This surprisingly honest account from the New York Times shows the jizya -- the tax on the People of the Book (primarily Jews and Christians) by Qur'an 9:29 -- for what it is: protection money. Pay up, or get killed. In a hadith, Muhammad says:
Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah. Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. [...] When you meet your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withold yourself from doing them any harm. Invite them to (accept) Islam; if they respond to you, accept it from them and desist from fighting against them. [...] If they refuse to pay the tax, seek Allah's help and fight them.... (Sahih Muslim 4294)
In other words, bid them to convert to Islam, pay the tax and submit, or die.
This mandate comes from Qur'an 9:29. Ibn Juzayy says that this verse is “a command to fight the People of the Book” and, in a reference to v. 30, “denying their belief in Allah because of the words of the Jews, ‘Uzayr [Ezra] is the son of Allah’ and the words of the Christians, ‘The Messiah is the son of Allah.’” Muslims must also fight them because “they do not enter Islam.” He says that “scholars agree about accepting jizya [a religious-based poll tax] from the Jews and Christians,” and that it signifies “submission and obedience.”
According to the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, Bat Ye’or:
The poll tax was extorted by torture. The tax inspectors demanded gifts for themselves; widows and orphans were pillaged and despoiled. In theory, women, paupers, the sick, and the infirm were exempt from the poll tax; nevertheless, Armenian, Syriac, and Jewish sources provide abundant proof that the jizya was exacted from children, widows, orphans, and even the dead. A considerable number of extant documents, preserved over the centuries, testify to the persistence and endurance of these measures. In Aleppo in 1683, French Consul Chevalier Laurent d’Arvieux noted that ten-year-old Christian children paid the jizya. Here again, one finds the disparity and contradiction between the ideal in the theory and the reality of the facts. (The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam, pp. 78-9).
As-Sawi specifies that the payment of the jizya signifies that the non-Muslims are “humble and obedient to the judgements of Islam.” As-Suyuti notes that the jizya is “not taken from someone in a state of hardship,” although that was a stipulation at times honored in the breach. For example, a contemporary account of the Muslims’ conquest of Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 640’s, says that “it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month…”
This was a manifestation of the “state of abasement” specified by this verse and spelled out by the Bedouin commander al-Mughira bin Sa’d when he met the Persian Rustam. Said al-Mughira: “I call you to Islam or else you must pay the jizya while you are in a state of abasement.”
Rustam replied, “I know what jizya means, but what does ‘a state of abasement’ mean?”
Al-Mughira explained: “You pay it while you are standing and I am sitting and the whip hanging is over your head.”
Similarly, Ibn Kathir says that the dhimmis must be “disgraced, humiliated and belittled. Therefore, Muslims are not allowed to honor the people of Dhimmah or elevate them above Muslims, for they are miserable, disgraced and humiliated.” The seventh-century jurist Sa’id ibn al-Musayyab stated: “I prefer that the people of the dhimma become tired by paying the jizya since He says, ‘until they pay the jizya with their own hands in a state of complete abasement.’” As-Suyuti elaborates that this verse “is used as a proof by those who say that it is taken in a humiliating way, and so the taker sits and the dhimmi stands with his head bowed and his back bent. The jizya is placed in the balance and the taker seizes his beard and hits his chin.” He adds, however, that “this is rejected according to an-Nawawi who said, ‘This manner is invalid.’” Zamakhshari, however, agreed that the jizya should be collected “with belittlement and humiliation.”
Asad, Daryabadi and other Western-oriented commentators maintain that the jizya was merely a tax for exemption for military service. Asad explains: “every able-bodied Muslim is obliged to take up arms in jihad (i.e., in a just war in God’s cause) whenever the freedom of his faith or the political safety of his community is imperiled…Since this is, primarily, a religious obligation, non-Muslim citizens, who do not subscribe to the ideology of Islam, cannot in fairness be expected to assume a similar burden.” But they pass in silence over the latter part of v. 29, which mandates the humiliation of non-Muslims.
In explaining how the Jews and Christians must “feel themselves subdued,” Ibn Kathir quotes a saying of Muhammad: “Do not initiate the Salam [greeting of peace] to the Jews and Christians, and if you meet any of them in a road, force them to its narrowest alley.” He then goes on to outline the notorious Pact of Umar, an agreement made, according to Islamic tradition, between the caliph Umar, who ruled the Muslims from 634 to 644, and a Christian community.
This Pact is worth close examination, because it became the foundation for Islamic law regarding the treatment of the dhimmis. With remarkably little variation, throughout Islamic history whenever Islamic law was strictly enforced, this is generally how non-Muslims were treated. Working from the full text as Ibn Kathir has it, these are the conditions the Christians accept in return for “safety for ourselves, children, property and followers of our religion” – conditions that, according to Ibn Kathir, “ensured their continued humiliation, degradation and disgrace.” The Christians will not:
1. Build “a monastery, church, or a sanctuary for a monk”;
2. “Restore any place of worship that needs restoration”;
3. Use such places “for the purpose of enmity against Muslims”;
4. “Allow a spy against Muslims into our churches and homes or hide deceit [or betrayal] against Muslims”;
5. Imitate the Muslims’ “clothing, caps, turbans, sandals, hairstyles, speech, nicknames and title names”;
6. “Ride on saddles, hang swords on the shoulders, collect weapons of any kind or carry these weapons”;
7. “Encrypt our stamps in Arabic”
8. “Sell liquor” – Christians in Iraq in the last few years ran afoul of Muslims reasserting this rule;
9. “Teach our children the Qur’an”;
10. “Publicize practices of Shirk” – that is, associating partners with Allah, such as regarding Jesus as Son of God. In other words, Christian and other non-Muslim religious practice will be private, if not downright furtive;
11. Build “crosses on the outside of our churches and demonstrating them and our books in public in Muslim fairways and markets” – again, Christian worship must not be public, where Muslims can see it and become annoyed;
12. “Sound the bells in our churches, except discreetly, or raise our voices while reciting our holy books inside our churches in the presence of Muslims, nor raise our voices [with prayer] at our funerals, or light torches in funeral processions in the fairways of Muslims, or their markets”;
13. “Bury our dead next to Muslim dead”;
14. “Buy servants who were captured by Muslims”;
15. “Invite anyone to Shirk” – that is, proselytize, although the Christians also agree not to:
16. “Prevent any of our fellows from embracing Islam, if they choose to do so.” Thus the Christians can be the objects of proselytizing, but must not engage in it themselves;
17. “Beat any Muslim.”
Meanwhile, the Christians will:
1. Allow Muslims to rest “in our churches whether they come by day or night”;
2. “Open the doors [of our houses of worship] for the wayfarer and passerby”;
3. Provide board and food for “those Muslims who come as guests” for three days;
4. “Respect Muslims, move from the places we sit in if they choose to sit in them” – shades of Jim Crow;
5. “Have the front of our hair cut, wear our customary clothes wherever we are, wear belts around our waist” – these are so that a Muslim recognizes a non-Muslim as such and doesn’t make the mistake of greeting him with As-salaamu aleikum, “Peace be upon you,” which is the Muslim greeting for a fellow Muslim;
6. “Be guides for Muslims and refrain from breaching their privacy in their homes.”
The Christians swore: “If we break any of these promises that we set for your benefit against ourselves, then our Dhimmah (promise of protection) is broken and you are allowed to do with us what you are allowed of people of defiance and rebellion.”
Of course, the Pact of Umar, if authentic at all, was a seventh-century document. But the imperative to subjugate non-Muslims as mandated by Qur’an 9:29 and elaborated by this Pact became and remained part of Islamic law. In the nineteenth century the Western powers began to pressure the last Islamic empire, the Ottoman Empire, to abolish the dhimma. In Baghdad in the early nineteenth century, Sheikh Syed Mahmud Allusi (1802-1853), author of the noted commentary on the Qur’an Ruhul Ma’ani, complains that the Muslims have grown so weak that the dhimmis pay the jizya through agents, rather than delivering it themselves on foot. In his Tafsir Anwar al-Bayan, the twentieth-century Indian Mufti Muhammad Aashiq Ilahi Bulandshahri laments that “in today’s times, the system of Atonement (Jizya) is not practised at all by the Muslims. It is indeed unfortunate that not only are the Muslim States afraid to impose Atonement (Jizya) on the disbelievers (kuffar) living in their countries, but they grant them more rights than they grant the Muslims and respect them more. They fail to understand that Allah desires that the Muslims show no respect to any disbeliever (kafir) and that they should not accord any special rights to them.”
The influential twentieth century jihadist theorist Sayyid Qutb (1906-1966) emphasizes that these rules should be revived, for “these verses are given as a general statement, and the order to fight the people of the earlier revelations until they pay the submission tax with a willing hand and are subdued is also of general import” (In the Shade of the Qur’an, Vol. VIII, p. 126).
Likewise the Pakistani jihadist writer and activist Syed Abul A’la Maududi (1903-1979) states that “the simple fact is that according to Islam, non-Muslims have been granted the freedom to stay outside the Islamic fold and to cling to their false, man-made, ways if they so wish.” That heads off any potential contradiction between his understanding of v. 29 and 2:256, “There is no compulsion in religion.” Maududi continues by declaring that the unbelievers “have, however, absolutely no right to seize the reins of power in any part of God’s earth nor to direct the collective affairs of human beings according to their own misconceived doctrines. For if they are given such an opportunity, corruption and mischief will ensue. In such a situation the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life” (Towards Understanding the Qur’an, vol. III, p. 202).
"For Iraqi Christians, Money Bought Survival," by Andrew E. Kramer in the New York Times, June 26 (thanks to all who sent this in):
MOSUL, Iraq — As priests do everywhere, Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the leader of the Chaldean Catholics in this ancient city, gathered alms at Sunday Mass. But for years the money, a crumpled pile of multicolored Iraqi dinars, went into an envelope and then into the hand of a man who had threatened to kill him and his entire congregation.“What else could he do?” asked Ghazi Rahho, a cousin of the archbishop. “He tried to protect the Christian people.”
But American military officials now say that as security began to improve around Iraq last year, Archbishop Rahho, 65, stopped paying the protection money, one sliver of the frightening larger shadow of violence and persecution that has forced hundreds of thousands of Christians from Iraq. That decision, the officials say, may be why he was kidnapped in February.
Two weeks later, his body was found in a shallow grave outside Mosul, the biblical city of Nineveh.
Archbishop Rahho was among the highest-profile Iraqi Christians to die in the war. He was mourned by President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI before his role as a conduit for protection money paid by the Chaldean Christians to insurgents became known outside Iraq.
These payments, American military officials and Iraqi Christians say, peaked from 2005 to 2007 and grew into a source of financing for the insurgency. They thus became a secret, shameful and extraordinary complication in the lives of Iraq’s Christians and their leaders — one that Christians are only now talking about more openly, with violence much lower than in the first years of the war.
“People deny it, people say it’s too complex, and nobody in the international community does anything about it,” said Canon Andrew White, the Anglican vicar of Baghdad. Complicating the issue further, he said, some of the protection money came from funds donated by Christians abroad to help their fellow Christians in Iraq.
Yonadam Kanna, a Christian lawmaker in Iraq’s Parliament, said, “All Iraqi Christians paid.” [...]
Since the time of the Prophet Muhammad, the founder of Islam, Muslims in the Middle East permitted that diversity in part through a special tax on Jews and Christians. The tax was called a jizya — and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.
Officials say the demands could be hundreds of dollars a month per male member of a household. In many cases, Christian families drained their life savings and went into debt to make the payments. Insurgents also raised money by kidnapping priests. The ransoms, often paid by the congregations, typically ran as high as $150,000, several priests and lay Christians said. [...]
What was called the jizya was collected and paid by Jewish and Christian leaders to the insurgents operating on the west bank of the Tigris River. Archbishop Rahho, according to Mr. Kanna, the Christian lawmaker, made the payments on behalf of the Christians living in eastern neighborhoods of Mosul. He would have been an obvious choice: he had spent nearly his entire life in Mosul and was well known.
“He was the link,” Mr. Kanna said.
The archbishop’s cousin, Mr. Rahho, characterized the role as less central and emphasized the life-and-death nature of the choice to pay to save the lives of the parishioners. And the archbishop was certainly not the only person paying.
“We all paid,” said one Assyrian Orthodox Christian priest here who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution from insurgents. “We were afraid.”
By several accounts by Christians who paid, the money changed hands quietly, according to a simple mechanism.
A man who introduced himself as Abu Huraitha, and who sometimes said he represented Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, made the menacing phone calls, the Assyrian priest said.
“He said: ‘I need money, I need money. If you do not give us money, I will kill you,’ ” the priest said. The bagman, however, was a fellow Christian, an elderly blue-eyed man who made the rounds of churches for the insurgents, the priest said. “If you do not give to him, they kill you.”
He said he paid 10 million Iraqi dinars, or about $8,000, over three years, until last winter, when the United States Army reinforced its garrison in Mosul with the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment. Military operations increased in the city. The American units built neighborhood forts and traffic control points that disrupted the insurgents’ movements. The racket started to fall apart.
During the fighting last winter, the Assyrian priest said, word trickled out that the Americans had killed Abu Huraitha. Many church leaders used the death of this contact to halt payments. Among them, perhaps most prominently, was Archbishop Rahho. He gave a speech on television in January denouncing the payments and saying that they should no longer be made.
A month later, on Feb. 29, he was kidnapped by gunmen after praying at the Holy Spirit Cathedral. They shot and killed his driver and two guards and bundled him into the trunk of a car. In the darkness, he managed to reach his cellphone and call his church. He implored them not to pay a ransom that would finance violence, church officials said. [...]
And in the West today, Muslims extract a jizya of the mind, which the leaders of our institutions, from the mass media to the Department of State, pay with as gross a degree of deference as any cringing dhimmi of old.
A point that should be made: every single detail in this wretched tale of extortion, hostage taking, ransom demands, murders, threats and mayhem, and foreign Christians lovingly giving money to help their persecuted brethren, money that merely finishes up delaying the mass murder for another day or so whilst lining the pockets of greedy and cruel Muslim warlords waging jihad, reads like any one of multiple miserable tales recorded from every period of the Empire of Islam, and collected in Bat Yeor's 'The Dhimmi' and 'The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam', and in Andrew Bostom's 'Legacy of Jihad'.
The Jews of the diaspora within Christendom used to pass round the hat to help Jews living in Jerusalem pay the exorbitant 'protection' money demanded by the sadistic Muslim bosses. The Christian communities in the Holy Land survived because Christians elsewhere sent money...to pay the exceedingly expensive jizya. Or else. Or else the Christians would be killed by the Muslims. Hostages. Held to ransom by despicable bandits.
Islam has ALWAYS behaved, toward its neighbours, and especially toward the dhimmis, just like the mafia, or a criminal bikie gang; let's stop talking about the Ummah, and start talking about The (Muslim) Mob.
Christian dhimmis throughout the Islamosphere are ALL de facto hostages and jihadi cash cows, at the moment.
We either arm them and help them and dust off the venerable concept of the Just War, so they can vigorously defend themselves in a suitable stronghold; or we get them out, period, and quit playing the hostage game.
I wonder how much of the money given by earnest and charitable Christians, to help 'palestinian' Christians, even when it goes church-to-church, goes straight out of the church plate into the hands of the noisome jihad bosses, without even one cent of it paying for food, or medicine, or clothing?
Stories like this make me angry enough to spit chips.
Mohammed was a 'boss', making his living by killing, robbing and extortion. No better than the grubbiest mafia godfather. Al Capone with a religious gloss. And Islam has been governed by similar 'bosses' ever since.
No more jizya.
Nothing to the Poor Palestinians - help the Christians to get the hell out, and then...nix, nichts, nothing. Nothing more to Pakistan, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt, or (are you listening, Mr Rudd? - Indonesia, or Malaysia).
No more 'aid' to any Muslim entity, period; it will ALWAYS end up enabling the Jihad, and thus prolonging and entrenching the miserable slavery of the Muslims themselves.
@dumbledoresarmy.
May every word in your excellent post come to pass speedily and in our day.
Amen. Selah.
It is interesting to note that upon the arrival of Mohammed in Medina, the prophet immediately began to rob caravans rather than pursue honest work.
Re: Dumblesdoresarmy. Palestinians and the price of Christianity in West Bank/Holy Land.
Through a friend, who's brother is a long time friend of a Franciscan priest that has worked in Bethlehem and Jerusalem, etc., for two decades, and is the president of the Franciscan Foundation of the Holy Land, I became interested in researching the Foundation and it's work. While I did not have the opportunity to meet Fr. Vasko during a recent trip to Israel I purchased and watched his series of DVD's from the Catholic channel. At first I was very putoff by the interviews with Palestinian Christians that seemed to blame Israel for the high rate of unemployment and access to Jerusalem through Israeli checkpoints on Israel. Then I read through the website and began to realize from Vasko’s letters, interviews, and a tiny bit of knowledge of the situation there, the fine line he must tread to maintain access to Catholic sponsored schools and institutions in the West Bank, Bethlehem most prominently. He does say that prior to 1990 (Oslo, but he does not say it!!) 80% of the population of Bethlehem was Christian. That percentage has dwindled to a very, very meager 10% or less and they are making strenuous efforts to maintain a Christian presence there.
Obviously I am reading between the lines on my assumptions, but it looks to me that with Hamas and the Palestinians in charge they probably will not be successful unless the Christian community is not supported in some way. I am hoping to meet with the good Father when he comes to the US on his next fund raising trip, or there on my next trip to Israel.
I agree with you that donations, in round about ways, may assist Islamic terror in that area. But how else do we contribute to keep the Franciscans at their important task? Most of the children educated in the schools are Arab, not Christian, and it seems to me that the presence of Christian educators may well be a key to maintaining a non-Islamic point of view. Admittedly, I do not know their curriculum and nothing is said about that or if any pressure is put on these Christian schools regarding what is taught.
Still, I am hoping that the little bit of assistance I can provide will go to the right places and that just as importantly, they know that all Christians, even we Protestants, support their efforts.
Islam: it's the hidden fees that kill you.
A Kleptocracy posing as a Faith.
A surprisingly clear-eyed article from the NYT--I'm happy to see it, but appalled by the story.
Certainly, I knew that Christians in Iraq were under tremendous threat, but I had not realized that virtually the entire Christian community was paying the jizya today--years *after* the US-led liberation of Iraq. Not only could we not protect Christians from the jizya, but it seems that they were so terrified that they did not even seek protection from the Americans or the British (I am not even going to mention seeking protection from the Iraqi government).
Dumbledor's Army, excellent post. We have to say, "enough is enough".
from above:
The tax was called a jizya — and that is the name with which the insurgents chose to cloak extortion, Mafia-style, from Christians.
......................
Over all, the article is very good, and much less equivical than many stories about such matters, which often mumble about "cultural norms" and "traditions".
To say, though, that the insurgents used the term "jizya" to cloak extortion, however, is wrong--extracting the jizya was never any sort of decent institution--it was *never* anything but extortion.
This Mafia reference comes up often, and it is an apt comparison. However, it is anachronistic. Now, thugs demanding tribute--treasure, slaves, money--in exchange for staying their hand, is sadly older than history.
I don't think it is any coincidence, however, that the Mafia arose in Sicily, a part of Europe that suffered for centuries under Muslim occupation. Muslims are not aping the Mafia--it is likely that the Mafia was adopting, in part, Muslim tactics.
Islam has ALWAYS behaved, toward its neighbours, and especially toward the dhimmis, just like the mafia, or a criminal bikie gang; let's stop talking about the Ummah, and start talking about The (Muslim) Mob.
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy
Islam proves itself over and over again to act like a rapacious demanding Cult (of Allah), per the diktats of their delusional prophet Mohammad to conquer the world for his Mesopotamian moon god, while trying to legitimize his supremacist world domination ambitions with a thin cloak of religion. Dhimmis who buy into this disguise pay homage to a epileptic delusional ‘prophet’ (who never prophecized anything anyway), whose perverted pedophile ways fits handily into the polygamous subjugation of women as ‘baby factories’ for his world Jihad. Is this how a mafia Mob gangster would act? To a large degree yes, with protection money (jizya) and racketeering enterprises (booty and slaves) and prostitution (what the right hand possesses), to further their Islamic conquests of all the lands for the Allah Cult. Combining mafia Mob tactics with religious-cult superstitious delusions is the masterful brilliance of Mohammad’s ‘prophecy’ as written into his Koranic war manual. So yes indeed, “Islam ALWAYS behaved towards its neighbors - just like the mafia.” Why not simply accept this as fact? It's not 'Islamophobia' to look back through 1400 years of Muslim history. They ALWAYS did this!
Why should it be any different for the Christian dhimmies in Iraq or anywhere else? They are all under the evil domination of this Mob (Muslim) mafia Allah Cult.
Islam is NOT A RELIGION - it is an evil power hungry supremacist war machine dedicated to their founder Mohammad’s world domination for his evil pagan god Allah (the false One god) for conquest purposes only – all else about this ‘religion of peace’ is pure bull devoid of any spiritual redemption of Faith - to conquer for Allah and enrich the ignorant demented Muslim rabble with spoils of war. Islam is an evil Cult.
same things
The fate of the Christians in Iraq should not have come as a complete surprise. It is true that some believed that the kind of Iraqis in exile they met, the soft-spoken thoroughly westernized chalabis and makiyas, who were represenative men, and would, with others like them, inherit Iraq. Really? Was that ever plausible?
Here was the worldly, smiling, slippery eye-always-on-the-main-chance Chalabi, a man who had lived in the West since the age of 14 (he left Iraq at the time of Qassem’s coup, and the overturning of the monarchy, back in 1958). He had become thoroughly used to London, to New York, to Chicago, and forgotten what real non-westernized Muslim Arabs in Iraq, his old countrymen, were like, and dreamed his abstract mathematical dreams of an older time, of the old elites and old families, of those who, though in the Muslim world, and nominally Muslim, had acquired ways of thought, by having money, by attending non-Muslm schools (oh, those good Boston College Jesuuits, who ran Baghdad College, which everyone, who was to become anyone, attended). It's the dream that they all have, as they mislead themselves, and mislead, still more grievously, Westerners who have gone to school with them, or befriended them, and assume they know what they are talking about, forgetting that those who are Muslims are well-versed in deception, and if they are unwilling to renounce Islam, will continue to work, naturally, for their own power -- a power that they may think will help curb the "excesses" of the primitive Believers, but that is a far different goal from what should be the goal of Infidels -- to wit, to weaken the Camp of Islam, and the hold of Islam over the minds of men.
Chalabi had been out of Iraq since Qassem's coup in 1958, when the monarchy came to an end, and the real power -- "strongman" Nuri as-Said, was killed and his half-naked corpse dragged through the streets of Baghdad, so that delighted onlookers could join in the fun, hitting it with their shoes, or perhaps, here and there, adding or rather substracting, their own two bits from the already-mutilated corpse.
So Chalabi, friend of Wolfowitz and others, who paid his respects in Princeton to Bernard Lewis and surely must have expressed his admiration, that of a knowledgeable fellow connoisseur, for his taste in Islamic art and manuscripts and books, and Lewis must have found Chalabi, in turn, a fine and trustworthy fellow, and also must have been pleased to have had such influence in Washington, especially as, when he lived in Great Britain, the Arabists of the Foreign Office could not ignore his friend, colleague, and fellow editor, Ann Lambton (her field was Iran, but she was consulted, she was listened to, for she – unlike Lewis – had the merit of being the right sort, even being related to Harold Macmillan’s wife), but they could, and did, pay insufficient attention to the acute Bernard Lewis for the obvious cruel and stupid reason).
There was, along with Chalabi, the Arab girlfiend of Wolfowitz, the one who hoped for good things to happen in Iraq and then in the larger Arab world, good things that would be brought about by the Americans, by the expenditure of American efforts, lives, money, war materiel. One wonders if Wolfowitz has come perhaps to realize, especially after a recent display by his frirend of irrational defensiveness and wild accusations about those setting forth the attitude toward Jews that is fostered by the texts of Islam, that there can be, under a Western veneer, a hard-to-eradicate mental type, and what he failed to perceive before, and is only just now beginning to comprehend, may help explain what “went wrong” in Iraq, and why.
Kanan Makiya, whose mother was apparently English, did not spend nearly fifty years outside of Iraq. But he seemed genuinely puzzled as to why Arab “intellectuals” never denounced the murders of the Kurds. But he, Kanan Makiya, himself failed to realize, or did not allow himself to realize, that in the world of Islam, some Muslims are superior to others, and Arab supremacism explains the indifference to the fate of the Kurds, but the continuing complete lack of sympathy, by Arabs, for the Kurdish desire for autonomy and even an independent Kurdistan. And the same Arab supremacism, explains the indifference to the cultural and linguistic imperialism of the Arabs in Algeria, who only recently were pressured by men and events into repealing the law banning the use of the Berber language, Tamagzight, and otherwise making more rather than less, difficult the survival or renewal of Berber culture. And the war of Arab Muslims on black African Muslims in Darfur, with the Arab Muslims – especially Egypt – running diplomatic interference for the Arabs of Khartoum – can also be explained, but only if one recognizes that Islam has been, is now, and always will be a vehicle – despite its universalist pretensions – for Arab supremacism. Makiya has not permitted his brain to go there; it is all too unsettling, all too damning in a way that he, who can one minute declare himself to be an atheist, and then, on the same television show, immediately become defensive when he senses that Islam is being questioned or attacked, cannot endure.
With reliance on Chalabi and Makiya and those Americans who found them plausible, the Administration went to war without having learned about Islam, and identified the correct goal of the Iraq campaign, which should have been: to weaken the Camp of Islam. That goal would or should have made the Bush Administration not choose, as its consolation prize once the weaponry had not been found, the messianic sentimentalism of “bringing freedom” to “ordinary moms and dads” in Iraq and then, through this exemplary Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations project, to the rest of the Arabs, who had to endure despotisms, seemed remarkably prone to enduring those despotisms, though so many were so busy solemnly explaining why Islam and democracy were so compatible, and anyone who suggested otherwise didn’t know what he was talking about or was, still worse, a “racist,” that those who calmly pointed out how, in what ways, Islam and democracy of the advanced kind – that is, the kind beyond mere vote-counting, the kind that guarantees individual rights, and does not insist that the final measure of rightness be the Shari’a – were based on different ideas of what constitutes political legitimacy, and democracy in the Western sense could not be transplanted, for the good gardener could not ignore that deeply-rooted and broadly-ramified difference between the inshallah-fatalism and Obedience to the Ruler that Islam demanded, and the very different ideas that modern democracy is based on.
And then there were the Christians. Who planned, who foresaw, who thought about, the Christians of Iraq? Saddam Hussein did not do them favors. What he did do is, because his Ba’athist figleaf, the one that covered the unseemly reality of what was essentially a despotism run largely by, of, and for Sunni Arabs, was “secular” – that is, it was theoretically open to all, Arabs and Kurds, and even non-Muslims. Tariq Aziz, a Christian, played a useful part. Christians helped supply the household staff, the tasters and the cooks and the drivers, for Saddam Hussein, because they could be trusted, they would not dare turn out to be treacherous, and they had no independent base of support, they existed on the whim of the Muslim ruler in a Muslim land. Indeed, the Americans in the Green Zone inherited the same staffs of Christians, the same ones who had waited on Saddam Hussein.
But what did the Americans understand about Islam? Nothing. So they did not know, and they were not to learn, that 100,000 Assyrians had been murdered by Muslim Arabs in 1933, soon after the British left. They did not know what the word “Jizyah” meant, just as they were not told – not at Fort Jackson, not at Fort Bragg, not at Fort Benning, not anywhere at all that the troops were trained – about Islam, and about the treatment of non-Muslims that was the natural state of affairs under Islam, that arose from the texts and the tenets, and even in Iraq, where Saddam Hussein rightly recognized that the main threat to him came from the Shi’a Arabs, those who were not what we call, with an unavoidable rough-and-readiness, “secular” – like Iyad Allawi, who had once been a member of the Ba’ath Party before going into his anti-Saddam exile – but rather devout, and the more devout they were, the more of a danger they were to Saddam Hussein, but also, of course, to the Christians.
There was no understanding of what would naturally happen when the regime of Saddam Hussein was overturned. The chalabis and makiyas and rend al-rahim francke, and those of similar Georgetown and McLean acceptability and chic and charm, were too much in evidence,and the unrepresentative un-primitives were taken to represent the masses in Iraq, just as those who played tennis with, or drank port or smoked cigars with, Prince Bandar were convinced that he represented the “real” Saudi Arabia, and all the dour Wahhabi stuff was just for show. We have fools running us, fools in the most basic sense – unclever and unschooled and unstudied in the ways of men and the force of events, and convinced, because they fly all around the world, from capital to capital, they therefore understand the world. But really, what do the likes of Condoleezza Rice, or Madeleine Albright, understand, no matter how many world leaders they meet?
Saddam Hussein, who was called “secular” because the Ba’athist Party (which camouflaged a Sunni Arab despotism) allowed women certain freedoms (including the freedom to go to school and learn enough biology to be usefully employed in germ warfare), , and allowed Christians to belong, especially since they were no threat to the regime. For Saddam Hussein the threat was always mosque-based, with the mosques being those of the Shi’a; a second perceived threat not so much to the regime as to Iraq itself was identified as coming from those Kurds unwilling to submit to the arabization of what they saw, not always accurately – the Assyrians had been there before – as Kurdish lands that should remain Kurdish.
The Christian refugees who have appeared occasionally on NPR, such people as Donny George (former head of the Baghdad Museum), have – unsurprisingly but still annoyingly – blamed America for everything. Without saying, quite, that they longed for the days of Saddam Hussein, because although bad he was not so bad for them, they talk about those they are always careful to call “the turbans.” American listeners may not realize that “the turbans” refers only to the Shi’a, because in the experience of the Christians the secular Sunnis of the Ba’ath Party were not a threat; the Shi’a, those with the turbans, were. Christian Iraqis cannot, they realize, say this openly, cannot explain fully to themselves, still less to the outside world’s Infidels, how tenuous was their position, as Christians in a Muslim society, and how Christian regret at what was wrought in Iraq, that is the removal of someone whom most of us have no trouble seeing as a monster, and this view of Iraqi Christians, while it may seem immoral to outsiders, seems to them not immoral but born of necessity, yet they cannot quite bring themselves to explain the horrible situation in which Christians, in Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East, find themselves in, and therefore the kind of moral compromises they must make with this Muslim leader or group, or with that, in order to survive.
The Christians of Iraq made the best of it, but now, with Saddam Hussein gone, it is difficult to see who will protect them. About half of them have left, and since Christians made up a large disproportionate percentage of the doctors, engineers, and other professionals whom the Iraqi state needs, but will doubtless never be induced to return, one can assume that Iraq will be the loser. What about those who remain? Will the Muslim Shi’a who run the country decide to protect the Christians, if only to guarantee that they are seen by their American benefactors to seem to practice “tolerance”? Or possibly to make sure that the remaining Christian professionals remain, because they are so needed?
And if the American forces withdraw, should they not be making plans to protect those Christians, to establish some kind of sanctuary, perhaps in northern Iraq, close to or within Kurdistan, and to arm the Christians, and leave an expeditionary force there to protect them, a force that can call on airpower from the Gulf carriers, and from bases in Bulgaria (and perhaps even Turkey) at quick notice. Such planning, however, can take place only if the Administration, or the Pentagon, recognizes that the threat to the Christians, from the now-unchained Muslims, is real, is permanent, and must be taken as a grim fact of Dar-al-Islam life.
And if any Iraqi “refugees” are to be admitted to this country, it should only be Christians. They, after all, are indeed threatened. But Sunni Arab Iraqis have all kinds of places under Sunni Arab control. Shi’a Arab Iraqis have most of Baghdad and the entire south. The Kurds now have the north. It is the Assyrians, and the Chaldeans, and the Mandeans (a tiny sect, whose ancient libraries have been pillaged by Muslims) who, if anyone needs to be considered a refugee from Iraq, can be so considered. Keep that in mind, the next time someone says we must admit all kinds of Iraqis. No, we should not. And furthermore, too many of those Muslim Iraqis who came here, as “refugees” from Saddam Hussein, and who can now go back to Iraq without fear of persecution, have not done so. They should be made to do so. They no longer have an excuse, fall into the category, of those who need to remain.
I think that someone who resists the DARK SIDE to the point of continued debasement deserves a whole lot more respect than those animals who perpetrate this crime against humanity.
Now I understand why Hitler admired islam so much.
A connection the Left in Germany and everywhere else REFUSES to make.
The fact that so many people refuse to join the cult which is all they'd need do in order to join the side of supremacist exploitation says a LOT about the character of those innocent victims of the violent cult islam.
Throughout its fourteen hundred year history, Islam, with its legalized demands for jizya, kharaj, and other forms of extortion imposed on unbelievers, is, inter alia , inherently parasitic. This aspect of Islam, I believe, has been underemphasized, and should receive more attention.
"We have fools running us, fools in the most basic sense – unclever and unschooled and unstudied in the ways of men and the force of events, and convinced, because they fly all around the world, from capital to capital, they therefore understand the world."
Too true. Small men in large offices, whose willful ignorance is terrifying. Not that their intellectual nonfeasance doesn't carry rewards, as this bright shiny gong shows:
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/019569.php
As contemptible as these Islamic punks are, this mentality hurts them in the long run. Instead of trying to find some just and innovative way to improve life and their economy, they resort to these barbaric, backwards ways.
Interesting... this is the same tax the Saudi King is exacting on ALL Americans... in the form of higher oil costs and non-increased production. He must have really enjoyed having President Bush beg for mercy...
I wonder if the we had all of Congress go and bow down to that King, if he would reduce that tax burden on us... Perhaps starting with a few significant Democratic Senators.
Well, I can dream...