Author: Serge Trifkovic
Publication: Chronicles Magazine
Date: January 24, 2007
URL: http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/Neoconservatives/Dinesh_the_Dhimmi.html?seemore=y
Jihad's Fellow-Traveller's Agenda
Nearly two years ago the Jihadist lobby in
the United States made a concerted affort to have my book The Sword of the
Prophet banned from National Review Online. Jihadi activists gathered around
CAIR claimed the book defamed Islam and its "prophet." When it did
not get immediate satisfaction from National Review, CAIR instructed its partisans
to pressure the Boeing Corporation to withdraw its advertisements from the
magazine. Faced with the loss of revenue National Review briefly took down
The Sword, but then quickly reposted it, under pressure from mainly conservative
quarters.
It is now, perhaps inevitably, the turn of
a phony conservative to join CAIR's ranks. In his latest book, The Enemy At
Home, Dinesh D'Souza writes that,
In order to build alliances with traditional
Muslims, the right must take three critical steps. First, stop attacking Islam.
Conservatives have to cease blaming Islam for the behavior of the radical
Muslims. Recently the right has produced a spate of Islamophobic tracts with
titles like Islam Unveiled, Sword of the Prophet, and The Myth of Islamic
Tolerance. There is probably no better way to repel traditional Muslims, and
push them into the radical camp, than to attack their religion and their prophet.
Two of the titles D'Souza finds so offensive that condemning them tops his
list of "critical steps" are by my friend Robert Spencer, and "The
Sword" is mine. D'Souza wants us, and presumably other similarly minded
authors (Bat Ye'or, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Walid Shoebat, et al.), to
shut up.
As my fellow offender Spencer has noted, D'Souza
assumes that peaceful Muslims will have a greater sense of solidarity with
jihadists than with non-Muslims, which is indeed the case, but it makes hash
of his entire thesis-that social conservatives should ally themselves with
these "traditional" Muslims:
For if these peaceful Muslims really abhor
jihadism, they should have no reason to object to critical presentations of
the elements of Islam that foster jihadism. But if such presentations will
just drive them into the arms of the jihadists, then how committed could they
really have been to peace and moderation in the first place? If they think
'Islamophobic tracts' . . . are more threatening to their religion than acts
of terrorism done in the name of Islam, how 'traditional' and moderate could
they possibly be?
It is noteworthy that D'Souza is condemning our writings as "Islamophobic"
without further elaboration. Like the term "Islamophobia" itself-a
classic product of the Hate Crime Industry-his technique is characteristic
of the totalitarian Left. I remember reading, as a teenager in Tito's Yugoslavia,
similarly worded condemnations of dissident writers and their "tracts"
in the communist-controlled press. Once they were defined as "anti-socialist,"
"reactionary," or "nationalist," no further elaboration
was needed and no debate allowed.
Furthermore, D'Souza uses "Islamophobia"
with the implicit assumption that the term's meaning is well familiar to his
readers. For the uninitiated it is nevertheless necessary to spell out its
formal, legally tested definition, however. It is provided by the European
Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia (EUMC), a lavishly-funded organ
of the European Union. Based in Vienna, this body diligently tracks the instances
of "Islamophobia" all over the Old Continent and summarizes them
in its reports. The Monitoring Center's definition of Islamophobia includes
eight salient features:
1. Islam is seen as a monolithic bloc, static
and unresponsive to change.
2. Islam is seen as separate and "other."
3. Islam is seen as inferior to the West,
barbaric, irrational, primitive and sexist.
4. Islam is seen as violent, aggressive, supportive
of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations.
5. Islam is seen as a political ideology.
6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam are
rejected out of hand.
7. Hostility towards Islam is used to justify
discriminatory practices towards Muslims and exclusion of Muslims from mainstream
society.
8. Anti-Muslim hostility is seen as natural
or normal.
This definition is obviously intended to preclude
any possibility of meaningful discussion of Islam. The implication that Islamophobia
thus defined demands legal sanction is a regular feature of the Race Relations
Industry output. It also routinely refers to "institutional Islamophobia"
as an inherent social and cultural sickness of most Western societies that
needs to be rooted out by education, re-education, and legislation. In reality,
of course, all eight proscribed statements are to some extent true. As I have
argued in these pages and elsewhere,
1. That Islam is fundamentally static and
unresponsive to change is evident from the absence of an orthodox school of
thought capable of reflecting critically upon jihad, Sharia, jizya, etc. and
developing new Islamic interpretations that Western liberals (and notably
the 9-11 Commission's Final Report) keep hoping for. Attempts to reformulate
the doctrine are not new, but they have failed because they opposed centuries
of orthodoxy. As Clement Huart pointed out back in 1907, "Until the newer
conceptions, as to what the Koran teaches as to the duty of the believer towards
non-believers, have spread further and have more generally leavened the mass
of Moslem belief and opinion, it is the older and orthodox standpoint on this
question which must be regarded by non-Moslems as representing Mohammedan
teaching and as guiding Mohammedan action." Huart's near-contemporary
Sir William Muir, noted that "a reformed faith that should question the
divine authority on which the institutions of Islam rest, or attempt by rationalistic
selection or abatement to effect a change, would be Islam no longer. A century
later the diagnosis still stands: it is not the jihadists who are "distorting"
Islam; the would-be reformers are.
2. That Islam is separate from our (Western,
Christian, European) culture and civilization, and other than our culture
and civilization, is a fact that will not change even if the West (Christendom,
Europe) eventually succumb to the ongoing jihadist demographic onslaught.
3. Whether Islam is "inferior to the
West" is a matter of opinion. That it cannot create a prosperous, harmonious,
stable, creative and attractive polity is not. Whether Islam is "barbaric,
irrational, primitive and sexist" is at least debatable; but that its
fruits are such is beyond reasonable doubt.
4. Islam is seen as "violent, aggressive,
supportive of terrorism and engaged in a clash of civilizations" not
because of an irrational "phobia" in the feverish mind of the beholder,
but because of the clear mandate of its scripture, because of the record of
almost 14 centuries of historical practice, and above all because of the timeless
example of its founder.
5. "Islam is seen as a political ideology"
because its defining characteristic is a highly developed program to improve
man and create a new society; to impose complete control over that society;
and to train cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood. The doctrine of Jihad
makes Islam closer to Bolshevism or National Socialism than to any religion
known to man. It breeds a gnostic paradigm within which the standard response
to the challenge presented by non-Muslim cultural, technological and economic
achievements is hostility and hatred. D'Souza's alleged distinction between
Islamic "extremists" and "moderates" is a Western liberal
construct, of course. The difference between them may concern the methods
to be applied but not the final objective: to turn every last square mile
of Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam.
6. Criticisms made of the West by Islam should
not be rejected out of hand, they should be understood. Islam's chief "criticism"
of the West-and each and every other non-Islamic culture, civilization, or
tradition-is that it is infidel, and therefore undeserving of existence.
7. A priori hostility towards Islam should
not be "used to justify discriminatory practices towards Muslims."
Quite the contrary, a comprehensive education campaign about the teaching
and practice of Islam should result in legislative action that would exclude
Islam from the societies it is targeting, not because it is an offensive religion
but because it is an inherently seditious totalitarian ideology incompatible
with the fundamental values of the West-and all other civilized societies,
India, China and Japan included.
8. "Anti-Muslim hostility" is not
"natural or normal." The infidels' determination to defend their
lands, families, cultures and faith against Islamic aggression is both natural
and normal, however, and must not be neutralized by the Eurocrats from the
left of by D'Souza and his likes on the "right." They will deny
that Islam, in Muhammad's revelations, traditions and their codification,
threatens the rest of us, that it is the cult of war and intolerance, but
the truth will out. Until the petrodollars support a comprehensive and explicit
Kuranic revisionism capable of growing popular roots, we should seek ways
to defend ourselves by disengaging from the world of Islam, physically and
figuratively, by learning to keep our distance from the affairs of the Muslim
world and by keeping the Muslim world away from "the world of war"
that it seeks to conquer or destroy.
It is entirely possible that Dinesh D'Souza
subscribes to some other definition of "Islamophobia" than the one
provided above. If he does, he should spell it out so that those he singles
out for criticism can defend themselves. Until and unless he does so, we'll
have to agree with a recent commentator who concludes that D'Souza wants me
and others "to lie about Islam, like himself, or to be silent":
Now think how amazing this is. Has it ever
happened in this country-I'm not talking about some totalitarian country but
America-has it ever happened that a prominent "intellectual" called
on leading writers on a subject of major importance to stop writing what they're
writing, because it would "offend" someone? No, this has never happened
before. It has never happened before, because it's only in response to Mohammedanism
that Westerners adopt the posture of pre-emptive surrender, which Bat Ye'or
calls mental dhimmitude. Of all the social, ethnic, religious, political movements
in the world, only Islam has the ability to evoke this eagerly cringing attitude,
only Islam has this faculty of inducing people to surrender psychologically
to it even before it has any actual power over them.
Dixit. A man is defined, to some extent, by
his enemies. Counting D'Souza and his ilk among mine casts an eminently pleasing
glow on this drab January morning.