The most discouraging thing about conducting the struggle against Islamic supremacism is the fact that you're forced to read about atrocities every day. Indeed, Jihadwatch frequently looks like a kind of global police blotter, chronicling the latest outrage conducted by mobs in Gaza, kangaroo courts in Afghanistan, shariah conspirators in Pakistan, or bandit-gangs in Iraq. On days when the Islamic body count is low, there is nearly always some statement by a revered religious leader to a Muslim audience calling for violence against unbelievers, making outrageous demands of a Western government, or hurling false charges at Westerners who push back against their aggression. On the Islam beat, there's never a shortage of evil. I'm reminded of what I read in the memoirs of an exorcist, who warned of the exhaustion, depression, even suicidal despair that can threaten those who stand on the front line confronting the Enemy. I'm convinced that that danger applies here. I hope the unbelievers among my readership will indulge me here, and regard what I say next as a charming but harmless piece of Christian superstition:
I believe with all my heart that a spirit did indeed appear to Muhammad and inspire the Qur'an. I accept his account of how that spirit guided him to make its early suras amiable and uplifting, and then as his military power grew, ever darker and more intolerant. When I read how Muhammad sometimes showed some humane scruples—for instance, about stealing his stepson's wife—and the spirit urged him to go ahead and seize what he wanted... I believe that spirit was real. I think it is still with us, that Muhammad's private “bin Screwtape” still abides and watches over the mass movement he created.
Whenever we score a victory, he is enraged, and he afflicts us—where he can, by goading us into extreme statements or unjust actions that will discredit our cause with decent people. When we fall for that, when we lower ourselves to the level of our enemies, we do more than make some tactical mistake; we begin, I believe, to serve in some way the same spirit of hatred that inspired the Verse of the Sword. Even if we convince ourselves we are aiming that sword at Islam, in fact we are beginning to be mesmerized by it. Mirroring Islamic intolerance, and aiming it at Muslims, is at once a crime and a blunder. Let's remember that it wasn't the fanatically anti-German bigots of the Action Francaise who in fact formed the Resistance after 1940; members of that group disproportionately became instead collaborators.
Since most of us aren't actually prone to genuine hatred, the next tactic “bin Screwtape” tries is to grind us down with defeatism, to convince us that the struggle is unavailing, that the blindness of our fellow Westerners and the lazy, pleasure-loving short-sightedness of our society will never be a match for the disciplined, fertile fanatics whom he urges to enslave us. This too is a grave temptation. It pays to remember that anti-Communist hero Whittaker Chambers was wrong when he said he feared he had joined the losing side of history, that Moscow's fighting faith would prevail against the flaccid and hedonistic West. As early as 636, Abu Bakr warned the Persians he was attacking, “I have come to you with an army of men that love death, as you love life.”
Let's resist the urge to romanticize such evil, and grant it a power it doesn't really have. Remember that the fatalistic, samurai culture of Japan that inspired the kamikazes was utterly crushed by the America of Benny Goodman, the Lindy-Hop, and Abbott and Costello. The Carthaginians, who sacrificed their infants to ask their gods for victory, were defeated by Roman family farmers who fought to defend their Republic. The power that evil seems to grant us is in the long run an illusion, like the "high" one gets from a hit of coke or a joyride in a stolen car. Reality has its revenge.
Yes, fecklessness and weakness, cowardice and short-sighted selfishness can doom a culture—and make it prey to neighbors with sharper teeth and more fertile wombs. But such a victory isn't inevitable. There are enough signs of life left yet in the West—and to prove my point I'd like to show you one.
The video below appeared in Salon under the hysterical headline: “This is What Anti-Muslim Hate Looks Like.”
The video depicts a patriotic rally held outside a fundraiser for the Islamic Circle of North America, which supports the imposition of sharia law in the U.S. The keynote speakers for the evening—supposedly meant to raise money for women's shelters—were Imam Siraj Wahhaj and Amir Abdel Malik Ali. As the Orange County Register reported:
Wahhaj is an imam at a mosque in Brooklyn. A U.S. attorney named him and 169 others as co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.... Malik Ali is a Bay Area Islamic activist who spoke at 'Israeli Apartheid Week' at UC Irvine in 2010. There he said he supports Hezbollah, which the CIA labels a terrorist group.
The footage was shot by the local chapter of Hamas-linked CAIR—who were strongly motivated to find the ugliest images and most obnoxious quotes they could.... And this is the best they could do: A group of Americans peacefully gathered behind a barricade, chanting to the suited men and hijabed women who trooped into the event, “No sharia!” and “Go home!” Given that the event featured foreign-born supporters of terrorism and sharia law, these were not outrageous sentiments for Californians to express. Anything less would amount to servility.
Note that the rally was not a picket of a mosque full of peaceful Muslims, with no connections to militant groups, or public aspirations to impose Islamic law. It was aimed at a group of activists, who make no secret of their Islamic supremacism. The most “offensive” thing I could find on the video were some verbal references on the part of protestors to Muhammad's marriage to Ayesha, and the fact that she was at the time only 9 years old. Now as good Americans and good sports, this might seem like it's a “low blow.”
But is it really? Sharia law as it is interpreted in Iran (Hezbellah's chief sponsor) indeed allows the marriage of girls at 9—a “reform” the Ayatollah Khomeni enacted shortly after coming to power. Given that ICNA calls for sharia in America, the protestors' remarks were entirely fair. They were the cold, sober truth—which I'm proud and heartened to see Americans cast back in the teeth of our enemies here at home. The protestors in Orange County don't hate people, they hate evil—an evil they see imposing itself by force in countries across the world. They hate “bin-Screwtape.”
Yes, it's rude to insult the founder of someone else's religion. But I don't see Evangelicals or Russian Orthodox lining up outside Mormon temples to denounce Joseph Smith—whose religion they surely find almost as alien as Islam. Now why, do you think, is that?
Could it have something to do with the fact that in majority Muslim countries like Pakistan, you can be executed for criticizing Muhammad? That government ministers who oppose such laws are gunned down with impunity, and are praised for committing murder by high-placed Muslim clerics? As long as Muslims keep friendly relations with co-religionists who engage in such acts of violence, as long as they call for laws imposing that kind of tyranny on our shores, they should expect to reap the dragon's teeth they have sown.
