Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald comments on the Saudi hate literature being distributed from American mosques, and the energetic Saudi madrasa-building in Asia:
Saudi Arabia needs to understand that it has to stop this. No more hate tracts in American mosques. No more funding of madrasas world-wide. Otherwise, the royal family may find that all the information that has been collected about its decadent doings will find its way to the Internet, for the delectation of Saudis who, of course, in deploring their rulers, will first identify them as Infidels. And it can’t be much fun to be a member of the Al-Saud family once those palaces start being attacked, and even those villas, and country estates, in Western Europe. Even Bandar’s Plantagenet hunting lodge in England, or that house in Aspen where he had the mountain removed so as to get a better view — all of that can be most unpleasant.
And then of course there are the oilfields of Al-Haza, not to mention the recent explorations by — was it Elf or Total Fina that signed the contracts — in the Rub al-Khali. The former are right on the Persian Gulf, and unlike Iraq, there are not long distances for the oil to travel or to be sabotaged. And as for the natural gas in the Rub al-Khali — the natural point of exit is Oman, and for the right cut Sultan Qaboos, who doesn’t much are for Saudi Arabia anyway (remember the Dhofar rebellion, aided and abetted by Saudi Arabia?), might strike a deal. Oh, there is a good deal that can be done to Saudi Arabia. And that will be, if it doesn’t stop that funding.
What’s that, you say? Saudi Arabia has always been a “staunch ally”? How, exactly? Tell us how, tell us what Saudi Arabia has done by way of curbing the threat posed by its very own ideology to the entire Infidel world?
We can’t appeal to the wisdom or goodness of Saudis. We can only threaten them, either the ruling family itself — in other words, instead of protecting them, throwing them to the wolves, and seizing all of their overseas assets for they, in this war, are enemy aliens and their property can be seized (go back and see what happened to German-owned property during World War II). There are so many ways to make Saudi Arabia behave, if only we stopped pretending.
A Jihad Watch reader calling himself “William James” has assured us that “poverty” is one of the reasons for the bad behavior of some Muslims. Really? All the detailed studies, which analyze one by one the actual participants in terrorist activities, rather than rely on airy generalizations — i.e, that emulate Sir Lewis Namier’s prosopographic studies — show that on the whole they are much better off, and much better educated, than the run of Muslims. It is, precisely, the completely illiterate villagers in remote places in, say, Afghanistan, or Indonesia, who have not yet been exposed to, for example, audiocassettes and videocassettes, who have no access to madrasas, Saudi-funded or otherwise, who do not even possess, perhaps, much in the way of a mosque, who are least susceptible to the siren-song of the Jihad. Last I looked, it was the richest Muslim country of all, Saudi Arabia, that was a mortal threat, given its bankrolling of mosques, madrasas, and all sorts of louche undertakings, including bribing C.I.A. officials, Western diplomats, and journalists, as previously it had employed ARAMCO as its exclusive public relations agent, to present itself as a “staunch ally” of the Western world when it is in fact a permanent enemy — with or without its completely corrupt ruling family — not only of the West, but of the entire non-Muslim world.
In taking the name of one of America’s most distinguished thinkers, William James, who could never have emerged from a Muslim society, and would not have lasted a minute in such a society (see Jacques Barzun’s tribute-cum-study, A Walk with William James, or the beautiful short obituary by John Jay Chapman, in which he described James has having “so unexpectedly and incredibly died”) the blogger then makes a second point. It is the usual Tu-Quoque thing, about how all religions have their problems, and Christianity managed to have its “reformation” and now Islam is having “its reformation.” What reformation? The return to purity of practice, including the purity of the unadulterated application of the Sharia, is called “Wahhabism.” There is no reform of Islam. There are those who speak about “reform.” When Islam was seen, much more clearly, as weak, in the period 1900-1930, many more “Muslim reformers” were in evidence. They got nowhere. How could they? What texts could they have changed? Could they change the facts of Muhammad’s life? Could they change the Hadith deemed “authentic”? Could they have touched one hair on the head of the Qur’an? How, pray tell?
Anyone who speaks blithely of Muslim reformation has got to tell us what he means. What texts, precisely, will be changed, and by whom? And with what authority? If these questions cannot even begin to receive a plausible answer, then that itself is telling.
Finally, the blogger above assures us that we should join “interfaith groups” and reach out, blah blah blah. Nonsense. Those “interfaith groups” are invariably the tool of Muslims, who use them for the purposes of presenting more wool over more Infidel eyes, of engaging in outwardly sympathetic, and inwardly deeply deceptive and hostile, acts toward Infidels, who are being placated only in order to keep everyone from studying too closely what Islam is all about, and to maintain those conditions in which Muslims can establish themselves, or to use the power of inveigled Infidels (including an appeal to a phony “Arab-American” identity, a transparent attempt by Muslim Arabs to exploit the larger numbers, and far greater acceptance in American society, of the descendants of the Christians of the Middle East, especially Maronites and Copts, whose own ancestors came here precisely in order to flee the persecution by Muslims) to their own malevolent ends
No, there is no more need to play the fool. If it is shown that large numbers of Infidels have managed to educate themselves about the nature of Islam, and above all in its immutable attitude grounded in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira toward Infidels, the Muslims themselves will have to change their strategy. And it may be too late for them to do so. An aroused Western or even non-Muslim world will not permit the criminal negligence of the past, and will demand much greater resistance and counter-pressure, not because the West is conducting “a war on Islam” but because Islam has been conducting a war, not on the West but on the entire non-Muslim world, for 1350 years. What has changed is that, after the Cold War when Islam was seen as a “bulwark” against Communism, and after the farce of the decolonization period when fabulously rich Arabs presented themselves as among the world’s “victims” (save for Algeria, there was no colonial presence anywhere in the Arab world that lasted for even a half-century), after the terrorist attacks, we have begun to see what was there to see all along. But which we did not see, until after millions of Muslims had been allowed into our countries and the Saudis had energetically put up mosques all over. That presence has created a situation that makes life for the indigenous Infidels more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than it would have been had such immigration and mosque-building been stopped before it began.