Americans, and other Infidels, should stop worrying, stop giving the slightest thought, to what Arab Muslims “think of them.” Whatever they “think of them” is determined very largely by the Qur’an and Sunnah, and by what they are taught to think of all Infidels. To believe that Americans, or French, or Italians, can win real friendship from those well-versed in obtaining — by outward affability and displays of hollow warmth — whatever it is they want at that moment from the Infidels, is to pretend that Islam does not teach its adherents to distrust, shun, and hate Infidels, and to not “take them as friends, for they are friends only with each other,” and not to be impressed by any seeming kindnesses of those Infidels, for these displays of kindness are merely a means to win over, and corrupt, and ultimately to conquer, those poor, trusting Muslims.
Recognize that those who are adherents of Islam have grown up with a belief-system that is not merely a religion but an entire way of life. This belief-system affects the atmospherics of a whole society; it affects the attitudes even of those who do not attend mosques, and who may in fact be unorthodox or lax in their faith. Only to the degree that a Believer ignores the central division of Islam — that between Believer and Infidel — can that Believer conceivably offer real, as opposed to feigned, and permanent, as opposed to temporary, friendship for Infidels.
There is no need to keep doing endless favors for Muslims, in a vain campaign to win them over. We need not betray our real, Infidel interests or allies. We need not surrender a jot of our own, Western, laws and understandings in order to “win” favor from Muslims. We need not mute, and would obtain far better results if we were to increase, our criticism of Muslim behavior — and what’s more, to relate the failures and morally unacceptable behavior of Muslim societies and peoples to Islam itself. The connection, though seldom made, is not hard to make.
If Muslims living in the West, and Muslims in Dar al-Islam, realize that the jig is up, and that their efforts to prevent a growing awareness of the tenets of Islam, of the passages in Qur’an and stories in Hadith that show the centrality of the duty to Jihad have failed, it is they who will have to move heaven and earth either to somehow constrain Islam, or we Infidels will have to do it for them. Anyway, what do the nice ones, what does Fouad Ajami (who carefully, and so wrongly, titled his new book about Iraq “The Foreigner’s Gift” instead of, more truthfully, “The Infidel’s Gift”) what does Vali Nasr, what the hell do such people make of Islam? Surely they know perfectly well what is in Qur’an and Hadith, they know what Muhammad is all about. Well, do they think they can permanently avoid that subject, out of embarrassment or filial piety, without ultimately rendering themselves useless to Infidels, as we get closer and closer to the unpleasant truths about Islam, its tenets and its history? How long do they think that Infidels will remain unaware of these things?
They, those lax or mild Muslims, who do not really observe or believe much of it but also refuse to declare themselves apostates, should expect that we will have to view them with distrust, that their freedom to visit or live in the West, the ability of their children to thrive in the Infidel lands, will be curtailed. We Infidels cannot be expected to distinguish the “real moderate” from the person who is feigning, or who is capable of changing from being a “moderate” to a most “immoderate” Muslim.
Vali Nasr, Fouad Ajami, tutti quanti — put yourself in our place. Pretend you are an Infidel. And pretend that you, as that Infidel, have learned a good deal about Islam, including the history of Jihad-conquest and about the real status of non-Muslims under Islam. And we are not going to engage in comparative brutalities, in the manner of Bernard Lewis, who has been in this particular and some others acted as a higher apologist, in his own way, for Islam — possibly because of his own horror at the treatment of European Jewry.
What do you expect us to do? How do you expect us to act to save our own, non-Muslim civilizations, here and everywhere else? Can you blame us?