Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses some aspects of the question of monitoring mosques in the West:
The governments of the West will all have to monitor the mosques. That means they will have to hire agents who 1) know Arabic and other relevant languages, Urdu, Turkish, Farsi, and who are 2) are either non-Muslim, but can pass as Muslims (Copts, who are forced to receive some training in Islam, might be helpful; so too would Maronites, Arabic-speaking Jews, Chaldeans, Pakistani Christians, and Berbers who have turned). One would be foolish to rely on Muslim agents to monitor the khutbas and other goings-on in mosques.
Monitoring the mosques all over the non-Muslim world, of course, is a tall order. And a very expensive one, added to all the other huge expenses incurred in the campaign to make Infidel lands safe from the very people who are, paradoxically, still allowed in when should have been clear to all who had bothered to study the doctrines of Islam and the history of Islamic rule over non-Muslims, what was to have been expected.
These costs include those for the local police to monitor individuals, and for the lawyers and judges who must give their time to approving, or explaining, taps and search warrants and suchlike, and for the extra costs of guarding power plants and LNG terminals, and ports, and airports, and marshals on planes, and …on and on. Economists need to figure out just what the cost of this internal security against Muslim terrorist threats actually is. It would be instructive for taxpayers to know this: the real cost, in terms of all this monitoring and societal anxiety, and the constant need to worry about the latest demands — for a prayer room in schools, or a lawsuit demanding that a Muslim woman be shown with her face completely covered for her driver’s license, or all the other demands, big and small, ludicrous and plausible, that are made by Muslims who do not believe in pluralism. (That is, they do not believe in it except insofar as in the West they must use it to their own advantage, and only until they attain sufficient numbers.)
It would be instructive for taxpayers to know the full cost of protecting ourselves against (and accommodating with the other hand) those who do not believe that power should flow from the expressed will of the people, but from the codified will of Allah in the shari’a. It would be enlightening to know how much they cost, those who do not believe in the equality of the sexes, nor in individualism, nor in free and skeptical inquiry. Indeed, it is hard to see how, and in what way, Muslims who are true believers share many of the beliefs that are essential to, and defining of, our civilization. Why then do we so blithely allow ourselves to welcome those who do not wish us, our ideals, our society, our own beings, well? What sort of nonsense is this?
But, coming back to our moutons, those little European lambs whose throats are slit in the streets at Eid al-Fitr, just how are those mosques going to be monitored? Will there be tapes? Will fulltime agents have to visit every mosque, for every sermon? Will they wear wires, in the spirit of the The Sopranos or Tommasso Buscetta? How much will it all cost, all this visiting, and taping, and monitoring, and reporting, and checking, and re-checking? How much expense are the countries of Western Europe, and how much trouble, are they prepared to go to?
Once upon a time, one could argue that workers were needed, and Moroccans, Algerians, and so on were eager to come. And so they were, but they had other ideas. They did not jettison their ideological baggage when they arrived in the ports of southern Europe — no, that baggage became ever more precious and important and defining in their lives. The European elites refused to see, or refused to listen to those who warned that Islamic tenets had to be taken seriously. Now they are in the fix that they do not quite know how to address straight on.
But there is a way. First, limit all future immigration to people who will not require all this monitoring and other expense. Invite in people from Eastern Europe and Russia. Those from Eastern Europe are, after all, officially now part of the EU; they deserve to be allowed to migrate, and to take those jobs. They will not be the great security risks that Muslim immigrants will be, and thus their actual cost will not include the hidden cost, as yet unknown, of monitoring them. Or allow in Filipinos, Chinese, Hindus and Sikhs from India, people from Latin America — none of whom would require the khutba-monitoring, the taps and the tapes and so on, that would be necessary, from now on, for Muslim immigrants.
And do what can be done to sever the ideological links with the most virulent promoters of hostility. The Europeans should support any American effort to put permanently out of commission the satellite stations (and the satellite itself) of broadcast networks that support jihad. They should monitor not only the mosques, but of course all radio and television stations aimed at Muslims within their countries, and not shirk their duty to shut them down if there is the slightest evidence of hostility being encouraged against non-Muslims of any kind.
That is a beginning. But it requires a real understanding of Islam, and how, as a system of thought-control, and total regulation both of the individual, and of the Believer’s relations with all Infidels, there is nothing quite like it in the dangers it poses.
It would be interesting to know how the Turks, at least under Ataturk and Inonu, monitored the mosques, which ones they closed down outright, and how, before the age of tape-recorders, they ensured that the content was, if not anodyne, at least not full of rants against the Infidel.
Given that the Qur’an and the hadith are so full of such rants, it is fascinating to consider out of what material any khutba can be constructed, if the manichaeism essential to Islam — Muslims being Good, and Infidels being Bad — is deliberately proscribed. If the right of Islam to conquer can’t be mentioned, if the need to “struggle in the path of Allah” (the Jihad) is given only a psychological interpretation, if the natural law by which “Islam must dominate and is not to be dominated” cannot be invoked, why then it is hard to see what is left? And as for inspiring tales of Muhammad from the hadith and the sira, given that he was a political leader and warrior, and fought 78 battles, and was involved in killing hostages, and ordering the assassination of all sorts of people, including a Jew who was over 90 (or was it 100?) years old, and that his favorite wife Aisha was nine when he consummated his marriage to her — well, it is hard to see out of what acceptable material Muhammad’s life can be told. Possibly it will all come down to chanting over and over again the 99 epithets attached to Allah. If many find it boring, and begin to look for that oldtime religion in other places, that would be, from the Infidel point of view, highly desirable.