“A cow is a very good animal in the field; but we turn her out of a garden.” — Samuel Johnson, 1709-1784
The problem with writing about the religion of Islam is that one cannot hope to sound anything but repetitive, and this because Islam keeps making the news, whether it be reports of violence or reports denying Islam’s connection to that violence; and this because these reports are based always on vague synopsis which fails to point out the efficacy—and culpability—of the religion of Islam in creating this violence. This inadvertence is both a typical symptom of the Western world’s shameless imprudence and the Arab Muslim world’s proverbial intransigence and noetic destitution. After all, who but Muslim clerics would declare, in the 21st century, that the sun rotates around the earth, or that the world is flat, or that Albert Einstein was really a Shiite Muslim, or, last but not least, as Sheikh Muhammad Al-Munajid, a former diplomat at the Saudi embassy in Washington D.C. told his followers, that Mickey Mouse was “one of Satan’s soldiers” and should be “killed in all cases.”
For some strange reason, it is become forbidden to blame unseemly behaviour, namely terrorism and antisemitism, on the religion of Islam. We are quite willing to blame terrorism on anything else—Jews, Israel, Zionism, Christian Crusades, Western colonialism—but never the religion of Islam. Neil Kressel intimated that “In my own experience writing and speaking about Islamic antisemitism, I have come to expect a great deal of resistance whenever the taboo on addressing the topic is broken.” Ayn Rand wrote back in 1972 her prophetic words, “…men keep silent—while their culture is perishing from an entrenched, institutionalized epidemic of mediocrity.”
In his speech to the House of Commons about “the rise of global anti-Semitism,” Irwin Cotler said, “The laundering of anti-Semitism under the protective cover of the UN found dramatic expression in December, when the General Assembly—in yet another annual discriminatory ritual—adopted 20 resolutions against Israel, and only four against the rest of the world combined.” But then, as though the contradiction wasn’t so obvious, he concludes his speech with, “…Canada can and must be a world leader in heeding the call of the recent UN forum to renew, reaffirm and reinvigorate efforts to combat anti-Semitism…” On the one hand, the UN is exposed as being implicated as an accessory to global antisemitism, but on the other we are asked to trust in this same organization to “reinvigorate efforts to combat anti-Semitism.” Is it just me, or does Mr. Cotler sound like one of those whom Ayn Rand blames as being infected with the “epidemic of mediocrity”?
The trial has now commenced for Raed Jaser and Chiheb Esseghaier, as reported by Christie Blatchford of the National Post, the two Canadian would-be terrorists charged with plotting to derail a train “originating in New York and headed for Toronto.” Jaser’s lawyer, John Norris, is attempting to convince the jurors that his client is not really a terrorist but rather a bumbling con-man, regardless the “hateful things” he has been recorded as saying in conversations with an undercover FBI agent. Things like “We want this whole city, this country, to burn.” And also, not forgetting his religiously inspired Jew-hatred, things like “everyone’s a target—especially the Jews.” In times past, con men have been known to rob trains, but now, today, with the influx of Muslims and the religion of Islam into the Western hemisphere, we have a new type of con man: the sort who want only to blow up trains and kill Jews. They’re not committing their crimes for financial gain—they’re doing it for Allah, and to hell with the money. But they’re not really terrorists, remember. They’re con-men.
Efraim Karsh reminds us that, “Violence and oppression, then, have not been imported to the Middle East as a by-product of European imperialism; they were part of the political culture long before. If anything, it is the Middle East’s tortuous relationship with modernity that has left physical force as the main instrument of political discourse.” The West is now foolishly trying to accommodate a religious culture (Islam) that does not and will never mesh with the democratic body politic. This should be obvious to all, but it’s not. We have servants of the establishment, like Irwin Cotler, who, as Minister of Justice for Paul Martin’s Liberal government, somehow didn’t find it suspicious that Maher Arar was good friends with Abdullah Almalki, even dined with him in the Mango Café in Ottawa, even though Abdullah Almalki, in turn, was also a friend of Ahmed Khadr, an Egyptian-born Canadian and suspected by CSIS of being an alleged senior associate of Osama bin Laden. Apparently rubbing shoulders with terrorists—or friends and associates of terrorists—, according to current Western legal philosophy, is not a crime unless you actually blow up trains and kill Jews.
Omar Khadr (son of Ahmed Khadr) has been repatriated to Canada. He has filed a Can$20,000,000 lawsuit against the Canadian government (Maher Arar filed a 400 million lawsuit but settled for 10.5 million, plus a million to cover legal costs). Khadr’s defence is that he was merely a “child soldier” and exploited by both his Muslim father, who sent him “into the furnace of the battle” (as described in a 2008 biography by al Qaeda), and his American captors, who interrogated him vigorously for information about his connections to al Qaeda. I think it’s absolutely preposterous that Canadian tax dollars are being used to pay reparations to Muslims who have had associations—whether knowingly or otherwise—with terrorist operatives. How times have changed. In 1939 young Canadian and American boys who lied about their age in order to fight the evils of Nazism are remembered as heroes. Today we’re issuing national apologies to Muslims who, as underage boys, enlisted in absolutely evil terrorist organizations in order to kill anyone—even fellow Muslims—their Islamist ideology deems unfit for their new and improved Umma. Our quotient verdict here is to pity these returning jihadists, convince ourselves that they were formerly exploited as children, and offer them rehabilitation. The Nazis and their collaborators we prosecuted for the same crimes, but the Muslim jihadists and their dinner guests we forgive and pay their rent.
For the Western world, Islam has become our proverbial cow in the garden. This imperialist and expansionist religion is quite obviously incongruent with our democratic standards and traditions. It may be acceptable in the fields of the Middle East, in its place of origin, but Islam and its reprehensible and intolerant traditions are certainly not acceptable here in Canada and the United States.