Recently in Hugh Fitzgerald Category

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald poses two questions to Alain Gresh of Le Monde diplomatique relating to the common notion that poverty gives rise to Islamic terror:

I have two questions for Alain Gresh, the silly redacteur-en-chef of Le Monde diplomatique, and author of the entirely predictable book of apologetics, "L'Islam, la Republique, et le monde." Gresh, born in Cairo to a Coptic father and a Jewish mother, believes that this background entitles him to be taken as an expert without having studied Islam at all. He is of a piece with Dominique de Villepin, who because he was born in Morocco, considers himself to have special insight into that world. He is of a piece also with Edward Said, an Arab who was not a Muslim, and who did not grow up in the Islamic world but in the U.S. from the age of 14, and who apparently thought that his mere "arabness" would somehow -- osmosis, anyone? -- give him special insight into what Islam is all about. And a good many people seemed to find that plausible, and to forgive such things as his dreamy belief that Muslims conquered Byzantium before conquering Spain, when it was the other way round, and by 700 years.

Gresh seems to believe that only sinister "anti-Arab racists" would raise questions about Islam and attempt to frighten one and all about this entirely inoffensive religion (yes, for Gresh it is definitely and wholly and solely a religion, not a belief-system with any political content or significance whatsoever). So what we have here, in the reactions of alarmed Infidels, from southern Thailand to the streets of Holland to the beaches of Australia to the outskirts of Washington, is simply "anti-Arab racism" in the clever disguise of "Islamophobia."

Question #1 has several parts, and you, Monsieur Alain Gresh, redacteur-en-chef of Le Monde diplomatique, must answer all of them -- but take your time. Here goes:

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the need in some quarters to situate the present global conflicts solely or primarily in the mind of the West itself:

It has become a peculiar sort of conventional wisdom among those of a particular intellectual and ideological bent -– the idea that each generation of Americans seems to identify a particular enemy, contrived to fit ideologies or economic necessities. Americans must always find "The Other" whom they can then hate and fear.

"The Other" was, of course, Edward Said's favorite topic. He kept talking about the need of the West to create the Islamic "Other," but said nothing about the fact that the Original, the Ur, the Other of All Others, was the one that was created by Islam to sustain Believers. The most perduring “Other” is the Infidel, who must be hated no matter what good he "appears" to do, what kindness he "appears" to offer -– such as those hapless American soldiers in Iraq who wonder why everyone wishes to kill them as they build schools, hospitals, electricity grids, and roads.

But no one is concerned about that. Everyone know that the real “Other”-constructor, the real villain of the “Other” piece here, is not the Islamic world but the West -- the need for white, European, racist, colonialist Europe/America to "construct" that "Other" that it can then despise. For without that "Other" to hate, that miserable, racist, dysfunctional, poverty-stricken, ruinous, chaotic, violent, worthless bunch of countries and peoples who ridiculously call themselves the West, or, even more absurdly, "Western civilization," and who have given the world absolutely nothing of value, would scarcely be able to justify its own chaotic and confused existence. After all, just compare its ridiculous accomplishments with the scientific achievements and immortal works of art produced over 1350 years everywhere that Islam has planted itself.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses democracy on the march and makes a few suggestions for how to deal with Syria's Alawite regime:

"Democracy on the march"? Infidels should be largely indifferent to "democracy on the march" unless it means less Sharia, or a weaker Islamic superstructure. Ataturk was no democrat, certainly not in the 1920s when he began clamping down on the practice of Islam and diminishing its political and social influence. Others, including the late Shah of Iran, Mohammed V of Morocco, and Habib Bourguiba of Tunisia, quasi-enlightened despots who were variously despotic or enlightened, helped to keep Islam in check.

The Middle East requires us to make sense of a seemingly inexplicable crazy quilt. It is really not that crazy. In Lebanon there are the Christians, the allegiance-shifting Druse and the chastened Sunnis, now chagrined at their demographic defeat by the Shi’a -- just as once the Christians, in what had always been the main Christian redoubt in the Islamized East, had been previously disturbed to realize that the Muslims, both Sunni and Shi’a, had overtaken the Christians in population.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses Russia's stance toward the global jihad:

In the mental subset of many Russians the murder, by a maddened Muslim mob, of the greatest Russian playwright Griboyedov (author of "Woe from Wit, or The Misfortune of Being Clever") in 1829, cannot be effaced or erased. With his knowledge of Oriental languages, Griboyedov had been posted to Persia and Georgia, and was in the legation in Tehran, serving as minister-plenipotentiary.

Some Christians, including women -- Armenians and Georgians -- had sought to escape from pursuing Muslims by finding what they thought might be refuge in the Russian embassy. The fanatical mob -- plus ca change -- naturally ignored the rules about the sanctity of embassies (like all supposedly international rules of war and peace, as the American soldiers have discovered and the Israelis discovered before them, these rules do not apply to Muslims, who have their own guidebooks -- Qur'an and hadith and sira -- which tell them all they know, and all they need to know).

The place was stormed by the chanting fanatics ("Allahu Akbar" was not invented in Iraq yesterday), Griboyedov killed, and for three days his body was "so ill-treated by the mob" as the entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica (11th, and therefore still well-written, edition) states, that "it was at last recognized only by an old scar on the hand, due to a wound received in a duel."

Now this killing of someone whose work is taught to every Russian schoolchild has had its impact on Russian consciousnesses. So, of course, have the memories of the wild fanatical tribes in the Caucasus. The very phrase "vostochnij narod" -- an "Eastern people," readily evokes this wildness and fanaticism. But in Soviet times, while Islam was seen as a "religion" and therefore to be treated with as much ferocity as other "religions" -- no quarter was given -- in post-Soviet times Islam continues to be seen as a "religion" and has been allowed to flourish, and mosques to be built again, without a clear understanding that the only thing that permitted what development of science there has been in Central Asia was accomplished not despite, but because, Islam had been tamed. It will be instructive to compare the results between, for example, Kazakhstan (with its very large non-Muslim population, and its supposed Muslims often nominally so) and Uzbekistan, where the forces of Islam, naturally supported by Saudi and other Arabs, are helping to bring the country into disarray and to undo possibly the best thing the Soviet power ever managed to achieve -- the de-islamization of the elites, defined not economically but intellectually, of Central Asia.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald suggests some courses of action for the intelligence community:

How fares the C.I.A. with the jihad?

Mr. Scheuer, he of pseudo-“Anonymous” fame, who was supposedly “in charge” of the Bin Laden desk, was clearly not up to the task. Instead of low cunning, he offered a kind of Boy Scoutish, or rather Cub Scoutish, simplemindedness, and clearly understood nothing about the theory and practice of Islam. His every remark showed this. Yet apparently he was kept on for many years. The C.I.A. needs to have a cadre created, or expanded, of people who will be given the necessary leisure to read widely in the history of Islam -- and particularly to learn something about its teachings, and about Jihad-conquest, and about the very similar treatment, through time and space, of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. They then need to be trained in the fissures, or disgruntlements, within Islam itself. They need to learn as well about the points of obvious weakness that can be emphasized to non-Muslims all over the world, who are grossly underinformed about the nature of Islam.

One hopes that the C.I.A. is not pulling any punches about Islam. If it echoes the nonsense from the government about the “extremists” in Islam, and continues to offer a sanitized version of Islam instead of the Ibn Warraq or Ali Sina version, then there is not much to expect from those on whom we rely for our own security, and from whom we have a right to expect at least as hard-eyed a view as was taken by the secret services of America and England with the Nazis and then with the Communists. All pieties, all vagueness, all denial of reality, really have no place, whatever role they may have in public diplomacy (and it has been a grave error to define the current, and continuing, and endless but manageable conflict as a “war on terrorism” instead of as a “war against the Jihad”). And even the latter formulation, while much saner and more realistic, needs to be amplified: the Jihad has many instruments, and the three D’s -- Da’wa, demography, and dhimmitude -- are more potent, in the end, than intermittent terrorism.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the idea, being pooh-poohed everywhere today, that some Muslims want to dominate the world:

Haroon Siddiqui has an article in today’s Toronto Star entitled “Muslim conspiracy to rule world just nonsense.”

Really? Is the idea that Muslims want to restore the caliphate and impose it on the world just a fantasy?

Not to a fantasist -- or millions of them -- it isn't. The first lesson to take in is not to assume that jihadists are operating rationally, with rational calculation as we understand it. Servier's "The Psychology of the Musulman," now available online, and similar studies help make less impenetrable a different worldview, a different psychology.

For that matter, defectors from Islam -- see www.faithfreedom.org, are invaluable for those wishing to understand what some can't quite bring themselves to believe.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Muslim Brotherhood's resurgence in Egypt, and its wider implications:

The Muslim Brotherhood seeks its Total Answer in Islam. The problems it addresses may be those that all countries experience -- a ruthless, corrupt, completely worthless regime. In a non-Muslim country, the answer would be Clean Government, and Civil Service Examinations, and an Anti-Corruption Squad and Throw the Rascals Out. In a Muslim country, where the prism of Islam is ready, the Answer of Islam is ready, the discontent with the government (Mubarak, the Al-Saud, this or that despot or petty ruler) will always and everywhere be expressed in Islamic terms, with Islam as the Solution. That would be fine for Infidels if Islam, more Islam, did not mean also something else, and what it means is this: more hatred of the Infidels, unmitigated by worldliness and corruption. And it would be fine if the Infidel world is ready to take upon itself indefinitely the entire burden of ensuring that everywhere Good Government and an Honest and Efficient Civil Service will reign throughout the Muslim lands, and of supplying aid to any Muslims who might feel that they are poor and should not be. And many of them are poor, but the reasons are in the despotism that Islam encourages, and the habit of mental submission that Islam encourages, and the habit of inshallah-fatalism that Islam encourages.

And more Islam always means more hatred of Infidels, so that any protest is channeled through Islam -- and in a Muslim country it will always end up being channeled through Islam for all but a small enlightened or quasi-enlightened group (no more than 2-3% of the population). Yet since Islam itself is the main reason for their troubles, for their unresponsive political system, and for the rumors, nonsense, and lies that come so easily to Muslim societies that have never encouraged and cannot encourage skepticism as a way of mental life but rather foster credulity at every step, things will never get better until Islam itself is weakened, constrained, divided, demoralized, seen not as The Answer but, as Ataturk and Bourguiba did, as The Problem.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald predicts that Turkey will not make it into the E.U., and recommends that efforts be made to keep this rejection from strengthening Erdogan's Sharia aspirations:

Now that the Soviet Union does not constitute a threat, and now that Erdogan is hellbent on dismembering Kemalism (using the very application to the EU as justification, and excuse, for depriving the army of some of its powers), Turkey can be seen more clearly.

Kemalism turns out not a permanent feature, but requires permanent support by the vigilant, both in and out of Turkey. Unfortunately, that stratum of Turkish society -- possibly 1/4 to 1/2 of the population -- that has benefited from the past 80 years of Kemalism seems to take its freedoms for granted. It needs to be reminded that, but for Mustafa Kemal, the Islamic Republic of Iran, or Iraq, or Syria, or Egypt, or Saudi Arabia, or Algeria, are the likely models for what Turkey could have been, and may yet be. The failure of some scholars of Turkey in the West, much lionized in Turkey, to emphasize both the benefits and the fragility of Kemalism, has not helped Turkish secularists. Instead of soberly recognizing the alternative, these too-complacent observers of "modern Turkey" have minimized what Kemalism achieved and underestimated also what the real situation was, for example, of non-Muslims in Ottoman Turkey. And their refusal to call the Jihad against the Armenians a "genocide" did not do Turkey any favors, even if it helped them retain old friends.

Turkey will not be admitted to the E.U. It will not be admitted because, at this point, given the behavior mainly of Arab Muslims (for does anyone doubt that it was the Arab influence that caused some Chechens to embrace not only the idea of Jihad, but all of the current methods being used to further it), Europeans have lost their stomach for parroting phrases about the religion of "peace" and "tolerance." They do not want to admit a country of 70 million Muslims, who would then move freely about Europe. They do not want Turkey admitted because it will be an easy conduit for non-Turkish Muslims to enter Europe, posing as Turks. They do not want Turkey admitted because many of the new member states of the EU will join Greece in opposition. In Bulgaria, if not elsewhere, the Bulgarian Massacres, and centuries of Ottoman rule, are remembered. And in Rumania. And in Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and so on.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses one key aspect of the conceptual paralysis that has seized most of Washington and the Western world:

A kind of mental or conceptual paralysis prevents American, European, and even Israeli policymakers -- perhaps most intolerably, Israeli policymakers -- from recognizing the Muslim sources of Arab Muslim opposition to the well-being, or permanent existence, of a Jewish (i.e., non-Muslim) sovereign state in the middle of dar al-Islam. Of course, such opposition is also shared by certain "Palestinian" islamochristian Arabs, such as Naim Ateek, or the gunrunner for the PLO Archbishop Hilarion Cappucci, or Hanan Ashrawi, the good friend of Peter Jennings. Like the Christians who helped found the Ba'athist party (such as Michel Aflaq, who "reverted" to Islam at the end of his life), these Arab "islamochristians" have sought to make their own lives tolerable, and to find a way, as Christians, to survive in the midst of a permanently hostile Arab Muslim world. The only strategy they have discovered, once they realized that the European powers no longer were going to protect them (as France, for example, had helped protect Christians in Lebanon and Syria a century ago), is that of accepting, adopting, and promoting the Muslim worldview. They echo the refusal of Muslim Arabs to permanently accept Israel as a sovereign state, or for that matter the Maronites of Lebanon as autonomous in their own Lebanese redoubts, and thereby hope to curry favor, and deflect the violence, of the Muslims among whom they live.

And along with that, many "Christian" Arabs have been convinced of the intimate connection between Islam and "Arabtum" or "Uruba" or "Arabness." This is carefully encouraged by the Muslim Arabs, who believe that all Arabs, whether Christian or not, must somehow rally around Islam as the defining feature, the great achievement, the gift to all mankind, of the Arabs, in whose language the Qur'an was dictated to Muhammad, an Arab and the "best of men," who was a member of the "best of peoples." Those speakers or users of Arabic have been persuaded that this makes them "Arabs," though many of them, no doubt, are the descendants of the Christians and Jews who once populated the area before the Muslim Arab invaders arrived. They have been made to feel, they do feel, that their own ethnic identity is somehow wrapped up in the defense of Islam.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald considers the question of whether the rioting in France presents a problem that can really be solved by ameliorating the lot of Muslims there, by considering the case of Algeria:

From 1830 to 1962 the French ruled in Algeria. They had arrived to finally put paid to the attacks by Muslim corsairs on Christian shipping. In Algeria, they introduced modern agriculture. They allowed the humiliated and degraded Jews, through the loi Cremieux, to become French citizens and hence free from Muslim laws, humiliation, and degradation. They established schools and the French language and universities -- real universities. Some of the best French Orientalists lived in Algeria, and published their works in Algeria -- Emile Fagnan comes to mind. Whatever civilization Algeria came to possess, was the direct result of the French conquest and settlement and civilizing mission in Algeria.

What is Algeria like today? The last Christian religious, a group of Italian, and another group of French monks, exercising their vocation of charity and never attempting to be missionaries, all had their throats slit. The French cemeteries all over Algeria have been vandalized; the tombstones taken, the bones unearthed and thrown about -- they are, after all, merely the remains of Infidels, and deserve no respect. A succession of juntas, consisting of corrupt despots and their courtiers, with the odd supposed technocrat, continue to rule without end. Terrorism racks the country, terrorism and corruption and, despite the vast oil and gas deposits, poverty. Nor is there a single "Algerian" people, any more than there is a single "Iraqi" people. Arab cultural and linguistic oppression of the Berbers causes riots years ago in Tizi-Ouzou and elsewhere in the Kabyle, and finally, the continued unrest led the Arabs to grant one concession: no longer would speaking the Berber language, Tamizaght, be a punishable offense. But the forced arabization has not stopped. The Berber writer Kateb Yacine, who refused to write in Arabic but chose French, was not the only Berber intellectual who recognized that Islam was the vehicle for Arab supremacist ideology. The Berbers, like the Kurds, have learned that, some so well that they have managed to see Islam itself in a new, unflattering light.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses coverage of the Muslim riots in France:

So much nonsense is appearing -- see any number of NPR stations, or the New Duranty Times, where Craig Smith is outdoing himself day by day and leaving a nice record for someone to dissect. Smith, who last year wrote an article about Bat Ye'or, apparently never read, or never took in, Eurabia -- don't bother him, his mind is made up.

Everything has been done to deny completely any Muslim connection. According to NPR, "young men" rioted in France. These "young men" were also "disaffected youth." They were "angry and frustrated" because they, these "young men," were "jobless." These "jobless" young men and their families lived in "bleak" housing projects and though all medical care and education was free for them (all of it, period) these "young men" were "angry and frustrated" because apparently the state subsidies are not enough to overcome that "anger" and "frustration" and those "demands" which must be met. This despite the fact that those subsidies amount to round about $1,200 a month, which quite a few French non-Muslims are delighted to receive, and which comes along with all that free (and where there is no disruption from Muslim students, often excellent) education and free (first-world, not Muslim world) health care.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the acadhimmic cliche of a high Islamic civilization that far surpassed the rest of the world -- a cliche that has passed into the popular consciousness:

One of the most important means of softening up the Infidels has been the rewriting, both of Islamic cultural achievements, and of Western history, so as to make grand claims about the significance of the former for the latter. This is one of the aims of the carefully-premeditated Euro-Arab Dialogue that Bat Ye'or discusses at length in Eurabia.

Robin Cook, the late former Foreign Secretary, in 1998 at the Ismaili Center in London states that "It is the most wonderful reminder in the very heart of London that the roots of our culture are not just Greek or Roman in origiin, but Islmaic as well. Islamic art, science and philosophy have helped to shape who we are and how we think." He stressed "the debt our culture owes to Islam," for "Islam laid the intellectual foundations for large portions of Western civilization."

Similar remarks, equally smarmy, have been made by the current Foreign Secretary Jack Straw, or for that matter, by any number of European leaders -- and especially among those who have held positions in the E.U. bureacracy. A succession of Europeans trooped to the European-funded Library of Alexandria, where they gave speeches, one after the other, about the greatness of Islamic civilization and all that Europe owed to it. Romano Prodi, currently the front-runner to succeed Berlusconi in Italy, was particularly egregious in his comments. Ignorance? Stupidity? Indifference to history? A readiness to please the rich (Arabs) and the powerful (the Muslims within Europe, who need constantly to be placated)? Who knows? If Europeans were well-educated, or instructed by those who were well-educated and not about to let people get away with such nonsense, it would be one thing. But mass education, the 1968 debacle, which affected attitudes toward intellectual authority and merit, not only in France but elsewhere in Europe, lowered standards and helped soften up European brains for what is a propaganda war, based partly on these claims made for Islamic "culture."

It is important not to accept these dreamy claims either about the "greatness" of Islamic civilization -- which any number of people, including Bernard Lewis, formulaically allude to as if they feel they must always and everywhere make some gesture toward the wounded feelings, and self-esteem problems, of Muslims. How delicate we all allow ourselves to be, and yet how willing, at the same time, we are to treat history itself, Mnemosyne in her tatters, so roughly, without the slightest concern for her feelings, her sense of herself.

Planning to run for office? Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald has a few words for you:

I don't know what Democrats, or Republicans, hoping to run for Congress in 2006, or 2008, or 2010, are now doing. But whatever else they are doing, they should realize that there are certain things about Islam -- that is, practically everything about Islam -- that they do not know, and that they have a duty to inform themselves about.

Does anyone think that, had the leaders of Western Europe fully informed themselves about the tenets of Islam, about the contents of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, they would have ever allowed so many Turks into Germany, so many Pakistanis into England, so many Moroccans into Spain, so many Algerians into France, so many Egyptians and Libyans and Somalis into Italy? Not to mention smaller numbers, into every country in Europe, of Muslims from all the places mentioned and all the other Muslim countries.

Whether you hate Bush or not, whether you think the war in Iraq was completely unjustified, partly unjustified, perfectly justified, or justified in the early stages and a senseless squandering and misallocation of resources in its Light-Unto-the-Muslim-Nations Phase (roughly, from the mid-fall of 2003 on), you have a duty to study Islam. And not from the nonsense of Armstrong or Esposito, or the coffee-table books, all blue mosques and Iznik tiles, with nothing sensible or truthful about the nature and centrality of Jihad, and nothing at all, really, on the subjugation and mistreatment of non-Muslims under Islam. And while much can be gleaned from the writings of Bernard Lewis, he is extraordinarily inattentive to the condition of the dhimmi, has done nothing to promote Bat Ye'or (and something to discourage her reception). And because of his extensive personal and professional ties to Turkish scholars, to a well-connected Arab claque in Amman that likes to be thought cultured by a cultured Western scholar, and he in turn would not like to offend them, he sees, for example, the islamization of Europe, but dares not see far enough. For to do so would require him actually to suggest some of the things suggested here. And that Bernard Lewis cannot do -- though now he should be thinking only of the future of Western civilization, and not what fellow Ottomanists in Istanbul, or Prince Hassan of Jordan, may think of him.

And if you are going to study Islam, start with Robert Spencer's texts. Forget all those received opinions, and forget that epithet "right-wing." Forget that Regnery is his publisher. Pay attention to what he has actually written. Does what he writes hold up? Does it make sense? Does he offer copious quotation from the Qur'an and the Hadith? Does he have the air or tone of a fanatic, of someone who twists the evidence, or does he not?

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald lists some of the things we have lost already because of this business of Islamic terror, and what we stand to lose in the future in the West if our supine dhimmitude in the face of an increasingly obvious and large-scale cultural challenge continues:

What have we lost because of Islam? A short list:

Security: At every airport, subway station, bus station, at every sports event, at every public lecture, in every office building, at every museum, at every large gathering and many small gatherings all over this country (particularly those that are specifically Christian or Jewish or Hindu, and certainly all those that are devoted to discussing the menace of Islam), there are now security guards, security checks, long waits that use up, at airports alone, billions of man-hours that were never used up in such fashion before. Why? All is because of the threat not of "terrorism" but rather of Muslim terrorism. Measures may also soon be taken to monitor emails, telephone calls and so on, all of which may affect all of us, and none of which would have been necessary in the absence of Muslim terrorist threats which come out of Islam.

Freedom to travel over much of the world: How many of us now realize that it will be difficult or dangerous from now on out to visit all of the sites of classical antiquity that can be found in North Africa, or the Middle East, or in Turkey, because these lands are in the grip of increasingly restive and aggressive Muslims, not all of whom are content merely to take the dollars of Western tourists? Think of how many attacks there have been, prompted in the minds of the perpetrators by the tenets of Islam, the doctrines of Islam, the attitudes of Islam, against Swiss tourists at Luxor (68 stabbed to death, and many decapitated), or tourists elsewhere in Egypt, or at Djerba in Tunisia, or at Marrakech in Morocco. One may well be indifferent to the little created under Islam, but what is now off-limits is the much created before Islam, or despite Islam.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers some ways and means to counter the ongoing problem of jihad recruitment in American prisons:

Members of various Da'wa groups and individuals are busily promoting Islam with what is, of course, a captive population. Already nicely identified by their condition as economically and socially marginal, with an axe to grind (and sometimes with justification), these prisoners are Jihad-fodder. They can be offered spiritual guidance by smiling and plausible souls, who tell them such things, palpably untrue, as that Islam is devoid of racism. But in fact Islam is the most racist of all belief-systems, for it requires complete identification with, and mimicking of, the mores and manners of a particular people: the Arabs, who are "the best of people." Islam even goes so far as to insist that the Qur'an must be read in Arabic (a rule that seems in recent years to have been honored in the breach) and that converts take on new, Arabic names and slough off their pre-Islamic identities, histories, and interests. There has never been an imperialism, a cultural and linguistic imperialism, so successful.

That is what Islam is really like. It asks the new convert to strip himself of his identity. It asks him to take a new name. It asks him to give up art -- no sculpture, and no paintings of people or other living things. It asks him to give up music -- no gospel music, no jazz, no nothing. In some Arab countries, this ban is violated -- but the ban is part of Islam, and that should be clear (one has only to consult al-Qaradawi). How many people will be willing to trade in, for example, their music for -- silence? "There is no place for humor in Islam," wrote Ayatollah Khomeini. How right he was. There isn't -- just look not at the hysterical faces of those frenzied mobs in Rawalpindi or Gaza, but simply at the dour hijabbed faces you can see in photographs -- with those Muhammad Atta deadfish eyes. Surely that is worth pointing out. There is hardly any science in Islam and there has not been for a thousand years, that is, not since the gates of ijtihad were closed (for the best "Islamic" scientists, such as ar-Rhazi, were in fact freethinkers and skeptics, and always in danger of being punished, even executed). Science has been thin on the ground in Islam since the pre-existing populations of Christians and Jews, who were the translators of those works of Greek science that quite a few, including converts and those born into Islam give such exaggerated signficance to, were after a few centuries reduced by conversion and dhimmitude to irrelevance. Any histories of science written today devote, on average, 1% of their text (I have checked) to the so-called "enormous discoveries" that Muslims routinely like to cite, and lazy non-Muslims often accept or parrot, because they figure that it is just too time-consuming to go and look up the real significance of "Islamic science." For more on this, one could consult the book by Rodney Stark on why modern science developed in Christian Europe, and not under Islam, nor in China. And for still more, one can find online exchanges on the reasons for the decline of science in Islamic societies between the sober historian of science Toby Huff, and the hysterical George Saliba, eager to protect Islam at all costs. His defensiveness grows ever more shrill and absurd as he attempts to impugn Huff's motives for even considering what is, after all, a major question: why, after a few centuries, did science under Islam (not "islamic science") disappear, save for a handful of astronomers who did not, pace Saliba, anticipate Copernicus. Here again, the confusion of history with self-esteem studies, which so many Muslim and Arab professors seem to make, is quite extraordinary.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald reveals what he will tell the President of the United States when George calls him in, offers him a sparkling water, and asks him for some advice:

"What serious advice by the numbers would you give the president as to how to deal with the ever encroaching threat of fundamental Islam?" -- a question to me from a posting at Jihad Watch

1. Education: Make sure that the 5-10 most relevant books are read by generals, other officers, and men -- beginning with those at the War College. And make sure that those in the Department of Justice, civilian employees in the Department of Defense, upper-level employees in the Department of Health and Human Services, and members of Congress and state and local government are properly educated on the subject of Islam. Stop misrepresenting Islam as a doctrine that encourages "peace" and "tolerance." Stop continuing to insist that those who conduct Jihad are doing so despite Islam, and not quite properly prompted by, and in the name of, and in the spirit of, Islam.

Attempt on every occasion to raise the matter of what Islam teaches and how Muslims intend to deal with these teachings, or not to, at every meeting with Muslim ambassadors and leaders. Never leave it out of any speech -- and make sure that from the top down, everyone is echoing the same sentiments, asking the same questions, wondering the same things aloud.

2. Establish a War Board which, once it has been clearly understood that the menace threatening all Infidels everywhere is properly called a "Jihad," then that War Board will seek to identify and bring to the attention of Infidels everywhere the various instruments of that Jihad. While military means are part of Jihad, whether acts of terrorism or battlefield combat (qital), they are not the most effective or most threatening instruments of Jihad. These others include "wealth" (i.e. oil revenues), "pen, speech" (propaganda), and the latest weapon, the demographic weapon. It is important to produce evidence from Muslim press, radio, television, and websites, that there is a clear understanding among Muslims of how, for example, "demographic conquest" can -- and has in the past in various parts of the world -- succeed in islamizing a place.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald examines the Al-Saud and prescribes some ways the U.S. can and should be dealing with them:

The Al-Saud are, to anyone who looks, the most corrupt of despots. If those "anyone" are Infidels, they leave it at that -- corrupt despots, to be dealt with as one sees fit (and many in the West have seen fit to hold out their hands for Saudi gold, in order to recycle those petrodollars -- and never mind how this particular family arrogated to itself the national wealth). If those "anyone" are Muslims, it is not enough to say that someone is a "despot," because there is nothing wrong with a "despot" in Islam, and nothing wrong with a "despot" who helps himself to a large share of whatever wealth is available. Muhammad himself lay down the law, and he was to receive the largest share -- 20% -- of whatever booty was taken. The more luxurious the life of the caliph, or Mughal emperor, or sheikh, the more fascinating and impressive he was.

Now the Al-Saud take not all, but a great deal, of the national wealth. And so do the "royal" families in Kuwait (the Al-Sabah), Qatar (the Al-Thani), the United Arab Emirates (too complicated to start listing, but Zayed is gone from Abu Dhabi, and I can't recall his successor's name, but it hardly matters). And if you don't like it, and you are a Muslim, the only categories of praise and blame you know are the categories offered by Islam.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores the implications of Muslim attorney Tom Nelson's assertion that a bellicose version of the Qur'an distributed in Oregon is somehow anomalous:

"This version of the Quran was printed before the Sept. 11 attacks, when jihad did not have the same holy war connotations as today, Nelson said." -- from this article

It was an earlier version, an uncorrected version, of the Qur'an that was distributed in Oregon. Please ignore all previous versions. They are full of typos. Read only the new edition, the one that has on the cover the special "For Americans Only" lettering across the top, and the CAIR Seal-of-approval ("Tells you all you really need to know about Islam") and a scholarly introduction by Professor Michael Sells.

Or, if you wish, you can get the even more thoroughly abridged version, from the same company that, for last-minute and lazy students, offers a version of Anna Karenina in eleven pages and King Lear in three. And that 8-page version of the Qur'an will naturally carry blurbs:

"This is certain to be, for Infidels, the most painless way to learn about the Qur'an. This book should be -- no, this book definitely is -- required reading for today's crop of Infidels. And if its lessons are understood, then the whole family may be ready for the full text. Why make life even more difficult for your children than it would be otherwise? Read this book now. Read it as if your life depends on it." -- Douglas Hooper, Washington, D.C.

"In the breathtaking poetry of its misty vistas, from the highest hill of humanity where nightingales and roses bloom along the verdant slopes of the high uplands of justice which has always been the voice of the oppressed speaking truth to power, even when that power has gone out, but if one knows where to find the light-switch of the human heart, this is the book which can turn that light-switch of that human heart, not to mention the sometimes also necessary lungs, spleen and pancreas, on again, so that not only mere man but Man is made whole, the earth is made whole, the whole universe is made whole, and made whole in the best and only possible way -- holistically. Read it, again and again and again. The purest poetry that like a tree only God could have made, only God, or quite possibly Edward Said, had one of his admirers only been able to have been there for him, when he needed me, to take dictation." -- Hamid Dabashi, New York City

"If we are to avoid a conflict of civilizations, we will need to replace conflict with dialogue, attachment to our old ways of thinking with a willingness to accept entirely new ways, and to give up those silly concepts of 'Us' and 'Them' for a much broader 'They Are We' and 'We Are They.' Since it is 'they' who are now among 'us' and not 'we' who are among 'them,' surely the most sensible and painless solution is for 'us' to give up our shopworn and outworn and useless categories, and to try to do whatever 'they' require of 'us' so as to 'reassure' them.

"And just as they -- Muslims -- need reassurance that we are not out to get them, after the Crusades, after colonialism, after Israel's brutal oppression of unarmed Palestinians, after the cruel way that Saddam Hussein, that brave Arab leader, was removed, after the neo-colonialism and then the post-neocolonialism which has no sell-by date and therefore goes on forever as long as Infidels continue to exist, not only do 'they' (the 'Muslims') need some sign from us (the so-called 'non-Muslims') that 'we' are not out to get 'them,' but just as important, we need to study the Qur'an, and much more than the Qur'an, in order to reassure ourselves. We need to reassure ourselves that we have not lost our moral bearings, not retreated into some cruel dungeon or Guantanamo or Abu Ghraib of our own narrow mindedness, need to make sure that we have not lost our moral bearings, lost all of our own habit of, or habitat for, humanity.

"And there is no better indication of our own willingness to listen to others with compassion and understanding and acceptance as they tell us what they think or what they think we should think they think, and also tell us what to think, saving us the trouble, which given all of our advantages and our privileges and our narrow-minded indifference to all those who are different from us is the least of what we should be prepared to do in this diverse world of diversity that we live in.

"When the oppressed people of this earth, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait and the United Arab Emirates and in so many other places, want so clearly to reach out to us, to affect us, to help us see things as they see them, what better way to engage in that dialogue than to read, study, read again, study again, the book that means so much to them, means -- everything to them. Personally, I've read the Qur'an from cover to cover, and I've come to love it more every time." -- James Earl Carter, Georgia

"If you can only read one book in your life, let this one be it. Sometimes, you come across one book that makes all the difference. This is that book." -- Statement of the Joint Committee on Civilizational Literacy, a cooperative effort of the Modern Language Association, the American Historical Association, the American Association of University Presidents, the American Association of University Professors, and MESA Nostra

"The book our generation needs." -- Britney Spears, Honorary President of the What-Our-Generation-Needs Foundation (a 501 (c)(3) organization)

UPDATE December 17, 2005: Certain parties are trying to make use of selected quotes from this article to attempt to discredit Jihad Watch, Mr. Fitzgerald, and me. For a clarification of my -- and our -- position on these matters, please see here. -- Robert Spencer

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores some of the limitations of the increasingly common "clash of civilizations" paradigm.

The phrase "clash of civilizations," made famous by Samuel Huntington, is misleading. In Huntington's formulation (he owed an unacknowledged good deal to Adda Bozeman, who taught at Sarah Lawrence in the days when Kurt Rausch taught painting to well-bred young women and Randall Jarrell was taking notes for "Pictures from an Institution"), there are the Sinic, the Orthodox, the Hindu, the Islamic, the Western, and so on. And these are all potentially clashing. But this is nonsense. There is only one clash that counts: that of Islam with all of non-Islam. If, in the future, China and America were to go to war, it would not be because the former is "Sinic" and the latter "Christian" or "Western" or somesuch, but because of perceived Great-Power rivalries -- for China and America are now part of the same civilization, the shared, modern, universal civilization, with disagreements at the edges, but nothing like the clash between Islam and all Infidels. In fact, a war between China and America would be about power, and thus no different from, for example, the rivalry, ending in war, between Germany and England in the pre-1914 period.

It is interesting to note, meanwhile, that Arab and Muslim analysts around the world tend to prefer the phrase "clash of civilizations" -- because it avoids the truthful description of the conflict as one motivated by a belief-system, the belief-system of Islam. And it also gives the impression that America or "the West" or Western Christian or Western post-Christian civilization are the enemy, while in reality the global Islamic jihad is as much directed at Hindus and Buddhists, and the Eastern Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, and the non-Muslim black Africans, as it is against the much more powerful, and therefore more dangerous, United States of America.

Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald offers a glimpse inside the bizarre world of the Middle East Studies Association:

"The vast majority of people in the Arab world sympathize with al Qaeda only because it champions their issues and speaks their language and it's seemingly effective against their enemies." -- the egregious Shibley Telhami of the Brookings Institution and the University of Maryland

A nice example of deception and even possibly self-deception. It is not because it [Al Qaeda] "champions their issues." It is because Al Qaeda speaks the language of Islam, is deeply rooted in the canonical texts of Islam, and cannot be successfully refuted within Islam. Why not? Because it is true to the letter and the spirit of Islam -- to the Qur'an and Sunna, to the example of Muhammad, uswa hasana (Qur’an 33:21). The origins of Islam to justify and promote the Arab conquest of more advanced, richer, more populous tribes and groups of Christians and Jews, the role of Jihad-conquest in spreading Islam, the long record, over 1350 years, of the subjugation of non-Muslims of every kind, always and everywhere forced to endure the status of dhimmi (although sometimes the rigor of this was modified by the gentleness of an individual ruler, such as syncretistic Akbar in India), if permitted to live at all and to avoid forcible conversion -- all of this may have been forgotten in the Western world.

As The Legacy of Jihad (just out, and I can throw away the galleys I had and now read from the beautifully-bound book) demonstrates, Western scholars in the recent past (1880-1970) without exception understood Islam perfectly. But then something happened. A change of personnel, and a change in funding, and a change in world-views. Those experts on Islam died, or retired. They were not replaced by similar experts. The membership of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA Nostra, or MESA for short), for example, in 1970 consisted almost entirely of non-Muslim Americans: Muslims were about 3% of the membership. In 2005 more than half -- over 60% - of MESA Nostra's membership consists of Middle Easterners, Muslim and in most cases, Islamochristians. There are few Maronites, few Chaldeans or Assyrians, few Copts, but many, many Muslims and above all, the kind of Christians -- "Palestinians" -- who have chosen to identify with the Jihad against Israel and with Islam as the embodiment of Arabdom, Uruba. Some of these are smoother than others; after all, they want to be admitted to the corridors of power, to become "experts" who appear on this or that network, to be quoted -- so they learn quickly exactly how far they can go in their defense of Islam and their deflection of attention away from Islam.

The effect of this has been dramatic. It is hardly possible to learn about the main subject that one needs to learn about -- Islam – with any intelligent understanding of North Africa or the Middle East or the world wherever Muslims are now to be found and are aggressively promoting their demands, their Da'wa, their demographic conquest that proceeds, here fast and there slow, of the local Infidels. That is to say, it is hardly possible to get the truth about Islam almost anywhere you might once have expected to find it..