Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald dismantles another prevailing dhimmi assumption:
We”re often told that the defense against global jihad is disproportionate, and its advocates fear-mongers, because “no Islamic country can ever hurt the West.”
Really? What about Islamic “groups” then? What about communities of Muslims, living in the West, working actively to transform that West, now by noisy demands, and now by ostentatious displays of sweet reason, and by a sudden great attachment to the beauties of “pluralism” and “dialogue” — as on display in the taqiyya-kitman of the “new, improved” Islam that those Bright Young Muslim Things hold out as having so much promise, and that Tariq Ramadan, in his sinister way, is now flogging as well? “Dialogue,” “pluralism” that is at the heart of Islam — oh good god, spare us this nonsense.
Islam has been “hurting the West” for 1350 years. It took over what was once a central part of the Christian world — Mesopotamia, Syria, Egypt, the rest of North Africa. It took over the ancient homeland of the Jews, and apparently they who had endured the rule of Romans and Byzantines found the Muslim overlords so oppressive that many of them had to leave the Land of Israel — which is why eventually 90% of the world’s Jews ultimately came to live under Western Christendom, terrible as its own intermittent persecutions may have been, rather than live in the “paradise” of Islam.
Islam has been “hurting the West” ever since Muslims conquered Byzantium and destroyed its civilization — though the flight of Greek scholars to the West, it is true, helped to spark the Revival of Learning.
Islam has been “hurting the West” of Christians and Jews, and “hurting the East” of Hindus and Buddhists, for as long as it has been in existence.
“No Islamic country can hurt the West”? Madrid, Beslan, New York, Washington and a thousand plots and subplots uncovered in recent years suggest otherwise. But the hundreds of billions of dollars now being spent to defend against the Jihad, to monitor radiation levels in mosques, to protect synagogues and churches, Jewish and Christian schools, outspoken political figures (how much does it cost the Dutch state to protect Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali?), parliaments, subway systems, railroad stations, airports, bus stations, chemical plants, oil refineries, and on and on — all because of the existence of Believers in Islam — does that not inflict economic damage, as Bin Laden and others have expressly noted with such glee, on the Western world?
And what of the vast sums being expended now in Iraq, in a vain hope that “democracy” will remedy the situation, just as naive Israelis used to believe that making the desert bloom and bringing prosperity to one corner of the Middle East would serve as a “Light-Unto-the-Nations” as well, instead of as a horrifying example to Muslims of their own backwardness — which was contra naturam, for by all the laws of Allah it was right, it was proper, it was just, that Islam “is to dominate and not to be dominated.”
The presence of Muslims in the lands of the Infidels has, without question, already forced indigenous Infidels and non-indigenous non-Muslims (Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Confucians) to lead lives that are often far more unpleasant, unsettled, expensive, and dangerous, than they would be without the presence of Muslims — “moderate” or “immoderate” in their beliefs, with the former always in danger, after some personal setback, of transforming into the latter, with all that that implies.
Don’t believe that Islam has been harming the West for 1350 years? Please read The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam by Bat Ye’or. You will discover how the eastern half of Western civilization, which was in fact an equal inheritor of classical antiquity and the cradle of Christian civilization (where did Tertullian, where did St. Augustine come from, if not the Christian civilization of North Africa), was conquered in stages by Muslims. The conquerors in turn destroyed much of the physical evidence of that rich civilization (of course all sculpture and all paintings of living creatures had to go, but so did many churches and synagogues, and libraries and manuscripts). Then those members of the so-called “protected peoples” (protected from Muslims themselves) were subject to the many financial, social, and political disabilities, whose sum is the institution of dhimmitude. This led to the slow asphyxiation of all non-Muslim peoples under Islam, with their remaining remnants continuing to be persecuted everywhere that populations of non-Muslims exist, to one degree or another, throughout the lands where Islam prevails.
Why should anyone living in the U.K. or the rest of Europe, or the rest of the non-Muslim world, believe that things will be any different in the future?