A Jihad Watch commenter recently observed that the “true target” of Muslim jihadists “is the Jew, wherever he is.”
Actually, no. Jews are a convenient target, and an easy one -- there are so few of them, after all, and the pathological condition of antisemitism has helped supply willing collaborators among the non-Muslim population. See George Galloway, or Robert Fisk, or Taki Theodorocopulos.
But just as Israel may be seen as the sole target, when it was merely, for several decades, the most obvious and immediate target, so it may seem that Jews are the sole target. But they are not.
It is true that for a while Israel appeared to be the only war by Muslims that mattered -- given the manic over-coverage and miscoverage given to the war being made on Israel, a war that is without end but is manageable (if the Israelis, and the rest of the West, come to their senses). Few outside of India, save for the odd scholar of Indian civilization -- David McCutchion, Koenraad Elst, Francois Gautier -- paid attention to Muslim terrorism in Kashmir or India proper, or the persecution of Hindus in Pakistan and Bangladesh. And even the Taliban took the occasion of its ascendancy to make sure that the handful of Hindus left in Afghanistan were made to wear identifying garb for, as the Taliban sweetly explained, "for their own safety."
But there are much bigger fish to fry now than tiny Israel. The unearned (and unmerited) OPEC trillions (some twelve trillion dollars since 1973 alone), and the immigrant Muslim millions allowed to settle within Western Europe -- there are now about 25 million Muslims there -- both made it possible for Muslims not merely to dream, but to take real steps to expand beyond the Local or Lesser Jihads (such as those against Israel, and India in Kashmir) and to begin to put into their sights the Infidel nation-states of Western Europe. There, Muslims who had been foolishly permitted to live in such numbers in the Bilad al-kufr began to challenge, and to threaten, the legal and political institutions, and the foreign and domestic policies, and the physical wellbeing, of the Infidel indigenes, who are everywhere of course keenly aware of Muslim numbers. In some cases, as in Denmark and Italy, the Muslims have badly miscalculated. Let's hope that in Great Britain they have also, or soon will, be seen to have badly miscalculated.
For this is not a war only or even mainly on Jews. It is on all Infidels. The Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira make this clear. The Hindus are threatened. And Hindus in Great Britain know this, and are increasingly impatient, I should think, with those Hindu members of the elite back in India who have always been so careful to distance themselves from what they, those supercilious more-advanced-than-thou Hindus, regard as the crude, distasteful "communalism" of the BJP, with some fondly assuming that this attitude will establish in the minds of others, especially the minds of advanced Westerners, how very advanced they are -- those Hindu-by-background Indians. And what a surprise it will be for them when they discover, and quite soon, that the most advanced Westerners, the very people they think of as their soulmates, or mind-mates, have begun to study up on Islam, its doctrine and its practice. And the more they study, the more they find themselves becoming as alarmed by Islam as the most (supposedly) troglodytic member of the BJP, and not impressed, not at all, with the refusal of those Hindus who refuse to recognize the meaning, and the menace, of Islamic teaching for India.
And if Jews and Hindus are more easily targeted right now, just look at what happens to Christians wherever they live in Muslim lands. Would you care to be a Christian in Pakistan? In Bangladesh? In Indonesia? What about Saudi Arabia? Libya? How about Iran, not the Iran of the Shah, or the Iran of the advanced, relaxed, Frenchified, ancien regime (much about these people can be gleaned from such memoirs as "Daughter of Persia" by a perfect representative of that ancien regime, Sattareh Farman Farmaian)? Would you like to be a Copt in Egypt? Would it be okay for you in Iraq? An Assyrian in Iraq, now that Saddam Hussein is no longer there to protect you, for good and sufficient reasons of his own? Where might it be okay? In Turkey, advanced, Kemalist, "secular" Turkey -- is that where it would be absolutely fine to be a Christian, say with an Italian priest running the congregation? Where in the Muslim world are non-Muslims truly safe? And if you find such a place, ask yourself what events have made for that safety -- say, in the Central Asian stans, where the decades of anti-Islamic efforts by the Soviets have, in some cases, created a secular class sufficiently broad and deep to withstand the "return to Islam."
No, the Muslims rampaging in Golders Green are not Mosleyites limiting their rampages to Jews, though that should of course be sufficient to have the full weight of the state come down on them like not a ton but a thousand tons, of bricks.
Their true target is not Jews, but Jews, Hindus, Christians, Buddhists, atheists, everyone and everything, that is not-Islam, that is outside of Islam, that is not part of, or not completely subservient to, Islam.
There is also intra-Muslim violence, as the daily martyrdom operations in Iraq and elsewhere attest.
Once it becomes a duty to kill or subjugate the unbeliever, everyone is in danger, because religious belief is always imprecise and subjective, and accusations of heresy, also being subjective, can always be used as a weapon of opportunity, as happened during the Inquisition.
The spirit of the Inquisition lives on in Islam.
Only four non-muslim countries fall in the Islamic arc that stretches from Morocco in West Africa to Indonesia - Israel, India, Myanmar and Thailand. Even the preachers in the Indonesian mosques know that.
jewdog - you're right.
At least 35 of the deaths in Gaza are the result of Hamas assassinating fellow Gazan Muslims whom they declare to be Fatah supporters and whom they have merely *suspected* of 'collaborating with Israel'.
http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1230733155685&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull
Me, I suspect that the kangaroo court method has been employed; perhaps these people belong to Fatah; perhaps some of them *may* have passed information to the israelis; but it is also entirely probable that the charges of 'collaboration' are false.
Those deluded western jihad groupies who have appeared on western streets chanting 'we are Hamas', are supporting a bunch of amoral power-worshipping gangsters who throw the members of the opposing gang out of windows or drag them out of hospitals and gun them down in cold blood, or who shoot people in the legs to cripple them...all on the basis of mere suspicion, or even on the basis of deliberate, cold-blooded lies.
Even a whisper of collaboration with Israel, or a like event in any muslim country will be sure to bring swift retaliation that may include all the horrors of islam, set down in the Qur'an, Hadith and Sira. A legacy of persecution and death to all who refuse to convert or submit as dhimmis, to islam. Israel and gazastan are just the hottest
spot in islam's malignant spread around the globe. Look wherever there is war and conflict. What you will you find as the cause and at the center...Islam! Nothing more and everything evil that comes with it.
A kangaroo court would be considered legal and just by those who dish out this sort of "justice".It is way more common than the reports we see. Just like deaths from stoning, deacpitations and the trials of women and men under sharia law. This is why we all of us infidels and kafirs are targets of islam. The Jews and Israel just happen to be the epicenter at the moment. Just because they are defending the only homeland they have in the entire world, surround by millions of muslims ready to kill and reclaim the land that was never theirs.
I think of my relatives who died in Auschwitz, Treblinka, Buchewald. The ones that escaped and survived to tell their stories of the
persecution and deaths of others, who were not Jewish. They are coming, they are here and this will continue until many more wake from their stupor. Induced by too much koolaid, multiculturalism, diversity and europassiveism that has lulled so many to sleep. There is no peace within islam and there is no peace with islam. Hence, we are at war. One we cannot afford to lose.
Islam is an ongoing witchhunt. Takfir has ensured this. The practice of forbidding wrong within the milieu-controlled cult atmosphere, combined with the fact that Islam disallows almost all forms of fun, productivity, and self-improvement only fosters the climate in which people with no lives (especially women, who are essentially denied real lives and have literally nothing to do but gossip) continually indict one another for made-up "crimes." Imagine living in a society inhabited almost entirely by evil people wherein the gossip of some idiots could lead to your lynching or assassination. Truly horrifying.
Dumbledoresarmy, I would seriously doubt that they would even get kangaroo-court trials. At least, that was the exact thought that went through my mind when I watched this last night (the second scene with the trains of guys with their shirts pulled over their heads, being dragged off to their assassinations). I don't know what they were doing, but I doubt it was anything serious if they were congregating in a group, doing it in broad daylight in the middle of the street. I was thinking as I watched it that it was like when I was in high school and we would all stand by the side of the building, smoking cigarettes, and whoever was supposed to be on the lookout for teachers failed at their job, except that they all got shot in the head instead of getting JUG ("justice under God," Catholic-school detention, basically). They were probably doing something just as serious.
Great column, one glitch.
Let's be frank about Jihad. Self-defense isn't so hard to justify with our constitution.
You take a morally decrepit and moribund West (ex America, some moralists still alive), and you put in a few people who are actually "shocked" by its decrepitude. You ask them to labor in your factories and shop in your stores, and you tell them not to worry, that they are free to be who they are. They are free to practice their belief, as part of their freedom of confession. Part of that freedom is to not like you. Its a freedom, you can't take away from anyone. Included in that freedom is the right to organize. And that includes what Spencer calls the Stealthy Jihad.
Only its not Stealthy. Its a Constitutionally Given right. Right to defend their faith, and a right to defend themselves, against what they see as a form of modern aggression.
It's not a stretch, to claim that many of our founding fathers would feel more affinity for a "fundamentalist" Muslim, than a modern dread-head, bachelor at 40, two single-mother kids somewhere in his mental attic. Our society produces too many of the latter, and again, protected by the constitution.
Sincerely, if you believe in your society and country, how can you allow it to degenerate to the point where you can't even successfully argue for order and neatness against your neighbour -because he has a right to do everything he wants to? Wouldn't you feel "attacked" and "threatened" by such a neighbour, and by a society, which lets him live the way he does? Imagine you've got three kids, who have to see the trash get out of his house everyday, smoked up, drugged-up. Imagine you have to deal with his noise every night. And then you have to hear his self-justifications in the schools, in the media, everywhere.
I think we need to give the Jihadists a break. They are no different from American conservatives, fighting their little cultural war. And yes, the goal is everyone who opposes Islam, but so what, the goal in conservative circles is everyone who opposes conservatism. And its a right, to pursue this goal. Stealth or non-stealth. If they want to push for Islam in the West, they have the Constitutionally given right. They can even push for polygamy, for slavery, for every part of it that we in the West, at one point had. Theirs is the sovereignty. And no legal piece of paper can resolve the identity issue, behind this confrontation.
The paradoxes of the modern world, are not solvable with a few angry lines about Muslim intentions. They can only be solved if they are properly understood. If a people no longer feels as a people, like most people in the West do not, then you will be replaced by a people who do feel as a people.
Let the Muslims be. As Mark Steyn put it, Islam is a virile religion. The West has entered a phase where there is no possibility of self-asserting virility. You have to go postal, or you have to be an extremist, and that just sucks. Converting to Islam is a lot easier - plus you get all the perks of a healthy identity which can claim tradition, and unity, and get lost in that wonderful totalitarian crowd.
But guess what,Democracy doesn't work. Its a self-destructive system. That much was said by Socrates, but so many "Westerns" obviously couldn't bother to read him.
Not only is Democracy self-destructive, arguing against Islam with fake arguments for "tolerance" or "women' rights" or talking about genital mutilation and slavery, is fake fake fake. I can hear the falseness out of JihadWatch. As if it genuinely cared about any of these "liberal" values. If you argue against Islam on any of these grounds, you will lose. Because it can very well adapt to meet your criteria, and still you'll do yourself in. Because you don't read your socrates, and you idealise your own democracy to a point, where defending it for its own sake, you will destroy everything you are.
Then, it will be somebody else who will come and pick up your pieces - if not Islam, the Maratruchas.
Take women's liberty. Ok- now you have it, and most Americans can't stay in a marriage. Can't find a woman. They end up marrying asian girls, because with them, there is a chance at a family. So how much you gonna defend women's rights? You can't do it, if you don't take a family into account. But you can't do that, because in a perfect democracy, everyone decides what they want. So how will you tamper your calls for "liberation" with anything? You can't. By that token, you can argue against Islamic demands for blasphemy laws, but you won't be able to demand it ad infinitum, because then you will open yousrelf up to precisely the opposite - the right to preach Jihad. You cannot be, in other words, a democracy absolutist.
Those who try to be democracy absolutists, are in fact running away from an empty identity they have, since the only way to defend themselves against stronger identities, is through recourse to an empty rhetoric, which offers some defence. But its a paliative. Again, if you take the fundamentalist democratic line, you will expose your own flank.
IN the end, the more you reify democracy, and play down your own cultural heritage, the worst it gets. And while you think you are defeating Islam, you're engaged in a "Stealthy Self-Defeat". But to play up your cultural heritage, you actually have to have one. It can't be invented out of thin air. The Nazis tried that, and it was as pathetic, as its results were attrocious. They tried to arianise what christiainity was left of them, and it got them off the hook of any and all ethics, to the point that a generally decent people, became mechanical butchers and murderers. In other words, tampering with heritage, should have a "warning" labbel on it. Don't screw with it, if you don't know what the result is.
For the west, its simply time to admit defeat, and pray for the best. Its been decades we've lost touch with our-selves. Take your kids to a National Museum with paintings by Western Arists, and the trouble is, YOU are clueless about them. They dont' speak to you, nor can you interpret one for your kids...try going beyond "oh, that one is good..." Making it relevant to your own identity, will make you look that much more pathetic. At least the Jihadis have a reason to hate it. You can't even find an emotion above the 3 db level.
With the crisis coming on, prayer is the best answer. Because there is nothing you can do, which will look good. Pray - but you have no more G-ds or deities to pray to. Since you've mocked your G-d out of your house in the last 100 years - even if you claim to believe in him, and act like a demented Evangelical, claiming that belief in Darwin is somehow antithetical to the Bible. Since faith in America, has been a travesty show of Religious Consumerism, in which one Ego asserts its self over all others, since the Puritan Days.
You can run from your spiritual poverty, but in the end you have to hide behind an F16 or M16.
I would assume Spencer, a man of Eastern Rite heritage, should know better than most readers, what I am talking about, but instead he chooses to play games and make his career on easy arguments and falsities.
To SkeptikOverAll:
One detail you omitted changes your argument fundamentally. It is not constitutionally protected speech or action for Muslims to advocate Islamic law. Islamic law allows, encourages and demands the forcible overthrow of infidel regimes. That means us. Read the Smith Act.
To SkepticOverAll:
muslims "right to defend themselves....."
I don't recall that anyone attacked islam first. I believe it is the other way around.
Go back and read Genesis account re Ishmael (Gen 16:12) "....and he shall be a wild man...and his hand shall be against everyone, and everyone's hand shall be against him......"
Let me explain this verse to you. It is a prophecy: Ishmael, the progenitor of all the arab tribes on the earth will be a BAD DUDE, warlike and mean in every respect to everyone he encounters. I'd say the writer of Genesis knew what he was talking about.
Islam is NOT a religion; it's an irrational heresy, anexcuse to carry out barbarian behavior in the name of some bogus cause.
But don't worry Skeptic. God will finsh this fight in the end.
SkepticOverAll:
Either your name or your post is misleading. Is there a theocrat behind the "Skepticism?"
Hugh writes above:
"No, the Muslims rampaging in Golders Green are not Mosleyites limiting their rampages to Jews, though that should of course be sufficient to have the full weight of the state come down on them...."
Thank you for revealing that the mob that attacked restaurants and businesses in Golders Green last week were Muslims. I was unable to discover on-line (not being in Britain at the moment) whether they were Muslims or not. All reports simply described them, more or less, as 'about 15 men who had been demonstrating against Israel and before the police could get there they had escaped on the tube'. Reports mentioned the name of one restaurant they attacked - it is some distance from the tube station and where were British Transport Police at tube stations down the line? Pathetic.
Thirty five or more years ago a group of white skinhead East Enders went on the rampage down Brick Lane in Stepney in London, smashing the front windows of Bangladeshi shops and curry houses. No problem then learning the identity of those rampagers.
I concur with Hugh.
For which reason I am becoming daily more incensed at the seemingly endless political, popular and media obsession with Israel.
Israel has become a completely effective distraction, drawing attention away from the common and similar efforts by jihaddis everywhere.
If you like thinking about the disproportionate, consider that there are barely enough Jews in the world to fill a single medium sized modern city. A minute number compared to the hurricanes of hate, hot air and hooey that get blown about the subject.
When I call people's attention to the fate of the Catholics in Lebanon or the Buddhists in southern Thailand, they generally stare at me with blank expressions.
Everyone is a target.
Almost no one wants to face it.
Skeptic
who are you?
Cards on the table.
Where were you born?
Who are your ancestors?
Are you Russian? Greek?
Western white supremacist/ worshipper of the Will to Power?
Or...a Mohammedan Dementor in disguise, playing psy-war games?
You're sneering at Western civilisation because it's 'soft' and 'weak' and 'decadent'...you're thrilled by (or are you boasting about?) the alleged 'virility' of 'Islam' ...
when in fact it is *Islam* that poisons and freezes the mind and obliterates empathy and conscience; Islam that produces societies that alternate between frenzy and apathy, jerking back and forth between bloody Dionysian chaos (Taliban Afghanistan, Somalia) and equally bloody top-down autocracies (Ottoman Emperors, Saddam Hussein). It is Islam that lives off slaves and dhimmis and treats them like sh*t, working and f***ing them to death and then throwing them away like used kleenex. What's to admire in that? - NOTHING.
Islam has no real morality whatever. Islam nourishes and validates psychopaths and sociopaths, abuse of women and children, to baroque levels unheard of in the West.
It is Islam that permits the debauching of little girls by old men; Islam under whose shadow the cruellest forms of pederasty flourish; Islam that essentially practises human sacrifice (honor killings; mass murder of non-Muslims in jihad; the repeated assaults upon dhimmi communities; killing of fellow Muslims on trumped up charges of blasphemy,etc); Islam that annihilates art and sculpture and would wipe out music, all music, even lullabies, if it could; Islam that creates hell on earth, perpetually spiraling downward into a void.
If Islam were forced in upon itself and unable to attack and parasitise others, it would eat itself; bleeding endlessly away into total social, economic, political and ecological collapse.
@dumbledoresarmy
feel free to recount your personal journey through supremacism and the will to power, I've heard it a 1000 times before, but don't put words in MY mouth. "sneer" at western civ because it is weak and soft, I did not. Mention islamic virility I did.
Virility is a kind of healthy version of manliness. In America, we lack a healthy notion of manliness. We go to the extreme of 24hour fitness and bazookas.
As for my origin? Whoa.
Now I get it. From Islam influencing your patriotism, to ethnicity doing it. Which pay did you close your Main Kampf on, 15?
I am a well traveled American, of the same ethnic mix as most Americans. Cherokee and Choctaw, and Heeb-roow.
Your notion of Islam is pathetic. Rewind your clock to Europe in 1943, and using your logic, we can explain all of its ills with the Worship of Baal.
In any case, you clearly never heard of Sharansky's Defending Identity - so you are unfamiliar with my argument. It's easier hiding behind M1Abrahams, and scapegoating the foreigner, than admitting he has a right to live amongst you, as he sees fit. Our society gives him this right, and deprives usof having any say in how he lives.
We all agreed to this, in the sixties and seventies. Now suddenly, due to a few Muslims, we have to change the rules? It really seems to be the Western mind which is playing games with itself, not the Eastern. Easterners know where they come from, and where they want to go - Westerners don't. And it appears that pointing this out, will get you with the ad nazium argument from dumbledoresarmy. Yah, some identity crisis there!
---
The Smith Act, has nothing to say over Islam whatsoever. Muslims have a right, to peacefully organize, and lobby for changes in the constitution, to accommodate their understanding of American life.
Even if Sharia by virtue of advocating Jihad advocates theocracy, there is nothing whatsoever preventing Muslims from choosing to do so peacefully.
Its like claiming that signing on to the UN charter means we have to use force to intervene in countries which fail to play by the rules. Technically, this is almost true of the Charter, on the ground, which country puts it into practice?
-zero.
The founders were well aware of the dangers of unfettered democracy.
America is not and was never intended to be an unlimited democracy.
Man cannot live without a philosophy. A population with a strong commitment to an inferior philosophy can win out over a population with a weak commitment to a superior philosophy.
Man cannot live without a morality. A population with a strong commitment to an inferior philosophy can win out over a population with a weak commitment to a superior morality.
But free will means that there are no sure things in human affairs.
America was intended to be a republic in which the rights of the individual are sacrosanct.
Doctrines like nazism, communism, racial supremacism, the legitimation of slavery -- and sharia -- all of which explicitly deny the primacy of the rights of the individual, cannot be countenanced with bland, neutral legal acceptance. Neither can the law turn a blind eye to attempts to implement those doctrines, all of which are inherently hostile to the basic premises of the American constitution.
The founders could not, being mortal, anticipate every form of threat to freedom and well being that life and human irrationality could ever produce. Although they did a damned good job with the information available at the time.
It may well be that there is little, if anything in the precedents of history to prepare America for the employment of American freedoms to mount an organized attack on American freedoms. That doesn't mean that there is nothing to be done about it, or that all possible answers must be weak or unjust.
Spencer is discovering and delineating this new form of threat to advanced western civilization.
It's a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.
One of the ironies of the situation in which we find ourselves is that while the mohammedans seem externally to have a more virile society, they are productively impotent -- crippled as they are by their primitive philosophy and backward barbarian cultural norms.
While the west, including America, is suffering from a debilitating effeminacy and an ignorance of and indifference to its own roots, the philosophical stream which still irrigates the culture confers an unprecedented and truly awesome productive potency.
In fact, there is a good case to be made for the idea that America did not win its battles with the nazis and communists simply because its warriors were superior, but rather that America out-produced its enemies -- precisely because of America's legacy of freedom and free thought.
And there is nothing to prevent the same from happening again in the battle with the jihaddis, both the armed and the stealthy.
And it will be men like Spencer that lead the way -- because the strength of man comes first from the mind.
The history of our times will look back kindly, I believe, on our Robert Spencer and his allies in the intellectual front line of this fight.
joeblough
well put. I agree with every word you said.