Hanif Malik, an Islamic leader in Britain, said some time ago: “Yes, everyone agrees the Muslim leaders must be more pro-active in fighting radical thought. But it’s just empty words when Muslims feel the world is against them.”
The world is against them? One may be able to swallow this if one does not dwell on all those passages that preach Jihad and the need for Islam to spread and for Muslims to dominate, or if one does not pay attention to all those passages that inculcate hatred of Infidels that are all over the Qur’an. One may accept this if no attention is paid to how non-Muslims — no matter how disparate they might be, whether Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Confucians — have historically been treated wherever Muslims have had the upper hand.
Yet those Infidels have allowed Muslims by the millions into their countries. This creates an essentially immiscible, un-integrable population, a permanent security and societal threat. This creates a presence that makes the lives of those indigenous Infidels not full of some “rich diversity” that would otherwise not exist, but rather far more unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous than they would otherwise be, and precisely unpleasant, expensive, and dangerous in proportion to the size of the local Muslim population. Well, that does not appear to me to be a sign that “the world is against them.”
Far from it. “The world” has swallowed whole Muslim propaganda or Muslim acts everywhere. The genocide against Christians, the “Jihad” in southern Nigeria that led to the declaration of an independent Biafra, did not lead to any expression of Christian solidarity. No one came to Biafra’s aid, or even recognized a free Biafra (where Christian villagers were strafed by Egyptian pilots), save for Israel and Ghana. That was in 1967-1969, and even today the army of Nigeria acts as an occupying force in Ibo lands. The Arab Muslim genocide, conducted on clear Islamic grounds and prompted by the Muslim texts, that has led to the slow-motion murder of largely helpless Christian and animist black Africans in the southern Sudan and which took place over 20 years, has only now, and only thanks to efforts by private Christian groups, received some attention.
In the Balkans, no one in the Western world even began to understand the fears of the Serbs. Even today no government in the West has analyzed carefully what Izetbegovic threatened, and which helped push fearful Serbs into supporting the awful Milosevic. Today, no one does a thing about the Muslim destruction of ancient Orthodox churches, or the mass expulsions of Serbs. The Serbs are “bad” and the Muslims are “good” — or at least “the persecuted ones” are. That seems to be an immutable article of faith. It is nonsense.
In Pakistan and Bangladesh Hindus are persecuted, expropriated, beaten to death.
In Thailand the Muslims attack Buddhist monks, teachers, farmers, and the world appears to think that it is the “policies” of the former Thai government that are at fault. But matters have scarcely improved so far under the rule of the new Muslim leader.
In Indonesia, Muslims massacred in the 1960s 600,000 ethnic, but non-Muslim, Chinese. It was presented as a pre-emptive strike on “Communist fifth columnists.” The world chose to believe that. In East Timor, which was illegally seized by the Indonesians from the Portuguese, one-third of the East Timorese population — Christians — were killed until rescued by the Australian army. In the Moluccas, in Sulawesi, churches by the thousands have been destroyed (see the reports of the Barnabas Fund). Christians are being murdered, as are other non-Muslims.
In Pakistan, Christian schools and churches are bombed.
In India, in Indian-held Kashmir or in Delhi itself, nothing is safe from Muslim attack — the temple at Ayodhya, the Parliament building in Delhi.
As for Israel, its entire history has been one of fighting off a Jihad.
And yet these Muslims persist in their belief that “the whole world is against them.”
What the Muslims in question really mean is that it is extremely irksome to have to accommodate Infidels, Infidel laws, Infidel arrogance (meaning: refusal to give up, at least right away or on the fast-track schedule that Muslims think only right). These are for those Muslims all reasons to deplore the situation, to attack, to demand changes, to demand special recognition, to threaten, to attack. Yes, it all fits the world-view that Islam inculcates, that the model of Muhammad offers, that the Hadith support, that the Qur’an itself requires.
Why should anyone be surprised? These “angry” and “frustrated” Muslims are acting naturally. And so far the taqiyya-and-kitman “moderates” only attempt to retain their own position in society, and to deflect Infidel attention. For they know, or suspect, that the Muslims are not yet strong enough, the time is not right, and it was very silly of Bin Laden and others to strike in such a way so soon — for things were going so swimmingly without the need for any terrorism whatsoever.
And that is the problem. For if there are no terrorist acts, will Infidels cease to educate themselves about Islam and let down their guards — which, by the way, are hardly up at all? The mental inertia, the impulse not to find out too much, or to make sense of too much, for fear of what it might do to your own equanimity, is strong. But it has to be overcome — not by everyone, but by enough people to put up a fight, to resist. And resistance does not mean only, or mainly, girding on body armor and marching off to Iraq.
It means a thousand things.