The Irish Independent on Islam and Islamic Immigration

Link courtesy of Jihad Watch:

...how many Muslim immigrants can any society take, and yet retain the qualities that made it attractive to Muslims in the first place?...

And of course, if the immigrants then conform with local norms -- as British Hindus and Sikhs have usually done -- then there is usually no long-term problem. The result is a cultural enrichment and fusion in which everyone gains.

This is simply not true of Muslim immigration. Not merely is there not a single stable, prosperous Muslim democracy in the world, free of terrorism and fundamentalism, there is no society that has received large numbers of Muslims that has not soon been confronted by an Islamic defiance of existing societal norms. This defiance can be cultural, in which dissident dress code is sought as a religious right; or educational, in which Muslims are raised within their own autonomous school system; or legal, with a demand for Sharia law; or insurrectionary, in which local Muslims opt for terrorist jihad against the state which admitted them.

No European country -- not one -- that has admitted large numbers of Muslims has been spared any of these outcomes.

No European country -- not one -- that has admitted Hindus has had to face any comparable problem.

THE EU's response has been to ignore what it finds uncongenial to talk about, as meanwhile dogmatic "multiculturalists" silence sceptics with the perverse gagging laws that have arisen in every European country.

These make it almost impossible for Europeans to defend European values without being called "racist" or an "Islamophobe".

Diana West on the Value of Wikileaks

I am not happy about the material that was leaked to Julian Assange. I am no legal scholar and am not prepared to offer an opinion as to whether the actions of those involved amount to espionage. I am not even prepared to offer a firm opinion about the nature of the damage that was done to this country by these leaks. I have read more than one opinion from conservative authors, some holding that the leaks fatally compromise other countries' confidence in our ability to keep secrets, others suggesting that the leaks demonstrate the folly of having homosexuals in the military, others saying that the leaks reveal only what everybody probably already knew or suspected anyway.

Diana West, delightfully independent and incisive thinker that she is, offers some of the most interesting commentary, of which I provide a small sample:

One running theme that emerges from the leaked cables is that the U.S. government consistently obscures the identity of the nation's foes, for example, depicting the hostile peoples of Saudi Arabia and the Gulf States as "allies." It's not that such hostility is a secret, or even constitutes news. But the cables reveal that our diplomats actually recognize that these countries form the financial engine that drives global jihad, or, as they mincingly prefer to call it, "terrorism." But they, with the rest of the government, keep the American people officially in the dark

[snip]

Whether such information was originally "classified," the body politic should be electrified by the fact, as revealed by the leaked cables, that nations from Pakistan to Afghanistan to Saudi Arabia are regularly discussed as black holes of infinite corruption into which American money gushes, either through foreign aid or oil revenue, and unstaunched and unstaunchable sources of terror or terror-financing. If this were to get out -- and guess what, it did -- the foreign policy of at least the past two administrations, Democrat and Republican alike, would be unmasked as a colossal failure.

Now, again, for those who wonder: I am not at all opposed to fighting terrorism. My main concerns have been that we ought, before fighting wars, to declare them in the constitutionally prescribed fashion, and that we not try fighting terrorism by trying to change a centuries-old culture to which millions upon millions of people are devoted. It is not at all realistic to suppose that we will secure freedom from terrorism by turning nations and peoples that have never shown any interest in government as the protector of the God-given rights of all men--believer and non-believer alike--into American-style representative republics. That is a fool's errand. Like it or not, American-style representative government is based squarely on a Judeo-Christian worldview, and its originators said repeatedly that it would not work without a people devoted to such a view (a state that we are too close to achieving, in my view). There is not the proverbial snowball's chance that it is going to work in Dar al Islam, but making it work there is the basis of much of our foreign policy.

This is Not Going to Stop Islamic Terrorism

Ordinarily, I dislike quoting whole blogposts, but this one, from Diana West, is pretty much crying out for it. Fear not, it's short. Emphasis in the original:

Marine Sgt. Michael Brattole has been evacuated from Afghanistan to be treated in a US military hospital for extensive wounds suffered when a fragmentation grenade, which disperses "notched wire and ball bearings," ripped through his chest while he was leading a patrol earlier this month. He has already had open heart surgery "to remove shrapnel."

What was Brattole, 22, doing when he was so grievously wounded? Military officials aren't saying much, but a photographer who had been embedded with the Marine's unit last month made his overall mission pretty clear to the NJ.com. Brattole and his men had been ordered to find and domesticate a herd of unicorns.

In Afghanistan, Brattole led troops on patrol in Marjah in Helmand Province and tried to win the hearts and minds of the Afghan people, according to Cali Bagby, a journalist who was embedded last month with Brattole’s unit, 2nd Battalion, 6th Marine Regiment.

"There’s a lot of mud buildings spread out, but it’s extremely impoverished. A lot of areas are just desert," Bagby said. "It’s a very depressing landscape, and they’re trying to get the local people to stand up (to the Taliban)."

Bagby recalled Brattole’s regiment enduring temperatures of 120 degrees in the summer and 100 degrees as late as September.

On one mission, the soldiers tried to find a tribal elder to offer their support. They walked all day and climbed walls each carrying 90 pounds of gear, but couldn’t find the man.

Bold type isn't enough to draw attention to this lunacy -- COIN lunacy. Let's try that again:

On one mission, the soldiers tried to find a tribal elder to offer their support. They walked all day and climbed walls each carrying 90 pounds of gear, but couldn’t find the man.

My dream Congressional House Armed Services Committee hearing: I want to know who conceived of this find-a-unicorn program, who ordered the mission, whether anyone, anyone at all, expressed any doubt whatsoever that such a man existed, or if he existed was worth finding because the whole hearts-and-minds racket was nothing but a utopian mirage, not a battle plan, and whether this particular theoretical heart and mind out there was worth potentially losing one of our own.

The news report continued:

The mission could be described by the same word that Brattole’s family uses for him: tough.

Brattole is tough. This mission is insane. Come home, America.

Now, listen, before some of you on the Left decide that I've become anti-war-on-terror and some of you on the Right decide that I've gone soft on terrorism:

That's horsecrap. Much of Dar al Islam is making war on us, and we need to fight back. I have never had any objection to that.

Tear up Afghanistan from end to end because they wouldn't turn over Bin Laden? No problem on my end!

Tear up Iraq from end to end if you have credible information that Saddam Hussein has WMDs and is prepared to fork them over to terrorists for use against the US? (Yes, I know: all I'm going to say about it is that everyone I heard, including the ranking Democrats, had been saying precisely that about Iraq and Hussein for quite a while before Bush took action.) No problem on my end!

All I asked for in either event was that Congress do its job and declare war before doing either.

What I have objected to--objected to from the beginning of our sojourn in Iraq--is making war without a declaration of war--no, "authorizations to use force" do not count, the Constitution knows nothing of such an animal--and trying to make Islamic societies which, historically, top to bottom, do not care for or about such Western niceties as inalienable rights and representative government into Western-style representative republics. It won't work. It never had a chance. It was doomed from the start. If your approach to stopping Islamic terrorism is contingent on winning Islamists over to our way of thinking, you might as well bring the troops home and let them secure our borders.

The Truth About that Snide Little "Coexist" Sticker

That sticker has annoyed me from the first moment I saw it. This explains why.

You can, of course, click on it for a larger image. Found it on Jihad Watch.

Muslim "Tolerance"

This apparently happened in Minnesota, rapidly becoming home to large numbers of Muslims. From The Grand Jihad:

...what happened to an Owatonna High School senior who, in an assignment to write a class paper, chose the topic "Somalian Privileges," complaining that the Muslim students were not required to adhere to various school rules. He and his mother were promptly summoned to the school and advised that he would be suspended, officially for "language and inappropriate comments," but unofficially because school officials feared he would be attacked. After a few days that officials hoped would be a "cooling off period," the boy returned to school...and was mauled by a gang that grew to somewhere between twenty and forty Somali students. He had to be hospitalized for head injuries.

Now, stop. I already know what you are going to say. "Most Muslims aren't like that." Well, let's say that is true. Let's say that in that high school, there were a couple of hundred Muslims and most of them didn't have anything to do with that attack.

That still left "only" twenty to forty Somali students carrying out that attack.

Are you beginning to see the problem here? That it's not necessarily all that relevant that most Muslims aren't like that?

The Grand Jihad on "Blasphemy"

Sharia makes blasphemy a capital offense. It considers blasphemy to be any form of expression that casts Islam and its prophet in a poor light. Islamists refer to this concept as "defamation," and their apologists follow the script. But the equivalence is absurd. Defamation is slander: harming the reputation by the publication of things that are untrue. It is not defamation to call attention to the true parts of a doctrine that believers are embarrassed by or on which they would, for strategic reasons, prefer that you didn't focus. Islamists don't see, or at least won't acknowledge, this distinction because they see Islam as the one true religion, and there fore anything said against it must, by definition, be false...and punishable by death. In fact, in a recent case in Afghanistan, now under a new, U.S.-supported constitution that installed sharia as part of the fundamental law, merely expressing criticism of the crime of "insulting Islam" was itself deemed an offense against Islam by the court.

You know, one of the quickest ways to get labeled a "bigot" is to say perfectly true and applicable things about Islam--or to confess that you think it's reasonable to be apprehensive about some Muslims under certain circumstances. Just ask Juan Williams.

Andrew McCarthy on Grasping the Obvious

Free democratic systems, moreover, are based on notions of liberty, private property, and equality. In stark contrast, many Islamic traditions reject freedom of conscience, freedom to make law that countermands sharia, economic freedom, equality for Muslims and non-Muslims, and equality for men and women, to name just a few key divergences. But even if none of this were so, mightn't Occam's razor have reared its head by now? After fourteen centuries, there is no secular democratic tradition in Islamic society. Given that secular democracy is the best guarantor of liberty and prosperity, is it not self-evident that some precinct of the umma would have adopted it by now, without any help from us, if Islamic society were innately receptive?

This hints at my number one complaint about how we are conducting our "war on terror": we persist in this deranged idea that we can successfully convert nations into Western-style representative republics, when they have no historical interest in any such thing, when, in fact, their dominant belief-system strongly militates against such a conversion. It is a fool's errand.

There's Your Religion of Peace

Warning: this is truly bad.
Via Jihad Watch.

Yes, it's pretty sick. The whole religion is pretty sick.

Oh, I know what you're going to say, some of you. "MOTW, those are the extremists."

And all I have to say is:

a) It is perfectly consistent with Muhammad's own life and example, and

b) Those "extremists" appear to be running whole countries, or close to it. Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Yemen--whole countries given over to fairly stringent interpretations of sharia. How many millions of people have to embrace an Islam with strong historical precedent and ample support from Islam's scriptures before you concede that it isn't really "extreme"?

Oh--you were wondering, "What was the woman's 'crime'?" Apparently, she was seen out with a man.

Michael Medved on Islam and Muslims

Not much to add to this. Anything in bold reflects my emphasis.

The real question [that]...should confront the nearly 40% of Americans who say they feel positively impressed by Islam and its influence.

What aspect of Muslim teaching and achievement most inspires such respondents? The daily reports of suicidal violence from every corner of the globe, with fellow-Muslims (invariably) as the primary victims? Or the well-known association of Islamic piety with open-hearted respect for the rights of women, homosexuals and infidels? Or is it the sterling record of economic progress, cutting age technology and social justice achieved by precisely those societies (like Saudi Arabia, Iran or Afghanistan) that take Shariah law most seriously? Or would Islam’s American admirers cite the record of Muslim charities in the U.S., the most prominent of which (remember the Holy Land Foundation?) have been shut down by the government for their lavish support of murderous terrorist groups like Hamas?

[snip]

The spiritual leader of the proposed Islamic Cultural Center near Ground Zero insists that the true problem is extremism, not Islam itself. “The real battlefront today is not between Muslims and non-Muslims,” declared Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf to the Council on Foreign Relations, “but between moderates of all faith traditions against the extremists of all faith traditions.”

This ignores the huge differences --both quantitative (Islamic radicals are vastly more numerous) and qualitative (Muslim fanatics endorse uniquely murderous rhetoric and deeds) – between extremists in one faith tradition and all others.

A Christian fundamentalist may talk about burning Korans; Muslim crazies regularly burn buildings- and people. Even after Pastor Terry Jones called off his idiotic barbeque of the Islamic holy book, Muslims reacted with deadly riots in Kashmir that killed 16 and wounded sixty, while burning several schools and other government buildings.

Some Americans may dislike the style of worship in Pentecostal or Catholic churches, but the faithful (no matter how tackily dressed) never surge out of their sanctuaries on Sundays with fury and blood-lust, looking for non-believers to stone and property to destroy. Every Friday, however, somewhere in the vast Muslim world, some congregations of the devout react to their uplifting prayer services by going directly from their mosques to rousing orgies of rage and violence.

This observation isn’t an expression of bigotry; it’s a factual product of reading the newspaper, and regularly monitoring international news. The lame-brained insistence that all faith traditions deserve equal respect (or equal condemnation) doesn’t demonstrate tolerance or broad-mindedness; it expresses, rather, a refusal to take any religion seriously enough for honest evaluation of its virtues and flaws.

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?

The Muslim Stats

Since I know you want to know, here are some stats. From Andrew C. McCarthy's book, The Grand Jihad:

Islam's apologist legions counter-factually assure you that Muslims overwhelmingly reject terror. They intimate that violence is the only issue and that nothing "radical" is afoot as long as terrorism is not in the mix. Abdur-rahman Wahid, a globally renowned Muslim moderate whom we'll discuss momentarily, estimates--without offering any supporting data--that radicalism, or what he calls the "virulent ideology," holds sway over only 10 to 15 percent of Muslims. He cheerily posits that the remaining "85% to 90%" is comprised of the "traditional and sufi leadership and masses, who are not yet radicalized" (and notice the word yet, which tells you everything you need to know about which way even he knows the wind is blowing). Even if he were right about the comparatively paltry "radical" population, we'd still be talking about nearly 200 million people. But the problem is that Wahid is not right. As bracing as that huge number may be, he is low-balling. The actual numbers are closer to the opposite of the lopsided preponderance of ur-tolerant moderates he portrays.

In 2007, the University of Maryland joined with the pollster World Public Opinion to survey Islamic views. The poll included Muslims from the Middle East and North Africa to Southeast Asia, Arab and non-Arab. The results were jarring. Nearly two-thirds, 65.5 percent, said they would endorse the requirement of "a strict application of sharia law in every Islamic country." In fact, they said they would like to see all Muslim countries unified under a single caliphate, a position shared even by half of Indonesian Muslims. As we shall see, Islam in Indonesia is thought, with justification, to be among the moderate brands on the planet. Yet even there fundamentalism is on the rise, particularly in Aceh, where sharia rules and where the provincial parliament last year enacted the time-honored penalty of stoning to death for adultery. As the intrepid writer Sadanand Dhume observed, homosexuals and those who engage in premarital sex "drew a lighter rebuke...100 strokes of a rattan cane."

The 2007 poll figures match up with what related global polling suggests. In 2008, for example, 40 percent of British Muslims (i.e., close to a million people, including many British-born converts to Islam) favored the implementation of sharia in Britain--with 32 percent holding that killing in the name of religion is at least sometimes justifiable, 40 percent favoring a prohibition against mingling between the sexes, and 33 percent endorsing a global Islamic caliphate. In Pakistan, a plenary Muslim country of 175 million people, four in five favor strict enforcement of sharia (over half "strongly" so). Not surprisingly, in a 2007 poll, Pakistanis by a five-to-one margin preferred Osama bin Laden (at 46 percent approval) to then-President George W. Bush (9 percent)--bin Laden also easily topped Pakistan's then president Pervez Musharraf (38 percent).

Now, really: just how comfortable are you really with large, concentrated numbers of Muslims--say, in Detroit--when you know that probably about a third of them think that "killing in the name of religion is at least sometimes justifiable?" I mean, really, let's just suppose that the situation is no more complex than hinted here, and that two-thirds of Muslims--that would be the perpetually-invoked "most Muslims," wouldn't it?--do not agree with that statement. Let's say that it's just forty percent of Muslims who want to see their country adopt Sharia law, and sixty percent don't.

That still leaves a darn lot of Muslim "extremists" to deal with, doesn't it?

Just how "extreme" is a point of view that claims a third or more of its target population? That is the dominant belief system of whole countries? With numbers like that, isn't it part of mainstream Islam?

From The Grand Jihad

This is from Andrew C. McCarthy's The Grand Jihad. Emphasis is mine:

In 1979, Smadar Kaiser, her husband Danny, and their two small daughters, four-year-old Einat and two-year-old Yael, were awakened in their northern Israel apartment at midnight by gunfire and exploding grenades. A team of terrorists sent by Abu Abbas's Palestine Liberation Front was in the neighborhood. While a trembling Smadar hid with Yael in the dark, suffocating crawl space, the terrorists grabbed Danny and Einat and marched them down to a nearby beach. There, one of the four shot Danny in front of his daughter so that his death would be the last sight she'd ever see. Then the ruthless ringleader, Lebanese-born Samir Kuntar, bashed in the four-year-old's skull against a rock with the butt of his rifle. Hours later, upon finally being "rescued" from the crawl space, two-year-old Yael, too, was dead--accidentally smothered by her petrified mother in the effort to keep her quiet as the terrorists searched for more Jews to kill.

The Israelis captured Kuntar, who was sentenced to life in prison. For years, however, Palestinian leaders and masses agitated for his release, lionizing this monster as a "brave leader" and "model warrior." In 2007, the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert finally capitulated, exchanging Kuntar and other imprisoned terrorists for the remains of two deceased Israeli soldiers. Kuntar was welcomed to the West Bank as a conquering hero. The Palestinian Authority granted him and another released terrorist honorary citizenship "as an act of dedication to their struggle and their heroic suffering in the occupation's prisons."

You know, if you just put Jihad Watch in your Google Reader list, you know that this is not as unusual as some people would have you think. The quantity of material flowing through Jihad Watch is almost mind-numbing. There is no way I can find time to read it all. The headlines--all about Muslims all over the world up to no good, the overwhelming majority of the material being drawn from legitimate news accounts--change with upsetting regularity. There is absolutely no way anyone who bothers to do even a little reading on this subject can ignore the plain and obvious facts that Muslims who take the Qu'ran and the hadiths at face value are, at the least, supportive of violence against non-Muslims, and that they are on the increase.

Paying Attention to Geert Wilders' Trial?

Of course you're not. Hardly anyone in the United States is, despite its momentous nature.

Wilders, of course, is on trial in the Netherlands for saying perfectly true and applicable things about Islam. This happens to be against Dutch law. Diana West sums it up for you, emphasis mine:

...Dutch prosecutors announced in January 2009 that Wilders would go to trial for "insulting" Muslims and "inciting" hatred against them...

What we know now we knew then: that this trial presented a watershed moment. Wilders, leader of a growing democratic movement to save his Western nation from Islamization, risks one year in prison for speaking out about the facts and consequences of Islamization. Such speech is prohibited not by the Western tradition of free speech Wilders upholds, but rather by the Islamic laws against free speech that he rejects. Wilders' plight demonstrates the extent to which the West has already been Islamized.

"It is irrelevant whether Wilder's witnesses might prove Wilders' observations to be correct," the public prosecutor stated back at the beginning. "What's relevant is that his observations are illegal." Since when are observations "illegal"? Under communist dictatorships is one answer. Under Sharia is another.

[snip]

Topping the OIC wish list is its effort to criminalize criticism of Islam in the non-Muslim world. And this is what makes the Wilders case is so significant. It's one thing if Islamic street thugs mount assassination attempts in Western nations against violators of Islamic law (i.e., elderly Danish cartoonists), or Muslim ambassadors to Western nations lobby them to punish such violations (the free press), or OIC representatives introduce similar Sharia resolutions at the United Nations. It would be something else again if a Western government were itself to convict a democratically elected leader for violating the Sharia ban on criticizing Islam. That's not war anymore; that's conquest.

Note carefully the italicized and bolded statement from the Dutch prosecutor: the fact that what Wilders said is true is no defense!

Now, let me draw this a little tighter for you: we are talking about the Netherlands, that land famous for "tolerance" so great that its "red-light" districts are famous the world over, so great that it legalized so-called "homosexual marriage," so great that possession of small amounts of certain recreational drugs is a de facto legality. This oh-so-"tolerant" country has put a man on trial, and is threatening to send him to jail for a year, for the "crime" of saying perfectly true things about Islam.

Now, let me ask you this: twenty years ago, when there weren't quite so many Muslims in the Netherlands, if someone had said to the Dutch, "Creeping sharia is a threat; one day, you won't even be able to openly voice your opinion about Islam without threat of fine or imprisonment. Too many Muslims in our country will prove to be a grave threat to such basic freedoms as freedom of speech," what do you think the Dutch would have said?

Maybe about the same thing they're saying in the United States now? That saying such things is bigotry and xenophobia? That most Muslims "aren't like that?" That such things constitute hate speech?

A Hindu Talks about How Hindus Have Experienced "The Religion of Peace"

These are the words of Satya Dosapati of Hindu Human Rights Watch, as quoted by Robert Spencer:

Let me tell you what happened to Hindus in India. It would be a grim reminder to all of us to what can happen if we are not vigilant. When Columbus set sail to distant land, the land he was looking for was India. India, like today's America, was very open and tolerant society, scientifically and materially advanced, and held 25% of world's GDP just until few centuries ago. India at that time included today's Pakistan, Bangladesh and Afghanistan. But what happened to the great society was they gave into pacifism and liberalism. Hindu Kings were unprepared for the brutal violence of Islamic invaders from the 1100's. Hindu Kings were never prepared for the deception, hate and brutality in war and the senseless murder of innocent citizens and the rape of women that caused a holocaust of 80 million Hindus. They destroyed hundreds of thousands of magnificent temples and built symbols of conquest. They made sure the worshipped statues of the Hindu temples were placed under the steps of Mosques as the ultimate insult to infidels and their religion. Taj Mahal, you know today, is a Hindu Palace temple. According to Arab's own accounts, they talked with pride that they killed the Hindu infidels to such extent that they filled their rivers with blood by following the word of Allah. They even have a mountain named "Hindu Khush" near Afghanistan, commemorating the slaughter of 100,000 Hindus on just one day where they slit their throats and left them to die in the 1300's.

Just recently, Mahatma Gandhi's pacifism and liberalism resulted in the slaughter of millions of Hindus and in just 60 years a Muslim-majority country, Pakistan, literally wiped out 25% of its Hindu/Sikh population by kidnapping women and girls, raping the women and murdering the infidels and forcing conversions or evicting them. Actually, most of it was done in matter of few months. A Muslim-majority country, Bangladesh's genocide of Hindus caused their population decrease from 30% to less than 10% today, and the Islamic Government instituted laws that they have the right to take away infidel land any time.

What is happening in Hindu majority India? Muslims percentage increased from 7% to 15%. In just last few years, the number of terror deaths and terror incidents in India is next to Iraq. What happened on 9/11 was repeated on 26/11 in Mumbai. In India there was only one state where Muslims were a majority, that is Kashmir. Overnight 18 years ago, they drove away 350,000 Hindus under threat of violence and rape of women, they are still living as refugees in their own country in squalid camps. Now hear this. Just in the last 48 hours, as part of Ramadan celebrations, Muslims in the north eastern state of India, in the state of West Bengal, where Muslims are in larger percentage, have announced that they will rape every Hindu woman and girl, and started rampaging Hindu shops and homes. Indian Government has to call in the Army to control the situation.

This is the story we want to tell you millions of times, so that America as well as Europe never face the same situation by their preoccupation with liberalism. We do not want 100 years down the road somewhere in the world someone to talk about what happened to this great country. What is happening in the north eastern state of India today can very well happen in Michigan as the percentage of Muslims increase. What happened in Kashmir and various parts of India as Muslims increased in numbers will happen in many parts of this country. We are seeing this in the towns of Europe already. Consider this. Few hundred years ago until Islam invaded, Pakistan and Afghansithan were filled with Buddhists who would rather die than kill even a small animal. Today their descendants are performing barbaric acts under the name of Taliban and perpetrated the brutal acts on 9/11 against our country and killed thousands of innocent citizens. The once peaceful lands are all terrorist countries.

However, I do not blame Muslims. It is what the ideology of hate will do to a human being. Just look at Saudi Arabia where Koran is the constitution. They teach their little children from Koran that Christians and Jews are pigs, Hindus are worse than animals, infidels are equivalent to urine, feces, dead body. They produced 15 of the 17 well educated terrorists who committed 9/11. You cannot put a church, synagogue or temple, but they are spending billions of dollars building Mosques in our country and teaching intolerance and hate to thousands of Muslim children in our country. The situation is so bad that today's Jihadis are not from Pakistan, but from the Saudi funded mosques in our own country.

Now, I know you know that Hindus, unlike Christians, are never intolerant bigots, so I expect that you will take this guy's words on this subject a little more seriously than you take mine...

And Now, It's Dan Phillips' Turn

He saith:

Qu'ran, Quran, Koran, however you spell it: there is a church in New York Florida that plans to burn Qu'rans on September 11, to commemorate the day Muslim terrorists killed over 3000 Americans in a literally diabolically clever attack targeting non-combatants who were going about their daily lives.

Is it a good idea?

Candidly, part of me really likes it, really wants to give a fist-bump at this display of in-your-face defiance. Muslim extremists — which is closer to a tautology than one wishes — threaten and target anyone who dares speak out against any aspect of their cult, including cartoonists and writers. Here's a church saying, "Oh yeah? Take this!" I like it.

But by the time one celebrates about his fourth or fifth birthday, he is expected to have begun to develop the ability to think about impulses before acting on them. In this case, a moment's thought tells me it's a very bad idea.

If you want to know why he thinks it's a bad idea, read the rest of the post. I do agree with him (as does the inimitable Kat)--yet, as I have implied (or said outright) earlier, I frankly have a very hard time working up a whole bunch of sympathy for all these offended Muslims.

Shoot, you can't say diddly without offending Muslims. After a while, you just come to the conclusion that it's all manufactured outrage designed to make you more malleable as regards their never-ceasing demands for special privileges, special laws, etc. Either that, or you just get tired of them acting like little kids--violent little kids--and want to say, "Will you just honkin' grow up?"

Andrew McCarthy on "Moderate Islam"

He saith:

Americans have had our fill.

[snip]

We look around us and we see our country unrivaled by anything in the history of human tolerance. We see thousands of thriving mosques, permitted to operate freely even though we know for a fact that mosques have been used against us, repeatedly, to urge terrorism, recruit terrorists, raise money for terrorists, store and transfer firearms, and inflame Muslims against America and the West. As Islamists rage against us, we see Islam celebrated in official Washington. As we reach out for the umpty-umpth time, we find Muslim leaders taking what we offer, but always with complaint and never with reciprocation. We're weary, and we don't really care if that means that Time magazine, Michael Bloomberg, Katie Couric, Fareed Zakaria, and the rest think we're bad people -- they think we're bad people, anyway.

So finally we're asking: Where is this "moderate Islam" you've been telling us about? Why would a self-proclaimed bridge-builder insist on something so patently provocative and divisive? How can we be sure that if imam Rauf builds his monument on our graveyard, it won't become what other purportedly "moderate" Islamic centers have become: a cauldron of anti-American vitriol?

It turns out that there are no satisfactory answers. When finally pressed on the taxonomy of moderate Islam, the best our elites can do -- besides shouting "Islamophobia!" -- is debate whether there ever was a "golden age" of Islamic tolerance. They have to confess that the Islamists -- whom they'd like us to see as a handful of "extremists" but who are in truth a mass movement -- are in the ascendancy. It is embarrassingly obvious that while some of us have been working to defeat Islamism in our midst, our elites are of the incorrigibly progressive mindset that counsels accommodating them -- in the delusion that they will be appeased rather than encouraged to become more aggressive. That is precisely the mindset that makes an Islamist think: Maybe now is the time for a $100 million mosque at Ground Zero.

"Moderate Islam" is a dream, not a reality. It is a dream with potential, because there are millions of Muslims who are moderate people, and because there are dedicated Muslims working to transform their faith into something that is institutionally moderate. But they work against great odds. They confront Islamists whose dedication to theocratic principles is deeply and undeniably rooted in Islamic scripture. And they confront American opinion elites who, wittingly or not, serve as the lifeline of the Islamists.

Diana West on Islam and Tolerance

Emphasis, where present, is mine:

It is becoming clear to people, despite the gag of political correctness, that there's a reason "Islam" means "submission." Islam not only seeks to order the spiritual realm inhabited by a Muslim and Allah, it lays out a doctrine to control every believer's behavior (down to the most intimate bodily functions) as well as the public life of the collective. Doctrinally, Islam is thus "doubly totalitarian," in the words of G.H. Bousquet, a leading scholar of Islamic law, in accordance with the body of law known as Shariah. Under Shariah, freedom of conscience and freedom of speech are outlawed with extreme sanction (those who leave Islam fear death to this day), while non-Muslims and women exist as legal inferiors to the Muslim man. Meanwhile, jihad -- holy war to extend Islamic rule -- is a sacred command. And I have the books that prove it.

In other words, this isn't Islam because I say so, but because its sacred, authoritative, mainstream, non-hijacked, untwisted texts say so.

[snip]

The crucial fact is, whether we are brutalized by acts of jihad or confused by acts of dawa (proselytizing), their goal is identical: more Islamic law.

[snip]

Bloomberg types are blind to these things, from the Shariah-spreading efforts of Rauf (noted here last week), to dictates of Shariah that subvert constitutional liberties. So, blindly, they sound platitudes in Islam's defense, plucking emotional chords that resonate with Americans about "liberty," "tolerance" and "religious freedom" on behalf of a belief system that, ultra-ironically, outlaws them all.

[snip]

Indeed, tolerance is doomed if it is extended to the intolerant, something philosopher Karl Popper worked out in the last century. "Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed and tolerance with them. ... We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant."

Pat Buchanan Saith Regarding Islam..

True conservatives are people of the heart who use the weapons of the mind to defend the things of the heart.

Why would Americans be reflexively skeptical and wary of Islam?

We were born a Christian nation, an extension of Christendom. For most of us, it is part of our DNA. And for a thousand years, our ancestors fought a war of civilizations with Islam.

In the name of Islam, Muslim fanatics massacred 3,000 of us. In our media, the names commonly associated with Islam are al-Qaida, Hamas, Hezbollah, Moqtada al-Sadr, Ahmadinejad, Ayatollah Khomeini, Osama bin Laden and the Taliban.

What are sins in Christianity -- adultery and homosexuality -- are capital crimes in Islamic countries. From the Copts in Egypt to the Chaldeans of Iraq, Christians are persecuted and purged in the Middle East. Few remain in the old Christian towns of Jerusalem, Nazareth and Bethlehem. Christian missionaries in Islamic countries risk stonings and beheading. Muslims are attacking Christians in Nigeria, Sudan, the Caucasus, Palestine, Iraq, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia and the Philippines.

Are there scores of thousands of patriotic American Muslims, hundreds of millions of decent, peace-loving Muslims around the world?

Undeniably true.

Yet one would have to be obtuse not to understand that a Western nation that opens its doors to mass migration from the Islamic world is taking a grave risk with its unity and identity.

An apprehension about that is what Burke called the "latent wisdom" of a people.

This is not an argument for war with Islam, but for recognition that "East is East and West is West" and America cannot absorb and assimilate all the creeds of mankind without ceasing to be who we are.

We Have Forgotten How to Fight a War

Well, the Marines remember how, no doubt, but unfortunately, they're not in charge of making policy.

I read Diana West's latest and just cringed.

Soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are not diplomats. They are who you send in when the diplomats fail. Their job, bluntly, is to impose the will of the United States on our enemies by killing people and breaking things. When we are training troops on whether or not they should remove their gloves before shaking hands with some backwoods Afghan police chief, we have left the sphere of rationality.

Look, every time I write along these lines, I just know somebody out there is going to interpret my remarks as meaning that I'm opposed to the War on Terror. I'm not. You can read a bit more of my viewpoint on the subject here.

Some things in life ought to be obvious. The U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war--or to withhold such a declaration. It does not give anyone the power to conduct ongoing conflicts without a declaration of war.

Dadgummit, either declare war or change your dadgum approach to dealing with the problem!

It is stupid to refer to this conflict as a war on "terror." Terror is a tactic employed by an enemy. Who is our enemy in this struggle? Those who adhere to what some dimwittedly refer to as "radical" Islam--though it is nothing but Islam, period, if you take its scriptures and history at face value. That is how you recruit a jihadist, don't you know: you take a "moderate" Muslim and just convince him that the words mean what they say.

Simmer down. I am not for an instant saying that it is possible to exterminate every radicalized Muslim in the world. All I am saying is that you have to have the (insert Sarah Palin's recent euphemism here) to correctly identify the enemy.

Sooner or later we have to give up this insane idea that we can win societies dedicated to a seventh-century madman's deluded visions over to doing things the way we do. If we don't, we will never lift our eyes high enough to see real solutions.

Penn Jillette on How Christians and Muslims React to Criticism

Robert Spencer quotes Penn Jillette, from an interview in Las Vegas Weekly:

Teller and I have been brutal to Christians, and their response shows that they're good ----ing Americans who believe in freedom of speech. We attack them all the time, and we still get letters that say, "We appreciate your passion. Sincerely yours, in Christ." Christians come to our show at the Rio and give us Bibles all the time. They're incredibly kind to us. Sure, there are a couple of them who live in garages, give themselves titles and send out death threats to me and Bill Maher and Trey Parker. But the vast majority are polite, open-minded people, and I respect them for that....

And what, you might wonder, did he have to say about the religion of pieces Islam, since we all know that all religions teach the same basic moral values?

... we haven't tackled Islam because we have families...I think the worst thing you can say about a group in a free society is that you're afraid to talk about it...

And there you have it, folks: two religions that, obviously, teach the same basic moral values, and clearly reacting in the same broad-minded fashion to criticism...

Ah, no, that's not it...

Actually, there's a heckuva difference...

And even atheist Penn Jillette knows it.