Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald pleads for some common sense in our relationship with the new terrorists running the Palestinian Authority:
The Administration failed to predict the Hamas victory in the “Palestinian” election. Will it now compound the error by continuing the jizya? After the results were in, Cheney consoled himself with the misleading explanation that while everyone had been aware of the corruption of the Arafat years, loyally continued by the corrupt wolf-in-accountant’s-clothing Abbas, they had not realized the depth of resentment at what Cheney too easily described as a “vote against corruption.”
He still does not understand the whole point about “democracy” as mere vote-counting in the Muslim countries. It will always lead to Islam, for there are always far more primitive extreme Believers than there are Makiyas, Chalabis, and Allawis, who themselves may be “Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslims who wish that they could bottle Islam up. After all, didn’t Ataturk do it? But Ataturk was a war hero, who came to power after the loss of the Ottoman Empire, at a time when Turkey had difficulty holding onto Antaolia, and he used the situation, and his own fame, to limit Islam as a political and social force. The westernized Iraqis who spent from 20 to 45 years in exile, must realize that they are in no position to limit Islam, and the blend of careerist calculation and filial or civliizational piety and most importantly, physical fear, that prevents so many non-believing Muslims from openly expressing the need to limit Islam for the sake of Muslims themselves, hobbles even the most intelligent secularists.
Yes, there was corruption in the “Palestinian” territories. And before that, there was corruption in the PLO ranks in Tunis, and before that in Beirut. And there is gigantic corruption in Egypt (what do you think happens to that American aid?), and in Saudi Arabia (how do you think the Saudi share of the $10 trillion received by OPEC states since 1973 have been spent?) and everywhere in the regimes run by despots in the Arab and Muslim world. In them, the entire universe is seen through the prism of Islam. There is Islam and only Islam. The good government party, the party of the disaffected, will always be Islamic. That is the point.
Until conditions are created such that Muslims themselves can come to see that the lords of misrule that they endure have been fostered by the tradition of despotism that Islam (and its “uswa hasana” model for all time) encourages, they will continue to suffer — and so will we. The habit of mental submission and discouragement of free and skeptical inquiry is naturally, at all times and everywhere, against the creation of a free citizenry. For god’s sake, we are not asking for the sturdy English yeomen to be created — just some sense that the legitimacy of a government resides, believe it or not, in the consent of the governed, and not in a despot or the Shari’a, which is simply despotism reduced to rules.
What should we do now? We should stop with Grand Plans to remake the Islamic world. Stop trying, with Infidel billions and lives, and sympathetic attention, to change what can only be changed, if it can be changed, from within, over a very long time. Leave the Muslim Arabs to their own devices, and most of the other Muslims as well. (Where non-Arab resentment of Arabs, where the growing perception that islamization has always been a vehicle for Arab cultural and linguistic and other kinds of imperialism exists, that may be played upon). Don’t transfer still more wealth from the Infidels to the Muslim world. The gigantic sums that the Arab and Muslim members of OPEC receive are enough; the huge sums that Infidels within Europe transfer, as both welfare payments to large Muslim families where every Infidel penny is grabbed, and for prisons, where Muslims in such countries as France are now the majority of the population, and the enormous amounts now spent on security measures to monitor mosques, madrasas, and the Muslim communities, and individuals, all over Western Europe, represent already a great and growing strain on Infidel economies. Don’t invade Muslim countries (but make sure they don’t acquire major weaponry, a matter that does not require a land invasion). Don’t let them have easy access to Western technology, or their students to Western training in any subject — physics, chemistry, computer sciences — that might be put to military use. Don’t allow the rich Arabs to continue to assume that they can buy whatever goods and services they wish, or have safe houses and apartments and other real estate waiting for them, as they fondly believe, should they ever need to flee from their own countries, and the people whom they have fleeced. . Work to reduce their revenues so that they cannot employ the “wealth weapon” to fund the world-wide Jihad. Allow whatever divisions that exist within Islam to grow, and grow, and grow — do nothing to discourage that growth.
That’s it. And don’t find solace in the notion that some Muslims were “voting against corruption.” So they were. But they were also voting for Islam, more Islam, naked Islam, no longer the pretense of something else which in any case was purely for the consumption of the non-Islamic world.
Some are worried that if we stop the jizya to the Palestinians, and leave them be, Hamas will take money from Saudi Arabia or Iran. Why worry? Will they be even more extreme than those who know proudly proclaim their desire “to drink the blood of Jews” and to wipe out Israel entirely? Exactly how much more extreme could they get? Let them use up funds from Iran, further alienating the Iranians who have not forgotten the role of Arafat and the PLO in putting Khomeini in power and subjecting Iran to 25 years of misery and terror. Let them watch as the “Palestinian” Arabs use up Iranian money. It will not make them more favorably inclined to the Arabs about whom Iranians, like Turks, make clear to any Westerner who will listen their limitless contempt. And some may even connect that funding of the unworthy Arabs — “Palestinians” — as reminding them that Islam itself was a poisoned chalice first brought to Sassanian Persia by the conquering Arabs. Mountains of eyes at Kerbala. Mass death at Qadassiyah.
And if the supplier of money is Saudi Arabia, that is a good thing. The more money that can be soaked up, or drained away, from Saudi Arabia, the better. Let them pay for the “Palestinians.” It may curb their enthusiasm for the increasingly expensive Jihad.
And this will also get the Americans and the Europeans used to a brand-new, seemingly unheard-of notion — they, the Infidels, owe the “Palestinians” who are the shock troops of the Lesser Jihad exactly nothing. They should not have to apologize or even adduce some reason for failing to give Jizyah to those local Arabs. No reason at all is necessary. It was foolish to start paying this damn Jizyah in the first place.
Stop it. Stop it for Hamas, and don’t renew it for any group other than Hamas. Fatah is no different in its ultimate aim, but merely in the way it phrases things to fool a Western world quite eager to be fooled.
Stop the Jizyah for the “Palestinian” Arabs. Get the idea, then stop all such payments to Arabs and Muslims elsewhere. It makes no sense. It gives the Muslims exactly the wrong idea.
That idea has to be undone, from top to bottom.