Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald reflects on the exclamations of surprise with which both Muslims and dhimmis generally greet the arrest of a Muslim on terror charges, and explores some of their implications:
Virtually every time a Muslim terrorist is arrested we hear it: “He was a quiet, soft-spoken young man”¦.He was a normal young kid like all his peers…A normal kid, very polite but secluded. He didn’t mingle much with people…We never felt that or noticed any changes in his attitude.”
Terrorists, in murdering Infidels, do not necessarily start out as fire-breathers. They may, in outward aspect, seem to be just like any “normal young kid.” But that “normal young kid” is a normal young Muslim kid — and that makes all the difference.
Indeed, they need not have been concealing, all this time, a particularly fervent and murderous faith at all — as some have implied. That could happen. It is even possible that rising high in various Western governments are Muslim moles, concealing their real feelings until such time as they are able to exploit their positions, or perhaps even now exploiting them. But there is a much larger problem. It is not the fervent Muslim who is hiding his fervency. It is the Muslim who is not fervent, but for whom changes in his personal life transform the merely observant into the fanatic and the protector or supporter of killers, or even a killer himself.
And if Muslims themselves, in Iraq, in Israel, in Egypt, in Morocco, in Tunisia, in Algeria, and elsewhere, have expressed great surprise, not in all but in many cases, at the son or brother who ended up as a suicide killer, how much more difficult, how impossible, really, for Infidels, innocent of Muslim ways, innocent of the fantastic ability to conceal, overwhelmed and confused by Muslim apologetics and rhetoric, disinclined to see the scope or nature of the menace because to recognize it is simply too upsetting, then how nearly impossible it must be for those Infidels to avoid being deceived. And this happens all the time, individually, and collectively, about all sorts of matters.
Shall all Muslims be monitored for sudden changes in their personal lives? Shall we have a National Register to record when that Muslim someone’s father or mother dies, when a child becomes mortally ill, a husband or wife leaves, a job is lost, a stock investment sours, or bipolar disorder sets in — for every last Muslim?
Of course we cannot. We must recognize that with the System of Islam already accepted, any Believer might, potentially, be set off by these purely personal setbacks. Apologists for Islam keep stressing the idiotic idea that Muslims behave as they do only because of perceived injustice by the “colonialist” or “imperialist” West. You know what the Arabs and Muslims mean — they mean such outrages as the United States of America being so busy stealing all of Iraq’s oil (yes, so far the American government has made how many hundreds of billions on its imperialist venture in Iraq?), not to mention stealing all of Saudi Arabia’s oil, and don’t forget that Great Israeli Empire that stretches a full 8 miles from Kalkilya to the Mediterranean.
Through the prism of Islam, one views the Universe as divided into two camps: the Believers and the Infidels. It does not matter if the Infidels are white or black, rich or poor, whether they have rescued you from a tyrant, or rushed to help you when a tsunami, or an earthquake devastate. It does not matter if they are Infidel Americans in the United States, or in Iraq, or walking down a street to see a tourist site in Cairo or Beirut, or taking the metro in London, or Madrid. It does not matter if they are Hindus celebrating a wedding in Kashmir, or a poor tiffin-wallah who happens to be walking by a mosque at the end of Friday Prayers in Dacca, who is then beaten to death by the excited worshippers, eager to take care of at least one Hindu that day. It does not matter if those Infidels happen to be Dinka and Nuer tribesmen in the south of the Sudan, who never posed a threat to the Arabs who have over the past century, from being a mere 10% of the country, slowly been taking it over, demographically and geographically It does not matter whether they are Christian villagers who are ethnically identical to Muslims, in northern Nigeria, or in the Moluccas, or the southern Philippines, or whether those villagers are Buddhists in southern Thailand. All that matters is that they are Infidels, non-Muslims. They can be targeted for any reason — or no reason.
Not all Muslims feel their Islam in that way. But we, the Infidels, cannot detect who receives Islam in what way. And the insistent blend of nonsense and lies, the taqiyya and tu quoque, that we receive from Muslim spokesmen, some smoother and more plausible than others, does not inspire our confidence. And we have no way of detecting the changes, over time, that can occur for no other reason than personal ones. Mohammad Atta felt keenly his loss of status, and the usual graduate student angst, and loneliness, while in Hamburg. All of that led him to more, and more fanatical, Islam. It was his consolation. Ayman al-Zawahiri and Bin Laden were children of very prominent and rich families, but had always taken their religious obligations more seriously. Their disgust at the circumambient society necessarily had to take on a religious cast, had to locate the enemy not in the corruption and swinish behavior of the Egyptian and Saudi elites, but in Infidels. And they responded by attacking those elites for being, precisely, insufficiently Islamic, and tied to the Infidels.
When will this government, when will other Western governments, when will the press, manage to understand that ideas matter, and that Islam is essentially an idea, a very primitive Idea, but an Idea, a geopolitical Idea, whatever its bits and pieces of pagan Arab lore, and stories appropriated in distorted fashion from Judaism and Christianity?
These ideas must be taken seriously. One cannot blandly assert that “only a few” Muslims are a problem. How does one know this? How does one know which Muslim, perhaps both outwardly and inwardly content with his life, will never prove susceptible, not to some wild extra-Islamic doctrine, but to Islam itself? All the technological “progress” that has been made has helped to dry up those pockets of innocent village Islam, where illiterate peasants go to a ramshackle mosque and are pious, content, and know nothing of the outside world. Now those same villagers, like the Iranian peasants who listened to Khomeini’s tapes, can see the videocassettes of decapitations of Nicholas Berg and Kenneth Bigley, and can hear the chants — Qur’anic chants, war chants, consisting only of Qur’anic verses (nothing made up, for nothing need be made up).
Let us assume that the estimate, given by one , that 10-15% of Muslims are terrorists or potential terrorists. One does not know how this figure is arrived at. Ali Sina and other defectors from Islam, whom I trust, consider it to have the percentages backwards, for they suggest that 85-90% of Muslims might become potential terrorists, or supporters of similar acts, or would be ready to harm non-Muslims in other ways, in the conduct of Jihad. Who knows, really — and how could we ever be certain? But even the gleeful behavior of masses of Muslims all over the world, after 9/11, or the numbers of people naming their sons “Osama,” or the kinds of things routinely said and applauded at meetings of Muslim nations, or the kinds of demands made on Infidel societies by Muslims now living in their midst, or the behavior of Muslim pressure groups to limit the power of Infidels to undertake reasonable security measures (including, precisely, profiling to target not a race, or an ethnic group, but the adherents or potential adherents of the ideology of Islam), and the enormous efforts to conduct Da’wa by every conceivable and sly means, including the rewriting of textbooks to transform the history of Infidel lands, and to target the most vulnerable members of society(prisoners, immigrants, schoolchildren) for the conduct of Da’wa — all of this should give any Infidel who has studied the theory and practice of Islam, considerable pause.
But suppose that the lowest estimate — 10% of all Muslims — were in fact somehow true? No, let us make that figure 5% — only 5% are potential terrorists. Then what? If one out of 20 Muslims allowed into the Western world holds to these ideas, where are we then? Or what if one of the other 19 picks them up from that one? We have no way of insuring that every single Muslim will forever and ever be immune to such appeals.
That being the case, it is a matter of obvious prudence for Western governments to study carefully the question of Muslims migration to the Western world. Even if the figure of “only” 10% is accurate, we would be mad to continue to allow in and give citizenship to such a pool of people without a moment’s hesitation or examination or consideration. Infidel governments should not allow their policies to be dictated by fear of offending, or by believing their own absurdities — no one should continue to mouth the kind of absurdities about the religion of “peace” and “tolerance” that we have had to endure in the past.
Prudence demands that risks be minimized. And time is running out.