If you read this carefully enough, the truth is spoken. All this time, we've heard that the Muslim World is not at war with us. We've heard that it's only the "radical Muslims" who hate us.

If this were true, and it never was, then why would we declare a truce with the Muslim world?

Because this is a clash of civilizations, one civilized, one not. I'd agree to a truce with Muslims, on the following conditions:

1. Burn every copy of the unholy Qur'an in existence.

2. Learn to read, and reduce your illiteracy rate to acceptable levels.

3. Agree to never, ever raise the price of oil on your customers in an effort to hold them hostage for the spreading of your bullshit radical views.

4. Stop oppressing, starving, hacking, and gassing your own people, especially women and children.

5. Dismantle and never pursue nuclear power again.

6. Put fatboy Al Sadr, and fatter boy Abu Hamza on strict diets.

7. Disassemble any and all groups who operate under the same format as CAIR, them especially.

8. Move out of North America, South America, Central America, Africa, Europe, and Australia.

9. Tear down every Mosque in North America, South America, Central America, Africa, Europe, and Australia, before you move out.

If they would adhere to all of the above, a truce can be called, and we won't have to continue beating their asses from one dune to another.

Posted by: DCWatson at August 30, 2004 9:53 AM

As everyone knows -- not that you would be able to find it out from, say, the Middle Eastern faculty at Columbia, which consists largely of propagandists in the Said-line -- a hudna is of limited duration. The Muslim side is obligated to resume conflict whenever it feels strong enough; only "darura" or "necessity" gives Muslims the right NOT to continue to work, via the Jihad (and Jihad need not be conducted by qital, or combat -- economic warfare, propaganda, and of course, now, demographic conquest from within, are all permissible and useful means. This is, by the way, written about and well understood -- particularly the last -- within the Muslim world).

Furthermore, this is not a "clash of civilizations." It is the age-old Jihad, which never went away but for various reasons went largely unrecognized. Under the slow Ottoman decline, Muslims were largely unaware of the outside world. They did not have much information about the West; illiterate people living in a village in Egypt, or Mesopotamia, who listen occasionally to the local reading of the Qur'an in a small ramshackle mosque, and living on the edge of poverty, are not likely to think of making war on the Infidel -- unless of course an Infidel is around to harm (as all Western diplomats and travellers could report). In India, the British dominance helped the Hindus to recover their own status, and indeed, their own past, obscured by centuries of bloody Muslim rule, where Aurangzeb was the rule, and Akbar (detested by Muslims precisely for his unIslamic pluralism and even, at times, his syncretism) the exception.

But nonetheless, there was Jihad after Jihad. In 1804, in West Africa. In the 1830s, with Abd El Kader in North Africa. In the 1880s, with the Mahdi in the Sudan. In 1894-95, the Jihad to suppress the "giavour" -- i.e. the Armenians in Turkey. The world-wide Jihad declared in 1915, from Constantinople. The min-jihads in the Dutch East Indies, suppressed by both arms, and the extremely thoughtful and clever policies that the scholar of Islam, Snouck Hurgronje, helped devise.

What really changed everything, however, was the OPEC oil money. Technologically primitive, the Muslims could nonetheless now buy all sorts of weaponry, and buy they did, and they continue to be the world's major arms buyers. They could also buy not only weapons, but Western traitors willing to help them, or to transfer technology. This helped, for example, A. Q. Khan, who not only had some Westerners assist him, but simply stole secrets from those among whom he had gone in the West to "conduct research."

Money helped to bribe diplomats and journalists and even intelligence operatives. If a C.I.A. agent knows, by retiring, he can then go into business with those he is supposed to be reporting on, and subsequently does, what might that do to the quality of his reporting? We still do not know what it was that Raymond Close, in two weeks to be an honored speaker in Washington (along with the likes of Hanan Ashrawi and Nihad Awad, and of course the inevitable, presumably rectitudinous and certainly platitudinous and comical Anthony Cordesman) reported to the American government, while he was station chief for the C.I.A. between 1970 and 1977. But it is known that he "retired" in order to go into business with two Saudis; that he was in up to his neck in the B.C.C.I. scandal (the "Bank of Crooks and Criminals" as it was dubbed), that he was involved in certain unauthorized transfers of American-supplied weapons by the Saudis to Pakistan, that he has for years been toiling in the vineyard, as that suspect thing, an "international business consultant," in giving lectures and writing articles on how wonderful Saudi Arabia is, and how misunderstood, and how aggrieved the Arabs feel about our "unconditional" support for Israel.

Isn't it time, in order to prevent this kind of thing from continuing, that Raymond Close, and all those ex-diplomats wrapping themselves in the mantle of "'American National Interest" (you know, even as they accept Arab money, we are supposed to ignore that, and to believe that anyone who supports Israel could NOT be acting in their self-defined, and self-exculpating, definition of the "American National Interest." Eugene Bird, Andrew Kilgore, James Akins, the late John C. West (and his friend Crawford Cook, for whom he obtained a job doing P.R. work for the Saudis even while West was still ambassador to Saudi Arabia). These people need to be thoroughly examined. What kind of information, or misinformation, did they communicate back to Washington, so that there was no attempt to create a coherent strategy based on an understanding of the tenets of Islam, and the view that Islam inculcates toward all non-Muslims, and indeed, a realistic view of how, over 1350 years, non-Muslims have been treated wherever Islam conquered, and can certainly expect to be treated in a similar manner, since the canonical texts of Islam remain immutable, the same wherever, in the future, Muslims may manage to acquire power over the indigenous non-Muslims.

The Jihad is immutable. The ability to wage Jihad depends on money, and on the ability to keep fooling not the West, but the entire non-Muslim world (indeed, constant emphasis on "the West" is foolish, because it allows those conducting the Jihad to pretend that this is the "rich, colonial blah blah countries" making war on the "poor" (OPEC revenues represent the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, some 5-6 trillion dollars, all from an accident of geology). It is NOT a "clash of civilizations." It is a Jihad. It has no end. IT can, however, be contained, and the conditions created by which some, if not all Muslims, will begin to see that their political, economic, intellectual, and indeed moral problems come, not from "the West" (the Hindus in Kashmir and Bangladesh, the Buddhists in Thailand, the HIndus, and Confucians in Malaysia, the Hindus, Buddhists, and Christians in Indonesia, the Christians in the southern Sudan and northern Nigeria, are NOT part of "the West" are they?)but from the tenets of Islam itself.

The non-Muslim world already with difficulty is beginning to comprehend the problem, but the promptings and urge to deny reality are very strong. The sine qua non of any policy is a real understanding of what is going on. This cannot be obtained from most university departments, either of "Islamic" or of "Middle Eastern studies." Not all of them present as horrific a spectacle as that at Columbia University, completely in the hands of apologists for Islam -- both Muslim and non-Muslim -- whose main task is to AVOID having any real information about the tenets of Islam, about the nature of Jihad, about the institution of dhimmitude, about even the impossiblity of a permanent peace made by Muslims with non-Muslims (given the centrality, in relevant Islamic jurisprudence, of the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya, as Majid Khadduri and many others hav repeatedly pointed out).

Whatever failures there have been in Iraq, they have been based on this failure of intelligence: the failure to understand Islam. American soldiers are puzzled. Why when they have deposed someone who murdered hundreds of thousands, and who was in power for 35 years and he, and his sons, fully prepared to stay another 35, why would someone like Moqtada al-Sadr whose father and uncles were murdered by Saddam Hussein, not feel a nanosecond of gratitude? They forgot, or never knew, and the army seems not to realize it has to start telling its own soldiers the truth, that Islam requires its adherents to view them, and all Infidels, as the enemy. It does not matter how many schools, roads, electricity grids, bridges, oil wells they build or repair, rebuild or re-repair. They are Infidels.

Unless and until a large number of people begin to understand Islam this is not a war, of self-defense against the world-wide and essentially endless Jihad, that can be adequately fought. More attention to the brilliant analyses of ex-Muslims such as Ibn Warraq, Anwar Shaikh, Azam Kamguian, Ali Sina, and so on needs to be given. They need to be heard, lest the likes of the full-time propagandists, their sources of funds nicely "landered" through famous, but in some cases no-longer--distinguished university programs (the PLO apparatchik Khalidi comes to mind, with his Arab backers finally, and most reluctantly, revealed when Columbia releated the list of those funding the "Edward Said Chair.").

And there are those who, while perhaps not ex-Muslims, see clearly the near-impossibility of reconciling Islam with human rights as those rights are, everywhere outside the Muslim world, understood. Reza Afshari, Irfan Khawaja, and others have written brilliantly. They, like Ibn Warraq and others, are the ones who deserve support, university positions, and a wide audience.

Hudna indeed. Fat chance.

Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2004 10:42 AM

Only an idiot would agree to hudna with Islam, as we all know that hudna is temporary until the next opportunity when THEY see the advantage. Jihad is perpetual until one side or the other is destroyed.

Posted by: epg at August 30, 2004 2:38 PM

A truce with the muslim world and radical islam in particular??????????????? It's up to Europe to be the good broker??????????????? Go stick your head back in the sand Mr. Ostrich. Idiot.

Posted by: Jim at August 30, 2004 2:39 PM

It's a moonbat two-fer!

Posted by: Rottweiller at August 30, 2004 3:08 PM

Addendum:

The Daily Star, of course, is a Beirut daily, the kind which, though in English, pushes a Muslim line, despite the editor, one Rami Khoury (the name gives away his Christian origin, but he is hardly a Christian of the Habib Malik school -- rather, he is in the well-known islamochristian Hanan Ashrawi line). Khoury is a favorite of some PBS staffers, a smooth talker, whose serial fabrications leave one almost admiring at the breathtaking way he has of telling one poltical lie after another. One wonders if this came naturally to him, and if it helped him get that grand thing, a Neiman Fellowship -- well, hanging out at Lippman House certainly let him make the kind of connections he would find useful.

The point of the article is of course hidden in the little phrase about a complete arms embargo by the United States on all "undemocratic countries" including "Egypt, Saudi Arabia" oh, and, let's just slip in here (the way Woody Allen, in a movie, marches up to the clerk to pay for his magazines and has them rung up at the register: "The New York Review of Books," "The Hudson Review," "Partisan Review," "The Times Literary Supplement," and, oh yes, a copy of "Slut") "Israel." Get it? The point is to put a complete embargo on Israel because it is purportedly "undemocratic" and presumably, lacking in the kind of human rights that Egypt and Saudi Arabia are. Does Khoury, does this "Levine" really take us all for complete fools?

Quite possibly, yes.

Posted by: Hugh at August 30, 2004 3:45 PM

Only an idiot would agree to hudna with Islam

I think that was Mark Levines Qualification as a writer......

OK Let Mr Levine lead by example....where should he begin?

Posted by: Joe Bananas at August 30, 2004 7:21 PM

Sure, a "truce". Sounds like just the ticket.

001 DO UNTIL (nobody left to come back to the table)

002 We can agree to a truce and play it their way: we just keep pounding them with fire and steel during the "truce" period.

003 And when they come back to the table complaining that we did not keep our side of the bargain, well OK, we admit it.

004 Then we agree to another truce, and keep pounding away.

005 END

Posted by: Hulegu Khan at August 30, 2004 10:45 PM

Every war has is traitors, and Mark Levine is one.

Posted by: wodan82 at August 31, 2004 2:38 AM