Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald assesses the current scene and makes some foreign policy recommendations:
“I would blow myself up if I can’t feed my kids.” — from this article
The Egyptian government is corrupt. Egyptian leaders batten on the $2 billion in American aid, not to mention whatever they manage to wheedle out of the Europeans. But the poor, who exist everywhere, or others who are not poor but outraged at the corruption, do not merely say that Mubarak and company are “corrupt.” That is what non-Muslims would say. No — they say that Mubarak and his Family-and-Friends fellow thieves are “infidels” or in the pockets of “infidels” or in league with the “infidels” or un-Islamic. In other words, all discontent, all political life, can be reduced to the categories that Islam so conveniently provides, and the two biggest categories of all are those of the Believer and the Infidel.
It is no different in Saudi Arabia. Are the thousands of “princes” of the Al-Saud family helping themselves to the country’s oil wealth? Of course they are. Is it sickening? Of course it is. But the problem is seen, by those sickened by that appropriation, and the decadent pursuits (which are not “decadent” only in Islamic terms) of those princes is seen as demonstrating the “un-Islamic” nature of the Al-Saud.
Muslims view the world through the prism of Islam. It provides a Total Explanation of the Universe, which covers every possible detail of life. It would be impossible to find a category of injustice that cannot be defined in terms of Islam. Corruption is unjust, and therefore, for those who wish to fight it, it must necessarily be un-Islamic. On the other hand, spreading Islam, fighting the Infidels if they resist, and treating them terribly according to the principles of the sharia when and where they submit or are conquered, is also Islamic.
So what should we do? Those now making policy seem to want to believe any number of things, none of them true. Some want to believe that Islam is fundamentally decent, save for the fundamentalists, whose definition keeps changing and expanding — from a “tiny handful of extremists” to “the Wahhabis” to the “Wahhabis and the Salafists” to “10-15% of all Muslims” to…well, the latest effort is to convince us that there is “war going on within Islam itself” (nonsense — there are some who are secret or open secularists, but they are hardly making war on the others. They are just trying to survive as best they can, and to stop the further encroachments of Islam where it has temporarily been constrained, as in Turkey under Kemalist rulers, or even in Iraq under the Ba’athists).
There is no “war for the soul of Islam.” There is the 1350-year war of Islam against, not the West — but all the rest. It can die down, when the wherewithal for conducting the war diminishes. It can die down, when there are no triumphs to swell hearts and encourage the troops. It can die down, as money and access to arms diminish, or Muslims lose the freedom to move to Infidel lands to conduct, behind enemy lines, the kind of non-military warfare that undermines Infidel morale and even spreads Islam among the most vulnerable types within Infidel society: the economically marginal; the psychically marginal; the innocent, young and desperate prisoners, with many in both groups searching for An Answer; and the spoiled and confused flotsam and jetsam of Western social collapse, such as John Walker Lindh.
There is no “war within Islam.” There is only the age-old, and endless war of Islam, using whatever instruments it possesses (and military combat is only one of those instruments).
Unless this is understood, Infidels will no doubt keep transferring the already hideously large sums being given to OPEC (with its oligopolistic pricing, and seeming paralysis by the American government to tax gasoline and to support a crash program to develop all other sources, and supplies, of energy). This not being understood, Infidels will continue to supply aid to Egypt, Pakistan, the “Palestinians” and all other Musim groups or countries that do not have oil revenues (and of course whom the rich oil countries somehow are not expected to support — that is apparently the job of the so-called “rich” Western world, which means Western taxpayers who, compared to the rich of the Arabian peninsula, are on the brink of starvation).
Those who view the universe through the prism of Islam will always find a way to blame Infidels, or to regard those they resent in their own societies as Infidels. Let us not do anything to encourage that feeling. The Egyptian government is corrupt in every way. Continuing to give it aid is nonsensical — in every way.
The best strategy remains the same:
1) Limit the ability of Muslim states or groups to acquire major weaponry.
2) Work feverishly to diminish the OPEC revenues of the Muslim countries.
3) Work in Europe and in North America to educate people about the tenets of Islam, the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, and the history of both Jihad-conquest, and of the imposition of dhimmi status on subjugated non-Muslims, over 1350 years.
4) Support those in the Western world who are keenly aware of what is going on, and able to articulate the problem.
5) Do nothing that would inadvertently dampen the natural fissures within the Islamic world, between Arabs and non-Arabs, between Sunni and Shia. The obvious example is Iraq, where a thousand legitimate excuses for leaving now present themselves — and should be used to bid adieu, always reserving the right, of course, to supply one side (the Kurds, for example) or another, in order to promote our own interests — and not those of Islam.
6) By denying further aid, by embarking on a course of action that will ensure not only that the price of oil never goes down (which would preserve OPEC’s market share, and delay for too long the move away from fossil fuels), but that self-taxation will take away much of the power of OPEC to collect all the profit for itself (the more we tax the oil, the more the Saudis, the only swing producers, have to worry about raising the price further themselves — and this has been true and might have been acted on, had we understood Saudi Arabia, back in 1973), and by doing nothing that will hearten or encourage the forces of Jihad anywhere, and finally, by ending Muslim migration to dar al-Harb, and preventing the use of foreign (chiefly but not exclusively Saudi) money to promote Islam by funding mosques and madrasas (but no alternative mosques, funded by Infidel governments, should be supported — let the locals pay for their own housese of worship, or not have them at all), we can save ourselves.
Again, here is a sentence that needs to be memorized. Its truth cannot be denied. And that sentence is as follows:
“The presence of large numbers of Muslims within the lands of the Infidels has created a situation for the indigenous Infidels that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than it would be without the presence of large numbers of Muslims.”There are not many people in France, Italy, Spain, England, Germany, Belgium, Sweden, Denmark and other places who could deny the truth of that statement. Even when they do not know quite what to do, even if they are among those who “hope” that they can “integrate” many of the Muslims, they all know that a terrible mistake was made in allowing them to migrate in into their countries in the first place.
Save for the hirelings — those on the take from Arabs, the band of ex-diplomats, ex-intelligence agents, estate agents selling mansions and messuage to assorted rich Gulf Arabs, journalists, academic recipients of Saudi, U.A.E., and Kuwaiti largesse — everyone else (save for the wandering tribe of antisemites, who find themselves quite naturally on the side of Islam, even if they don’t know a thing about it or give a damn) knows that that sentence is true.