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Fitzgerald: A tribute to Prince Abdullah

Nov 21, 2004 1:43 pm By Hugh Fitzgerald

Here is Jihad Watch Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald’s take on Saudi Crown Prince Abdullah’s complaint that terrorists are tarnishing the image of Islam:

It’s too late for the likes of Abdullah to any longer prettify Islam. Too many people can now read the Qur’an and hadith, for they are on-line. Too many people are finally fed up with the likes of Esposito and Armstrong or the endless propagandists, including that triumvirate of transparent propagandists, Rashid Khalidi at Columbia, Rami Khoury at the Daily Star in Beirut, and Fawaz Gerges (like Khoury an “islamochristian” who parrots the Muslim agenda and view of things, but with a broader grimace). These are the ones who want us to keep focusing on the putative sins of Israel and the “centrality” of that matter — when a glance around the from Beslan to Amsterdam to Madrid to Kashmir to southern Sudan to northern Nigeria to the Balkans to New York, to Washington, to southern Thailand causes us to realize that the war against Israel is only a local expression of a world-wide totalitarian belief-system whose adherents firmly believe in the right, as Muhammad says, of “Islam to dominate and not to be dominated.” Naturally the Arabs would prefer that Infidels learn nothing about the tenets of Islam, still less about the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule, over 1350 years, and from Spain to Indonesia, and to keep the high-beams on that little affair of little Israel.

But Infidels are not having it any longer. “J”en ai marre” — I”m fed up — that is what they are saying even in France, if the always-perspicacous Yvan Rioufol’s latest column in Figaro is to be trusted. They have come to realize that neither their governments, nor many of the apologists for Islam now teaching in Western universities, will offer any guidance or real instruction. So they are studying that belief-system on their own. It is not, after all, impossible to learn what hundreds of millions of others have learned. And it is nonsense for defenders of Islam to suggest that “only” native speakers of Arabic can read the texts when 70-80% of the world’s Muslims cannot read Arabic, and that one now has available, on-line, and side-by-side, four or five translations of the Qur’an, and at the same site, Bukhari’s Hadith, and elsewhere, one can find other hadith, as well as the sira (the sacralized biography) of Muhammad. And further, for insight into the mindset of many Muslims, to understand the quality of its logic, the nature of its reasoning power, the worldview that Islam encourages, Infidels can now go to Muslim websites and be amused, or horrified, or both.

Michael Sells may put out a sanitized version of the Qur’an and the apologists at the University of North Carolina may force this utterly misleading text on the hapless freshmen (is there no faculty member willing to protest this outrage — in, for example, the History Department?). But we are not Chapel Hill freshmen, meek and mild, and neither Sells, nor Carl Ernst, nor the rest of the members of MESA can any longer control what we read, and what we learn. And they know perfectly well that the most distinguished scholars of Islam or of Muslim history in America — including MIchael Cook, Patricia Crone, and Bernard Lewis — however much even these people mind their backs and pull their punches out of all sorts of considerations and apprehensions — know the truth of the matter far more than the Rashid Khalidis and the Roy Mottahedehs (unkind, one knows, to put his name in the same sentence with a crude propagandist like Khalidi, but Mottahedeh should know better””after all, he quotes Robert Benchley). The army of apologists of Islam, both Muslim and non-Muslim, abroad in the Western world, is simply being ignored. For their predictions (pooh-poohing any problem with militant Islam for the past several decades) and their analyses simply are false, and now can easily be seen to be false. There is just too much data that does not fit their theories — such as the “theory” that the Arab war on Israel explains Muslim hatred of America or the West. Now that Muslim aggression against non-Muslims everywhere in the world is out in the open, and now that there is greater understanding of the war against the Infidels -though as yet a full comprehension of the 1350-year history of Muslim subjugation of non-Muslims is not yet widely comprehended — many statements that might have passed a decade ago, or five years ago, or even two years ago, are simply going to be met with incredulity and suspicion. Even the doctrines of taqiyya and kitman can be found widely discussed on-line — and with the name, comes the concept, and once the concept is understood, the mixture as before of nonsense and lies cannot any longer continue to succeed. All over the Western world, some triggering event — such as the murder of Theo van Gogh — is waking Infidels up. Some still choose to deny, out of fear of what full understanding would then require them to do, if they are to save their own civilisation, but the numbers of those still capable, with a straight face, in parroting nonsense is perhaps smaller among the led and the ruled, than among the leaders and the rulers. It is they who need to change their rhetoric, and they who need to reflect, in their own policies, what so many ordinary Dutch, Italians, French, English, Russians — and Americans — have come to understand, not because of government efforts to whip them up against Islam, but despite the best efforts of governments and the media to prevent them from learning the full, unsettling truth about the tenets of Islam. More Muslims in the Lands of the Infidels must inevitably mean, for those indigenous Infidels, a rise in daily friction, in unpleasantness, in collisions, in huge and growing security costs (including the costs of police, guards at railroads and airports and subways and bus stations, and to guard Jewish schools, and Christian schools, and synagogues, and churches, and outspoken political figures, and all the rest), and in greater physical danger (Beslan, Moscow, Madrid, New York, Washington, Bali, southern Thailand, churches in Iraq, Pakistan, and Sudan). Ultimately the Shari”a is incompatible with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, with the American Constitution, and with the Declaration of the Rights of Man. How one can, with a straight face, pretend that adherents of a belief-system that directly contradicts all of those, and that preaches that “Islam must dominate and is not to dominate,” and that Muslims owe all their loyalty to fellow Muslims, can somehow “integrate” or “be integrated” into Western society — without fatally changing, for the worse, the nature of that society — is hard to understand.

And it is too late, for the Abdullahs of this world, to suppress the accumulated scholarsihp of the past, scholarship of French, English, American, German, Dutch, Italian, Russian, Bulgarian, Rumanian, Greek, Serbia, Spanish, Indian students of aspects of Islamic conquest, or of the Muslim belief-system, or of the remarkably similar treatment, over 1350 years of conquest and subjugation, of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. What Mary Boyce discovered amounted to a history of massacre, persecution, and slow asphyixation of the Zoroastrians — adherents of the original state religion of Iran — under Islam, is remarkably similar to what the Christians and Jews of the MIddle East and North Africa and of the Balkans endured. The Hindus of India, under the 250 years of Mughal rule, had it still worse, with 60-70 million killed over that period. The use now made not only of Muslim sources, but of non-Muslim sources (e.g. the chronicler Arakel of Tabriz, the treasure-trove of the Cairo Geniza that Goitein so thoroughly investigated, the Infidel diplomats who, for the past two hundred years, have been sending back reports from the Muslim world — at least, until diplomats in the last 40 years became the hirelings of Arab states). Bat Ye’or, the world’s leading student of dhimmitude, has in her three previous books — The Dhimmi, Islam and Dhimmitude, The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam — been undeterred by the cold shoulder shown her by many.

As for “tarnishing the image of Islam” — Abdullah should think for a moment, and just imagine what it might be like to be a non-Muslim who now has begun to read, with intelligent comprehension, the Qur’an, the hadith, and the sira. And to read some of the commentaries. And to read Schacht, Margoliouth, Noldeke, Bousquet, Lal, Bell, Blachere, Muir, Goldziher, Fagnan, Hurgronje, Wensinck, Zwemer, Jeffery, Bat Ye’or, and a hundred others. Were all of these French, British, American, German, Dutch, Italian scholars (and Spanish, Bulgarian, Russian, Rumanian, Czech, Polish, and Danish scholars of Islam and Muslim history could just as easily have had their names been added ) simply attempting to “tarnish the image” of Islam?

Islam is a totalitarian belief-system. It emphasizes the collective; it refuses the autonomy of individual conscience. Believers cannnot ever leave the Army of Islam — they must stay as Muslims or face severe punishment, even death. It is a belief-system based on dominance — of men over women, but even more, of Believers over Unbelievers or Infidels. Its model, Muhammad, was a warrior who preached that “war is deception,” who tricked and took pride in tricking his trusting enemies, who ordered the assassination even of those who did nothing against him, including old men and women, who distributed booty from conquest, who oversaw approvingly the massacre of hundreds of helpless prisoners, who — and all of the relevant quotations are available online at many websites — married Aisha when she was six, and had intercourse with her when she was nine.

Does the sira of Muhammad, in Abdullah’s eyes, given that Muhammad is a model for all men for all time, “tarnish the image of Muhammad”? What about the massacre of hundreds of children at Beslan — or two dozen at Ma’alot in 1974? What about the decapitations, with Qur’anic justification, that we see all over Iraq? And the murders of Pim Fortuyn and now Theo van Gogh, with political figures being threatened by Muslims all over Europe — even now, when the Muslims make up only 10-15% of the population in France, Holland, and elsewhere?

As it says in Luke: “If they do this when the wood is green, what will happen when the wood is dry?” If Muslims in Europe behave with the same violence and hatred, and threats even now –what will it be like, if their numbers continue to grow through overbreeding and Da’wa among the economically and psychically marginal, for the Infidel peoples, and civilisations, of Europe?

“Tarnish the image” — a little matter, no doubt, of more Saudi money being spread around among ex-diplomats and government officials and all the willing hirelings to be found in the capitals of the West — who unless exposed, ridiculed, and forced to disgorge their treasonous profits (and why not? Why not sue someone who, as a diplomat or C.I.A. agent, misinformed his country as part of an unstated deal, so that after retirement he could receive Saudi emoluments?) will continue to offer the mixture as before.

But this time, one suspects, it will not work. Not for assorted Abdullahs and Fahds and Muhammads and Husseins and Fawzis, all over the place, nor for their handmaidens at Columbia and Georgetown and at the Quai d’Orsay, and the BBC, and RFI. It’s just too late.

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