Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explains why Turkey should not be admitted to the EU — and why Tariq Ramadan is not necessarily what he appears to be:
Turkey should not be, and will not be, admitted to the EU. The vote has to be unanimous. Whether it is Holland, or Bulgaria, or Italy, or some other country, and it would be good if a number joined in, the most populous state in the EU cannot be a Muslim one.
Tariq Ramadan has just been at one of those phoney “dialogue of civilisation” meetings in Prague, where he self-assuredly declared that there is no “clash of civilizations” because — well, because Islam is part of Europe, Muslims are already in Europe, Europe owes so much, historically, to Islam. In other words, we are here, and here to stay, and there is nothing you can do about it.
Everything he said was wrong. Europe owes very little to Islam, unless one wishes to give credit to the translators (most of them, by the way, Christians and Jews) of some Greek texts — texts which were not Islamic in origin, and of which nothing much was made in the Islamic world. A handful of astronomers at Maragha (of course, if you want to believe the thin–skinned George Saliba of Columbia, why Copernicus practically owes everything to Muslim astronomers — but Saliba’s exaggerated claims, and his hysteria over Toby Huff’s even daring to raise the Big Question — “Why Did Islamic Science Die Out a Millennium Ago” (real answer: the Jews and Christians died out as a fructifying force in “Islamic civilization” and once the gates of ijtihad had closed, even those handful of quite islamically unorthodox Muslims, such as Al-Rhazi, could no longer be thrown up, or allowed the free and skeptical inquiry that even Western Europe in the time of Copernicus (a professor of theology at one point), or of Newton (a devout Christian) later, could permit. See Rodney Stark’s recent “For the Glory of God” on why within Western Christendom, the conditions were created in which modern science — science which undercut theological dogmas — could arise, but that Islam effectively prevented, completely, the free and skeptical inquiry which Christianity did not, in the end, stifle.
More than a thousand years ago the world of Islam separated, and indeed blocked, the former links of West and East (Alexander helped to bring Hellenism, after all, to Central Asia, and the Greco-Buddhist synthesis in Afghanistan was destroyed only by the Muslim invaders). Then Islamic civilization was given exaggerated credit for borrowing certain inventions from that same East — such as papermaking (see Dard Hunter) from China, or the concept of zero (my, what a big press that gets) and “Arabic” numerals from India — while the actual discoveries within Islam, by Muslims, are very limited, and by Muslim Arabs, as opposed to Persians, even more limited — as compared to the West, to China, even to Mayan and other New World civilizations. And when the Christian and Jewish communities were sufficiently reduced in significance, and all the dogmas sealed and rendered immutable, that was the end of so-called “Islamic Science.”
As for painting, sculpture, music, literature — there was almost no connection. A few themes — the Arabian Nights, for example — leave a few traces in a few writers (Al-Musawi at Columbia has written about this). Some may recall the footnotes in Robinson’s edition of Chaucer, where one runs across a few allusions to Ptolemy, and the “Almagest,” and things that call to mind the East. End of story.
What the Tariq Ramadans of this world, echoed by the Euro-Arab quislings hellbent, as hirelings, in rewriting the history of Europe so as to exaggerate the connection of the very Muslims who, for more than a millennium, attacked, raided up and down the coasts of Europe, and kept Western Christendom worried up until the final throwing back of the Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683. “Mama li turchi” has entered the Italian languagee — the bogeyman is “the Turk” which is to say, the generic Muslim.
And further, when Tariq Ramadan talks of Muslims as now being part of Western civilization, he is confusing, in his primitive notion of what constitutes taking part in a civilization, the mere presence of Muslims within Europe — within Europe, but not of Europe. They have failed to produce, or to emulate, a single one of the achievements of Western civilization — in art, in science, in the progress toward recognition of the equality of the sexes, in the equal treatment of religious and other minorities, in enlarging the scope of personal autonomy.
In every respect, in its emphasis on the collective, its hatred of individual freedoms — above all the freedom to change or drop one’s religion if that original religion is Islam (but not of course if one is “reverting” to Islam from another religion), in its adamant hostlility to most higher forms of artistic expression (save for mosque architecture, mostly a thousand years old, and calligraphy–not practiced at the level of, for example, Chinese calligraphy, achievement than in the Far East), including sculpture, painting, and music. If there are some RAI singers in Algeria, that is despite Islam, and some of them have been killed. If there are Indo-Persian miniatures, in which small human forms — usually of the folkloristic or fairy-tale Leyla-and-Majnoun characters, or of warriors or princes, are depicted — that is despite the orthodox prohibitions of Islam.
What exactly are the great contributions of Islam to European civilization? Virtually nothing. Yet Tariq Ramadan is allowed scot-free to get away with this sort of thing.
And in what way are those who now have somehow been allowed to live in Europe, essentially carrying within them a belief-system that causes them to owe their loyalty only to Islam, and to fellow Muslims, and to despise, and wish to work to undo, everything of value in Western civilization, one wonders how he can say that Muslims are now “part of Europe.” They are no more “part of Europe” than German occupying soldiers, strutting down the Champs-Elysees, pushing aside the fearful French (just as Arabs do today, on that same Champs-Elysees, to other fearful French. In Europe, but not of Europe. There is a big difference.
And someone needs to say that to Tariq Ramadan’s smiling taqiyya-practiced face.
In Washington, and elsewhere, the planning should be going on now for Turkey’s rejection — and how Erdogan will use this rejection to whip up hatred of “Western Christendom” and to further undo Kemalist constraints on Islam.
Instead, the rejection should be used by the Turkish secularists, from the industrialist Sabanci to various novelists who like to think of themselves as “bestriding East and West,” and the class of secularist beneficiaries of Ataturk’s reforms, to blame Erdogan, and blame the “Arab Muslims” and “Iranian Muslims” (that should not be difficult) for the supposedly “bad image” that Islam has received, and from which Turkey has suffered by being rejected.
Plan for the rejection of Turkey now (postings on this have appeared frequently before at Jihadwatch). So arrange things that Erdogan, instead of being able to use it to play to Muslim resentments, finds that the rejection is used against him, for his maladroit refusal, as in the case discussed above, to do any of the things vis-a-vis non-Muslim minorities that would show a real change of heart.
He refused, standing at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, to answer questions about, or to discuss, anything having to do with the Armenian genocide. He blocked Americans from using Turkey as a point of departure for the Iraq undertaking. He has vilified, absurdly, Israel — to curry favor with the Arabs, and prove his Muslim worth. And by now it should be clear that Islam itself is an immmiscible belief-system. It cannot be tamed. It cannot be reformed. And there is no way for Infidels to detect in which Muslims the violent Jihadist virus will lie quiescent, and dormant, and then erupt into its active and murderous state.
Pentagon propagandists — start now, will you? Even if in two weeks Europe does not put a full stop to Turkish ambitions, it will eventually do so — because Islam is Islam, and more and more Europeans are being forced, despite their own best efforts, to learn the awful truth.