<Islam> Resentment as a religion

Author: Marian Kester Coombs Publication: The Washington Times Date: November 25, 2001

The questions of the hour are "Is Islam the problem?" and "If so, then what is Islam?" The West had been waiting for the formidable Salman Rushdie - a man who has been living under a "fatwa" a few years longer than the rest of us - to weigh in, and he did so in early November, answering the question "Is it Islam?" with a resounding yes.

Islam, he noted, unlike Christianity, is a petrified belief structure that has never undergone any sort of Reformation since its inception in the seventh century; its most modern self-critique consists of 18th-century Wahhabism, a fundamentalist, puritanical, theocratic reaction to the "corruption of the true faith" which has now found its most perfect incarnation in the Taliban.

Another man who should know, expatriate Iranian author and journalist Amir Taheri, also begs us to blame Islam. "The refusal to subject Islam to rational analysis" - anathema to believers - "is a recipe for further fanaticism," wrote Mr. Taheri in the Wall Street Journal on Oct. 27.

"All but one of the world's remaining military regimes are in Muslim countries. With the exception of Turkey and Bangladesh, there are no real elections in any Muslim country. Of the current 30 active conflicts in the world no fewer than 28 concern Muslim governments and/or communities. Two-thirds of the world's political prisoners are held in Muslim countries, which also carry out 80 percent of all executions each year."

Islam should be critiqued not as a belief system but as "an existential reality," argues Mr. Taheri, one that prevents Muslim nations "from developing a modern political culture, without which they cannot reform their societies and rebuild their economies."

Nick Griffin is a British National Party politician who just shocked the U.K. establishment by winning 16.4 percent of the general election vote in Oldham, a town in the north of England where Muslim riots and attacks on white Britons have become epidemic. He was in the States the other day to warn Americans what is in store for us as the "clash of civilizations" gets up-close and personal.

Mr. Griffin has made a study of Islam and finds it to be not a religion, in the sense of requiring some sort of moral response from the believer, but rather a tendency, in the political sense of a faction contesting for power. The Koran, which he likens to "the Talmud on angel dust," instructs believers living in "infidel" nations to lay low until they reach about 10 percent of the population; then they may attack and disrupt the sinful host society with a better chance of ultimate takeover.

With a birthrate of six children per woman in contrast to the native British rate of 1.7, Muslims are massing to hit that critical percentage in Britain very soon. In France they are already there, and Muslim unrest, from gangs assaulting French girls to machine-gun attacks on police stations, has been steadily increasing. Mr. Griffin warns that the European experience has destroyed any illusions about Muslim assimilation of the West. Official protestations to the contrary, they are here not to assimilate, but to conquer.

What is the wellspring of this implacable enmity? We know its history: briefly, the repulsion of the Mohammedan armies by Charles the Hammer near Tours in 732 A.D., the attack on Jerusalem by the First Crusade in 1099 and the Crusades that followed, the Cid's exploits in the 12th century, Ferdinand and Isabella's expulsion of the Moors from most of Spain in 1492, Phillip III's reconquest of Granada and the remaining Moor-held Spanish provinces in 1609, the halt of the Ottoman Empire's forces at the gates of Vienna in 1683, the Ottoman collapse after World War I.

But what keeps Islam's appetite for conflict with "Christendom" ever whetted? After all, Spain no longer simmers vengefully over England's rude reception of the Armada, nor are the Dutch still spoiling for a rematch over the East Indies. Islam does not move on because for some reason it cannot.

Shelby Steele wrote "War of the Worlds" for the Wall Street Journal of Sept. 17 a stirring ode to Western civilization in which he declared, "It has always astounded me how much white Americans take for granted the rich and utterly decisive heritage of Western culture," and warned that "White guilt morally and culturally disarms the West [and] only inflames the narcissism of the ineffectual" Third World. Later, one Sajid Ali Khan opined from London that "Greek civilization was fortunately translated into Arabic and thence percolated into 'the West.' And so on so forth. For instance do his heroic paler-skinned not all use Arabic numerals? The Arab al-gibr gives rise to algebra in the most recent spelling, and also to the sort of gibberish with which Mr. Steele is haunted."

Preferring not to dwell on the peculiarities of Mr. Khan's opinion, Jed Skillman opined back from Brookfield, Ill., that he had missed the point: "It's true the West has adopted the use of Arabic numerals. It happened some time ago and it's not news. I think the point is that no one thinks of himself as 'acting Arabic' for doing so." In other words, algebra was a long time ago - what have you done for us lately?

Explaining why the Arab world, once a center of learning and scientific inquiry, had lost momentum to the West by around 1500, Pakistani physicist Pervez Hoodbhoy noted mildly in the New York Times on Oct. 30: "The notion that all knowledge is in the Great Text [Koran] is a great disincentive to learning." Arab scholars may have preserved and translated the treasures of Greek science, keeping them alive to be passed later to Europeans, and collaborated on the invention of zero and the decimal system, but they could not sustain the social conditions necessary to the search for scientific truth.

Because Islamic states are theocratic, they dare not encourage theoretical inquiries and technological innovations that would tend to produce strains in what should be a perfect and immutable God-ordained system. And because the Islamic motivation to do science is only religious, the kind of disinterested, open-ended "pure" science that has so benefited the world is rarely pursued.

One also need not be a Friedan feminist to see how the lowly status of Muslim women permits an unhealthy psychic base of unearned male supremacism. Chivalry, another innovation unique to the West, was a deliberate drive by European men to reform masculinity and to honor women qua women. Muslim polygamy, likewise, creates a large pool of "undomesticated" and disenfranchised men ripe for recruitment to fanaticism, while Western monogamy has worked to offer each man a peaceful democratic stake in society (cf. the writings of Kevin MacDonald).

One of the nastier features of globalization is how every culture is now forced to compare itself to every other. No more do the veiling effects of time and distance mercifully render "mysterious" the brutish everyday realities of more backward peoples. For those who once were great and now are way behind, the glare of global invidious comparison is particularly unbearable.

Not a contemporary but nonetheless a highly modern voice is that of Friedrich Nietzsche, the "posthumous" man who inhabited a world post-God and beyond Good and Evil. His critique of ressentiment - the "self-poisoned mind" of resentment - fits Islam like a glove. For Nietzsche, the repressed emotion of ressentiment leads at length to an entire falsified worldview, a whole revalued code of values, a complete morality based upon sour grapes, vindictiveness, delusions of grandeur and an embittered sense of helpless inferiority. The envied enemy is hated for his superior virtues, which are transformed by the alchemy of ressentiment into objects of loathing.

Sociologists also distinguish between two types of juvenile deviant behavior: criminality which aims at direct personal gain, and delinquency which targets symbols such as schools and churches. This distinction accounts for the strong element of vandalism - sheer malicious joy in destroying - that is so striking in the current terrorist campaign; Islam is collective, ethnic ressentiment expressing itself in the attempted wholesale vandalization of Western society.

The "Son of Sam" defense ("My dog made me do it") has now been joined by the "Son of Islam" defense ("My god made me do it"). Gods, dogs - as long as you can relocate the will to kill and maim outside yourself in some higher power, you're righteous. Right?

Before September 11, Americans who reacted against the many hate-filled threats and insults directed at our country were labeled "paranoid" and instructed to blithely ignore such provocations. Now the media squeak in wonderment at "how naive we all were," and scold us to hurry up and worry about everything under the sun.

Meanwhile, London's Sunday Telegraph reports that our close trading partners, the Chinese, by the thousands are snapping up garish videos of the September attack with narration like "This is the America the whole world has wanted to see," and "Look at the panic in their faces as they wipe off the dust and crawl out of their strong buildings - now just a heap of rubble. We will never fear these people again, they have been shown to be soft- bellied paper tigers."

Please let us know when it's no longer "paranoid" to react to these little digs, OK?

Vienna was a strong fortress, but by the end of August the city was in mortal danger. Food and ammunition were inadequate, and on September 1, the Turks exploded a mine under the walls and captured one part of it. Outside the walls however the outlook was brighter. The defeat of a Turkish corp at Bisamberg allowed the concentration of the allied armies northwest of Vienna. Most importantly 30,000 Poles under their warrior-king Jan Sobieski had arrived.

Sobieski, who already had a considerable reputation against the Turks, assumed command. His plan was to force battle on the plain west of the city and annihilate the Turkish army, thus breaking the siege. The Turkish commander Kara Mustapha continued to focus much of his effort at capturing the city, therefore at the start of the battle only part of his army was prepared to meet the relief force. At four a.m. on the 12th of September 1683, the Austrians on the left wing moved forward and commenced battle, the Germans in the left center soon joined them. As the Turks were preparing to counterattack, the Polish infantry emerged on the right wing clearing the foothills dominating the plain. By four p.m. the cavalry had moved up and prepared to charge. At five p.m. Sobieski ordered the charge. One German-Austrian and three Polish cavalry groups, 20,000 men charged down hill, echelon after echelon, lead by King Jan Sobieski, straight for the center of the Turkish camp. As the cavalry burst into the Turkish lines, the garrison in the city attacked the Turkish rear. The demoralized Turks and Tartars soon broke and ran, and the battle turned into a route. At half past five Sobieski entered the Grand Viziers tent and the siege of Vienna was broken.

The Turks lost about 15,000 men on the field, while the allies lost less then 4000 killed and wounded. Vienna had been delivered in the nick of time, earlier that same day the Turks had exploded mines that had given them access to the city.

The Turks never recovered from the battle, while the Ottoman Empire survived for another two hundred plus years, from here on out it was merely a holding action. For Poland, this was her last great moment on centerstage until the battle of Warsaw in 1920 when once again she saved Europe from the East.

I've been trying to make this point for almost two years now [since, oh, about September 12, 2001], and I have been vilified by a hord of politically correct Muslim apologists on this board.

The West had been waiting for the formidable Salman Rushdie... to weigh in...
Islam, he noted, unlike Christianity, is a petrified belief structure that has never undergone any sort of Reformation since its inception in the seventh century; its most modern self-critique consists of 18th-century Wahhabism, a fundamentalist, puritanical, theocratic reaction to the "corruption of the true faith" which has now found its most perfect incarnation in the Taliban.

My only beef with this article is that even here, we still see a dogged determination to deny the fundamental difference between the explicit instructions of the New Testament and the explicit instructions of the Koran. The New Testament didn't need any sort of Reformation to create these explicit instructions - they already existed.

Jesus explicitly instructed his followers to forgo all violence:

The Gospel according to
St. Matthew
Chapter 5
The Holy Bible
King James Version 2000
Ye have heard that it hath been said, An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth:
but I say unto you, That ye resist not evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek, turn to him the other also.
And if any man will sue thee at the law, and take away thy coat, let him have thy cloak also.
And whosoever shall compel thee to go a mile, go with him twain.
Give to him that asketh thee, and from him that would borrow of thee turn not thou away.
Ye have heard that it hath been said, Thou shalt love thy neighbor, and hate thine enemy.
But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you;
that ye may be the children of your Father which is in heaven: for he maketh his sun to rise on the evil and on the good, and sendeth rain on the just and on the unjust.
For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same?
And if ye salute your brethren only, what do ye more than others? do not even the publicans so?
Be ye therefore perfect, even as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.

Mohammed, on the other hand, explicitly instructed his followers to practice not only violence, but murder itself:

Medina Suras
The Chapter of Women
[Chapters from the Koran]
The Harvard Classics 1909–14
But if there befalls you grace from God, he would say—as though there were no friendship between you and him—‘O would that I had been with thee to attain this mighty happiness!’ Let those then fight in God’s way who sell this life of the world for the next; and whoso fights in God’s way, then, be he killed or be he victorious, we will give him a mighty hire.
What ails you that ye do not fight in God’s way, and for the weak men and women and children, who say, ‘Lord, bring us out of this town 19 of oppressive folk, and make for us from Thee a patron, and make for us from Thee a help?’
Those who believe fight in the way of God; and those who disbelieve fight in the way of Tâghût; fight ye then against the friends of Satan, verily, Satan’s tricks are weak.
Do ye not see those to whom it is said, ‘Restrain your hands, and be steadfast in prayer and give alms;’ and when it is prescribed for them to fight then a band of them fear men, as though it were the fear of God or a still stronger fear, and they say, ‘O our Lord! why hast thou prescribed for us to fight, couldst thou not let us abide till our near appointed time?’ Say, ‘The enjoyment of this world is but slight, and the next is better for him who fears;’—but they shall not be wronged a straw.

...
Why are ye two parties about the hypocrites, when God hath overturned them for what they earned? Do ye wish to guide those whom God hath led astray? Whoso God hath led astray ye shall not surely find for him a path. They would fain that ye misbelieve as they misbelieve, that ye might be alike; take ye not patrons from among them until they too flee in God’s way; but if they turn their backs, then seize them and kill them wheresoever ye find them, and take from them neither patron nor help,—save those who reach a people betwixt whom and you is an alliance—or who come to you while their bosoms prevent them from fighting you or fighting their own people. But had God pleased He would have given you dominion over them, and they would surely have fought you. But if they retire from you and do not fight you, and offer you peace,—then God hath given you no way against them.
Ye will find others who seek for quarter from you, and quarter from their own people; whenever they return to sedition they shall be overturned therein: but if they retire not from you, nor offer you peace, nor restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wheresoever ye find them;—over these we have made for you manifest power.

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