Author: Serge Trifkovic
Publication: FrontPageMagazine.com
Date: December 10, 2002
URL: http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=5011
One in a series of articles adapted
by Robert Locke from Dr. Serge Trifkovic's new book The Sword of the Prophet:
A Politically-Incorrect Guide to Islam.
Our political and intellectual elite
is remarkably inflexible in its secular liberal ideological assumptions.
Having no serious religious faith of its own, its members refuse to take
seriously the faith of others. Instead of pondering the complex problem
of the relationship between the world's great religions - the West and
the rest - they assure us that no religious problem exists.
The most outspoken character witnesses
for the hastily nicknamed "Religion of Peace and Tolerance" were, unsurprisingly,
non-Moslems, Sunday-morning popular entertainers, academicians steeped
in political correctitude, and politicians. Their hasty claims about the
distinction between "real" Islam and its violent aberrations were crudely
ideological. They were based on their simple conviction that all faiths,
having equal legal privileges, must in some sense be equally good, and
"true," and hence capable of celebrating all others in the spirit of tolerance.
Why is the liberal elite so eager
to vindicate Islam? It is a sign of the infinite arrogance of this elite
that it imagines even at this late date that it can use and manipulate
Islam to its own purposes. The rulers of the British Empire, in the days
when more Moslems lived under British rule than under any other government,
were arrogant enough to think they could "manage" Islam and get it to do
things like accept the establishment of Israel. But even they never had
the idea of using Islam as a tool to do their bidding outside itself, and
they never suffered from the delusion that Moslems were really Englishmen
under the skin.
Today, having enlisted militant
Islam in the destruction of the communist threat to its world-wide dominance,
our ruling establishment aspires to use it to erode the reliquiae reliquiarum
of the Christian culture in the Western world, which it despises and would
like to replace with a multicultural globalism that trivializes all cultures
and thus liquidates the possibility of any resistance to a world organized
solely for its profits. The twin spearheads of this attempt to co-opt Islam
as a tool are multiculturalism and mass immigration. It is the dirty little
secret of our present global civilizational conflict that large sections
of our own elite are ambivalent about which side they are on because Islam
is an objective ally in their own struggle for globalism. (Of course, this
marriage of convenience won't work for the globalists in the long run,
but as with all doomed policies, this doesn't stop them from trying in
the short run.)
Let's take immigration first. Leeds
and Leicester have acquired the sight and sounds of Peshawar and Rawalpindi,
Marseilles and Toulon the suburbs of Dakkar or Algiers, Berlin and Stuttgart
a growing slice of Istanbul or Adana. This social experiment - Britain's
Roy Jenkins, a liberal Home Secretary in the mid-sixties, admitted slyly
that his contemporaries "might have considered matters more carefully"
- antedated America's Cold War expedients, but the consequences of the
experiment and the expedient have fused. The assumption all along has been
that the Islamic genie released by Carter National Security Adviser Dr.
Brzezinski's "excellent idea" - enlisting radical Islam to fight the USSR
in Afghanistan - could be controlled. Supposedly, it would be reduced to
yet another humanistic project in self-celebration through its adherents'
immersion in the consumerist subculture and through their children's multicultural
indoctrination by state education. We were going to use Islam to fight
Marxism, then destroy it by means of McDonald's and MTV.
Liberal Christianity, i.e. intellectually-bankrupt
forms of Protestantism like the fast-declining "mainline" protestant denominations
like the Episcopalians, Lutherans and Presbyterians, has collaborated in
the whitewashing of Islam. They have been abetted by post-Vatican-II
Catholics. The World Council of Churches shares the same worldview. It
seeks "dialogue" with Islam "in order to learn from each other and to accept
one another."
How have Western attempts to co-opt
and manipulate Islam fared? Decades of covert and overt support for "moderate"
Islamic movements, countries, and regimes, whenever they were deemed useful
to Western foreign policy objectives-and especially if they have lots of
oil, or prove willing to make peace with Israel, or both-have been an unmitigated
moral and political disaster.
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Turkey,
Pakistan, Morocco, the Gulf states, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Nigeria, Indonesia,
and a few others have become the darlings of U.S. policy, valued as supposed
bulwarks against "fundamentalism" of the Saudi or Iranian variety (Iran
itself having formerly been a member of the favored group.) Operationally,
this means not only overlooking the radical activities of the supposedly
"moderate" Moslem states - for example, Saudi Arabia's and Pakistan's support
for the Taliban regime in Afghanistan and assistance by virtually all Islamic
nations to the thinly disguised radical regime in Sarajevo - but also a
consistent American bias in favor of the Moslem party in virtually every
conflict with a Christian nation.[i]
So we bombed Serbia, a nation that
has never done anything to the US, in support of the Bosnian Moslems. Among
its sorry preconditions of the Bosnian war was the capture of the leadership
of the Moslem people by a group of untypical Islamist bigots: Izetbegovic
was an extremist in any sense of the word; the Chechen leadership were
far worse: unhinged fanatics who forced Russia into a war she was extremely
reluctant to fight. The Kosovo UCK (a.k.a. KLA) were brigands financing
their warfare by drug smuggling and slavery-prostitution rackets whom the
Americans had on their official terrorism list until just a few weeks before
going to war on their behalf.
Appeasement of Saudi Arabia in
particular, and the string of related little despotic sheikhdoms along
its eastern rim, is continuing even in the aftermath of September 11. It
is as detrimental to peace and democracy in all affected regions as it
is detrimental to the long-term security of North America and Europe. It
does nothing to help the Moslem world come out of its state of deep denial
about its responsibility for the worst terrorist outrage of all time, the
denial as irrational as the culture that breeds it.
The beneficiaries of three decades
of Western appeasement have been Osama bin Laden, his ilk, and his co-religionists
all over the world. Conceivers and executors of Brezhinski's "excellent
idea" paved the way for September 11 by failing to grasp Islam's inherent
link with violence and intolerance. The unspoken assumption of the architects
of failed Western policies, that generosity would be rewarded by loyalty,
is mistaken: loyalty to unbelievers is not a Moslem trait. Cynical pragmatism,
however, is - and, as Yohanan Ramati has remarked, "pragmatism prescribes
that when dealing with fools one milks them for all one can get, demoralizes
them until they are incapable of protecting their interests, and then deprives
them of any influence they have left."
Islam might have been made much
less threatening if the West had not conciliated or sponsored its most
threatening exponents. Islam was exposed to a devastating collapse in credibility
within the Arab world itself in the middle of the twentieth century. The
forces of secularism were very strong indeed. But America opposed
them every time because they were socialist, communist, or simply anti-American
nationalist. America gave whole-hearted support to the worst fascist freak-show
in the region: Saudi Arabia. As the economies of real states faltered and
halted in accord with Islam's eternal difficulty in establishing a viable
economy upon a predator mindset, the Saudi petrodollars were poured into
establishing violent fanaticism as the big alternative. Inexorably,
the people who could have moderated Islam have been pushed aside by raving
sheiks congratulated by US diplomats.
The Moslem world today has no love
and very little respect for the Western powers in general and for the United
States in particular. It was for many years a bitterly divided world, where
individual rulers competed with each other for wealth, influence and sometimes
territory. This was why the wealthy states of the Gulf Cooperation Council
were ready to accept protection from American and other Western forces.
But four decades of prattling about decolonization and "globalism" have
made their mark. If globalism is a good reason for uniting Europe, preventing
it is a better reason for uniting Moslem states (which have much more in
common than the Europeans) on a policy to wrest power from the unbelievers.[ii]
The Moslem states are aware of
Western greed and its political repercussions, and they trust that they
will not be hindered in increasing their military, political and economic
capacity to a point at which they can blackmail the West into accepting
their political, cultural, or religious demands. After September 11, they
are hoping that the US will settle for destroying Bin Laden and the Taliban
and gradually resume its oil-dictated pro-Moslem policies. The crack whore
of Western petro-consumerism will always return to her john for her next
fix, however much she complains about how he treats here.
Such policies, drastically manifested
in the "great game" under Presidents Carter and Reagan, have had their
apologists in each subsequent American administration. Under Bush I, they
were summarized in a statement by then- Assistant Secretary of State for
Near East and North African Affairs, Edward Djerejian, who declared that
the United States did not regard Islam or Islamic movements as the enemy,
and recognized their right to participate in the political process.[iii]
The spirit of the statement was reiterated and expanded upon by his successor,
Robert Pelletreau, under Clinton. Pelletreau lamented in 1996 the fact
that the
"image of Islam in the minds of
the average newspaper reader is often one of an undifferentiated movement
hostile to the West and ready to use violence and terrorism to achieve
its ends."[iv]
He distinguished the many "legitimate,
socially responsible Moslem groups with political goals from Islamists
who operate outside the bounds of law."
A generation ago it was understandable,
even excusable, for bone-headed God- fearing CIA bosses of the low-Church
Protestant kind to work up a hatred of atheism and enjoy dealing with believers.
They used Moslems in just the way they used the Roman Catholic Church in
the early 1950s, the time of the Gladio. But appeasement by their feeble
successors in our own time only breeds the contempt and arrogance of the
Islamic radicals and fuels their limitless ambition.
Changing the self-defeating trend
demands recognition that the West is in a war of religion, whether it wants
that or not and however much it hates the fact. This war is being fought,
on the Islamic side, with the deep and unshakeable condition that the West
is on its last legs. The success of their demographic deluge enhances the
image of "a candy store with the busted lock," and that view is reinforced
by the evidence from history that a civilization that loses the urge for
biological self-perpetuation is indeed finished. Even after its unfinished
victory in Afghanistan, America is viewed as a paper tiger, with F-16s
and dollars but no strong heart and no long-term stamina. Indeed, it is
uncertain that anything significant has taken place in Afghanistan: the
Afghan Talibs were forced to change their coats as one set of Islamists
took a lot of money for replacing another.
Mr. Bush may be hoping to domesticate
Islam under the aegis of the non- denominational deism that is professed
in his rhetoric. In the last century Americans, inspired by Protestant
missionaries, conceived the ambition of getting closer to the Arab world
and the Chinese than the imperialist Europeans. The attempts failed, but
they left echoes in American thinking. The wish to patronize Islamic modernism
is one. Hence the enduring fantasy of an American-Islamic alliance against
extremism. The Islamists are often quite worldly and some have accommodated
themselves to the appropriation of great wealth. Nevertheless, the alliance
Mr. Bush may be looking for is less available than ever. There may be no
homo Islamicus - a Moslem is certainly not a programmed fanatic - but saying
so is too often a preface to evasive talk about tiny minorities with no
power.
The West cannot wage "war on terror"
while maintaining its dependence on Arab oil, appeasing Islamist designs
around the world, and allowing mass immigration of Moslems into its own
lands. It risks being the star actor of a Greek tragedy in which the Gods
make the unfortunate rulers mad before they destroy them.
On the ground, the reversal of
existing policies means, inter alia, active Western help, diplomatic and
when necessary military, to relieve Indonesia of West Papua and the Christian
parts of the Moluccas, to expel Syria from Lebanon and create a Christian
state in part of Lebanon, to create an independent Christian state in southern
Sudan, to detach the Serb-populated and Croat-populated parts from Moslem-dominated
Bosnia-Herzegovina, to stop Albanian attempts to take over Kosovo or Macedonia
and to force the Arabs to give "land for peace" to Israel. It also means
supporting India against Pakistan and independence for oil-producing, Christian
provinces of Nigeria.
The inevitable argument against
such a policy reversal will be that it will set off Islamic terrorism "on
a never before experienced scale." It is as spurious as the logic that
combines "globalization" and "promotion of democracy" with support of Moslem
dictatorships. Islamic terrorism has been thriving because the existing
policy is perceived as a sign of Western weakness. The real problem facing
the United States and Western democracy is not how the Moslems will respond
to a policy hostile to their interests but whether the West still has the
moral strength to adopt any policy causing its power-wielders temporary
financial losses. Curbing their greed - this doesn't mean you personally,
Pres. Bush, but it does mean some of your slimy oil-patch friends whispering
in your ear - is a prerequisite for success in the inevitable conflict
with Islam and indeed for maintaining US superpower status at all, as a
nation that can be put on the run by these people simply is not a superpower.[v]
Just as in 1936 with the Nazis,
checking appeasement requires a revolution in the West's political thinking.
It requires a realization that safeguarding Western elites' economic interests
from Moslem encroachment or confiscation may become impossible if such
encroachments continue to be tolerated or encouraged. It also requires
understanding that, as Reagan impolitely observed about Marxism, Islam
regards lies, violence, and threats of violence as legitimate means of
gaining political ends and that the only capacity Islam respects in an
unbeliever is the capacity to use diplomacy or military force successfully
against it.
Pandering to Islam's geopolitical
designs, and sacrificing smaller Christian nations - Timorese and Sudanese
yesterday, Serbs and Orthodox Cypriots today, Bulgars and Greeks tomorrow
- is counterproductive: such morsels will only whet the Islamic appetite,
paving the way to a major confrontation some time in this century.
The price of delusions is going
up. The time to sell off is now.
[i] James Jatras, Chronicles (1999),
op. cit.
[ii] Yohanan Ramati: The Islamic
Danger to Western Civilization http://
www.westerndefense.org/special/TwinTowers2001.htm
[iii] http://dosfan.lib.uic.edu/ERC/briefing/dispatch/1993/html/Dispatchv4no21.html
[iv] http://www.usis-israel.org.il/publish/press/state/archive/august/sd2_8-28.htm
[v] Yohanan Ramati, op. cit.
(Serge Trifkovic received his PhD
from the University of Southampton in England and pursued postdoctoral
research at the Hoover Institution at Stanford. His past journalistic outlets
have included the BBC World Service, the Voice of America, CNN International,
MSNBC, U.S. News & World Report, The Washington Times, the Philadelphia
Inquirer, The Times of London, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. He is foreign
affairs editor of Chronicles.)
