Fitzgerald: Nonsense and lies, and those who fall for them

This statement issued by some Muslim groups, in order to protect Islam from scrutiny and to prolong the unwariness of Infidels, is a farrago of nonsense and lies.

My favorite is this:

"The unity of our society must be maintained and we must not allow divisions to emerge between us. We must remain friends, neighbours and colleagues, and take Britain forward as one nation – towards a Greater Britain."

"Unity of our society"? We "must remain friends"?

Well, the authors of this document must then publicly take issue with what Islam tells them to believe, how it tells them to regard Infidels, and how they are told not even to recognize by a greeting the religious holidays -- the worthless holidays -- of Infidels, unless of course such a greeting, not heartfelt but feigned, is offered in order to further the interests of Islam and its image.

They must further explain all the passages in the Qur'an, all the stories in the Hadith, and all the details in Muhammad's life that uncompromisingly divide the world between Believer and Infidel, and require a permanent state of war -- though not necessarily of active warfare -- between them. This doctrine lies at the heart of Islam, a belief-system cobbled together from pre-Islamic Arab pagan lore, stories and figures appropriated (and distorted) from Judaism and Christianity, and all put together as a belief-system useful for justifying, and promoting, conquest of peoples (at first Christians, Jews, and then Zoroastrians in Sassanian Persia) far more advanced, settled, and wealthy than the primitive Arabs who conquered them.

Let's just start with a simple passage, utterly unambiguous, and see how those who wrote the document above would care to explain it, or harmonize the sly blague they have offered us with this from the Qur'an, the immutable Word of God:

5:51 "O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people."

And yet instead of challenging them on this, the British authorities are delighted. And in another perfect illustration of the misunderstanding of Islam, or rather of Muslims, that prevails among those who lead us, Bush is going to send an ambassador to the “Organization of the Islamic Conference.” In his shallow calculation, and that of Rice, sending an envoy to the O.I.C., which has 57 "Muslim countries" as members, will be an intelligent way to "engage" the world's Muslims. It will help to win those hearts and those minds that seem always to need winning, no matter how many Muslims are rescued, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, or given huge sums of money, as with ungrateful Egypt, meretricious Pakistan, and the ungrateful, meretricious, corrupt, and completely transparent "Palestinians," or both rescued from a tyrant and been given all kinds of aid, with the whole enterprise costing more than all the wars, save World War II, the United States has ever fought -- as in Iraq.

This sending of an envoy will be taken as a sign of appeasement and desperation. Given that the Americans are going to have to withdraw from Iraq, and to do within the next year or two at the very most, now is not the time to have that withdrawal be misinterpreted. Now is exactly the time to signal, in every possible way -- in Darfur, and in energy policy, and in public attitudes toward the Saudis and their still-unhalted expenditures in the Western world -- that the mixture as before will not do, and that the withdrawal from Iraq is a sign not of appeasement at all, but part of a larger strategy that will have no place for sentimentalism and bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. Instead, it will be about one thing and one thing only: weakening the Camp of Islamic Jihad.

If the fiction is maintained that the threat is not from Muslims who take to heart what Islam inculcates, but rather from Muslims who are in some unspecified way being "untrue" to Islam -- as Bush dreamily believes, and so does Blair, and Rice, and any number of policy-makers who have shown themselves perversely, deliberately unwilling to study Islam and the history of Islamic conquest -– we will continue to go down the wrong path. Either Bush and Rice have it right, or Winston Churchill, and John Quincy Adams, and Tocqueville, and every serious Western scholar of Islam up to the past forty years had it right.

This sending of an envoy will prolong the misunderstanding on our side, just as this new declaration by Muslims in Britain will. The envoy will allow Muslim hearts and minds not to be wooed and won, but rather, to swell with a sense of triumph: America is on the run, even the United States must eventually yield. It will dishearten people in Western Europe who, rightly deploring the squandering of resources in Iraq, nonetheless are ready to reunite with the United States, if it can put the Iraq nonsense behind it, or exploit the situation there in order to divide and demoralize Islam.

No good can come of this. Or rather, the only good is that those who have continued to be Bush loyalists, continued to think that somehow he, and his Administration, must "know what they are doing" in Iraq and with Islam, will finally and totally give up on this captain of the S.S. Narrenschiff, who has been exactly the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place.

A hideous situation. An intolerable waste.

Posted by Hugh at July 7, 2007 8:48 AM
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