Islam, Peace and an Irish King

Since the jihad against the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, US officials and civic leaders have been wringing their hands over the "racist stereotyping" of Moslems, over assaults on Moslems in US cities, and insisting over and over that the "vast majority of Moslems" oppose terrorism and violence, that Islam is the religion of peace. Even the assimilationist liberals among US Jews have been spending more time on denouncing the "stereotyping of Moslems" and protecting Arab civil rights than on anything else.

Now let us be clear. Yes, the word "Islam" comes from Salaam or peace. Yes, there are some Moslems who have consistently opposed violence and terror, although they are a small minority. The vast majority of Moslems have condoned and endorsed terrorist violence, especially when directed against Jewish children and civilians.

Yes, for centuries Islamic civilization was the most advanced and most tolerant and most enlightened on the planet. Islamic civilization preserved the ancient Classical Greek and Roman learning, invented algebra and chemistry, led the world of scholarship. The great tragedy of Islam is that this brilliant civilization of the seventh through fifteenth centuries has long ago degenerated into savage barbarism, where violence is commonly worshipped. Where - aside from Turkey - no Moslem country has embraced democracy or freedom or tolerance or diversity.

One of the unchallenged axioms of American civic religion is that each and every group of people on earth must consist of an "overwhelmingly vast majority of decent hard-working honest people who want peace and are tolerant and freedom-loving and anti-violence."

It is an unchallengeable presumption of this theology that "vast majorities" of not only each and every racial/religious/ethnic group may be so described, but even vast majorities of each and any subgroup within society. Hence we even sometimes hear assertions that the vast majority of prisoners, prostitutes, drug users, gang members, etc. are also decent, honest, peace-loving, honorable people.

The one imponderable in American civic theology is the idea that somewhere out there someplace there just might be a group of people, the majority of whom are NOT peace-loving or honest or tolerant. This belief in universal peacefulness in the minds of Americans is the main obstacle to Americans ever understanding the Middle East. The simple fact of the matter is that the overwhelmingly vast majority of Arabs, and the overwhelmingly vast majority of Moslems, are not peace-loving and are not opposed to violence.

Noting this could not be more timely. Commentator after commentator among the Western media discuss the reactions in the Moslem world to the atrocities in the US with the self-righteous, fawning observation that Islam is a religion of peace, that the terrorists are about as representative of true Islam as the IRA bombers are of Catholicism or as white supremacists are of Christianity. Each commentator goes out of his way to emphasize how we all understand that the vast majority of Moslems oppose terrorism and violence.

The only problem with this is that it is simply false and empirically disprovable. It is wishful thinking. The vast majority of Germans supported Hitler, supported wars of aggression, and supported genocide. The vast majorities of Hutus and Tutsis support massacres of the other. Similarly, the vast majority of Arabs support terror and violence and war.

They do not see anything wrong with the blowing up of hundreds of civilians in an Embassy of the United States or in an office building of Argentinean Jews. They see any act of force taken against the perpetrators of such things to be itself a crime (this is not to say that the vast majority of each and every subgroup of Moslems support such barbarism; the Turks and Indonesian-Malays come to mind as possible exceptions).

True, Islam is a religion of peace and its very name derives from salaam - peace. However, it is a religion of peace with other Moslems and for non-Moslems living under the clear domination of Moslems. True also, the vast majority of Moslems do not personally engage in violence and terror in their daily lives. The vast majority of Germans did not take personal part in the Holocaust. Indeed, as a blanket statement regarding Arabs in Israel, I would say that most Arabs exhibit on average far better manners and more consideration than do Jewish Israelis. Of course that is hardly the point.

The vast majority of Moslems support the random and indiscriminate use of terror and violence against Jews and against Americans. The reactions of Moslems everywhere are there on the TV screens for all to see and will be more unambiguously pro-terror the moment the US begins to attack Afghanistan and/or Iraq.

Arab political thought is fundamentally Orwellian: murder is peace, prevention of murder or retaliation for murder is terror. Moslems were outraged by events in the Balkans because Moslems are being massacred, but if Bosnians and Albanians were instead massacring Serbs, they would have trouble hiding their approval and delight. We have also known for decades that the vast majority of Moslems also approve of Palestinian atrocities and bombings directly against Jews. There is no act of savagery directed against Israelis or Jews of which they will not approve by enormous majorities and no act of defense by Israel that they will legitimize.

Public opinion polls are not conducted in most Moslem countries, but if they were they would no doubt reflect this popular approval. Polls ARE conducted among Palestinians and they show without exception that Palestinians approve of bombings and suicide bombs and atrocities committed against Jews, by enormous majorities. Their approval rates have generally increased with each Israeli concession to them under Oslo. The vast majority of Palestinians support Saddam Hussein. The vast majority probably support Bin Laden and the bombings of the Americans. There have been massive anti-American marches by the Palestinian brownshirts and US flags have been burned throughout the Palestinian zones. The vast majority would probably approve if Iran or Iraq dumped chemical weapons or nerve gas on Tel Aviv. These are the people with whom Oslo is supposed to produce peace.

Oh, you might object, but Arafat has denounced bin Laden and even endorsed the US bombings in Sudan and Afghanistan. Well, yes he did, no doubt hoping thus to get the US to force Israel to make a few more concessions as quid pro quo and he was no doubt as sincere as were the IRA folks who denounced the bombing of Omagh. The Palestinian fascist hordes, taking their signals from the PLO, know he is posturing and winking and these folks support bin Laden by overwhelming majorities.

Now the entire Oslo "peace process" is based on the naive American civic dogma, adopted by Israeli politicians, holding that the vast majority of Palestinians want peace with Israel. They do not. Unless of course one means the sort of peace that prevailed and prevails in traditional Islamic societies, where the non-Moslems live as low-profile minorities with no political sovereignty (the vast majority of Germans, one supposes, would have favored peace in 1940 if they could have gotten it on Hitler´s terms).

The vast majority of Palestinians want to see Israel destroyed and support all violence against Jews. Once Israel is destroyed and large portions of its population are killed or dispersed, no doubt the remainder will be permitted to live under conditions resembling those of the Copts in Egypt or the Armenians and Bahais in Iran. That is the only peace Arabs want.

Sweeney was the name of an Irish king who believed he was a bird and spent his life in treetops. The Oslo "peace process" is the direct function of the Sweeneyization of the political establishment of Israel. Peres Sweeney and Beilin Sweeney adopted the wishful thinking of American civic religion, presumed that the vast majority of Palestinians prefer peace and prosperity to continuing war and violence. They took it as axiomatic that Palestinians would compromise over land and sovereignty because, after all, they were willing to do so. Their evidence that Palestinians would place peace above land is that Jews do so. Their belief that economic prosperity would interest Palestinians more than irredentist aggression and terror is that decent honorable people anywhere should feel this way. In short, Oslo is the godchild of King Sweeney taking over the Israeli Labor Party, Meretz and even swaths of the Likud.

These Sweeneyites are the same people who refuse to even ponder the possibility that the vast majorities of Palestinians, other Arabs and Moslems are not at all peace-seeking (at least not when it comes to Israel and the US), are not anti-violence, are not anti-terror. In other words, Oslo is based upon a fundamental denial of empirical reality. Like the old Peter and Gordon song from the 60´s, "I don´t care what they say I won´t stay in a world without love." What happens to Sweeneys who live in unlit corners of the earth without love? They pretend to be birds and rise above such mundane things as reality to live in treetops of utopian dreams. Leaving the rest of us to face terror, murder, violence, Arab fascism and threats of genocidal extermination

In the Arabic language, the word Islam means "surrender" or "submission"-submission to the will of God. A follower of Islam is called a Muslim, which in Arabic means "one who surrenders to God."

Islam

[Arabic 'islâm, submission, from 'aslama, to surrender, resign oneself, from Syriac 'ašlem.]

[Arab., = submission to, or having peace with, God]

"There is not a Musselman alive who would not imagine that he was performing an action pleasing to God and his Holy Prophet by exterminating every Christian on earth, while the Christians are scarcely more tolerant on their side." -- Denis Diderot (1713-84), French philosopher. Conversations with a Christian Lady (written 1774; published 1777; repr. in Selected Writings, ed. by Lester G. Crocker, 1966).

"Muhammad is the Messenger of God, and those who are with him are hard against the unbelievers, merciful one to another. Thou seest them bowing, prostrating, seeking bounty from God and good pleasure. Their mark is on their faces, the trace of prostration…. God has promised those of them who believe and do deeds of righteousness forgiveness and a mighty wage." Qur'an. Victory 48:35 (ed. by Arthur J. Arberry, 1955).

"Muhammad brought down from heaven and put into the Koran not religious doctrines only, but political maxims, criminal and civil laws, and scientific theories. The Gospels, on the other hand, deal only with the general relations between man and God and between man and man. Beyond that, they teach nothing and do not oblige people to believe anything. That alone, among a thousand reasons, is enough to show that Islam will not be able to hold its power long in ages of enlightenment and democracy, while Christianity is destined to reign in such ages, as in all others." Alexis de Tocqueville (1805-59), French social philosopher. Democracy in America, vol. 2, pt. 1, ch. 5 (1840).

Whoever wrote this article should really do some research before he flys off the handle like this. Arabic society was the jewel of civilization from the 10th until the early 13th centuries. As he implied, they were the preservers of classical Greek, Roman, and Byzantine learning. Their advances in agriculture are still the basis of farming today. They did not "devolve" into barbarism... What actually happened was that the Mongols invaded and virtually levelled the entire Middle East, as was their general practice. The Arabic civilization was destroyed, completely and utterly. By necessity, the inhabtants of the Middle East shifted their energies from intellectual growth to simple survival. Much of their great teachings were lost to them from that point. Any scholar of the region will point to the Mongol invasion and say that the region still has never recovered.

As for dealings with Muslims in our country, I know many Muslims, and to a person they are fine, loyal, patriotic Americans. Terrorists are the exception, not the norm.

I wish writers would quit praising Turkey as a relatively "good" Muslim country, as follows:

The great tragedy of Islam is that this brilliant civilization of the seventh through fifteenth centuries has long ago degenerated into savage barbarism, where violence is commonly worshipped. Where - aside from Turkey - no Moslem country has embraced democracy or freedom or tolerance or diversity.

Turkey may be officially secularized, suppressing Islamic political parties for political reasons, but it is still a society based on a thousand years of imperial oppression and massacres of Christian populations in the Middle East and the Balkans, as recently as 1955, when half a million Greek natives of Constantinople (currently named Istanbul) were driven out, and in 1974, with the Turkish invasion and ethnic cleansing of northern Cyprus. (Not to mention the massacre of Armenians in 1915, which the military allies of Turkey such as the US and Israel wish to downplay.)

Considering how they ruled their fellow-Muslim Arabs for centuries and still suppress the fellow-Muslim Kurds, it seems backwards for the West to continually go of their way to keep praising the Turks as "good" Muslims, when history proves the opposite.

Tolerance, the way the leftist liberal socialist societal engineers have defined it, will be the undoing of America. We have come to believe that we must tolerate even those belief systems and behvaior patterns that are proven to be corrosive to our 'sovereignty of the people' based nation. What happens with this sort of tolerance that promotes blindness is as follows (and we've seen it played out with the ACLU repeatedly): the loud voices accusing someone of intolerance are given empowerment and those pointing to the tyranny of the special groups being afforded special rights are silenced. The net result is, the corrosive and intolerant special groups achieve privilege in the destruction of true freedom and individual rights of others. How is it sane to grant a special privilege to women to murder the unborn? By disregarding the fundamental humanity of the exploited unborn in granting special rights becuase of the women's clamor! How will the terrorists being tolerated and hidden in the Muslim community be free to attack US from within? By being granted special privilege from profiling, in the name of religious toleration ... yet the special interest group--the Muslim community--doesn't adhere to the same rules of toleration!

Who can find in the Constitution the direction that this nation must tolerate any group which seeks to destroy this nation's principles and reshape the fundamentals? The Islamic religion as forwarded by the bin Ladens in their terrorist assault on Western Civilization are appealing to a fundamental aspect of Islam, INTOLERANCE. Will the sheeple of America recognize this ruse, this satanic wolf in 'peaceful' Islamic clothing? I doubt it!... Most of the American Muslim community secretly (and not so secretly of late) longs for a leader who will make up their minds for them, to relieve them of the burden to think and open their hearts to a personal relationship with God the Creator, allowing a Mullah or Imam to be their heart and mind.

I'm greatly encouraged when I hear Fouad Ajami say 'We' when referring to this nation against bin Laden and the intolerant, totalitarian fundamentalism of the bin Laden types. Sadly, Fouad speaks for rational minds but the ones leading the majority of Mosques in America are not from his traditions, they are from the madrassa of fundamentalism and absolute intolerance of other religions. At first, it seems paradoxical that tolerance, which is the foundation of our Republican freedoms, would be our downfall. But to tolerate that which seeks to destroy the pool in which tolerance may flourish is counterculture. The single biggest problem when trying to defend this nationa against internal corrosion is achieving consensus ... and the enemy knows this, hence the dissonance regarding Islam as 'peace' when it is totally intolerant and thus can never be at peace with other religions for very long, for it must be dominant to squelch any alternate voices that may expose the ungodly basis for Islam, the rpomotion of works as a means to force God's response to open paradise.

This is going to get much more messy within America, before we begin to see a light in the distance. One need only notice the absence of Muslim clerics openly denouncing the totalitarian fundamentalism to realize we have a populace among US who do not consider themselves Americans, rather they are Muslims living in the United States. it is the same phenomenon that underpinned the notion of 'african-american' except that religious intolerance is much more difficult to make peace with than social intolerance because--especially with religions like Islam--martyrdom is considered a righteous debt to be collected from God! How do you change the heart of someone who believes they can make God owe them? Such arrogance is insurmountable in the human sense. Pray! That's all I see as our alternative to change hearts darkened by a religion that promotes empowerment over God.

An excellent post.

Americans and liberal western Europeans of today are incapable of analytically evaluating a culture and the people who produced that culture. They are prisoners of an enlightenment sort of political philosophy which is fine when applied to some groups of western Europeans and select others.

Most Nazis, Huns, Mongols, Spartans, Vikings, Imperalist Romans, etc., simply did not think the way we do, nor view reality from our perspective. The same is true of the overwhelming number of Islamites. In that sense they are a historical anachronism.

Enlightenment philosophy is not an aspect of Islam, nor is secular humanism, Judaic morality or Christian morality.

Islam has become a militant, intolerant, aggressive faith which demands that all non-Muslims either convert or assume second-class citizenship. Any ideas which are inconsonant with their theology are viewed as being the product of Satan and deserving of destruction. They are what American liberals incorrectly portray Christian fundamentalists.

The closest modern analogies are with Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan during the Second World War. If you are not one of them, you are less than human.

Where do you get the grapes to call me a traitor, just 'cause you're a bigot? I work in national security and was in Crystal City 1/2 mile away when the plane hit the Pentagon. I am keenly aware of what's going on, I understand the enemy and the fight. I wholeheartedly support our military action to defend our nation and bring terrorists to justice. I suggest you educate yourself, learn what's going on instead of spouting uninformed and obtuse garbage like you just did. Attacking and harassing people just because they have different colored skin isn't going to solve anything. I'm not apologizing for Islamic fundamentalists or Saudis or whatever garbage you're spewing, I'm saying it's not right for you to condemn an American citizen and question their loyalty just because they're a Muslim. So cram it with walnuts, dude.

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