“That lies should be necessary to life is part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of life.” –Nietzsche
I couldn’t help but notice how the major media outlets avoided articulating into print what much of thinking humanity suspected after hearing the horrible news of Germanwings pilot Andreas Lubitz deliberately flying his plane into the side of a mountain, killing himself and all others on board. I read two pieces in the New York Times where the subject of Islam and jihad and the most chilling phrase, “new convert to Islam,” was noticeably absent. Yahoo News posted an article with the reassurance that “Düsseldorf prosecutors said on Friday they had not found a suicide note, confession or anything pointing to a ‘political or religious’ motive.” As it turns out, Mr. Lubitz was not a “new convert to Islam” and his tragic behaviour, without any proof, cannot be attributed to terrorism and the commonplace Islamic stratagem of killing as many infidels as possible while simultaneously taking leave of this world.
Of course, certain blogs boldly and blindly attempted to make a connection between Islam and the Germanwings tragedy. In retrospect, considering what is now known of the impulsive behaviour of the jihadist terrorist, I understand such zealous assumptions. But zealous assumptions can never serve as solid fact. And without any proof, with only empty accusations to string a line between “a new convert to Islam” and the pieces of an Airbus scattered all over the French Alps, these blogs do more harm than good to those whose sole and noble intention is to bring to light the danger the religion of Islam and its inherent ideology of jihad pose to the Western world.
When our suspicions are disproved by lack of evidence, it is our moral duty to repudiate those suspicions. Josh Billings wrote way back in 1865, “As scarce as truth is, the supply has always been in excess of the demand.” We cannot feign truth where no truth exists. We are not apologists for Islam—this is their way, not ours. There are enough ugly truths to tell about Islam without inventing angry falsehoods to take their place. Robert Spencer is not hated because he tells lies about Islam and its jihadist proponents; he is hated because he tells the truth about Islam and its jihadist proponents. These bloggers I speak of above would do well to follow his example.
Balzac wrote, “Equality may perhaps be a right, but no power on earth can ever turn it into truth.” And this is the truth we tell, that all religions are not equal, and more to the point, that Islam has failed mankind, will continue to fail mankind, because, as its history poignantly proves, it has always been prone to turning good Muslims into bad imperialists. Conversely, the innumerable lies that apologists for Islam tell is that the religion of Islam is not to blame, that anti-Jewish hatred is tangential of Islam proper (or an “infection”, as Neil Kessel puts it), that jihad is a defensive ideology and the Western world’s “colonialism” only is at fault for the concomitant evils of Hamas and al-Qaeda and ISIS and Boko Harem and the Taliban (the list is growing).
For the Muslim apologist, lies, especially when addressing the observations of Western critics, are become “part and parcel of the terrible and questionable character of life.” Daily these apologists are faced with the insuperable task of removing the stamp of Islam from countless acts of terrorism and mind-numbing atrocities, from egregious anti-Jewish pronouncements and from extremely calumnious references to the non-Muslim. And these lies are by now sounding tediously repetitious in the ears of the Western critic. More than that, the fact that they are being repeated, again and again, speaks volumes about what surely is the lack of objectivity in their camp. One is reminded of Elias Canetti’s words, “One keeps saying the same thing, but the fact that one has to say it is eerie.” Faced with such an overabundance of unavoidable truths, the Muslim apologist has no other choice but to invent necessary lies.