Musings Of An Indie WriterWednesday, September 8, 2010
The War With Islam, “Moderate Muslims,” And The Florida Koran Roast
The planned Florida Koran bonfire has elicited statements of concern from numerous public figures in America, and (of course) shrill messages of condemnation from Muslims everywhere. The overall thrust of the adverse American reactions has been that this sort of act will "alienate moderate Muslims," supposedly "the very allies we need to defeat the Islamists and Wahhabi extremists."
There's no need for your Curmudgeon to elucidate the adverse reactions of Muslims, is there?
A few subliterates -- at least, that's one explanation for their inadequate knowledge of history -- have commented to the effect that we would be outraged by a Muslim bonfire of Bibles, and that the two cases are exactly parallel. Therefore, they say, the planned bonfire would be a betrayal of the values we claim to hold.
Don't ask them about what values those might be. Freedom, justice, and manly defiance of those who seek to intimidate us won't be among them. And don't ask them whether they're aware that Bible bonfires have occurred many times in Islamic nations, particularly Iran and Saudi Arabia. If they are, they'll wave it aside; if not, they'll claim you must be lying.
Clearly, it's time for some light on the subject, rather than more heat.
First, the self-delusion about "moderate Muslims" simply has to stop. There's no such thing as a moderate Muslim, because there's no such thing as moderate Islam. Islam proclaims certain premises:
- That the Koran is the literal Word of Allah, never to be edited nor reinterpreted;
- That the Prophet Muhammad was the Perfect Man, to be emulated in all ways;
- That Muslims are obligated to make Islam the only accepted religion on Earth by any means expedient, including lethal violence.
Those premises are absolute. For a Muslim to question any one of them is called Zandaka -- heresy -- and is punishable by death.
There's nothing moderate about the ethos that flows from those premises. It sanctions all manner of vileness, including deceit and stealthy violence against "the unbeliever;" the subjugation of all non-Muslims; polygamy and pedophilia; the chattelization of women; and a criminal code so barbaric that a Westerner can scarcely credit it, even though it's put into practice every day.
Yet no one who disputes any aspect of that evil code can call himself a Muslim. That would undermine the creed in toto, and put him in jeopardy of death at the hands of other Muslims. Ergo, the "moderate Muslim" is a fiction concocted for public-relations purposes among persons not yet subjugated to "the religion of peace."
What we have here in the United States are not "moderate Muslims" but temperate Muslims: persons who, whatever they might believe or advocate among themselves, are indisposed to act on the commands of their creed at this time. If polls conducted among Middle Eastern Muslims of every station can be taken to measure the attitudes and preferences of Muslims in America, they support the "extremists" in principle, approve of their overall aims, and will neither speak nor act against them.
To seek to conciliate such persons is fatuous. To trust them is insane.
Just in case you've napped away the past thirty years, there's a war on. No, not in Afghanistan, and certainly not in Iraq. The war of which your Curmudgeon speaks is the stealth jihad of which Robert Spencer and others have so eloquently warned us: the ongoing, loosely organized Islamic campaign to demoralize the nations of the West so that shari'a, Islam's law code, can penetrate our lands and eventually displace our native arrangements. That campaign uses Western "tolerance" toward religious differences to disarm our resistance to Islam's advance.
But Islam is not a religion. It's a totalitarian ideology with a few theological trimmings. If you're aware of its prescriptions, its proscriptions, and its record when in the saddle, you cannot sincerely disagree. If not, you need to complete your education before allowing yourself an opinion on the subject.
Persons throughout recorded history have done terrible things in the name of a religion, but only Islam, "the religion of peace," literally commands its adherents to do such things, and to support those who advance Islam in that manner, unconditionally. In that sense, the war between Islam and the Christian-Enlightenment West goes back a lot further than thirty years.
One does not fight a war by conciliating the enemy. No, not even a war of ideas, insofar as Islam can be considered an idea to be assessed objectively and rationally. In a war successfully concluded, there can only be victory and defeat. Inasmuch as Islam has defined itself as a war creed unalterably opposed to all others -- read the Koran if you don't believe your Curmudgeon on that score -- our choice is to prosecute the war to victory, or to meekly accept defeat.
Estimates of the world population of Muslims hover around 1.3 billion. That's a formidable number. If it were necessary to slaughter them all to prevail in the war between us, we would probably be unable to do it -- not for lack of military capacity, but for lack of will. Fortunately, we can prevail without such wholesale slaughter if we can contrive to sever the bonds between the temperate fraction and their activist brethren.
How does one persuade persons disinclined to violence to separate themselves from persons of the opposed inclination? In one of two ways only:
- By appealing to their better natures;
- By appealing to their self-interest.
No mortal conflict in all of history has been settled by appealing to the enemy's better nature. If he truly desires to subjugate you, any gestures of conciliation toward him will indicate weakness, unreadiness or unwillingness to fight; they will merely strengthen his resolve. The sole positive course is to put the enemy in a position in which his self-interest plainly requires that he surrender: that he accept the cessation of hostilities on terms you dictate.
Sun Tzu and other writers on warfare have emphasized the importance of breaking the enemy's will to fight. How this is to be done depends on the nature of the enemy and the contest. In a war such as ours with Islam, the available strokes in that direction must emphasize:
- That we recognize that a state of war exists between us;
- That we're ready, willing, and able to fight it all the way to a conclusion;
- That we regard victory as the only acceptable outcome;
- That the alternatives available to them are:
- Utter extinction;
- Unconditional surrender and complete withdrawal from the field of battle.
The first step is the one we've been most reluctant to take. A Koran bonfire is one way of announcing that we've taken it.
We are not the Americans who fought World Wars I or II. We have far greater material resources than they, but we haven't demonstrated the same moral courage or resolve. Unless and until we marshal our spirits to the imperative task of our age, our bodies will remain flaccid.
We can begin by burning a Koran on September 11. Your Curmudgeon plans to do so himself. Are you willing to join him?
UPDATE: Welcome, James Wolcott admirers! When you're finished here, please be sure to enjoy this other piece, and perhaps this entire series, and draw the appropriate inferences.
