Jihad Watch Board Vice President Hugh Fitzgerald discusses the Lesser Jihad and the Greater Jihad, by which he means not the distinction between warfare and the struggle within the soul, but the struggle against Israel and that against the rest of the world.
It by now should be clear that the war against Israel is a Lesser Jihad, and always has been. It was such before the Infidels, in this case Jews, dared to buy land and dared to dream of possessing a small sliver of land in which they would not have to live as they and Christians, and all other non-Muslims had had to live: as dhimmis under Shari’a law or some version of it. This was true whether the overlords were Arabs or, as for the past four centuries, the Turks.
“Should be clear.” But the Israelis themselves have done everything they can to hide that painful recognition. They would prefer to believe that Islam, and especially the most virulent form of Islam, that possessed by the Arabs who have no other identity to conceivably draw upon, contains no elements that are not benign, and that their struggle is against nationalist Arabs. Yet those same Arabs” sense of Islam is interwoven with “Uruba” or “arabness.” This makes even many Christian Arabs (though not the Arabic-speaking, but non-Arab Maronites and Copts) accept, parrot, and promote the Islamic agenda, including the Lesser Jihad against Infidel Israel that, were it to be successful, might actually improve the prospects for a continued Christian presence in the Middle East.
Israelis do not wish to contemplate the notion that the relentless war against them has no solution. Yet the Cold War also seemed to have no solution, and in the end, Soviet Communism crumbled because the West held firm, and a sufficient number of people realized that Communism had failed to deliver on its own terms. Whether that will ever happen to the Islamic jihad is unclear, but it is not impossible for its role and its power, and therefore its menace, to be sufficiently reduced — say, to what it was in 1930, long before the oil money arrived, or those millions of Muslims were permitted to settle behind enemy lines, in Western Europe.
During the Cold War, the American government, and with it the rest of NATO, paid little attention to Islam. The Muslims were without OPEC oil money. There were only a handful of Muslim migrants within Europe; in Holland, for example, even by 1970 there were no more then 50,000 (now there are a million). Why worry about Islam? Islam was then thought of mainly as a useful “bulwark against Communism” — which meant that left-leaning Nasser could not have been a real Muslim (but he was), and anti-Communist Saudi Arabia was to be supported to the hilt (which it was). This brought about the silly CENTO military alliance of Great Britain (the initiator), the United States, Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Pakistan. CENTO collapsed when the old regime in Iraq was overturned in 1958; it had never amounted to anything except as a way for Muslim armies to begin to extract military equipment and knowhow from the Western powers. Then the Americans favored those Pakistani generals, and of course Turkey, where Kemalism, it was believed, was solidly entrenched and was making Turkey ever more modern, more secular.
The Israelis committed the same error — or a variant on that error. They tried to woo, naturally, the one non-Arab country in the region — Iran under the Shah. From sentimental invocation of the pre-Islamic alliance between Persians and Jews to the appeal to the Shah’s advanced, westernized, and largely secular court, which would want to distinguish the advanced civilization of the “Persians” from that of the “Arabs,” it seemed to work on both sides. But the Shah was temporary; Islam was permanent. And the same happened to that very brief alliance of Turkey and Israel — which the government of Erdogan has so discouraged, except in those moments when Erdogan shows up in Washington to be introduced at a think-tank, by Richard Perle. Then the anti-Israel viciousness is muted for the audience.
The Lesser Jihad against Israel was the one that has attracted the most attention. Who, outside of India, paid any attention to the steady persecution of Hindus in West Pakistan or East Pakistan, or after 1971, in the renamed Bangladesh or what was now called Pakistan? Who paid attention to what Col. Ojukwu forthrightly called a “jihad” against the Christians in Nigeria during the Biafra War? Who saw the Muslim dimension to the war against the Christians in East Timor? In the Southern Sudan? In the southern Philippines? In the statements by Izetbegovic about reinstituting a Muslim state, and the full Shari’a — statements which terrified the Serbs but which no one else paid any attention to?
Since the early 1970s, several things permitted the Muslims, and especially the Muslim Arabs who run Islam (for they brought it to the world, and the Qur’an was in “their language” and they “are the best of people” and all Muslims, everywhere, must look to seventh-century Arabia, or failing that, to the Arabs today, for spiritual/political/intellectual guidance) to become more aggressive.
These were:
1. OPEC, and the manipulation of the market that permitted the quadrupling of oil prices in 1973. This has led in the past one-third century to the greatest transfer of wealth in human history, that from the oil-consuming to the oil-producing nations. The Muslim oil states have taken in approximately $10 trillion. They have failed to create modern economies or societies. They exist on the basis of wage-slaves from outside. But they have bought arms and more arms, of every kind; they are by far the largest buyers of armaments from foreign suppliers in the world, with hundreds of billions spent. They have paid for mosques all over the world, and especially in the capitals of the Western world. They have paid for madrasas. They have paid for Da’wa — Muslim missionaries. They have paid for every sort of propaganda, beginning with those special inserts in The New Duranty Times, The Financial Times, The Economist, and so on. They have established, or bought up, or contributed to, academic centers carefully chosen — usually in capitals (as at Georgetown, which has both a Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and a Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding — both of which are exactly what you suspect they are). They have paid for hirelings all over the Western world to run their propaganda. These hirelings are often chosen from among the former diplomats and former intelligence agents who were posted in the Arab countries. Many of them, even before they retire from their official duties, are made keenly aware of the sums they can make if they play their cards right, starting in their present job. The incredible failure of successive American governments to realize that gasoline had to be taxed, that oil consumption had to be forcefully, and forcibly, diminished, is a tribute to the Saudis and to such people as James Baker (whose Baker Center, just like the Presidential libraries of Bush Senior and Clinton and Carter, has received major donations from — do I really have to tell you, or can you guess?).
2) The admission of millions of Muslims into the countries of Western Europe. Cupidity and stupidity — the Esdrujula Explanation — help to explain this. Few in the governments of West Germany, France, and England, as they admitted Turks (as gastarbeiter who didn’t leave), realized the implications of what they were doing. They admitted them as single male workers, who then were permitted to bring in their “wives” and children, for it was believed that this would diminish the evidence of what was wrongly perceived as sociopathic criminality, when it was merely Muslims treating Infidel women, property, laws, and customs with the contempt all things Infidel deserve. In England, it was Pakistanis, who kept being referred to as “Asians” as if the problems in Bradford or Manchester or anywhere else had to do with geography. Yet the Hindus were, and remain, loyal and inoffensive, and lumping them in with the Muslim immigrants is deliberately meretricious.
3) The ability of Muslims to exploit Western technology — audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television stations, the Internet — for the purposes of disseminating the doctrines of Islam. Examples include the role of audiocassettes of Khomeini’s speeches that flooded Iran before the Revolution; the decapitation videos; and I.E.D. bombings in Iraq. All serve as recruitment tools for proud mujahedin showing examples of their handiwork.
All these developments have enabled Muslims to go from the Lesser Jihad that focused on Israel (and which continues, of course, unabated, though now there are two schools: the Abbas school of Slow Jihad, and the Hamas school of Fast Jihad), to the much wider Jihad. The latter is wide enough to take in the entire world. This should by now be apparent, if not to everyone, at least to those who should, in Washington and London, in Paris and Rome, in Madrid and Amsterdam and Oslo, have been studying the tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam nonstop over the past four years. They should have studied as well the history of Islamic conquest of non-Muslims, and the subjugation of the latter as dhimmis, a status clearly of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity.
That is where we are today. But many Israelis, and those whose belief that their hearts are in the right place, because they “support Israel” (what does that mean?), believe that they are exempt from the duty of finding out exactly what it is that menaces Israel. Understanding what really menaces Israel would involve learning enough about Islam to realize that further surrenders of the legal, moral, and historic rights that the Israelis have been so consistently been so willing to surrender (and certainly for the past 30 years have been unable, or unwilling, to articulate forcefully), will merely whet, not sate, the appetites for Jihad. For the very idea of an Infidel sovereign state on land once possessed by Muslims is intolerable — especially one ruled by the contemptible, and supposedly weak, Jews. Borders mean nothing. The size of Israel means nothing. The “state” of a recently-invented “Palestinian” people (invented for the purposes of disguising the Jihadist impulse — and done most successfully, because the world was eager to believe that this was merely a case of “two tiny peoples, each…etc.”) means nothing.
Yet in the face of the Lesser Jihad and the Greater Jihad, and all we get from Washington is talk about that “war on terror.” Look at the population figures for Rotterdam, for Malmo, for France itself. Look at the demands made for changes in local customs and laws. Look at the demands at the international level, at the U.N., to force Infidels to accept Muslim ideas of what free speech should be. Look at the mosques opening. Look at the Da’wa being conducted among the most vulnerable populations in the Western world. Look at the fear of “reverts” who, one suspects from what they have written, might now wish to leave Islam, but are frightened to do so. At least one such revert appeared, from his postings at JW, to have such doubts. He no longer appears, apparently infuriated by the mockery which greeted his attempts to inform all of us of his Spiritual Search and Dilemma and so on, which not all of us found quite as fascinating as he did.
Look at all that, and tell me what you want to do when you hear someone blithely say “we have to win this war on terror” or “we are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we won’t have to fight them here.”
Tell me what decibel level is reached by your scream of frustration and fury.