“These people are speaking a strange language.
It is strange to me
And strange, I think, even to themselves.”
-Louis Simpson
I am a lover of words. I have a collection of dictionaries. I love the way words can articulate meaning in just a certain way. In my Penguin Dictionary I found the word pronoid, and the meaning of this word given in the 2004 edition (paperback) is: “showing undue optimism and happiness, and especially having a firm and often unjustified, belief that one is liked by other people.”
It is my opinion that a great percentage of the Muslim world, and especially those Muslims living in the Western hemisphere, and of those Muslims in the Western hemisphere, especially those who write apologia for the religion of Islam and bad Muslim behaviour, are living under this trance—this unjustified belief. Why else would the entire Muslim world refer to the non-Muslim as infidel? As though we have no choice but to admire the religion of Islam for the good virtues we are continually assured it possesses; as though the non-Muslim is incapable of virtue of any kind without the influence of Islam and the fright of its umma. As though such an appellation is not insulting.
The Muslim religious presume that the non-Muslim world acknowledges—and rejects—only their god, as though only their god exists. Therefore they perpetuate the supremacist Islamic sentiment that only their god, Allah, is worthy of fidelity and that the non-Muslim is incapable of such a feat. They believe that if all infidels were to submit to their god today, everything would be well in the world: Jews would be exterminated en masse, even those hiding behind stones, as foretold in their Quranic teachings, the State of Israel would cease to exist, and the so-called Palestinians would live happily ever after.
It was reported in Canada’s National Post yesterday that Hussein Hamdani, at one time “widely hailed as a hero on the front lines of Canada’s war against homegrown terrorism” is now “suspended from the Cross Cultural Roundtable on National Security, which he has sat on since 1995.” Hamandi has since posted a video in the Montreal Gazette where he tells of his hurt feelings and boasts of his efforts to rescue Muslim teenagers from the dark evils of “radicalization.” In this video he remarks that “Canadians aren’t stupid.” No, we’re not. A majority of us—an obfuscated majority, I might add—have been deeply confounded for a long time now as to why our politicians, but especially the selected members sitting at the Cross Cultural Roundtable, have failed to honestly critique the real source of all “homegrown terrorism.” We are always dealing with this problem second-hand.
Why do we go on pretending that this religion [Islam] is not strange and foreign to traditional Canadian (or American) values? I’m no Pierre Burton, but I cannot remember this country ever before accommodating (or accepting as unremarkable) the atrocious custom of honour killings, or a court of law releasing a convicted terrorist murderer (Omar Khadr) into the public domain, simply because we’ve become so forcefully acculturated with the norms of a religion whose political advocates insist we have nothing to worry about. Hussein Hamdani complains that his rejection is the result of political intrigue. Welcome to the West, Mr. Hamdani. This is that part of the world where political intrigue is experienced as being dealt an unfair shake—not where our political opponents are removed from the running by way of suicide bombs and assassination. Besides, you had to know that if you signed up for an anti-terrorism roundtable, it would be a Conservative government, not a Liberal government, would one day probably kick your ass out the door (no matter what “Islamicize” meant back in 1994). Unlike Justin Trudeau and the proverbial toad, Prime Minister Stephen Harper has not become so tender-hearted that he’s lost his intelligence.
In their very Clintonesque work The Age of Sacred Terror, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon note that, “We are a long way from taking full measure of the new terrorists. Those who have committed the most atrocious violence—the jihadists, who are the most numerous—have done the most to explain themselves.” This was published a year after 9/11. The terrorists may have explained themselves well, but, since 9/11, we have heard very little from the moderate side of Islam to explain the violent side of Islam. Their best excuse is the “radicalization” theory, but that theory doesn’t go far enough to explain why the religion of Islam, even after being embedded in relatively peaceful Western societies, should have such a breach in its teachings that terrorism is still its most prolific attribute.
Benjamin and Simon point out that, “A surfeit of causes lies behind the challenge of bin Laden and his radical Islamists, including frustration with states that fail them politically and economically, a pessimism born of several centuries in which Muslim countries failed to achieve like Western ones…” When will the Muslim world give up blaming the West for Islam’s failure to bring those countries wherein it has gained preponderance out of the 7th century and into the modern age? One would think that these Islamist grudges must surely sound strange (and by now unfounded) in the ears of those Muslims who’ve experienced the abundance of peace and security of Western democracies. But, alas, many of them insist on speaking this strange language, this lexicon of hate and antisemitism, only because they erroneously believe their hatred does not sound strange in our ears—because they think we like them for it.