Robert Spencer recently remarked here that a certain fact was "contrary to the bland assumptions of the learned analysts."
But which "learned analysts" are those? What is happening today is not that a new doctrine has arisen, but that the old, and permanent doctrine of Jihad has been given new life by the new strength of Islam that is the result of three things:
1) The money that comes from oil and gas, and that since 1973 alone has amounted to ten trillion dollars.
2) The nearly-simultaneous admission, into many of the countries that make up the Bilad al-Kufr, or Lands of the Infidels, of millions of Muslim migrants. The ruling elites who so carelessly let them in did not know, and simply made bland assumptions about, the texts and tenets and attitudes naturally arising from Islam. They never wondered about what was contained, undeclared, in the mental baggage of those Muslim migrants. They were seen, quite incorrectly, only as "economic migrants" -- just like other, non-Muslim immigrants -- who would come, work hard, and then somehow fit in. The doctrine of Islam makes a central division of the universe between Believer and Infidel, Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb. That doctrine mandates a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare) between Believer and Infidel, and requires of Muslims that they participate, sometimes as a collective but in certain circumstances individually, in a "struggle" or Jihad to push back the boundaries of Dar al-Islam at the expense of Dar al-Harb, so that eventually the whole world, which of course belongs to Allah, comes under Islam's dominance, and Muslims rule, everywhere.
This is the doctrine. That some Muslims may, for various reasons, do not participate wholeheartedly in that Jihad, or may choose to engage in non-violent Jihad -- through deployment of the Money Weapon, or non-stop well-financed carefully-targeted campaigns of Da'wa, or simply through constant overbreeding relative to the indigenous Infidels so that they are engaged, without more, in demographic conquest -- should be no relief at all for wary Infidels. The Netherlands had 15,000 Muslims in 1970; now it has one million. Similar terrifying rises can be charted for other countries in Europe. What is to be done? Nothing? Something? If something, what? At the very least, all Muslim migration to the West must be halted, as well as all support from abroad from the Saudis who pay for the building and upkeep for those ever-expanding mosques and madrasas. Then authorities should carefully examine how Muslims exploit the benefits offered -- free education, health care, subsidized or free housing -- in ways that involve the definition of the family, and outright fraud. They should apply all the resources of the state to investigating and denying claims, and prosecuting those Muslims (in other words, a selective use of investigative and prosecutorial resources) who are found to be fiddlers of the system. Finally, there are other ways to make a country less gushingly welcoming (see Karen Hughes) to those whose ideology makes them permanent enemies of that country's political and legal institutions -- institutions that they would change, in a minute, if only they could.
Those who believe in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira cannot conceivably offer their allegiance to the American Constitution; the texts and tenets of Islam flatly contradict the Constitution. If anyone denies this, let him start by explaining how Islam views three clauses -- Freedom of Speech, Free Exercise, and the Establishment Clauses, of the First Amendment. And from that, go to the Fourteenth Amendment, and ask about how in Muslim societies, what equivalent now exists to ensure equal treatment for non-Muslims under the law -- or what equivalent ever could be found.
3) The appropriation by Muslim propagandists, for their own malevolent uses, of the technological advances made in the Western world -- audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television, the Internet -- that make the dissemination of Islam's full message, and of its propaganda, much easier.
Now if by "learned analysts" one means the various apologists -- google "MESA Nostra" for more -- who include both Muslims (Omid Safi, Rashid Khalidi, the inimitable Ode-to-Edward-Said composer Hamid Dabashi) and non-Muslims (Michael Sells, Carl Ernst, Richard Bulliet et al.), including the occasional successful Sammy Glick of Academe (google "Academic War Profiteers"), then perhaps the epithet ought to be dropped.
The true "learned analysts" of Islam are Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Henri Lammens, Joseph Schacht, Georges Vajda, and several hundred others, those once called "Orientalists." They were the scholars whose training, whose mental preparation, was incomparably more complete than that of so many of those now parading about on campuses today. They studied and wrote about Islam when one could be truthful, and did not care about offending Muslim colleagues, the century (from roughly 1865 to 1965) before the Great Inhibition descended. After that, only a handful dared to continue to write the truth, while those who might have done so were driven out of the field, not hired or not promoted, so that it could be left almost entirely in the hands of the Army of Apologists.
And only recently have, here and there, a few managed to slip by. But the breach has been made, and MESA Nostrans have now been held up to inspection and well-deserved criticism and ridicule -- despite their numbers, and despite so many of them sitting in well-upholstered and well-endowed chairs (filled, in many cases, in the careful way that Omid Safi was hired at Chapel Hill through the machinations of Carl Ernst, for the apologists will always be careful to hire others just like themselves, lest the Party Line for the students be discordantly interrupted by a dissident voice).
"Learned" analysts can be found. Just go to the library. Start with Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, Lammens, St. Clair Tisdall, even Lewis at his best not his worst ("The Political Language of Islam" and "The Multiple Identities of the Middle East"). Don’t forget Bat Ye'or and her pioneering works on the dhimmi and what she (not Bashir Gemayel) first called, usefully -- despite the disgraceful attempt by Bernard Lewis to prevent that word gaining currency -- "dhimmitude."
They are all sitting on the library shelves, waiting for you: the true Learned Analysts. Go to them.
In addition to Robert Spencer and Hugh Fitzgerald, I think it would be wrong not to include among the learned analysts people like Andrew Bostom, Serge Trifkovich, David Bukay, Moshe Sharon, Paul Fregosi and Matthias Küntzel. But there are also many many others.
The tragedy is that while the knowledge produced by these eminent scholars is rapidly spreading among the general public, no political leader has of yet even heard about them and their books.
For how long shall we permit our politicians to remain ignorant and dumb? Is there a need for an awareness week (or year) directed at political leaders?
And don't forget the edyfying and fascinating:
The Golden Age of Islam is a Myth
By Serge Trifkovic
We need to learn more in an age when an organization of infidels (the LA ACLU) says there is no justification for considering the Islamic community to be particularly prone to violence.
Here's a source for a lecture by Snouk Hergronje:
http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/10163
Academics who wish to offer critique of Islamic practices or ideology must run a gaunlet of potential backlash. It is not a business for the faint of heart. Why, for instance, aren't there multitudes of Western feminists trying to do empirical research on a host of psychological and physical abuses related to Islamic ideology and practices, like spousal abuse, the pyschology of the hijab, rape, honor killings, denial of education and the like? The obvious answer is fear.
There are surely thousands of academics who would very much like to offer publically scathing critiques on a variety of issues related to Islam, from political theory to theology to moral theory to economic theory to psychology, but they are muzzled by silent threats of hostility. One will confront degrees of resistance, aggression, slander, and perhaps even threats of violence if one chooses to test the waters of blasphemy, from a wide range of parties, from hateful, nameless true believers, to MSA shock troops, to assorted racial leftist groups (who spontenously demonize any thinker who appears to be 'on the right') to other more powerful parties, like deans and senior faculty who do not want someone rocking the boat and causing trouble. And that is what public critique of Islam in academia tends to bring in its wake, trouble. If one does not want trouble, and that is the last thing most academics want, one should stay away from Islam. Talk about something else. There are so many other more interesting topics to write about. Texts like the Qur'an and Sunnah are horribly boring reads anyway.
And in this environment of silent hostility against those who would critique Islam, what does an institution like the AAUP do, that defender of academic freedom? Does it worry, for instance, about the reasons why a scholar like Christopher Luxemborg must write with a pseudonym? Does it worry about the implications of the enduring fatwa against Salman Rushdie and what it means for other writers and scholars? Does it wonder why a speaker like Ayaan Hirsi Ali must travel with bodyguards, even in the United States? And does the AAUP take action to assess whether or not a climate of fear exists for American academics who would like to criticize Islamic ideology and practices. No it sues to ensure that Tariq Ramandan gets a visa and worries about a new 'Iron Curtain' against ideas, the ideas of Ramandan, I suppose.
http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/newsroom/pressreleases/habibpr.htm
"Texts like the Qur'an and Sunnah are horribly boring reads anyway."
-- from a posting above
Yes, indeed. I don't know how Robert stands it. But then, he likes modern jazz, without lyrics. There's no accounting for taste.
Hugh writes:
""Texts like the Qur'an and Sunnah are horribly boring reads anyway."
-- from a posting above
Yes, indeed. I don't know how Robert stands it. But then, he likes modern jazz, without lyrics. There's no accounting for taste. "
Jazz as an improvised musical form has long
downplayed lyrics, so "modern" is a bit confusing.
Louis Armstrong's "West End Blues" is without
lyrics, as is Coleman Hawkins famous version of
"Body And Soul", which has far more instrumental
than vocal versions.
It's way off topic of course, but far more interesting than the Koran and Sunnah, which
would be so dreadfully boring if they didn't
happen to be motivating savages to try and kill
us.
Here's the kind of thing, and the kind of lyrics, I would be missing if my taste had been coltrane-trained-and-constrained:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S2reIHdWsY0
Hugh: "Those who believe in the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira cannot conceivably offer their allegiance to the American Constitution; the texts and tenets of Islam flatly contradict the Constitution."
I keep coming back to the issue of doctrine and the importance being able to provide the context of its implementation. I know what the 'trinity' says, and can share this with people ignorant of the texts. But what I lack is a good knowledge of how the doctrine is being PUT INTO PRACTICE in Islamic societies today. We need a resource bank of instances in which verses from the Qur'an, Hadith and Sira are quoted by Muslims to justify acts which demonstrate the incompatibiity of Islam and free civil society. I feel I need more concrete evidence to really drive this home: the link between text and practice. I do not know of ONE source online that monitors the adoption of SHARIA law in countries around the world. Why isn't the UN or some gutsy NGO funding and doing this work?
After reading the above threads it appears that the topic is now shifting to the topic of jazz.
Yawn
Go ahead and write about whatever inspires you. But I am not inspired by modern jazz and don't care to read about who is inspired by this form of music.
I would like to bring this dialogue back to the topic of learned analysts.
One "learned analyst" who can be trusted is Bet Ye'or. Bat Ye'Or is an Egyptian-born Jewish researcher who is married to English historian David Littman. Bet Ye'Or completed some impressive historical research into the reasons that Muslim immigration proliferated throughout Europe during the past 60 years.
Bernard Moran from New Zealand wrote an interesting article covered by News Weekly titled, Muslim immigration and the rise of 'Euroabia'
In Moran's article, he uses the scholarship of Bet Ye'Or to analyze the rise of Euroabia.
Because I believe that it can help to provide some insight into Muslim immigration into Europe, I have quoted a very good section of his article, Muslim immigration and the rise of 'Euroabia'
__________________________________________________
Bat Ye'or provides a detailed chronicle of the process beginning in May 1945 when Charles de Gaulle, embittered about France's exclusion from the Yalta negotiations, rescued the notorious former Mufti of Jerusalem Haj Amin, from appearing at the Nuremberg Trials as a war criminal. The Mufti had spent most of the war in Berlin, but now he offered his influence in the Arab world, and especially the Muslim Brotherhood, to advance a new alliance with France.
Growing public knowledge of his Nazi past and war crimes forced the French to facilitate his escape from Paris to Egypt, where he maintained contact with the French Embassy, through to his settling in Lebanon in 1962.
Haj Amin's advocacy of a French-Arab alliance attracted powerful support in Gaullist and intellectual circles. They saw such an alliance with a Muslim federation extending through North Africa and the Middle East as restoring French prestige, impressing the Soviet Union and establishing a rival power bloc to the United States.
Bet Ye'or writes: "Two elements thus cemented the Franco-Arab alliance in the 1960s: French anti-Americanism fed by frustrated power ambitions, and a convergence of French Vichy anti-Semitism with the Arab desire to destroy Israel. From then on, America and Israel were inextricably linked in this policy."
The Euro-Arab Dialogue actually dates from a meeting between the French President Georges Pompidou and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt on November 26–27, 1973, which coincided with the summit of the Arab Conference in Algiers on November 28.
The conference issued a statement specifying their conditions for cooperating with the then European Economic Community (EEC): that Europe would defend Arab claims to Jerusalem and the "occupied territories" and recognise the autonomous Palestinian people.
The Arab Declaration of Algiers was followed by President Pompidou calling for an EEC summit in Copenhagen in December 1973. European heads of state and their civil servants examined the Middle East crisis and planned for cooperation between the Arab League and EEC countries.
In an interview with Jamie Glazov of FrontPageMagazine.com (September 21, 2004), Bat Ye'or described how Eurabia as a geopolitical reality was synchronised as an association called the Europe-Arab Dialogue (EAD) in July 1974 in Paris. She said:
"A working body composed of committees, and always jointly presided by a European and an Arab delegate, planned the agendas, and organized and monitored the applications of the decisions.
"The field of Euro-Arab collaboration covered every domain: from economy and policy to immigration. In foreign policy, it backed anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism and Israel's delegitimization; the promotion of the PLO and [Yasser] Arafat; a Euro-Arab associative diplomacy in international forums; and NGO collaboration.
"In domestic policy, the EAD established a close cooperation between the Arab and European media: television, radio, journalists, publishing houses, academia, cultural centres, school textbooks, student and youth associations and tourism.
"Church inter-faith dialogues were determinant in the development of this policy. Eurabia is therefore this strong Euro-Arab network of associations - a comprehensive symbiosis, with cooperation and partnership on policy, economy, demography and culture."
Bat Ye'or believes that France and the rest of Western Europe cannot change their policy anymore - their future is Eurabia.
"I don't see how they can reverse the movement they set in motion thirty years ago. Nor do Eurabians want to modify this policy. It is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently though immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration.
"Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it."
"This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia."
A 2003 poll conducted for the European Commission in the 15 EU countries, found that Europeans considered Israel the greatest threat to world peace - greater than Islamic terrorism or North Korea.
Mass Muslim immigration was planned at the University of Venice, in March 1977.
Under the auspices of the Euro-Arab Dialogue, there were four sessions under joint Euro-Arab chairmanship. Representatives from 14 universities in Arab countries joined 19 Arabists from European universities. The recommendations from the seminar on Arab inculturation served to end any critical public discourse about Islam and the Islamic world.
Also the recommendations on meeting the educational needs of Muslim immigrants were then approved by the foreign ministers of the European Community, the president, and their Arab counterparts on the EAD General Commission.
As Bat Ye'or notes, the EAD General Commission held closed sessions, with no public record of the proceedings. The decisions to encourage mass Muslim immigration were apparently agreed upon behind closed doors and could only be "deduced by the fact of their subsequent implementation".
At Alexandria in October, 2003, Romano Prodi, President of the European Commission (in 2006 elected Prime Minister of Italy) announced the Proximity Policy which would place the Euro-Mediterranean partnership on an equal footing. The practical instrument would be the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation, enabling new policies and cultural and intellectual exchanges.
Prodi encouraged the advisory group to create a "friendly neighborhood policy" in which the EU would consider its "Mediterranean partners" on a par with the Eastern European countries that had entered the EU.
The ensuing report recommended that the new Eastern European member states could themselves become open lands for southern Muslim immigration. This influx would assist Arab states concerned about their rapid demographic growth.
The Muslim populations of Bulgaria, the Balkans, Turkey, and those of Turkish origin in Germany and Austria, could combine with Arab Muslims in bringing about the diversification of European Islam.
It was believed this new European Islamic culture would dispel the notion of a rampant Islamisation of Europe.
Proximity Policy
The Proximity Policy is intended to unfold, utilising existing EU-funded support structures for the increased teaching of Arabic and other measures to assist Muslims integrate into European society.
A crucial arm of the Proximity Policy is the Euro-Mediterranean Foundation which is intended to function as a cultural or social "change agent". The advisory group insists that no culture can claim any kind of superiority. The European and Mediterranean (PC term for Arabs) entities will together form "the cultural dimension of our unfolding history".
Bat Ye'or summarises the Foundation's design as "nothing less than complete Euro-Arab integration under its guidance, with control over European intellectual life and education".
She says: "This intercultural dialogue thus requires that the Europeans reinvent their identity and history in order to integrate the Southern Arab migrant populations."
The planners intend to effect social change at every educational and cultural level. "States will have to undertake a re-examination of schoolbooks dealing with the history of the region. Study centres and networks of scholars will assume the control of publications and the diffusion of knowledge of the history of the Euro-Mediterranean region. The Foundation will create an active network of artists and writers and the media: film, television and publishing will be a vital instrument of its policy."
Bat Ye'or reports that Euro-Mediterranean foreign ministers met in Dublin on May 5-6, 2004, and agreed on the creation of the Foundation under the title: the Anna Lindh Foundation for the Dialogue of Cultures, whose headquarters will be in Alexandria, Egypt.
Anna Lindh was the Swedish foreign minister stabbed to death by a deranged man in September, 2002. She was a strong supporter of Yasser Arafat, personally boycotted Israeli products and condemned President Bush's Middle East policy.
Bernard Moran is a New Zealand writer
http://www.newsweekly.com.au/articles/2006jun24_i.html
Thanks Johnathan for the article. You'll find ample references to Bat Yeor in Jihad Watch and Dhimmi Watch, in both Robert and Hugh's writings. She appears at the bottom of this list I compiled for interested friends:
Books on Islam and Dhimmitude for Infidels
Bruce Bawer
- While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within
Andrew Bostom
- The Legacy of Jihad
- The Legacy of Anti-Semitism (forthcoming)
Burr and Colins
- Alms for Jihad
David Cook
- Understanding Jihad
Caroline Cox
- The West, Islam & Islamism: Is Ideological Islam Compatible With Liberal Democracy?
Patricia Crone
- God's Caliph: Religious Authority in the First Centuries of Islam
- Slaves on Horses: The Evolution of the Islamic Polity
- Meccan Trade and the Rise of Islam
Rachel Ehrenfeld
- Funding Evil
Steven Emerson
- Jihad Incorporated: A Guide to Militant Islam in the US
- Terrorists Among Us: Jihad in America
Oriana Fallaci
- The Rage and the Pride
- Force of Reason
Douglas Farah
- Blood from Stones
Dore Gold
- Hatred's Kingdom: How Saudi Arabia Supports the New Global Terrorism
Ignaz Goldziher
- Introduction to Islamic Theology and Law (Modern Classics in Near Eastern Studies)
Tawfik Hamid
- The Roots of Jihad
Ayaan Hirsi Ali
- The Caged Virgin: An Emancipation Proclamation for Women and Islam
- Infidel
Raymond Ibrahim
- The Al Qaeda Reader
Efraim Karsh
- Islamic Imperialism
David Margoliouth
- Mohammed and The Rise of Islam
Rudolph Peters
- Jihad In Classical And Modern Islam: A Reader
Daniel Pipes
- In the Path of God: Islam and Political Power
- Militant Islam Reaches America
Walid Phares
- Future Jihad
- The War of Ideas
Melanie Philips
- Londonistan
Joseph Schacht
- An Introduction to Islamic Law; The Origins of Muhammadan Jurisprudence
Robert Spencer
- Onward Muslim Soldiers
- Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World's Fastest Growing Faith
- The Myth of Islamic Tolerance
- The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades
- The Truth About Muhammad
- Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn't
Serge Trifkovic
- Defeating Jihad: How the War on Terrorism Can Be Won - in Spite of Ourselves
Ibn Warraq
- The Origins of the Koran: Classic Essays on Islam's Holy Book
- Why I am Not a Muslim
- What the Koran Really Says: Language, Text, and Commentary
- Leaving Islam: Apostates Speak Out
- Defending the West: A Critique of Edward Said's Orientalism
Bat Yeor
- The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam: From Jihad to Dhimmitude : Seventh-Twentieth Century
- Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide
- The Dhimmi: Jews & Christians Under Islam
- Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis
Then there is this:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/006605.php
While on books, many of the Orientalist authors Hugh lists are described vividly in Robert Irwin's "For Lust of Knowing: The Orientalists and Their Enemies" aka "Dangerous Knowledge: Orientalism and Its Discontents".
Almost in passing, Irwin brilliantly and repeatedly skewers Edward Said's pernicious Orientalism thesis.
Unfortunately, it remains a monster that will require many more wooden stakes through the heart before the dangerous death throes cease. Too many people have an interest in keeping it alive.
As good a summary of the situation as ever I've seen.
I heard recently that Daniel Pipes will be taking an advisory position with Rudy Guiliani. Now that is very interesting considering a candidate finally has someone in their corner that isn't an apologist of the religion of peace.
Very interesting !
That's as good a summary of the situation as ever I've seen.
Ought to be required reading, for pretty much everybody.
"I heard recently that Daniel Pipes will be taking an advisory position with Rudy Guiliani. Now that is very interesting considering a candidate finally has someone in their corner that isn't an apologist of the religion of peace."
- comment above
But don't discount Martin Kramer, who is already on board.
As to Giuliani's reported advisers on Islam:
Norman Podhoretz, who has been a Bush loyalist right up to now, the end, and apparently still believes deeply (or perhaps not so deeply), in the Iraq folly, can't quite come to grips with how wrong he has been. His enthusiasm for the war, and the way in which he has expressed himself about Islam, never quite coming to the kind of understanding that would have made him less of an enthusist for Bush, makes him a foreign-policy albatross, whom Giuliani has mistakenly taken on board. If Giuliani becomes the Republican candidate, and still continues to support the war in Iraq, even rhetorically, or with such a lightning-rod advsier as Podhoretz, he has a much greater chance of losing the election. And if he regards a conceivable democratic victory as deeply damaging to intelligent American leadership of, or even effective participation in, a war of self-defense, or counter-Jihad, he needs to make a clean break over Iraq. And Norman Podhoretz, alas, stands in the minds of many for that Iraq folly. Furthremore, there is so much wrong with the way Podhoretz puts things, as with this "World War IV" business for example, that while it may even be, in a sense, true, is stated in a way that wins over no one, and alienates a a great many who otherwise are, or would be, beginning to see the light.
As to Daniel Pipes, he may have stopped repeating his well-known formulation that "moderate Muslims are the solution" on his lecture tours, and in Op/Eds, but an explicit renunciation of that ill-thought out, misleading, and dangerous, formulation, would at this point be welcome. Perhaps he cannot do so now, because it would make him a more truth-telling, and hence less acceptable (in some quarters) adviser.
As to Martin Kramer, one would like to think that he is immune to the personal (not professonal) deformation that affects so many of Bernard Lewis's students, that of thinking the Great Man is not to be criticised, is Always Right, because you see, as Podhoretz likes to say, "he is the world's greatest living student of Islam." (repeat Ad Libitum). Lewis is deeply cultivated --those paintings, those artworks, those linguistic gifts which can best be appreciated, of course, by Arab or Turkish or Persian visitors (intellectual vanity that can best be assuaged by those who know how much you know, because they are native speakers of those languages, can be a dangerous thing), a good teacher who cares far beyond many others in helping his (good) students, a deplorer of the second-rate people who have been systematically replacing others far better than they. He is also the author of many important works, including "The Multiple Identities of the Middle East" and "The Political Language of Islam." He is a scholar of modern Turkey. He is an elegant polemicist, as demonstrated in the way he delicately dismembered Edward Said in that essay "The Question of 'Orientalism'" -- his footnote on "thawra" outweighs, in its permanent worth, the entire corpus of crap turned out by the MESA-Nostra Brigade at Columbia. But he has also, over the years, belittled -- and not helped but possibly hindered -- Bat Ye'or. He has, one suspects, somewhere along the line missed something, something essential about Islam, possibly because the Muslims he knows, the ones who laugh at his bons mots, the ones who can appreciate his linguistic sallies in Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, are as unrepresentative as were Ahmad Chalabi and Kanan Makiya and Rend al-Rahim Francke and all the other elegant, and westernized (westernized in the sense that they could play at being Westerners) Iraqis in exile whose influence, and whose assurances, had such a disastrous impact -- along with such non-Iraqi influences as Natan Sharansky -- on the Bush plans for Iraq. He must have missed something, else why would he, Lewis, have supported so enthusiastically the Oslo Accords, and then the Iraq Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations folly, in which he allowed himself to believe, or hope, all kinds of things, and to argue, in Op/Eds, all kinds of other things to support that belief or that hope. One allows oneself to believe that Martin Kramer is not now, if he once may have been (I don't know), intent on protecting Lewis from justified criticism.
A professor should, in any case, be proud to have trained students who, when the time comes, will be able to see what that professor has done wrong, along with all of the right, rather than remain uncritical, worshipful acolytes.
In any case, Giuliani's foreign policy advisers, including the reported director, Charles Hill, immediately strike one as far superior to those advisers to the candidates in the Democratic camp. I have read that Albright and Berger are, unbelievably, still being consulted by Hilary Clinton. And Brzezinski by Obama Barack. That these names, these people, should be consulted by anyone, at this point, given their records on Iran, on Arafat, bref, on all things having to do with Islam, is, of course, fantastic.
William F Buckley once said that he would rather be governed by the first 100 names in a Boston phone book than the faculty at Harvard.
I think the presidential candidates would receive supperior advice from people at your average American bowling alley or barbershop then from the entrenched elites who have been unopposed and unchallenged since the end of Reagan's presidency.
It likes a lot of "education" to suspend common sense and learn things that just aren't so.
Strictly applied, the above would lead to the conclusion that every believing Muslim behind enemy lines, in the lands of the infidels, is a potential terrorist and jihad-inspired killer. This is obviously not the case, but how do we sort the the serious muslims from those who are marginal, for identification purposes only, muslims?
An impossible task.
Osmund Bindalen wrote, of people like Bat Yeor and Spencer: "the knowledge produced by these eminent scholars is rapidly spreading among the general public".
Frustrating though it is, perhaps it is best that it is happening this way around - the self-informing of the general public first, a movement from the ground up not from the top down.
Because a broad-based grassroots body of knowledge - not emotions or opinions whipped up by propaganda rhetoric, but KNOWLEDGE based on personal experience meshing with real history, and the rock-solid scholarship and personal integrity of people like Spencer and Bat Ye'or, or the defectors from Islam, the Patrick Sookhdeos and Daniel Shayestehs spreading the word within the parish churches - in the USA but also in Australia, Canada, NZ, UK, Scandinavia, Israel, perhaps even, via sites like this, to Thailand and the Philippines, South Korea and India, and, please God, into Russia and even China, will in the end sustain those leaders who DO wake up. They won't have to waste time changing minds and getting everyone pointing in the same direction - that's being done already. It's one thing to be a politician trying to awaken a movement; another thing to find, when you pop your head up, that the movement has identified YOU.
For example: if in a few years' time a PM in Australia, say, tentatively proposed to restore a national draft modelled on the example of Singapore, or the IDF, or Switzerland, for homeland defence, in the light of the fact that our large neighbour to the northwest is rapidly Islamising and jihad likely to erupt, they might be surprised by how many people would simply say - 'do it - and about time too!'
Get out Tolkien's Lord of the Rings, book two; read the chapter entitled 'Treebeard'. Sometimes the discussion on this blog - doubtless mirroring and triggering a myriad other discussions elsewhere - reminds me of the Entmoot. The Muslims - and their Sarumans - had better watch out when the tipping point comes and the forest transforms itself into an army - furious and focused.
"I have an odd feeling about these Ents", says Merry. " Somehow I don't think they are quite as safe and, well, funny, as they seem. They seem slow, queer, and patient, almost sad; and yet I believe they COULD be roused. If that happened, I would rather not be on the other side."
"Yes" said Pippin. 'I know what you mean. There might be all the difference between an old cow sitting and thoughtfully chewing, and a bull charging; and the change might come suddenly".
Again: a propos the role of the 'general public', the following poem may provide some inspiration.
The Other Little Boats
A pause came in the fighting and England held her breath
For the battle was not ended and the ending might be death.
Then out they came, the little boats, from all the Channel shores
Free men were these who set the sails and laboured at the oars.
From Itchenor and Shoreham, from Deal and Winchelsea,
They put out into the Channel to keep their country free
Not of Dunkirk this story, but of boatmen long ago,
When our Queen was Gloriana and King Philip was our foe
And galleons rode the Narrow Sea, and Effingham and Drake
Were out of shot and powder, with all England still at stake.
They got the shot and powder, they charged the guns again,
The guns that guarded England from the galleons of Spain,
And the men who helped them to do it, helped them still to hold the sea.
Men from Itchenor and Shoreham, men from Deal and Winchelsea,
Looked out happily from Heaven and cheered to see the work
Of their grandsons' grandsons' grandsons on the beaches of Dunkirk.
- Edward Shanks
This poem celebrates the fact that in the ‘western’ civilization, Naipaul's ‘universal’ civilization, it is the little people, the body of free citizens, like the ‘hobbits’ of Tolkien’s fictional Shire, who, in the end, acting by their own choice, freely and together, with knowledge and courage, may turn the tide of history. Let's remember that, and take heart.