Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald decries the ongoing dhimmi calls to ignore the elements of Islam that incite violence and call for subjugation of infidels — calls that are still eagerly heeded by liberals and conservatives alike:
The Pakistani Senate Chairman, Mohammedmian Soomro, “said Islam, like all other religions, stood for tolerance but is unfortunately being misunderstood in some quarters”¦” — from this news item
Misunderstood. In order to understand Islam properly, we are to ignore over a hundred passages in the Qur’an, including all of Sura 9. We are to ignore many hundreds of Hadith, as collected and winnowed and judged to be the most “authentic” by al-Bukhari and Muslim. We are to ignore all the events in Muhammad’s life that preach hatred and violence, looting and killing and seizure and enslavement of Infidels, and violence as well against all those who dared to cross or mock or behave in an insufficiently submissive way to Muhammad.
We are to ignore reality. Infidels everywhere must not dare to read Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira — or rather, they may read the Qur’an, but without comprehension, without any glosses, without any understanding of abrogation, without being able to figure out that the half-dozen phrases that sound nice on first reading (“There shall be no compulsion in religion”) may have been abrogated (and will those organizations now mailing out free Qur’ans be sure to include a little sheet explaining “naskh” or abrogation to their innocent audiences?). Or they may mean, to Muslims, something quite different from what we may take them to mean. Simply ask yourself: does the inferior status, the at times unendurable status, of being a non-Muslim in a Muslim-ruled land itself not constitute “compulsion” which, over time, led those attempting to shed that status to become Muslims? And isn’t that dhimmi status quite enough “compulsion” even without going into the real meaning of the phrase?
No, on the Internet, the full texts of Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira are a click away. Intelligent discussion — as at Answering Islam — is available. Scholarly articles are available at www.dhimmitude.org. A host of websites run by ex-Muslims, the surest and most relentless guides to what Islam is all about — can be found at www.secularislam.org and www.faithfreedom.org. They vary in tone; they vary in the level of the quality of the prose, depending on the individual author. But they all provide so much information that, at the moment, the only problem is in acquiring the funds to hire translators to make available in the world’s major languages the contents which are mostly, in English. There is also, of course, this site, which attempts to gather information about the Jihad — a worldwide phenomenon — and about the status of non-Muslims both under Muslim rule, and even in the Infidel world. In that world, as if in some kind of foretaste of what might come, some Infidels have decided, even where there is no need, and where such behavior merely helps promote the Jihad which they fear, to behave, voluntarily, as they would be forced to behave under Muslim rule.
It is too late to insist that we all participate in denying what is staring us in the face. Keep up those “dialogue-of-civilization” meetings all you want. Invite and fool all those willing to be fooled. But in the end, it is the behavior of Muslims, whether in London or Madrid or Amsterdam or Falls Church, Virginia, or Basra or Baghdad or Riyadh or Jiddah or for that matter Bahrain and Algiers and Karachi and Islamabad and the Moluccas and southern Thailand and the Sudan, that will determine, along with those canonical texts, how Islam is perceived. Those with open eyes will still consult those studies of Islam by Western scholars which the careful myrmidons of MESA Nostra have tried so desperately to keep their students from learning about, much less reading — usually by not mentioning them at all, or if mentioning them, proleptically dismissing them as “classic examples of ‘Orientalism.'” This ensures that those dutiful students will simply abide by the judgment of assorted Rashids and Hamids and Khaleds and Omids, and never trouble themselves to actually read Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Arthur Jeffery, Richard Gottheil, David Margoliouth, Clement Huart, Edmnond Fagnan, W. St. Clair Tisdal, and a hundred others, whose knowledge of Islam and of Muslim history far exceeded anything possessed by the run-of-the-mill academics today.
Still, to judge by certain hints and glints, there are those even in the bosom of MESA Nostra who, for professional reasons, may have to be members but are not idiots. They are not happy with the Coles and Khalidis and Andersons and the others who have come to dominate and twist that organization. These, quietly working in their own fields, are beginning to figure out — a little late, some of them embarrassedly confess — what Islam is all about. And they have been helped by all sorts of things, including those websites listed above — and even this one.
Time marches on, goes the old newsreel. And information, that famous information highway — well, some may still have their thumbs out, homo-pollex style, mere hitchhikers on that highway. But many others have been picked up, or are now driving their own cars, and are roaring along. They cannot, despite the best efforts of assorted and essentially interchangeable Mohammedmian Soomros in Pakistan and elsewhere, be flagged and pulled over.
Too late.