Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald explains how the New York Times’ shoddy coverage of the Danish cartoon controversy reveals deeper problems with its coverage of the global jihad:
“Denmark unlikely front in Islam-West Culture War.”
– title of this New Duranty Times articleThis title is already a dead giveaway to what is wrong, so wrong, with the coverage of Islam at The New Duranty Times.
First, why is Denmark an “unlikely front”? Well, because Denmark, it is well understood, its people and its king, acquitted themselves well during World War II. And from that time on Denmark has been, like Holland, seen as well as what it has been, a place of easy-going tolerance, relaxed about religion, sexual mores, and all that other stuff — sometimes, possibly, with unintended and unwelcome consequences. If Denmark is an “unlikely front” in something (in a minute we’ll get to how The New Duranty Times describes that something) it must be because we expect “likely fronts” to be European countries that have historically been seen as less tolerant, less easygoing, not like Denmark at all. Because, you see, as far as the New Duranty Times is concerned the problem lies solely with the European countries themselves and how they respond to Muslims — not with Islam, or with Muslims, or with what Islam teaches, and what Muslims believe, and act upon.
If The New Duranty Times saw the problem correctly, it would have fashioned a different title. If the reporter and editors had recognized the phenomenon of the Jihad that causes so many Muslims everywhere, sooner or later, to strive “to dominate and not to be dominated” (as a Hadith puts it, and as the entire life of Muhammad insists), their story would have been quite different. The Times should have recognized that the problems in Denmark posed by Islamic attempts to censor what can and cannot be written or said in Denmark are of a piece with the various attempts by Muslims, wherever they may be within the Lands of the Infidels (temporarily, as they see it, the Lands of the Infidels), to transform the indigenous non-Muslim laws, customs, manners, understandings, and the non-Muslims” ability to behave with wonted freedom. The threats and fury directed by the entire Muslim world at little Denmark for a dozen cartoons, most of them so mild as to cause one to wonder why anyone could cause a fuss, is no different from the demands made for the wearing of the hijab in French schools, or the removal of all crosses from public places in Italy, or the insistence that the Shari’a law apply to local Muslim communities in Canada, or any number of other such demands, made so insistently, and so outrageously, and at a time when Muslims are only a small percentage of the population and held, correctly, in deep and growing suspicion. One can only wonder how things will be if the percentage of Muslims in the population is permitted to grow, and mosques and madrasas — almost all supported by money from abroad — are allowed to be built, to spread the doctrines to be found in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. Anyone bothering to look into all that will, if he is an Infidel, come away with a feeling of dread.
For that matter, within those countries firmly under Muslim control, such as Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sudan, Nigeria, Egypt, Algeria, and Iraq, precisely the extent of the fervency of the local Muslims and their ability to work their will determines how much all local communities of non-Muslims (whether Christians or Hindus or others — no Jews are left, but there are Bahai’s, Buddhists, Sikhs, followers of Confucius, animists, and of course those without any attachment to an organized religion) will be made to suffer. They will suffer from discrimination and a feeling of permanent insecurity, and from other indignities all the way up to expulsions and attacks on churches and Hindu temples, attacks on church-run schools and hospitals, and upon any other non-Muslim institutions that can be identified and attacked.
Second, there is the second half of the Times” meretricious title: “Islam-West Culture War.” Wrong on both counts. The war of Islam is not against the West, but Against the Rest — that is, all the Rest of the World: all of the peoples, wherever they are located, and all of the polities, that are not Islamic. The victims include the Hindus, Sikhs, and Jains of India, Kashmir, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Bali, and Malaysia. These Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists have always been under assault by Muslims. Only superior power, such as that which the British offered, or superior numbers (Hindus in India today, free of the Muslim military domination) prevent even more assaults. And then there are the Christians of Asia and Africa. Look at what happened in the “Jihad” (Col. Ojukwu’s word) against the Christians of Nigeria, which led to the declaration of a free Biafra. Biafra was smashed by a Muslim army and by Muslims from elsewhere, including Egyptian air force pilots who strafed and bombed hundreds of Ibo villages. Look at the 1.8 million casualties, murdered or deliberately starved to death, among the non-Muslim of the Sudan, both Christians and animists. Look at the constant pressure of Muslim Arabs on the blacks of sub-Saharan Africa, sometimes employing quasi-arabized black Muslim tribes to push Islam, or a corrupt leader or two, to promote Islam in countries formerly Christian (see the Ivory Coast, see Togo). Look at the Christians in Pakistan: remember the martyrdom of Bishop John Joseph, remember all the attacks, past and present, on Christian church services, Christian schools, Christian hospitals, individual Christians accused of the capital offense of “blasphemy against Islam.” Look at Bangladesh, where the Hindus bear the brunt of Muslim persecution and murder. Look at Indonesia, where attacks by Muslims on Christians, and then counter-attacks by the Christians in revenge, are always described by the Times and the media establishment most inaccurately as “communal violence” — as if both sides were equally at fault, and the Christians were just as guilty. Look at the attacks by Muslims especially in the Moluccas; the mass murder of 200,000 Christian East Timorese by Muslim Indonesians; the murders of 600,000 non-Muslim Chinese from 1965-1967. In all of these the Muslim component was carefully erased from all reporting, to conform to mental templates provided by Cold War attitudes. Look at continuing attacks on Hindus in Bali, and Buddhists elsewhere in the East Indian archipelago.
What about them? What about the Christian villagers decapitated by Muslims in the Philippines? And what about the attacks on Buddhists in Thailand? What about that? Is that attributable to, or to be subsumed under the idiotic rubric of an “Islam-West Culture War”? Is this all part of a war fought between “Islam” and “the West”? How is the “West” fighting “Islam”?
Aside from participating in the largest transfer of wealth in human history, how does the “West” attack “Islam” in Dar al-Islam? How? By mildly suggesting that it wouldn’t be a great idea to wipe out Israel? By buying Christian black slaves back from their Arab Muslim masters in Sudan? By trying to create a decent society and nation-state in Iraq, despite the obvious hostility directed at Infidels from the very recipients of such liberation, not to mention the tens of billions being spent by Infidels to make life better for Iraq’s Muslims? Or is the war that “the West” is conducting that of protecting Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo (with Infidels bombing fellow Infidels)? Is it the Gulf War, whereby the Muslims of Kuwait were rescued from Saddam Hussein? Is it the almost unlimited access given, until recently, to Western educational institutions (here, sign up for this course on nuclear physics, or this one on bacteriology — go ahead, the Western taxpayers will pay your tuition for such useful courses), as well as to Western medical care, to Western goods of all kinds, to Western armaments (hundreds of billions of Western armaments), and to Western goodwill (here, have 7 acres of land in the midst of Rome, to build the Rome Mosque, or here, we’ll sell you this land in Boston at below-market value, or here…fill it in for yourself)? Western leaders have been falling all over themselves trying to insist that Islam is a good religion, a religion of peace and tolerance. Just look at what Bush and Blair and Rice have said — the uninterrupted series of falsehoods about the wonderfulness of Islam, their great respect for Islam, their understanding that Islam has nothing whatever to do with the perceived behavior of Muslims worldwide.
It is not a Culture War. It is Jihad. Though it is being conducted by more varied instruments of warfare, it is a war no different in goals from the Jihads that have been waged by the adherents of Islam whenever such a war was feasible, over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies. These wars follow the teachings clearly expressed in Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, with Muhammad the very model, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, for all Muslims everywhere. It is a war to be conducted by military means where possible, and by other means when necessary. In Western Europe, at the moment, it is being conducted by Da’wa and slow but steady demographic conquest, accompanied by relentless demands made on Infidels to change their own societies, their laws, their customs, their understandings, their ways of doing things, in order to accommodate Muslims. This is not “integration.” This is occupation — Europe is now Muslim-occupied. The occupiers do not wish to integrate with, much less accept the ways of, the locals, but rather to dominate and subjugate them, and to transform their societies so that Islam will dominate and Muslims will rule. And this will occur long before Muslims are an absolute majority, as it did all over Dar al-Islam over the past 13 centuries, in a pattern of conquest by a few and subjugation of many who, over time, became Muslims, for they lost their original identities and histories. Those who were not killed upon conquest or in intermittent mass violence by Muslims (and there was a good deal of that) were slowly converted, forcibly in the sense that they did so not because of some intellectual or moral wonderfulness of Islam, but rather in order to avoid for themselves and their children the status of dhimmi — that is, the state of enduring humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity that was the permanent fate of all non-Muslims under Islam.
And such will be the fate of the reporters of the New Duranty Times, a fate they will have helped bring upon themselves. And on us, their exasperated and infuriated readers.