There are, within Robert Spencer’s General Evisceration of CAIR’s Omer Subhani, some details that deserve to be held up for special inspection.
This is the part that struck me the most. Spencer says:
What's more, the Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217), who traversed the Mediterranean on his way to Mecca in the early 1180s, found that even Muslims preferred living in Crusader lands. He lamented that near Tyre he passed a series of farms where "the inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj [Franks, or Crusaders] -- may Allah preserve them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested....Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, while the Franj act with equity."
Does anyone doubt that Muslims today flock to non-Muslim lands because they are better run? They are safer, the lives of the citizens are more secure, and the possibility of redress against authority is greater. There is access to the wonders of the modern world that are the product of a mental freedom, and an absence of the inshallah-fatalism that is the hallmark of mind-forged-manacled Muslims.
So any Muslim in his right mind of course wishes to live in Great Britain, say, rather than in Pakistan, or in France rather than Algeria or Morocco, or in the Netherlands rather than in Morocco or Turkey, and so on. Even Turkey? Yes, because Kemalism did not go far enough, and the remains of the pre-Kemalist Day, that is Islam, are all about, and indeed now being relentlessly revived.
But these Muslim "refugees from Islam" do not recognize that what they find and like in the West is precisely owed to the fact of the West's non-Islamic history. And so, quite unlike previous refugees, such as those from the Nazis who worked to warn people about the Nazis, and refugees from Russia or Eastern Europe or China, who worked to warn people in the West, where they found refuge, about the menace of Communism, about the threat from Soviet Union and Communist China, Muslims in the West come not to warn the West about Islam. Rather, they bring with them the very Islam that has caused their own countries to be so unpleasant or unlivable in the first place.
They do not see this. They are "slaves to Allah," or rather, slaves to Islam as a Total Belief-System. And while the morally and intellectually most advanced see this, and some of them become apostates, others are afraid to follow them in this, or are tied down by filial piety. They have a desire to retain, as many feel they must, "cultural" or "family" ties. They do not wish to suffer the ostracism that they fear they will suffer (and they have very good reason for that fear) if they do indeed break openly with Islam.
Only the very most advanced, and the bravest, dare to see Islam for what it is and what it inculcates. Only the bravest and most advanced dare to see the actual content of its texts, its tenets, its attitudes -- the very attitudes that they hear expressed openly in Muslim-only gatherings, where the hostility to Infidels is not hidden. Some of them hear this with horror, but many others hear it and are prompted not to break with Islam, which often means breaking with their families. Instead, they choose to hide or disguise that anti-Infidel feeling that they know about, know all about.
They decide to lie about it in order to protect their coreligionists -- whether out of embarrassment or out of fear that Muslims may lose their truly "protected status" in the lands of the Infidels. In those lands so far they are allowed to essentially retain a loyalty to Islam, and therefore to the Shari'a and to a general worldview that necessarily bespeaks permanent hostility to the Infidel nation-states, to the legal and political institutions of those nation-states, in which they now live and of which they have even been permitted, by those too ignorant to understand Islam, to obtain citizenship.
Boom! Another direct hit, Hugh.
Hear hear!
Free the Muslims!
Imagine if the death penalty for apostasy was lifted. How many Muslims would there be? How many different sects would there be? What would "Islamic" culture look like?
Thank you! Each and every word is SO true.
If only there was another inhabitable planet that all Infidels could migrate to, and leave this entire earth to Mohammedans, and then let them figure out where they want to live. But don't let them into the new planet.
Or vice versa. Idea being - separate us completely!
We know that Islam degenerates men into primitive imbeciles. Look at the constant erratic suicide bombings, the economies of Muslim countries are a shamble with gross human rights violation. Furthermore, the influx of Muslims in certain segments of society and that part of society degenerates into sheer poverty and economic and social turmoil. Go figure MoHAMtheMUD could only think of robbing, looting rapping and pillage rich cultures because it is just beyond their own mental capacity to create think critically and value human freedom, and thought. There is no generosity in the Islamic mindset it is only take and plunder and destroy it until it becomes a barren wasteland like the deserts of Saudi Arabia where all this hell broke loose from.
So, if the mahometans succeed in turning the last tiny speck of civilization in the Middle East into another islamic shithole, do we welcome the 2 million muslims who are currently beneficiaries of Israeli largesse they neither deserve nor appreciate into the West?
It’s only a matter of time before all over Europe we see headlines like these: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7400460.stm
The ‘slaves of Allah’ escape the intolerable conditions of their self imposed slavery in their home failed societies only to bring their ‘slavery’ with them. They now plague us.
When Europe has had enough, it will not be the thieving Roma Gypsies but the Musselmen who will need police protection. Or else they escape from their self imposed prisons of stifling mind-manacled-Allah slavery. Will they do it? Will it be done for these lying scheming slaves? Truth of history will know. Don’t think it will be pretty. Freedom is not kind to slavery, for very strong reasons.
Live in freedom, or go back to slavery, but not both. Choose one or the other.
"Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, while the Franj act with equity."
Cannot be true! The liberals and MSM have been telling us for years the Crusaders treated muslims badly unlike the nice muslims who were good to Christians!
And Hugh, being that the "western" (or other) system that the Muslim is going into is superior, it is reasonable for the Muslim to conclude that the culture is superior.
One more reason for an American Constitutional amendment (pls improve upon, anybody):
Whereby freedom of conscience and religion is consistent with other parts of the US Constitution, and where a doctrine or religion does not allow these freedoms is fundamentally oppressive, and whereas Islamic religious law prohibits its former adherents to break from its tenacles, and Islamic law instructs death as the penalty for making this choice, as well as there being other basic tenets of the religion that are not compatible with basic human rights, Islam or direct theological offshoots are forbidden to be practiced in the United States.
The piece on the BBC about the Gypsies is interesting in what it did not reveal. I spent time in Roanoke, where there is a small Gypsy population that plagues the stores. The kids would go in to distract a cashier, while an older sibling would rob the til. Or they would make bogus returns and make scenes when I wouldn't give them back their money. We knew them all, that's how few of them there were. But the point is this: The Roma are panhandlers, con artists and criminals. It's their culture. And all cultures are equal, aren't they?
The other thing left out of the article is that Italy relies heavily on tourism. There are begging gangs of Albanians, Romanians, you name the group of outcasts, and they're all there, hassling the tourists and making the place difficult to enjoy visiting.
The most interesting instance of Muslims preferring non-Muslim lands is, of course, those Muslim citizens of Israel who are distressed about the possibility of their citizenship being transferred to a Palestinian state.
I think the United States is blessed so far about its immigrants. Generally speaking, Muslim immigrants themselves have too much sense to make trouble (they came for a better life and are not about to endanger it), and I don't know offhand of problems with subsequent generations, the time which plague Europe. Maybe I'm too optimistic in supposing that this state of affairs can endure, or just maybe the United States is such an attractive place that it is immune to second-generation jihadism.
Our problems are generally with those who come to this country specifically for terrorism (not true immigrants the way I see it), and converts. Converts to Islam pretty much have to be nuts from the start....
"I think the United States is blessed so far about its immigrants. Generally speaking, Muslim immigrants themselves have too much sense to make trouble (they came for a better life and are not about to endanger it)..."
-- from a posting above
There is a myth, one accepted and repeated in surprising quarters (for example, by Mark Steyn, who will have to be a little less reliant on fluent glibness, and a little less sur de lui-meme, and pay a little more humble attention to the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam if he wishes to triumph in every debate or encounter with smooth-talking plausible thoroughly-schooled-in-Western-ways Muslims), that "Muslims in America" are "different" because, you see, "America is different." This dreamy belief relies partly on the notion that because we do not have the kind of welfare system that Western European countries possess, Muslims can't simply lie back and rely on Infidel taxpayers, while they hatch their plans to conduct Da'wa or otherwise promote Islam or intimidate --without "terror" -- circumambient Infidels. In Steyn's case, it is his belief that the American system provides for not "multiculturalism" but real "integration." But this is far too sanguine a view.
The reason, the only reason, for less of a problem in this country than in Western Europe with Muslims is that there are far fewer of them, and that there are far more active (and believing) Christians, and far more Jews (able to help fight in their own self-defense), and others, including many who are the direct or indirect victims of Islam (Lebanese, that is Maronites, and Armenians, and Copts, and even black Africans from the southern Sudan -- those mediagenic "Lost Boys", and Ibos and other Christians from Nigeria), than in any country in Western Europe.
It is only by dint of eternal vigilance, and constant pedagogic efforts, that we will be able to keep the United States from grimly becoming like the Netherlands, or Great Britain, or other countries of Western Europe, where, let me repeat, the large-scale presence of Muslims has led to a situation for the indigenous Infidels, and for non-Muslim immigrants, that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence."
No one in Western Europe can deny the truth of that statement. The only difference is between those who recognize that truth, but out of fear and a want of imagination and possibly a failure to recognize the full menace to the Western civilizational legacy, have chosen to be appeasers, and those who, having recognized the same truth, and having realized, with a pang, that this problem could have been avoided had the political and media elites never allowed such an invasion by Muslim immigrants in the first place. Those people, growing rapidly in number, have at long last been alerted to the threat to the advanced West and to that civiliziational legacy, a threat that is as great, and in the end more meancing, than that posed in the past by other, more obviously military threats, those of the Nazis and the Communists.
This touching faith in American exceptionalism leads to complacency. It can happen here. It is happening here. It requires, now and forever, constant unwearying, relentless resistance.
Well, Hugh, so far empirical observation backs me up. May be due to a variety of factors, and certainly it doesn't hurt that our massive illegal immigration problems tend to be with Christians rather than Muslims, and that Muslims live mostly in some considerable dilution, where they can't help but disobey Quranic intolerance and become friends with infidels. So far we don't have a big second generation Muslim problem as do those European countries which periodically suffer outbreaks of criminal rioting by "youths". Sure, this could change, and I'm perfectly willing to revise my optimism if it does. In the meantime, my policy is that Muslims should be treated with the decency and respect that they would not accord others in their own countries -- because we are better than they are, and we need to stay better, and to provide them with a model.
I think it best to work to discourage Muslims from settling here, to find that this is not the place for them, unless of course they are willing to jettison Islam or modify -- god knows how -- what they make of it.
I don't see what you see. I have met some "cultural" Muslims and "Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims (often Iranians in exile) and these people are one thing. But the other kind, the kind whose females are started to wear, with a certain severe and grim look, the hijab or, still worse, everything right up and including the niqab -- are, whatever their status, a threat. I am not prepared to put out a welcome mat, or to "show them how to behave." It cuts no ice with them.
I am prepared to listen to what three groups of people say. The first group consists of the articulate apostates -- and I know a few of the best-known ones, and they regard with unrelieved dismay, even horror, the immigration of Muslims to the West, and the billions that pour in from outside to support them, and to help them in their duty of Jihad to spread Islam, and remove all barriers or obstacles to that spread.
The second group consists of non-Muslims who have lived in lands controlled by Muslims -- Christians or Hindus,, say, from Pakistan, or Bangladesh, or Indonesia, or Indians and Chinese from Malaysia, or Buddhists from southern Thailand, or Ibos who remember the Biafra War, or black African Christians from the southern Sudan, or Jews who endured life in Libya, Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Iraq, Syria, or Maronites from Lebanon, or Copts from Egypt, or Chaldeans and Assyrians from Iraq (once they have lived here long enough to see things clearly, including the real, realpolitikal reasons that things were "better" under Sadddam, and stop misrepresenting their own history when they assert that "everything was fine under Saddam" but that the American invasion "turned power over to the 'turbans' [i.e., Shi'a]" as if Sunnis were never a threat, or as if the position of the Christians was ever truly secure (the same misperception of their own pasts can be found in some, a few, Jews from Baghdad, including the mother of Daniel Pearl, who see the past through rose-tinted glasses, forgetting the Farhud, forgetting the murders in 1948-1950, forgetting the public hanging of "Zionist spies" in Baghdad, before a hysterical crowd of a half-million Muslim Arabs, in 1968).
The third group consists of the Western scholars of Islam and of Islamic conquest who, in addition to their book-learning, had lived in and among Muslims. Such figures include C. Snouck Hurgronje, St. Clair Tisdall, Joseph Schacht, Samuel Zwemer, Henri Lammens, Bat Ye'or, and a great many others. I trust them, as of course I do not trust at all such people as Esposito, Armstrong, or the assorted fellow-travellers of Islam who can be found in Saudi-funded departments (Exeter, Durham) or Centers (as Esposito's scandalous operaton), or if not funded directly by Muslim Arabs, then in departments where Muslims and Arabs rule the roost, and must not be offended, and by now we all know how careful Muslims and Arabs are to be on the qui vive for the slightest quiver of a conceivable slight, or deviation from the Received Believers' Version of Islam.
And what I have learned from my familiarity with all three groups is: it hardly matters whether Infidels treat Muslims well or ill. In the end, those Infidels are Infidels, and they, their ways, their mores and customs, their manners and laws, must yield to Islam, to the demands of Islam, so that Islam may everywhere dominate, and Muslim rule, everywhere.
You wish to claim, or perhaps wish to keep hoping, based possibly on familiarity or friendship with this or that Muslim (a charmer, a genuinely nice guy) that things will be different here.
I beg to differ.
But these Muslim "refugees from Islam" do not recognize that what they find and like in the West is precisely owed to the fact of the West's non-Islamic history.
Hugh, is it even possible that they could see this? Don't they attribute our success in making life a little less nasty, brutish and short to Allah, who for some inscrutable reason is helping the infidels?
I will never forget watching a YouTube clip of an imam in Pakistan who basically said he couldn't wait for the day when infidels used their knowledge of science and technology in the service of their Muslims overlords. Reminded me of the passage in Virgil when he laid out the Roman doctrine that it was the job of others to measure the stars (a metaphor for all practical work) and it was the job of Romans to rule over them. At least the Romans had culture, not like these Muslim savages.
>I think it best to work to discourage Muslims
>from settling here, to find that this is not the
>place for them, unless of course they are
>willing to jettison Islam or modify -- god knows
>how -- what they make of it.
My faith is that here in the United States, the second or third generation will inevitably do just that -- jettison the real Islam just as Hispanics jettison the Spanish language. When they see that their American ideals conflict with their Islamic ideals, they will have the sense to figure out which to embrace.