Jihad Watch, by Hugh Fitzgerald, June 25, 2015:
Six years ago I delivered a talk I titled “Strategies of Denial.” As it did not appear at Jihad Watch but at another site, New English Review, many who come here may not have seen it. And since what I noted at that time does not date, I am taking the liberty of reprinting it here, in segments, with some updated comments interpolated throughout. There is really nothing new to say about Islam; it demands of commentators that they keep repeating themselves, in slightly different words, to put into context each new manifestation of Islamic behavior, whether it be an attack on Infidels, or something less dramatic. There are new attacks, new outrages, but there are no new explanations of Muslim behavior. Each new attack bears mentioning, and each new attempt to explain it away as “un-Islamic” deserves comment, but the generalizing about the subject — the overview — does not need revision, merely constant repetition and, where appropriate, new application.
My reason for breaking up the piece is simple: the new material throughout; I have expanded on what was given in a somewhat lapidary fashion, appealing more to our common experience of what is happening all over the West today. And I would like it not to overwhelm or burden the readers at this website, but to be read.
Now let’s go to the original introduction to “Strategies of Denial”:
Strategies of Denial –the title is ambiguous. Possibly deliberately. What might it mean? It might refer to Muslims, and to all the ways that adherents of Islam, “slaves of Allah,” especially those living in the West, have managed so successfully to distract or confuse or intimidate, morally or intellectually or physically, so many non-Muslims, managed to keep those non-Muslims from finding out too much about what Islam inculcates, and to achieve this despite the fact that the Islamic texts — Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira – are easily accessible, no more than a mouse-click away, and their meaning discussed at thousands of Muslim websites. And though not always a mouse-click away, there is the long record of Islamic imperialism, of the conquest through violence and the subsequent subjugation, also through violence and the threat of violence, of non-Muslims, which had always been known throughout the Western world, discussed by its outstanding figures (see John Quincy Adams, see Tocqueville, see Winston Churchill), and noted as a matter of course by Western travelers to Muslim lands, whose own experiences revealed the clear hostility of Muslims toward them (and toward all non-Muslims). When the great mass of Christians in earlier centuries thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that those who had studied Islam and those who had encountered Muslims must surely be right: Islam was a ferocious and fanatical faith – for “faith” and not “religion” was the word used until the past century. It was American writers of books for children who first began to use that leveling phrase about “the world’s great religions,” and not until recent decades that the soothingly misleading phrase about “the three abrahamic faiths” began to be used. Never before in the history of the Western world would such a phrase have been invoked, never before would it have been taken seriously or used to convince non-Muslims that there was some kind of shared faith and shared traditions which bound Christians (and Jews) to Muslims. People once understood, even if they could not site sura and ayat, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” And even if Sura 9 and a hundred other Jihad verses in the Qur’an had not been read, and the hundreds or thousands of malevolent anti-Infidel hadiths were unknown, inhabitants of the Western world – the chief obstacle to the spread of Islam for a thousand years – did grasp, in the main, the nature of Islam.
But in the last few decades, the very decades in which the political and media elites of Europe have permitted millions of Muslim migrants, in an act of civilisational heedlessness and historical amnesia, to settle within their lands, those same elites failed to reconsider their earlier presumptions and negligence, failed to meet their solemn responsibility to study the texts and tenets of Islam, and their observable effect over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies, on the behavior of Muslims. They have instead avoided such study, and still worse, have attacked those who have engaged in such study and, armed with the knowledge of the meaning, and therefore the menace, of Islam, have begun to sound all kinds of tocsins.
It’s an amazing feat, really: the ability of millions of Muslims to settle within the non-Muslim lands, what in Islam is called Dar al-Harb, the House or Domain of War, where the writ of Islam does not yet run, and Muslims do not yet rule, and yet those Muslims have been able to prevent, to stave off, to deflect, any serious and widespread study of Islam, and hence to prevent the understanding of the threat that a large Muslim population unavoidably presents (for a handful of apostates, and a slightly-larger handful of those who become “cultural” Muslims or “Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslims, do not relieve us from worrying about the 90% or more of Muslims who remain True Believers and Defenders of the Faith).
And as of now — late June 2015 — the movement of Muslims into Europe has reached flood tide. They come from North Africa, but not all of North Africa. Their main point of departure is Libya, where the overthrow of Qaddafi meant that no one despot could control the flow of population, as he was willing to do for the right payment, as from the Italian government under Berlusconi. Even if a Western power wanted to pay someone today to prevent Arab and sub-Saharan Africans from leaving in those boats that head toward Lampedusa (the Italian island where these boats often are taken, or the smugglers easily arrange to have then taken — deliberate sinking or half-sinking of vessels by the smugglers is a common tactic) who, exactly, would he pay? No one controls the coast of Libya anymore; at best, some militias might control in Benghazi, or in Misrata, but even they are so fractured, their leaders so changeable, the ability to make sure that a deal that is struck kept so difficult, that Libyan immigration cannot be stopped unless the boats themselves are destroyed, as has been suggested should be done, but for reasons one cannot fathom, this elementary measure of self-defense has not yet been taken.
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