A few questions. Are Muslims anywhere in the West now working in the passport-issuing services? Are they working in the immigration and naturalization services? Are they privy to plans for investigating fraud that might allow fellow Muslims to remain in this or other Western countries, or allow them to bring in plural wives, or in other ways fiddle the system?
Muslims are taught that the world is divided between Believer and Infidel. They are taught that they have a duty to participate, always collectively but sometimes, as well, individually, in the Jihad. That is the struggle to remove all the obstacles of Islam that remain anywhere, and ultimately, to ensure that the entire world comes under Islamic rule (even if some non-Muslims are left alive, subject to the Shari’a or Holy Law of Islam, which provides the legal framework for the treatment of non-Muslims under Muslim rule). It is not a choice that Muslims can take or leave. The duty of Jihad is so central to Islam that it has been called by some the Sixth Pillar of Islam. If it is not always and everywhere apparent, that is because many people are naive and assume that the only form that Jihad takes is that of the bomb and the gun.
Not at all. Jihad includes use of the “wealth weapon.” It includes the use of “pen and tongue” — that is speech, that is propaganda, and by propaganda one means propaganda on behalf of Islam to spread it among others, or to defend it from those who would too critically, and in too well-informed a manner, examine its doctrines and its practice. It includes, therefore, the well-financed campaigns of Da’wa all over the West. It includes the well-financed campaigns to build mosques and madrasas and other Muslim institutions, including such organizations as CAIR and concolorous groups that are designed to put up obstacles to every attempt by Infidel peoples and governments to defend themselves, however haphazardly and mildly (and to date all efforts have been most mild, most haphazard), against a very clever, and tireless, and creative enemy. That enemy will never stop, and cannot possibly stop — because Islam directs Muslims never to stop until they have achieved the final goal: a world under Islam, a world where, everywhere, Islam “is to dominate and is not to be dominated.”
A failure of imagination, based on an underlying failure of intelligence and knowledge, explains much of the Western world’s helplessness and seeming hopelessness. Damage to morale of the West has been done by measures undertaken that are the wrong measures. These measures are directed at the wrong goals, and squander enormous resources. They also damage morale, not least among the subset of the population (the people who go into the Army, the Reserves, the National Guard) and their families, in what is clearly an effort based on the naive notion that:
1) this is a “war on terror” not a war against all the instruments of Jihad
2) Islam is essentially okay, and most Muslims are just fine, and it is only “extremists” who have “hijacked” or otherwise “misused” a “great religion” who are the problem, and that therefore the only thing to worry about is the absence of “freedom” in the Muslim countries
3) we need not concern ourselves with demographic changes or campaigns of Daw’a because, you see, Islam is essentially just one more “religion,” and all “religions,” as Bush can tell you, deserve our respect.
At this time, in the history of the West, we have such people as Bush and Rice and Karen Hughes among us. It is they who are making policy. It is their understanding of, their knowledge of, Islam that is causing American troops to be sent, repeatedly, to Iraq, and for the costs of that war to rise. In present and incurred costs (see the studies, even now out–of-date, of Joseph Stiglitz and Bilmes in this country, and Keith Hartley in Great Britain), even if macroeconomic costs are discounted, the minimum now is estimated, reasonably, at one trillion dollars.
What could have been done to fight the Jihad, with propaganda, with energy projects, with educating Infidels everywhere, with one trillion dollars?
What do you think? Do you think that more has been accomplished in checking the instruments of the worldwide Jihad by this attempt to bring “democracy” (in the form that it has been understood by Bush and Rice — i.e. mere head-counting, without any guarantees for individual rights and legal equality for everyone, including women and religious and ethnic minorities, that are the distinguishing features of advanced western democracies) to the “ordinary moms and dads” in the “Middle East”? Can you explain to yourself that if Iraq were to remain a single country, and even were it to be lavished with still more tens or hundreds of billions of dollars in American taxpayers’ money (though Iraq sits on the second-largest reserves of oil in the world, and might borrow against future revenues), that this will somehow have an effect on the Muslims killing Buddhists in southern Thailand, or imposing the Shari”a in certain states of northern Nigeria, or continuing to oppress Christians in the southern Sudan? How will a unified (why? Why should it remain unified? On what theory?) Iraq lessen the campaigns of Da’wa in London and Bradford, in Paris and Marseilles, in Newark and Detroit and Los Angeles? How? What is the relation between the stated goals, or confusedly stated goals, of the Administration in Iraq, and winning, not merely that “war on terror,” but any part of the war, anywhere, against all of the other instruments of Jihad?
All the Administration has to go on at this point is its own obstinacy, and its own ability to rally the unthinking supporters, who are to be whipped up with phrases such as “we can’t accept failure” or we must stay until “we’ve accomplished the mission.” What failure? What failure results from leaving Iraq, and letting ethnic and sectarian fissures divide the Camp of Islam? What mission is that, pray tell? And then there is the usual flogging of the usual suspects, the “cut-and-runners”: here insert any names of any political idiots on the left you choose: Cindy Sheehan, or Jane Fonda, or Noam Chomsky. There, feel better? Feel as though that is a suitable defense for the war in Iraq, and that explains, or explains away, the idiocy of the policy, and the one trillion dollar expense? Merely by invoking “Cindy Sheehan” and such phrases as “moonbats” — that does it for you? My, if so, you are easily pleased.
The colossal mess of Tarbaby Iraq has become, at this point, the greatest failure in American history. The sheer size and scope and monumentality and variousness of this catastrophic squandering of resources is based on the almost willful ignorance of Islam not only of the major figures in this Administration, as well as the ignorance of those in all the previous Administrations — including those grey figures who keep appearing, James Baker, or Brent Scowcroft, not to mention the pious and evil simpletons like Carter. These are Yesterday’s Men. They haven’t a clue about Islam. For all I know, they really do think Saudi Arabia is our “ally,” if they may have by now concluded it is no longer our “staunch ally.” None of these people did a thing to undo, or at least recapture, oligopolistic rents from OPEC by having us tax ourselves. None of them has gotten away from the idea that the Arab-Israeli “problem” must be “solved,” because none of them understands that there is no “solution” short of the total disappearance of Israel as a Jewish state that will ever satisfy any of the Arab Muslims. And the Slow Jihadists of Fatah and the Fast Jihadists of Hamas do not differ the slightest on their ultimate goals, but only on their timetables and their tactics.
Muslims in this country are not all working tirelessly for the Jihad. Some are indifferent. Some are indifferent now, but can become far less indifferent — and often for reasons having nothing to do with politics, but rather with hard-or-impossible-to-discern personal problems, or even depression. Then they have, ready-made, not only the solace of Islam, but the mental and emotional grid that causes them to see Infidels as the reason, Infidels as the cause of all that is wrong, in the world as in their lives, and to act accordingly — as “Mike” Hawash did, or that would-be killer at Chapel Hill, or so many others, who seemed so….so “moderate.”
The expensive farce of Tarbaby Iraq makes it more, not less, difficult, to summon up public support for the kind of intelligent measures that are necessary. Those measures are not machiavellian, not ruthless — they are merely the same kind of intelligent measures that, say, the Americans or British would and did undertake during World War II in regard to suspected sympathizers with the enemy. One must understand the teachings of Islam and the psychology of Muslims — and don’t ask me, or Robert Spencer. If you don’t trust us, ask instead Ibn Warraq, and Ali Sina, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and all of the “defectors” from the Army of Islam who did not suddenly forget their entire life histories, as Muslims, when they left that army. They are here to report the truth about it to the Western world, if only that world were intelligent enough, and paying attention enough, to listen.
What about those passport-issuing offices? What about that INS? And who in the Muslim lands is working in our embassies and consulates and interviewing smiling locals? Who interviews the girls who carefully take off their burkas and even hijabs, and affix lipstick and put on high heels just around the corner from the embassy or consulate, before they enter for their interview? They do this, but they needn’t worry overmuch, because the American State Department, in its infinite wisdom, is entrusting these vetting interviews, in so many cases — for example in Egypt and Syria — to locals named Mohammad and Osama and Jihad.