The Guirard/Waller school would have us believe that if we pretend Jihad is not Jihad, but rather, as the Saudis keep pushing them to believe and disseminate, “hiraba,” that all manner of things shall be well.
For, the Al-Saud whisper to us, we have had remarkable success in re-educating our own local Al-Qaada members. Why, just as soon as we manage to convince them that what Al Qaeda does here is called properly not “Jihad” but “hiraba,” why, they are ready to see the error of their past ways.
And this kind of thing becomes the subject of gushing reports on television — just look at what those Saudis can do. Why, to see some of those commentators, one would think that Saudi Arabia should be put in charge of Guantanamo, and the re-education of those prisoners.
This, like nothing else, shows the level of ignorance of Islam among those who by this time should know better, should have learned something. What the Saudi authorities do, of course, is to attempt, using assorted members of the ulema (clergy), to convince these disaffected Saudis that attacks by Muslims on a nice Muslim state, with such nice Muslim rulers as the beneficent Al-Saud, is just not halal. It is “hiraba.” And that bad man Osama bin Laden, and his bad associate Ayman Al-Zawahiri, simply are wrong and deceitful to call it “Jihad.”
For “Jihad” is what you conduct, by whatever means available, to spread Islam in the lands of the Infidels. But Saudi Arabia is a part of Dar al-Islam. Are not, those clerics say, the Al-Saud in general wise and benevolent rulers? Are they not, in truth, the Guardians of the Two Noble Sanctuaries, Mecca and Medina? Have they not spent tens of billions on the grand Grand Mosque of Mecca, and on improvements in facilities for pilgrims, and on airports and other means of transportation for those pilgrims? Does Saudi Arabia not spend billions — up to one hundred billion dollars, in fact, over the past 20 or so years, on mosques and madrasas all over the world? Does it not spread propaganda, pay for missionaries to conduct Da’wa, buy up Western hirelings who are so effective in preventing real understanding, in the capitals of the West, of the true views and deep animus of Saudi Arabia? And of course at the same time those hirelings are working hard to prevent any real understanding of Islam, and to keep the Western governments focused on such things as the “plight of the ‘Palestinians'” and how the resolution of that “plight” in a “two-state solution” (we know it is a “solution” because that is what it is called, so it must be) will lead to das ewige Fried, the Sweet Dream of Eternal Peace. They do all this in order both to further the Lesser Jihad against Israel — which is presented by those Western hirelings and collaborators and willing simpletons as merely a matter of clashing “nationalisms,” instead of as a war by Muslim Arabs, implacable and permanent, against an Infidel state. That war will be unaffected by any Israeli surrenders or further shrinkage. Israel must be destroyed, in this view, because it is on land that not only was once part of Dar al-Islam, but sits right in the middle of Dar al-Islam. Therefore it has priority on the very large To-Do List of Muslims conducting Jihad, or supporting Jihad, everywhere.
The Saudis do not re-educate their prisoners to abandon Jihad. That is, they do nothing to get them to drop their desire to remove all obstacles to the spread of Islam. Quite the contrary. They explain that they themselves, the Al-Saud and the government of Saudi Arabia, have been mischaracterized, maligned, by Al Qaeda’s leaders. Bin Laden, of course, has “issues,” as the child by the polyphiloprogentive father with a not-quite-fully-Arab Syrian mother, making him keen to prove that he could be “plus islamiste que les islamistes” — that is, those who are pure-bred Arabs, the best of people.
They do not attack Jihad. They merely have those clerics show that attacks on Muslims who are loyal and true to Islam are wrong. And the Saudis are, they maintain, true Muslims in their Jihad-supporting-and-promoting ways, which far outweigh their little peccadilloes at the gaming-tables and in the brothels of the West — which, of course, they no doubt have those imams explain, are merely “stories” concocted by vicious Bin Laden, nasty Al-Zawahiri.
The endless naivete, ignorance, hopefulness, sentimentalism, fleeing from reality, of our political class all over the Western world is surely the most striking feature of this, the initial stage of what will be not a “Long War” as the Administration likes to say, thinking how very tough-minded and realistic it is being, but rather, a war without end, a war that cannot end as long as the texts, and therefore the tenets, and the attitudes, of Islam remain, as remain they will. But it is a war in which the enemy can be reduced to a condition that renders it no longer so menacing, that puts it back, roughly, vis-a-vis the Infidel world, about where it was, say, in 1950, or 1930. The same duty of Jihad existed then as it does now, as it will in twenty years, or fifty, as it has existed for the entire life of Islam. But what was lacking was the wherewithal. It came, with those OPEC trillions, and those migrant Muslim millions.
Diminish those revenues. Force expenditures to go sky-high. Force the sharing of wealth by rich Muslims with poor Muslims, instead of supplying the latter with the disguised Jizyah of constant and very large amounts of Infidel foreign aid. Make the poorer Arabs and Muslims suitably apprised of, and resentful about, the fantastic wealth of, for example, the greedy and selfish Gulf Arabs.
And study the effect of the Muslim presence in the Infidel lands, as a matter of national security. For that large-scale presence clearly has created a situation all over Western Europe that is unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the indigenous Infidels, and is a threat to their political and legal institutions as well.
This is not very hard, one would think, to grasp. But apparently a great many people are having a great deal of trouble doing so — the grasping, I mean. Well, they will just have to keep trying. And one good place to start is to see what is ludicrous about thinking that the Saudi government has managed to “de-program” those prisoners to give up Jihad or their hostility and even murderous hatred for Infidels — that is, for you and for me. What they have managed to do is to get those prisoners to be “de-programmed” so that they are no longer going to regard the Al-Saud, for their corruption and Western decadence, as non-Muslims, but rather, will have learned anew about just what True-Blue Believers the Al-Saud princes and princelings and princelettes, all daggers and dishdashas and sneers of cold command, really are. And then they will change their attitude — but only toward the Saudis, not toward Infidels. And so there is no lesson, no message of hope, that this program, with its art therapy and its sports, holds for Infidels.
For them, the Jihad marches on. La lutte continue.