Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores some of the delusions that pass for truth today, and how it is that they have become so widespread:
The world of Islam is a world of nonsense and lies and denial and deception and filial piety that refuses to face up to facts. It could be called, too sweetly in my view, the “Dream Palace of the Arabs.” Come to think of it, it has been called that by Fouad Ajami, who is too intelligent not to know the truth about Islam, but too afraid that he would be cutting his ties, and his career prospects, and his usefulness, if he were to engage with the real subject that underlies his “we were all Nasserites in those days, sitting in Beirut cafes and drinking endless cups of thick muddy coffee…” (or words, and shtick, to that effect).
The Arab Mind by Patai is said to be read earnestly at The Pentagon. Fine. But it continually failes to relate the behavior of Arabs, as uber-Muslims, to Islam itself. A better book for those purposes, which has been mentioned endlessly at JW, is Andre Servier’s The Psychology of the Musulman, last published in 1923.
The sheer craziness that Islam induces is abetted by Western journalists who quickly — too quickly — adapt to it, and silently make allowances for it. Why do they apply the lowest of standards to Muslims and to Arabs, and even at times participate in the farce — as when the most absurd statements about so-called “atrocities” of Americans or Israelis are bruited about? How lazy, how weak, can these journalists be? How monstrously they have covered Islam: never has the American, or the Western television-viewer or radio-listener, or newspaper-reader been given any hint of the thick miasma of lies that one immediately encounters throughout the Muslim world, in minds that find reality too painful. Whenever they can find solace by blaming Infidels, by lying about them, they will. And they will continue to do so until things are as they are now in the Islamic Republic of Iran — where Islam itself is put on trial in the mental courts of all who can think, and is found guilty as charged.
This craziness goes on virtually unnoticed while Western authorities occupy themselves only with Islam’s charming, well-spoken, decent representatives — the very best, the very most unrepresentative representatives — such as Fouad Ajami. In Iraq the Americans were partly snookered, and partly wanted to believe, that the “good” Shi’a exiles represented Iraq: that Chalabi and Allawi and Rend al-Rahim and Kanan Makiya somehow represented more than 1% or 2% or even possibly 5% of the population. Then there are those who believe that Fouad Ajami’s example shows the sweet conceivable reasonableness of Lebanese Shi’a, or that Azar Nafisi’s example shows that we should not attack Iran, lest it dampen the campaign of all those nice innocent Iranian enemies of the regime whose cause would be set back, or that in Syria we should make common cause with Fawaz Ghadri, or in Egypt with Salah Eddin Ibrahim — NO. No more being led astray by those whose interests, in the end, are not those of Infidels.
In Turkey, for example, the “secularists” want Turkey to be admitted to the E.U. Orhan Pamuk wants Turkey in the E.U. — just ask Christopher Hitchens, qui fait son petit Orwell. And it is understandable why. Yet Turkish “secularists” at every turn have shown that they took Kemalism, secularism, for granted, and did not continue ruthlessly to constrain and contain Islam more and more and more. Instead, they let the Islamists, Erbakan and then Erdogan and their supporters, to cleverly out-maneuver them at every step. Now the “secularists” are feeling worried. In order somehow to make their own positions more secure, they would like to dilute the power of Islam in Turkey by making the problem not that of the Turkish secularists alone, but of all the non-Muslims in the E.U.
The policy for survival of Infidels should not be based on the siren-songs or the unrepresentative nature of those perfectly presentable, highly articulate, deeply self-interested “Muslim-for-identification-purposes” Muslims. It should instead be based only on what will give the greatest security to the Infidels. That means keeping Turkey out of the E.U. That means not hesitating a minute to attack the Islamic Republic of Iran, even if some in the Iranian opposition believe that “if only” the West stays its hand, finally some internal revolt will solve the problem. But of course, Iran, as a Muslim state, cannot ever be permitted to acquire nuclear weaponry — not unless there is a mass apostasy, a return to Zoroastrianism, an embrace of Christianity, a willingness to contemplate free-thinking disbelief. And in Lebanon, the best course is to find ways to lure the Hezbollah into sending its best fighters off to Iran to defend the Shi’a heartland, or to Iraq.
What could be better than to have the black-balaclaved bezonians of Hezbollah fight with, and kill or be killed by, the black-balaclaved bezonians of Al-Zarqawi and company?