Fitzgerald: Bernard Lewis and his influence

Hugh Fitzgerald comments on the influence Bernard Lewis wields, and does not wield:

Many have spoken approvingly of Bernard Lewis’ influence in the Islamic world, and of the power of that influence when he claims that “suicide bombing” is un-Islamic. But in reality, Bernard Lewis has no influence among the Muslim masses. Prince Hassan, Halil Inalcik, Fouad Ajami, and others of that ilk are hardly the Muslim masses who need to be persuaded that Lewis’ position on "suicide bombing" is correct from an Islamic point of view.

Lewis's real and only audience, at this point, are intelligent Infidels. The effect of his enthusiasm for the Oslo Accords, and for the Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Project which he now claims was "mishandled," has been disastrous. He has contended that it was merely a matter of botched execution, and not of something that was always messianic, silly, and missing-the-point. The point in fact was not to make a Muslim state a splendid example of what could be done if only an entire Infidel army came in, overturned the regime, and spent a few hundred billion dollars. Rather, it was, or should have been, to create the conditions in which the camp of Jihad would be divided and demoralized. Instead, as of now, the camp of Infidels is divided and demoralized. And the warriors of Jihad are successfully exploiting, in Western Europe, the pre-existing mental conditions of antisemitism and anti-Americanism in order to divide the two parts of the Western Alliance, America and Europe.

Lewis may believe he can have some effect on Muslims worldwide. He can't. But he has an effect on Cheney and others in the Administration. Instead of distancing himself now from the policy about which he was such an enthusiast (or at least, that is what so many took him to be), he ought to explain that the Iraq business was a mistake. He should explain that the hostility between Shi'a and Sunni cannot be overcome, and that he grossly underestimated both the Shi'a resentment and the crazed Sunni determination not to give up political (and therefore economic and every other kind of) power. And that he underestimated the willingness of the Kurds to continue to remain in an Arab-ruled state. He should acknowledge that he had not given much thought to the exploitation of the situation in Iraq, which turns out to be the ideal place to allow sectarian and ethnic fissures within Islam to fester and to grow, and to hope that outside Muslim states, chiefly Iran and Saudi Arabia, would in turn be forced to use up men, materiel, money, and attention in helping their respective sectarian sides within Iraq – instead of using up men, material, money and attention in the Jihad against the West.

He could say this. He could admit to it, instead of refusing to discuss Iraq in public at all, except to allude to the "mistakes" of others -- always of others, never of Bernard Lewis.

He could.

In making claims belied by Muslims themselves, enough of whom engage in the logic-chopping necessary so that attacks that kill Infidels, even if suicidal in nature, are no longer considered "suicide," Lewis may indeed be trying to somehow create a new form of Islam that will be less lethal to the West. But this is, if not his own private Islam, certainly an Islam that Muslims themselves will, en masse, not agree to -- for the hysteria of suicide-bombing is clearly permitted by all too many religious authorities. In doing what he does, at this stage of the game, Lewis does not change a single Muslim mind. But he does continue to contribute to keeping Infidels less alarmed, more unwary, more touchingly convinced that if only enough good things are done to and for Muslims (make them prosperous, bring them good government, satisfy their every local grievance which can always be presented not as prompted by the unassuagable demands that Islam makes, but by assuagable desires for "self-determination" or "nationalism" by local Muslims), everything will be all right.

Lewis, enthusiast for the Oslo Accords, enthusiast (now backing away, blaming all the "mistakes" in execution by the Bush Administration, and refusing to admit that his own enthusiasm was wrong) for the Light Unto the Muslim Nations Project in Iraq, liked to pretend that he was simply a scholar in the stacks, unaccustomed to influencing those in power, a man au-dessus de la melee. It was nonsense. But perhaps in light of the consequences of his two major ventures (the third, his attempt to help some of the outwardly more plausible "reformers" in Egypt, such as Saad Eddin Ibrahim also has been misplaced, for it assumes that reform, and not establishment of the conditions that will force Muslims to constrain Islam, is the answer, and that the way to do this is not to threaten a small reduction, but to end altogether the Jizyah of foreign aid, and not just to the Mubarak regime, but to Egypt), it will become true at last.

Fitzgerald: The destruction of the monuments

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the larger issues involved in the Azeri destruction of an Armenian cemetery:

Islam, like other religions, was ruthlessly suppressed in the Soviet Union. For some this suppression apparently took. This forcible break with Islam was something that only a regime such as the Soviet Union could allow itself to enforce. But there were many – in Azerbaijan as well as elsewhere – among whom it did not take. And so now Islam is at work again in Azerbaijan, with the destruction of the ancient Christian cemetery. The destruction of one or two graves might be the work of vandals. If an entire ancient cemetery disappears -- the way the Jewish tombstones on the Mount of Olives were pulled up by British-led, British-trained and supposedly well-behaved Jordanians, and used to line the floors of their army latrines -- then something else is at work: complete disrespect, even hatred, for those who are not Muslim, and for everything that might conceivably be sacred or important to those non-Muslims.

Of course in the mists of time, when no one was looking, no doubt Muslims destroyed monuments, churches, temples, cemeteries, statuary and artifacts of every kind.

One opens "The World of Islam" by Ernst J. Grube (Curator, Islamic Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art), part of the series "Landmarks of the World's Art," and finds on p. 165 a picture of the "Kutb Mosque (Quwaat al-Islam) Delhi" shown and described:

Built by Kutb al-din Aibak in his fortress of Lallkot near Old Delhi in 1193. This mosque is the earliest extant monument of Islamic architecture in India and its combination of local, pre-Muslim traditions and imported architectural forms is typical of the earliest period. The mosque is built on the ruins of a Jain temple...

So the earliest "extant monument of Islamic architecture in India" was "built on the ruins of a Jain temple" -- that temple being made into "ruins," of course, by the Muslim invaders.

But that was then, you think to yourself.

And this is now. And now, in the full light of history, knowing that they are being watched, surely they will not do such things. Surely, in this new 21st century, Muslims everywhere will watch their steps, and not desecrate, vandalize, destroy as before.

But then you look only at what has happened since the new century began, since 2000. And here is a tentative list off the top of my head:

• Bamiyan Buddhas, 1,500 years old, in Afghanistan, destroyed by Taliban with explosives, and technical help from Saudi and Pakistani engineers.

• Tomb of Joseph in Israel, reduced to rubble by the "Palestinians," despite that site supposedly being sacred to Muslims as well as to Jews.

• A Hindu temple in Kuala Lumpur, where Hindus and Chinese both labor under the disguised Jizyah of the Bumiputra system.

• Orthodox churches and monasteries, destroyed in Kosovo and Bosnia, in full view of NATO troops, the U.N., and the world's media.

• And then, of course, the thousands of churches destroyed in Indonesia, as recorded by the Barnabas Fund.

• The remaining Greco-Bactrian artifacts among the tiny holdings in the Kabul Museum.

• The damage done to the Temple Mount structure by the excavations and vandalism to Solomon's Stables from the "Palestinians."

• Statuary vandalized by Muslims -- both Christian statuary in a church in northern France, and pagan statuary in the Piazza del Popolo.

Oh, these are just things that come off the top of one's head. Should one recall the damage done to the Parthenon by Turkish Muslim troops, or to the Sphinx by generations of Muslim Arabs in Egypt? Or the damage done to the monuments of classical antiquity or left by other pre-Islamic civlizations, all of which are, in the Muslim view, worthless, part of a general Jahiliyya (time of ignorance), and not to be treated with respect or interest?

Start your own list. Do what Sita Ram Goel and Indian scholars did in compiling merely a list of the thousands of Hindu temples destroyed by Muslim invaders. Make up a list, for example, of the Christian churches of Constantinople, for five hundred years the richest, most important city in all of Christendom.

Go ahead. Now look that list over. Now think about the Louvre, the Prado, the National Gallery, the Uffizi, the Alte Pinakothek, the Rijksmuseum. Think of what those who followed the strictures of the late Sheik Bin Baz, or the still-living Al-Qaradawi, or the primitive Ahmadinejad, would do to the contents of all those.

What do you propose to do about it?

John Updike pens a "sympathetic, loving" portrait of a jihadist

In my younger days I used to look forward eagerly to the next John Updike novel, until he became little more than an upscale pornographer. I haven't read anything he has written in years, and this one looks supremely missable -- unless one wants an insight into how wealthy postmodern Americans view with careful, studied generosity and understanding the mujahedin who have vowed to destroy their comforts. Updike may indeed be the harbinger of a new radical chic that focuses not on the Black Panther Leonard Bernstein celebrated in Tom Wolfe's memorable piece, but on the mujahedin.

"In 'Terrorist,' a Cautious Novelist Takes On a New Fear," from the New Duranty Times (aka New York Times), with thanks to David:

John Updike's 22nd novel, "Terrorist," about a Muslim in a city that is much like Paterson, N.J., will go on sale next week.

For his new novel, "Terrorist," however, he ventured onto the Web to research bomb detonators. He was fairly certain, he remarked recently during an interview in Boston, that the only detonator he could recall — the one that Gary Cooper plunges in "For Whom the Bell Tolls" — must be out of date, but he was also reassured to discover, as he put it, that "the Internet doesn't like you to learn too much about explosives."...

And he hired a car and a driver to take him around some of the seedier neighborhoods in Paterson, N.J., and to show him some churches and storefronts that had been converted into mosques. "He did his best, but I think I puzzled him as a tour customer," Mr. Updike said.

"Terrorist," which comes out from Alfred A. Knopf next week, is set in Paterson — or, rather, in a slightly smaller, tidier version of the city, called New Prospect — and is about just what the title says. Its protagonist is an 18-year-old named Ahmad, the son of a hippie-ish American mother and an Egyptian exchange student, now absent, who embraces Islam and is eventually recruited to blow up the Lincoln Tunnel.

The new novel is Mr. Updike's 22nd and in some ways a departure....Originally, though, he imagined the protagonist as a young Christian, an extension of the troubled teenage character in his early story "Pigeon Feathers," who comes to feel betrayed by a clergyman. "I imagined a young seminarian who sees everyone around him as a devil trying to take away his faith," he said. "The 21st century does look like that, I think, to a great many people in the Arab world."

When Mr. Updike switched the protagonist's religion to Islam, he explained, it was because he "thought he had something to say from the standpoint of a terrorist."

He went on: "I think I felt I could understand the animosity and hatred which an Islamic believer would have for our system. Nobody's trying to see it from that point of view. I guess I have stuck my neck out here in a number of ways, but that's what writers are for, maybe."

And we do need to understand this. We do not need to sympathize with it.

He laughed and added: "I sometimes think, 'Why did I do this?' I'm delving into what can be a very sore subject for some people. But when those shadows would cross my mind, I'd say, 'They can't ask for a more sympathetic and, in a way, more loving portrait of a terrorist.' "

Ahmad is lovable, or at least appealing; he's in many ways the most moral and thoughtful character in the entire book, and he gains in vividness from being pictured in that familiar Updikean setting, the American high school....

When he was in high school, Mr. Updike added, his own head was "in The New Yorker instead of the Koran," and so while working on "Terrorist" he again picked up that religious text, a book he first read when learning how to impersonate Colonel Ellelloû, the narrator of Mr. Updike's 1978 novel, "The Coup."

"A lot of the Koran does not speak very eloquently to a Westerner," he said. "Much of it is either legalistic or opaquely poetic. There's a lot of hellfire — descriptions of making unbelievers drink molten metal occur more than once. It's not a fuzzy, lovable book, although in the very next verse there can be something quite generous."

"Terrorist" even includes some Koran passages in Arabic transliteration; Shady Nasser, a graduate student, helped Mr. Updike on those sections. "My conscience was pricked by the notion that I was putting into the book something that I can't pronounce," he said, but he added: "Arabic is very twisting, very beautiful. The call to prayer is quite haunting; it almost makes you a believer on the spot. My feeling was, 'This is God's language, and the fact that you don't understand it means you don't know enough about God.' "

If Updike really means that, he should convert to Islam. But of course a hallmark of his set is that they never quite mean what they say.

For all its theological concerns, "Terrorist" is also an authentic Updike novel, and, thankfully, includes some sheet-rumpled, love-flushed sex scenes between Ahmad's mother, Teresa, and Jack Levy, a guidance counselor at the high school.

Ah. So it will not be all that much of a departure after all -- it is starting to sound like a standard Updike novel.

"I was happy — because there was so much shaky ground in the writing of this novel — when Jack began to hit on Terry Mulloy," Mr. Updike said. "I felt I was in a scene I could handle. That little romance was very real — to me, at least. I liked those two because they're normal, godless, cynical but amiable modern people."

Which, of course, describes Updike himself, and his audience, to a T: normal, godless, cynical and amiable. Such people believe they are being broadminded and generous when they paint sympathetic, loving portraits of terrorists. In fact, of course, they're just being suicidal.

Pakistan: Around 600 people a year are forcely converted to Islam

Forced conversion is forbidden by Islamic law. However, it has been a constant of Islamic history, and continues today. "Around 600 people a year are forcely converted to Islam," from AsiaNews, with thanks to Liberal Muslim:

Lahore (AsiaNews) – The same Islam that pronounces death for conversion to another religion, forces women married to Muslims to become Muslims too. Forced conversions figures reach between 500 to 600 people a year in Pakistan, although “national media report only 100 such cases” that police and the courts “treat prejudicially”. This was the most significant conclusion of a meeting on “Forced Conversion of Women and Minorities Rights in Pakistan” held on 26 May in a hotel in Lahore.

More than 50 human rights activists, lawyers and representatives of religious minorities from four provinces of Pakistan participated in the consultation organized by the Minority Rights Commission of Pakistan (MRC).

Khaliq Shah – MRC member – outlined the aims of the meeting: to highlight this important issue at national level; to launch a campaign against forced conversions; to analyze the causes and to review the law. Shah, who has been researching the topic for a long time, said: “The problem is especially present among poorer and marginalized social groups”.

I.A. Rehman, member of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, said that according to the Universal declaration of Human Rights, every individual can join any faith of his choice and practice that faith freely, and no one can force him to change his belief. “From this perspective, free conversion is no problem but forced conversions should be banned; this issue must be debated,” he said.

“In Pakistan we do not have any law against forced conversion and converting from Islam to any other religion means death. To change this state of affairs, we must consider the issue as a struggle for democracy and invite Muslims as well to these meetings, so they can help us to better understand all points of view of the argument”.

Mgr Joseph Coutts, bishop of Faisalabad, was also present at the meeting. “This is a delicate problem and each of us should contribute towards resolving it. At the root of the problem are factors like feudalism and the country’s socio-economic structure. When we discuss forced conversions, we must talk about these aspects too.”

Kalyan Singh, a Sikh participant said one of the toughest challenges to overcome was the “subjection of judges to Islamic clerics. Judges do not manage to deal with such cases neutrally because they are scared of the revenge of religious extremists.”

American Linguist Noam Chomsky: Hamas Policies Are More Conducive to a Peaceful Settlement than Those of the U.S. or Israel

In my 2003 book Onward Muslim Soldiers, I skewer Chomsky and the Left's general eagerness to unite with the jihadists who will, if given the chance, happily subjugate their allies along with the rest of us. Here is more evidence.

From MEMRITV, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Following are excerpts from an interview with the American linguist Noam Chomsky, which aired on LBC TV on May 23, 2006.

Interviewer: Do you consider Hizbullah to be a terrorist organization?

Chomsky: The United States considers Hizbullah a terrorist organization, but the term terrorism is used by the great powers simply to refer to forms of violence of which they disapprove. So the U.S. was of course supporting the Israeli invasions and occupation of southern Lebanon. Hizbullah was instrumental in driving them out, so for that reason they are a terrorist organization.

[...]

It's an interesting dilemma. Personally I'm very much opposed to Hamas' policies in almost every respect. However, we should recognize that the policies of Hamas are more forthcoming and more conducive to a peaceful settlement than those of the United States or Israel. So to repeat: the policies, in my view, are unacceptable, but preferable to the policies of the United States and Israel.

So, for example, Hamas has called for a long-term indefinite truce on the international border. There is a long-standing international consensus that goes back over thirty years that there should be a two-state political settlement on the international border, the pre-June 1967 border, with minor and mutual modifications. That's the official phrase. Hamas is willing to accept that as a long-term truce. The United States and Israel are unwilling even to consider it.

The Hamas is being... The demand on Hamas by the United States and the European Union and Israel... The demand is first that they recognize the State of Israel. Actually, that they recognize its right to exist. Well, Israel and the U.S. certainly don't recognize the right of Palestine to exist, nor recognize any state of Palestine. In fact, they have been acting consistently to undermine any such possibility.

This is so contrary to fact it is astounding. The U.S. and Israel agreed to the Oslo accords and to so much else dedicated to helping "Palestine" exist. And what did the Palestinians do in response? Stepped up the jihad attacks.

The second condition is that Hamas must renounce violence. Israel and the United States certainly do not renounce violence.

Sure. It would be foolhardy to renounce violence unilaterally while the other side pursues it. But Hamas need have no such concerns; it is abundantly clear that the U.S. and Israel would abide by peace accords. It is only one side that has broken them.

The third condition is that Hamas accept international agreements. The United States and Israel reject international agreements.

International agreements issued by the UN at the behest of the OIC bloc? Sure. And they should reject them.

So, though the policies of Hamas are, again in my view, unacceptable, they happen to be closer to the international consensus on a political peaceful settlement than those of their antagonists, and it's a reflection of the power of the imperial states - the United States and Europe - that they are able to shift the framework, so that the problem appears to be Hamas' policies, and not the more extreme policies of the United States and Israel.

In this, of course, he ignores Hamas' repeatedly stated vow to destroy Israel altogether.

Electing a New People: The Leftist - Islamic Alliance

A new essay by the European writer Fjordman:

Bertolt Brecht wrote a satirical poem after the 1953 East German risings:

"The solution
After the uprising of 17 June
The Secretary of the Writers' Union
Had leaflets distributed in the Stalinallee
Stating that the People
Had forfeited the confidence of the government
And could win it back only
By redoubled efforts. Would it not be easier
In that case for the government
To dissolve the people
And elect another?"

At the beginning of the 21st century, electing a new people seems to be exactly what Socialist parties in Europe are doing. Perhaps the greatest idea of the Leftist parties after the Cold War was to re-invent themselves as Multicultural immigration parties and start importing voters from abroad. In addition to this, they have managed to denounce the opposition as racists, bigots and extremists. A new alliance of convenience between Leftists and Muslim immigrants is taking shape in Europe. I think the deal is that the Leftist parties get a number of new clients, I mean voters, in return for giving Muslims privileges and subsidies, as well as keeping the borders more or less open for new Muslims to enter. As one Muslim put it: "I vote for the Socialists because they give me more money." The Leftists are, in essence, electing a new people, replacing the one already there with one more supportive of their agenda.

There is, of course, nothing new in buying votes and "clients" by promising them access to other people's money. This was the essence of Leftism in the first place. However, although this is probably a flaw in the democratic system, democracy has still functioned within the borders of stable nation states. This flaw gets a lot more dangerous when combined with massive immigration, where certain political parties simply import people from other nations, even vocal enemies of their country, to shore up their own short-term support in elections. This will in the longer term breed resentment among the native population, who will in this way be forced to fund their own colonization. In the context of Europe, Muslim immigration could turn democracy into a self-defeating system that will eventually break down because native Europeans no longer feel that it serves their interests.

Leftists and Muslims have a mutual short-term interest in keeping the Leftist parties in power, and a mutual long-term interest in weakening the traditional, Judeo-Christian culture of Europe, which Socialists at best view with indifference, at worst as an evil obstacle blocking the road to the Socialist Utopia. Besides, Socialists traditionally place little ideological importance on such trivial matters as national borders. I believe Lenin said that borders between Soviet Republics were unimportant, as Socialism would transcend all national and religious boundaries and render them a thing of the past, anyway.

Many Marxists still haven't given up that ideal, after a century of failures. Hanne Andersen, a Danish Social Democrat, thinks that people from, say, Yemen or Pakistan should have as much right to live in Denmark as native Danes:

"I have for many years been of the opinion that it is incomprehensible that some people (especially from
the Danish People's Party) think they have a greater right than other people to live in a specific part of the earth. All people, all over the world, who have respect for others, their religion, culture, history and values have, as far as I'm concerned, an equal right to live wherever they want to."

Omer Taspinar describes how "Europe's Muslim Street," the 15 million or more Muslims of the European Union, is becoming a more powerful political force than the fabled Arab street: "This political ascendance threatens to exacerbate existing strains within the trans-Atlantic relationship. The presence of nearly 10 million Muslims versus only 700,000 Jews in France and Germany alone helps explain why continental Europe might look at the Middle East from a different angle than does the United States. Indeed, French and German concerns about a unilateral U.S. attack on Iraq or Washington's blind support for Israel are at least partly related to nervousness about the Muslim street at home." "In Germany and elsewhere in Europe, a Muslim swing vote is already having a critical impact."

Iranian-in-exile Amir Taheri, too, has noticed this "red-black" cooperation. According to him, Europe's hard Left "sees Muslims as the new under-class" in the continent: "The European Marxist-Islamist coalition does not offer a coherent political platform. Its ideology is built around three themes: hatred of the United States, the dream of wiping Israel off the map, and the hoped-for collapse of the global economic system."

This cooperation has received support from Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelan terrorist known as Carlos the Jackal. Carlos has said that
Islam is the only force capable of persuading large numbers of people to become "volunteers" for suicide attacks against the US. "Only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the US," he said. As Christopher Hitchens put it, "once you decide that American-led "globalisation" is the main enemy, then any revolt against it is better than none at all. In some way yet to be determined, Al-Qaeda might be able to help to stave off global warming."

Christopher Caldwell, writing about this Islamic-leftist alliance, tells of how the second annual European Social Forum in 2003 was held in three Communist-controlled suburbs around Paris. "Muslims were hugely overrepresented among the Social Forum's delegates." The yearnings of radical Muslims are now at the core of the Social Forum's universe. "They have jostled aside the left-wing economics and focus on global markets that once dominated." The key sign of this shift was the Forum's anointing of Tariq Ramadan as the event's co-star. Ramadan, a professor of Islamic studies in Geneva, Switzerland, is the grandson of Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, and a hero to Muslims in Europe.

The Muslims are quite happy with this collaboration, at least for now: "We say to anyone who hates the Americans and wants to throw the Jews out of Palestine: ahlan wa sahlan (welcome)," quipped Abu-Hamza al-Masri, the British Islamist firebrand who is awaiting extradition to the US on various criminal charges. "The Prophet teaches that we could ally ourselves even with the atheists if it helps us destroy [the] enemy."

The American William S. Lind calls this "the Marx-Mohammed Pact:" "What made possible the recent bombings in London (July 2005), and the many more that almost assuredly will follow in Europe and the United States, is the Marx-Mohammed Pact. Once again, two sworn enemies, Marxism - - specifically, the cultural Marxism commonly known as Political Correctness - - and Islam, have made a Devil's bargain whereby each assists the other against a common enemy, the remnants of the Christian West." "London was only a foretaste of what those policies will bring to Europe and America. If we dare rip down the camouflage nets cultural Marxism has erected to blind us we see Europe has two real choices: an infinity of Londons or second expulsion of the Moors."

Of course, the same collaboration happened in Iran, where popular "reformers" such as Ali Shariati in the years before the 1979 revolution infused Islam with aspects of Western thought and made the Marxists believe that they could coexist with Islam. So they cooperated in overthrowing the Shah - and then all the godless Socialists were the first ones to hang from lamp posts around the country when Khomeini and his Islamic cronies seized power. The secular Leftists in Europe know fully well that they do not agree with religious Muslims on some issues, but they believe they are the senior partners in the alliance and that they can "ride the tiger." That may be true now, but for how long will the situation remain like that?

In Denmark, writers Helle Merete Brix, Torben Hansen and Lars Hedegaard think the Muslim immigration and the clashes we are witnessing now is part of a third Islamic Jihad, a third attempt to conquer and subdue the West. The fist one came with the Arabs more than a thousand years ago, the second with the Turks in the early modern era. Will three times be the charm for the Muslims? Will they succeed this time?

During the first Jihad, Charles Martel, "The Hammer," brilliant general and founder of the Carolingian Empire, the first Western power after the fall of Rome, defeated the Arabs in the Battle of Tours (or Poitiers) in 732, thus saving Western civilization, and by extension much of the world, from Islam. The Muslims underestimated the strength of the Franks, who they considered barbarians, and allowed them to pick both the time and place of the battle. The Muslims were also burdened with booty. During the battle, members of the Frankish army began freeing prisoners, and fearing loss of their riches, a significant part of the Muslim army abandoned the battle to protect their plunder. Although they managed to conquer Spain, Muslims thus lost the first shot at subduing the European heartland because they were too arrogant and underestimated the strength of their Western opponents, and were too weighed down by and concerned with their riches to fight effectively. Is the same thing happening now, only in reverse, with the arrogant West underestimating their Muslim opponents until it's too late?

During the second Jihad, Jan Sobieski, king of Poland, routed the Ottoman armies that had laid siege to Vienna in 1683. Leading a combined force of Polish, Austrian and German troops, Sobieski attacked a numerically superior Turkish army until their lines were broken and the Turks fled in confusion. This was the last time Muslims came close to threatening the West in traditional warfare. They now prefer demographic warfare through migration, combined with terrorism.

The third Jihad started with the oil embargo, the influx of Saudi petrodollars and the beginnings of Eurabia and Muslim immigration to the West in the 1960s and early 70s. During the third Jihad, Leftists all over Europe seem to be opening the gates of Europe from within. "You want to conquer Europe? That's ok. Just vote for us and help us get rid of capitalism and eradicate the Christian heritage of Europe, and we'll let you in. In the meantime, you can enjoy some welfare goodies, and we will ban opposition to this undertaking as racism and hate speech."

The basic trends are remarkably similar throughout Western Europe. I will start with describing the situation in the Scandinavian countries, as I'm Norwegian myself and thus have the most detailed knowledge of this region.

You know you have entered a strange, Eurabian world when leading politicians from Norway, a country straddling the Arctic Circle and with no colonial history, begin their election campaigns in the Pakistani countryside. Before Norway's national elections in 2005, the leader of the Socialist Left party, Kristin Halvorsen, praised all the "blood, sweat and tears Pakistanis in Norway have spent on building the country." While the deputy leader of the Socialist Left party has stated that he wants to abolish private property, its leader Kristin Halvorsen is in 2006 Norway's Minister of Finance. 83 percent of Muslims in Norway voted for Leftist parties in 2005. The Labor Party got a majority of these votes, whereas the Socialist Left Party got 30, 5 %, more than three times the percentage it got among the general populace. Psephologist Anders Todal Jenssen pointed out that parties such as the Socialist Left party had the most liberal immigration policies, and that this probably contributed to this tilt towards Leftist parties among immigrants. Likewise, the Labor Party is seen as the primary guarantor of the generous welfare state. The Leftist parties won a very slim majority (in fact, a minority of the votes) in parliament in 2005, and formed a coalition government that has been notoriously anti-Israeli and critical of the USA, as well as appeasing towards Palestinian Hamas terrorists.

Before Norway's Constitution Day, May 17th, in 2006, the Multicultural lobby in the country wanted to celebrate the day by singing the
Norwegian national anthem - in Urdu. The idea was that an Urdu version of the anthem would allow many immigrants from Pakistan, for example, to more easily express their love for Norway. The title of Norway's national anthem is "Ja vi elsker," which in English translates to "Yes we love (this country)." It may sound ridiculous to sing Urdu in Norway, but the capital city of Oslo in particular has a significant and fast-growing Pakistani community. In fact, it is expected that native Norwegians will be a minority in their own capital city within a generation. American writer Bruce Bawer, who lives in Norway, has pointed out in his book While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within, that there are now more direct flights from Norway to Pakistan than from Norway to the USA.

Samira Munir, Norwegian politician of Pakistani origins, received many death threats against herself and her family because of her work as a champion of the rights of Muslim immigrant women. She was found dead under strange circumstances in November 2005 at Kolbotn station, one of the suburban lines outside Oslo. Earlier in 2005, Munir had claimed that there was widespread cooperation between the Socialist parties and Muslim communities during that year's elections in Norway. "The heads of families and the mosques would decide how entire groups of immigrants would vote. They made deals such as "How much money will we get if we get our people to vote for you?", and the deals were always made with the Socialist parties" said Munir. It should be noted that her own, Conservative party was not innocent of this, either. Akhtar Chaudhry, politician for the Socialist Left party, stated that Norway with its welfare state was pretty close to the Muslim idea of Paradise, and that the welfare state was similar to Islamic concepts of social justice. Of course, he failed to mention that according to "Islamic justice," non-Muslims should pay Muslims tribute as a sign of submission, and that undoubtedly many Muslim immigrants view the infidel welfare state in this way. He also failed to explain why Muslims cannot create such a "paradise" in their own countries, or whether the Scandinavian "Paradise" can survive a massive influx of Muslim immigrants.

In Denmark in 2005, less than five percent of immigrant voters supported the centre-right government, which had taken some steps in recent years to limit Muslim immigration. The country's Leftist parties had the near unanimous support of Denmark's immigrants. According to the Copenhagen Post, "over 95 percent of non-ethnic Danes with the right to vote say they support left-leaning opposition parties." The most popular party with immigrants was the Social Democrats. The second largest party in parliament drew the support of 47.6 percent of immigrants. Second most popular was the Social Liberal Party, polling at 21.4 percent. This trend has not gone unnoticed by those wanting to limit Muslim immigration, such as the Danish People's Party and its leader Pia Kjærsgaard: "Let's be honest. The Radicals are not just café latte-sipping people from the creative class. To a large degree, it is also largely composed of immigrants, and one could fear the result of the upcoming local elections in large cities, where there are large concentrations of immigrants that the Social Liberals pander to,' Kjærsgaard said. In the Scandinavian and Nordic countries, non-citizen immigrants gain voter rights in local (but not national) elections after living in the country for three years.

A vitriolic row erupted into the heart of Denmark's general election campaign early in 2005 when Islamic leaders urged the country's Muslims to vote against the ruling centre-right coalition. Kasem Said Ahmad, a prominent Muslim community spokesman, said he "advised all Muslims to oppose the government." Mr Ahmad organized a gathering of imams in an anti-government message during that week's Friday prayers. Danish Prime Minister Fogh Rasmussen, who was eventually re-elected, responded angrily and immediately to the proposed intervention of Denmark's imams: "They should keep their fingers out of politics," Mr Fogh Rasmussen said. "In Denmark we keep politics and religion separate. Imagine if Danish priests were to use church pulpits to urge people to vote for particular parties," he said. Morten Messerschmidt, a member of Denmark's Parliament for the Danish People's Party, says that "everybody should have expected that the leftwing would be the first to cry out against the Muslim intolerance. But for some reason only a few have done so. It has to do with a screwed up idea of cultural relativism." "Secondly I believe it has to do with power – it is well known that the Muslim minorities in Denmark are voting for leftwing parties. And some politicians – in Denmark as well as in many other European countries – are deliberately campaigning for these votes. Of course you wouldn't like to disturb the people handing you your paycheque."

In the spring of 2006, Sweden's largest Muslim organisation demanded in a letter, signed by its leader Mahmoud Aldebe, that Sweden should introduce separate laws for Muslims. The letter was a list running over several pages with aggressive demands for just about everything; separate family laws for Muslims, regulating marriage and divorce, that public schools should employ imams to teach homogeneous classes of Muslims children in their religion and the language of their original homeland. Sweden's Equality Minister Jens Orback called the proposals "completely unacceptable."

However, it looks increasingly as if the election in September will be a very close race, and the Leftist parties will be dependent upon the support of immigrants to remain in power. As Nima Sanandaji points out in FrontPage Magazine, "Swedish public television exposed that the leading Social Democratic party had started fishing for votes with the help of radical Muslim clergies." For several years the Christian wing of the Social Democratic party, called The Brotherhood, has been working with the influential Muslim leader Mahmoud Aldebe, president of Sweden's Muslim Association. Already in 1999, Aldebe proposed that sharia, Islamic law, should be introduced in Sweden. After the last election in 2002, Sweden's Muslim Association sent a congratulation letter to the re-elected Social Democratic Prime minister Göran Persson, congratulating him on his victory and hoping that Persson would work for implementing some of the demands of the Association in the future. The Muslim Brotherhood has earlier stated that for them, "Sweden is in many ways an ideal country, [and it] shares the ideals of the [Swedish] Social Democrats in their view of the welfare society. Leading figures in Muslim congregations are also active within the Social Democratic [Party], and have very good relations with Sweden's Christian Social Democrats. "The Social Democrats have, in turn, and perhaps as thanks for the support they receive from the mosque leadership, shown a tendency to shy away from the fact that there is extremism in some of our mosques. This has given the Muslim Brotherhood the freedom to force its ideology upon [the mosque's worshippers]." Israeli authorities in 2006 called Sweden "the most anti-Israeli country in Europe." The number of rape charges in the country has quadrupled parallel with Muslim immigration in recent years.

During the elections in the United Kingdom in 2005, the Labour Party tried hard to win back the traditional support from Muslims in Britain, many of whom threatened to leave the party in favor of anti-war Respect Party candidate George Galloway or even the Liberal Democrats because of Tony Blair's support for the war in Iraq. The most visible result of this was the attempts to pass a law banning incitement to "religious hatred." Prominent Muslims have stated their hope that according to this new law, it would be a crime to use terms such as "Islamic terrorism." The bill has been proposed in the British Parliament several times, but stranded on opposition from the House of Lords. As newspaper the Daily Telegraph stated, "it is a bone tossed to those who claim to speak on behalf of a Muslim community that overwhelmingly resides in Labour inner city heartlands." "If such a law had existed in the 1980s, Salman Rushdie might have been prosecuted for writing Satanic Verses rather than being protected by the British state." A local Labour candidate in London, Oona King, who eventually lost her election to Galloway, was accused of double standards after dropping references to Muslims in leaflets for predominantly white areas. One of the leaflets stated: "Oona voted to protect Muslims from hate crimes." But in the other leaflet it said: "Oona voted to make incitement to religious hatred a crime." One of her colleagues tried to lure British Muslims back into the fold with the following arguments: "Labour and British Muslims: Can we dream the same dream?" "Are you still unconvinced that the Muslims need or should want a Labour Prime Minister in Downing Street? Tony Blair is the first Prime Minister to have ever read the Qur'an, to quote from it and to talk about it." "The Muslim Council of Britain has been at the forefront of lobbying the Government on issues to help Muslims. Recently Iqbal Sacranie, the General Secretary of the Council, asked Tony Blair to declare that the Government would introduce a new law banning religious discrimination. Two weeks later, Tony Blair promised that the next Labour Government would ban religious discrimination. It was a major victory for the Muslim community in Britain."

Gordon Brown, Blair's PM-successor-in-waiting, paid tribute to British Muslims as "modern heroes" who brought hope and idealism to the country. He said they had "contributed to Britain spiritually and economically because Islam was a religion that encouraged fair play, social justice and equality." Labour PM Tony Blair himself called Islam "progressive" and praised the Koran for being "practical and way ahead of its time in attitudes to marriage, women and governance." This was after the Jihadist terror bombings in London in July 2005, and while several Muslim clerics in the UK were openly calling for overthrowing the West and British democracy. Maybe Blair, Brown and their ilk didn't read writer Spengler of the Asia Times Online, who, while reviewing Melanie Phillips' book "Londonistan," noted that "revulsion and contempt color Muslim attitudes toward the British leftists who most desire to appease them." In all fairness, it should be mentioned that even Conservative Party leader Michael Howard in 2005 spoke of the "immense" contribution Muslims have made to British life. Mr Howard said the "economically vibrant, culturally creative, socially aware" British Muslim community enriched modern Britain." This attempt of flirting with Muslims voters met with little success, however. The Tories complained in 2005 that it was difficult for them "to win the cities." As elsewhere in Europe, Muslim immigrants in Britain tend to be concentrated in major cities, thus consolidating the grip Leftist parties had on these areas. In the Netherlands, the municipal elections in March 2006 were won by the Labour Party, the Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA). The balance was tipped by the Muslim vote. Eighty percent of the growing immigrant electorate voted for the PvdA, while the remaining Muslims voted for smaller parties of the extreme left. This phenomenon prompted De Telegraaf, the largest paper in the country, to write that the immigrants have become a "power block." A case in point was the Amsterdam borough of Geuzenveld-Slotermeer. Here the PvdA won 54% of the votes. Of their 13 seats, however, 5 were won by Turkish and 2 by Moroccan candidates. This means that more than half the seats of the largest party were won by Muslims. The situation resembled that in the regional parliament of Brussels, Belgium, the so-called "capital of Europe," where the Parti Socialiste was the largest party. Over half its 26 seats were held by Muslim immigrants. As the online Brussels Journal noted, "the electoral strength of the Left in Western Europe is increasingly based on the immigrant vote, as the Left caters for voters who favour extensive redistribution of taxpayers' money to so-called "underprivileged" groups such as immigrants." "In many West European countries the parties of the Left are actively catering for the growing Muslim vote. The Left realizes that the Third World immigrants guarantee its power base because these immigrants moved to Western Europe attracted by the generous welfare benefits that the parties of the Left promote."

The PvdA leader Bos was worried about the poor competence of many of these newly elected immigrants. He said that "our new immigrant councillors" are bound to cause trouble because their "political culture" is often incompatible with Dutch politics: "They conduct politics according to the culture of their home countries, where clientelism is the norm." Bos's words were widely reported by the Dutch media and caused anger among the newly elected PvdA councillors, some of whom hinted that Bos had made a racist remark. According to the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies of the University of Amsterdam 80% of the non-indigenous electorate voted for Labour. This explains why cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Breda and Arnhem succumbed to the Left.

In Germany in the general election in 2002, numbers have indicated that about up to 90 percent of the Muslim voters backed Schröder's left-wing coalition. "Some 200,000 German Muslims voted for Schroeder in the elections which he won by only 9,000." Poll data from 2005, when the Social Democratic SPD narrowly lost the election to the conservatives and joined in a coalition with Angela Merkel as Chancellor, indicate that 77 percent of Turkish voters planned to vote for the Social Democrats, followed by 9.2 percent for the Greens and 7.8 percent for the Left Alliance. Pundits said that the Muslim vote was likely to reward Schröder's Social Democrats (SPD) for its anti-Iraq war position and pro-Muslim policies. A meager 4.8 percent said they would cast votes for the conservative CDU. Cem Özedmir, a member of the European Parliament for Germany's Green Party, said the Christian Democrats had made a strategic decision in not trying to attract Turkish voters. "It is too high a cost," he explained. "For every Turkish voter the party might win, it would lose two or three German voters because of the party's conservative attitudes toward immigration and its social base." Guelay Yasin, manager of the Turkish-German Chamber of Commerce, made it clear for which party most of her members would vote. "We will vote for the party which supports Turkey's membership to the EU," Yasin said. The Social Democrats would profit from this since Schröder had personally supported Turkey's becoming a member of the EU.

In fact, the major challenge to the Social Democrats in vying for the Muslim vote in Germany, especially the country's 2.6 million Turks, 840,000 of them with German passports, comes from other Leftist parties. Some warned that the SPD could lose a number of Turkish voters to the newly formed and immigrant-friendly Left Party, a group born out of the marriage of former East German communists and Oskar Lafontaine, the ex-chief of the Social Democrats. Hans-Christian Ströbele, a member of parliament for the Green Party, in 2006 triggered a debate by calling for an official Turkish translation of the German national anthem. Conservatives worried it would send the wrong signal about integration. A Turkish version, Ströbele said, could demonstrate how multicultural German society has become. "I would see it as a sign of integration if citizens of Turkish descent could sing the third verse in Turkish."

Early in 2006, the secretary general of Italy's largest Muslim organisation, the Union of Islamic communities in Italy, called on Italian Muslims to vote for the Party of Italian Communists at the general election. The leader of UCOII said that their party's willingness to accommodate the needs of the Muslim community was a good reason to vote for them - even placing at the end of his email the logos of the Party of Italian Communists and its allies at the Senate, the Greens, both members of the center-left coalition. Just weeks after Italian Muslims recommended voting for the Communist Party, a Communist minister in the newly elected Leftist coalition of Romano Prodi, super-Eurocrat and former President of the European Commission, which won a very slim majority and ousted right-winger Berlusconi, decided to make it easier for immigrants from North Africa to enter the country. Italy's new Social Solidarity Minister, Paolo Ferrero, touched off an immigration controversy by announcing that under Prodi's new center-left government, "any foreigner with a job should be allowed to stay in the country." "The declarations of Minister for Social Solidarity Paolo Ferrero on the delicate issue of immigration were met enthusiastically by the people who are waiting to set sail from other shores of the Mediterranean" said deputy Senate speaker Roberto Calderoli, who belonged to Italy's anti-immigrant Northern League. "Announcing the closure of temporary shelter camps and the abolition of the Bossi-Fini law will unleash an invasion." Italy is facing a growing number of illegal workers from North Africa. There has been an increase in arrivals to Italy by sea, as "Moroccans who used to cross into Spain to get into the rest of Europe are changing tactics and now going by boat from Libya to Italy." Libya has become the bottleneck of much of the immigration from Africa and of a large part of the Middle East.

Leading Sunni Sheikh Yousef Al-Qaradhawi and others have hailed the coming Islamic conquest of Rome, just like Constantinople was conquered in 1453. "Islam will return to Europe as a conqueror and victor, after being expelled from it twice. Islam entered Europe twice and left it… Perhaps we will conquer these lands without armies." The Saudi Sheikh Muhammad bin Abd Al-Rahman Al-'Arifi, imam of the mosque of King Fahd Defense Academy, concurred: "We will control the land of the Vatican; we will control Rome and introduce Islam in it. Yes, the Christians (…) will yet pay us the Jiziya [poll tax paid by non-Muslims under Muslim rule], in humiliation, or they will convert to Islam…"

Given the actions of European Leftists, Qaradhawi could end up being right in his predictions.

An Islamist human rights activist

In "Omani dissident promises to keep speaking out" from Agence France Presse (thanks to DFS), Taiba al-Mawali is called both an "Islamist" and a "human rights activist." And, apparently with abundant justification, a "very unusual woman."

It would be interesting to know whether she thinks general equality of rights should be accorded to women in Oman, or to non-Muslims, and if Amnesty International knew or cared about her positions on these matters before floating her name for the Nobel Peace Prize. It seems from her statement about changes in Islam that she opposes any attempt at softening Sharia provisions. But the Sharia-inspired violations of human rights are so far off the radar screen for most people that I think it is highly doubtful that these matters came up at all.

MUSCAT: For an Omani, Taiba al-Mawali is a very unusual woman. She is a militant human rights activist, unafraid to say what she thinks in a country where any criticism of the authorities is considered heresy. "I always say what I think is good for the country - and they don't like it," the former teacher and official radio journalist told AFP in an interview.

A fervent Islamist, Mawali, 42, has paid dearly for her beliefs - she spent six months in prison for criticizing the trial last year of 31 Islamists for having "plotted the overthrow of the government by force of arms ... by forming an illegal underground organization."

They were sentenced in May 2005 to prison terms ranging between one and 20 years but pardoned a month later.

The Islamist affair has left its marks on Mawali, a mother of six who is married to a policeman, turning her life upside down. Mawali says she has been under surveillance by the security services since her membership in the Majlis al-Shura (Consultative Council) from 1994-2000....

Then, at the beginning of 2005, dozens of people suspected of being part of an Islamist plot were interrogated, and 31 were later charged.

"I knew them personally. I had read their books and visited them in their homes. They love their country and His Majesty," she said of Sultan Qabous bin Saeed, whom she says is misled by his advisers. Her friends, she said, had merely been trying "to teach religion to people as it should be taught." Mawali claims the Omani authorities have changed "many things" in the teaching of Islam "in the cause of the Americans."...

Last July, Mawali was sentenced to 18 months for her Internet articles and criticizing the authorities. She appealed. But she was afraid of being thrown in jail before this was heard, and fled to a friend's house where she hid for 17 days. The day before the appeal hearing, she returned home "disguised as a man."

Six months in prison was the verdict, and she was immediately taken into custody. She was freed a few days before the full term of her sentence, and believes this was done to avoid any public demonstration of support upon her release.

According to Amnesty International, which called her a "prisoner of conscience," Mawali's name has been put forward for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Mawali says prison made her more determined.

"We want proper and free elections," she said, "[and] we have to have an independent judiciary. Because I know my religion, I fight for the rights of man and for justice."

Man, yes. But woman?

Azerbaijan 'flattened' sacred Armenian site

The Azeris deny that they have destroyed the site. But everyone is just going to have to take their word for it; no one can go look for himself.

To destroy the site, of course, would be in keeping with the Islamic concept of jahiliyya, pre-Islamic ignorance. This site has no value: it is not Islamic.

From the Independent, with thanks to all who sent this in:

Fears that Azerbaijan has systematically destroyed hundreds of 500-year-old Christian artefacts have exploded into a diplomatic row, after Euro MPs were barred from inspecting an ancient Armenian burial site.

The predominantly Muslim country's government has been accused of "flagrant vandalism" similar to the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan Buddhas in Afghanistan.

The claims centre on the fate of rare "khachkars", stone crosses carved with intricate floral designs, at the burial ground of Djulfa in the Nakhichevan region of Azerbaijan, an enclave separated from the rest of the country by Armenia.

The works - some of the most important examples of Armenian heritage - are said to have been smashed with sledgehammers last December as the site was concreted over.

The Azerbaijan government, which denies the claims, is now at the centre of a row with MEPs, some of whom it accused of a "biased and hysterical approach". Its ambassador to the EU also says the European Parliament has ignored damage to Muslim sites in Armenia. Azerbaijan has refused to allow a delegation of Euro MPs permission to visit the 1,500-year-old Djulfa cemetery during their trip to the region last month.

Most of original 10,000 khachkars, most of which date from the 15th and 16th century, were destroyed by the early 20th century, leaving probably fewer than 3,000 by the late 1970s.

According to the International Council on Monuments and Sites (Icomos), the Azerbaijan government removed 800 khachkars in 1998. Though the destruction was halted following protests from Unesco, it resumed four years later. By January 2003 "the 1,500-year-old cemetery had completely been flattened," Icomos says.

Witnesses, quoted in the Armenian press, say the final round of vandalism was unleashed in December last year by Azerbaijani soldiers wielding sledgehammers....

Hannes Swoboda, an Austrian socialist MEP and member of the committee barred from examining the site, said he hopes a visit can be arranged in the autumn. He added: "If they do not allow us to go, we have a clear hint that something bad has happened. If something is hidden we want to ask why. It can only be because some of the allegations are true."

And he warned: "One of the major elements of any country that wants to come close to Europe is that the cultural heritage of neighbours is respected."

Mmm hmm.

Dhimmi NY prof: Bible, Qur'an are violent, but 'read between lines'

Here is yet another moral equivalence argument, the likes of which we have seen many times before, from a professor in New York State. I continue to point out the weaknesses in these arguments because the idea that Christianity and Islam are equal in their capacity to incite violence is not only false, but it distracts from the reality and magnitude of the global jihad -- and weakens our ability to resist that jihad, since if all religions are equally likely to inspire this sort of thing, we can not legimately do anything to limit the spread of the jihad ideology in the West.

"Bible, Koran are violent, but 'read between lines,'" from the Sydney Morning Herald, with thanks to Mathew:

THE Bible has as many invocations to violence as the Koran, if not more, says an American biblical scholar and peace activist. There is a darker side to the sacred text that many Christians will not admit.

"If not more"? Please tell me more about this, Dr. Stanley. You only quote four below. Here, on the other hand, are eighteen invocations to violence from the Qur'an: 9:5, 9:29, 2:190-193, 2:244, 3:125-126, 3:169, 3:195, 4:71, 4:74-77, 4:84, 4:89-91, 5:33, 5:35, 8:9-10, 8:15-17, 8:39-40, 9:123, and 47:4. Now, I am fully aware that a single newspaper article cannot possibly contain the entire substance of your argument. So please send me the other Bible verses you have in mind (I can be reached at director@jihadwatch.org), and I will then post the more than 100 other Qur'an verses that incite or encourage violence. And then we'll tally them up. I look forward to hearing from you.

Alongside passages exhorting believers to love their neighbour and turn the other cheek are verses that refer to hellfire, encourage acts of violence or call for God to carry out acts of vengeance against sinners.

If you want to add in hellfire verses or calls to God to carry out acts of vengeance, the Qur'an has plenty of those as well. I'll add them to my list

Even the Book of Psalms, generally regarded by Christians as uplifting and comforting, referred to the dashing of "little ones" against rock, said Chris Stanley, a professor of theology at St Bonaventure University in western New York state.

This is the point at which those in Stanley's audience should have asked him, "Where are the Jewish and Christian terror groups that dash little ones against rock and point to this verse as their inspiration and justification? What, there aren't any? What about in history? No, Jews and Christians never took this verse as a mandate for violence? Why is that, exactly? You mean it's always been understood as rhetorical excess, not as a call to action? Then how does it compare to verses of the Qur'an that exhort Muslims to 'slay the unbelievers,' (9:5), a verse for which Osama bin Laden praised Allah?"

"There is the angry violent god of the Old Testament, but there is plenty of language in the New Testament that portrays God as a violent judge, and some that can be taken that human violence is something that God would ordain," Dr Stanley said.

"Can be taken"? Possibly. "Have been taken or are being taken"? No.

Dr Stanley spoke at a two-day seminar hosted by the United Theological College that explored how religious texts have been used to validate violence - and can be reinterpreted to encourage dialogue between faiths.

This month, the Catholic Archbishop of Sydney, Cardinal George Pell, was criticised by Islamic leaders when he said the Koran was riddled with invocations to violence and described the central challenge of Islam as the struggle between moderate and extremist forces.

Dr Stanley said religious violence was not distinctively a Muslim problem and those who engage in violence and claim support from scripture are not necessarily twisting words, but picking up on past elements.

False opposition. To say that religious violence is distinctively a Muslim problem would be asinine, and unsupported by history. But to suggest that all traditions have this problem equally would be also asinine, and unsupported either by history or the situation of the present day.

Christians and Jews each had to face up to, not paper over, their violent antecedents, and no religion could claim the moral high ground.

That's true as far as it goes: Muslims need to face up to, not paper over, the violence in their theology and history. But here again, the equivalence is faulty. Christians and Jews and everyone else have done evil things. But there is no doctrine of warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers in Christianity or Judaism. In Islam there is. This is a matter of fact, abundantly established by the texts not just of the Qur'an, but of Hadith and fiqh.

It was, however, sometimes harder for Muslims to deal critically with the violent statements in the Koran because of the belief that every word of the Koran is spoken by God.

The challenge, he said, was to have people follow those parts of the scriptures that espouse non-violence....

Indeed. But then there are people such as the Chief Justice of Saudi Arabia arguing that the elements of the Qur'an that espouse non-violence, such as the 109th sura, have been superseded by the violent verses. Nor is he the originator or sole proponent of this concept. This kind of exegesis is what needs to be addressed by people like Stanley and self-professed Muslim moderates. The world is still waiting.

The things that you're liable to read in the Bible …

Psalms 137:9 Happy shall he be, that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones.

See above.

Matthew 10: 34-36 Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

Uh-oh. Get ready for the Christian jihad against mothers-in-law!

Seriously, here we have no command to violence, nothing like "Fight those who believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, nor hold that forbidden which hath been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger, nor acknowledge the religion of Truth, (even if they are) of the People of the Book, until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued" (Qur'an 9:29). We have, instead, a verse that has been traditionally interpreted by all Christian sects as referring to differences between people that would be created by the Christianity of one and the non-Christianity of the other. Nothing to do with fighting or killing people at all.

Deuteronomy 7:2 And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor show mercy unto them.

This one would be frightening indeed if it were an open-ended, universal command for all believers to wage war against all unbelievers, such as is found in the Qur'an (9:5, 9:29, etc.). But in fact, it refers to the Hittites, Girgashites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites. And it is not in force for all time, but only until the Israelites take possession of the land God gave them. Evidence for this is found in the fact that no Jewish or Christian group that committed acts of violence in any context ever invoked Deuteronomy 7:2 to justify their actions. The contrast with the Qur'an and contemporary jihad groups couldn't be more stark.

Psalms 58:10 : The righteous shall rejoice when he seeth the vengeance: he shall wash his feet in the blood of the wicked

Here again: when we see Jewish and Christian terror groups washing their feet in the blood of the wicked, we may have something to be concerned about. Until then, we can rest on the assurance that Jewish and Christian interpretative traditions -- mainstream traditions -- mitigate the force of the literal understanding of this in various ways. Again, the contrast with mainstream Qur'anic interpretation couldn't be more stark.

Bernard Lewis backs Bush: Suicide terror a perversion of Islam

"Lewis backs Bush: Suicide terror a perversion of Islam," from the World Tribune, with thanks to Mathew:

Princeton historian Bernard Lewis, a foremost authority on Islam and the West, said recently that the Bush administration needs to better identify its global campaign against terrorism.

“I feel that while we are indeed engaged in a war against terror, it is inadequate and even misleading,” Lewis said recently at a forum. “If Churchill had informed the country in 1940, we are engaged in a war against bomber aircraft and submarines, that would have been an accurate statement but not a very helpful one. To say we are engaged in a war against terror is of the same order. Terror is a tactic. It's a method of waging war. It is not a cause, it is not an adversary, it is not anything that one can identify as an opponent, and I think we need to be more specific in fighting a war. It's useful to know who the enemy is.”

That part is great. In fact, it sounds as if Bernard Lewis has been reading my book The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades) in which I make precisely this point.

(Note for the literal-minded: no, of course I don't think Lewis has read any of my books.)

Lewis, speaking at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life last month, agreed with President Bush that Islamist extremism is a perversion of Islam.

“Take, for example, the suicide bomber. Classical Islamic legal and religious texts are quite clear on the subject of suicide. Suicide is what Christians would call a mortal sin. Even if a man or a woman had lived a life of unremitting virtue, by committing suicide they forfeit paradise and go straight to hell, where, according to the sacred texts, the eternal punishment of the suicide consists of the eternal repetition of the act of suicide," he said.

Under Islam, a person who poisons himself will experience “an eternity of bellyache.”

Suicide terrorism is a recent development that has come in stages. Islamic jurists recently ruled that throwing oneself to death against a superior enemy was permissible.

“And that was where it stood for centuries and centuries,” Lewis said. “Even the famous Assassins of the Middle Ages never died by their own hands and never killed anyone but the marked target.”

Recently, however, Islamist extremists were able to change the law to allow taking one’s life while taking a sufficient number of the enemy as well. Lewis called it a “radical departure” from past Islamic practice and theology.

Suicide terrorism emanated from Wahabism, in Najd, part of Saudi Arabia in the 18th Century.

All right. Just a couple of points here, Professor Lewis. As I have noted before, John Paul Jones encountered suicide attacks by Muslim Turks in 1788 -- a time when Wahhabism was an Arabian movement opposed by the Ottomans. Jones described a naval encounter between the Turks and the Russians that took place when Jones served in the Russian Navy:

“…for it was the intention of the Turks to attack us and board us, and if we had been only three versts further the attempt would have been made on the 16th [June 1788] (before the vessel of the Captain Pacha ran aground in advancing before the wind with all his forces to attack us,), God only knows what would have been the result…The Turks had a very large force, and we have been informed by our prisoners that they were resolved to destroy us, even by burning themselves, (in setting fire to their own vessels after having grappled with ours.) [note added by Jones: Before their departure from Constantinople, they swore by the beard of the Sultan to execute this horrible plan…if Providence had not caused its failure from two circumstances which no man could forsee.”]

That's from John Paul Jones’ Letter to Prince Potemkin, June 20, 1788, from Life and Character of John Paul Jones-A Captain in the Navy of the United States, John H. Sherburne, 1825, p. 308 (thanks to Andrew Bostom).

Now why would these almost certainly non-Wahhabi Muslim sailors do such a thing? Could it be because At-Tauba 111, chapter 9 verse 111 of the Qur'an, is in their Qur'ans as well as in Wahhabi Qur'ans? That verse promises Paradise to one who "kills and is killed" for Allah. Such a death is not considered suicide, and so Lewis is noting Islamic prohibitions of suicide even though they simply don't apply to jihad/martyrdom attacks.

Here and here are Hugh Fitzgerald's tributes to Bernard Lewis.

UPDATE: Andrew Bostom has alerted me to the fact that Professor Franz Rosenthal, the great American scholar of Islam who 50 years ago translated Ibn Khaldun's classic Muqaddimah, wrote this in his 1946 essay "On Suicide in Islam":

While the Qur'anic attitude toward suicide remains uncertain, the great authorities of the hadith leave no doubt as to the official attitude of Islam. In their opinion suicide is an unlawful act....On the other hand, death as the result of "suicidal" missions and of the desire of martyrdom occurs not infrequently, since death is considered highly commendable according to Muslim religious concepts. However, such cases are no[t] suicides in the proper sense of the term. (Rosenthal, Franz, "On Suicide in Islam," Journal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 66, pp. 243, 256.)

What would Lewis say to Rosenthal? Would he consider that an accurate or an inaccurate summation?

Bostom himself notes what has often been noted here, about Qaradawi and others:

That is why even clerics such as the popular Al-Jazeera personality Yusuf Al Qaradawi openly sanction murderous Palestinian homicide bomber "martyrdom" operations against innocent Israeli citizens (all of whom are considered "combatants" who obstruct the "call to Islam") during fatwa councils convened in the heart of Europe.

(UPDATE: I took out my quip about Edward Said and Lewis. It was a little attempt at a joke, based on Lewis' strange wobbliness on key issues in recent years. I think the wobbliness is well attested, but nobody liked the joke, so I have removed it. For the record: Lewis is in many areas a great scholar, a hero of scholarship, and his work should be read by all -- especially The Political Language of Islam.)

Imposition of Shariah on non-Muslims proposed in Aceh

Islamic Tolerance Alert from Ekklesia, with thanks to Mathew:

A bill proposed by lawmakers in the Indonesian province of Aceh would impose Shariah law on all non-Muslims, the armed forces and law enforcement officers, a local police official has announced.

The news comes two months after the Deutsche Presse-Agentur warned of “Taliban-style Islamic police terrorizing Indonesia's Aceh”.

Shariah took effect in 2005 in Aceh, a predominantly Muslim region on the northernmost tip of Sumatra. But it only applied to Muslims....

Alyasa Abubakar, head of the relevant local government office, declared recently: "Based on equality in law, Acehnese people have formally proposed ... to apply the Islamic Shariah Law to all those residing in Aceh, including military, police and non-Muslims."

The provincial Islamic law department has called a further crackdown on 'immorality' - alcohol, gambling, women appearing in public without headscarves or venturing out at night without a male escort.

Recently a young Acehnese woman was allegedly publicly flogged for kissing her boyfriend in public, while another 23-year-old has been locked up in Acehnese jail for more than two weeks without access to an attorney after being caught drinking beer.

Shariah police are said to have barged into the lobby of a leading Banda Aceh hotel to arrest three women attending an international conference because they were not wearing headscarves.

Fitzgerald: Dismay and fury

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses official Washington's continuing misapprehension and dhimmitude:

The army is full of officers and men who, even if they once were sturdily willing to do what they saw as their duty, after their second or third tour in Iraq have come away, despite their best efforts at times to remain quiet about it, disgusted with the waste and the stupidity of the effort. They are now full of justified loathing not only for the Sunni insurgents or the Mahdi army boys, but also for so many in the general population who clearly are collaborating with those trying to kill the Americans, and who do so little, so unwillingly, to defend their own "Iraq." So as the army becomes demoralized, more and more people are realizing that the Administration did not commit a few "mistakes" in the execution of the war, but rather misconceived the entire war as "a war on terror" -- rather than as a war of self-defense against Islamic jihad. To understand this would mean to understand that no Muslim state can be permitted to acquire weapons of mass destruction, and that Iraq was, despite all this "secularist" business, a Muslim state, its not unrepresentative regime infused with the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam in the version that we all "Pan-Arabism."

And so now many of the best young officers leave, and soldiers do not re-enlist, and the recruitment standards are dangerously lowered, and those who signed up for the Reserves or the National Guard in a burst of patriotism in 2002 and 2003 are disgusted by the behavior of so many of the generals who "do not get it" and keep prating about "winning hearts and minds" in Iraq, or Afghanistan. They are disgusted by leaders who are afraid to state clearly that not only did the Administration fail to identify the enemy, it also got Iraq entirely wrong. Those leaders miscomprehended the depth of the Shi'a resentment of Sunnis, which is not merely a result of Saddam Hussein, nor of the past 50 years (i.e., since the coup that overthrew the monarchy and Nuri as-Said) of Iraq's history, but of 1300 years of Sunnis and Shi'a being at each other's throats. They failed as well to realize that the Sunni Arabs will never reconcile themselves, whether in or out of Iraq, to the Land of the Two Rivers being dominated by Shi’ites. The Sunni Arabs will never be disabused of their crazed conviction that they constitute 42%, and not 19%, of the population.

Nonetheless, the Administration keeps chasing the will-o'-the-wisp of an "Iraqi" army and an "Iraqi" police force. It risks the lives of American soldiers who are told to train those "Iraqi" forces and even be embedded with them. But the notion that Sunni Arabs and Shi'a Arabs, and Arabs and Kurds, could fight in a cohesive unit, trusting one another with their lives, is nonsense. And the Americans there have no ability to detect the Muslim they can trust from the one they can't. They certainly cannot know which Sunni Arab will suddenly turn on his Shi'a fellows, or vice-versa, or both, at different times, or else will turn on the American whom equally they detest. All this is making officers and men sacrifice possibly their lives on the altar of Administration stupidity, timidity, cupidity, and obstinate refusal to see how wrong it is -- 180 degrees wrong – to decline to defend ourselves by exploiting, instead of trying against all odds to heal, those ethnic and sectarian fissures.

And now that the same madness is reflected in the State Department. Had Ambassador John Evans, the U.S. Ambassador to Armenia who was fired for referring to the Armenian genocide, not been forced to apologize for speaking the truth, had he not been forced to resign, had Turkish protests been met with steely indifference, it would have been good for American relations with Turkey. The Turks must in any number of ways be made to realize that a series of events has demonstrated that Turkey is not the ally that the United States thought it was. These include its refusal to allow the fourth division to enter Iraq from bases in Turkey, and the disgusting remarks of an important Turksih official declaring American soldiers in Iraq "worse than Nazis," and the Turkish film that became a box-office smash depicting those soldiers as Nazis (and with a Jewish doctor who harvests organs from Iraqis supposedly murdered at Abu Ghraib prison). Then there was the best-sellerdom of Mein Kampf in Turkey. All of this shows that the Turkey of the Ankara generals (it just a few years ago that both Douglas Feith and Richard Perle were registered agents of Turkey) is a thing of the past under Erdogan. Kemalism is transient; Islam is forever. That is the lesson of Turkey. And if Islam is not bound hand and foot, as Ataturk tried to do, it will keep coming back, like Rasputin.

It was important to signal to both Armenia and Turkey that the genocide would be called what it is. It was important for Ambassador Evans to be celebrated. It was even more important to begin to tell the Turkish government and people that they have to face up to this history, and in so doing, should put the blame right where it belongs: not on some fault inherent in Turks, but on Islam, which made Muslim Turks willing to massacre Christian Armenians whom they deemed in violation of their dhimma. In that way, secularist Turks can claim that in taming or distancing themselves from Islam, they have tried to tame the ideological source for those mass murders in 1894-96 and then the later genocide (in its intent and scope, by many of those involved) of 1915-1920.

In the State Department, among the decent, there must be dismay. And at the European desks, there must be alarm at how the islamization of Europe proceeds without any signaling from the American government that it understands this problem, and a sentiment that NATO must meet (without Turkey) to discuss this matter, that it cannot wait.

Dismay among the soldiers. Dismay among the diplomats.

And fury, absolute fury, among the American people who watch the idiocy continue.

Denmark Condemned for Mishandling Cartoon Crisis

Danish dhimmitude from IslamOnline, with thanks to Inexion:

COPENHAGEN, May 26, 2006 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Denmark was condemned Thursday, May 25, in an official report for its mishandling of the cartoon crisis sparked by the publication of 12 caricatures that lampooned Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him) in Danish mass-circulation Jyllands Posten in September.

"The government's management of the Muhammad (cartoon) affair was a bigger problem than the caricatures themselves and the prime minister ... should have entered into dialogue with the Muslim ambassadors," said the government-sanctioned study, a copy of which was obtained by Jyllands Posten, reported Agence France-Presse (AFP)....

What absurdity. Fogh Rasmussen, you may recall, refused to meet with the ambassadors because he said, correctly, that it was not his province to limit freedom of the speech or freedom of the press. But for this "official report," evidently, those freedoms matter less than appeasing those whose reaction to these cartoons was so insanely disproportionate as to include multiple murders of innocent people.

The study said that the Danish government has not proved forthcoming and responded negatively to Muslim bids to break the standoff.

"Denmark, in practice, did not want dialogue," said the Danish university researchers who wrote the study.

"It did not acknowledge the points of view of the other party (Muslim nations) and ... saw being open to dialogue as compromising its own values."

Danish Muslim leaders had taken pains to settle the crisis, but they were given the could shoulder by the government.

This is nonsense. They didn't want to settle it. They wanted to stir it up -- remember the three more incendiary cartoons, which did not appear in the newspaper, that somehow made it into the dossier they circulated in the Islamic world.

They would only have wanted Fogh Rasmussen to kowtow and demands that the newspaper and cartoonists kowtow also.

They then took their case to the Muslim world, embarking on a multi-leg Arab tour that outraged the government which accused them of "internationalizing" the issue and inciting anti-Danish hatred.

No mention in IslamOnline, you'll notice, of the three additional cartoons.

Canada's largest bookstore chain cowers before the specter of Islamic violence

More Cartoon Dhimmitude. "Indigo pulls controversial Harper's off the shelves," from the Globe and Mail, with thanks to m3:

Canada's largest retail bookseller has removed all copies of the June issue of Harper's Magazine from its 260 stores, claiming an article by New York cartoonist Art Spiegelman could foment protests similar to those that occurred this year in reaction to the publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons depicting the Prophet Mohammed.

Indigo Books and Music took the action this week when its executives noticed that the 10-page Harper's article, titled Drawing Blood, reproduced all 12 cartoons first published last September by Jyllands-Posten (The Morning Newspaper).

The article also contains five cartoons, including one by Mr. Spiegelman and two by Israelis, “inspired” by an Iranian newspaper's call in February for an international Holocaust cartoon contest “to test the limits of Western tolerance of free speech.”...

In a memo obtained by The Globe and Mail that was e-mailed to Indigo managers yesterday about “what to do if customers question Indigo's censorship” of Harper's, employees are told to say that “the decision was made based on the fact that the content about to be published has been known to ignite demonstrations around the world. Indigo [and its subsidiaries] Chapters and Coles will not carry this particular issue of the magazine but will continue to carry other issues of this publication in the future.”...

“I'd expect an American company to do this, not a Canadian,” Mr. MacArthur said yesterday. “Even though you have tougher libel laws than us and your own versions of political correctness, to my mind [Canada] has always been a freer place for political discourse.”

The U.S. news media have become “terribly prone to self-censorship,” especially after the events of Sept. 11, 2001, he said. “There's a more wide open debate [in Canada] than in America.”

That is, there was.

U.S. Ambassador to Armenia fired for referring to Armenian genocide

Dhimmitude at State. A press release from the Armenian National Committee of America (thanks to Andrew Bostom):

REP. MARKEY LEADS CONGRESSIONAL OPPOSITION TO WHITE HOUSE RECALL OF U.S. AMBASSADOR TO ARMENIA

ANCA Calls for Senate Foreign Relations Committee to Hold Hearing on Firing

WASHINGTON, DC – Over 60 Members of Congress, led by Rep. Ed Markey (D-MA), sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice asking for clarification on reports of U.S. Ambassador to Armenian John Evans’ recall over his forthright remarks about the Armenian Genocide, reported the Armenian National Committee of America (ANCA).

The letter was sent on the eve of a May 23rd White House announcement nominating Richard Hoagland to serve as the new Ambassador to Armenia. Amb. Evans will be relieved of his duties as soon as Hoagland's Senate confirmation process is completed.

The Administration has recalled Amb. Evans over his February 2005 statements at Armenian American community functions, during which he properly characterized the Armenian Genocide as ‘genocide.’ Following his statements, Amb. Evans was apparently forced to issue a statement clarifying that his references to the Armenian Genocide were his personal views and did not represent a change in US policy. He subsequently issued a correction to this statement, replacing a reference to the genocide with the word “tragedy.” The American Foreign Service Association, which had planned to honor Amb. Evans with the “Christian A. Herter Award,” recognizing creative thinking and intellectual courage within the Foreign Service, reportedly rescinded the award following pressure from the State Department a few days before Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan traveled to Washington, DC to meet with President Bush.

“Ambassador Evans has been recalled for doing nothing more than honoring the forsaken pledge of his president,” said ANCA Executive Director Aram Hamparian. “We want to thank Congressman Markey and his 59 colleagues for calling for a clarification and rejecting the Armenian Genocide ‘gag-rule’ imposed by the Turkish government and, sadly, enforced by our own State Department.”

"Armenian Americans truly regret that the Administration lacks the courage to speak honestly about its reasons for firing Ambassador Evans," added Hamparian. "We call upon the Senate Foreign Relations Committee - the Congressional panel constitutionally charged with oversight of diplomatic appointments - to hold a hearing thoroughly examining the reasons behind this firing, the role of the Turkish government, and the broader implications for the future of the Foreign Service that a senior American diplomat's career has been ended simply for speaking the truth."

Iran: Palace of Darius the Great Discovered, Vandalized

"...archeologists believe that illegal diggers cannot be held responsible for destroying of this palace by bulldozers, and it was a deliberate act by an unknown person or group of people who intended to devastate this place for a reason that is not clear for archeologists."

Since some of the archeologists are apparently Muslims, they should not be so puzzled about this. They would find the mystery cleared up by the traditional Islamic idea that all artifacts of pre-Islamic civilization are manifestations of jahiliyya, the pre-Islamic period of ignorance, and as such are so much trash. They are not to be valued, venerated, respected in any way. It is likely that the people who did this damage in Iran believe these things.

"Palace of Darius the Great Discovered in Bolaghi Gorge," from the Cultural Heritage News Agency, with thanks to Dafydd:

Tehran, 15 May 2006 (CHN) -- Iran-French joint archeology team at Bolaghi Gorge succeeded in discovering and identifying the remains of a gigantic palace, believed to be from the Achaemenid era (648 BC–330 BC), during their second season of excavations in the area.

“Before the start of this season of excavations, our geophysical tests in area number 33 of Bolaghi Gorge had revealed to us the possible existence of a huge building near the Sivand Dam. Clay artifacts found in this area showed that this building used to be the residential palace of the Achaemenid kings. With the start of the new excavation season, we resumed our excavations in area number 33 with this attitude,” said Mohammad Taghi Ataee, head of the Iran-French joint archeology team at Bolaghi Gorge.

“After we started our excavations in the historic hill where this monument is located, we realized that it consisted of one historic layer only. Since no other layers were constructed on top of this layer, archeologists were hoping to unearth the entire palace intact. However, after they made their trenches they got to a number of wells which had been dug by illegal smugglers and also traces of bulldozers which had caused serious damage to this ancient Achaemenid palace,” said Ataee.

Plundering of archeological sites by the smugglers has become a common issue in archeology. However, according to Ataee, archeologists believe that illegal diggers cannot be held responsible for destroying of this palace by bulldozers, and it was a deliberate act by an unknown person or group of people who intended to devastate this place for a reason that is not clear for archeologists.

Fitzgerald: Why didn't we know?

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald wonders why recent revelations about Saudi textbooks actually surprise some people:

In the three decades plus since the quadrupling of oil prices, the 10 Arab or Muslim member-states of OPEC (which is to say, all the members of OPEC, save Venezuela) have received about $9-10 trillion dollars. The figure I have previously used of $5-6 trillion was too low. For more on this, google "OPEC" and "annual revenues" and do your own calculations.

Some of that money could all along have been saved, through the recapture of oligopolistic rents, simply by taxing ourselves. At any point, Saudi Arabia has an "ideal" price -- i.e., the price at which the value of its reserves, by its own calculation, is maximized. This is based on the energy market, at present and in the future, including the development of other oil fields, or of alternative sources of energy, or of elasticity of demand. Whatever that "ideal" price X, at any one time, the addition by the consuming nations of a tax Y will force the Saudis either to lower their own prices (up to the full amount of "Y" if they wish to keep their ideal price "X" for consumers), or to see the market shift away from oil too rapidly.

This was not understood back in 1973, when much could have been done (a few trillion dollars saved -- think what that could have done for Social Security, education, alternative energy, for a start). The fact that it was not done reflects the Saudi success in buying up the services of a small army of apologists, including ex-ambassadors and C.I.A. agents. Attention has been paid to Edwin Wilson and Fran Terpil, who were involved with Khaddafy; no attention has been paid to Raymond Close, who "retired" early in 1977 from being Station Chief in Saudi Arabia to go into business with some Saudis, and who has been dutifully involved in all sorts of activities, including BCCI, and has been working as an "international business consultant" ever since -- dutifully giving the Saudi take on everything. The Saudis have also paid journalists and of course well-connected political figures and hangers-on. (The Kennedy apparatchik Fred Dutton should not be overlooked). These people, like others all over the Western world, took in some tens or perhaps hundreds of millions of dollars.

Meanwhile, several trillion dollars might have been recaptured from OPEC if Saudi Arabia had been seen, accurately, not as a friend but as a mortal enemy of Infidels --whatever plausible Prince "we-are-all-men-of-the-world-have-some-port-have-a-Havana-cigar" Bandar assured successive American governments. And of course no one bothered to ask about Saudi Arabia's funding of mosques and madrasas all over the world, with their close connection -- see the Freedom House Report -- to inculcation of hatred toward all Infidels. After all, that bought-and-paid-for army of apologists was there to parrot the Saudi view, and to tell us again and again that Saudi Arabia is America’s “staunch ally” -- beginning as always with that picture of Ibn Saud and Roosevelt meeting on a ship.

One would not have expected any alarms about Saudi money (nearly $100 billion worldwide) going to fund mosques, madrasas, and hate literature (with Infidels being the hated) to come from the likes of Raymond Close, or James Akins, or the late John C. West, or West's friend Crawford Cook, or the entire host of Saudi hirelings (direct or indirect). Nor would we have expected any alarms to come from those who have simply been given gigantic honoraria for this or that "speech" to an Arab audience in Kuwait or the U.A.E., or at an Arab-funded lecture series at places such as Tufts. George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton have both pocketed large sums from the latter. Few can 'scape whipping -- or should.

As part of the 9/11 report, Congress ought to have investigated the role of Saudi money in creating these apologists, in putting so many on the payroll, and in buying up and controlling academic centers for "Islamic Studies" -- or at least setting up individual chairs. The Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding. The Center for Contemporary Arab Studies. Both conveniently at Georgetown, in Washington. The Saudi funding for a chair (or was it a "center"?) in Islamic Studies, establishedat the University of Arkansas when Clinton was president. The money for Presidential libraries: Bush, Carter, Clinton. The money for King Abdul Aziz Chairs hither and yon. The $20 million just given to Esposito's operation, and then to Harvard. The support for Professor Frank Vogel, recipient of Saudi largesse at Harvard Law School as "The Guardian of the Two Noble Cities Adjunct Professor of Islamic Law" --- a little "adjunct" sum to supplement his regular chair's emoluments. And so many others, at Exeter and Durham in England, for centers, departments, individual chairs, all keeping the discussion of Islam carefully within the MESA Nostra bounds, so that were a potential Joseph Schacht or a Snouck Hurgronje or an Arthur Jeffrey to come along as a student, he would not be nurtured but stymied, his scholarly investigation limited (no following in the footsteps of Bat Ye'or for further work on treatment of non-Muslims under Islam, no discussion of the immutability of Islam when "reform" is all the rage, no investigation of the doctrine of Jihad as it is understood at al-Azhar, or the seminaries of Qom, or by the good doctors of Saudi Islamic universities. Whether the money is used to create a "center" or to go to a pre-existing department, or merely to fund an individual "scholar" who will keep things under control it all amounts to the same thing. And it's worked. MESA Nostra rules. The great scholars of Islam who lived between 1880 and 1960 have been replaced by -- something else. Here and there an individual carries on, but that is despite all the odds, and certainly not at the "great" universities where the situation is the worst. The Saudis, for more than 3 decades, have been getting their money's worth.

And they still are.

Remember that all these "bad things" about Saudi textbooks that we are suddenly getting glimpses of, all that indoctrination in hatred of Infidels, was always there -- it did not suddenly enter the curriculum. It is we who simply, over a longer period, knew nothing about it.

Why didn't we? Who kept us from knowing? Where was the C.I.A.? The American ambassadors? The journalists? Why was it not understood in 1950, or 1960, or 1970, or October 1973 when OPEC prices were quadrupled, that much of the money would inevitably be spent on those mosques, those madrasas, that Da'wa, demography, and dhimmitude?

Why?

Iraqi tennis players shot 'for wearing shorts'

Sharia Alert from the Brave New Liberated Iraq. "Iraqis shot 'for wearing shorts,'" from the BBC, with thanks to all who sent this in:

The coach of Iraq's tennis team and two players were shot dead in Baghdad on Thursday, said Iraqi Olympic officials.

Coach Hussein Ahmed Rashid and players Nasser Ali Hatem and Wissam Adel Auda were killed in the al-Saidiya district of the capital.

Witnesses said the three were dressed in shorts and were killed days after militants issued a warning forbidding the wearing of shorts.

Other Iraqi athletes have been targeted in recent incidents.

In this case, according to accounts, the men dropped off laundry and were then stopped in their vehicle by gunmen.

Leaflets

Two of the athletes stepped out of the car and were shot in the head, said one witness. The third was shot dead in the vehicle.

"The gunman took the body out of the car and threw it on top of the other two bodies before stealing the car," said the witness, who requested anonymity.

He said leaflets had been recently distributed in the area warning residents not to wear shorts.

Hugh Fitzgerald's Douce France in German

A special service for German-speaking visitors. Translation by Hugo Schmidt-Fischer:

Douce France, eine treffend scharfsinnige Betrachtung unserer Freunde im Lande Lafayettes:

Stell Dir vor Du wärest ein verwöhntes Mitglied der französischen Elite. Ein Kind macht gerade die khâgne, und peilt rue d’Ulm an. Ein anderes ist derzeit politechnicien. Du geniesst ein gutes Auskommen und bist verbeamtet. Du und Deine Gattin, ihr seid Journalisten oder Schriftsteller oder einer aus den grossen Heeresscharen die “recherches” ausführen, und das Leben ist gut, kommod, wie es sein sollte. Ja nun, Du bemerkst zunehmend mehr Muslime um Dich herum wo immer Du umher gehst, nicht länger auf den banlieues, aber im Zentrum von Paris, oder Toulouse, oder Lyon. Und weist Du noch wie unbehaglich Dir zumute wahr, vor vier Jahren als Du zufällig über die Cannebière in Marseille spazieren gingst. Du hast sogleich einen Entschluss gefasst dann und damals, Du würdest nie dorthin zurückkehren.
Und Du hast Freunde die im Süden wohnen. Und sie erzählen Dir, dass die beurs – einige nennen sie die maghrébins – allen das Leben zur Hölle machen. Sie greifen französische Kinder auf dem Schulweg an. Sie zerstören mutwillig Personenwagen. Sie bedrohen, und noch mehr viel mehr als zu bedrohen sie jeden der noch immer so töricht ist mit einer Kippa oder einem Kreuz herauszugehen. Ganze Bezirke von Städten im Süden wie auch im Norden und Osten und Westen, wurden zu Tabuzonen für nicht–Muslime. In den Schulen ist den Lehrern die Autorität abhanden gekommen. Sie können sogar die Spezialgebiete des Zweiten Weltkrieges, der Resitance und der Ermordung der Juden nicht behandeln, wie vom Staat verordnet; mit Recht befürchten sie die gewalttätige Reaktion der mohammedanischen Schüler.

Und während die Schulen für nicht–muslimische Schüler und Lehrkräfte zunehmend gefährlich werden, während mehr Zeit und Ressourcen der Disziplin statt dem Lernen gewidmet werden, derweil rechnen sich im stillen französische Eltern und werdende Eltern, die künftig zu erwartenden Kosten ihrer Kinderplanung aus und schlagen auf ihre Budgets jetzt den Barwert der wie sie feststellen müssen, erforderlichen Hinzurechnung: das Schulgeld für Privatschulen. Und das wiederum bedeutet, dass diese französischen Menschen kleinere Familien planen werden. Und sie werden in ihre Rechnung den wachsenden Aufwand einbeziehen müssen, diese französischen Steuerzahler, die Auslagen die sie leisten werden müssen für das steigende Gebilde der Sicherheit, für die Wächter in den Schulen, die Aufpasser in den U-Bahn Stationen und métros und Flughäfen und für das Bewachungspersonal auf Regierungsämtern, überall, den Aufwand zur Vorbeugung gegen die Vandalisierung der Grabsteine, zum Schutz der Synagogen und der Kirchen, die Umtriebe für all die Telefon-Abhörungen und die Agenten in den Moscheen, und Subventionen für Rechtsanwälte und Richter für die Anhörung von Anklagen gegen Muslime, und die Kosten zur Überwachung von Da’wa in den Strafanstalten (über 50% Muslime). Doch den Muslimen sind die Aufwendungen des französischen Staates gleichgültig. Frankreich ist Teil der Welt und die gehört Allah und seinen Gläubigen. Diese Doktrin ist seit 1400 Jahren unveränderlich geblieben. Imam Bouziane, derjenige den sie seit Jahren versuchen auszuschaffen, hat 16 Kinder von zwei Ehegattinnen, alle auf Kosten des französischen Staates lebend; ein charakteristischer muslimischer Mann. Mit der Zeit, steigt die Differenz zwischen der durchschnittlichen Familiengrösse von Muslimen und nicht-Muslimen stetig. Und mit der Zeit, zerfällt das Bildungswesen. Eben jetzt kannst Du es vielleicht nicht sehen. Deine Kinder besuchen die besten Schulen, gefolgt durch die besten lyceés. Du machst Ferien in der Normandie oder Bretagne, oder der Ile de Ré. Und Du benützt die metro nicht oft genug, oder Du gehst durch die richtigen Quartiere, oder arbeitest in den richtigen Fabriken oder Büros um je zu verstehen was zehnlige von Millionen Deiner französischen Landsleute ertragen müssen. Du, im Moment, bist noch immer immun, bist immer noch mit Absicht unwissend. Du hast die letzten Jahrzehnte damit verbracht Dich über die islamische Welt von Eric Rouleau zu informieren und von seinen Nachahmern (nachdem sie Peroncel-Hugoz, den einen Journalisten der die Wahrheit berichtete zum Schweigen brachten) in Le Monde. Du bist zutiefst bewandert in der ständig berichteten, endlos ausufernden Niederträchtigkeit des mächtigen Imperiums Israels. Dir ist bekannt was uns allen eingepfercht wurde: dass die arabischen Muslime vernünftige Menschen sind, mit klar berechtigten Beschwerden, so mässige und eingeschränkte Beschwerden, das Recht gebietet, dass sie zufrieden gestellt werden. Alle sind sich bezüglich der „Lösung“ einig. Sie wird die „Zwei Staaten Lösung“ genannt, und gewiss ist sie eine „Lösung“ den sonst, freilich würde sie nicht als eine „Lösung„ bezeichnet.

Und alles sieht aus wie früher: die Lindenbäume, der Fluss, die Brücken, die étalage in der boulangerie im Wohnviertel. Douce France, cher pays de mon enfance. Am Ende des Schultages versammeln sich chic-feine Mütter wie auch schon, in den Ortschaften oder on den Kleinstädten vor dem Schulgebäude – vor jener oder der anderen Ecole Jules Ferry – und warten darauf ihre Kinder abzuholen. Da kommen die aller kleinsten aus Maternelle, da laufen sie – schau wie niedlich sie sind. Und da ist die CE1 Gruppe, mit den riesigen cartables auf ihren kleinen Rücken. Lauf, lauf lauf zu Mammi. Hoppla. Und dann Jahre des büffelns, büffelns, büffelns, gekennzeichnet durch immer grössere cahiers -- "cahier" und "cartable" diese Worte erfassen das französische DNA besser als Piaf oder gauloises, nicht wahr? Und nun lasst uns die Bücher lesen und die Lehrfächer studieren die ja so vollständig und präzise vom Bildungsministerium festgelegt sind. Und nun sind wir bereits am Endexamen am letzten Jahr, wir bereiten uns auf das Bac vor, mit Kopien von blau markierten BALISES, Handbücher zu Les Châtiments und La Peau de Chagrin. Und sieh Mal die Ergebnisse werden in der Zeitung gebracht: Claire-Alix erhielt eine mention très bien. Fantastisch. Alles ist perfekt, alles wird ewig so bleiben, ganze Länder können sich gar nicht wandeln. Es geht gar nicht.
Aber es ändert sich doch, es löst sich auf, leise, langsam – lasst uns bloss nicht zu nahe hingucken, wir dürfen dem nicht zuviel Beachtung schenken - die Strassen, die Schulen, die Spitäler, das Vermögen die Wahrheit über Dinge auszusprechen, über das Leben wie es gelebt wird, la vita vissuta wie sie im Nachbarland zu sagen pflegen. Dominique de Villepin wusste schon immer dass man sich keine Sorgen machen musste; er wurde schlussendlich in Salé, in der Nähe von Rabat geboren, er verbrachte sogar einige Jahre seiner frühen Kindheit dort; natürlich kennt er seine Araber, seine Muslime. Und Eric Rouleau sicherlich, Jahrzehnte lang alteingesessener Experte im Le Monde für den Mittleren Osten (so sachkundig war er, dass er die Lehren des Koran und der Sunna nie auch nur zu erwähnen brauchte), gewiss wusste er alles nicht doch? Und diese französischen Übersetzungen von Edward Said die mit solcher Leidenschaft die Islamophobie anprangerten, und die böswilligen Zerrbilder mit der der blinde und verrottete Westen schon seit jeher, die arabisch mohammedanische Welt lächerlich machte. Ach, wir waren so schrecklich zu den Arabern, wir Kolonialisten, wir Franzosen, wir Abendländer. Und dann gibt es noch diese unendliche Gemeinheit Israels, dieser immerwährende kolonialistische Wundherd. Natürlich haben sie jedes Recht, die Muslime um hier her zu kommen, nach Frankreich. Einst gingen wir zu ihren Ländern, nun kommen sie zu uns. Und sie haben jedes Recht uns zu hassen, oder?

Und jetzt sind wir entschlossen nicht mehr zu verstehen, und alle Bänder der Sympathie mit Israel abzuschneiden, -- und wieso hegten wir überhaupt jegliche Sympathie zu ihnen eigentlich, wie einige unserer Eltern damals in 1948 oder 1956 oder 1967? Konnten sie nicht sehen was das „Palestinensische Volk durchmachen musste? Hanan, Yassir, Said, Saeb, Aziz, Walid, Rashid, Mohammed – Du hast unsere Herzen und unsere
Überzeugungen erobert. Nimm uns, mach mit uns was Du willst.
Keiner sagt was sich abspielt oder welche Überlegungen wir anstellen sollten darüber nachzudenken was zu tun wäre damit wir uns retten können. Niemand mit jeglichem Anstand. Und was immer Le Pen und Megret sagen, wir müssen das Gegenteil bewähren (ausser, natürlich wenn sie ihre Feindlichkeit gegenüber „den Juden“ zum Ausdruck bringen). Mach nicht darauf Aufmerksam, denk nicht daran. Freie Gedanken mögen in der Theorie recht sein, aber wahrhaftig – überleg doch die Konsequenzen. Wage nicht ausserhalb des Rahmens zu denken, der läuft über mit idées reçues. Défense de penser au dehors du box.

Nein. Alles wird in Ordnung sein, während Du entlang des Boulevards Stralemann flanierst. Diese Moslems werden uns nie gewachsen sein. Sieh Mal, schau doch wie diese legionnaires marschieren à pas lent, die Champs-Elysées herab, denk doch an die Reihe der Wüsten Siege. In unseren Köpfen ist 1930 und da gleich ist die Exposition coloniale. Erinnerst Du dich, tu t’en souviens, das Gemälde von le Douanier Rousseau, oder? Mit dem Araber mit dem Burnus der neben dem farbigen Senegalesen steht? Stimmt doch, ich hab doch recht? Frankreich wird immer Frankreich bleiben. Nichts wird sich ändern.

An einem gewissen Punkt, und trotz allem was Dich davon abhält nicht das zu sehen was Dich ins Gesicht anstarrt, realisierst Du, dass etwas furchtbar schief gelaufen ist mit Deinem Land und, dass Du und Deine Kinder Gefahr laufen das Land zu verlieren, bis aufs letzte Dorf und Haus, qui m’est une province et beaucoup davantage. Und Du weisst nicht was zu tun oder wie dieses Gefühl anderen zu vermitteln oder denen den Du Deine geheimen Ängste anvertraust, oder was zu tun wäre. Es ist so konfus und so ärgerlich. Du kannst nicht für Le Pen wählen. Du kannst „Cowboy“ Bush nicht befürworten oder diese unmöglichen Amerikaner. Du kannst Dich nirgend wo hinwenden.

Und dann erfährst Du was Jacques Chirac – der bereits ein muslimisches Enkelkind hat -- und Dominique de Villepin, nicht möchten, dass Du erfährst. Denn falls Du es solltest, könntest Du sehr aufgebracht werden. Du entdeckst, dass 1 von jeden 3 Babys die in Frankreich heute geboren werden, ein Moslem Baby ist. Und das bedeutet, dass in 20 Jahren, einer von jeden drei 20-jährigen ein muslimischer zwanzig-jähriger sein wird. Und das heisst, dass zwanzig Jahre später danach, mit den heutigen Geburtsraten, Frankreich eine muslimische Mehrheit haben wird. Wo werden wir die Statuen aus Marly-le-roi verstecken? Und die Venus de Milo? Und was soll aus diesen Bildern von lebendigem Leben – all diese Portraits im Louvre, und dem Grand Palais, und dem Musée Guimet dort in der Linden-gesäumten Aix, und überall in dem mit Kunst gefüllten kunstvollen Frankreich, mère des arts, des armes, et des loix – welche ausgesprochen verboten sind gemäss den unveränderlichen Beschränkungen des Korans. Sollen sie zur Verwahrung verschickt werden zu diesen Amerikanern in Übersee? Bis dann werden die meisten Juden Frankreich bereits verlassen haben, über die Meere für ihr eigenes Wohl, nach Israel oder ins englischsprachige Kanada (Sie machten sich Sorgen über die moslemische Bevölkerung von Quebec, weisst Du, welcher gestattetet wurde heranzuwachsen, unter der Politik der Provinz von Quebec die frankophonen Einwanderer zu fördern, und Nord Afrikaner vorzuziehen anstelle von potentiellen Einwanderern aus Italien, Griechenland, Spanien), und vor allem nach Amerika. Welch Glück die Amerikaner hatten. Keine Legate mehr für Frankreich von den ihresgleichen der Rothschilds oder der Nissim Camondos. Keine Spenden eines anderen Pierre Lévys. Geniesse die kufische Kalligraphie; einige finden unendliche Faszination daran.
Für den Moment erlaubst Du Dir die Vorstellung, es wird schon wieder werden. All diese Muslime werden höchstwahrscheinlich einfach konvertieren. Ich meine doch, das tun sie, nicht wahr, recht leicht, so sagt man mir. Natürlich, wieso habe ich nicht gleich daran gedacht, genau so wird es sein. Die Lage immer im richtigen Moment gerettet. Genau wie im Krieg. Keine Sorgen zu machen, Gar keine.

Anmerkung

Dieser Artikel von Hugh Fitzgerald wurde 2004 erstmals veröffentlicht.