Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explores some lessons contained within the chill that has gripped Dutch public discourse:
The lesson of the death threats against politicians in the Netherlands is this: Learn from each other. Every other Infidel country should be paying close attention to what is happening in the Netherlands. Every other Infidel country should be paying attention to what is happening in France. Every other Infidel country should be paying attention to what is happening in England. Jahjah in Belgium, the imam of Venissieux in France, the Australian imams who rant about Infidels and about Jihad, the Finsbury Mosque people — and also the oozing, “respectable” and even knighted Sir Iqbal Sacarnie, the Muslims threatening the leader of a political party in Norway, demanding the police stay away from Muslim “zones” in Denmark, or in Malmo, Sweden — this is all of a piece.
The Western powers must begin to dare to discuss, perhaps at meetings of NATO, the ideology of Islam — oh hell, go ahead and call it “radical” Islam if you will — which is surely the greatest threat that the peoples and governments that constitute NATO now face. Oh, and is Turkey still a member of NATO? Well if that inhibits discussion, then form a new group. But the very notion that one cannot examine what is happening worldwide, and especially all over the Infidel countries, is suicidal. (What happens in the Muslim countries, where all political discontent and resentments are naturally expressed in Muslim rhetoric, with appeals to Muslim beliefs, and almost nothing takes place without reference to Islam, is not the key problem for Infidels — it is the Infidel world itself that is being subverted, in the most classic sense, from within).
Take, for example, the above-mentioned imam of Venissieux. What infuriated the French tax-paying public of Infidels was not his preaching about how to (mis)treat women, but rather the fact that the imam dont on parle himself had two wives, and by those wives, a total of 16 children — every single one of them on the French dole. Thus, the French, who like many Europeans have been carefully limiting the size of their families because of the expense of child-rearing (including the expense of private schools, now that public schools have become both very dangerous, in so many areas, and with their academic standards fatally vitiated, by the presence of so many aggressive and hostile Muslim students), were enraged to have this visible example of Muslim families living at French expense, families where families with eight, or ten, or thirteen, or sixteen children are not unusual.
In her La Rabbia e l’Orgoglio, Oriana Fallaci had a phrase that no doubt was found by many to be unpleasant; she wrote in one of her outbursts of sheer fury and frustration of Muslims in Europe “breeding like rats.” It was, it remains an offensive phrase. But some French people were, no doubt, put in mind of such phrases by the imam of Venissieux.
But don’t be fooled; Dominique de Villepin has not joined the side of the angels; he is still on the side of the djinns. Sarkozy is by Pensée Unique now to be demonized unless he backtracks. NPR stations in America are now carrying programs in which we are “told about France” by those highly-disinterested parties, Tariq Ramadan and the quasi-apologist Olivier Roy (or in the latter case, perhaps he is simply stupid). And if the “respectable” leaders in France, save for Philippe de Villiers, and Sarkozy if he does not soften but hardens, are incapable of comprehension, the leaders of other Western countries are no better. Enough with this grotesque attention to making the Muslim countries minimally better. Enough money flung at new Democracy Projects or Initiatives for Muslim Democracy or whatever it is that they are called, with such naive and irrelevant hope.
What counts is this: France is being forced, at the point of riots and mayhem, looting and rapes and even murder, to change its laws, its customs, its understandings. And almost no one outside France in the mass media, or the governments of the West, seems deeply sympathetic. Rather, they all seem willing to buy this Craig-Smith (winner of this year’s Walter Duranty Prize, in a walk) stuff about the “angry” and “frustrated” “young men” who are “not allowed” to be “part of France” — tell that to all the black Antillais, or black Christians from former French West Africa, or all those who came from Indochina, with a straight face. Tell their children at the grandes ecoles that they are not “welcomed” in France because the French are “racist” etc. etc.
Not for one minute do the Craig Smiths of this world consider — even if only to deny — the relevance of what Islam teaches, what it inculcates, what it offers by way of attitudinal miasma that naturally affects, and explains the world-view of, those who call themselves Muslims — whether or not they read the Qur’an, whether or not they attend mosques. They have a word, they have the Word, the Truth, and from that Truth which they need not go to a mosque to learn about, they believe they are entitled to view things — and above all other things, Infidels — in a certain and implacably hostile way. And that hostility cannot be made to disappear with employment or permanent settlement in Infidel lands. It will remain, in other forms, expressed in other ways. And meanwhile, France will have ceased to be France, in a foolish attempt to buy temporary peace, instead of undoing the damage it did to itself by not heeding those few who warned that unlike all other immigrants, Muslims brought with them in their mental baggage something that could not quite be declared, might not quite be understood, but which has grave long term affects for the unwary society that welcomed them into its midst.