by Mark Steyn
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 twenty-first 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.
Chapter Five
The Anything They’ll Believe In
CHURCH VS. STATE
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 Western-promoted 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 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: “Police are investigating allegations that the four suspected July 21 bombers collected more than £500,000 in benefits payments in Britain.”
No-hoper jihadists in their twenties have a quarter-million dollars in welfare cash in their checking accounts. I’m not saying every benefit recipient is a terrorist welfare queen, only that the best hope of reforming bloated European welfare systems is if America declares them a national security threat.
A terrorist wakes up in Baghdad early Monday morning, straps on the old explosives, and toddles off to blow up some infidels at the gate to the Green Zone, dreaming of getting at least a couple of the virgins in before lunch. But the belt jams and U.S. troops arrest him and he’s stuck on a plane to Gitmo and forty-eight hours later he’s whining to his D.C. lawyer about t
he quality of the chicken chasseur and plotting his Supreme Court case. When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments for and against “gay marriage,” there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It’s already practiced de facto if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom’s pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal legal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudo-grievances of both.
For example, Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary “moderation” he’s been knighted by the Queen. Around the time Brokeback Mountain opened, Sir Iqbal, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was “immoral,” “not acceptable,” “spreads disease,” and “damaged the very foundations of society.” A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard’s “community safety unit” which deals with “hate crimes” and “homophobia.”
Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a “barmy doctrine” growing “like a canker” and deeply “homophobic.” In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for “Islamophobia.”
Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia.
As someone who’s called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I can’t help marveling at the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I’d be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. “Homophobia” was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phony-baloney “phobia” was a way of casting opposition to the gay political agenda as a kind of mental illness: don’t worry, you’re not really against same-sex marriage; with a bit of treatment and some medication, you’ll soon be feeling okay.
On the other hand, “Islamophobia” is not phony or even psychological but very literal—if you’re a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam’s appropriation of the gay lobby’s framing of the debate is very artful. It’s the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You’ll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus “Islamophobia”—i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues—they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia—i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind’s invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.
THE NON-VISIBLE MINORITY
Still, as we always say, the “vast majority” of Muslims oppose “extremism.” These are the so-called “moderate Muslims.” One is tempted to update the old joke: a ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there’s Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?
Answer: the radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures.
The “moderate Muslim” is not entirely fictional. But it would be more accurate to call them quiescent Muslims. In the 1930s, there were plenty of “moderate Germans,” and a fat lot of good they did us or them. Today, the “moderate Muslim” is a unique contributor to cultural diversity: unlike all the visible minorities, he’s a non-visible one—or, at any rate, non-audible. But that doesn’t mean we can’t speak up on his behalf. So, for example, EU officials have produced new “guidelines” for discussing the, ah, current unpleasantness. The phrase “Islamic terrorism” is out. Instead, the EU bureaucrats have replaced it with the expression “terrorists who abusively invoke Islam.”
Who’s some white-bread Belgian to say whether Johnny bin Jihad is “abusively” invoking Islam? There seem to be plenty of Muslim scholars and imams who would disagree. We know, because Western politicians and religious leaders tell us so incessantly, that the “vast majority” of Muslims do not support terrorism? Yet how vast is the minority that does? One percent? Ten percent? Here are a couple of examples that suggest it might be rather more. Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar, a sociology professor at Mount Royal College in Calgary, went along to a funeral at the city’s largest mosque and was discombobulated when the man who led the prayers—in Urdu—said, “Oh, God, protect us from the infidels, who pollute us with their vile ways.” Dr. Kanwar said, “How dare you attack my country,” and pointed out to the crowd that he’d known this man for thirty years, most of which time he’d been living on welfare and thus the food on his table came courtesy of the taxes of the hardworking infidels.
As Licia Corbella wrote in the Calgary Sun: “Guess which of the two men is no longer welcome at the Sarcee Trail mosque?”
Final score: Radical Islam 1, Moderate Muslims 0.
Here’s another example: Souleiman Ghali was born in Palestine and, as he put it, raised to hate “Shiites, Christians—and especially Jews.” After emigrating to America, he found himself rethinking these old prejudices and in 1993 helped found a mosque in San Francisco. As Mr. Ghali’s website states: “Our vision is the emergence of an American Muslim identity founded on compassion, respect, dignity, and love.” That’s hard work, especially given the supply of imams. In 2002, Mr. Ghali fired an imam who urged California Muslims to follow the sterling example of Palestinian suicide bombers. Safwat Morsy is Egyptian and speaks barely any English, but he knew enough to sue Mr. Ghali’s mosque for wrongful dismissal and was awarded $400,000.
So far, so typical. But the part of the story that matters is that the firebrand imams had a popular following, and Mr. Morsy’s firing was the final straw. Mr. Ghali was forced off the board and out of any role in the mosque he founded. And, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Safwat Morsy—a man who thinks American Muslims should be waddling around in Semtex belts—is doing a roaring trade: “His mosque is looking to buy a building to accommodate the capacity crowds coming these days for Friday prayers.”
That’s Radical Islam 2, Moderate Muslims 0.
What proportion of mosques is “extreme”? And what proportion of “worshippers” is jihadist? Twenty percent? Two percent? Point-two percent? Nobody knows—because we (and most Western legal systems) see them as analogous to Catholic churches or Congregationalist meetinghouses.
At this point it’s time to throw in another round of “of courses”: of course most Western Muslims aren’t terrorists and of course most have no desire to be terrorists. One gathers anecdotally that they’re secure enough in their Muslim identity to dismiss the fire-breathing imam down the street as a kind of vulgar novelty act for the kids—in the same way that middle-class suburban white parents sigh and roll their eyes when Junior comes home with “Slap Up My Bitch” or “I’m Gonna Shoot That Cop Right After I F—His Ho” or whatever the latest popular vocal ditty is. But, aside from the few brave but marginalized men like Mr. Ghali, one can’t help noticing that the most prominent “moderate Muslims” would seem to be mo
re accurately designated as apostate or ex-Muslims, like the feminist lesbian Canadian Irshad Manji and the California academic Wafa Sultan. It seems likely that the beliefs of Mohammed Atta are closer to the thinking of most Muslims than those of Ms. Manji are.
The pseudonymous apostate Ibn Warraq makes an important distinction: there are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam. Millions of Muslims just want to get on with their lives, and there are—or were—remote corners of the world where, far from Mecca, Muslim practices reached accommodation with local customs. But all of the official schools of Islamic jurisprudence commend sharia and violent jihad. So a “moderate Muslim” can find no formal authority to support his moderation. And to be a “moderate Muslim” publicly means standing up to the leaders of your community, to men like Shaker Elsayed, leader of the Dar al Hijrah, one of America’s largest mosques, who has told his coreligionists in blunt terms: “The call to reform Islam is an alien call.”
