Many Muslim groups and individual Muslims are rewriting the history of the world. Islam teaches them how to do it. What came before Islam, wherever Islam goes, is waved out of memory and consideration, as merely the time of ignorance, Jahiliyya. In the West, we are now in our own Time of Ignorance, just as the Arabs of Arabia were before Muhammad came along to receive — over 23 years — successive revelations from Allah, who had chosen the Arabs as the best of peoples, to receive his message, and the Arabic language, in which to present it. Arabs still maintain that only the Arabic Qur’an is the true Qur’an, that no translation, no matter how faithful, can be the “Holy Qur’an.”
For 1350 years they have been rewriting history. The zero is in their retelling an Arab invention, as is algebra (the Arabic name apparently is enough to dismiss everything taken from the Sanskrit mathematicians). Like Soviet propagandists on steroids, they claim for “Islam” and “Islamic science” Greek texts translated and preserved by Jews and Christians in the schools of translators at Cordoba and Baghdad. They claim not only the Hindu “zero” but paper-making, brought (see Dard Hunter) from China to Damascus. They insist that in the first 200-300 years of Muslim conquest, when the Christians and Jews still outnumbered the Muslims who ruled over them, that the intellectual activities of those Jews and Christians, or of those who were one or at most two generations from being Jews and Christians and who were raised in a milieu not yet stifled by Islam with its hatred of free inquiry, are attributable to “Islam” and claimed for “Islamic civilization.”
Yet the most famous Muslim scientist, Rhazes (al-Razi) was a freethinker, as were many of the dozen or two Muslim names that are constantly bandied about. They”re always the same names, but we in the West are kept constantly confused by those same names, with Ibn Rushd (or is it Averroes?) and Avicenna (or is it Ibn Sina) or is Ibn Sina Ibn Rushd, or what the hell is going on. So in place of the thousands of names of writers, sculptors, painters, musicians, philosophers, thinkers in the non-Muslim West, we keep getting handed the same pitiful list of the same people, and we keep being impressed as Muslims and their ahistoric apologists tell us over and over again such fables as “when the West was in the Dark Ages [a phrase, and idea, put paid to by the past half-century of Western historiography] Islamic science was flourishing.” Utter crap. Start with Toby Huff, or Father Jaki.
Was it just a year or two ago that the State Department, in an excess of desire to please, agreed with the preposterous Muslim claim that Muslims had been with Columbus when he discovered America? And of course we have also heard the Muslim claim that Muslims discovered America not with Columbus, but before 900 A.D., and not only discovered America but settled here. Anything will be said, or claimed. Just as Muslims are given to embracing the wildest conspiracy theories about Infidels, they are also given to the wildest fantasies about their own achievements, because the habit of mental submission, the habit of discouraging all skeptical and critical and free inquiry, has its consequences. The most obvious consequence is the primitive mental conditioning that makes people susceptible to those conspiracy theories, and those baseless dreams of glory.
The Muslim claim to have “discovered” America in 880 A.D., or that Muslims were with Columbus (who had a great interest in claiming the New World for Christian Spain, and was keenly aware of the menace of Islam to Western Christendom), or the still-more recent Muslim claim that long before the Europeans arrived, Muslims had arrived in and settled in Australia, are all part of the same Muslim impulse to stake a claim to the world. In Muslim terms, for Muslims only, the claim may not be necessary. After all, in the Muslim view everyone was born a Muslim, so why isn’t that enough to make the Muslim claim? But of course they have taken note of Infidels, who apparently are not impressed with this everyone-is-born-a-Muslim argument (which is why people are said not to “convert” but rather to “revert” to Islam). They need a little something more for them to accept Muslim claims, whether to land or to cultural achievements, that are not their own.
And these are not the simple claims of simple folk who simply derive pleasure from some achievement of others like them, the way someone might keep track of famous sports stars or entertainers or scientists or political leaders sharing the same ethnic or racial or religious background. Not at all. These are claims made by Muslims with a more sinister intent: to make sure that the Infidels understand that Muslims have a claim, a claim on territory, a claim that is somehow validated by the backdating of a Muslim presence, or the exaggeration of Muslim efforts.
The new claims about Muslim veterans are prompted by current concerns. It is the attempt to claim a specious loyalty, with a specious — because grossly exaggerated if not entirely fictional — “Muslim contribution to the American war effort.” Of course there may have seen a Muslim or two in the American army, no doubt an early precursor of the Black Muslims. Yet the Black Muslims were never regarded by Arab Muslims as real Muslims because of their practices, which include a much wider acceptance of music, as well as a much less fierce attitude toward Christians. Or possibly, the most prominent Muslim World War II vet, this “Hakim” (a name that can also be used by Christians from Arabic-language societies), was not at the time a Muslim, but converted later.
The whole thing is designed to allow for some kind of “Muslim ceremony” by “Muslim veterans.” Yet aside from Black Muslims, there cannot have been very many Muslims serving in recent years in combat positions in either Afghanistan or Iraq, and the odd Bangladeshi-American or two, serving not with the support of fellow Muslims, proudly displaying in their grocery stores pictures of American Muslim servicemen, as any other immigrant community would and did do. Rather, they have been for the most part either stonily silent about, or actively hostile to, the handful of Muslims who have joined the American military. And even there it is now clear that throughout the Western world Muslims, when they do join the military or, as in England, the police, they turn out to be sources of anguish and necessarily must be monitored. For they themselves constitute, given the Total Belief System of Islam and inculcated loyalty to the Umma and to Islam, a permanent security headache that has to be recognized even by those Infidels who keep whistling in the dark and insisting on “integration” of Muslims into Western society as the answer. Of course, they never explaining how, given the texts and tenets of Islam, such “integration” can realistically be achieved.
The Muslims are late to the West, and they are attempting some Nunc Pro Tunc backdating of everything. They were here a thousand years ago, or five hundred. They discovered America. They discovered Australia. They settled here among the Indians. Or perhaps they predated the Indians who walked across the frozen wastes of the Bering Strait. They invented this, they built that. And in a certain sense, all of those claims are true — because everyone who ever lived was born a Muslim, and only became something else because of a wrong turn, a bad upbringing, a wretched environment. You, and I, and every little boy and girl, was a Muslim once.
But let’s get back to our own little lambs, those lambs among our elites who are being readied for some Eid al-Fitr slaughter. It is they who will report breathlessly on, they who will insert into sentimental speeches, news of this “Muslim Veteran” and the Muslim group that will “honor” him, without understanding what malevolence and calculation, not loyalty to America, is afoot. It is they who will fail to note that during World War II, the Arabs were stoutly on the side of the Nazis. Sadat, Saint Sadat himself, was imprisoned by the British for his pro-Nazi activites, as was Nasser (and Nasser’s brother published an Arab edition of “Mein Kampf” in 1939). In Iraq, there was the pro-Axis Rashid Ali, fortunately undone by a British-sponsored coup. In Iran, the Shah was replaced because of his pro-German views by his son, the late Shah Reza Pahlevi. And the most important, best known Arab leader, the Mufti of Jerusalem, not only supported Hitler, but was especially enthusiastic about his plans for an “Endlosung” or that “Final Solution” of the “Judische Frage” (Jewish Question). He even volunteered to raise an S. S. battalion among the Muslims of Bosnia, and did so — with a young Izetbegovic helping out as a recruiter. The Muslim Arabs of North Africa, similarly, were hardly to be found in the ranks of the Free French, nor of the Resistance — though here and there, there might be one, or possibly two, or even three or four, exceptions.
And if the Arabs and Muslims admired Hitler, admired the Nazis and what the Nazis could do to what was seen as Western Christendom, the admiration of Hitler for Islam, his wish that Europe had been Islamized because this would have been a better foundation for his own Nazi ideology and plans, has been well and frequently recorded — by such people as, for example, Rudolf Hess. The emphasis on fighting, on mental submission, on the cult of death and of world-conquering plans — all this Hitler found most appealing.
In raising the little matter of a single and doubtful example of a “Muslim veteran” of World War II, the organizers of this have opened all of these matters up for discussion. And they have similarly opened up discussions about the behavior of the Muslims who have recently been in the American military and made the news. These include Hassan Akbar, a soldier who rolled grenades into the tents of sleeping officers, killing two, and that Muslim Marine (who ended his press conference, the one he held just before sneaking off to Lebanon with a stout “Semper Fi”) who deserted his post, and made his way through Iraq to Lebanon, and the Muslim on a Navy ship who apparently made known his willingness to betray secrets to the enemy. And there are other cases, as yet unpublicized, of behavior in and around the Iraqi theatre that at least some soldiers are aware of, but that may, or may not, come to light.
Go ahead. Let’s talk about both the doctrine and the practice of Islam, and about where Muslim loyalties must — according to Islam — lie. Do they, or don’t they? Even if this or that individual chooses to ignore or overlook the doctrine, he can always return to it, re-impressed with its truth. Thus can we Infidels entrust, say, an Air Force plane, or any major weaponry, or any security operations at all, whether by the military, or the C.I.A., or the F.B.I., to those who still identify themselves, for whatever reason, as Muslims? Does that make sense? Is that an intelligent wager to make with our own security?