When apologists for Islam’s Jihad refer to “enemies of Islam,” they increasingly mean those who dare to look steadily at the actual contents of Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira and then begin to take note of the history of Jihad-conquest and subjugation of all non-Muslims. What makes them crazy is that such “enemies,” like Robert Spencer, keep level-headedly pointing to the actual contents of Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira, about which they can do nothing, and to the commentaries not by one or two isolated crazies, but by the perfectly respectable orthodox jurisconsults.
The mental stamina Robert Spencer exhibits in refuting, point by point, the bizarre representative of a bizarre world, with its bizarre claims that are yet believed by hundreds of millions, is to be admired. One might think it is easy to deal with what would appear to be such crazy claims, but it turns out to be hard, because 99% of the Western world has decided it would rather believe palpable nonsense and lies, or at least pretend to, in the hope that by pretending, somehow it would all come true.
Yet the fact that they are lies is not difficult to establish. Imagine you are a Muslim today. You are trying to divert the attention of 5 billion Infidels from Islam itself. You are trying to make sure that Infidels do not look closely at what is actually in the immutable texts of Islam. Taqiyya. Tu Quoque. Smiling “Open Houses” where the chicken and pita and baklava, and those carefully friendly faces, and the careful patter about the “three Abrahamic faiths” and “the three monotheisms” and the “prophets such as Jesus and Moses whom we honor” and so on are meant to keep the Infidels quiet, and satisfied.
And you keep it up. You have plenty of money to support you, and an army of Infidels, some ignorant and willfully so, some unable to come to grips with a matter so disturbing, some lazy, some piously convinced that everyone everywhere wants just exactly the same thing and we are all god’s chillun to boot, some possessing mental pathologies (e.g. antisemitism or anti-Americanism) that makes them eager to believe the best of Islam, some merely doing-it-for-the-money Western hirelings, perfectly aware of how to improve their bank accounts through doing the bidding of the Saudis or other rich Arabs and Muslims.
And then along comes someone, Robert Spencer or someone like him, who simply keeps going back to the texts and the history of how those texts were received, and acted upon. And you can never, ever, rebut a word he says. Never. Not a single quotation has been found false. Not a single passage. Nothing. You can only, therefore, provide the argument that he must be this, or must be that, and how maddening it is when he turns out to be not this, and not that, but exactly what he says.
And what’s more, the cat is now out of the bag. For we can all read those texts. They’re a click away, in various translations presented synoptically. We can read the Qur’an. We can read as many of the Hadith as we can stand to read without our brains turning to mush. We can read the biography, the Sira, of Muhammad. We can find out all those things he did that Muslims insist are not to be criticised, but indeed to be emulated, for Muhammad is uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil.
What can one do when you cannot hide these texts, and indeed in a certain sense want to spread them — but only to those Infidels who will not criticise but instead marvel at them, and be driven to “revert” to Islam? And yet, at the very same time, you want to keep those same texts from the prying eyes and comprehending brains of tens or hundreds of millions of Muslims?
A tall order. An impossible order.
Sometimes we hear that these “enemies of Islam,” as one Muslim put it some time ago, “control vast media resources, such as television networks, news agencies, newspapers, radio stations, Internet sites, magazines, music companies, film studios, and publishing houses.” One only wishes it were true. A handful of Internet sites, possibly. But what newspapers? Le Monde? The Guardian? The New Duranty Times? The Bandar Beacon? What radio stations — the ones such as the BBC that are handmaidens of Al-Jazeera in their coverage? What television networks in the Western world have not bent over backwards in their desire to curry favor with Muslims? What news agencies? Reuters, Agence France Press? What magazines, what music companies, what film studios? In 1942, Hollywood made 300 anti-Nazi films — with the encouragement of the War Office.
We are in a war now, a war that is carefully unrecognized — that is, war is being made on us, and will continue to be made on us by those who take their Islam seriously enough, and possess the wherewithal to conduct Jihad by whatever means are available. Has there been a single explicitly anti-Jihad movie? Do you know of any that have depicted, say, an agent of Islam burrowing his way deep into the government, possibly with the help of those ex-ambassadors and others who have for so long who have been on the Saudi take, directly or indirectly? Have you ever seen a film depicting some sinister pseudo-academic figure with a well-funded operation — very much reminiscent of the Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding, run by lean, mean, jogging John Esposito, always ready to offer his lengthy resume designed to show what an authority he is, and always ready to set straight members of the government, as well as the laziest and most unquestioning of reporters who might actually go to him to “find out about Islam”?
There’s a movie here. Who wants to produce it? I’ll write it — and it won’t be a kinder, gentler sort of movie. Let’s start that production of war movies soon; it is getting on to 1943, and we need a little more oomph.