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"Some say there is an inevitable clash between Western civilization and Western values, and Islamic civilizations and values. I believe this view is terribly wrong. False prophets may use and abuse any religion to justify whatever political objectives they have - even cold-blooded murder. Some may have the world believe that almighty God himself, the merciful, grants a license to kill. But that is not our understanding of Islam. . . There are over 1,200 mosques and Islamic centers in the United States, and the number is rapidly increasing. The six million Americans who worship there will tell you there is no inherent clash between Islam and America. Americans respect and honor Islam. (President Clinton at the U.N., September 21, 1998)
And so the quest by our ruling establishment
for user-friendly Islam is officially over. If "six million Americans"
believe in something, that in itself is taken as proof that their tenets
are praiseworthy, tolerant of
other beliefs, and thoroughly "American."
That Mr. Clinton's assertions on any subject should not be taken at face value was confirmed by his discourse at the General Assembly. Like the unicorn or phlogiston, the Stone of Wisdom or El Dorado, "tolerant Islam" can be defined, visualized, described in some detail; but for all that it cannot be made real. Patted and complimented in the name of "diversity," Islam is its subverter, or else it ceases to be what it is.
To Clinton, his wife, and other members of the ruling post-Christian elite this notion is unbearable. Having no faith themselves (except the baby-boomers' belief in their own uniqueness) they do not take Islam's faith seriously. Smugly observing the demise of Christian belief and culture on both sides of the Atlantic, they trust the combined efforts of Oprah, Big Mac, and public education system to do the trick with any little Mohammad and Azra as it has done with the Billies and Sharons of this world.
If the proselytizers of America's civic creed of unbelief knew some history they might pause here; if they knew how to do it, they might even reflect. Contrary to Mr. Clinton's self-avowed "understanding of Islam" this peculiar creed has been synonymous with violence and intolerance since its earliest days. Like Bolshevism and Nazism, it is part religion and part ideology that seeks to impose mind-numbing uniformity of thought and feeling on its faithful, and to subjugate and ultimately destroy its non-adherents.
By implying that only "false prophets" can justify "cold-blooded murder" Mr. Clinton has aptly - albeit unwittingly - summarized Islam's foundations. The beginnings of "prophet" Mohammad's public career are little known to most Westerners, and it is not done to recount his exploits in polite multicultural company. In historical fact that career was marked by a long string of murders, armed robberies and rape, interspersed by a series of "divine" pronouncements of varying coherence. The outsiders - the Jews of Medinah, or his Arabic kinsmen reluctant to accept Mohammad's self-proclaimed divinity - were equally likely to experience his "justice" and "mercy."
When in 626 AD, for instance, six of Mohammad's henchmen murdered an elderly Jew by the name of Abu Rafi in his sleep, they argued afterwards whose weapon had actually ended the victim's life. The "prophet" decided that the person who owned the sword that still had traces of food on it was the winner. Abu Rafi had just finished his dinner before falling asleep, and the fatal slash went through his stomach.
If Abu Rafi's murder was Kristalnacht, Mohammed's attack against the tribe of Banu-'l-Mustaliq, later in that same year, was a decisive step towards Endloesung. His followers slaughtered many tribesmen, and looted thousands of their camels and sheep; they also kidnapped five hundred of their women. The night after the battle Mohammed and his brigands staged an orgy of rape. As one Abu Sa'id Khudri remembered, a slight problem needed to be resolved first: in order to get ransom from the surviving tribesmen, the Muslims had pledged not to violate their captives.
"We were lusting after women and chastity had become too hard for us, but we wanted to get the ransom money for our prisoners. So we wanted to use the Azl (coitus interruptus). . . We asked the Prophet about it and he said: You are not under any obligation to stop yourselves from doing it like that."
The members of the last surviving Jewish tribe in Medinah, Banu Qurayza, were even less fortunate. Mohammad offered the men conversion to Islam as an alternative to death; upon their refusal all nine hundred were decapitated in front of their enslaved women and children. The women were subsequently raped; Mohammad chose for himself one Raihana Bint Amr, whose father and husband were both slaughtered before her eyes only hours earlier. He kept her as his concubine thereafter.
This same man, part Charles Manson part John Gotti, is explicitly acknowledged by all Muslims everywhere - from L.A. to Sarajevo, from Marseilles to Chechnya - to be the paragon of godly, morally impeccable behavior, to be admired and emulated until the end of time. The prevalence of his name among the Muslim men is symbolic of the covenant. His behavior, and that of his followers, was sanctioned in Mohammad's own prophetic revelation, and duly recorded in his "holy book":
"And all married women are forbidden unto you except those captives whom your right hand possesses. It is a decree of Allah for you. Lawful unto you are all beyond those mentioned, so that you seek them with your wealth in honest wedlock, not debauchery." (Koran 4:24)
Non-Muslims will seek in vain mercy and compassion from these quarters. The "prophet" explicitly forbade his followers to make friends of Christia ns and Jews, and warned them of the sanction for disobedience: He among you who taketh them for friends is one of them. (Koran 5:51) But as the marauders could derive no material benefit from corpses, their lives could be spared if they agreed to pay a hefty tribute to the Muslims. In his own lifetime Mohammad thus established the model for subsequent relationship between Islamic conquerors and their Christian or Jewish subjects for centuries to come.
The option of conversion was always available, and to be on the right side of Allah - and of history, as it seemed for a long time - was not too demanding. God, the creator and sustainer of the world, rewarded all those who expressed their worship in prayer, almsgiving and self-purification, and above all in unquestioning obedience to Mohammad. That "God is great, and that there is no God but God" was easily grasped by the nomadic tribes of the desert, and later of the steppe, only dimly aware that "He" was but the metamorphosed moon god of the Arab pagans. Underdeveloped culturally and socially, they had few theological and logical qualms about Mohammad's claim that he was the sole spokesman for the authentic "religion of Abraham" that had been corrupted by Jews and Christian alike. Seeing that Jerusalem was out of reach at first, it was to his own privatized "Abraham" that Mohammad audaciously attributed the founding of the old pagan sanctuary, the Kabaa, a piece of black meteoric rock that became the Muslims' holy of holies. It was only later that the non-Arab converts translated "the crude and casual assertions of the Prophet" into a coherent teaching.
Between Mohammad's death in 632 AD and the second siege of Vienna, just over a thousand years later, Islam expanded - at first rapidly, then intermittently - at the expense of everything and everyone in the way of its warriors. But Islamic models of culture and society - as represented by the horsemen who swept across three continents in the decades after Mohammad's death - were quite unable to induce the heirs of Christian, Middle Eastern and Indian civilizations to attune their values and ways of life to the True Faith. Subsequently little cross-fertilization of elements from diverse regions and traditions was possible: Islam was accepted or rejected in its entirety, regardless of local custom or tradition. An unprecedented rigidity was introduced into the relations between civilizations, reflecting the fundamental tenet of Islam - accurately restated a decade ago by Bosnia's President Alija Izetbegovic in his Islamic Declaration - that "there can be no peace between Islam and other forms of social and political organization."
Unleashed as the militant faith of a barbarian war-band, Islam turned its boundary with the outside world into a perpetual war zone. For a long time the outcome of the onslaught was in doubt. The early, western attack on Christendom reached as far as Tours, and almost enabled Koran - in Gibbon's memorable phrase - to be taught in the schools of Oxford" to a circumcised people. The last attempt in pre-modern times, going through the Balkans, took the Sultan's janissaries more than half way from Constantinople to Dover. On both occasions the tide was checked, but its subsequent rolling back took decades, even centuries.
For the millions of Christians and Jews engulfed by the deluge those were the centuries of quiet desperation interrupted by the regular pangs of agony. Materially and culturally rich Christian civilization of Byzantium and its budding Slavic offspring in Serbia and Bulgaria were reduced to dhimmis, "people of the Book," whose ostensible advantage over pagans was that their life and earthly goods were presumably safe for as long as they submitted to Islamic rule. That rule rested on two pillars of Islamic ideology and political practice - Jihad and Sharia - that provided the quasi-legal framework for institutionalized oppression of the infidels.
The story of the non-Muslims' experiences under Islamic rule is as politically incorrect to tell, and therefore as little known in today's America, as the remarkable life of Mohammad himself. At first the choice of the vanquished seemed to be not "Islam or death" but "Islam or super-tax," but over time Sharia ensured the decline of eastern Christianity in numbers, the sapping of the captives' vitality and capacity for renewal. The practice of devshirme, the annual "blood levy" of Christian boys to be trained as Janissaries, and the spiking of infidels, were among its more obvious consequences.
If any single factor made the Balkans what they are today - to take a newsworthy example - it was the ordeal of five centuries of Mohammedan misrule. Modern attempts by some apologists of Islam in the West - notably by one Noel Malcolm - to present the sordid casino of Ottoman overlordship in southeast Europe as "tolerant," or even enlightened, are as intellectually dishonest as they are factually insupportable. Bat Ye'or's Eastern Christians Between Jihad and Dhimmitude put paid to all that.
The key to understanding Islam's record with its non-adherents is not in comparing it to Judaism or Christianity, but in matching it against modern totalitarian ideologies, notably Bolshevism and National Socialism. All three were explicit in denying legitimacy to all forms of social, political and cultural organization other than themselves. Stalin's forma mentis was different from that of Khomeini only in "quantity," not in "quality." When the latter readily admitted that the Muslims have no choice but to wage "holy war against profane governments" until the conquest of the world has been accomplished, it was Khrushchev's we shall bury you wrapped in green instead of red. "Peaceful coexistence" was but jihad under another name. They all sought an eschatological shortcut that would enable the initiated to bypass the predicament of a seemingly aimless existence, while explicitly rejecting Christian grace and replacing it with the gnostic mantras of Surrender ("Islam"), a.k.a. dialectic materialism, Volksgemeinschaft.
Nazism was the least coherent of the three; but it was among the Nazis, and most notably with the architect of the Holocaust, Heinrich Himmler, that Islam had found its willing promoters and collaborators in the pre-multicultural Europe. Himmler's hatred of "soft" Christianity was equal to his liking for Islam, which he saw as a masculine, martial religion based on the SS "qualities" of blind obedience and readiness for self-sacrifice untainted by compassion for one's enemies. By creating an SS division composed of Bosnian Muslims he sought to enhance the links between Nazi Germany and the Islamic world. One of his closest aides, Obergruppenfuehrer Gottlob Berger, stated that "a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism on an open, honest basis. It will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East." (While Hitler did not think much of Himmler's neo-pagan mysticism, he was happy to let Islam become "the SS religion.")
In his drive to recruit Muslims Himmler enlisted the support of the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, El Husseini, who went to the Nazi puppet state of Croatia in 1943 to encourage his Bosnian Muslim flock to fight for the Reich. More than twenty thousand enlisted in the 13. SS Division, Hanjar (Turkish curved sword). The total number of Bosnian Muslim volunteers in Himmler's units reached 46,000 by September 1943. This exceeded the number of Bosnian Muslims serving with Tito's Partisans and Croatian Ustasas together.
Half a century later, having triumphed over its red and black rivals, post-Christian "liberal democracy" expects to neuter Islam by reducing it to yet another humanistic project in self-celebration. But Islam knows how to play the game. It will act as if it were reducible to just another competitor in the marketplace of the secular political system, but it will never give up its ultimate claims and objectives. It starts with a strong hand. For starters, it is "non-White," non-European and non-Christian, which makes it a natural ally of the ruling elites. At the same time, it has an inherent advantage over Clinton, Blaire, Schroeder and Chirac, in that they are unable to generate an emotional response among hoi polloi for their tepid ideology of multicultural mediocrity. It also has an advantage over most established Christian denominations in that the latter are no longer even "the Tory Party at Prayer" but - at best - the Social Workers at Therapy. Richly endowed with petrodollars, Islam's PR front will use the symbols and vocabulary of the Dominant Tendency, and wait for its implosion.
We should not blame Islam for being what it is, and its adherents for acting accordingly; Luther would say that they kann nicht anders. We should not hate it, nor ban it. We should blame ourselves for refusing to acknowledge the facts of the case, and failing to take stock of our options.
In the present state of Western
feebleness this process may well lead further millions to the conclusion
that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually
and demographically. But the least those of us who do not cherish the prospect
should demand from our rulers is to present that option fairly and squarely.
To pretend - as Mr. Clinton does - that Islam is rather like Episcopalianism
(minus the sodomists) is plain stupid or deeply dishonest. In view of the
source, it is probably both.
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