Part One is here, Part Two here, Part Three here, and Part Four here.
Gates spent his speech — see here — ignoring the nature of what Muslims learn about Infidels: Americans are Infidels, and the United States is the military leader of the Infidel camp, the Camp that begins, but does not end, with the West. Gates said that the hostility Pakistanis had for the U.S. — expressed in the survey that found that “64 percent” of Pakistanis saw the United States as an enemy” — was disturbing but not “surprising.”
Pakistan, pace Gates, is not right to mistrust Americans. But Pakistanis do distrust Americans, even though we have done so much, given so much, to Pakistan, and even though we have ignored over many decades a history of meretriciousness from a recipient of a great deal of aid. Pakistan is considered an “ally” — yet against the U.S. it has maintained a level and duration of meretriciousness that is possibly without parallel in recent American history. Pakistanis mistrust and will always mistrust Americans because Pakistanis are Muslims, and we are Infidels. They are taught, they are inculcated, in a massive brainwashing that begins very early in childhood and never lets up in societies and states suffused with Islam, to believe that Infidels are always in league with Shaytan (Satan), are the permanent enemies of Muslims, and must be regarded as such. Infidels are the enemies of Muslims in what is a state of permanent war between Believers and Infidels. No Muslim should be fooled by acts of seeming kindness on the part of Infidels. If they are kind, it is only, you see, for deceitful reasons, including the desire to eventually win away Muslims from the only true faith, the Deen that matters, Islam itself.
Gates apparently does not know the history of the past half-century of America’s relations with Pakistan, beginning with CENTO, and all the aid that has been lavished, and then lavished some more, on Pakistan, and all the ways that Pakistan has taken that aid, and done exactly what it wants with it.
Temporarily, in Afghanistan, when the Americans thought that the most important thing to do was to weaken the Soviet Army by strengthening the local mujahideen, a temporary alliance was made with Pakistan, which became the conduit for American aid to Afghani fighters. This was seen as a great achievement by the Americans. It was not. In retrospect, it was probably a bad idea, and it would have been better had the Red Army managed to contain, to crush, the mujahideen, and to set up a regime of local secularists, who in the Muslim world often used to call themselves “Communists.” That word had no real meaning beyond that of signaling that they were deeply secular — and that deep secularism was, and remains, in the Muslim world, a Good Thing, and the only hope, if the threat of Islam is to be contained.
But people seemingly ignorant of history — not ancient history but recent history — as Robert Gates are in charge of the Pentagon at this moment, and such people really believe that Pakistanis have earned the right to mistrust Americans, when this is not only false but the exact opposite of the truth. It is the Americans who, because of the past fifty years, should all have a well-founded mistrust of all Pakistanis, civilian and military, and should cease to give such aid to Pakistan as it has been getting.
The outward aspect of Gates — the way he speaks, his form and his content — suggest someone unused to thinking for himself, someone who accepts policies rather than questions them, from top to bottom, and who is not capable of getting out of the frame of mind of those who have been unable to come to grips with the threat, not of “extremists” alone, but of Muslims, of Islam, which is and always has been the historic enemy of the West, and of the mental freedom that the West has achieved.
His speech claims the opposite of the truth. Gates claims that Pakistanis are justified in being mistrustful of Americans, when for fifty years we have been naively compliant in almost every way with Pakistani demands, Pakistani blague and blackmail. We have ignored the thousand ways that Pakistan has been so dangerously meretricious with us, when what he should have said is that “while Pakistanis claim to mistrust Americans, perhaps I can tell them how Americans see them, and how and why so many Americans mistrust them, and then ask the government and people of Pakistan whether or not they intend to allay our fears, and in what ways.” But he did not, because he is the Secretary of Defense in an Administration that cannot see beyond the immediate theatre — whether that theatre of war be the old one in Iraq, or now the new theatre of war in Afghanistan and Pakistan. The real theatre is the whole world, for it is really the whole world, and most immediately the historic West in Europe, that is threatened by Jihad in all of its manifestations, and not only or mainly by the terrorism that seems to have mesmerized so many, and made them overlook Jihad by money, Jihad al-mal, Jihad by propaganda (and Da’wa), Jihad by demography. Demographic conquest was boldly proclaimed by many Muslims, even in front of the world, as Boumedienne did in 1974 at the U.N. where he foresaw the coming Muslim conquest of Europe “through the wombs of our women,” and by Khaddafy, and many others, not all of them well-known.
It is difficult to believe that Robert Gates is as ignorant of American-Pakistani relations over the past half-century, and of the nature of Islam, as he appears from this speech, and many others, to be. Let us cling to the hope that this is all an act, that in the privacy of the inner sanctums of power he reveals that he understands things quite differently, much more accurately, and speaks more truthfully.
Let that hope not turn out to be a forlorn hope. Intelligent Americans and Europeans realize that there is something uniquely disturbing about Islam. They are perfectly aware that many immigrant groups have come to North America and Europe — Hindus, Chinese, Buddhists from Vietnam, Andean Indians, sub-Saharan and Caribbean blacks — and many of these groups have language problems, or come bearing an alien creed. But only Muslim immigrants come bearing an alien and a hostile creed, one that makes claims on every aspect of life. It would be idiotic to ignore the fact that no other immigrant group, in France or Great Britain or in Spain or in Germany or even in those two tiny countries that have made a virtual state religion out of Tolerance And Diversity, Denmark and the Netherlands, has given the kind of trouble, has been impossible to integrate, and that makes endless demands. Those demands keep coming and do not stop. Muslims want changes in their host countries, in the laws, and the customs, and the understandings, above all in the freedoms, that have been the slow-won achievement, and some would describe as the glory and justification, of the Western world. These freedoms help to explain the West’s political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral advances, even as Islam explains the political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral failures of Muslim peoples and polities. The cause of those failures, the very failures of the societies and states they wish to escape by coming to Europe and to North America, instead follows them, is brought by them, is contained in the mental baggage that they bring, undeclared, and then unpack, to the great harm of the Infidels among whom they have come to live, and whose societies those Muslim immigrants — to the precise extent that they take Islam to heart — intend to change, slowly, steadily, inexorably.
They must not be allowed to do so, and the threat they represent has to be recognized by those who are in charge, as it is, more and more, by those people who have been sickened by the nonsense and lies, not only of those in charge of immigration policy, but by all those, among our political and media elites, who know far less about Islam, who still know almost nothing about Islam, eight years after the fatidic date which marks, or should have marked, an end to ignorance about Islam. Many people have — almost unwillingly, hoping not to discover what they have discovered, hoping it can’t really be true — engaged in intensive self-study of Islam. And in studying Islam, its texts, its tenets, its attitudes, its atmospherics, in reading the works of the great Western scholars of Islam, those who lived in the century, roughly, from 1860 to 1960, and in reading, as well, the works of those who, having been born and raised within Islam, and then having moved to the West and enjoyed its mental freedom and freedom from physical fear (a fear that keeps questioning people in Muslim lands permanently quiet about whatever doubts they may have about Islam), have testified so eloquently. See Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ali Sina, and many thousands of others whose names are as yet unknown, sometimes by design, to the Great World.
It all seems to be taking place below the radar of Our Great And Powerful Men in Washington, who construct policies that make no sense, and spend trillions of what is our money, and expend the lives of those who are our relatives or our friends or our fellow citizens, and who use up vast amounts of war materiel. And incidentally, that materiel is used up not only in combat, or blown up by the enemy, but is also being transferred to Muslim soldiers, to the armies we have idiotically built up in Iraq and Afghanistan — and with still more tens of billions being transferred to Pakistan. How many thousands of very expensive vehicles, capable of withstanding I.E.D. attacks, will be left with the Iraqi army and police? With the Afghanis? Possibly given to Pakistan? How much other expensive equipment is being crazily lavished on Muslims? How much training is being given, which our military appears to believe will be used only against other Muslims, that is, against the so-called “extremists” who are supposed to be so very different from the other Muslims, the “good” Muslims, whom we are so eagerly training and outfitting?
Between the army and the police, in Iraq the Americans have trained, outfitted, supplied with advanced weaponry of every kind, more than half-a-million Iraqis. Our friends and allies, forever? Do you think so? On what basis do you think so? And there are another several hundred thousand men under arms — army and police — in Afghanistan, Muslims all of course, who have been trained, outfitted, given all kinds of equipment. Is this an achievement? Eight years after the 9/11/2001 attack, the leading Infidel military power can claim as its greatest achievement that it has built up two very large armies of Muslims. In doing so, it has also spent nearly three trillion dollars, money spent or committed (including life-time care for tens of thousands of severely wounded American soldiers and Marines) in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan.
What might we have done with that three trillion dollars, in, for example, energy projects to deprive Muslims of their Money Weapon? What kind of health care problems would we have had we not spent three trillion dollars in the last eight years in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan, and on aid to practically any Muslim state that did not have oil — Egypt, Jordan, even the “Palestinians” who are merely the carefully-renamed local Arabs who are the shock troops of the Jihad, that has no end, being waged against Israel?
No, none of this is the kind of thing of which Robert Gates shows any awareness. His speech last Thursday was an amazing performance, one that should give pause to all those who think that those who run the Pentagon have a grasp of history and of the ideology of Islam. He, Gates, has no idea of Pakistan’s consistent record of grasping, calculated meretriciousness over the past fifty years. And he appears to have forgotten — if he ever knew — how constantly, and characteristically, generous, as well as far too trusting, the American government has been with Pakistan, endlessly treacherous Pakistan.
Perhaps there are others in the corridors of power who can enlighten Gates, or work around him, or somehow get policies accepted that are based on something very like reality. It’s not much to ask.
To be continued.