakis in their cesspoolstan, no more in the West until they revert back to the Hindu ancestors or become anything but muslims.
Robert Spencer says, there is no "effective theological response to Muslims"
Exactly the point, so how does one deal with them if they can not be spoken to. (rhetorical)
One can either destroy by military force and attrition their resources to keep them fuming in their own dusty enclaves.
One can withdraw and allow them to rebuild in a year to deliver nuclear from Russia, biological out of Syria and chemical from every source into the United States in 2008 to affect the elections.
One can execute the entire lot by nuclear strikes in response to what has happened or what will occur.
Those are the 2 responses being pushed and the 3rd is the reactive response to the first 2.
American soldiers in mission can either die for Americans in the Middle East or Americans can die on United States soil.
People apparently want the latter and since Hillary Clinton will be elected in 2008 as America has abandoned Bush policy, the sign up line for sacrificial Americans will be what they have demanded as Clinton policy was 100 dead Americans a year from terrorist murder was acceptable.
al Qaeda now though in policy is demanding hundreds of thousands of dead American children for all Muslim children they claim have died throughout history from "outsiders".
This is not going away and the consequences to policy being implemented will have costs. People need to understand just what they are implementing as blaming George Bush or Conservatives in active response policy is going to be incorrect as the President advocates policy 1 to keep America from implementing policy 3.
Some Infidels, of course, suffer on the other hand from rigidity (we can't change our policies, we can't see things afresh, we can't analyze things anew. It would take too much effort, and we're just too busy).
Or just too damned embarrassed at their inveterate incorrectitude and, yes, just too busy for the explaining they'd have to do if they admitted their mistakes, which they will not.
Alarmed Pig Farmer has it exactly right. Its political correctness, and the gods of multiculturalism that our academic, political, and cultural establishments worship that prevent them from recognizing Islam as a threat.
Until we can stop breathing in this anesthetic we will continue to stay asleep.
Yes. It's a little hard to admit that the Sunni-Shi'a split has been around for a long time, is observable in countries far from Iraq, was observed in Iraq by Gertrude Bell and others, and owes its origins to events that took place in the first century of Islam, with consequences that have never been exactly hidden from view.
Did Bush know about Sipah-e-Sahaba, the Sunni terrorist group that targets Shi'a? Did he know of any history of Sunni-Shi'a conflict in Yemen or Lebanon? Is he aware that in Afghanistan the Sunni Taliban massacred the Hazara (an ethnic group descended from Mongols) and would have killed all of them, because they were Shi'a (see Rory Steward, "The Places In-Between" for an account in a hard-to-miss best-seller).
No, apparently he did not.
And because he did not, nor did others in his Administration, they are not about to say, at this point: well, it was there all along. We just missed it. Chalabi didn't tell us. Bernard Lewis underestimated the problem (for god's sake, Lewis co-wrote an article proosing a Sunni monarch - his friend Prince Hassan, without naming him -- to be set on a throne created for him in Iraq by the Americans.
But if the Administration and its loyalists argue that this conflict was not inevitable, and that no one foresaw it, much less thought it was something to welcome and exploit, they have two problems:
1) Why, in 500-600 postings here, was that conflict steadily described as the inevitable outcome of the removal of Saddam Hussein, one that would occur whatever the Americans did or did not do?
2) If it was NOT inevitable, than presumably this outcome was the result of human error. Whose error? Why, the error of the Americans of course. Haven't they been the ones who have irrupted into Iraq, and mucked about with Iraq's otherwise splendidly harmonioius sectarian and ethnic arrangements?
So the Bush Administration is going to have to choose what whipping it prefers. Does it wish to be accused of merely making mistake after mistke in "execution" of a perfectly sensible, rational policy, with goals that if achieved would have furthered American and Infidel interests, and weakened the Camp of Islam, but that here and there -- Bremer dissolving the army and accepting de-Ba'athification, for example -- "mistakes were made"?
Or should it choose to take the blame, that it deserves to take, for not understanding very much about Islam, and thus identifying the enemy wrongly in that phrase "the war on terror," and furthermore, not knowing much about Iraq, or how deep and intratable were, and are, and will be, the sectarian and ethnic fissures, and why that is not a bad, but a good thing for us, something that the Bush Administration just cannot seem able to comprehend.
Perhaps it is more than mere obstinacy, an inability to admit how wrong it was (and thus, what a waste most of those trillion dollars, and so many of those soldiers' lives, that were expended after the invasion and the first, possibly justifiable year). Perhaps it is also sentimentality: we can't "just leave these people to kill each other." Of course we can. Our loyalty should be singlemindedly to ourselves, to Americans and to the other Infidel victims of Islam, those threatened most immediately, and those that still have a decade or two to do something to protect themselves.
"So the Bush Administration is going to have to choose what whipping it prefers. Does it wish to be accused of merely making mistake after mistake in "execution" of a perfectly sensible, rational policy, with goals that if achieved would have furthered American and Infidel interests, and weakened the Camp of Islam, but that here and there -- Bremer dissolving the army and accepting de-Ba'athification, for example -- "mistakes were made"?
Or should it choose to take the blame, that it deserves to take, for not understanding very much about Islam, and thus identifying the enemy wrongly in that phrase "the war on terror," and furthermore, not knowing much about Iraq, or how deep and intratable were, and are, and will be, the sectarian and ethnic fissures, and why that is not a bad, but a good thing for us, something that the Bush Administration just cannot seem able to comprehend."
- from a posting by Hugh above
What I find so frightening and scary is that even with the level of incompetency and unwillingness to learn from its mistakes that is the hallmark of the Bush government ... the opposition Democrat party is worse. I have yet to hear anyone in the Democrat party who is even willing to use the words Islam and terrorism together within the same sentence.
No choice, o armchair generals.
One can never go further than what the homies allow you to do.
Rummy did a great job, and was removed for that reason by the Surrender Party.
The military has done and is doing a great job, and will continue unless the Surrender Party stops them.
The end game can only be victory, and those who enjoin retreat - whether temporary or in view of a different option (get them to kill each other) are deluding yourselves and only aiding the enemy.
Like Savage getting his ego stroked for "having the courage" to oppose or criticize G.W. by a talkshow award from a flaming liberal org. - a natural ally being deluded by a curious award - like getting a cheaper version of the Nobel Peace prize from the European fools.
So until someone here makes a better case out of the Orwellian satire that peace is war and war is peace, and winning is losing and losing is winning, unless we are clear in this area, we could be on a wrong track. If we dont win in Iraq, when winning is not that difficult, then we lose. And if you are arguing that winning is leaving the battlefield, then one is likely self deluded.
We have seen what happens when the dhimmi flee and the numbers of them that remain are so low that they can not possibly do all the work and support all the muslims - so the country turns into a crud hole.
Egypt still have enough copt Christians to do the work that the muslim feels too superior to do. Our military made mention of the numbers of men who sit around doing nothing while they did the rebuilding of many things in Iraq. They, our USA politicians and military leaders, still don't know about dhimmitude - a muslim's willingness to let infidels do work that they feel is inferior to a muslim.
I found this passage interesting in this article: "Some Infidels, of course, suffer on the other hand from rigidity (we can't change our policies, we can't see things afresh, we can't analyze things anew. It would take too much effort, and we're just too busy). "
I find this very true on a daily basis. In some of my readings I remember passages that tell us that people are mainly sheep. And I see in the USA those that profess to be 'free', to be 'this or that' but still refuse to do one iota of thinking, reading, or discussing what we are facing with this war and reviewing the idea that we are not fighting the Vietcong anymore - this is NOT Vietnam - we are in a fight for our civilization and people's eyes glaze over. But they are so willing to read a newspaper that tell them to hate this war and to hate Bush and to think that this is Vietnam. They let the mainstream media do their thinking for them. The left knows that people are sheep because this is how they train new recruits into their fold, all the while knowing that the 'watch dogs' will keep them safe while spewing hatred against those 'dogs'. The left should worry that they succeed in getting what they want - they won't be too happy then - they will have to wear burkas and/or scarves and know their place, and any speaking out against the leaders - they will find their heads rolling down the gutters - or maybe just a tongue if they are lucky.
All the while we hear of more and more muslims testing our laws openly, running people over in cabs if they go against sharia law, flee from a building on fire with numerous wives and godzillions of children, and more single jihadists opening fire on us while people's eyes glaze over OR more importantly much of our news reporters don't even tell us the truth about what is happening - even Fox news quite often omits some facts per the persuasion of Saudi Arabian princes who own Fox news stock.
Pakistan is a country created out of the chaos of continual terror and bloodshed until the people of India just let them have their way. And the people of India - are they waking up to the fact that the muslims now want more land? They should since kashmir is barely in their grasps now. India's people haven't learned even after the muslim hordes went through there centuries ago - they are still trying to appease them. And do we think we will be better than the others? All I see are people with their eyes glazed over.
People are mostly sheep and that is why tyrants, thugs, etc eventually come to power and take control. People let it happen and then when it is too late - they sit and 'hope'. 'hope' that someone else will take the steps necessary to effect a positive change. We see that in Iraq, we saw it in Afghanistan, we see it in Lebanon, and look how many countries succumbed to islam? many.
Excellent post, R_not.
DGene:
No choice, o armchair generals.
One can never go further than what the homies allow you to do.
Rummy did a great job, and was removed for that reason by the Surrender Party.
The military has done and is doing a great job, and will continue unless the Surrender Party stops them.
Neither party has done a great job.
And Rummy did not do a great job.
So far, Bush, Condi, Rummi, The Republican party, The Democratic party and the rest of the West have all failed to identify who the enemy is. Until they do that, any strategy may or may not serve the West's interests. It is like fighting blind. If the West cannot identify who the enemy is - how can they fight?
Waking up the media is the right thing to do.
Blogging is the right thing to do.
Alerting the politicians is the right thing to do.
The funny thing is that America has been here before. Communism employed propaganda.
Doesnt America recognise the same stench coming every time most Muslims open their mouths?
America should recognise this.
"The effective theological response is the Gospel."
It is a little difficult to respond if your head is separated from your body.