The Fourth (and Probably the Last) Quote from The Grand Jihad

I am not making this the last quote from The Grand Jihad because it is a bad book; far from it! Overall, it is a very good book, with my main caveat so far being that, in discussing the Muslim Brotherhood's multitudinous front groups, Mr. McCarthy too frequently uses just the acronyms, perhaps forgetting that those of us who do not spend every waking moment thinking about Islamists are having a hard time keeping up with him.

Seriously, a flow chart would have been nice.

However, be that as it may, the book is extremely informative, and as soon as the "used" price at Amazon drops down to a level acceptable to my budget, I'll buy a copy for my own shelves. This last quote discusses something that I have discussed with people on Facebook and in person: sharia creep, or creeping sharia.

I once pointed out, in a Facebook comment on a friend's post, that it was hardly likely, when England started allowing large numbers of Muslims to immigrate, that they thought they would one day have sharia courts in England, but that they now do. Someone else--a stranger to me--then talked about how the sharia courts in England only deal with relatively minor matters of Islamic law, and that I should start looking into these things more deeply rather than just exhibiting ignorant, knee-jerk Islamophobia (I am paraphrasing his words rather freely here, I admit).

I am often amused when someone accuses me of ignorance. I plead guilty to the charge, absolutely--as Will Rogers said, everyone is ignorant, only on different subjects--but if Will was right, then that implies that my accusers are ignorant on at least some things, too. In my experience, their areas of ignorance frequently correspond to my areas of knowledge--that is, they know least about the things I know most about. If I am less than expert about the niceties of the supposedly sixty percent of Muslims who are not interested in Islamism, they are less than expert about the hegemonistic ambitions of the forty percent of Muslims who are--to say nothing of the history of Muhammad's life.

At any rate, this is not, by any means, all that Mr. McCarthy has to say about creeping sharia, but it is a lot. And that is why I am making it the last quote from his book, good as it is. You see, I am afraid that I am on the edge of crossing the line from providing interesting and informative quotes that will encourage you to go out and read the book, to just making it unnecessary for you to read the book.

Go read the book. You need to. Here's the last quote. As usual, anything in bold reflects my emphasis:

This is not to say Islamists are failing to prioritize the Islamicization of Western society. Like Abdel Rahman's theory, under which violent jihad proceeds on two tracks, Sheikh Qaradawi has a plan for Islamicizing Western societies on a macro level while the micro-work of gradual sharia implementation proceeds. That plan is the establishment of autonomous Muslim enclaves, parallel societies adherent to sharia law. It is a gambit analysts have aptly labeled "voluntary apartheid."

That it is a Trojan-horse cannot be seriously doubted. Qaradawi is candid: "Were we to convince Western leaders and decision-makers of our right to live according to our faith--ideologically, legislatively, and ethically--without imposing our views or inflicting harm upon them, we would have traversed an immense barrier in our quest for an Islamic state." Notice, again, the mindset: without inflicting harm upon them. One might think it difficult to fathom anything more harmful to individual liberty than the establishment of an Islamic state. Yet, that's not how we think. Qaradawi adroitly reads the West's temperament: We're tunnel-focused on terrorism, concerned only about forcible damage to life, limb, and property. As long as we're told there will be no harm he rightly figures we'll assume he means no terrorism. If terrorism is not in the equation,we go back to sleep--amenable to all manner of accommodation, even to sowing the seeds of our own destruction at the behest of people who tell us, flat-out, that their goal is conquest. In our suicidal dispostion, "democracy" somehow requires this of us.

The enclave strategy has already been implemented to great effect in Europe. Qaradawi made it sound unthreatening enough. In early 2005, at a session of his European Council for Fatwa and Research, he encouraged the continent's sizable Muslim population--which is still a minority, for now--to integrate into European society. There was just one caveat: the integration must be done "without violating the rules of sharia." There is only one way such an integration can happen on Qaradawi's terms: Muslims must capitalize on their unity and growing strength to pressure Europe into adopting sharia, bit by bit.

Obviously, the strategy is working. The eminent Bernard Lewis stunned Western readers when he predicted that Europe will be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century, but, judging from the whirlwind pace of things, he may be several decades behind the curve. Already, the landscape in Europe, as well as Australia, is dotted by "no-go" zones: Muslim neighborhoods where police no longer patrol, sovereignty having been effectively surrendered to the local imams, shura councils, and Muslim gangs. In France, for example, police estimate that some eight million people (12 percent of the population--and climbing) live in the country's 751 zones urbaines sensibles, sensitive urban areas.

And when French police do make arrests, an ever greater percentage of the offenders is Islamic, with Muslims now constituting 60 percent of the national prison population. In 2005, an effort to arrest two Muslim teenagers, who electrocuted themselves trying to hide in a power station, touched off three weeks of mass rioting, arson, and vandalism. Over 8000 cars were torched and nearly 3000 people arrested. Rioting has broken out sporadically ever since. Press coverage, though, is muted: The authorities have encouraged the media to suppress the story for fear of reigniting the rampages of what journalists euphemestically call "youths" of "South Asian" heritage.

The United Kingdom may be in even greater crisis. There, the Islamic ascendancy dovetails with the Labour government's transnational progressivism in a campaign against cultural Britishness. As the columnist Leo McKinstry observes: "England is in the middle of a profoundly disturbing social experiment. For the first time in a mature democracy, a Government is waging a campaign of aggressive discrimination against its indigenous population." Sharia has become a key element of that campaign.

Exploiting the feature of British law that permits parties, on consent, to bring their legal disputes to "voluntary arbitration tribunals" rather than law courts, a Muslim commercial-law barrister named Faisal Aqtab Siddiqi shrewdly established a sharia court as the "Muslim Arbitration Council." Quipping that "these are early days," the brilliant writer John O'Sullivan notes tht the British sharia court "so far only handles civil cases such as divorces and inheritance disputes, since British society isn't ready for such innovations as public floggings and hand-choppings."

Still, the present caseload is plenty alarming. English police officers are enforcing sharia judgments on domestic violence complaints--meaning there have been instances of investigations dropped after the Islamic authority sides with accused husbands, in deference to the Koranic endorsement of spousal abuse. There has also been at least one decision awarding an estate's male heirs twice as much as the female heir.

And by granting extra welfare benefits to men with multiple families, England, like much of Europe, is giving tacit approval to Islamic polygamy (Muslim men may marry up to four women; women, you'll no doubt be stunned to hear, are restricted to one husband). Similarly, thanks to Muslim activists and feckless bureaucrats, the British welfare state--honoring a decree from the European Court of Human Rights--forces taxpayers to subsidize suspected foreign terrorists whom the government seeks to monitor under anti-terror laws but cannot deport because of Britain's alien-coddling immigration laws.

Simultaneously, "hate speech" laws have been interpreted by police and bureaucrats in Britain's immigrant Muslim hubs to bar such exhibitions of "racism" as the raising of the Union Jack (or wearing clothes that bear its likeness)--a stigma also being attached to national flags in the Netherlands, Sweden, France, and other European countries. Meanwhile, writing in the Brussels Journal, the commentator Fjordman recounts instances of Britons being banned from swimming at a popular sports club in London during "Muslim men only" sessions; assaults on Christian clerics in London; and a police threat to Christian preachers in Birmingham: Desist handing out gospel leaflets lest you be arrested for committing a "hate crime"--or, worse, beaten by local Muslims without intervention by the police (after all, you've been warned).

Then there is the matter of violent crime, particularly rape, by Muslim immigrants. Rape, the unspoken epidemic of Western Europe, is as much and more about psychological domination as it is about physical gratification. As a violent jihadist tactic, it has long been an infamous weapon in the Sudanese Islamist regime's genocidal arsenal, used first against Christians and Animists in the south in the early Nineties and, more recently, in western Sudan against the Muslims of Darfur, whom Islamists judge to be insufficiently Islamic. Now, with the tide of immigration, jihad by rape has been imported to Europe, where indignation by the politically correct press is predictably reserved not for the perpetrators but for the few journalists willing to report on it.

Consistent with Sheikh Qaradawi's aforementioned view that the rape victim is to blame for her plight if she has failed to adhere to fundamentalist protocols for women's attire, Shahid Mehdi, a top Islamic cleric in Denmark, has explained that women who fail to don a headscarf are asking to be raped (an admonition also given voice by Sheik Faiz Mohammed, a prominent Lebanese cleric, during a lecture he delivered in Australia). Not surprisingly given such encouragement, Fjordman painstakingly documents that it has become a commonplace for young Muslim men to participate in sexual assaults and absolve themselves from culpability. As a psychologist working in the prison system, the incomparable Theodore Dalrymple witnessed the six-fold spike in Britain's Muslim inmate population between 1990 and 2005. He bluntly notes that "thanks to their cultural inheritance, [the Muslims'] abuse of women is systematic rather than unsystematic as it is with" white and black inmates. Robert Spencer elaborates:

The Islamic legal manual Umdat al-Salik, which carries the endorsement of Al-Azhar University, the most respected authority in Sunni Islam, stipulates: "When a child or a woman is taken captive, they become slaves by the fact of capture, and the woman's previous marriage is immediately annulled." Why? So that they are free to become the concubines of their captors. The Qur'an permits Muslim men to have intercourse with their wives and their slave girls: "Forbidden to you are...married women, except those whom you own as slaves" (sura 4:23-24).

As atrocious as rape is on its own, the Sudanese experience demonstrates that it is even more harrowing as a component in a broader intimidation campaign. Writing in Frontpage Magazine, the former Australian army officer Sharon Lapkin has recounted (my italics):

Retired Australian detective Tim Priest warned in 2004 that the Lebanese gangs, which emerged in Sydney in the 1990s--when the police were asleep--had morphed out of control. "The Lebanese groups," he said, "were ruthless, extremely violent, and they intimidated not only innocent witnesses, but even the police that attempted to arrest them" Priest describes how in 2001, in a Muslim dominated area of Sydney two policement stopped a car containing three well-known Middle Eastern men to search for stolen property. As the police carried out their search they were physcially threatened and the three men claimed they were going to track them down, kill them and then rape their girlfriends..... As the Sydney police called for backup the three men used their mobile phones to call their associates, and within minutes, 20 Middle Eastern men arrived on the scene. They punched and pushed the police and damaged state vehicles. The police retreated and the gang followed them to the police station where they intimidated staff, damaged property and held the police station hostage. Eventually the gang left, the police licked their wounds, and not one of them took action against the Middle Eastern men. Priest claims, "In the minds of the local population, the police are cowards and the message was, 'Lebanese [Muslim gangs] rule the streets.'"

The situation, Lapkin learned, was the same in Malmo, Sweden's third largest city, where police concede that they are no longer in control. Muslim immigrant gangs rule the streets. To make their dominion emphatic, even ambulance personnel are routinely attacked and abused. They won't go into many neighborhoods without police protection, and the police, in turn, will not enter without additional back-up.

Islamists are taking the measure of the West and finding it to be a shallow, self-loathing husk.

[snip]

Sharia creep, moreover, does not stop at the Atlantic's eastern shores--far from it. Witness, for example, a 2005 proposal by Ontario's former attorney general to incorporate sharia in the Canadian legal code. Like emerging British sharia, the scheme would have approved the use of Muslim law to settle such domestic relations matters as divorce and child custody involving the province's estimated 600, 000 Muslims.

[snip]

As for the American dawa front, Zeyno Baran offers this assessment:

Qaradawi...has repeatedly advised Muslims living in the West to create their own "Muslim ghettos" to avoid cultural assimilation. If American Muslims start forming parallel societies, it will be much easier for the Ikhwan to push for the introduction of sharia in these societies. While this may seem far-fetched, it cannot be so easily dismissed given how close the Islamists came to introducing sharia for Canadian Muslims. And since most of the American Muslim organizations are in the hands of Islamists, who enjoy seemingly unlimited money, media attention, and political influence, few non-Islamists would be able to fight back.

Now, again, knowing that part of the deliberate strategy of quite a large hunk of Dar al Islam is emigrate to Western nations, form enclaves, demand (or just unilaterally implement) parts of sharia law, gradually expand the enclaves and adherence to sharia, and that the deliberate use of fear, intimidation, and violence are not off the table, just how far are you willing to go in your quest for cultural tolerance? Are you willing to extend tolerance to an ideology that demands the extinction of yours?