WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama’s advisers will remove religious terms such as “Islamic extremism” from the central document outlining the U.S. national security strategy and will use the rewritten document to emphasize that the United States does not view Muslim nations through the lens of terror, counterterrorism officials said. – from this news story
This is not only a problem in the United States. It is a problem all over the Western world. How are the people of Western Europe to understand their own reality if they cannot speak truthfully, and openly, about the ideology of Islam? If they have noticed — and they have at long last noticed — that Muslim immigrants are particularly aggressive, demanding, hostile, and un-integrable, save always for a small, discrete minority of people who arrive as Muslims but become integrable only to the precise extent that they cease to take Islam to heart, or even, in the best cases, as a result of the mental freedom and physical security that the West offers them, become estranged permanently from Islam (for who knows better what Islam is all about, than Wafa Sultan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Magdi Allam, and all the other outstanding and brilliant apostates who offer us their articulate testimonies?), should the peoples of Western Europe not allow themselves to employ the only vocabulary that allows them to discuss this matter?
And when they realize, as many of them now do, that this is a problem not in one, or two, or a half-dozen, countries in Western Europe, but in all of the them without exception, and perhaps most noticeably so in the two countries that have elevated Tolerance to the level of State Religions (i.e., Denmark and the Netherlands), are they to be rendered mute through a policy that fills the collective heart of the O.I.C. with satisfaction and deep pleasure?
If they realize that these Muslim immigrants pose a permanent problem that no group of non-Muslim immigrants poses, should they be reduced to whispers? Should their permitted lexicon be lacking such words as “Jihad” and “dhimmi” and “Jizyah” and even, it seems, “Islam” itself? The latter word is always and everywhere, if applied to the case, to be modified fore and aft, with such meretricious verbal tricks as “Islamism” and “Islamists,” or sleight of word, as with “violent extremists” who have kidnapped — in the alternative, hijacked — “a great religion.”
If Israelis wish to begin to grasp their own reality, and to comprehend why “peace-processes” and treaties mean nothing, but are merely part of one unending Treaty of Al Hudaibiyya being used to whittle away at the state of Israel, in order to push it back into conditions of maximum peril and hopeless vulnerability, they will need to use, and to hear others use, such words as “Islam” and “Jihad” and “dhimmi.” If the Hindus, Sikhs, and other non-Muslims of India are to grasp the permanent threat to them, one not assuaged by a possible surrender of Kashmir, but that goes on, unassuageable, forever, they will need to use such words as “Jihad” and “dhimmi” and “Dar al-Islam.” If the Thais, or the Russians, or the Filipinos, wish to understand what it is that they are dealing with, they must — they cannot but — use the words that exist to properly explain this reality. The Christians of the southern Sudan, and the Christians of southern Nigeria, have used such words as “Jihad” before. They understand, perhaps better than those in the West, what Islam is all about, because in black Africa, the Arabs and those whom they have islamized and arabized have been able to treat the black African non-Muslims as roughly, as murderously, as they wish. They have had no need to engage in the kind of stuff we see Muslims engaging in here — Interfaith-Healing, Outreach Nights at the Mosque, taqiyya masters such as Tariq Ramadan spreading their smiling word in order to charm or confuse the unwary and the ill-prepared, and to keep up this mountebank’s patter at such a pace that no one who speaks quietly, logically, and with attention to the evidence can get in a word, or if he can get in a word, can truly and properly be heard by those unwary and those ignorant Infidels over the steady tariq-ramadanian hum.
Those who make policy and construct policies are dealing with a reality that they refuse to learn adequately about. In so refusing, they hobble themselves from thinking sensibly, and at times imaginatively, about what makes the most sense, what would weaken the Camp of Islam and thus the threat to all non-Muslims from Islam and its adherents. They prefer to throw money, and men, and materiel, at the problem. The wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, before we are through, will have cost well over three trillion dollars.
Think of what that could have done, as far as this country goes. We fight over a few hundred million here and there, we fight about health care and social security, and we keep avoiding, in some collective mental paralysis, connecting these budgetary woes with the sums being spent — futilely, and quite unnecessarily, in the lands of Muslims, in order to bring them (for how long? forever?) prosperity, to bribe them into (most temporarily) being “our friends.” This “friendship” consists of their not becoming or giving harbor to those “violent extremists” who, we tell ourselves, are a discrete, isolated group, when in fact any Muslim who now, or in the future, for whatever reason, chooses to take Islam fully to heart, can become one of those “violent extremists.” And long before that, Muslims have shown, in thought, word, and deed, that they do take Islam sufficiently seriously to attempt to press its case everywhere, to change our legal and political institutions and our social arrangements, to interfere with our academic teaching and thinking about Islam, to interfere with our freedom of speech, and our ideas of what can or cannot be spoken and written. They do all this unapologetically, with violence or the threat of violence. What’s more, they conduct, unhindered, vast campaigns of Da’wa targeted at the most vulnerable and also the potentially most dangerous kinds of people — the psychically and economically marginal — who, in converting to Islam, add to the security threat to all the non-Muslims. Those former fellow citizens, now changed utterly, become a threat to us and the political institutions of this country, and the physical security of its citizens.
Because of the ignorance of Islam at the top, we have instead locked ourselves into a Tar Baby policy that requires the expenditure of vast sums on places that cannot, because of Islam, ever embrace advanced Western democracy. They cannot — because of Islam — ever be our true allies, or ever be counted on to help suppress the forces of violent Islam. They will, however, do what they can to divert outside their countries, to the Infidels, the fury of those who are working against their own regimes, as the Saudi government’s “re-education” efforts of Al-Qaeda supporters consists not in ending their Muslim fanaticism, which the Al-Saud share or promote, but in redirecting their murderous fury away from the Al-Saud themselves to the Western Infidels who deserve whatever those local fanatics wish to inflict on them — just please leave us, the nice Al-Saud, alone.
Never before has such sustained stupidity, in the face of a decade of what should have led to some obvious conclusions, been exhibited by the Western world. Even with Hitler and the Nazis, there were only six years from his resistible rise in 1933 to the outbreak of war in 1939, when suddenly “everyone” appeared to have “known all along” what Churchill and a few others, and only they, had known. We have had perfectly good information — for those who do not put their trust in the New York Times but go online — about the Jihad, in its violent manifestations, and in those that employ non-violent means, for nearly a decade. We have had the vain efforts in Iraq and the vain effort now in Afghanistan, where the actual goals are never clearly stated, because to even attempt to do that would expose the whole enterprise to the quizzical looks, and the criticism, and even the mockery, that the assumptions upon which it rests deserve.
Eventually reality will break in. But when? At what considerable unnecessary future cost? Perhaps there are those in the Obama Administration who have never read “Politics and the English Language” by Orwell, though it is now a staple in freshman composition courses. Perhaps they are unaware of how Hitler and Stalin, refashioned the lexicon, or how such words as, for example, “People’s Democracy” came to describe the most despotic of regimes.
The Obama Administration does not strike me as full of people terribly interested in, or impressed by, faith — in the way that George Bush, a born-again Christian, was so impressed with what religion had done for him that he simply couldn’t believe that something — Islam — called a “religion” could be other than good.
So what is it that prevents the Obama Administration from learning about, analyzing, studying the history of, Islam and Islamic conquest, as it would, presumably, anything else? What makes it so fearful, in the councils and corridors of power, of people speaking truthfully about such matters, or at least asymptotically coming close to that truth, so that they are now apparently being deliberately told they cannot use the very lexicon they most need, and now most lack?
The self-inflicted intellectual wounds here will have, do already have, fantastic consequences — not good ones for us, but very good for the Camp of Islam — in the world we like to call “real.” But the Obama Administration is engaged in the political construction of a reality that does not exist, and is leading itself, and those whom it presumes to instruct and protect, astray.