Selected Speeches

Can the West Be Saved? Mission Europa Conference, Netzwerk Karl Martell, Vienna, May 11, 2008

Arabs, Jews, the West and the Rest Trinity College Dublin, November 23, 2006

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ISLAM: THE SCORE

Defending Western Civilization Conference, Baltimore, February 7, 2009

The Western civilization faces an old existential enemy. He appeared to be moribund for the better part of the past two centuries; but he’d been undead, licking his wounds and nursing his grievances. Now, Nosferatu-like, he is back with a vengeance. He is an aggressive, demographically vibrant and ideologically rigid foe, and he sees us – all of us and our kin and offspring – as future converts, slaves, or corpses.

The enemy is not “Islamism,” or “Islamofascism,” let alone some amorphous “radicalism.” It is Islam. Its contemporary upsurge as an ideology and a blueprint for political action cannot be compared in dynamism, energy, and potential consequences with any other creed or dogma since early Bolshevism. That upsurge has global proportions and world-historical significance.

The challenge demands a bold, Lepanto-like Western response that has been absent so far. Just take the “the war on terrorism”: The squeamishness of Europeans and Americans alike in naming the enemy, and opting to single out of his methods instead, is but one sign of a deep malaise that hampers resistance. Had World War II been waged against the Blitzkrieg rather than Nazism, the Reich would still have 925 years to go. Had Jan Sobieski rushed to Vienna to wage War on Janissarism, the game would have been up.

It is essential to define and understand the enemy on the basis of his history and dogma, and not on any a priori judgment. That answer needs to be honest because the survival of our culture and civilization is at stake. It demands a look at what Muslims – all orthodox, mainstream Muslims – actually believe. Let us therefore start with the remarkable career of Muhammad, who was both the prophet of the new religion and the creator of political ideology, legal code, and radical social program associated with it.

MUHAMMAD, THE KEY – Almost 14 centuries after his death Muhammad rremains, to all true Muslims, the inviolable paragon of goodness, and imitatio Muhammadi is reflected in the prevalence of his name throughout the Muslim world. Understanding him is the key to the Muslim world outlook, yet of Muhammad’s life we are informed mainly from the Muslim sources: the Kuran, the sunna, the hadith or recorded “traditions about the Prophet,” and the consensus of Islamic scholars. Those sources provide an account that may not be historically accurate. It is nevertheless essential because it is regarded as true by all true Muslims. Together with the Kuran, it provides the sole basis for the Islamic law.

Muhammad was born in the city of Mecca in or around AD 570, in the region of Hijaz, on the western edge of the great desert that covers most of today’s Saudi Arabia. Mecca had been a place of pagan pilgrimage focused on the temple of Kaaba (“cube”) that sheltered a revered black stone. The dominant deity was the moon-god whose title was al-ilah – “the chief among all gods” – shortened by frequency of usage to Allah. It corresponded to Babylonian Baal.

Mecca was halfway between Yemen and Syria, which enabled it to develop as an important trading center connecting the caravans from India and Persia with those from the West. Muhammad’s tribe included many successful merchants, but the family of infant Abu’l-Qasim was poor. Orphaned at an early age, he grew up on the social margins of a society in which power and money were the defining currency of one’s standing. Muhammad’s later bitterness towards his native city and its social and spiritual structure reflected the sense of powerlessness felt by a resentful and marginalized young man. At 25 Muhammad met a wealthy widow, Khadija, 15 years his senior, and entered her service as a camel driver, soon rising to become her partner and eventually husband. His commercial savvy made him an affluent man, self-educated by travel. But his enduring detachment from Meccan society prompted the development of his contemplative side. He would often wonder in the hills around Mecca, meditating in solitude. One day, coming out of one of his meditative trances, he confided to his wife a strange experience. It was in the year 610 AD, when Muhammad was 40 years of age, that he told her he was visited by a majestic being – whom he identified as angel Gabriel – with a call to prophecy: “You are the Messenger of God.” That “Night of Power” marked the beginning of his career as self-proclaimed messenger of God, or Prophet, nabi. Starting in 610, at increasingly frequent intervals until his death, Muhammad received “revelations,” or verbal messages that he believed came directly from Allah. Some of them he and his followers kept in memory and sometimes they were written down. Around 650 AD they were collected and written in the Kuran, the sacred scriptures of Islam, and eventually codified in the form that has endured till today. Muslims believe the Kuran is the eternal, final and perfect divine revelation, written in the very words of Allah himself. Three years after the first supposed revelation Muhammad decided to go public. His initial message was simple, focused on the submission to one transcendent Allah, on the Day of Judgment when all will be brought to life, on the subsequent delights of paradise for the virtuous and torments of hell for the sinners. In the early days his revelations were delivered in the tone of warnings and appeals, rather than threats. The leaders of the Meccan establishment sneered at the audacity of a common man with tarnished standing in the community and no natural claim to authority or prestige. His attack on the divinity of old idols also implied denial to his tribe of the standing and profits derived from the guardianship of the temple of the Kaaba. The humorous contempt for Muhammad’s claims to prophethood turned to indignation and a mob raged against the “divider” and a small band of his followers. He became an outcast.

Muhammad was bitterly offended by the rejection, as is evident in the first “revelation” violent in tone. It was directed against two of his early detractors, his uncle Abu Lahab and aunt Umm Jamil: “He shall be burnt in a flaming fire, and his wife, laden with faggots, shall have a rope of fiber around her neck!” Muhammad’s problems with the family were thus echoed by Allah himself, for the first time but certainly not the last.

Muhammad’s fortunes improved in June 622, when Arab tribesmen from the settlement of Yathrib, 200 miles north of Mecca, offered him hospitality. In his escape from Mecca Muhammad was joined by a small group of seventy muhajirun who were all intensely loyal to him personally. This was the hijra, and Muhammad’s arrival in Yathrib on in September 24, 622, marked the beginning of the history of Islam. Yathrib became the city of the prophet, Medinnet el Nebi, shortened to Medina. Significantly, just prior to leaving for Medina, Muhammad received first revelations allowing him to fight the Meccans.

It took Muhammad a year and a half, and a victory in battle, to fully establish his power base, and another three years to become absolute ruler of Medina. It all started when he sent his destitute and increasingly restless followers to raid Meccan caravans passing near Medina on their way to Syria. An early raid took place in the sacred (pagan) month of Rajab, when no Arab was permitted to raise arms in battle. The scandal of the violation was preempted by a revelation from Allah, however, confirming that the attack enjoyed divine sanction: the Meccans’ refusal to accept Muhammad’s prophecy was worse transgression than the violation of the holy month. From that moment on, the morality rooted in pre-Islamic custom and natural human sensibility was to be regularly abrogated by Allah in favor of what happened to be advantageous to Muhammad.

Notably, Allah was invoked as the authority supporting the prophet’s daily objectives and personal needs. Nowhere was this more obvious than when it came to his exaggerated sensuality. Contrary to his regulations for others he had at least fifteen wives. The youngest was Aisha, who was seven years old when Muhammad – 44 years her senior – married her, and two years later consummated the marriage. He came up with a Kuranic verse approving his nightly trysts with an attractive Egyptian slave girl, to which his wives reacted with jealous rage.[1] Allah’s revelation also enabled Muhammad to take his daughter-in-law Zainab as a wife as soon as he started lusting after her.[2]

In 624, at Badr, his men killed forty Meccans in a single raid that fortified Muhammad’s prestige and power in Medina. Divine justification was required for ambushing and murdering one’s own kinsmen, and it was duly granted.[3] Allah’s messages, conveyed by Muhammad, grew accordingly more bellicose: “I will instill terror into the hearts of the unbelievers, Smite ye above their necks and smite all their finger tips of them.”[4] The “messenger,” on the other hand, gloated in the spectacle of his slain fellow-tribesmen and relatives, and ordered execution of several prisoners who had offended him in Mecca. From that moment on, to quote Ayatollah Khomeini, “Islam grew with blood.”

The prospect of war booty and ransom was also divinely sanctioned. The issue was so big to his followers that it merited a separate sura in the Kuran (8th). Every man was allowed to retain the plunder of those whom he had slain; the rest went into a common stock of which one fifth was Muhammad’s, as condoned by Allah.[5] But once the loot was divided, it was time to relax: “Now enjoy what ye have won, as lawful and good, and keep your duty to Allah.”[6] “Allah promiseth you much booty that ye will capture.”[7] You desire the lure of this world, so “enjoy what you have won as lawful and good.”[8] As for the fallen, a tangible, sensual paradise awaits immediately.[9] At Badr the preacher of Mecca finally morphed into a vengeful warlord who jubilantly exclaimed that the spectacle of severed enemy heads pleased him better than “the choicest camel in Arabia.” Killing of prisoners was also divinely condoned.[10] Fresh revelations described the unbelievers as “the worst animals”[11] and “the vilest of creatures”[12] undeserving of mercy. The prophet was the “enemy of infidels”[13] and his enemies’ heads were to be cut off.[14] Muhammad returned to Medina in triumph, and proceeded to settle scores with his detractors there, including local Jews. The fruits are summarized in a chillingly euphemistic account by a modern Muslim scholar: “the final result of the struggle was the disappearance of the Jewish communities from Arabia proper.[15]

This disappearance was as spontaneous as the Final Solution. It was the result of ethnic cleansing and genocide, culminating in the attack the last Jewish tribe in Medina, Banu Qurayzah. Accused of treachery, up to 900 of its men were decapitated in front of their women and children. “Truly the judgment of Allah was pronounced on high” was Muhammad’s gloating comment, and Allah responded by praising Muhammad for the way “he struck terror into their hearts.[16] The women were subsequently raped; Muhammad chose as his concubine one Raihana Bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes some hours earlier.

In the process of solidifying his power Muhammad also resorted to individual murders. On some 20 occasions he instigated the crime. Allah’s messages concerning the infidel grew ever harsher: “Take him and fetter him and expose him to hell fire.”[17] They “will be killed or crucified, or have their hands and feet on alternate sides cut off.”[18] In this world for the captured infidel “We have prepared chains, yokes and a blazing fire.”[19] In the hereafter things get even worse: “garments of fire will be cut out for them, boiling fluid will be poured down their heads. Their bellies, and their skins too, will be melted.”[20]

On January 12, 630, Muhammad finally marched into Mecca in triumph, having violated the ten-year truce of Hudaybiyya signed two years previously. It goes without saying that this violation, too, was condoned by Allah.[21] Ever since that time Islamic jurists have held that truces with the infidel could only be temporary and that their only permissible objective was to enable the Muslim side to gain strength for a new onslaught. Hudaybiyya still denotes a temporary ploy to deceive the infidel until the Muslim side is strong enough to destroy him: note how Hamas proposes a 50-year truce with Israel. A permanent peace with the infidel is impossible by definition, however.

By the time of Muhammad’s death in 633AD the triumph of Islam in the Arab heartland was assured. The progression from a despised outsider to a warrior-prophet and dictator was complete, too.

Many of Muhammad’s actions and words, as immortalized in the Kuran and recorded in the Traditions, are abhorrent and criminal by the standards of our time. But even in the context of the 7^th century Arabia they were so dubious that Muhammad had to resort to revelations as a means of suppressing the prevalent moral code. Attacking caravans in the holy month, taking up arms against his own kinsmen, slaughtering prisoners, reserving a lion’s share of the booty, murdering people, violating treaties, and indulging with considerable abandon one’s sensual passions, was fundamentally at odds with the moral standards of his own Arab contemporaries. Only the ultimate authority could sanction it, and Allah duly obliged. Muhammad’s practice and encouragement of bloodshed are unique in the history of religions. Murder, pillage, and rape have pressed on his followers a deep belief in the value of bloodshed as opening the gates of Paradise and prompted countless Muslim governors, caliphs, and viziers, to refer to Muhammad’s example to justify their mass killings, looting, and destruction. Allah’s order to “kill the unbelievers wherever you find them” is an injunction clear and powerful. The lives of the conquered Jews and Christians could be spared only if they pay a tribute to the Muslims: “Fight those who do not profess the true faith till they pay the jiziya (poll tax) with the hand of humility.”[22] That Islam sees the world as an open-ended conflict between the Land of Peace (Dar al-Islam) and the Land of War (Dar al-Harb), which must be conquered by jihad, is the most important bequest of Muhammad to his heirs. Ever since his time Islam has been a permanent threat to all non-Muslim polities around it. “Bloody borders,” indeed… The option of conversion was always available to its surviving victims, and to be on the right side of Allah – and of history, as it seemed for a long time – was not too demanding at first. That “Allah is great, and that there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is his prophet” was easily grasped by the nomadic tribes of the desert and the steppe, especially when the celestial reward was preceded by a lot of tangible, divinely sanctioned loot.

On its own admission Islam stands or falls with the person of Muhammad. He was a deeply flawed man by the standards of his own society, as well as those of the Old and New Testaments, both of which he acknowledged as divine revelation. The problem of Islam, and the problem of the rest of the world with Islam, is not the remarkable career of Muhammad per se, undoubtedly a “great man” in terms of his impact on human history. It is Islam’s claim that the words and acts of its prophet provide the universally valid standard of morality as such, for all time and all men.

DOGMA – In Mecca Muhammad introduced the “five pillars” of Islam as the basis of its practice: recital of the formula of belief, prayer, fasting, almsgiving, and the pilgrimage to Mecca. The participation in the holy war, jihad, was added later, in Medina. It soon acquired a practical significance, for Muslims and non-Muslims alike, that surpassed all others. A bona fide Muslim has to follow them all. These “pillars” are largely rooted in pre-Islamic ideas, beliefs, and practices, notably the purely pagan rituals connected with pilgrimage, which are at odds with the old claim that Islam is a “rational” religion. There are also obligatory prohibitions, against usury, wine, swearing false oaths by Allah, cursing etc. They are elaborated on the body of Islamic law, the Shari’a.

The principal tents of Islam are presented in the Kuran, the “recited Tradition.” To help Muslims understand and interpret their holy book there is sunnah, “a well trodden path,” translated as a normative way of conduct. The “unrecited Tradition” of Muhammad’s words and deeds is recorded in hadith. They give the details of the alleged acts and sayings of Muhammad and provide the basis for elaboration of Islamic law and custom. The result is ijma, the consensus of the scholars of Islam represented by the prominent imams, the Kuranic commentators and the masters of Muslim jurisprudence. The method is analogy, strict deduction from principles admitted in the Kuran and in the Traditions.

ALLAH, according to Muslims, is allegedly the same as Jahweh Elohim, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.[23] His love is conditional: if you love Allah follow me, Muhammad says, and he will love you and forgive your sins in return, but he “does not love the unbelievers.”[24] Man’s “experience” of Allah is impossible. Any attempt to get to “know” him would imply heretical encroachment on his absolute transcendence.

There is no original sin in Islam, and man need only follow the straight and narrow of obeying Allah’s will to obtain salvation. Men are neither “fallen” nor “saved” and therefore need do no more than avoid disbelief and follow commands to be granted everlasting life – if so be the will of an absolutely transcendent and therefore capricious Allah. The result is an explicitly nominalistic system of ethics. Nothing we do, say or think is good or bad as such in Islam, nothing is right or wrong without specific reference to the revealed will of Allah or the traditions of his prophet.

The agony of those not granted Allah’s gift of paradise is graphically, even gleefully depicted in numerous Kuranic passages. They will languish amid pestilential winds and in scalding water, in the shadow of a black smoke. Draughts of boiling water will be forced down their throats. They will be dragged by the scalp, flung into the fire, wrapped in garments of flame, and beaten with iron maces. When their skins are well burned, others will grow for fresh torture. While the damnation of all infidels will be hopeless and eternal, the Muslims, who, though holding the true religion, have been guilty of heinous sins, will be delivered from hell after expiating their crimes.

As for the virtuous, the joys and glories of paradise are tangible and eminently sensual. “But the pious shall be amid gardens and fountains… and we will wed them to the virgins with large dark eyes.”[25] Their breasts are swelling and firm, but to enjoy them in full Allah will give each Muslim the manliness of a hundred mortals in this heaven of perpetual youth and copulation, “all that they desire.”[26]

Islamic teaching on the ultimate question that has vexed men since time immemorial, the purpose of our existence, is simple. Allah has honored men by creating them and our only purpose is to serve and glory him -- not because it makes any difference to Allah, who is utterly beyond our reach, but because that is our vocation. Those who profess Islam are “the best of peoples, evolved for mankind, enjoining what is right, forbidding what is wrong, and believing in Allah.” The rest of creation is there to serve their needs. While nature is subject to man, at all times Allah is the master and man is the slave. Western concepts of “democracy” and “freedom” are incompatible with this relationship. Any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in the complete submission to the will of Allah is heresy.[27] Freedom is the realized necessity of such submission. Only Allah creates our acts and enables us to act, while we are but transmission belts with a preordained balance of debit or credit that determines our destiny in the hereafter.[28] Once again, our only purpose is the service of Allah.[29] “Freedom” is no part of that purpose, not any more than to “know God,” or to be more like God.Only Muslims are fully human, in Allah’s favor, worthy of another Muslim’s respect, and only they can attain salvation. Jews’ and Christians’ refusal to acknowledge Mohammad dooms them to lowly status in this life and eternal suffering after death.[30] Christians are mortal sinners: “the fire will be his abode.”[31] Muslims must be merciless with infidels.[32] Social relations are forbidden, because “whoso of you makes them his friends is one of them.”[33] War, not friendship, is mandatory until Islam reigns everywhere.[34] Muslims are ordered to fight the unbelievers, “and let them find harshness in you.”[35] Compared to the moral teaching, language, style, or coherence of the Bible, the Kuran reads like a construct entirely human in origin and intent. It is clear in its earthly sources of inspiration and in the intention to provide fulfillment of the daily needs, personal and political, of its author. But no Muslim can reflect on it: “Whoever so interprets the Quran by his opinion, let him seek his abode in the fire.”[36] Where an explicit command of Allah or a precedent established by his Prophet already exists, no man and no human institution can form an independent judgment. Sovereignty and power belong to Allah alone. No man-made law is legitimate per se. The only true law has been spelled out for all eternity by Allah, and our task is to interpret it and to apply it. Islam rejects reason: “Reasoning” under Sharia means looking for analogies and deductions. Making inductive leaps or invoking any notion of natural morality is verboten. The state is based on the Sharia, or else it is illegitimate. Owing primary allegiance to a secular non-Islamic state and respecting its commandments even if they contradict the word of Allah as revealed by the Prophet would be, under sharia, an act of apostasy punishable by death. Muhammad is the final prophet, and the Kuran and sunna provide final guidance. This undermines the possibility of rational civic debate in Moslem nations and limits the ability of Muslims to partake in good faith in the civic life of a non-Muslim society. Politics is not “part of Islam,” as this would imply that in origin it is a separate sphere of existence which is then eventually amalgamated with Islam. Rather, politics is the inherent core of the Islamic imperative of Allah’s sovereignty. The result, Winston Churchill noted over a century ago, are a “fearful fatalistic apathy… improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property” wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live; “A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity.” This “Golden Age” myth perpetrated by the Western elite class is belied by history. After the brief period of flourishing, first in Baghdad, then in Spain, the history of Islam has been that of a long decline without fall. What started as a violent creed of the invaders from the desert soon ran out of steam, but the collective memory of earlier successes lingered on. It was not until 1683 that the menace to Europe was finally crushed at the gates of Vienna, but for long before that the Islamic world had little interesting to say, measured against its enormous cultural opportunities between East and West. Not even a prime location at the crossroads of the world could supply an antidote to the paralysis of obscurantism. The tension developed between the view of world history as the fulfillment of Islam and its triumph everywhere, and the reality of the squalor, decadence and weakness. The absence of spirit of critical inquiry essential to the growth of knowledge has always been the key to understanding Islam’s closed heart and a closed mind.

JIHAD – Jihad, “war in the path of Allah” with the objective of converting, killing, or else subjugating and taxing the “infidel,” was in Muhammad’s view the most important work a man could perform, in addition to having faith. The doctrine of jihad was also Muhammad’s most significant single contribution to the world history. It defined Islam in its earliest days, it has defined the relations between Islam and other religions and cultures ever since, and it continues to define the mindset of Islam today.

Muhammad’s followers and successors were prone to war by custom and nature. Theirs was an expansionism devoid of any specific goal, brutal, and born of a necessity, but Islam provided a powerful ideological justification for those wars – a justification that made expansionism inherently global in scope and totalitarian in nature. It shifted the focus of attention of the tribesmen from their internecine feuds to the outside world. The enormous aggressive energy and hunger for loot was henceforth to be directed outwards.

The view of modern Islamic activists, that “Islam must rule the world and until Islam does rule the world we will continue to sacrifice our lives,”[37] has been solidly rooted in traditional Islam ever since the early divine sanction of violence that came to Muhammad in Medina: “O Prophet! Rouse the Believers to the fight,” the Kuran orders, and promises that twenty Muslims, “patient and persevering,” would vanquish two hundred unbelievers,[38] “and slay them wherever ye catch them.”[39] The end of the fight is possible only when “there prevail justice and faith in Allah” – literally everywhere.[40]

Ever since Muhammad’s early years in Medina Islam has combined the dualism of a universal religion and a universal state. The permanent “rejection of the Other” by every bona fide Muslim is a divine obligation. While jihad does not necessarily mean permanent fighting, it does mean a permanent state of war. In addition to the verses of the Kuran, there are dozens of hadith with Muhammad’s assurances that Allah guarantees to all jihadi warriors instant paradise in case of martyrdom, or “reward or booty he has earned.” To be a Muslim was a win-win proposition, Muhammad assured his troops, rewarding in hereafter for the falled and profitable in this life for the victorious veterans: Jihad is the best method of earning, he assured them, “both spiritual and temporal. If victory is won, there is enormous booty and conquest of a country, which cannot be equaled to any other source of earning. If there is defeat or death, there is ever-lasting Paradise and a great spiritual benefit. Jihad is the fight to establish the kingdom of Allah on earth.”[41] Only after the universal Islamic Empire is established, the notion of an “inner” jihad—that of one’s personal fight against his ego and sinful desires—may be invoked, once the external, real jihad “in the path of Allah” was over. The concept of spiritual struggle was never meant to replace, let alone abrogate the original, warlike meaning.

Furthermore, all jihad is “defensive” jihad. Since no political system or material power is allowed to put hindrances in the way of preaching Islam, any such “hindrance” constitutes an act of aggression and Islam has no recourse but to remove it by force.

The conquered lands were turned into an Arab empire ruled by Muslim warriors who lived entirely on the spoils of war, that is, the poll and land taxes paid by the subjugated peoples. All conquered lands were duly transformed into the House of Islam, where umma had been established, while the rest of the world belonged to the House of War inhabited by Harbis.

There is an intermediate stage known as Dar al Sulh — when the Muslims are a minority community and need to adopt temporarily a peaceful attitude in order to deceive their neighbors. This is important: The Muslim diaspora in the Western world is well aware of the example of Muhammad, who accepted a truce with Mecca when he was in an inferior position but broke it as soon as his recuperated strength allowed. The final objective all along is Dar al Islam, where Muslims dominate and infidels are converted or massacred.

The Kuranic “Verse of the Sword” which states this so eloquently (9:5) abrogates 124 earlier verses – the ones that are quoted most regularly by Islam's apologists to prove its tolerance and benevolence. Yes, abrogates: Allah reserves the right to substitute earlier revelations with new ones.[42] Muhammad’s revelation that “No change can there be in the Words of Allah” (10:64) is easily resolved: the only exception applies to Allah himself making the change, again courtesy of his prophet![43]

After Sura 9 had been “revealed,” the Muslims were obliged to wage war against all unbelievers. Tactical ceasefires are possible, but never the war’s abandonment short of the unbelievers’ submission. This is the real meaning of Jihad. That meaning, of the obligatory and permanent war against non-Muslims, has not changed since Muhammad: “Those who believe fight in the cause of God.”[44] The conquered peoples were “protected” only if they submitted to Islamic domination by a “Contract” (Dhimma), paid poll tax—jizya--and land tax—haraj--to their masters.

The resulting inequality of rights in all domains between Muslims and dhimmis steadily eroded the latter by attrition and conversion. It is remarkable that in this age of rampant victimology the treatment of non-Muslims by Muslims is taboo in the Western academe. But the cover-up is not new. Writing seven decades ago, Arthur Jeffery dismissed as “the sheerest sophistry” the tendency apparent in his own time that sought to explain away Muhammad’s warlike raids as “defensive wars” or to interpret Jihad as merely a bloodless striving in missionary zeal for the spread of Islam: “The early Arabic sources quite plainly and frankly describe the expeditions as military expeditions, and it would never have occurred to anyone at that day to interpret them as anything else.”[45]

Contemporary apologists for Islam assert that the early Muslims should be judged in the “context” of their time. Such sensitive understanding is not extended towards the Crusaders, however, who attempted to turn the tables and take the battle back into the enemy camp – but whose actions those Western apologists of Islam sternly condemn.[46]

The reality of militant jihad as a centuries-long religious and legal institution of Islam has a rock-solid rooting in its scriptures, traditions, and schools of jurisprudence.[47] The apologists also assert that Muslims are called by the Kuran to strive for peace, but the “peace” that is called upon believers to implement is impossible unless it is established under an all-pervasive Islamic rule. Only when the entire world is a Dar al-Islam will it be a Dar al-Salaam, or House of Peace. This is the same definition of “peace” as that used by Stalin: it is the goal, but it is attainable only after the defeat of “imperialism” and the triumph of the vanguard of the proletariat in the whole world.[48] The distinction between Islamic terror through the centuries (starting with the “final solution” for the Medinan Jews) and its 20^th century totalitarian counterparts – as practiced in the workhouses of the Holocaust and the Gulag – is that of degree, rather than kind. While Islam differs in its detail from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to improve man and create a new society; complete control over that society; and cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood. And like 20^th century totalitarian ideologies, Islam justifies aggression by an ideology that twists meanings of words and stunts the sense of moral distinctions. It breeds a gnostic paradigm within which the only response to the challenge presented by non-Islam’s technological and military might is the clamoring for more “Islamic solutions.” In the end, terrorism offers the release from tension of modernity by democratizing jihad, making it individualized and justified by decentralized charismatic ulemas.

The terrorist is guided by incontrovertibly valid Islamic sources, precedents, and methods of deduction. The terrorists’ sources and principles are independent of any capricious or dubious interpretations of the Kuran or the Hadith. They may differ from other Muslims in the exact command for action that they derive from those scriptures, but they speak the same language, legally and theologically.

IMPLICATIONS – Islam has created jihad and remains defined by jihad. It is the only major religion with a developed doctrine, theology, and legal system of mandatory violence against non-believers. This fact also makes Islam the first political ideology that adopted terrorism as a systemic tool of policy, not as a mere expedient. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam is devoid of any reasoned principle of justice or moderation. Jihad is an institution and a mindset, religious and political, inherently conducive to terrorism.

Islam creates among its adherents the paradigm of a permanent cosmic war. Antagonism towards the demonized “infidel” is rooted in the conviction that Islam is not only the true faith but the only faith with any truth.

Humanity is divided between Muslims and kafirs. No matter how long a Muslim has been exposed to Western or secular thought, or which passport he carries or what clothes he wears, his instinctive first priority on meeting a stranger is to establish which side of the divide he belongs. Antagonism towards non-Muslim persons, religions, societies and cultures, is not shared by all Muslims, but it is an attitude mandated to all true Muslims. Jihad turned Islam into a quasi-religious ideology of cultural and political imperialism that knows no natural limits to itself.

Islam has created a moral philosophy and a legal code that in principle allows terrorist acts. It erases individual judgment based on natural morality or on the allegiance to any other source of authority but itself, and mandates submission to the letter of revealed law or to the precedent of Muhammad. Analogies thus derived stand above reason, conscience, or nature. Islam denies natural law, this high motive, as C.S. Lewis called it, that is found in glorious traditions: “Ignorance deprives savage nations of such incentives,” he wrote. “Yet in the marvelous economy of nature this very ignorance is a source of greater strength. It affords them the mighty stimulus of fanaticism.”[49] A good Muslim is afforded such mighty “stimulus” because he knows that a thing is right simply because Allah says so, or because his “prophet” has thus said or done. There is no “spirit of the law” in Islam, no sense for human reason to discover. There is no discernment of the consequences of deeds, as revelation and tradition must not be questioned. No external standard of good and evil can be invoked or imagined.

Islam’s denigration of the individual conscience stifles inhibitions against random violence, inhibitions that other religions, other legal codes, and other world views reinforce. The dictum of jihad befits the demand for an obedient servant’s prostration before a capricious master whose commands have no rational basis. . Any notion of freedom distinct from that implicit in that complete submission of a slave to his master is forbidden and sinful.

The fruits of Islam’s denial of natural morality are as predictable as they are grim, for the Muslims no less than for their victims: both are enslaved, brutalized, and de-humanized. As Bernard Lewis has noted, the all-pervasive lack of freedom is the hallmark of the Muslim world. The fruits of Muhammad’s adage that “only Muslims’ blood is equal” is the offensive curse that cannot be eradicated, short of a merciless reform from within that seems no more likely today than at any time in the past 14 centuries. Until and unless we see it completed, we must resist Muhammad and all his works with whips and scorpions, hammer and tongs.

CONCLUSION – This summary is of course sketchy. It is nevertheless truer and more honest than the politicized pap, fed to the West, according to which we are the main culprits for all that went wrong between the West and the rest over the centuries while a noble, tolerant Islamic world had been wantonly victimized.

It is most unlikely that a reformed variety of Islam will emerge that would be capable of reforming itself. Attempts to reformulate the doctrine of jihad in particular are not new, but they have failed because they opposed centuries of orthodoxy. A small number of well-meaning and usually Western-educated intellectuals have been clamoring for, even heralding, the birth of a more user-friendly variety of the faith for over a century; but, as Clement Huart pointed out back in 1907,

“Until the newer conceptions, as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the believer towards non-believers, have spread further and have more generally leavened the mass of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older and orthodox standpoint on this question which must be regarded by non-Moslems as representing Mohammedan teaching and as guiding Mohammedan action.”

A century after Huart, the willingness of a few to become objectively bad Muslims, because they are willing to reject discriminatory and offensive tenets of historical Islam, may be laudable in human terms but it will do nothing to modify Islam as a doctrine. As Huart’s near-contemporary Sir William Muir noted, a reformed faith that should question the divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer. For the majority of Muslims, any such attempt will smack of heresy.

It is not the jihadists who are “distorting” Islam; the would-be reformers are. Islam, in Muhammad’s revelations, traditions and their codification, threatens the rest of us. It is deeply offensive to non-Muslims. It breeds a peculiar form of totalitarian mindset, of that kind against which Burke warned when he wrote that “intemperate minds never can be free; their passions forge their fetters” – the mindset that left an ever deepening trail of blood from Muhammad to Robespierre, Lenin, Hitler, and Mao.

Short of a comprehensive and explicit Kuranic revisionism capable of growing popular roots, we should seek ways to defend ourselves by disengaging from the world of Islam, physically and figuratively, by keeping distance from the affairs of the Muslim world, and by keeping that world away from “the world of war” that Muhammad mandated his followers to conquer or destroy.

The Western elite class deems this conclusion illegitimate. In many parts of Europe it is even illegal. On both sides of the ocean, the elite consensus insists that an insane form of multiculturalism and the existence of an ever-growing Muslim diaspora within the West are a fixed given. That consensus is ideological in nature, flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in results. It needs to be challenged and tested against evidence, not against the norms of acceptable discourse dictated by the enemy.

The impact of ongoing Islamic migratory influx and especially the existence of a multi-million Muslim diaspora in Western Europe and North America, is the main practical problem. But controlling the borders is only the first step. Enemies must be identified and deported, and “Islamic activism” needs to be treated to that end as an eminently political and excludable rather than “religious” activity. That may seem politically unviable now, but it will not be so after the next Big One – the 9-11 Redux that jihad’s master-strategists want to avoid, yet self-starting hotheads are busy plotting as we speak.

Rediscovering who we are is the essential prerequisite for all of the above. The victory in the war on terrorism ultimately has to be won in the domain of morals and culture. It can be won only by an America (and Britain, and France…) that has regained its awareness of its moral, spiritual, and civilizational identity. At the root of the domestic malaise is the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment – regardless of his culture, attitude, or intentions. The notion is that the resulting random melange of mutually disconnected multitudes is actually a blessing that enriches and elevates an otherwise arid and monotonous society. The claim that we should not feel a special bond for any country, nation, race, or culture, but transfer our preferences on the whole world, “the Humanity.” If such evil idiocies are discredited, and that would be the only good to come from the present crisis, the impulse to defend Western lands and to procreate would come, too. While the chance of belated recovery remains in doubt, it is not impossible. Miracles do happen, so they will happen. We should not succumb to the myth that the game is up, that Dar al Islam is the end of the road for all of us. We are endowed with feelings and reason, with the awareness of who we are and the pride in our patrimony. Being the heirs of the greatest and best civilization the world has known, we know we will not fail it. Our struggle against Jihad is just and natural and good, even if the outcome is uncertain – just as the knowledge each of us has of his mortality does not stop us from holding on to life, and beauty, and truth.

REFERENCES

[1] 66:1-3

[2] 36:37

[3] Kuran, Sura [chapter] 3, verses 123-125

[4] Ibid, 8:12

[5] 8:41

[6] 8:69

[7] 48:20-21

[8] 69:30-37

[9] Hadith, Buhari, Volume 4, Book 52, Number 46

[10] 8:68

[11] 8:55

[12] 98:6

[13] 2:90

[14] 47:4

[15] W.N. Arafat, “New light on the story of Banu Qurayza and the Jews of Medina,” Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society of Great Britain and Ireland, (1976), pp. 100-107.

[16] 33:25

[17] 69:30-37

[18] 5: 33-34

[19] 76:4

[20] 22: 19-22

[21] 60:10

[22] 9:29

[23] 29:46

[24] 3:32

[25] 44, 51-54

[26] 25:15-16

[27] Watt: Islam and Christianity Today page 127.

[28] 2:163-165

[29] 51:56

[30] 5:72-73

[31] 5:75

[32] 48:29

[33] 5:55

[34] 8:39 and 2:193

[35] 9:123

[36] Al Hadis, Bk. 1, Sec 3, Chap. 4, no. 55 and 57

[37] Al-Badr spokesman Mustaq Aksari, CNN, September 19,2001

[38] 8:65

[39] 2:191

[40] 2:193

[41] Mishkat II, p. 253

[42] 2:106

[43] 17:86

[44] 4:76

[45] Quoted in Andrew Bostom (Ed.), The Legacy of Jihad, Amhrerst, New York: Prometheus, 2005, p. 25.

[46] Notably e.g. Muhammad : A Biography of the Prophet by Karen Armstrong.

[47] I.e. Maliki, Hanbali, Hanafi, and Shafi’i. For relevant quotes by a representative of each school cf. Bostom (Ed.), op. cit, p. 27.

[48] As per Ayatollah Khomeini, “those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world: all the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation.”

[49] C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man

Can the West be Saved?

Keynote speech at Mission Europa conference, Netzwerk Karl Martell, Vienna, May 11, 2008

I am not going to waste your time tonight with yet another treatise on why Islam is not the Religion of Peace, Tolerance, Compassion, etc, etc. We are beyond that. Had America agonized, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, whether Shinto was actually OK but only Bushido was bad, the Greater Asian Co-prosperity Sphere would be going strong to this day. Among reasonable people, unblinkered by the dicta of political correctitude, the real score on Muhammad and his followers is well known. It has been known for centuries. That score, however, no matter how calmly stated and comprehensively supported, invariably elicits the howls of “Islamophobia” from the neoliberal elite class.

An Eminent Postmodern Little Phobia

In the way of an introduction, let us therefore look at the formal, legally tested definition of that word, the latest addition to the arsenal of postmodern “phobias.” It is provided by the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC) based here in Vienna. (“Orwellian” is a worn-out adjective, but it simply has to be used in connection with this particular institution.) The EUMC diligently tracks the instances of “Islamophobia” all over the Old Continent, which it defines by eight red flags:

Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static and unresponsive to change.
Islam is seen as separate and “Other.”
Islam is seen as inferior to the West, barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, linked to terrorism, engaged in a clash of civilizations.
Islam is seen as a political ideology.
Criticisms made of the West by Islam are rejected out of hand.
Discriminatory practices and Muslims’ exclusion from mainstream society are advocated.
Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural or normal.

This definition is obviously intended to preclude any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. As it happens,

That Islam is static and unresponsive to change is evident from the absence of an internal, orthodox critique of jihad, sharia, jizya, etc. As Clement Huart pointed out back in 1907, “Until the newer conceptions, as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the believer towards non-believers, have spread further and have more generally leavened the mass of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older and orthodox standpoint on this question which must be regarded by non-Moslems as representing Mohammedan teaching and as guiding Mohammedan action.” A century later his diagnosis still stands: it is not the jihadists who are “distorting” Islam; the would-be reformers are.
That Islam is separate from our Western, Christian, European culture and civilization, and “other” than our culture and civilization, is a fact that will not change even if Europe eventually succumbs to the ongoing jihadist demographic onslaught.
Whether Islam is “inferior to the West” is a matter of opinion, of course. That Islam cannot create a prosperous, harmonious, stable, creative, and attractive human society is not. Whether Islam is “barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist” is at least debatable; but that many of its tangible fruits are so, is all too painfully visible.
Islam is seen by so many as “violent, aggressive, supportive of terrorism” not because of some irrational “phobia” in the feverish mind of the beholder, but because (a) of the clear mandate of its scripture; (b) of the record of its 14 centuries of historical practice; and above all (c) of the timeless example of its founder.
“Islam is seen as a political ideology,” and it should be seen as one, because its key trait is a political program to improve man and create a new society; to impose complete control over that society; and to train cadres ready and eager to spill blood. This makes Islam closer to Bolshevism and to National Socialism than to any other religion. It breeds a gnostic paradigm within which the standard response to the challenge presented by “the Other,” i.e. non-Muslim societies and cultures, is implacable hostility and violence, or violent intent.
Criticisms made of the West by Islam should not be rejected out of hand; they should be understood. Its chief “criticism” of the West-and of every other non-Islamic culture or tradition-is that it is infidel, and therefore undeserving of existence.
A priori hostility towards Islam should not be “used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims.” Quite the contrary, an education campaign about the teaching and practice of Islam should result in legislative action that would exclude Islam from the societies it is targeting – not because it is an intolerant “religion,” but because it is an inherently seditious totalitarian ideology incompatible with the values of the West.
And finally, while anti-Muslim hostility is not a priori “natural or normal,” the desire of non-Muslims to defend their lands, families, cultures and faith against Islamic aggression is “natural and normal”; but the elite class is actively trying to neutralize it.

As the demand for Sharia-based communal self-rule is made with increasing frequency in the banlieus of Paris and the grim West Midlands council estates, Europe’s elite class is ready to throw in the towel. Dutch Justice Minister Piet Hein Donner-a Christian Democrat!-sees the demand as perfectly legitimate and argues that sharia could be introduced “by democratic means.” Muslims have a right to follow the commands of their religion, even if that included some “dissenting rules of behavior”: “Could you block this legally? It would also be a scandal to say ‘this isn’t allowed’! The majority counts. That is the essence of democracy…”

Guilt-Ridden Fellow-Travellers

Such inanities are light years away from Winston Churchill’s warning, over a century ago, that “no stronger retrograde force exists in the world” than Islam:

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science-the science against which it had vainly struggled-the civilization of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilization of ancient Rome.

Even Churchill’s prescience could not envisage the possibility that the invader would find his fellow-travellers at No. 10, Downing Street, at the European Union headquarters in Brussels, and in dozens of chancelleries and palaces across the Old Continent. Their joint efforts are helping change the face of Europe. The cumulative effect is not in doubt: by 2050, Muslims will account for over one-third of “Old Europe’s” young residents. Millions of them already live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

The elite class responds to such hostility with calls for ever-greater inclusiveness. Giuseppe Pisanu, Berlusconi’s former minister of the interior, responsible for controlling the country’s borders, thus declared five years ago that the high fatality rate of North African illegals on the high seas en route to Sicily was “a dreadful tragedy that weighs on the conscience of Europe.” His view was paradigmatic of the utopian liberal mind-set. If “Europe” should feel shame and guilt that people who have no right to come to its shores are risking their lives while trying to do so illegally, then only the establishment of a free passenger-ferry service between Tripoli and Palermo-with no passport or customs formalities required upon arrival, and a free shuttle to Rome or Milan-would offer some relief to that burdened conscience. And Sr Pisanu is supposedly a man of the “Right”!

The tangible results of the leaders’ moral decrepitude are devastating. A century ago, Sr. Pisanu and his class shared social commonalities that could be observed in Monte Carlo, Carlsbad, Biaritz or Paris, depending on the season. Englishmen, Russians, and Austrians shared the same outlook and sense of propriety, they all spoke French, but they nevertheless remained rooted in their national traditions, the permanent vessels in which Weltanschauung could be translated into Kultur. Today’s “United Europe,” by contrast, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores, disdain for inherited values, and an overt rejection of “traditional” culture. It creates the dreary sameness of “antidiscriminationism” and “tolerance.”

Such weakness breeds contempt and haughty arrogance on the other side. Take Tariq Ramadan, who calmly insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of the host-society. Muslims in Europe should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, “under the terms of Western liberal tolerance,” society as a whole should be “obliged to respect that choice.”

If such “respect” continues to be extended by the elite class, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing-or else simply forced into accepting-that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is actually a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The “liberal tolerance” and the accompanying “societal obligation” that Tariq Ramadan invokes thus become the tools of Western suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.” The weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if Europe is to survive.

The Pathology Of The Elite Class

It is in the inability and unwillingness of the neoliberal elite class to confront the grave threat to our civilization that Western Europe and North America most tellingly certify that they share the same cultural chromosomes. In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans-still nominally Christian-and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?”

Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, ancestors, and common culture; the consequences are predictable:

the loss of a sense of place and history among Europeans and North Americans;
rapid demographic decline, especially in Europe, unparalleled in history;
rampant Third World (and in Europe, overwhelmingly Muslim) immigration;
collapse of private and public manners, morals, and traditional commonalities;
imposition of “diversity,” “multiculturalism,” “sensitivity”; and
demonization and criminalization of any opposition to any of the above.

The end-result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands. Before 1914, both the West and the Muslim world could define themselves against each other in a cultural sense. The neoliberal elite insists on casting aside any idea of a specifically “Western” geographic and cultural space that should be protected from those who do not belong to it and have no rightful claim to it. The elite insists that our countries belong to the whole world.

We face an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed and immutable fact that must not be scrutinized. That consensus, I contend, is ideological in nature, flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in its results. It needs to be tested against evidence, and not against the alleged norms of acceptable public discourse imposed by those who do not know Islam, or else do not want us to know the truth about it.

In addition, a depraved mass culture and multiculturalist indoctrination in state schools and the mainstream media have already largely neutralized the sense of historical and cultural continuity among young West Europeans and North Americans. By contrast, the blend of soft porn and consumerism that targets every denizen of the Western world has not had the same effect on the Muslim diaspora in the West. The roll-call of Western-born and educated young Muslims supportive of terrorism confirms that failure.

The loss of a sense of place and history experienced by millions of Westerners follows the emergence of two sides of the same coin: a neoliberal post-national hyper-state in Europe and the neoconservative “benevolent global hegemony” in the U.S. epitomized by the demand for an ever-growing NATO. These two mindsets, seemingly at odds, are but two aspects of the same emerging globalized universe, two sides of the same coin. The neoliberals advocate multilateralism in the form of an emerging “international community” framed by the United Nations and adjudicated by the International Criminal Court (ICC), with the EU acting as an interim medium for transferring sovereign prerogatives to a supra-national body; the neocons prefer to be the only cop in town. Both share the same distaste for traditional, naturally evolving societies and cultures.

The revolutionary character of the multiculturalist project is revealed in the endless mantra of Race, Gender and Sexuality, the formula now elevated to the status of the post-modern Philosopher’s Stone, the force that moves the linear historical process forward, towards the grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures that will mark the end of history. Race, Gender and Sexuality have replaced the Proletariat as both the oppressed underclass (hence the cult of the non-white, non-male, non-heterosexual victimhood), and as the historically preordained agent of revolutionary change.

Classical Marxist political economy found the dynamics of revolution in the inevitable conflict between the owners of the means of production and the proletariat that has nothing to sell but its labor and nothing to lose but its chains. Latter-day Marxist revolutionaries go beyond dialectical materialism, however, by introducing a wholly metaphysical concept of victimhood and an array of associated special-rights claims that have worked such wonders for Islam all over the Western world. Majority populations of “old” Europe and America, in this insane but all-pervasive paradigm, are guilty of “oppression” by their very existence, and therefore must not protest the migratory deluge, let alone try to oppose it: that is “racism.”.

The fruits are with us already. Gibbon could have had today’s Antwerp or Malmo in mind, or Marseilles, or Huddersfield, when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.” On present form, within a century the native Western majorities will melt away: “child-free” is a legitimate yuppie lifestyle term, on par with “fat-free” and “drug-free.” But whereas the threat of extinction of an exotic tribal group in Borneo or Amazonia - let alone a species of spotted owl or sperm whale - would cause alarm and prompt activism among neoliberal elites, it is deemed inherently racist to mention the fact that Europeans and their trans-Atlantic cousins are, literally, endangered species.

There will be no grand synthesis, no civilizational cross-fertilization, between the West and Islam. Even the ultra-tolerant Dutch are beginning to see the light, pace Geert Wilders, but they are hamstrung by guilt-ridden self-haters and appeasers, whose hold on the political power, the media, and the academe is undemocratic, unnatural, and obscene. If Europe is to survive they need to be unmasked for what they are: traitors to their nations and their culture. They must be replaced by people ready and willing to subject the issues of immigration and identity to the test of democracy, unhindered by administrative or judicial fiat.

If the coming war against jihad is to be won, the first task is to start talking frankly about the identity and character of the enemy and the nature of the threat. The obligation to do so is dictated by morality no less than by the need for self-preservation. “If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” says Sun Tzu. Well, we know the enemy. We know his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious society.

The main problem is with ourselves; or, to be precise, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis. Having absorbed postmodernist relativism, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any faith except the faith in their own infallibility, members of the Western neoliberal elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a problem that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed “cures” that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia.

Abroad, we are told, we need to address political and economic grievances of the Muslim impoverished masses, we need to spread democracy and free markets in the Muslim world, we need to invest more in public diplomacy. At home we need more tolerance, greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the minorities that feel marginalized. The predictable failure of such cures leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and to ever more morbid self-doubt. This vicious circle must be broken.

Breaking The Deadlock

The deadlock on the Somme in 1916, or at Verdun a year later, could not be broken with the ideas and modus operandi of Messrs. Haig, Foch, Cadrona or Hindenburg. It could have been unlocked, however, had Lidell-Hart, de Gaulle, or Guderian held the old guard’s ranks and positions. Winning a war demands “knowing the enemy and knowing oneself,” of course, but it also demands “thinking outside the box.” This cliché is apt: the magnitude of the threat demands radical responses that fall outside the cognitive parameters of the elite class.

Let us therefore start our specific policy recommendations with the complex and emotionally charged issue of “human rights” versus national security.

DEFINING ISLAMIC ACTIVISM – Instead of seeking a ban on all Muslim immigration right away, which is not a realistic goal at this moment, Western anti-jihadist activists should campaign for changes in immigration legislation of their home countries to include clauses that would exclude Islamic activists before they come, and have them deported if they are already infiltrated into the country.

This demand needs to be made acceptable and attractive to a wide cross-section of the electorate regardless of political and ideological preferences. Therefore it should be focused on the Islamic activists’ threat to the neoliberal values themselves:

Discrimination against other religions (with special emphasis on the rising European phenomenon of Islamic anti-Semitism), outlooks (inc. atheism) and lifestyles;
Discrimination and violence against women (esp. wives and “disobedient” daughters);
Discrimination and violence against homosexuals;
Threats of violence in any form and for whatever alleged “offense” or “insult” (e.g. drawing cartoons, making documentaries, writing books);
Apology or justification for all of the above.

It is essential to focus on the despicable acts themselves, and then drawing the direct line to the commands of Islam’s scripture and its founder, rather than doing it in reverse, as some well-meaning but politically less astute anti-jihadist activists do.

This definition of Islamic activism would be a major step in the direction of denying actual or potential jihadists a foothold in Europe and the rest of the West. In the U.S. the broad model is provided by the old 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act (INA, the McCarran-Walter Act), mandating the exclusion or deportation of any alien who engaged or had purpose to engage in activities prejudicial to the public interest or subversive to national security. “Ideological” grounds for deportation were on the US statute books until 1990, when they were repealed by Congress. After the Russian revolution foreign communists were singled out for deportation. One night alone in January of 1920, more than 2,500 “alien radicals” were seized in thirty-three cities across the country and deported to their countries of origin.

DENYING CITIZENSHIP TO ISLAMIC ACTIVISTS – I submit to you that all Western countries need laws that will treat any naturalized citizen’s or legally resident alien’s known adherence to an Islamist world outlook as excludable - on political, rather than “religious” grounds. It is politically feasible to articulate the demand that citizenship of a democratic Western country should be denied to all Islamic activists.

In the United States a foreigner who becomes naturalized has to declare, on oath, “that I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which I have heretofore been a subject or citizen; that I will support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic.” A declaration of this kind, of not a solemn oath of allegiance, is expected from naturalized citizens in most European countries.

For a Muslim to declare all of the above in good faith, and especially that he accepts an “infidel,” i.e. non-Muslim document or law as the source of his highest loyalty, is an act of apostasy par excellence, punishable by death under the Islamic law. The sharia, to a Muslim, is not an addition to the “secular” legal code with which it coexists; it is the only true code, the only basis of obligation. To be legitimate, all political power therefore must rest exclusively with those who enjoy Allah’s authority on the basis of his revealed will – and for as long as they remain infidel, both Europe and America are illegitimate. So how can a self-avowedly devout Muslim take the oath, and expect the rest of us to believe that it was done in good faith? Because he is practicing taqiyya, the art of elaborate lying that was inaugurated by Muhammad to help destabilize and undermine non-Muslim communities almost ripe for a touch of Jihad. (Or else because he is not devout enough and confused, but in that case there is the ever-present danger that at some point he will rediscover his roots.)

AUXILLIARY MEASURES – Those who preach or promote jihad and advocate the introduction of sharia can and should be treated in exactly the same manner that adherents of other totalitarian ideologies had been treated in the free world during the Cold War. It will be a long and hard struggle to open the eyes of legislators and legal regulators that Islam itself is a radical, revolutionary ideology, inherently seditious and inimical to Western values and institutions, but it can be done. Other necessary measures would then follow, but to that end anti-jihadists should start articulating and advocating them now:

Seek zero porosity of the borders. Preventing illegal immigration is a desirable objective per se; in the context of stopping terrorists it is mandatory. No anti-jihadist strategy is possible without complete physical control of borders. This is an issue on which a majority of the electorate of each and every Western country will agree - much to the chagrin of the liberal elites. Anti-jihadists should insist that all illegal immigration is a major security threat and that it can and should be subject to the letter of the law, and not to the suicidal dictates of the “human rights” lobby.
Demand mandatory cooperation of state agencies at all levels in identifying, registering and apprehending illegal immigrants and in assisting in their deportation - starting with those from nations and groups at risk for terrorism. It is a curious phenomenon in most Western countries that at various levels of state administration (e.g. welfare officers and social workers) and law enforcement (e.g. police forces in major cities) we encounter varying levels of tolerance, and even encouragement, of illegal immigrants’ continued presence in the community. Again, this demand for simple compliance with the law by tax-funded public officers would be politically popular.
Discard the irrational ban on “profiling.” Not all Muslims are terrorists, of course, but all transnational terrorist networks that threaten Western countries’ national security and way of life are composed of Muslims. It is time to accept that “profiling” based on a person’s appearance, origin, and apparent or suspected beliefs is an essential tool of trade of law enforcement and war on terrorism. Just ask the Israelis!
Subject the work of Islamic centers to legal limitations and security supervision. All over the Western world, Islamic centers have provided platforms for exhortations to the faithful to support causes and to engage in acts that are morally reprehensible, legally punishable, and detrimental to the host country’s national security. They have provided shelter to the outlaws, and offered recruitment to the leaders.
Treat affiliation with Islamic activism as grounds for denial or revoking of any level of security clearance. Such affiliation is incompatible with the requirements of personal commitment, patriotic loyalty and unquestionable reliability that are essential in the military, law enforcement, intelligence services, and other related branches of government (e.g. immigration control, airport security). Presence of practicing Muslims in any of these institutions would present an inherent risk to its integrity and would undermine morale.

Acceptance of these proposals would represent a new start in devising long-term defense. The proposed measures recognize that we are in a war of ideas and religion, whether we want that or not and however much we hate the fact. They reflect the seriousness of the struggle. This war is being fought, on the Islamic side, with the deep condition that the West is on its last legs. The success of its demographic onslaught on Europe enhances the image of “a candy store with the busted lock,” and that view is reinforced by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for self-perpetuation is indeed in peril.

Can The Candy Store With A Busted Lock Be Saved?

The above proposals are not only pragmatic, they are morally just. They will elicit the accusation of “discrimination” from the self-hating segments of the elite class, even though no such label is applicable. Targeting people for screening, supervision and exclusion on the basis of their genes would be discriminatory indeed, but doing so because of their beliefs, ideas, actions, and intentions is justified and necessary. Orthodox Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to the European civilization, culture, and way of life.

The elite class rejects this diagnosis, of course, but among reasonable, well-informed citizens the debate must be conducted on terms liberated from the shackles of the elite class. Geert Wilders certainly shows the way. We should act accordingly, and never, ever be afraid of causing controversy. That means being subjected to the threat of legal proceedings by the neoliberal state - or to the threat of death, by those whom the neoliberal state continues to protect to the detriment of its own citizens.

Western leaders did not agonize over communism’s “true” nature during the Berlin air lift in 1949, or in Korea in 1950, but acted effectively to contain it by whatever means necessary. Yes, back then we had a legion of Moscow’s apologists, character witnesses, moles and fellow-travelers, assuring us that the Comrades want nothing but social justice at home and peaceful coexistence abroad. They held tenured chairs at prestigious universities and dominated all smart salons, from London and Paris to New York. They explained away and justified the inconsistencies and horrifyingly violent implications of the source texts of Marx and Lenin. They explained away and justified the appalling fruits: the bloodbath of the Revolution, the genocidal great famine, the show trials and purges, the killing of millions of innocents in the Gulag, the pact with Hitler, the works.

Today their spiritual heirs in politics, the academy and the media establishment act as Islam’s apologists, character witnesses and fellow travelers. They flatly deny or else explain away, with identical scholastic sophistry and moral depravity, the dark and violent implications of the source texts, the Kuran and the Hadith, the deeply unnerving career of Muhammad, and centuries of conquests, wars, slaughters, subjugation, decline without fall, spiritual and material misery, and murderous fanaticism.

Nil Desperandum!

Some eighty years ago Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his times, The treason of the intellectuals. For generations prior to the 20th century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite ensured that “humanity did evil, but honored good.” The “Treason” of the title occurred when they gave up promoting lasting civilizational values in favor of short-term political preferences. Benda wrote at a time when fascism, nazism and bolshevism dominated Europe’s scene. Today the “treason” of the elite class takes a different form. It upholds the allegedly universal values of multiculturalism, inclusiveness and antidiscriminationism to the detriment of the particular value of our civilization and all its fruits. The propensity of the elite class to the betrayal of our culture remains the same, however.

The fact that normal people don’t realize the magnitude of the problem works to the advantage of the people like Solana, Soros, Blair, Prodi, or Hillary Clinton. Their ideas, which but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric or insane, now rule the Euro-American mainstream. Only a society inured to the concept of open borders can be unblinkingly told that Islam is good and tolerant, that “we” (the West) have been nasty and unkind to it over the centuries - remember the Crusades! - and that “terrorism” needs to be understood, and cured, by social therapy that is independent of Islam’s teaching and practice.

At the root of the domestic malaise is the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment in time - regardless of his culture, attitude, or intentions. The resulting random melange of mutually disconnected multitudes is supposed to be a blessing that enriches an otherwise arid and monotonous society.

A further pernicious fallacy is the dictum that we should not feel a special bond for any particular country, nation, race, or culture, but transfer our preferences on the whole world, “the Humanity,” equally. Such notions have been internalized by the elite class in America and Western Europe to the point where they actively help Islamic terrorism. In America the process has been under way for decades. By 1999 then-Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott felt ready to declare that the United States may not exist “in its current form” in the 21st century, because the very concept of nationhood – here and throughout the world – will have been rendered obsolete.

A generation earlier such uttering from a senior government official would have caused a scandal. By the end of the 20th century such declarations bothered only the unsophisticates who persist in assuming that the purpose of what Dr. Talbott was doing at the Department of State was to ensure the survival, security and prosperity of the United States within the international system, rather than its eventual absorption by the system. But his was an exultant prophecy, not an impartial assessment. The ideological foundation for Talbott’s beliefs was stated bluntly: “All countries are basically social arrangements, accommodations to changing circumstances. No matter how permanent and even sacred they may seem at any one time, in fact they are all artificial and temporary.” To the members of his class, all countries are but transient, virtual-reality entities. Owing emotional allegiance to any one of them is irrational, and risking one’s life for its sake is absurd.

The refusal of the Western elite class to protect their nations from jihadist infiltration is the biggest betrayal in history. It is rooted in the mindset that breeds the claim that “force is not an answer” to terrorism, that profiling is bad and open borders are good, that “true” Islam is peaceful and the West is wicked. The upholders of such claims belong to the culture that has lost its bond with nature, history, and the supporting community. In the meantime, thanks to them, the quiet onslaught continues unabated, across the Straits of Gibraltar, through JFK and O’Hare, Heathrow and Schiphol. Far from enhancing diversity, it threatens to impose a numbing sameness and eradicate the identity of target-populations, to demolish their special character and uniqueness.

That supporting community, the real nation, is still out there, in North America and Europe alike, working and paying taxes and grinning and bearing it. When it is told of Islam’s “peace and tolerance,” it grumbles about someone’s stupidity or ineptitude, but it still does not suspect outright betrayal. The betrayers, meanwhile, promote an ideology of universal human values, of a common culture for the whole world. They may not even realize why they abet Islam. For all the outward differences, they share with the mullahs and sheikhs and imams the desire for a monistic One World. They both long for Talbot’s Single Global Authority, post-national and seamlessly standardized, an Ummah under a fancy secular name.

Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands and nations more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil. They are our enemies and jihad’s indispensable objective allies.

The elite class, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, has every intention of continuing to “fight” the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win.

It is up to the millions of normal Europeans and their American cousins to stop the madness. The traitor class wants them to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as people with a historical memory and a cultural identity, and to make room for the post-human, monistic Utopia spearheaded by the jihadist fifth column.

This crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty.