Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses some problems posed by mosques in Western countries, and what to do about them:
When building new mosques in the West, one-for-one should be the rule. For every mosque that is permitted in the Infidel world, one church, synagogue, Hindu temple, depending on where the mosque is built, must be permitted — one of similar size, and prominence — within Dar al-Islam. Simple reciprocity. And no punishment for apostasy, so that there is freedom of conscience. Otherwise, no further permission for the building of mosques need be granted.
Reciprocity. That’s a reasonable demand.
The mosques that are already here pose a more vexed question. A “dual-use” mosque, where one use is incitement of religious or other kinds of hatred, and where there is some evidence of something unconnected to individual worship going on, is not at all like a church or synagogue where there may be social gatherings and so on. When a belief-system is not only a religion but a geopolitical program, and when there is evidence that that geopolitical program threatens all others, religious or non-religious, if they are not Muslims, one has a right to investigate the place where such believers congregate. For such a place, hiding behind religion, is in fact a meeting-ground — it has been discovered in mosques all over Europe and the Middle East — where weapons, false documents, and similar material has been stored.
Bluntly put, any mosque where such activities go on, or where the contents of the khutaba incite hatred, should be carefully examined and, if necessary, shut down. If a mosque contains doubtful items — false passports, explosives, audiocassettes and videocassettes about violence and warfare — or because what goes on in the course of services tends to threaten the wellbeing of Infidels (for example, if the contents of khutaba preach hatred of Infidels and the duty of Jihad to spread Islam until it conquers the globe and Muslims rule), then not only should its imam be sent packing, but the mosque itself should be closed. Let it be done once. Let a case be brought and the First Amendment be invoked by people who would not for one minute, if they were in charge, permit the full application of the Free Exercise Clause (which would give Muslim apostates their freedom not to be Muslims), and let it be argued out in the courts. But we need a test case. Enough of this, and the idea of what constitutes reasonable — non-life-threatening — conduct will be established. And what does not will be also.
Khutba-monitoring already goes on, in Turkey and Tunisia and elsewhere (even in Saudi Arabia and Jordan, to make sure that those who preach takfiri denunciations of other Muslims are monitored and often silenced). It should go on here too. Since Islam is far more than what we mean when we use the word “religion,” it is the political and geopolitical aspects of that belief-system that clearly need to be monitored by the security services. Allowing people to simply wave, as all-purpose protection, the word “religion,” as if that were enough to prevent any such monitoring — well, by now informed people will be able to dismiss that kind of thing.
What is the alternative? Arrest and convict and expel the errant imam, and let the mosque remain open. Yet in that event it will likely continue to offer the same mental merchandise — like one of those stores that sells Oriental rugs and is forever having “going-out-of-business” sales, but you eventually realize it is under the same management. And the “same management” in this case are those same pesky passages in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, from which khutaba are, after all, composed. You didn’t think khutaba would suddenly be full of Christian theme-words, did you, like “mercy” and “compassion” and “peace” and how “all men are brothers”? (Whether or not all Christians take all that in, or mean it, is quite another matter — we are talking about the raw material, the materia prima, from which the ethical tossed salad is made.) The ingredients for the khutaba, if you leave out all the naughty bits (from the Infidel point of view) in the Muslim canonical texts, are rather thin. And no one wants to lose mental or emotional weight in attending the mosque of his choice. Give him that old-time religion. But of course, in Muslim terms, that old-time religion does not mean the kind of thing that the Ministry of Religious Affairs that Ataturk set up to write every carefully-composed khutba, had in mind.
It’s a problem. How do we deal with it? One way, the way favored by everyone nowadays, is to pretend the problem doesn’t exist. It is simply non-existent, so forget about it.
Good strategy. Now about that Avian Flu that is winging its way closer to our shores…or that comet that is due to hit the earth in 2017….
No, you are right. Forget about it. Go back to bed. Wait for the barbarians, in our common Desert of Tartary.