What should The Times have been doing, not now, but for years, to cover Islam — in and out of Europe — appropriately?
In the case of Islam in Europe, it ought to have familiarized readers with the views of Oriana Fallaci, Pim Fortuyn, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Jacques Ellul, and all the others who cannot be dismissed as “right-wing” — and not one of whom can be considered a “fundamentalist” Christian or a mad-dog anything.
It ought to have shown the reasons for the immigration to different countries of Europe by different sets of Muslims — for example, Pakistanis to England, Moroccans to Holland, Algerians and Moroccans to France, Somalis and Libyans and Egyptians to Italy, and so on. It ought to have provided figures on the Muslim population in those countries over the past 30-40 years. For example, would it not have been eye-opening for readers to learn that there were 15,000 Muslims in Holland in 1970, and now there are a million?
It ought, that Times of New York, that New Duranty Times, to have noted that everywhere, in every Infidel land, there were problems with Muslim immigrants, no matter the political or economic regime, or the background of the local Infidels. It ought to have noted, and not merely noted but attempted to explain to readers, why it was that in places as different as Denmark and Spain, or Italy and Germany, with widely disparate national cultures and expectations, there was always the grim problem of Muslims who viewed their new surroundings not with gratitude, but as a place that as if by right belonged to them. It ought to have noted that when those immigrants repeat, as they do, that “we are here to stay” and “this is our country,” those phrases, which ordinarily might be found stirring, take on an entirely different and sinister meaning.
And The New Duranty Times might have tried to understand why it is that wherever there are Muslim immigrants in sufficient numbers to give them the impression that they need not disguise forever their real attitudes, there have been problems — so that the problem must lie not with the hosts, but with the Muslim guests, and does not depend either on the nature of that host country, or of the place from whence those particular Muslim immigrants came.
And then it was the duty of The New Duranty Times to do a comparative study: to show how Hindus from India, Buddhists from Vietnam, Christians from sub-Saharan black Africa, Chinese who are Confucian or Christian or nothing at all, somehow have managed without untoward incident to fit in to the countries of Western Europe. No doubt in some cases there have been problems, but always without the sense that there is a permanent and irreducible problem. For there is a great difference between those who arrive ready to adapt to new customs and mores and those who arrive carrying undeclared, in their mental luggage, an alien and a hostile creed.
And then there is the most important thing of all, the thing that has prevented people from understanding or making sense of the very small amount of “Jihad News” that The New Duranty Times permits, almost reluctantly, to appear in its newpaper of its own dismal record (a record not worse than that of other newspapers in the United States, but no better either): there has been no attempt at all to actually inform readers about Islam. You would not possibly know a thing about the actual disturbing contents of the Qur’an from reading, diligently, the daily and Sunday New Duranty Times. You would know nothing of 9.29 or 9.5 or the entire Sura 9. You would know nothing, have read nothing, about the more than one hundred so-called Jihad verses in the Qur’an. You would have not been exposed to the Hadith or understood what they are, or how they have been ranked according to “authenticity.” You would be at sea whenever the phrase “Qur’an and Sunnah” were to be invoked, as it is a hundred million times a day, by Muslim Believers.
And you would not only be unfamiliar with the most basic texts of Islam, but you would also not know “how to read the Qur’an.” What do you do when you come across an obvious contradiction between two passages in a book that is the uncreated Word of God, and that cannot be tampered with, cannot be changed? And what is a poor Infidel to make of the detectable difference in tone between what are often described as the “Meccan” or softer verses (the ones presumably written when Muhammad was less powerful and still needed to placate or woo his enemies) and the “Medinan” or harsher verses, when Muhammad felt strong enough to no longer disguise his Will to Power, and the worldly goals of his militant and aggressive followers? Where, in what issue of The New Duranty Times, have you learned about “abrogation” or “naskh”? In what issue of The New Duranty Times have you learned who Al-Bukhari was, or Muslim, the two most important muhaddithin? In what issue of The New Duranty Times have you run across a single column by a single columnist other than the prating, clownish Tom Friedman (a pet of the businessmen’s conventions, where Tom Friedman ‘splains it all to you — the world economy, the Middle East, the entire Future of Humanity, all kinds of immigrants — for a mere $45,000 per appearance, and it’s a bargain at any price) and the entirely ill-informed Nicholas Kristof, who still has no idea that the massacres in Darfur that he has made the subject of his Very Own Public Anguish have something to do, everything to do, with the Arab supremacism of which Islam is a convenient and powerful vehicle — despite the outward universalist claims made for what Anwar Shaikh rightly calls “the Arab National Religion.”
In what issue of The New Duranty Times will you find out how Islam is a belief-system that contains a Total Regulation of Life? In what issue will that set of regulations, of everything from clothes and hairstyles to the most intimate details of personal hygiene, be set down? In what issue will it be explained how in Islamic law life consists of that which is Halal and that which is Haram, and the entire universe is divided between Things Commanded and Things Prohibited? In what issue of The New Duranty Times will you find out about the Total Explanation of the Universe that Islam provides, so that the good Believer need not seek elsewhere for guidance, and ideally, will not? For the Qur’an contains everything — including all of modern science — if only we mere men have the minds to tease out its meaning, on everything. Yes, everything, including cosmology — yes, no doubt we can find in the Qur’an predictions as to the anisotropy in the black-belt radiation as a result of our peculiar velocity, and the structure of recombinant DNA, and the origins of volcanoes, and fractals and chaos theory and the space-time continuum and positively everything, in this or any conceivable universe.
And where, in what past or present issue of The New Duranty Times, would one discover the nature of the God of Islam? In what issue would one discover how he is whimsical and obeys no laws, and is quite different, therefore, from the Christian God? In what issue is it shown how this difference helps explain the non-development of science in Islam — that and the discouragement, at every step, of free and skeptical inquiry in Islam?
And where, in what past or present issue of The New Duranty Times, would you have learned that sculpture and almost all of painting is haram, forbidden, in Islam, that almost all music is similarly banned, and that the only outlets for artistic expression historically have been the architecture and geometric ornamentation of mosques and the Quran’ic or other calligraphy which compares — not favorably, but compares — to the much more spectacular and sophisticated art of calligraphy of China and the East?
Where would one find studies in The New Duranty Times on the collectivist nature of Islam — where those who are persuaded or coerced, as so many have been over time, to become Muslims are seen not as individuals but rather as conscripts for the army of Islam, a belief-system in which the Umma or Collective is everything, and the right of individual conscience (as in exercising the right to leave Islam and choose another belief-system or none at all) is denied? Where would one find the information that individuals who dare to put their own thoughts above the good of the Umma al-Islamiyya can be punished, and should be punished according to the canonical texts, with death?
And where in all the back issues of The New Duranty Times, will you, dear reader, find any discussion of the division of the world between Believer and Infidel that is central to the Muslim worldview, and that arises naturally out of the tenets of Islam? Not all Muslims may accept that worldview, but they do so only by ignoring those tenets, by ignoring above all the figure of Muhammad.
And that brings us to another great lapse, in the series of unforgivable and unforgettable lapses by The New Duranty Times. This is its third challenge after its miserable coverage of Russia under Stalin in the 1930s (with the eponymous Walter Duranty pooh-poohing the truth, elevating the lies). Then at the same time The New Duranty Times minimized what Hitler began doing to the Jews of Germany in the 1930s, and what he planned to do on a much larger scale when he had the chance, until it was too late for hundreds of thousands of its trusting readers to understand fully the threat faced by their own relatives in Europe, so that they could move heaven and earth to save them. Thus does the Times have real blood on its hands, and forever. And now comes the third failure: the failure to cover Islam, to make sense of Islam, to tell us anything except what the editors of The New Duranty Times or their mediocre and hopelessly uncomprehending “foreign-affairs” columnists (Friedman, Kirstof) or the apologists they favor on their Op-Ed page want to hear — all the while keeping out all those who might actually offer some disturbing home truths about Islam.
And what about Ibn Warraq, and Ali Sina, and all the defectors from Islam? When was the last time you saw any of them mentioned in The New Duranty Times? When could you have found out, in more than a passing reference, in a small, ill-informed, and unpleasant article by Craig Smith a few years ago, about the important work of Bat Ye’or on the institution of the dhimma, its legal framework, and the mental attitudes engendered by such a system not only in the Muslim overlord and the non-Muslim over whom he lords it in Dar al-Islam, but also, curiously, in the ways in which Infidel foreign aid to Muslims has come to resemble, in the attitudes of both the giver and the receiver, the classic Jizyah? No, nothing about Bat Ye’or or her important work. Indeed, if you wished to find out about the status of the non-Muslim or dhimmi under Islamic rule for nearly 1400 years, you would not find a word about it in the hundred thousand pages of print (well, often thin rivulet of print meandering between plump banks of swelling advertisements) that The New Duranty Times, the hideously inadequate New York Times, part of the hideously inadequate Western press, has published since 9.11.2001.