Fitzgerald: Go back to bed -- David Cole will wake you when it's over

"'When you're targeting as 'special' 20 percent of the world, you're obviously sweeping far too broadly and you're going to waste a lot of resources on people who pose no threat,' said David Cole, a professor at Georgetown University Law Center in Washington.

'The second problem is that when you treat people from Muslim countries as suspect merely because they come from Muslim countries, you are very likely to alienate the people here and abroad we need to be working with if we're going to get helpful information on what the real threats are.'" -- from this article

How does David Cole know that Muslims "pose no threat"? Has he carefully studied the texts and tenets of Islam? Has he read and reread, and reread again, those texts, with appropriate commentaries -- not the work of sly apologists, but the straightforward commentaries by Muslims themselves, meant for Muslim audiences, or those by non-apologists in the West? Has he read the Qur'an, the Hadith (at least a few hundred of those deemed most authentic), and the Sira at all? Has he studied the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslim peoples? Does he fully grasp how Islam is, unlike those other faiths we call religion, a Total System, a politics as well as a "religion"?

What entitles David Cole to dismiss the idea that those who carry important elements of that Total System in their mental baggage are, until it can be carefully demonstrated on an individual basis, not permanent security risks to non-Muslims everywhere? The Shari'a flatly contradicts the most important individual rights guaranteed by the American Constitution. Would Cole wish to deny it? Would he wish to insist that those who call themselves Muslims don't really believe in the tenets of Islam? How could he do that? And why should we bet our national and individual security on his, David Cole's, notion of Islam -- a very hazy notion?

And the very idea that, in order not to offend Muslims elsewhere, described by David Cole as "the very people we need to be working with" (an assertion that needs to be examined, to see if that quite describes the situation), we cannot keep new immigrants from swelling Muslim ranks in the Western world, which ranks have already created a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive (the costs of monitoring that population, those mosques, those madrasas, those "civil rights groups" such as sinister CAIR), and physically dangerous than it would be without a large-scale Muslim presence.

David Cole presumes. He knows what Islam is all about, and why its adherents are not a threat. He knows that all this talk about the uncompromising division of the world between Believers, to whom all loyalty is owed by fellow members of the Umma, and Infidels, with whom those Believers are instructed they must be in a state of permanent war, though not necessarily open warfare, is simply so much nonsense.

David Cole knows. How does he know? Oh, he just knows. He doesn't have to tell you. As for Snouck Hurgronje, Henri Lammens, Arthur Jeffery, and hundreds of other Western scholars of Islam -- they didn't know. It was only when Arab money came along, to pay for the room and board of the likes of John Esposito, that the Western world finally began to understand Islam. Up to then, no one -- not Hume, not Spinoza, not John Wesley, not John Quincy Adams, not Tocqueville, not Churchill, not Malraux, not anyone in the Western world, understood Islam. For 1350 years the West has grossly misunderstood Islam. Only in the last several decades has the sheer wonderfulness of Islam -- on this George Bush and David Cole can agree, can spout their soothing sentiments to each other -- become apparent all over the Western world.

And the stories in the world's press -- from the southern Sudan or southern Thailand, from the travails of Christians in Egypt, or northern Nigeria, or Iraq, or Lebanon, or the punishments meted out to apostates in Afghanistan or Iran or Kuwait, or the ways in which Hindus (and Christians) are treated in Pakistan and Bangladesh -- all that confirms, every day in every way, that David Cole has it right, and there is no reason for alarm. Don't listen to Ibn Warraq, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali, or Wafa Sultan, or a hundred other apostates who were born, and raised within, societies suffused with Islam. Listen to David Cole. He knows.

Just go back to bed. David Cole will wake you when it's over.

Posted by Hugh at March 12, 2008 9:15 AM
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