A Jihad Watch reader recently wrote: “You don’t want them in the UK. And they don’t want you in Iraq, Afghanistan. They don’t want your diplomatic double standards over Palestine, Somalia, Darfur, Iraq, Afghanistan, etc…If you want to be left alone, leave others alone.”
Yes, one can partly agree with this. The West should remove itself from Iraq and from Afghanistan, and never try to engage in such a baseless “bringing freedom to ordinary moms and dads” bit of nonsense again. And it should cease the transfer, from Infidels to Believers, of all that wealth, including more than $60 billion to Egypt from the United States alone, and $27.5 billion, if one includes debt relief, to Pakistan by the United States since 2001 alone. The disguised Jizyah of foreign aid to Muslim states that do not have oil does not change the attitudes and atmospherics of Muslim states, attitudes and atmospherics that flow naturally from the tenets, that are derived naturally from the immutable canonical texts of Islam — Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira. The fiasco of Tarbaby Iraq, which has cost the United States $880 billion, more than the total cost of all the wars, save World War II, ever fought by the United States, should be clear.
And it should be clear that the large-scale presence of Muslims in the Bilad al-Kufr, the Lands of the Infidels, has created a situation which, both for the indigenous Infidels, and for non-Muslim immigrants as well, is much more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale presence. Once that is clearly understood, sensible measures — beginning with a halt to Muslim migration, and intelligent ways to reverse current trends, can be undertaken. One has only to look around — for Americans, say, to see what has happened in England or France, or the British to see what has happened in the Netherlands, or the Italians to look at Malmo or Rotterdam, or the Americans, who have the advantage of seeing what has happened and is happening in Western Europe — to understand this problem.
Finally, there is no way to “reform” Islam through the efforts of Infidels, and possibly not through the efforts of those who are now aware of the problem, but out of filial piety or embarrassment continue to Defend the Faith, and do not join the impressive and articulate defectors from it, such as Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and many others. For not only is their the fear of what true Believers will do (death for such defectors can and has been the result in some cases) inhibiting, but complete social ostracism is a powerful inhibitor as well. And it is difficult to see steadily and whole a Total System, that regulates all areas of life, and — at no extra cost — explains the universe.
The goals of the Infidels are not to be achieved by sending armies to keep a non-existent “Iraq” united, much less make it a swell place, a Model or Light Unto the Muslim Nations. Its pre-existing fissures, sectarian and ethnic, of which the Bush policymakers were entirely ignorant, or to which they were oblivious, are not to be deplored, but welcomed. Nothing need be done to widen them. The Sunnis will never acquiesce in the hated Shi’a, those “Rafidite dogs,” ruling over the Land of the Two Rivers and especially over fabled Baghdad, the madinat al-salaam, for 400 years the capital of the Abbasid Caliphate, and therefore the most important city (save for Mecca and Medina) for history-haunted Sunni Arabs. The Shi’a, in turn, will never surrender their new power. Nor will either side compromise, as assorted American politicians and generals appear to think. They will not, because Islam does not teach compromise with one’s enemies. It teaches that one emerges either the Victor or the Vanquished. And even though, in the Islamic texts, the contesting parties are Believers and Infidels, the same attitudes and atmospherics affect the relations of Sunnis to Shi’a, of Shi’a to Sunnis.
Similarly, the Americans should not be preventing but encouraging the Kurds to win a state of their own. For a key to splitting the Camp of Jihad, and diminishing its power (and therefore its menace) is to encourage non-Arab Muslims to do what Anwar Shaikh and Ibn Warraq (both from Pakistan) managed to do: to realize that Islam has always been a vehicle for Arab supremacism. This supremacism manifests itself in the taking of Arab names (something that is great fun for the new convert or “revert”), the five-times-a-day Meccatropical prayer-prostrations, the taking of a seventh-century Arab as the Model of Conduct, uswa hasana, as the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, and in the deep belief that the Arabs have that despite the universalist claims of Islam, Islam truly belongs to the Arabs as the “best of peoples” to whom the Qur’an was given, and in their language.
What better way to raise the whole matter, in the consciousnesses of the 80% of the world’s Muslims who are not Arabs, about Islam as the carrier of Arab supremacism, then to have the world’s attention focused on the Kurdish attempt to throw off the Arab yoke? What will Berbers, themselves the victims of Arab cultural and linguistic imperialism, do if they see a Kurdish state? What will the Berbers who in the Kabyle, and in France, the association of “maghrebins laics,” show the most promise of questioning, or even possibly abandoning, here and there, Islam, think of such a state? And what would such a state mean for the Kurds of Syria and Iran, and, in its ripple effect, what would Iranian efforts to crush unrest in the Kurdish areas of Iran, do to the Baluchis, the Azeris, or the Arabs in oil-bearing Khuzistan? Every effort by the Americans so far has been naively based on the idea of bringing toys and good things to eat to the boys and girls on the other side of the mountain, but this chug-chugging I-Think-I-Can-I-Think-I-Can has not and will not work. Less naiveté, less hopelessness, is called for — and also called for is a renewed alliance between the United States and Western Europe, for the Muslim threat is shared, and the only difference is that the threat internally is greater for the Europeans than for the Americans, who still have time to protect themselves far more easily.
Finally, if you wished Muslims well, what would you wish them? You would wish them to be able to escape from the mental prison of that faith that stunts mental and moral growth, wouldn’t you? But it can’t be done from outside. All one can do is demonstrate, implacably, that one is not fooled by taqiyya-and-tu-quoque, that one has read, and reread, the essential texts (Qur’an, Hadith — a few hundred from al-Bukhari and Muslim will do, and Sira), and that you have already heard all the selective quotation (5.32 without 5.33, “there is no compulsion in religion,” and so on) but also know exactly what those texts mean, or what has been carefully omitted, or what Muslims take from the texts of Islam. The weapons of Jihad are many, and qitaal, or combat, or the kind of acts that we call “terrorism” but Muslims regard merely as a justified form of unconventional “qitaal,” is only one of them, the only one that the Bush Administration seems capable of recognizing. The Money Weapon, careful campaigns of Da’wa targeted at psychically and economically vulnerable people, the marginal members of Western society, and finally, inexorable demographic conquest, of which Muslims from Boumedienne boasting at the U.N. in 1974, to a simple retired accountant writing his letter to the Pakistani paper “Dawn” on December 5, 2001, about “demography” as the newest and most effective instrument of Jihad in the West — these are the instruments that matter. As long as Muslim states and peoples are prevented from acquiring the most dangerous weaponry, that famous WMD, or if they have managed (as A. Q. Khan did through theft of Western secrets) to acquire such weaponry, to limit their power to deliver it, little military intervention is necessary. And certainly there should never again be a repeat of the Iraq folly, well-meaning as it was.
Suitably informed, Infidels can demonstrate to Muslims outside, and within their own countries, that they are not susceptible to blague. And they can point out, again and again, that the failures of Muslim states, societies, and peoples, the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of those societies, are a result of Islam itself. And the more that is understood, and the less inhibited Infidels are from expressing that view, the more that Muslims themselves will begin to think and write about such matters, and since the justice of the claim will soon become evident, even obvious, the demoralization of Islam, through disaffection not among the primitives but among the thinking classes, will hasten the disarray and demoralization.
This would be much more effective than silly boots-on-the-ground in Baghdad, or endless amounts of money spent, or surrenders contemplated at the expense of others (as in the throwing-Israel-to-the-wolves strategy, whereby the legal, historic, and moral rights of that country are minimized or simply ignored, and the nature of the Arab and Muslim war against it — a Lesser Jihad — is deliberately misinterpreted as a “nationalist” cause by that post-1967 creation the “Palestinian people”). All this is done in order to win “hearts and minds.” But both are unwinnable, by Infidels, if those hearts and those minds are Muslim.
How do we know? The Qur’an tells us so. And the Hadith, And the Sira. And 1350 years of Jihad-conquest, and the subsequent subjugation, in the best case, of the surviving non-Muslims, as dhimmis, subject to the onerous conditions that led so many Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, and even in India, where Hindus were finally accorded a kind of honorary ahl-al-kitab, or “People of the Book” status, meaning that they would not be killed or immediately converted, but in order to keep that Jizyah flowing, would be allowed to stay alive. Of course, 60-70 million Hindus were, such historians as K. S. Lal have noted, killed during several centuries of Muslim rule, while some were either forcibly converted early on (those Muslim rulers needed some local support, given the size of the population they had to rule over), or later as others , quite understandably, wishing to escape the horrors of their status as dhimmis (subcontinental “zimmis”), a status which was one of deliberate humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, made the decision to join those who were part of the master class, that of the Muslim overlords. And that explains how islamization has turned vast areas of the conquered-by-Islam globe into places where Muslims now predominate, and continue, even now, to make life as difficult and often as dangerous as it now is, for those tiny remaining populations of non-Muslims in lands now securely under Muslim rule.