Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the French fatwa condemning those who attack “blindly,” and the dhimmis who fall for it:
Finally, after ten days of rioting, with 300 cities scenes of attacks, the supposedly “good” Muslims offer a fatwa apparently condemning the riots. The adverb “blindly” is big enough, as Robert Spencer and others have pointed out, to allow for all sorts of attacks — if they are not “blind” but directed at, say, American or Israeli or English or Australian embassies or consulates or citizens. That might be okay. Wasn’t it former Prime Minister Raymond Barre who said of a previous Muslim attack in Paris that some “innocents” were killed along with the intended (Jewish) targets, implying that there were right, and wrong, victims of such attacks?
This fatwa is terrible in another way. Accepting it, indeed welcoming it, means that the French government now becomes complicit in the notion that Muslims can tell Muslims what to do, even Muslim “citizens of France.” But that should be rejected. The fatwa-issuers do not have the right to tell Muslim citizens of France how to behave, even if in this particular case they are telling them that, at this point, with France not yet as far gone demographically as it will be in a decade or two, they should cool it — for they are damaging the only thing that counts to these fatwa-issuers, which is to say, the present and future well-being of Islam. In that respect, they are no different from those whose behavior they claim to regulate; both want the same ultimate aim. The rioting Muslims want to seize the Infidel property, or the positions in society, to which as Muslims they believe themselves entitled, that they do not have to earn. In the end, the goal of the fatwa-issuers is not different: they would like to ensure not merely the survival of Islam in France and the rest of Western Europe, but its ultimate dominance.
In this respect, the rioters are akin to Hamas and Islamic Jihad and Hezbollah, and the fatwa-issuers akin to Mahmoud Abbas. Same goal, different means. The Fast Jihad of open threats and aggression, the Slow Jihad of all the other instruments of Jihad, including the soothing words, and make-believe cool-it message of this fatwa.
Articles about this subject — the nonsense and lies and half-truths and ellipses of Muslim spokesmen (as in that Qur’anic passage about “He who kills a man….” with the important Muslim exceptions interpolated into the Hebrew original from which the passage comes, exceptions that do allow for quite a bit of such killing, and even make it a duty) — well, such articles need to be written and submitted to local papers, and their contents made the subject of calls to various talk shows, nonstop. In other words, those who are foolish or ignorant enough not to see through these documents need to be shown up publicly, so that the wider public, already deeply suspicious, will receive one more booster shot in the series, intended to inoculate them against taqiyya and kitman. Everything, if approached in the right way, can become what is called a teaching moment.
Here is what needs to be taught:
There is not a “moderate” version of the Qur’an.
There is not a “moderate” edition of the Hadith as collected and ranked according to putative authenticity by the most respected muhaddithin, Bukhari and Muslim.
There is not a “moderate” version of the Sira.
There is only one version of each. That is the one Bin Laden and Al-Zawahiri read, and so do hundreds of millions of Muslims in dar al-Islam. There they do not have to engage, or do not feel they have to engage, in the sly taqiyya-and-kitman and highly selective quotation of passages, with many telling yet unexplained ellipses in what they quote, that is so artfully employed by those Muslims in the dar al-Harb, and above all here in America. This new French fatwa demonstrates anew the Islamic ability to misstate and mislead, all in the service of continuing to misinform and fool Infidels, as many as they can, for as long as they can, as they try to figure out how to do what may become impossible: to keep lying about the tenets and history of Islam until they are so firmly entrenched that they cannot be dislodged.
But we Americans are watching how those “entrenched” Muslims in Europe are now behaving, as well as those in the Middle East. And there is nothing the Muslims in this country or in Europe can do to keep us either from drawing certain conclusions from what we can so clearly observe (or from the ever-more frantic calls from within Europe for something to be done about the islamization of Europe and its peoples). Nothing can keep us from studying Islam without bowdlerized versions of the Qur’an (Michael Sells’ preposterously dishonest “Approaching the Qur’an”), and without those “guides” who are in fact professors and members of MESA Nostra and who generously offer their “services” to students and government officials alike. They are akin to some smiling fellow who offers to take Western tourists, for the slightest of fees (and possibly just a little more at the end, please, effendi?) through some Middle Eastern tourist attraction or trap, or through the souk, assuring us he has only one thing in mind, effendi: to make your trip as authentic an experience as possible, effendi, as he carefully steers you to the stalls where the owners have previously paid him off, bringing the Infidel tourist sheep to be well and truly sheared.