In the weeks just after 9.11.2001, the American government still did not understand Islam. It had spent the past fifty years not understanding Islam. It had spent the past fifty years thinking of Islam only as a “bulwark against Communism” and attempting to curry favor with such “staunch allies” as Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, while taking an indignant stand against its main allies at Suez (when Nasser might have been, and should have been, knocked right down). It constantly pressured Israel after 1967 to give up the Sinai for worthless guarantees. Later, in the post-1967 world, with all that Kissinger “shuttle diplomacy” and then the Rogers Plan, and then a dozen other plans and schemes, not a single thing was done about the menace of OPEC. Nothing, or close to nothing, has been done to diminish these monstrous revenues in the one-third of a century since 1973.
Nothing has been done to prevent, or even to study or wonder about or question aloud, the policy of permitting the mass settlement of Muslims within the Western countries, a policy of criminal negligence toward all Infidel peoples by all Infidel governments. This policy has been based on sheer laziness and sheer unwillingness to learn enough about Islam, or to listen to the diminishing number of real scholars — as opposed to Muslim and non-Muslim apologists carefully infiltrating and rising in the ranks of academic and government “experts” and “advisers” on Islam: John Esposito was consulted by the Clinton Administration; Gilles Kepel and Olivier Roy by the French government; Tariq Ramadan was appointed to all sorts of E.U. commissions and is even now, in his pseudo-academic post at St. Antony’s, “advising” the Blair regime that does not know where to put its feet and hands — but its opponents promise no better.
Successive Administrations, and therefore the fates of the Americans whom they presume to protect and instruct, relied on all sorts of people of both parties who were equally ignorant of Islam or unwilling to consider the evidence of the their senses or of their minds. (And how many people who have risen to the top of the Washington anthill have the time and the leisure for reading and taking in, and beginning to comprehend, entirely new subjects?) They relied on all those who never understood Islam — such people as Brzezinski with Carter (not to mention that “Iran” specialist Gary Sick), who masterminded the disaster of abandoning the Shah when he might have been saved. Or they relied on such people as Scowcroft the chocolate soldier and Baker the fixer, or Dennis Ross, merely the most earnestly comical, or comically earnest, of all those in Washington who spent their entire professional lives in the “peace process.” What a phrase, what an idea whose time never came, and never could come! With all their absurd and exhausting and frenetic “peace-making,” these peacemakers never figured out that the Lesser Jihad against Israel had no solution based on “negotiations” and “treaties.”
And of course, the latest avatar of silliness and ignorance is that “two-state solution” that Condoleeza Rice thinks would be a wonderful achievement for the United States, as her remarkable, or rather incredible, speech to some American group “for Palestine” a few weeks ago demonstrated for all who possessed minds that could still be properly horrified. There is still not a hint that anyone in official Washington has ever read a thing about the Law of War and Peace in the Law of Islam. There is no evidence that anyone there has read Majid Khadduri or Robert Spencer or a hundred others who could explain, carefully, the essential role of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya in Islamic law and practice, and why all treaties between Muslims and Infidels are meant on the Muslim side purely as “truces” and never to be permanent “peace treaties” — because that would go against all of Islam, implying that some parts of the world could forever remain free from Islam, free to remain Infidel. Such an idea goes against everything in Islam, a belief-system that springs from a desire by the already-conquering Arabs to possess their own faith, one that would both justify and promote their conquest of Christians and Jews (and then Zoroastrians, and then still later Buddhists and Hindus) — non-Muslim peoples far more advanced, wealthy, and settled peoples than the primitive Arabs who by force seized their lands in the Middle East and North Africa. Islamic theology has not changed in this essential division, so obviously reflected in the terms Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.
No, one doubts that anyone in Washington has pondered or even heard of the Treaty of Al-Hudaibiyya, made by Muhammad with the Meccans in 628 A.D. and broken deliberately by him 18 months later. (His breaking of it, by the way, was later held to be an act of magnificent cleverness by Muslims, as Muhammad — who said that “war is deception” — proved a master at defeating, by any means, his enemies.) “Pacta Sunt Servanda” is the basis of Western treaty-making, but not of treaty-making in Islam. Every “peace treaty” signed by Muslims with Infidels is meant only as a “truce treaty.” But why should Dennis Ross, or Condoleeza Rice, be expected to know about that, any more than they should be expected to know about the concept and definition of the “dhimmi,” much less to have read Antoine Fattal’s full treatment of the status of non-Muslims according to the Shari’a, the Holy Law of Islam? Why take Islam seriously, when Prince Bandar, and now Prince Al-Turki, offer such generous hospitality at their lavish receptions, and speak so well, so “forthrightly”? Why study ancient treaties when, after all, all kinds of Arab and Muslim leaders keep assuring us that all this business of Islam is just so much nonsense? Rice and the rest can look deep into their eyes, grasp their souls the way Bush grasped the soul of Vladimir Putin — and see that what they say must be true.
Had the American government been properly prepared on 9.11.2001, it would have contained a sufficient number of people well versed in Islam, who therefore would have remained serenely and calmly comprehending of what had past, was passing, and was to come. Had such people been much in evidence on 9.12.2001, then the American government might have been thinking clearly. It might then have reacted not merely with anger, but with anger that had behind it well-prepared minds lucidly planning. These might have made the government of Pakistan an offer it couldn’t refuse — not about helping to find Osama Bin Laden, but rather on handing over those nuclear weapons it managed to acquire through the thefts and ISI funding of A. Q. Khan, lest its entire economy and country be destroyed (and the Americans, together with India, could do that). Instead, about Khan’s nuclear aid to North Korea and Iran, the Pakistani government announced this past week that it is “truly sorry” and it won’t happen again, and by the way, why shouldn’t Pakistan now get the same nuclear deal as India? I’ll tell you why: because Pakistan is a Muslim state, with Muslim people in control. That’s why. One might as well ask why we would not object if Australia acquired nuclear weapons but do object when North Korea does, or why it is necessary and proper for Israel to acquire such weaponry, which is the only thing that will ensure its survival and threatens no Infidel state, but on the other hand, neither “our ally” Egypt, nor “our ally” Saudi Arabia, nor any other Muslim state, can be allowed to acquire weapons of mass destruction. Might as well make that clear, if not say it quite so directly to those who complain. They can be given, rather, to understand.
There is, instead of rational analysis, a sensational aspect to the whole Bin Laden business: the caves, the Saudi plutocrat who becomes a kind of J. Worthwington Foulfellow with his sidekick Ayman al-Zawahiri, and all those solemn “terrorism experts” who, like Peter Bergen, still keep far away from the larger and more important questions but apparently can dine out in the American media and even elsewhere on the fact that they “met Bin Laden” or “travelled in Afghanistan” or “have studied Al Qaeda for years.” That should be seen as part of the sensational, quasi-yellow press, and the lowering of standards all way round. Suppose someone knew every detail of Bin Laden’s life? Or suppose the American government kills Bin Laden? So what? What does this have to do with the menace of islamization in Western Europe? How does this stop the Saudi-financed campaigns of Da’wa everywhere in the world, even among those who are Muslims (as in Niger, where the syncretistic local version of Islam, with its marabouts and unhijabbed women, has with Saudi money and influence been completely transformed, as has the practice of Islam in many sub-Saharan states)? That Da”wa proceeds, of course, also among Infidels who, out of their economic or psychic unsteadiness, have been correctly identified as ready (the readiness is all) for efforts to convert them. All this helps acquire more recruits, deep behind Infidel — i.e., enemy — lines, for the Army of Islam.
The “Hunt for Bin Laden” business (and all those books, and book-tours, by those “experts” who once saw Bin Laden plain) involves the perceived need to obtain the cooperation of the government of Pakistan by cancelling billions of dollars in debts and offering new billions in aid of all kinds. It involves not reading Pakistan the riot act about A. Q. Khan (he should be in American custody, subject to American grilling) and in not threatening complete economic destruction unless those nuclear weapons are given to the Americans “for safe-keeping.” (The Pakistani government would not have had to announce this; it might have simply pretended that it still had them, to keep the primitive Muslim masses calm, or as calm as they can be.) All this has been a disaster. It has allowed Musharraf to present himself as something he is not, and Pakistan as something it is not. That misrepresentation continues to play on long-established innocences and dreams about “Islam” as essentially okay and unworrisome, if only the “moderates” can keep control.
And thus we have the fiascos we see all around us, including the fiasco of Iraq, where Bush, who once had an idea, and now that idea has him, still will not relent on his foolish squandering of men’s lives, of money, of war materiel. He will not exploit, and certainly is incapable of welcoming, the ethnic and sectarian divisions that sooner or later will explode, and for our sake should explode. What’s more, these divisions will have consequences for Shi’a-Sunni relations outside of Iraq, and possibly, if the Kurds get their state, for the relations between non-Arab and Arab Muslims (as with the Berbers in Algeria and in France). All this internecine warfare can only weaken the Camp of Islam. It would be useful for Europeans to observe this warfare, and to draw the necessary conclusions from it.
Within the Bilad al-Kufr, the Lands of the Infidels, there are still very few who comprehend the permanent menace of Islam to most forms of art, to the free and skeptical inquiry necessary for the enterprise of science, to individual rights and to mental freedom, and to all the legal and political institutions and social arrangements and understandings and assumptions upon which the advanced West is based. There is no sense of the peril to that which so many in that Western world, over several millennia of thought and effort, managed to achieve, and to all the artifacts they produced. Those who today call themselves “English” or “French” or “Italians” or “Americans” hold these achievements and artifacts merely in trust, as a legacy in which they have but a life estate. They have a duty to learn about them, and then having learned about to appreciate them, to defend them intelligently — especially now, when it can be done at very little human cost, because the most effective weapons of the Jihad are the “wealth weapon,” campaigns of Da’wa, and demographic conquest.
As has been steadily insisted here for nearly three years, the “wealth weapon” can be countered by taxes on gasoline in the United States that rise in steady increments to far higher, possibly European levels, in taxes on all uses of oil, on subsidies to mass transit, on subsidies and all kinds of encouragement for solar, wind, and other forms of energy, including new ways to burn or to transform coal, and of course nuclear energy — which should be seen, following the French example, as one of the best ways to diminish reliance on oil. Everything conceivable should be done. Because of the costs involved (and insurance for nuclear plants) governments, including the American government, should participate fully and eagerly. Nonsense about “letting the marketplace” decide will not do. No one said during World War II that the government should not fund the Manhattan Project. The diminishment of the Muslim “oil weapon” is essential. So too is the ending of all the transfers of hundreds of billions of dollars from Infidel peoples (unwillingly) by their governments (all too willing), to Muslim states and groups such as Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, and the ineffable “Palestinians” — about whom a veritable cult of aid has developed, not because the “Palestinians” themselves are worthy, but because of an unexpungable animus toward Israel, an animus that has been carefully cultivated by the Islamintern International and its supporters in the world press. It is used to encourage aid for the “Palestinians” and their quite unnecessary, and utterly phony, “plight.”
As for campaigns of Da’wa, they can be constrained at every step, beginning with careful monitoring in prisons, aid to Christian missionary efforts, and the segregating of Muslim prisoners in separate buildings (for “security and administrative — i.e., halal food and other observances — purposes). Since black prisoners are a special target, why not employ black African refugees such as Sudanese “lost boys” to speak frequently in prisons about their experiences? Why not introduce the subject of the Arab slave trade and the use of Islam as a vehicle for Arab imperialism (the most successful imperialism in history, as yet not fully comprehended save, so far, by a few)? Why not discuss how the inshallah-fatalism of Islam encourages economic paralysis, and that only the false manna of oil managed to provide any prosperity for Muslims once they no longer had large numbers of non-Muslims within their lands upon which to batten?
As for demographic conquest, that can be halted. As the Infidel peoples wake up, they can not only halt, but reverse the immigration of the past three or four heedless decades, and undo much of what they stupidly permitted to be done. Just as the parents of young children try to “child-proof” their house, by all sorts of measures, so the Lands of the Infidels can be made, not welcoming, but unwelcoming, for the continued practice of Islam and calls for introduction of Sharia provisions in the West. We need not make allowances. We need not yield in the slightest to Muslim demands. We can be quick to detect the campaigns in the press that are designed to render us more susceptible to Islam, to focus only on the most inoffensive of the rituals (i.e., Ramadan) and not on what is written in Qur’an and hadith. Certainly the press has failed completely to deal with the figure of Muhammad and what he did, and what Muslims revere him for — which is everything he said, and everything he did.
There has as yet been as little action over all this by the American government, paralyzed by Iraq, as there has been in dealing with its false allies — such as Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and of course Pakistan.
But it will change. It will change because whatever Bush clings to, in 2008 a new President will have to promise, as Eisenhower promised to “go to Korea” and to end that war, to end promptly the now clearly misguided and wasteful effort in Iraq. It was misguided by March 2004, when the country had been thoroughly scoured for weapons of mass destruction. It is misguided if the goal is to weaken the Camp of Islamic Jihad (i.e., the Camp of Islam). And that should be the goal, whatever vague description of “victory” is in vogue today in Washington. That “victory” has actually never been clearly defined by our confused and confusing President, who cannot allow himself even the possibility of speaking clearly and lucidly on this subject — for if he did, then his whole edifice built to date would come tumbling down, and in public.