–˜A Muslim doesn’t look to peace, security, education, work, or the love of any other number of things as his ultimate goals,” al-Amriki said. “˜Instead, a Muslim is always working and striving to please the one true Creator.– — from this news article
The problem is that many of those who now are our rulers, or are “taking a leadership role,” are as limited as McNamara’s whiz kids. They, and the circumambient society, confuse a diploma, a degree, with education. There is a great and touching faith in the power of a famous university to somehow “educate,” when the curriculum is often an incoherent and chaotic smorgasbord of courses. The subjects that those “taking a leadership role” need most are history and literature, the one providing the ballast of fact and the other the divine afflatus of a well-exercised imagination to fill the sails of the ship of state. Without that ballast and that wind the Ship of State is merely Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff, careening this way and that, or at times, motionless when motion is called for.
Not knowing about Islam, and still refractory about learning its texts and tenets, and the history of Islam in the world, our leaders, the members of our political and media elites, are not well prepared. And not being well prepared with facts, they also lack the imagination to conceive of people who are not, in the end, more or less like themselves, wanting the same things, sharing the same worldview. It isn’t true.
For all the prating and gloating about the splendors of “diversity,” there is no real understanding of what kinds of “diversity” there might really be in the world. Chief among the diversities that is not studied and not understood, there is that which Islam offers, an ideology whose adherents are inculcated with the idea that between Believers and Unbelievers, Muslims and Infidels, a permanent state of war (though not necessarily of open warfare) must exist, until such time as all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam are removed.
One does not win Muslim hearts and minds by lavishing Western largesse on Muslims. That is taken only as what is due, a kind of updated Jizyah for the age, and received without any gratitude whatsoever. And the lavishing of such largesse tends to create, in the Infidel donors, the belief that they must continue with such aid lest its diminishment, or its ending, were to create a certain hostility in the Muslims who had gotten used to it. Thus the psychological attitudes expressed in the enforced exaction on non-Muslims of Jizyah in Muslim-ruled lands make a new appearance in our own age, under a different guise: that of huge amounts of aid — as if the trillions transferred to Arab and Muslim oil states were not enough, or could not for some unstated reason be shared with other Arabs and Muslims who lacked such oil wealth. This aid will supposedly bring “prosperity” –though inshallah-fatalism, and the hatred of bid”a or innovation (which come from Islam itself) explain the economic failures of Muslim peoples and polities.
Many Muslims, when they can, are indeed distracted “by this temporary life” and thus are not good Muslims. Thank god for that. But one cannot base a policy of self-defense on the assumption that unobservant or lapsed Muslims will always remain so, and never become the other kind. And since the definition of “moderate” Muslim is always unsteady and shape-shifting, and we again and again have encountered the phenomenon of the Muslim who is outwardly “moderate” at Interfaith Gatherings but in for-Muslims-only audiences states his real, quite different, often bloodcurdling views (there are many examples of this, which can be found at this website), we would be fools to rely on the notion of a permanent and immutable, unswervable, corps or core of “moderates.”
The texts of Islam, and the model of Muhammad, are on the side of those we call the “extremists.” They have the textual authority. The other kind of Muslims do not. And those who are primitive and credulous tend always and everywhere to outnumber those who are not, so that a policy aimed at protecting Infidels from those who take their Islam seriously must not place civilisational bets on those Muslims who do not take it quite so seriously.