Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the oppressive “anti-Muslim rhetoric” with which Akbar Ahmed takes issue here:
“The anti-Muslim rhetoric, which has saturated public discourse, has left the impression that Islam and its followers are being targeted for annihilation. The reaction from the Muslim community has been to strike out in violence to defend its survival and restore its honor and restore dignity.”
— from this articleWhat “anti-Muslim rhetoric” has “saturated public discourse” would that be? The constant references by every single political figure in the Western world who counts to Islam as a “religion” of “peace” and “tolerance” (Bush, Blair), a “great religion” (Rice), a “proud religion” (Stephen Hadley) whose adherents are horrified by those who do terrible things “in the name of Islam” while they violate the essence of this “peaceful” and “tolerant” and “great” and “proud” religion? Do you, inhabitant of the Western world, feel that anti-Muslim rhetoric has saturated public discourse? Do you feel that way even given how the major newspapers and radio and television can hardly bring themselves even to mention the word “terrorist” (with the BBC being the gold standard of appeasement)? Do you feel that way even after 1350 years of Muslim conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims — or if we ignore that, after decades of Muslim Jihad in Kashmir, Israel, West Africa and East Africa, India, and within the Muslim lands the continued persecution and murder of non-Muslims (chiefly Christians and Hindus) — or if we ignore even that, then simply the last four years of attacks, some of them famous, with many victims, some of them hardly noted, with few victims, some of them attacks warded off or foiled so they get no attention at all (there have been 25,000 would-be terrorist attacks in Israel in the past four years)? Anti-Muslim rhetoric has saturated public discourse? This is nonsense.
Muslims are not “striking out” in reaction to any of the quite modest measures undertaken so far to deal with Muslim terrorism. It is fantastic, after all, that many of the mosques tied to terrorism have not been permanently shut, or that all Muslim immigration has not as yet permanently been closed down — as if we somehow have a duty to allow into our midst those whose belief-system tells them that they must hate us, must not take us as friends, but must only feignedly do so at times in order to further the cause of Islam, and that Muslims everywhere have a duty to participate, collectively and sometimes individually, in the Jihad to spread Islam, using whatever instruments are available and most effective.
Muslims are doing what they have always done whenever they have the chance. What has changed are three things:
1) The permitted migration of large numbers of Muslims into Bilad al-Kufr, the Lands of the Infidels;
2) The gigantic increase in Arab and Muslim wealth, entirely the product of an accident of geology — with that money providing the wherewithal for the vast support for the building and maintenance of a network of mosques and madrasas all over the world, including the Infidel lands, and money for propaganda: for the hiring of public relations agents, lawyers, businessmen, diplomats, intelligence agents, and academics all of whom work, some in this way, some in that, to be apologists both for Islam. Often they work, more specifically, for Saudi Arabia and its objectives in promoting, as all Muslims inevitably must if they are good Muslims, the Jihad to spread Islam across the globe — for Islam “must dominate and is not to be dominated”;
3) The technological developments that have permitted the spreading of the full message of Islam into every nook and cranny of the Muslim world, so that even the simple illiterate villager, the pious man who might say his prayers but go no further than that, can now be exposed to propaganda on tapes (think of what those tapes did for the Ayatollah Khomeini when he was still in his French exile — those tapes that spread all over Iran with his violent and implacable message, so thoroughly Islamic) and on videocassettes (now also spread around — how wonderful to see those decapitations of various Infidels, the knife going in, the blood spurting — what a recruitment tool! what an inspiration to Muslims everywhere!), and of course satellite channels (such as Rached Ghannouchi’s ongoing attempts to undermine Tunisian secularism via satellite from London).
Unhindered migration behind Infidel lines, vast sums of money, and technological advances in the West and by the West, exploited by Muslims who were themselves completely incapable of such advances, or indeed of creating economies that would earn them the kind of revenues the oil bonanza allows them — these are the three developments that explain the problem.
Jihad was not born yesterday. The pseudo-moderate Kamal Nawash insisted on the BBC yesterday the the “problem” for non-Muslims with Islam somehow began, for reasons he carefully does not identify, about 20 years ago That’s right: while admitting that the current problem is not to be attributed to this or that specific grievance, whether that grievance is summarily identified as “Iraq” or “Palestine,” Nawash carefully insisted to Claire Bolderson that “the problem started about 20 years ago.” In other words, even as he goes through the motions of being a “brave” and “outspoken” reformer — which these days, in order to win the hearts, and mindes, and especailly the pocketbooks of those dispensers of grant money and private contributions and even government funding — Nawash is clearly diverting attention from, for example, the analysis that correctly labels the Arab Muslim (and Arab islamochristian) war on Israel as a classic Jihad, and would like to make the problem seem to be one that does not extend as far back as the creation of Islam, but is simply a matter of some “20 years.” Well, to say such a thing shows the phoniness, or possibly the incomplete miscomprehension (or possibly the complete comprehension) of Islamic doctrine by Mr. Kamal Nawash.
The “problem” did not start “20 years ago.” The “problem” — to which there is no “solution” — started 1350 years ago, with an ideology. The ability to spread that ideology, the ability to pay for the spread of that ideology by supporting Muslims, and therefore Muslim demands, and conduct of Da’wa, in the West — that is a function of several things happening all at once, roughly over the past 40 years. First, there was the beginning of North African immigration into France in the mid-late 1960s, after the Algerian War ended, and the nearly-simultaneous beginnings of Turkish gastarbeiter going to West Germany (Ludwig Erhard’s wunderbar economic boom, don’t forget), and Pakistanis to England. The flow increased, and to it were added Moroccans in Spain, Somalis and North Africans and Egyptians in Italy. Everywhere, Saudi and other Arab money helped to fortify the presence of Muslims and the potential for the future conduct of Da’wa.
That is the how it happened. This is how we got to where we are today.