National Guard told: study jihadists

Wow, I'm impressed! They're actually thinking beyond the limits of "political correctness!"

Indeed, they're actually THINKING!

Indeed, they're actually THINKING!
Posted by: darcy

Yes Darcy, and what a headache it has given them. 'Thinking' for those used to having others do it for them, is very difficult. Some people actually get migraines from thinking too hard. That's why liberals and leftists are often red faced and angry.
Being forced to think, is painful. It's better to kick back, smoke dope, and listen to soul destroying
rap music. No thinking required there. 'Thinking' is strictly out of the question, so it is amazing when one of these people actually has a valid thought.

As far as the article, good luck, I don't 'think' that Islam is reformable, but there is no excuse for not trying...

Robert, your analysis is so right on. Why do we keep hearing this same blather over and over in the media? Polls show it's NOT a tiny minority. Yes, the majority aren't blowing themselves up, but they are rooting for the bad guys, especially in places like Pakistan. The media is feeding the public a regimen of disinformation. When I see burqa-clad women on my street I don't need to wonder what their views are.

How to defeat jihad?

1. The vast Muslim empire was created by jihad.

2. Many Muslims became wealthy due to the booty that was looted from North Africa, Europe, Byzantium, Central Asia, India and the resulting slave trade from these savage jihads.

3. Islam divides the world into believers and kuffir (infidels). There are rules regarding your behavior towards believers (male), there are no rules regarding kuffirs. Thus, warfare against unbelievers is a religious duty. Until they submit and become your slaves.

4. Most Moslems have fond memories regarding the jihads that were fought against the infidels in the past and present.

5. Jihad is considered the fifth pillar of Islam.

To defeat jihad, you cannot just change the actions of the few, but change the attitudes of the many.

I would add a 6th point to overcome Sharia supremacist Jihad:

6. Call upon Muslims to enforce 'religious freedom' in Islam, that there will be no 'death for apostasy' anywhere in the West or the Muslim world.

"Exhort Muslims"..."Call upon Muslims"..."Teach Muslims" etc...

Since the Islam IS the source of Jihad, seems to me this is vanity disguised with hope...that you can reform Muslims that are still committed to the source of it.

Its like telling someone swimming in a disease filled polluted river to make sure they don't get splashed in the face too much or swallow any of the water.

The only solution is to either pull them out of it or immediately block off the entire source. Otherwise it will just keep flowing into our land to the point where greater numbers of Muslims will eventually find deeper commitment to pure Islam. Then we will be dealing with Jihad on the level like Great Britain & Eurabia is presently facing.

What an excellent piece, Robert! Right on target. It's too bad we can't get this published in all the major 'papers', and get it on MSM TV and radio. I realize these muslims know all this info in your piece, but maybe it would shame them into appropriate peaceful actions.

from the article and the quoted comments

"* Reduce the corruption, economic backwardness and tyranny that Jihadists exploit.

Study after study has shown that jihadists are generally better educated and wealthier than their peers. But why let the facts get in the way of fashionable
analysis?"

It is true in our country generally that links between violence and poverty and lack of education are pretty solid. But the author is equating jihad with criminality which is not the culture that jihadia is infused with. It shows an underlying assumption of cultural equivalence. It might be better to return to the europeon past and remember that those who went on crusades were more generally of the wealthier classes whose wealth could sustain them while they were following a cause.

It is certain that immigration reform has been couched in such a way that we would tend to take in more of those who were wealthy and educated enough to engage in Jihad, rejecting those Middle eastern Christians and converts from mahometanism who generally have been impoverished by the depredations of their consciences choice.

"Guardmembers must clearly distinguish between radical, violent Jihadists and the vast majority of Muslims, Finney said, citing an observation by Bernard Lewis,"
'“Most Muslims are not fundamentalists,” Lewis wrote'
"Jihadists are a very small, fanatical Muslim minority"

So what about this "vast majority" of "most" Moslems? Where do they stand in relation to jihad? Maybe they're not active jihadists in the sense that they're willing to take their AK-47's and go a spree of killing infidels, or that they're willing to strap on their suicide-vests and blow themselves up on a bus or in a shopping mall. But what if they contribute time or money or in-kind support to jihadist groups? What if they willingly listen to jihadist sermons from their imams?
By the logic that the Left applies to other ethnic groups, they -- i.e. this "vast majority" of Moslems -- are virtually all jihadists. After all, we're told that virtually all Germans -- except for a few saints like Bonhoeffer and Schindler -- bear guilt for the Holocaust and the war. And we routinely hear that virtually all American whites were, and are, guilty of "racism", even if they were never near a lynch mob or a cross-burning.
So let's see the Left show some consistent thinking, and declare that Moslems are all jihadists, except for "a very small minority".

OST, Jihadists do exploit oppression and poverty, blaming those things on the west and the wests realpolitik support for some of the regimes involved in oppression and poverty, but it seems to me that when democracy is tried, not our american form with respect to minority rights and a general bill of rights, which things grew out of a generally protestant Christian culture, but a trust the people, people are generally good more secular attitude type of democracy, that then we get elections of Muslim Brotherhood and Hamas types.

I would like to see if in the future those places that have succumbed to the worst angels of their nature and elected Hamas, will be given the oppurtunity to correct their mistakes in free fair elections. The events in the gaza make me extremely pessimistic that such parties as Hamas are able to share power, or to recognize any check or balance upon it other than their self serving interpretations of the koaran

Fellow Jihadwatchers e-mail your local State National Guard or the National Guard website and if you know anyone personaly in the National Guard suggest Robert Spencers books and website to be included in the study material.Also give Robert contact info director@jihadwatch.org so that Robert can give a lectures to the National Guard.

Fellow Jihadwatchers e-mail your local State National Guard or the National Guard website and if you know anyone personaly in the National Guard suggest Robert Spencers books and website to be included in the study material.Also give Robert contact info director@jihadwatch.org so that Robert can give a lectures to the National Guard.

Although this article indicates thinking that falls well short of the mark, at least it begins to acknowledge that there is a connection between Islam and Jihadi Violence! (Now that I have written something conciliatory I can add the meat.)

There are a few military members who on personal initiative have engaged in study of the fundamental issues of this war. However, these individuals are certainly in the minority and encouragement for such education does not come from military higher-ups. There are many fine individuals serving in uniform today who do not have a clue about the gravity and the 7th Century nature of the conflict. Reference to the 20th Century "radicalization" is a typical cop out to avoid the otherwise necessary visit to classical Islam to find the actual root causes.

By far, the U.S. Military structure, doctrine and persona are STILL oriented to fighting previous (outdated) great land warfare conflicts with nations designed on the Westphalian construct - while at the same time sponsoring sensitivity training from Imams and even Catholic priests to discuss the peaceful nature of Islam. After all, the current, published National Security Strategy tells us that Islam is a Religion of Peace! I have read the NSS and come away wondering where to look to find a real strategy. The economic stranglehold that petroleum has on us is small in comparison to the vulnerabilities created by PC.

I wouldn't worry much about most of the military, as when it comes down to the brass tacks, they'll revert back to the primary (humorous and unspoken, but effective) directive of the military...it's even a popular bumper sticker & guaranteed to defeat the enemy every time it's tried...

Join the Armed Forces,
see the world-
meet all kinds of new
& interesting people...
then kill them.

;-)

Why should a strong belief system, which promises a blissful and erotic Paradise, change to accomodate a lesser belief system of infidels? (One is fragmented into hundred of sects in the West, and whose "heaven" is not sensual enough to appeal to the spiritually and emotionally and intellectually simplistic?)

There is no reasoning with a conceptual dogmatism (Islam) which has decreed that reason itself is a weakness and a limitation not to be placed upon their deity "Allah".

Only a revolution of humane rationality (which would include profound and daring psychological and philosophical and theological self-questioning) by Muslims, within Islam, will change this warlord's sanctified totalitarianism into something that could coexist with other religious approaches to Life.

The radical jihadists tend to murder any reformers who approach this gate.

Until the reformers are as ruthless in response to the militant and fanatically-fundamentalist (textually literalist) jihadists, the homicidal element of Islam will overrule any possibility of compassionate revision.

Only by being met with equal force of belief can the Jihad be defeated.

Whether an existing and loving "religious" belief, or a simple belief that human decency is superior to blind obedience to any dogmatic brutality.

The West needs to rally its belief.

And challenge Islam's tenets directly.

Compassion versus compulsion.

Consciousness versus coma.

Right on Robert,

Enough of this up to the eyeballs of "this is the religion of peace"

At some point if they wish to coexist with the West they will have to address the evil at the core in the koran.

If they dont, all bets are off.

Join the Armed Forces,
see the world-
meet all kinds of new
& interesting people...
then kill them.

jcom1972 -

I remember this from a new-left poster back in the '60s. It was a canard then and still is. As an Army vet, I urge you to forbear regurgitating Communist propaganda.

Excellent decision Robert to couple your criticism with explicit recommendations. Perhaps Finney will get wind of them and think a little further.

I'm not,Papa...
(it's ok, we're on thesame page, and I'm being humorous) it's become humorous to the Armed Forces, in direct slam-down of that same communist PAPaganda since they used it ad nauseum to the point where it eventually became a laughingstock to those who had to hear it constantly (especially by the end of the dhimmi jimmy dark ages),
yes it was pap brought on by the earlier generation of communist infestations which is a critical cog in the machine better known as the "Unholy Alliance" of today...but the "communist propaganda" infestation mindset of today and their entirely-different vernacular (aka political correctness) is far greater concern, especially since it's being shoved down the throats of the commiephiles, conspiracy kooks and the generally uninformed who get fooled by the MSM since it's the only place they get news & info from.

It's ok...we're on the same page...just using some return-fire psychology as it's worked quite effectively for about 27 years with our men & women in uniform today...and the Unholy Alliance H-A-T-E-S it being thrown back at them.
(I'll keep your concern in mind if it's too much a sore spot as that wasn't my aim)

;-)

Havoc's Two-Point Plan:

1. Round them up.

2. Deport Them.

Any questions?

"Study Jihadists, take advantage of DOD foreign culture, language programs, Guardmembers urged"
-- from the title of the article by Staff Sgt. Jim Greenhill above, posted at the National Guard website

Yes, but more needs to be done. There has to be a way to make sure that those who study Islam do so properly, learning not from the propagandists but from those whose work and understanding of Islam is something that two distinct imagined audiences would recognize as something like the truth.

The first of those two audiences consists of the great Western scholars of Islam, the "Orientalists" -- who lived and studied and taught and wrote during the Golden Age, roughly that century between 1860 and 1960, before the Great Inhibition set in. Such people as C. Snouck Hurgronje and Joseph Schacht and Arthur Jeffrey and Henri Lammens and Edmond Fagnan and Georges Vajda and dozens of others, English and German, American and French, Italian and Spanish, Bulgarian and Serbian, Hungarian and Polish, Indian and even Christian experts on Islam from among the Maronites and other besieged non-Muslim populations in Dar al-Islam.

The second audience that needs to see how Islam is being presented to American military forces, the regular army, the Reservists, and the National Guard, consists of those who, through no fault of their own, were born into Islam and raised in states, or societies, suffused with Islam. Such people as Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, and many others know exactly what Islam is all about, know what is said to Infidels and all the tricks of apologists and sinister propagandists, the deliberate misreadings, or omissions, or misinterpretations fed the gullible Infidels, and they -- like the scholars of yore, done such damage by the likes of Edward Said (but buy, and read, Ibn Warraq's just-published reply to Said, "The Defense of the West")- will be able to keep the American defense establishment from listening to all the wrong people, and not only listening to, but fondly believing what they have to say, no matter how transparently misleading and absurd it may be.

This requires a pedagogic czar, or a board of czarevitches. Certainly Wafa Sultan, and Robert Spencer, and Ubn Warraq, and Martin Kramer (from the within-the-pale list, as currently defined) would be good names to start with.

Yes, but who will educate the President and the Secretary of State?

Probably this guy...
http://atlasshrugs2000.typepad.com/atlas_shrugs/2007/11/unindicted-co-c.html

;-)

"4. Call upon Muslims to begin comprehensive international programs in mosques all over the world to teach against the ideas of violent jihad and Islamic supremacism."

Is this even possible? How would Muslims re-interpret what is so absolutely clear? Who would be authorized to make such changes in Islamic interpretations and law?

In order for Mr. Spencer's step four to happen, wouldn't it have to start from the Islamic schools of jurisprudence, before it would spill over? If so, who could change long static Islamic jurisprudence and based on what? New sources perhaps? Authenticating more Hadith than Bhukari or Moselm? Dead Sand Scrolls found in Mecca?

What about Mr. Spencer's enlightening information regarding the Ijtihad, with concerns over who would be qualified to make such changes, let alone what changes they could possibly make to a pretty straight forward and repeated message of distinction between believer and non believer?

The reference to Jihad, meaning inner struggle, maybe more popular with the present day Muslims overal, but that doesn't make it correct, and as Mr. Spencer points out again, Jihadists exploit that error to present true ISlam for recruit, through constant endless messages of what Hugh apply points out as Da'wa. It only takes an increase in Islamic piety to transform from Jekyll to Hyde. Daniel Pipes has coined a good term, "Sudden Jihadi Syndrome".

Islam appears to be a duelistic logic. Contradictions as we see them don't exist, they can't. The thinking is completely alien to westerners. Jihad means both, non violent and violent. Best way to grasp what Jihad truly means is to view the term in it's context, citing references, and how they were used in context...... and unfortunately for the reformest crowd, when researched, you're looking at a 70-80% use in context of physical war as opposed to the amount of references to Jihad in a spiritual context.

Lets face reality, without the stolen bits of Hanif and Judean story plots, mixed in with a few pagan rituals, Islam is very short on spirituality. Without gutting Islam, there is no reform, and if it's gutted, it would cease to exist, therefore our options are few, and hope shouldn't be misplaced.

Just my 2 cents !

Just keep screaming at them to read a book, or a few, and not rely on lean, mean, jogging espositos and smiliing fortes and plausible imams. Even Jimmy Durante sang a song about how he decided to read a book, and liked it so much that he said he might do it again some day.

In summ: "It's an extremists' world, the moderates just live in it."

"Finney said, citing an observation by Bernard Lewis, eminent Princeton University historian of the Islamic world:

'Most Muslims are not fundamentalists,' Lewis wrote in his 2004 book “The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror,” and 'most fundamentalists are not terrorists but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.'"
-- from the article above

Though it may be hard for both Finney and Norman Podhoretz and others to believe, Bernard Lewis is not the final authrity, nor the "world's greatest authority" on Islam. There are those, such as the pioneering scholar of the dhimmi status and condition, Bat Ye'or, who have grown distinctly unimpressed with Lewis's grasp of Islam. He has written a lot on many different subjects, lucidly, often beautifully. His authority, in the main, comes from these writings, and someof his books undeniably have great value, with those least subject to criticism being "The Political Language of Islam" and "The Multiple Identities of the Middle East." He delivered, felinely, the first blow to the atrocious Edward Said's atrocious "Orientalism" in a brief essay, "The Question of 'Orientalism."" He has been a master of the essay form, an eloquent synthesizer whose apercus are often worth more than an article or even a book churned out by lesser people. So few people of his generation, who were solidly educated in a different time and place, and came out cultivated and with the ability to become ever more widely cultivated, and also had the possibility to be trained in languages in ways, and to a level, beyond anything conceivable now, when the same kind of opportunities for travel and residence in Iran, Turkey, the Arab countries tno longer exists in the ways that it once did. Living in Istanbul, or Cairo, sixty or seventy years ago, or employing native informants as repetieurs at Langues O. or Oxford, offers something that no "term abroad" enrolled in some Arabic-language course in Cairo or Damascus, with fellow American students never far away, is not the same thing, cannot produce the same result.

Lewis has outlived those who were on his level, and that has allowed him to seem more imposing, and more authoritiatve, than he is. Of course he speaks better, in whole well-fashioned paragraphs, and stands far above those who attack him (and thus give him greater authority among) and also among those who honor him but do so gushingly, in that "world's-greatest-authority" vein that so pains, or should pain, Lewis himself. S. D. Goitein, who at the end of his life admitted that until he studied the papers from the Cairo Geniza, he had failed to realize how onerous was the Jizyah, and said that he had had to revise his whole view of the treatment of non-Muslims. One wonders if Lewis, that enthusiast for both the Oslo Accords and for the Iraq venture -- a venture that he apparently expected would have ended years ago, with Ahmed Chalabi and those allied to him firmly in control (J. B. Kelly warned Lewis that the Iraq venture would "end it tears" and Lewis, though self-assured when it comes to the likes of espositos or other MESA-Nostrans, is not quite so confident with those who knew him back in London and who, like Kelly, have had longer, and more immediate experience of the Arabs in situ, their understanding of the Arab Muslims being much deeper than what comes from knowing, even being pursued or made much of by, educated, well-off, worldly, and clever Arabs and other Muslims who live in, or travel frequently to, the West, as has been the the case with Lewis.

Here are some of the deficiencies in the work of the much-lionized Bernard Lewis:

"Bernard Lewis is an acute scholar about many aspects of Islam. He writes beautifully. He is well-trained in languages. He lived during the war in Egypt. He is lionized in Turkey. Even in small shops off Taksim Square, the proprietors, when they discover a visitor is from the United States, ask if that visitor may happen to know "Professor Lewis."

He has all the right enemies: notably, the absurd Said, who knew nothing about Islam but for some reason thought his being an Arab entitled him to act as an expert (the footnote alone, on "thawra," in Lewis' "The Question of Orientalism," is enough to delicately dismember all of Said's pretentions; he does not survive the essay); and the apologist Esposito, who is not fit to be mentioned at the same time as Lewis. Esposito is an out-and-out apologist, an ignoramus, and the producer of glossy picture-books about Islam that win the reader over and distract from the apologetic or vapid texts he has chosen, with plenty of local color -- venerable mosques, turbans and Iznik tulips, the usual Mughal miniatures of hunting scenes, or Majnoun and Leyla, an apothecary jar or two from Abbassid Baghdad, the obligatory Persian poetry in nastaliq, and of course the Dome of the Rock. Meanwhile, he ignores so many subjects, including Jihad and the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam, or minimizes them to the point of disappearance.

In Lewis' long academic career in England, he was not listened to sufficiently by the Foreign Office, and their insulting behavior (stemming from antisemitism) could not but affect him. He clearly enjoys being appreciated. Who does not? He enjoys, on his visits to the Middle East, being made much of by Turkish or Arab hosts. If you had spent years learning, and learning well, certain languages, and the only people who could fully appreciate your achievement were, say, Muslim Arabs, or quasi-Muslim Turks, and if they seemed to you to talk a good game of "moderate" Islam (in the case of the Turks, it was meant), you too might not wish to offend those colleagues, those friends, those hosts and patrons. Some may find it telling that Lewis has reproduced, for both his book of translations from the Turkish, Persian, Hebrew, and Arabic, and for his latest collection of articles, "From Babel to Dragomans", a photograph that shows him sitting in Western dress (he never stoops to the clownish indignity of going native like the mythomane Lawrence, or St. John Philby, or dozens of others) in the tent, or something like it, that belongs to none other than the Hashemite Prince Hassan ibn Talal. Prince Hassan is that plummy-voiced "dialogue-of-civilisations" apologist for Islam: the most plausible, the most outwardly pleasing, the most subtle, and therefore the most convincing and dangerous of such apologists.
That photograph, that desire to have that photograph used on two of his books, might be taken simply as a way to show the members of MESA that -- look, the real Arabs know that I tell them the truth.

Lewis in various interviews does seem pleased that he can address two audiences at the same time. "He doth bestride the world like a colossus." He is proud of the fact that so many of his books have been translated into Turkish, Arabic, Farsi. But the truth is that you cannot write with two audiences in mind, one Muslim, the other non-Muslim. That Muslim audience is so prickly, so defensive, so unwilling to admit the events of its own history (the unwillingness, for example, to even read the scholarship of Bat Ye'or, even among the so-called advanced Arabs in the West, is absolutely flabbergasting), that Lewis finds himself at every turn either pulling his punches or enveloping his thought in veils of velleities. It is not a case of being fortiter in re, suaviter in modo. He is suave in his prose all right, but that suavity is not wrapped around a sufficient amount of truthful iron.

He is attempting a trick that cannot be achieved. You cannot write simultaneously for an audience of Muslims and for an audience of informed non-Muslims. Lewis tries to flatter his Muslim readers with constant, almost formulaic, reassurance about the "greatness" of high classical Islamic civilization -- which Lewis always describes, wrongly, as being far above any other civilisation of the time. Has he forgotten China? And does he still accept the older cliches about the "Dark Ages"? It is a poor historian who appeals to the self-esteem problem of part of his audience; that is not the historian's task.

Lewis now seems, at last, to be fully recognized and triumphant. But is he? He was an enthusiastic supporter of the disastrous Oslo Accords. It is understandable why people such as Clinton, or Tom Friedman, or all the others who know nothing about Islam, should believe in the efficacy of such negotiations and such treaties. But Lewis? Lewis knows all about the rules of Muslim jurisprudence regarding "treaties" with Infidel peoples and polities, and knows perfectly well why every treaty Israel has ever signed with an Arab state has been violated, sometimes completely, and knows too the significance of the Treaty of al-Hudaiybiyya, which Arafat so frequently mentioned to his Muslim audiences. What is Lewis' excuse for supporting, so loudly and for so long, the Oslo folly?

Lewis describes the series of political, legal, financial, social, sumptuary, and other disablities placed on dhimmis in quite brisk terms, usually limiting himself to a word or two about the jizya and "other disabilities." He does not stop to really go into the whole monstrous system, or to quizzically ask what that phrase "protected peoples" might mean, or how it was that everywhere that Islam conquered, the treatment of dhimmis, whether they were Christians or Jews or Zoroastrians or even Hindus or Buddhists -- was remarkably the same. He doesn't notice that in all cases the post-conquest (i.e. post-Jihad) institution of dhimmitude led to the enforced status of degradation, humiliation, and permanent insecurity (including intermittent massacres that Lewis hardly ever refers to) of all of these non-Muslim peoples.

Lewis himself must, more and more, have come to see -- especially as his beloved Turkey slides away from Kemalism -- that in certain essentials he got it wrong. He actually got Islam wrong. He underestimated its malevolence. He underestimated the difficulty of reform. He took as representative men the scholars, or the well-educated exiles, who came out of that world, but who were actually about as representative of it as Stravinsky, Balanchine, and Nabokov were of Soviet Russia. He was wrong; he was wrong on the Oslo Accords; he was wrong in his political advertisement (written with James Woolsey) to promote Prince Hassan to be a new king for Iraq. He remains wrong if he thinks that the United States should continue to be preoccupied with Iraq when there are so many other ways to expose the political, economic, moral, and intellectual failures of Islam. And that, in the long run, is the only thing which will cause, from within, the engendering of lots of local Ataturks who may work to constrain or limit Islam -- as its sacred texts, including the authoritative recensions of hadith, are immutable.

Lewis was asked some years ago by the TLS to review Ibn Warraq's Why I Am Not a Muslim. He dawdled and dithered; by the time he told them he just could not do it, it was too late, in the opinion of the TLS, to run any review. Contrast that with how the lefist, even Marxist French scholar of Islam, Maxime Rodinson, treated the same book. He was given it to review by Le Monde, which assumed that Rodinson, known for his tiersmondiste sympathies, would savage the book. (Rodinson's sympathies also probably explain why Edward Said gave an enthusiastic blurb to Rodinson's quite critical book on Muhammad -- but then Said was known to provide enthusastic blurbs for hundreds of books he never opened, but just guessed as to their general direction; his endorsements were spread around like confetti, and even cheaper). But Rodinson produced a favorable review, much to the chagrin of the editors at Le Monde -- and they, acting true to Stalinist form, simply refused to print the review (it can be found in Rodinson's other publications).

But how could Lewis, after all, praise Ibn Warraq publicly? And he could not publicly deny that the book had great merit either. So best to finesse; delay like Kutuzov; the mere passage of time will solve the problem. Solve it Time did, and consequently that book, one of the most important in recent decades, never received a review in the TLS.

It is fascinating to compare the behavior of Lewis with two other scholars of roughly the same age and status. S. D. Goitein wrote his celebrated "A Mediterranean Society" based on his detailed study of the papers found in the Cairo Geniza -- a record of the Jewish community in Cairo, and not only in Cairo, that extended over many centuries. Goitein, who earlier had had a kind of sympathetic, almost sentimental interest in promoting the idea of the natural sympathies and similarities of Muslims and Jews, was severely chastened by his last decades of scholarship. If there was one thing, he wrote, about which he had to revise his opinion, it was about the severity of the jizyah. He now realized what a terrible burden it was, especially on the poor non-Muslims. Just before he died, Goitein was preparing a favorable review of Bat Ye'or.

Even at their advanced ages, both Rodinson and Goitein were willing to break, in pat, with their own pasts, to declare that new evidence, and final summings-up, had led them to conclusions that were not nearly as favorable to Islam as they might once have hoped. Goitein's study of the Cairo Geniza led him to rethink the problem of the dhimmi, to reconsider his old pieties and sentimentalities. Rodinson, who had been (of course) a great defender of the Arabs against French colonialism, a die-hard tiersmondiste, a Marxist, found that Ibn Warraq's relentless assault on Islam (above all for its intellectual constraints and failures) deserved the highest praise -- and he was willing to disappoint his editors at Le Monde in insisting that they either publish his enthusiastic review, or squash it altogether (of course, they squashed it).

Lewis himself once wrote an essay that identified the philo-Islamic strain in Jewish Orientalists who found what seemed to be the more welcoming world of Islam as compared to the brutalities inflicted on Jews by Western Christendom. He was good at diagnosis, but not as good at self-diagnosis. Lewis has in the past been unwilling to endorse the scholarship of Bat Ye'or, describing it as "too polemical." Really? If the scrupulous scholarship of The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam is too polemical (is that a word which one applies when scholarship is sometimes informed with passion?), what of all the scholarship on which that book rests? What of Arakel of Tabriz? Or Armand Abel? Or Charles Dufourcq? Or Levi-Provencal? Or what about the scholarship that Bat Ye'or did not use, that of Mary Boyce on the Muslim treatment of Zoroastrians, or K. S. Lal on the Muslim treatment of Hindus?

Bat Ye'or managed both to create a work of scholarship and analysis, much of which was original to her, as well as a synthesis of a large amount of scholarly literature -- by French, German, Armenian, Greek, Bulgarian, Romanian, and other scholars -- scholarship which does not paint quite the picture of the Ottomans as that which Lewis has favored. Not that he has ever been an open apologist for Islam, but he has failed to convey, in book after book, the real nature and horror of dhimmitude. To describe, for example, the forced levy of Christian children by the Turks, as a "recruitment" (which to the modern mind evokes mental images of college or army recruiters dangling inducements) which was often envied by the Muslim parents, is to ignore the work by scholars from parts of Europe once under Ottoman rule, detailing the fear and horror of such events as the devshirme levy. The subject of dhimmitude has not been part of Lewis' main bailiwick. It is one thing not to treat of a subject, quite another to mislead as to its real significance; quite another still to simply shut out of serious consideration a lonely scholar, outside the regular academic system, who has produced the body of work that Bat Ye'or has produced and continues to produce.

One hesitates to criticize Lewis for this because of the disgraceful treatment of him by the members of MESA (the MIddle Eastern Studies Association). Their relation to Lewis reminds me of a story that the late Tibor Szamuely once wrote in The Spectator. He described a functionary, the compleat chinovnik, of the Soviet Writers' Union, giving a speech in Tula, famed for its samovars, in the southwest of Moscow. "In bad old Czarist days," he intoned, "we had only one writer from Tula Province." And then he noted proudly: "But now, but now we have 3,247 members of the Union of Soviet Writers from Tula Province alone." (Wild cheering, laughter, applause).

Szamuely drily added: "Yes. He was right. But he forgot to add that the one writer from "bad old Czarist days" was named Lev Tolstoy" and no one would ever remember any of the 3,247 current members of the Writers' Union from Tula. Well, something like that comes to mind when one thinks of Lewis, and his scholarship, compared to the heaps of Rashid Khalidis and Hamid Dabashis and Joel Beinins, some of whom are former propagandists for the PLO, others of whom spend their academic leisure beavering about in the busy "construction of the Palestinian identity" -- which if it really existed, as more than a transparently useful notion, would not require so much endless "construction." In relation to the MESA members who continue to deny him the recognition he deserves, reminds us of Tolstoy, in Szamuely's anecdote, in relation to his numerous (3,247, to be exact) epigones. But that does not absolve Lewis of his failures, his elisions, his distortions, his underappreciations, his allowing vanity to cloud his keen sight. How could he continue to deny the Armenian genocide? Out of what misplaced loyalties to Ottomanists and Osmanlis, and to his decades of friendship with many Turks, could he have found himself denying masses of evidence and eyewitness testimony? Which was more important -- the continued friendship of Turks, or the scholarly approval of Vahakn Dadrian and others who have studied the Armenian genocide?

If one is to believe the Wall Street Journal and other publications, Lewis has had an important influence on American policy in Iraq. By that, one means not the original invasion itself, but the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project, which was to bring "democracy" to Iraq, and then that "democracy," in turn, would serve as a model for other Arab states, and lead to all manner of good things, including the diminishing of the role of Islam. But Lewis, like those in the Pentagon, was making judgments on the basis of friendship with highly misrepresentative men, Iraqis who were well-educated in the West, who had spent decades in the West (Chalabi has been in the West for 45 years), and who not only had become Western, rational men, but had themselves forgotten just how irrational Iraqi society is, with its ever-present substratum of Islam, the hostility that Islam engenders toward all non-Muslims (which means, of course, that any gratitude toward Infidel Americans for rescuing them from the regime of Saddam Hussein will be either feigned, or fleeting, or both).

Lewis likes to think of himself as unswervingly unpolemical, the historian au-dessus de la melee -- but he did not hesitate to co-sign the above-mentioned political advertisement that he wrote with Woolsey on behalf of Prince Hassan of Jordan, to become the new king of Iraq. This advertisement required him to praise the ahistoric fantasies of Amartya Sen about the historically "democratic" strain in Islam, which, if we are talking about modern "democracy" and its connection to human rights, completely misstates the case.

Lewis allowed himself to forget, because he wanted not to remember, essential tenets of Islam: the manichaean split between Believer and Infidel, the inability of the Believer to accept any authority other than the sharia (and certainly not an authority stemmming from the votes of mere mortals), and the impossibility of there being a real defense of human rights (beginning with full freedom of conscience, which is impossible in any Islamic regime).

Lewis lived in Egypt during World War II, when Egypt was essentially ruled by the British under extraordinary wartime conditions (it was the British who jailed Answar Sadat for his pro-Nazi activities). Otherwise, Lewis has visited the Middle East as a dignitary, and Turkey a celebrity. He is feted, treated with famous courtesy. In Amman Prince Hassan himself is a host and patron. In Princeton, dissenters now eager for support within the Administration make sure, as Saad Eddin Ibrahim did, to visit Lewis in Princeton. (Lewis was instrumental in putting pressure on the Egyptian government, through threats to withhold $30 million, to change its treatment of Ibrahim in the courts.) All of this attention, all of this lionizing, has had an affect. Lewis has retailed on more than one occasion his bon mots to gathered Arab admirers in Amman; his natural wariness seems strangely absent in his retelling of a story where his sally met with appreciative laughter. Few of us would respond otherwise. Everyone likes to have a receptive audience.

Lewis did not grow up in the Arab and Muslim world, as did the dry and brilliant Elie Kedourie; nor did he live, among the Arabs in situ, as did J. B. Kelly. (It is quite another thing to live among Arab colleagues in the West). He does not recognize quite as easily, and thus dismiss quite as completely, the nonsense, lies,and blague that are the stock-in-trade in the Arab countries -- as Kelly, for example, is wont to do.

What is passing strange is that Lewis' first and greatest interest was modern Turkey. He admired the Kemalist reforms. He understood how difficult it was to undertake them. He knew that save for that reforms, the class of secularist Turks -- the very class from which his own colleagues and friends came -- would never have attained the critical mass it did. Yet, when confronted with Iraq, he did not draw any lessons from Kemalism. He did not stop to think that Kemalism was a result purely from within, a result derived from an enlightened despot who was convinced that Islam explained the failures, political, economic, social, and intellectual, of the Muslim peoples, including the Turks -- and that Islam would, in its practice, have to be constrained by government fiat. That was what Kemalism was all about.

Now, confronted with Iraq, Lewis ignores the lessons of Kemalism. Yet he must know that had the British tried, for example, with their soldiers still walking the streets of Istanbul, to impose the kind of de-islamizing reforms that Mustafa Kemal imposed, it would never have worked. He now seems to be promoting the idea that "democracy" can come to that most unlikely country, Iraq, where tribalism and not the idea of the individual still rules, and where ethnic (Kurd and Arab) and sectarian (Sunni and Shi'a) rivalries and hatreds have a long and deep history, and where the underlying ideology of Islam is opposed in every fiber to the rights enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- including the right to freedom of conscience (apostasy), the right of equal treatment under the law for believers in all religions (directly contradicted by the sharia), the right to equal treatment of men and women (also contradicted by the sharia), and so on.

Why did Lewis not apply the lessons of Kemalist Turkey, the only successful or quasi-successful democracy in the Muslim world, to Iraq? Surely the goal is not to bring "democracy" which would mean a Shi'a takeover. The goal for Infidels should be to bring about the kind of end-of-our-tether conditions that will allow a sufficient number of people within the Muslim world to see that Islam itself has failed, politically, economically, morally, and intellectually, and that the Kemalist approach is the only thing that will work. Infidels should not try, hopelessly, to "reform" Islam, but rather to grimly and relentlessly create the conditions that constrain the practice of Islam, so that a secularist class may be nurtured. And in turn, that class will have a stake in continuing to adhere to the local version of Kemalism and to continue to suppress any signs of backsliding, so that Islam can continue to be tamed.

Lewis must know from his own encounter a few days ago with the Turkish Prime Minster, Mr. Erdogan, Kemalism is now under assault, perhaps a successful assault. The assumption that the gains were permanent, that Turkey would remain unaffected by Islam's natural distempers (not, as Lewis would have it, merely reactions to the disappointments of the modern world), has turned out to be shaky.

Lewis has noted in public lectures that much has been achieved to bring "progress" to the Muslim world by those who would be properly described as enlightened despots, such as King Muhammad V of Morocco, Bourguiba in Tunisia, Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran, and especially, and most successfully, by Ataturk in Turkey. Belief in the "people" (i.e. in "democracy") in the Muslim world is likely to lead to retrograde legislation and a situation that makes things worse, not better, for Infidels.

So why did he apparently promote the idea of Iraq as a likely candidate for something called "democracy'? Just how was that to take place, and what was the final outcome likely to be in Iraq's power structure? And since there is nothing self-evident about the idea that "democracy" in Iraq will necessarily be worth the vast allocation of men, materiel, money, and attention that is now being spent, monomaniacally, on this project, just how does it relate to encouraging from within Islam lots of local and little Ataturks to recognize the failures of Islam, and in their own way, for the sake of their own peoples, to cunningly fashion ways to constrain its practice and dampen its appeal? What, one wonders, does Lewis think of the many Muslim or ex-Muslim scholars who have written about the total contradiction between the principles of sharia and the principles enshrined inthe Universal Declaration of Human Rights -- such scholars, for example, as Rexa Afshari, or Ali Sina, or Ibn Warraq, or Azam Kamguian? Does he give weight to their views, or regard them all as malcontents and (he has sometimes employed the Muslim word) "renegades"?

Particularly when it comes to the Middle East, where Muslims do not brook the slightest criticism of Islam or its greatness, or the greatness of its civilisation and so on, it is hard for scholars who perceive things otherwise to speak their minds fully. There is often a gap between what is said publicly and what is admitted privately. And a good many people like to think that if they spent many decades studying a subject, it must have inherent worth, its civilisation must have been a glorious thing indeed. Those mental pictures pass by in vivid array, those mosques in Samarkand and Tashkent and Bokhara, the Dome of the Rock gleaming in Jerusalem, those turbaned Turks and Iznik tulips, all the local color of that "high Islamic civilization" that Orientalists today still feel that they must formulaically overpraise (and in so doing, either tacitly accept the long-discarded notions of a European "Dark Ages," or belittle the vaster achievements of other non-Western civilizatons -- those of the Mayans, or the Hindus, or the Chinese).

Lewis has outlived almost all of his colleagues. The kind of training he received goes far beyond what the Beinins and the Khalidis can even conceive of, and much further still beyond what they could ever attain. Because he towers over those who foolishly attack him, he has been mistaken for a Giant Sequoia. Had those colleagues remained in the field, he would now be seen as still something impressive -- a sturdy English oak, Quercus robur, say -- but not quite as tall, or as impressive, as that Giant Sequoia.

Neither "academics" nor anyone else have to maintain a "good relationship with the areas they study." The academic study of Soviet Russia was, at least in the United States and the United Kingdom and partly in France, in the hands of people who knew exactly what was wrong with Soviet Russia. Think of Hugh Seton-Watson, Richard Pipes, Adam Ulam, Helene Carrere-d'Encausse, Alain Besancon, Karel van het Reve and the Herzen Institute in Amsterdam, Leo Labedz, and his indispensable one-man magazine in London. Think of the emigres, including Kerensky himself, or Nabokov (who stood au-dessus de la melee, but inflicted great damage in all the right quarters, by himself, that "one-man multitude," on the image of Communism among those who came to inhale his prose and took away a complete worldview). Think of the effect of the Chekhov Publishing House, of Novoye Russkoye Slovo (with educated editors, from Vishniak to Weinbaum, in the old days). Think of the mysteriously-funded French publishing house Les Ils d'Or: I have four of their books right on my desk now: "Staline au pouvoir", by Alexandre Ouralov, A. Ciliga's "Au Pays du Mensonge Deconcertant" and "En Siberie," A. Krakovwiecki's "Kolyma" (traduit du Polonais).

And when one had to study Russian, whether in college, or at Monterey, or elsewhere, one's teachers were not sly apologists for, or agents of, Communism or Soviet Russia. They were people who hated Communism.

But with Islam, with the Jihad, everything is different. No official support or recognition is given to the ex-Muslims who have just as much to tell us about Islam as did the defectors from the K.G.B. and the refugees. There is nothing comparable to what existed to inform the West about Soviet Communism. Why, for example, is Walid Shoebat, essentially a "Palestinian" Arab defector from both PLO terrorism and Islam itself, who is so piercing in his analyses, not given public hearings and is limited to Jewish audiences? Why is Ibn Warraq not supported? Where are the congressmen who are willing to call Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, and others to testify, and to promote a greater understanding of what Islam is about? Are they all afraid of offending assorted Muslim leaders? Are they all mesmerized by the word "religion," which implies something -- to them -- untouchable and off-limits? Can't they use the word "belief-system," which has been repeated, in this space, thousands of times?

And as for the grand scheme to throw tens of millions of dollars into the teaching of Arabic and other supposedly relevant languages, that is not likely to bring any greater understanding of things. What, after all, has not been translated? Expert translators at such organizations as MEMRI translate every text, every sermon in the khutbas, every column in Al Watan and Al Ahram and Al-whateveryouwant. There is not much one really a great need, though that is seen as the need, to add to the supply of Arabic speakers. It would take a fortune, and many years, to produce a cadre of Arabic-speakers who could replace those who most obviously are both available and trustworthy -- those "refugees" from Islam who know that world so well, including Maronites, Copts (whose relatives are safely out of Egypt), Arabic-speaking Jews (including some from every region of the Arab world, well-versed in its dialect), and the disaffected former Muslims among the Iranian refugees.

What is needed is not lingusitic training so much as the intelligent analysis of the situation and a thorough grasp not only of the tenets of Islam, but of those fissures within the world of Islam that may be exploited and how they may be exploited.

It is unfortunate that the endless naivete of the American government, including Congress and officials at every level, federal and state, is likely to result in greater sums of money being used to employ Arabic-speaking Muslims who will, in their gentle and sly ways, not only be used to first introduce innocent American students to the declensions and conjugations of Arab nouns and verbs, but who will also, along the way, with those encouraging smiles at the tentative first steps of the unaccustomed tongue, and those little asides about "life under occupation" in "Palestine," or about the "exaggerations" in the American press, slowly but surely -- and it will depend a good deal on exquisite politeness, and personal charm, and seeming sympathy (in which Arab culture specializes) -- win over those students even as they are officially being prepared to learn the language which supposedly will make them better at comprehending the threat of Jihad, and in warily recognizing all the arts of taqiyya and kitman.

Americans are innocents -- abroad and at home. A few of these Arabic-language students will see through the subtle propaganda of their teachers; many, however, will not. It will be nothing like the experience of those who, fifty or forty years ago, studied Russian under those who had suffered from, and hated, Communism.

Although quite a few of those who used to applaud Chairman Mao managed, before they retired or died, to change their tune, few acknowledged their previous silliness. I recall Jonathan Mirsky, a big radical at Dartmouth who now, as a Financial Times writer (if I recall rightly) is no longer a waver of little red books; the same with James Thomson. Orville Schell is now a respectable Dean of the School of Journalism somewhere; has he ever owned up to his previous period of pro-Mao writing and thinking?

There are always the exceptions. When it comes to Communist China, there was Simon Leys (Pierre Ryckmans), author of "Chinese Shadows" and "Chairman Mao's New Clothes," to embarrass some Sinologist apologists of Mao -- if not honest, at least less obviously dishonest.

But most of those who now fill departments of Middle Eastern or Islamic studies in the Western world -- not all, but most -- are apologists to one degree or another. They may not be quite as blatant as Michael Sells or John Esposito. Their motives vary. Some desire not to offend their quick-to-take-offense Muslim colleagues, with whom they must keep departmental peace. Others fear the reaction of Muslim students. The word "Islamophobia" has been primed and is ready for use at the earliest opportunity -- applied whenever anyone dares to question the tenets of Islam or the history of the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam. A few of the most courageous students of dhimmitude manage to escape because they happen to be specialists in, say, Byzantine studies, or Armenian studies -- one thinks of Vahakn Dadrian, or Speros Vryonis. These are special cases. Most of those teaching about Islam are hired either by a department where Muslims already predominate, or where they are a powerful presence. It does not take much to silence people into submission. Why, after all, make trouble? Tenure is here, the sun is shining, who cares if these silly little unteachable students are fed propaganda? Those who are worth anything should be able to arrive at the truth by themselves. Yes, who really gives a damn if the universities hire, and then churn out more students in Islamic or Middle Eastern studies whose views coincide so beautifully with those of the Arab League (properly modified for an American audience), or are the equivalent at Al-Azhar of the Propaganda Fide office at the Vatican? Who cares, indeed?

Better to get on with one's little book on Al-Ghazali -- oh, and did you see the really marvellous translations Robert Irwin did of the "singing crows"? And is there honey still for tea?

Meanwhile, those who dare to point out otherwise are marginalized. For example, in France, Anne-Marie Delcambre (who teaches at one of the best lycees) and Jean-Paul Charnay (whose little book on the sharia, and big book on "La strategie arabe" are both worth reading), must go their lonely way. Bat Ye'or is for many a non-person; never on the syllabi, or if put on, carefully denounced to the students so that they won't even bother to look into her work themselves. Ibn Warraq? Oh, like all ex-Muslims, just an embittered man, "every bit as fanatical" as those he claims to denounce (when in fact he is among the most cultivated, amusing, and bemused people on the face of this earth).

Even those who know better -- Michael Cook and Patricia Crone come to mind -- often use Aesopian language. Crone's latest book does not do justice to dhimmitude. She -- who allowed herself to be anonymously quoted by Alexander Stille on the "treacly nonsense" about Islam -- should perhaps allow herself a little more openness.

So many experts on Islam permit themselves to say in private (a whisper to Bassam Tibi here, a wink to Fouad Ajami or a Behbehani scion there) what they will not say in public. This really has to stop.

As for "the Other," that little idea has had its academic day, but not before it did a huge amount of intellectual damage. It began rather innocently. See, for example, Henri Baudet's modest and intelligent essay "Paradise on Earth (Some Thoughts on European Images of non-European Man)." Then the damned thing was taken up by the thuggish and meretricious Said, who used it as a way to block all intelligent investigation of Muslim Arab culture and mores. Though he presented his "Orientalism" as a general defense of the "oppressed Third World cultures," his intellectual thuggery, as Ibn Warraq noted in his long essay about Said, was designed to cause all "Orientalists" to shut up or at least not to be heeded. And by extension, Said really believed that only only Muslims, or those prepared to follow their scripts, could write about Islam. He obviously exempted himself, because as an Arab he apparently possessed a kind of special, genetic, racial knowledge about the tenets and history of Islam. Yet he made numerous little mistakes, such as his assertion that Islam conquered Byzantium before it did Spain, when it was nearly 800 years later. What did that little lapsus matter when he understood, as an Arab, the "essence of Islam" as someone like Lewis, or Schacht, or Margoliouth, or Snouck Hurgronje, never could, despite 50 or 60 years of intense study?

Ladies and gentlemen, the Desarts Vast of Academic Islam await ye. Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

[Posted by Hugh at June 17, 2004 11:32 AM]

"Encourage democratic governance while understanding that a Muslim form of democracy might not look exactly like Western models; Islamic practices and beliefs can coexist with democracy."

Frankly, I don't see much evidence that Islamic practices and beliefs can coexist with democracy."

True, democracy in an Islamic society might look something like the Western model, but the reality is something else.

Most Islamic countries today have Parliaments, Prime Ministers, Presidents, and even Constitutions, but otherwise guarantee very little in the way of basic human rights.

We saw a graphic example of this in Afghanistan this past year. An Afghan man was put on trial for his life because he converted from Islam to Christianity. How is this possible considering that the Afghan Constitution guarantees freedom of religion? Simple! the Constitution also contains an article stating that no law can conflict with Islamic law. In short, every guarantee of rights in the Contitution is cancelled out by a single article that guarantees the supremacy of Islam over every facet of peoples lives.

The only reason the man is alive today is because President Karzai had him declared insane and exiled him to Germany, where he now lives under a death Fatwa.

It might come as a shock to most Americans to know that most Islamic constitutions, including those of Iraq and Egypt, contain the exact same article in their constitutions, effectively obliterating all other rights guaranteed an individual.

If a Muslim form of democracy might not look exactly like Western models, it's because Most Muslims don't have the slightest idea of what true Democracy and freedom are.

Hmmmm

I can say it in three words

DON'T TRUST MOSLEMS

shiva-

Let's try it in two:

Islamic imperialism.

Dear Mr. Spencer:

From this article and postings, I sense the salient points and the need to direct these points to those most influential and those in authority most influenced, and to present these points with maximum effect to those who are, in time, most receptive to them.

In addition to those five points in your program, I think you should stress the necessity of recovering IJTIHAD (as SneakyZC suggests), and of universalizing it, thus aknowledging "everymuslim" as the arbiter and practical interpreter of the Quran and Tradition. Imagine, then, how the "fatwa industry" would recede! Imagine our friends at Muslims Against Sharia and their like making headway casting off the bounds of a cleric-ridden culture--to paraphrase Clemenceau, determining that "Islam is too important to be left to the imams." (Shaking off supercessionist dogma--like abrogation--may help our Muslim friends recover insights from revelations given to earlier Prophets, realize their universality, and learn to interpret the "final" revelation in light of earlier ones. Those intent on recovering the Quran's true sense are willing to reduce irreconciliable contradictions to literary devices and mere glosses.

It is also worth stressing a burden set upon all of us, not just American Muslims, to break "the economic stranglehold that [foreign] petroleum has on us"--defender. We know that we must increase efficiency, limit demand, and use and develop alternatives.

Finally, and to the point, does Dr. Finney and his employers--or Norman Podhoretz, inter alios-- know your views, Mr. Spencer, or those of whom Hugh mentions--Martin Kramer, Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan? Have you satisfactorily communicated these views to the former through the channels available to you? Those I have referred to are your ultimate audience, and I hope and expect that you engage them.

I hope these comments merit attention.

Dear Mr. Fitzgerald:

I also direct my thoughts and comments, above, to you, Sir; that you may more directly express your salient thinking to those of influence and those in authority who are influenced.

Before any progress can be made, muslims must acknowledge the fact that the Qur'an does indeed contain many threatening, bellicose, and intolerant statements regarding non-muslims. Most muslims are well aware of these and make weak, inane excuses for them, while simultaneously portraying all muslims as the victims of a concerted war against islam that began with the advent of islam. Muslims refuse to accept blame or responsibility for any of their problems; they are always victims of racism, bigotry, discrimination, or islamophobia in the West, and in their own dysfunctional, corrupt societies, they are victims of colonialism, war, tyranny and corruption. They are implacable, insatiable, perpetual malcontents, unwilling to remain in their own countries and work to change and improve them, and contemptuous of their adopted countries because they are not identical islamic hellholes! They cannot tolerate the reality of Western superiority because it defies not only the doctrine of islam, but everything they believed was true.

Muslims are oblivious to the fact that islam created the tyranny, corruption, and endless conflict that they fled and are drawn like flies to a similar puttrefied environment wherever they go. They are guaranteed to easily locate such an enclave anywhere in the multicultural West, where they can immediately immerse themselves in the comfortable familiarity of islamic culture. They escape the threat of being killed by warring sects but can maintain, promote, and declare their superiority, and wallow in a replicate of the venal, incorrigible islamic milieu they fled. Multiculturalism is largely responsible for the "radicalization" of muslims in the West. It provides a free ticket to breed and cultivate subversives, terrorists, and enemies of the state. Since the Qur'an itself tells muslims not to befriend or mingle among unbelievers, we have provided them with the perfect solution to this problem, and at our own peril.

The day I hear a respected leader or member of the news media, joined by a prominent muslim islamic scholar, acknowledge and divulge the supremacist, predatory, bellicose, and threatening doctrine of islam on national television, is the day I will know we're not playing around with these fanatics any more.

I do not expect the doctrine of islam to be reinterpreted, jihad outlawed, or the most egregious qur'anic suras omitted or declared obsolete. That will never happen. But there are ways to avoid the inevitable conflicts that islam will and is already causing in the West, and they really aren't that difficult. We all know what they are but our politicians seem to be clueless.

Here's a corollary thought to that I offer above: perhaps jihad is too important to be left to the mujihadeen! Now, if this idea were to become axiomatic, it might really transform the concept of jihad by a genuine shift of emphasis. Then, over time, the Greater Jihad is truly spiritualized and the Lesser becomes akin to the Christian Just War Theory. And this becomes so without contortions of thought that deny reality and defy reason.

One word is enough:

Islam.

How about a 7th point: Zero tolerance of hate and bigotry in western societies i.e we grow a pair of cojones and ban this evil cult. Period.

We're a laughing stock. We are too frightened to impose our superior beiefs and values and we allow evil to fester. Islam is a malignant tumor on the heart of humanity. We either cut it out or let it gorge itself until we are devoured.

I for one am sick of apologising and justifying the bleeding obvious.

I honestly can't see another, better option and the longer we delay this the harder it will be to win the victory.

There is no way around this. At some point we will have to fight the soldiers of Islam. The time for persuasive and logical argument, so eloquently expressed by people like Robert, Hugh, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq et al is over. It will never stop the jihad, only total war will.

The time for talking is over. We either fight for our way of life NOW while we can achieve a victory or we abrogate responsibility and leave it to those who follow us and who will find it far harder to prevail.

In fact, I already believe Europe's fate is sealed, we've had the fight brainwashed out of most of us. The US is next.

When do we say: no more talking, no more tolerance, no more BS - you want it, you've got it - in spades?

I repeat: it will come to war at some point. Demographics will see to that. The question is when will we have the courage to fight this evil creed?

I share your fears and suspicions, Susanp. Wouldn't want to aknowledge my own naivete--O, the shame and humiliation of admitting a failing!

Lionheart,

We have not yet been pushed far enough, unfortunately, as unbelievable as that may be. When we are, we will rally, realize who are genuine friend or foe, and THEN wage total war. Total war, for us, is next to unthinkable--submission or extinction are unthinkable.

Thanks go to Hugh for the essay on Bernard Lewis. It's especially timely for me because I just finished his two (short) books: Islam, What Went Wrong?, and The Crisis of Islam -- and was wondering why he glossed over so many things and minimized the travails of the non-Muslims under the Golden Age of Islam. Ah-ha, as the saying goes. This explains a lot!

Yes. He's an excellent writer and has quite the grasp, yet I had the feeling he was holding back. At least now I know why.

Thanks again, Hugh.

Here's a corollary thought to that I offer above: perhaps jihad is too important to be left to the mujihadeen! Now, if this idea were to become axiomatic, it might really transform the concept of jihad by a genuine shift of emphasis. Then, over time, the Greater Jihad is truly spiritualized and the Lesser becomes akin to the Christian Just War Theory. And this becomes so without contortions of thought that deny reality and defy reason.

I would take it one step further, John. I say we push jihad-sharia Islam all the way back to Mecca. Let them have a small principality, which like the Vatican can give moral support to their religious beliefs, but it cannot interfere with our secular laws or politics directly. We did this in the West, pushed back the Medieval Church all the way back out of our politics, until all that remains is a spiritual leadership of the multi denominational Church, and the Vatican for the original Christian catholicism. Do the same with Islam, push it out of politics and not allow it to influence our secular laws, but grant it a small tenured holding in Mecca, so it becomes a small principality there to offer (if such is possible) moral guidance to its religious adherents, the multi sects of Islam.

This means no Sharia, no Jihad, and no Islamic theocratic domination anywhere in the West, and in time anywhere in the Eastern world of their Ummah. Decontrol their governmental national constitutions from Islamic law. There must be some within Islam who can understand this and want to climb out from under this medieval theocracy in the same way we did in the West. Would it not make much more sense to support them, so they too can enjoy a world of freedom?

This portion of Islam must be pushed back:

* Islam is the one, true faith and will dominate the world; Muslims are in conflict with unbelievers.
* Only God can make laws, not man. Government must be by strict interpretation of Islamic law called Shari’a.
* The Quran and traditions about Mohammed’s life called the hadith contain the whole truth for determining a proper life for individuals and society at large.

and fraudulent death cultists, too...
http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/24/152943.shtml

A great read, jcom!

LAN ASTASLEM.

Great link to (false) Meccan history of Islam, jcom972.

From the link: http://archive.newsmax.com/archives/articles/2001/9/24/152943.shtml

"An exhaustive examination of all available evidence and sources leads Crone to conclude that Mohammed's career took place not in Mecca and Medina or in southwest Arabia at all, but in northwest Arabia."

All right, we'll allow for an Islamic 'Meccan' principality in northwestern Arabia, wherever that may be. Where is that, Iraq? :)

Of course this stands the whole idea of Islam coming from Mecca on its head:

"The myth of an original orthodoxy from which later challengers fall away as heretics is almost always the retrospective assertion of a politically dominant group whose aim is to establish their supremacy by appeal to divine sanction.

This applies to the Arab Conquest, says al-Rawandi, because for some 200 years the Arab conquerors were a minority amongst a non-Moslem majority. For al-Rawandi, Islam is an invention for the purpose of providing a religious justification for Arab imperialism. The Conquest is the reason and explanation for Islam, not the other way around."
-- from article linked.

Cool! :) The Islamic "supremacy by appeal to divine sanction" principality just moved northwest from Mecca.

If the National Guard people had any wit they would ask Spencer to chair a national workshop on Islam for leading Guardsmen - and pay for a very select group of female lecturers.

Let the women speak first, about Islam-on-the-ground. In the sad absence of the delicious and bracing Oriana Fallaci, I suggest the following panel.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is easy on the eyes, and on the ears, and has a mind like a rapier. She can think on her feet. She can tell the men, none better, what Islam, sharia law, does to women, and to men, and why, therefore, sharia must be utterly rejected, why sharia creep must be dealt with as ruthlessly as kudzu vine, why the advance of the jihad is as deadly as fire ants.

These men of the National Guard need to understand, at gut-level, that their vigilance and their courage in every sphere, military and civil, are, in the end, all that stands between present freedom and a withering future of absolute slavery, for every woman in their lives, and for all their future female descendants.

Phyllis Chesler could tell them what it was like to live in purdah, in a Muslim marriage, a Muslim clan, in pre-Taliban 'moderate' royal Kabul in the 1960s. She can give them the gruesome details of Arab Muslim honour killings in Judea and Samaria, and the underground railroad that whisks women-at-risk away from their murderous Muslim families, into hiding in...Israel, among the Jews. She and Ayaan could explain the appalling injustice of Muslim sharia laws concerning rape.

Nonie Darwish and Wafa Sultan come to mind also - personable matronly types, with their no-nonsense demolition of all the myths about the warm wonderfulness and superiority of Muslim 'family values', in those huge, inbred, backstabbing, polygamous Muslim families ...Chesler has things to say here, too, since she can demolish the tu quoque. Fiercely critical of Jewish and Christian societies' sins and failures, she nevertheless sees clearly that Islam is ten thousand times worse.

And then that tiny, delightful, feisty Jewish grandmother, Bat Yeor, to tell the story of her own family, her flight out of Egypt; to explain the pact of Omar, and what the Ummah does - has always done - to non-Muslims over whom it gains the upper hand, anywhere and everywhere. And all the means, violent or subtle, by which that upper hand has, traditionally, been gained. Call in some Coptic Christians, or Pakistani Christian escapee, who can explain what it is like to live in fear that your ten-year-old, thirteen-year-old, seventeen-year-old daughter may be kidnapped off the street, raped, and 'converted' to Islam.

Of course, too, there are those graceful, tall, ink-black, matronly and infinitely dignified Christian Sudanese female refugees, mothers of families, who could tell their stories of what happened to their husbands, their sons, their brothers, at the hands of the Janjaweed; and then, what happened to themselves and their daughters; the reality of Jihad, not in the distant past, but...last year, last month, last week. Such women would make a strong impression on Black members of the Guard.

Then let Robert Spencer, Mr Cool Calm and Collected, put it all into perspective, with Quran quotes, and Hadith quotes; an essay or two by Andrew Bostom, and every man gets his own copy of "The Truth About Muhammad", or "The PIG to Islam and the Crusades", paid for by some public-minded sponsor, and signed by the author at the end of the workshop.

PS - Is anyone going to send Mr Finney a Basic Recommended Reading List for Soldiers? - one of Hugh's Recommended Reading lists, stripped down to the barest essentials?

Dr. Wheeler is a real-life Indiana Jones-he goes to the source, not just studies it from a book.

He also notes elsewhere that Jerusalem isn't even mentioned in the koran, nor is there any evidence that ubu'l kassim...
(the REAL name of the bandit chieftain of southern jordan who bestowed upon himself the title "mohammed", meaning "praised one")
...ever even visited the place, let alone any mention of an "ascension" from the rock of Abraham...
thus, islam has ZERO claim to not only all of Jerusalem, but the entire land of ancient Israel proper. Islam should get off Israeli lands, not the other way around...and they damned well know it too.

He's the creator of the Reagan Doctrine.
Dr. Wheeler's credentials are impeccable and beyond reproach. His site is "To The Point News" http://www.tothepointnews.com
I know him, too...I worked with him back in the day. If he says so, bank on it.

I have a friend serving in Afghanistan who is reading "Islamic Imperialism" by Efraim Karsh. He does understand that Muslims don't play nice with non-muslims and apostates. I just read an article today in Front Page Magazine about the military sending anthropologists to Afghanistan, and the author has doubts at how effective that will be. I am taking an anthropology class presently at a university, and it seems like a bunch of Marxist b.s. to me. The article is very good and pertains to this particular subject. It is titled, "Anthropology Goes to War". http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=646FB536-9CDD-4C5B-B49D-42653C215F71

Regarding Arab Muslims, the author believes that "The Arab Mind" by Rafael Patai, is not a good book on understanding Arabs in particular. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? I thought it was interesting.

Regarding Arab Muslims, the author believes that "The Arab Mind" by Rafael Patai, is not a good book on understanding Arabs in particular. Does anyone have any thoughts on that? I thought it was interesting.

Posted by: lafn at November 25, 2007 12:22 AM

I have owned a copy of this book for over twenty years and hardly a week goes by that I don't re-read one chapter or another. While it accurately depicts the Arab psyche, it does not adequately demonstrate the immense impact of islam on its formation. Patai devoted only one short chapter to the influence of islam on the Arab mind, comparing the diminishing influence of religion in the West to the powerful and ubiquituous influence of islam on muslims. This book is old and much has changed since he wrote it-- islam has undergone a revival and the political and social moderation that existed under colonialism is now entirely eradicated. Arab countries have not progressed or modernized much but they have become more islamic and radical.

My thought process is not necessarily felicitous but nonetheless, I determined long ago that muslims are the products of islam; they are what islam spawns. That was the only way I could avoid despising muslims as much as I despise islam. I don't know why Patai did not give islam the credit it deserves for its overwhelming influence on the Arab ethos.

I remember reading somewhere in the book that the religious wars between muslims and Christians were long over. I think Mr. Patai would be very surprised at the profound changes that have occurred in the Arab world, changes he obviously did not forsee. And I believe the worst wars between muslims and non-muslims are yet to come.

Fantastic comments Susan.

I got the same impression reading the great historian Will Durant and HIS take on the Islamic world. He wrote about it in the 1930s and 40s, while it was subsumed by colonialism. He was excessively charitable....I think out of a cultural and intellectual magnanimity. Would that he could have glimpsed into the future and witnessed the Islamic world's post-independence revival, I believe he would have been much more circumspect in his appraisals.

Your comments also reminded me of a client I once had who was a trained psychologist and who had some fascinating insights into the Muslim psyche.

Her take was that the Muslim women is so dis-empowered that her only means of empowerment is through the good graces of her male offspring. Consequently, she and her daughters go to great lengths to indulge the boys in the house throughout their up-bringing.

The end result is an adult male population raised to believes that everything they want is their birth rite...and when the real world is unaccommodating, they seethe with anger and frustration.