Authors: Mark Steyn
• 16 percent say that while the attacks may have been wrong, the cause was right.
• 13 percent think that the four men who carried out the bombings should be regarded as "martyrs."
• 7 percent agree that suicide attacks on civilians in the United Kingdom can be justified in some circumstances, rising to 16 percent for a military target.
• 2 percent would be proud if a family member decided to join al Qaeda. 16
percent would be "indifferent."
If this is a war, then that is a substantial fifth column. There are, officially, one million Muslims in London, half of them under twenty-five. If 7 percent think suicide attacks on civilians are justified, that's 70,000 potential supporters in Britain's capital city. Most of them will never bomb a bus or even provide shelter or a bank account to someone who does. But some of them will. As September 11 demonstrated, you only have to find nineteen stouthearted men, and from a talent pool of 70,000 that's not bad odds. Besides, a large majority of Western Muslims support almost all the terrorists' strategic goals: according to one poll, over 60 percent of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom.
Another poll places the percentage favoring "hard-line" sharia at a mere 40 percent. So there's one definition of a "moderate Muslim": he's a Muslim who wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he's a "moderate" because he can't be bothered flying a plane into a skyscraper to get it. Another poll found that 20 percent of British Muslims sympathized with the "feelings and motives" of the July 7 London Tube bombers. Or, more accurately, 20 percent were prepared to admit to a pollster they felt sympathy, which suggests the real figure might be somewhat higher. Huge numbers of Muslims--many of them British subjects born and bred--see their fellow Britons blown apart on trains and buses and are willing to rationalize the actions of the mass murderers. The Islamic lobby groups pressure governments to make concessions to them rather than to the terrorists--even though both share the same aims. In fact, sharing the same aims as the terrorists is what gives the Islamic lobby groups their credibility. If there were a
"moderate Muslim" lobby--one that, say, believed that suicide bombing is always wrong, even against Israelis, or that supported the liberation of Iraq on the grounds that the Iraqi people are in favor of it--your average Western government would immediately be suspicious that such a group was not "authentically" Muslim. Whereas, if you oppose the occupation of Iraq and seek to justify the depravity of Hamas, you have instant credibility. And so government ministers in Western nations spend most of their time taking advice on the jihad from men who agree with its aims. You can pluck out news items at random: in London, a religious "hate crimes" law that makes honest discussion of Islam even more difficult; in Ottawa, a government report that recommends legalizing polygamy; in Seattle,
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the introduction of gender-separate Muslim-only swimming sessions in municipal pools .... The September 11 terrorists were in favor of all these ends. The disagreement is only on the means.
A while back, I found myself behind a car in Vermont that had a one-word bumper sticker containing the injunction "CO-EXIST." It's one of those sentiments beloved of Western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority, part of the multiculti mood music that makes lefty pieties one long soothing express elevator to cloud-cuckoo land. On this "CO-EXIST" sticker, the "C" was the Islamic crescent, the "0" was the hippy peace sign, the "X" was the Star of David and the "T" was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is that it's the first of those symbols that has a problem with "co-existence." Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn't need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, co-existence is what the Islamists are at war with--or, if you prefer, pluralism; the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighborhood. And even those who nominally respect the idea tend, on closer examination, to mean by "pluralism" something closer to "subjugation." Take one of those famous "moderate Muslims": Imam Zaid Shakir, the subject of a flattering profile in the New York Times under the headline "U.S. Muslim Clerics Seek a Modern Middle Ground." Good for them, but what does a "modern middle ground" mean? As Imam Shakir--who grew up as Ricky Mitchell in Georgia and Connecticut--says, "Every Muslim who is honest would say, I would like to see America become a Muslim country. I think it would help people, and if I didn't believe that, I wouldn't be a Muslim." I think he's right when he says honest Muslims want America to be a Muslim country. But they don't mean it in quite the same sense Christians do when they speak of America as a Christian country. By a "Muslim country," they don't just foresee a country with a majority of Muslim inhabitants but a country whose civil institutions are Muslim. The Islamists incite jihad from American, Canadian, British, European, and Australian mosques, and they get away with it. The West's elites lapse reflexively into twittering over insufficient "respect" and entirely fictional outbreaks of "Islamophobia." The Mounties, the FBI, Scotland Yard, and others are reasonably efficient at breaking up cells and plots, but they're the symptoms, not the disease. It's the ideological pipeline that needs to be dismantled. Through their network of schools and mosques, the Saudis are attempting to make themselves into a Muslim Vatican--if not infallible, at any rate the most authoritative voice in the Islamic world. We might have responded to the Wahhabist challenge by distinguishing, as William Tayler did, between Sunni and Shia, Sufi and Salafi, and all the rest, and attempting to exploit the divisions. But, as proper Western multiculturalists, we celebrate diversity by lumping them all together as "Islam."
So if the jihad has its war aims, maybe we should start thinking about ours. What would victory look like? As Fascism and Communism were in their day, Islamism is now the ideology of choice for the world's grievance-mongers. That means we have to destroy the ideology, or at least its potency--not Islam per se, but at the very minimum the toxic strain of Wahhabism, which thanks to Saudi oil money has been transformed from a fetish of isolated desert derelicts into the most influential radicalizing force of our time. If the implausible mantra of Western politicians that Islam is a "religion of peace" had any strategic value against the head hackers and suicide bombers, it would be as a prelude to pointing out that, sadly, Wahhabism is an exception to this otherwise saintly character, that Wahhabism is a religion of pieces. But our lack of curiosity about which particular school of imam is setting up shop on Main Street is greatly facilitating the cause of pan-Islamism, a much better
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example of globalization than McDonald's. In Bangladesh and Bosnia, it's put indigenous localized Islams out of business and imposed a one-size-fits-all Wahhab-Mart version cooked up by some guy at head office in Riyadh. One way to reverse its gains would be with a kind of anti-trust approach designed to restore all the less threatening mom n' pop Islams run out of town by the Saudis' Burqa King version of global homogeneity. By contrast, the much reviled yet mostly mythical "American imperialism" is up on bricks and rusting in the back of the garage. Wearying of what he regards as the deluded idealism of the liberty-touting Bush doctrine, National Review's John Derbyshire began promoting the slogan "Rubble Doesn't Cause Trouble." Cute, and I wish him well with the T-shirt sales. But, in arguing for a "realist" foreign policy of long-range bombing as necessary, he overlooks the very obvious point that rubble causes quite a lot of trouble: the rubble of Bosnia is directly responsible for radicalizing a generation of European Muslims, including Daniel Pearl's executioner; the rubble of Afghanistan became an international terrorist training camp, whose alumni include the shoe-bomber Richard Reid, the millennium bomber Ahmed Ressam, and the September 11 plotters; the rubble of Grozny turned Chechen nationalists into pan-Islamist jihadi. Those correspondents of mine who send me e-mails headed "Nuke Mecca!" might like to ponder the bigger strategic impact on a billion Muslims from Indonesia to Yorkshire, for whom any fallout will be psychological rather than carcinogenic. Rubble is an insufficient solution, unless you're also going to attend to the Muslim world's real problem: its intellectual rubble.
Arab Muslims fought in Afghanistan, British Muslims took up arms in Bosnia, Pakistani Muslims have been killed in Chechnya. When you're up against a globalized ideology, you need to globalize your own, not hunker down in Fortress America.
What's the bigger threat? A globalization that exports cheeseburgers or a globalization that exports the harshest and most oppressive features of its culture? Far too many American conservatives still think the dragons are at the far fringes of the map--that in the twenty-first century the United States can be a nineteenth-century republic untroubled by the world's pathogens because of its sheer distance from them. But, in an age of globalized proximity all of us in the modern multicultural West are like Lincoln on the steps of the Capitol that Saturday morning: the world is in the room with us. At the dawn of the twentyfirst century, Marshall McLuhan's global village is finally within reach: the Yanks run the diner, the Chinese the health clinic, and the Saudis the church. From America's point of view, that doesn't seem the best deal.
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Chapter Five
The Anything They'll Believe In
C H U R C H V S . S T A T E
Islam is not only a religion, it is a complete way of life. Islam guides Muslims from birth to grave. The Quran and prophet Muhammad's words and practical application of Quran in life cannot be changed.
Islam is a guide for humanity, for all times, until the day of judgment. It is forbidden in Islam to convert to any other religion. The penalty is death. There is no disagreement about it. Islam is being embraced by people of other faiths all the time. They should know they can embrace Islam, but cannot get out. This rule is not made by Muslims; it is the supreme law of God.
Please do not ask us Muslims to pick some rules and disregard other rules. Muslims are supposed to embrace Islam in its totality.
NAZRA QURAISHI, KINDERGARTEN TEACHER,
IN THE
LANSING STATE JOURNAL
(MICHIGAN), JULY 5. 2006
What we still don't know, as the years drift by since September 11, is how deep the psychoses of jihadism reach within Islam in general, and the West's Muslim populations in particular. How many are revolted by the slaughter of those Beslan schoolchildren or the beheading of Daniel Pearl and other hostages, and how many are willing to rationalize it?
More to the point, of those Muslims who are affronted by what is done in the name of their religion, what percentage are prepared to do anything about it? How many Western Muslims have formed "Not In Our Name" groups and marched to protest the bombings of their fellow citizens in New York, Madrid, and London? How many have joined "Islam Against Suicide Bombing" or banded together to force jihadist imams out of their mosques? How many are prepared to stand up and say they didn't come to America or Europe to raise their children as Saudis?
Hello? Anyone out there?
We--the befuddled infidels--talk airily about "reforming" Islam. But what if the reform has already taken place and jihadism is it? What if the long percolation of Islam through Wahhabism, the Muslim Brotherhood, the Iranian revolution, and contemporary Westernpromoted whining over grievances such as "colonialism" is the reform?
We chatter breezily about "assimilating" Western Muslims. But compare a gathering of mainstream Muslim politicians and religious leaders in Baghdad with any similar get-together in London or Detroit or Sydney, and you realize the Iraqis sound a lot more reasonable and amenable than most Western Muslim lobby groups. What if the problem is not that Muslims in the West are unfamiliar with the customs of their new land but rather that they are all too familiar with them--and explicitly reject them? And that the result is a mutated form of Islam uniquely well informed in its hostility to the infidel--and one furthermore in which ancient
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tribal hostilities between Sunni and Shia, Arab and non-Arab have been subsumed within a new pan-Islamic identity.
Muslims have assimilated brilliantly, at least when it comes to mastering the principal discourse of the advanced democratic state--the legalisms, victimology, and entitlement culture. Here are two small foot-of-the-page news items: first, a decision by the Massachusetts Supreme Court as reported by the Boston Herald: "The state's highest court has ruled that the state prison system has failed to justify denying a Muslim inmate special feast-day meats, such as oxen and camel."
The Third Infantry Division has to make do with MREs, but a Muslim prisoner can sue because they're not serving him camel. Meanwhile, in Britain they're rebuilding half the bathrooms in Her Majesty's prisons because Muslim inmates have complained that the toilets face Mecca and that therefore they're obliged to ride sidesaddle, which can be very uncomfortable.
And, if you're looking for "root causes" of terrorism, why not start with Euro-Canadian welfare systems? While it's not true that every immigrant on welfare is an Islamic terrorist, the vast majority of Islamic terrorists in Europe are on welfare, living in radicalized ghetto cultures with nothing to do but sit around the flat plotting the jihad all day at taxpayers'
expense. Muhammed Metin Kaplan used his time on welfare in Germany to set up his Islamist group, Caliphate State; the so-called "caliph of Cologne" was subsequently extradited to Turkey for planning to fly a plane into the mausoleum of Kemal Ataturk. Ahmed Ressam, arrested in Washington state en route to blow up Los Angeles International Airport, hatched his plot while on welfare in Montreal. Abdul Nacer Benbrika, leader of a group of Australian Islamists, lived in Melbourne for ten years and never did a day's work; now he's been jailed for terrorism-related activities, and taxpayers are ponying up $50,000 a year in benefits to his wife. Abu Hamza became Britain's most famous fire-breathing imam while on welfare in London and, after being charged with incitement to murder and sent to jail, sued the government for extra benefits on top of the £1,000 a week his family already received. Abu Qatada, a leading al Qaeda recruiter, became an Islamist big shot while on welfare in Britain, and only when he was discovered to have £150,000 in his bank account did the Department for Work and Pensions turn off the spigot. Oh, and here's another Welfare Megabucks bonanza, from the Times of London: