What does the attack on Kano, by fanatical Muslims against the local, Muslim-staffed symbol of the Nigerian state run mostly of, by, and for Muslim northerners, have to do with Iraq?
Everything. For the American government is monomaniacally fixated on Iraq, and the Executive branch, in its hallucinatory throes, tells Congress that it will leave "when the Iraqis tell us we can leave" but not when Congress tells Bush that it, as a representative of the American people, wishes to "tell us [that is, the Bush administration] when we can leave."
For Iraq, which continues to drain every kind of tangible resource (men, money, war materiel) also drains the intangible resources: the morale of the military and those who might remain in but now wish out, or those who might join but now will not do so. There has been a decline in recruiting standards, and roughshod and shoddy treatment of the troops -- a cruelty born of a necessity that itself was unnecessary had the army been expanded intelligently beginning four years ago, at the very moment that the invasion of Iraq started.
The Administration also does not look outside Iraq, at the larger local examples of Jihad or growing militancy that all contribute to one worldwide effort to keep Islam on the aggressive march. The belief that Iraq can serve as flypaper or as a "honeypot" to which all the "bad guys" -- as American soldiers are reduced to calling them, in an exhibition of the politically-correct infantilism of language that has been imposed -- will accommodatingly flock, there to be mowed down by the Americans and their "loyal" "Iraqi" "allies," (each of those three words deserves its own doubting quotation marks), has been proven wrong in every detail.
Saudi money is clearly transforming the practice of Islam in West Africa, and wherever it has been vaguely easygoing, with the marabouts and the syncretism. This is happening most of all in Nigeria (with all of its oil and status as the most populous black African state), and in Nigeria with the aggressive imposition of Shari'a in a dozen states, and in Niger (with its uranium), where the practice of Islam has in the last decade been transformed, thoroughly wahhabized -- because of all that Saudi money being poured into mosques and madrasas. Imams are loyal to their Saudi paymasters.
This is true also in many other places. But is there an "Islam in Africa" Desk at the State Department or at the Pentagon, or any effort to think of clever and effective ways to halt the Jihad, to roll back Dar al-Islam, and to do so in very inexpensive but symbolically very large ways -- such as the seizure of Darfur, and of the southern Sudan, by a few thousand American or NATO troops, who would stay until a referendum on independence from the Arab north could be held? No? Why not? Such a suggestion has been made at this website for the past four years. Surely among those who come here, including not a few who lift or copy passages and even particular words that they first read here (e.g. "reprimitivization" or "reprimitivized"), might repeat the suggestion about the Sudan.
And there are dozens of things that could and should be done to shore up the morale of Infidels in Western Europe, and to show, with meetings of NATO, that the American government is keenly aware -- instead of apparently not being aware at all -- of the growing security threat to Europe and to the West, of the islamization of the historic heart of the West through demographic, not military, conquest. The concomitant widespread unsettlement and the demoralization of Infidels are based on their recognition that a terrible problem has been caused through the negligence of elites who did not realize what the belief-system of Islam entails. Some of those elites still cannot recognize it, for that would be too painful -- in the same way that it would be too painful for the Bush Administration to realize that it had gone to war against a misidentified enemy, a “war on terror.” And in so misidentifying it, it fooled itself into believing its own nonsense about a “handful of extremists.” Even where Islam itself was dimly recognized as the real enemy, there was no understanding of all the other weapons of Jihad -- the money weapon (except insofar as money was used to fund terrorism), well-financed campaigns of carefully-targetted Da’wa and, completely undiscussed and unrecognized, demographic conquest. The latter is seemingly inexorable in Europe unless strong (and perfectly justifiable) measures are taken to halt all Muslim immigration into the West, and reverse the consequences of what immigration has been foolishly allowed.
The assault on European legal and political institutions by Muslims will not stop, but can only here and there be checked. These assaults include attempts, through organized economic boycotts, withdrawal of ambassadors, and even death threats directed at all Danes, to curtail the practice of free speech in Denmark. And the same curtailing of free speech has led to outspoken people losing their jobs under Muslim pressure, or because of those eager to placate Muslims (as Will Cummins or Kirby-Smith in England). It has also led to others, still more outspoken, losing their lives (Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh), while still others are under death threats (Geert Wilders in Holland, Magdi Allam in Italy, Ayaan Hirsi Ali even now that she has moved to Washington, Carl Hagen the leader of a Christian party in Norway, and many others). The efforts include that of denying the forces of order entry into Muslim enclaves, and the insistence that the principles of the state -- such as that of laic France, that no religious symbols be worn in schools -- should not apply to them. And of course, in every country, there are changes demanded of all kinds, from the prayer-rooms demanded in schools and workplaces (and time off, five times a day, to pray, no matter how disruptive), to changes in food, to changes in what is taught in the schools -- so that, for example, Muslim students in France have refused to study the Holocaust, and World War II, and the history of the kings of France, and of course the Crusades (unless the Muslim version is accepted, and history thereby travestied). They have also refused to read Voltaire or other important authors who are deemed anti-Muslim, or to exhibit Western decadence: imagine trying to teach Baudelaire, or for that matter Flaubert, to Muslim schoolgirls. Or they have refused them because of some other impediment: Montaigne, Proust, Perec and other writers who were Jewish or half-Jewish might be simply too hard for young Muslims to take.
Finally there is the huge drain on Western welfare states, created and funded by Infidels, from the fiddling by Muslims for every possible benefit and then some, and the huge families. In Great Britain benefits have been given to plural wives, so that a single out-of-work Pakistani or Arab or Somali, with two or three or four wives and 18 children, can be supported indefinitely. Such cases are not, as some would think, merely the lone “horror” exception produced by politicians to scare you.) And the housing subsidies and free medical care and all the rest of it has produced a drain that no one will talk about in the governments, and that few of the citizens find out about -- though they suspect, though they are becoming aware.
Finally, there is the military threat in Western Europe. Not the threat of acts of terror against a fresco in a Bologna church, or the European parliament in Strasbourg, or against the water supply in Milan, or against the metro system in Paris (to name the attacks that were planned but the planners caught in time), but the threat that large numbers of Muslims pose to the actual government, and the freedom of its foreign and domestic policy, to work with the West, to defend the West, and not to be paralyzed by fear of offending a large and coherent Muslim minority that is determined to work its will. And finally there is the problem of weapons, including the advanced weaponry of NATO armories. Will the nuclear weapons, or the planes and tanks of NATO countries, be acquired by Muslims as they acquire power, through unchecked demographic conquest, in this or that country in NATO?
What will be done to start thinking about, planning about, organizing about this looming problem? It should be obvious but apparently it is not, not while the American effort is aimed at making Iraq a Light Unto the Muslim Nations. The Administration, supposedly tough, is not tough enough. It is naïve about Islam, and about the possibilities and even the meaning of the word “democracy.” Bush, Rice, Richard Perle all seem greatly impressed with the going-to-the-polls in Iraq, failing to realize that that has gone on in all kinds of Muslim countries, including Egypt and Pakistan and Indonesia, without any real progress toward Western-style advanced democracy, with its guarantees of rights for individuals and for equal treatment of minorities. Real progress has only been made in the handful of Muslim states where Islam has been systematically constrained or weakened: Kemalist Turkey, Tunisia, and Kazakhstan, the one ‘stan” where Muslims are barely 50% of the population, and most of them, due to history, are Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only Muslims.
And that is why the attack on the police station in Kano will appear in the press, and be read. But in the White House, in the State Department, in the Pentagon, no one will think clearly about Nigeria, and about why it was wrong not to come to the aid of the Christians of the south during the Biafra War. No one will think about why it makes sense to seize the areas of Sudan whose people have been, are being, persecuted and mass-murdered by the Muslim Arabs of the north either because they are not Muslims, in the southern Sudan, or not Arabs, as in Darfur.
Because both the Executive and Legislative branches of the American government are just too busy with Tarbaby Iraq. They are too busy to have the European Desks at the State Department study carefully, and not counsel appeasement, but start now to work with Sarkozy and those even more on the right wave length (Philippe de Villiers), and Aznar and some of his former colleagues in Spain (Gustavo de Mariategui?). In Italy there are Fini and others keenly aware of Islam, in Great Britain possibly Cameron, now that he is beginning, apparently, to see the light. In the Netherlands there is Geert Wilders, and elsewhere the forces not of vulgar fascism, but of intelligent resistance to the fascism of Islam, with its collectivism, its suppression of free exercise of conscience and free thought, and its Total Belief System (Complete Regulation of Life, Complete Explanation of the Universe).
Until the Tarbaby Iraq matter comes to an end, one cannot expect any useful measures being taken to halt, or reverse, the OPEC-financed, Muslim-migrant-supported worldwide Jihad, with the results we see, from southern Thailand yesterday, to northern Nigeria today, to London or Paris or New York tomorrow.
Bush had an idea. Now the idea has him. The evidence is in, but he refuses to see it. Obstinate in his shallow idealism, he remains trapped in Iraq, stuck to the Tarbaby. But why should the entire country remain trapped along with him?
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The primary obstacle remains a total inability by the US government and educational institutions to have a comprehensive debate and analysis of the impact of Islam and Islamism on world events. This is hampered by the disparate schools of thought who either believe:
-- (1) there is no such think as Islamism, and to look at political aspects of Islam is Islamophobia
-- (2) there is no such think as Jihadism, and the acts of Jihadists are really just acts of isolated extremists
-- (3) the only real threat is Jihadists who commit terrorist actions and if we can get Jihadists to stop the tactic of terrorism, then we can win the "war on terror"
-- (4) there is Islamism, but there are also "moderate Islamists" and "moderate Jihadists" that can be negotiated with
-- (5) there is Islamism which is a growing political ideology - and Jihadist terror attacks are simply a tactic of a larger Islamist problem
-- (6) Islamism as a term is meaningless, because the issue of political Islam is rooted in Islamic practice itself, therefore debates over Islamism's threats are misleading and counterproductive
I don't think there is any immediate hope of reaching those whose denial is so great that they believe (1) or (2).
However, there is a large group of the American public stuck in believing (3) and (4) to our overall national security detriment.
The ANSWER in my opinion is to find a much stronger dialogue between those who believe in (5) and (6), so that they have a more unified voice in reaching those who believe in (3) or (4).