“Another example of how the ease of modern communications makes the spread of jihad easy also, for now jihadists can penetrate into areas of the Muslim world where the jihad ideology had lain dormant for considerable periods.” — from Robert Spencer’s comment on this article
Technological advances made by Infidels, but then appropriated by Muslims, allow the latter to disseminate not some made-up texts, but the actual texts of Islam, those that pertain most directly to the Jihad. That includes those texts about the Jihad using the instrument of qitaal, or combat. This is the version that Infidels have no trouble describing as “terrorism” and that for many Muslims is perfectly licit, given both their quite narrow definition of Infidel “civilians” and their willingness to describe suicide bombers as not really committing suicide (which is not licit in Islam) but merely as conducting combat operations that may very likely lead to their death. The Jihad, so central to Islam, manages to justify a great deal.
But technology, remember, is made more readily available where there is enough prosperity for television sets, or cassette players, or for towers to be built. Or for an Internet message to get through — that requires access to the Internet. In other words, the poorest villagers, in the most remote places, leading their hardscrabble existence, are the least likely to be a problem. But as soon as the wonders of modern (Infidel) technology arrive, things change.
Furthermore, there is one aspect of technology — the revolution in transportation — that also helps to disseminate the message of those conducting Jihad through violent means. Jihad conducted through any means, through Da’wa, through demographic conquest, is a danger, and in the long run far more dangerous to Infidel well-being than these acts of terrorism, but in order to recognize them as a danger, one must first be willing or able to comprehend their use, quite conscious use, as instruments to further Jihad, which itself is a “struggle” to spread Islam, not until it covers the globe, but until it dominates the globe, and Muslims rule, everywhere. That is the desired, that is the obvious, that is the natural end point. And whether it happens or not (one cannot imagine China, Japan, Korea, sturdier, more aware of their own pasts and cultures, succumbing to Islam) it is the state of permanent war between Believers and Infidels, one mandated by Islam — though open warfare need only be conducted when conditions are right, and ripe. It is advancing today against those who seem most vulnerable — psychically and economically marginal individuals and groups. And it is advancing because of that blend of willful ignorance and deliberate sentimentalism that characterizes, today, those who would presume to instruct and protect us.
The ability to send out the full message of Islam, with the special effects of the day, has indeed been damaging: those endless scenes of Arab “martyrs” and their deeds of derring-do, as this Humvee is seen being blown up, and then this one, or as the Twin Towers are shown as they crumble, or this or that hapless Infidel is spurtingly decapitated, and all to the sound of Arab war-cries and monotonous music, designed to thrill the would-be Jihadists everywhere. And then there are the endless pictures, the propaganda about American or Israeli or British or Thai or Filipino or Indian or (Your-Infidel-Here) supposed atrocities, with emphasis on blood, women and children, the whole thing.
Just imagine if the Nazi propaganda machine, which managed to take over all of Germany, had had the instruments now available — had had the Internet — for Goebbels and his associates to work their sinister magic, to people all over the world, in a dozen or perhaps two dozen languages.
And there is one other technological revolution that makes things quite different, and much more dangerous for Infidels. It is the communication and transportation revolution, the great ease with which Muslims, living in, and perhaps even being citizens of, this or that Infidel nation-state, but being able, as they could not, say, fifty years ago, to keep in constant touch by telephone with other Muslims in Muslim lands — especially those that they or their parents may have come from. And then there is the ability to travel back and forth, as hundreds of thousands of Pakistanis, some of them British citizens no doubt in the most limited, formal passport sense, do every year. They travel back to good old Pakistan to take a wife, or dump an old one, to refresh yearly their contact with the Old Sod — the Old Sod in question being a place where Al Qaeda is protected, where A.Q. Khan the nuclear thief (“Father of the Islamic Bomb”) lives in luxury safe from prying American investigators. And Lashkar Jihad, and Lashkar-e-Toiba, and Sipaha-e-Sahaba and a hundred other groups are there on the ground to see that justice is done.
Yet what is the position of the American and other Western governments? It is to “end poverty” and to build up, with roads, with all kinds of transportation and communication infrastructure, the very places which, as soon as they get it, will now be even more vulnerable to Arab Muslim propaganda. Will the Afghani villages as yet untouched by the Internet or satellite television become more, or less, fanatically Muslim when the Americans, in their heedless haste and waste (in Iraq, in Afghanistan, everywhere) proceed to brightly march in and bring with them as much as they can of advanced technology? Will those who think it is a splendid idea to present every little boy and girl in the backward world with a brand-new computer, and a very nice Internet connection to go with it, give a thought to what is now going to be available on that computer?
Don’t even think about it, we are told. Or rather, the question is not even raised. It is not even raised about sub-Saharan Africa, where we assume that those negroponte-ish (the other Negroponte) computers can only do good. But if such gift-horses bring with them, inadvertently, the “gift” of Islam, what Infidel, knowing what Islam does to stunt mental and moral growth (and the defectors or apostates from Islam know this perfectly well), would support such endeavors?
Oh, not to worry, some say, because little Muslims will naturally reject that, thanks to mindless Infidels. They will merely be tapping their feet to “High School Musical Part I” or possibly “High School Musical Part II.” Don’t be silly.