Hugh | Fitzgerald: Islamophobia? Not so fast And here a little something on "Islamophbia":

 Hugh | Fitzgerald: Islamophobia? Not so fast

And here a little something on "Islamophbia":

September 27, 2010 5:30 AM | 

Fitzgerald: Islamophobia? Not so fast

"Analysts both in the Muslim and the Western world by and large agree that “fear” and lack of objective dialogue are the root cause of Islamophobia and Anti-Americanism." – a statement by Abukar Arman in this article

Not so fast, buster. The word "Islamophobia" is not an acceptable term for intelligent apprehensions over Islam. For Islam is for its adherents a total belief-system whose central and moving idea is that of a complete division between Believer and Infidel. It asks of Believers that they offer their sole loyalty to Islam as a Total System, and to the Jihad, furthered through many conceivable instruments, to spread the dominance of Islam to lands that for now may still be under Infidel rule. Believers are also to ensure that dominance of Islam by removing "all obstacles" to its spread. They are to ensure that Muslims rule, and not just here or there, not just in the lands now part of Dar al-Islam or once part of Dar al-Islam, but everywhere.

The large-scale presence of Muslims in the Lands of the Infidels has brought about a situation, for those indigenous Infidels (and also for other non-indigenous arrivals, non-Muslim immigrants), that is unpleasant, expensive (the costs of monitoring, the costs of security, spiralling ever upward), and physically dangerous. Ask a Frenchman who dares to enter the "quartiers chauds" which are all over France. Or ask English residents of Birmingham and Bradford and Leeds and Manchester and parts of London, or ask Swedes in Malmo, or Dutch in Rotterdam and parts of Amsterdam.

"Islamophobia" is a word concocted to intimidate those who are rightly troubled, and more than troubled, by what they have learned of Islam largely through the observable behavior of Muslims not only in the West, but around the world -- and also through more and deeper study of the canonical texts and of the history of Jihad-conquest over the past 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies, and of the subsequent subjugation of many different non-Muslim peoples: Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others. The similarities in their treatment, and the similarities in the impulses and attitudes exhibited by Muslims over a wide area, are simply too great to ignore.

Likewise impossible to ignore are the problems of Muslims in Australia and England, in France and Germany, in Spain and Italy, in Belgium and the Netherlands, in Sweden and Denmark and Norway, or even, in far fewer numbers, in the United States and Canada. Everywhere they manifest the same kinds of hostility, the same kinds of wearing-away demands, the same false or real outrage, the same refusal to truly collaborate with the security services. They engage in constant attempts to undermine the most commonsensical of measures. They conduct sustained and cynical campaigns of Da'wa, often based on hiding the reality of Islam and offering the most superficial aspects of it (the rituals) to a vulnerable targeted audience of the economically and psychically marginal. And they do so many other things -- including the astonishing campaigns to shut down free speech everywhere, not only in Denmark (at Jyllands-Posten, which resulted in death threats directed at Danes from all over the Dar al-Islam) but also in The Netherlands (the murders of Pym Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh). Death threats have driven some out their jobs (Robert Redeker in France) and forced others to cease the expression of their views (Will Cummins in Great Britain). This is Islam On the March, completely determined to keep and hold and expand what it sees as its beachhead, and more than a beachhead, all over the Dar al-Harb.

The inability or willful refusal by many in the West to understand this is a product of many things. Among those things is sentimentalism about How All People Are the Same the Whole World Over and Everyone Wants the Same Thing, with its obvious variant, All Religions Are Equally Dangerous. Just look at a few of those blood-curdling lines about the Canaanites or some such in old Hebrew texts -- why, that makes Judaism just as dangerous, maybe more so, than Islam with whatever it is said to inculcate. Doesn't it?

What this transparent attempt at symmetry offers is not one falsehood but many. "Islamophobia" is a word used by apologists for Islam to avoid answering specific, detailed, and knowledgeable questions about Islam. These questions that cannot be answered, in truth, because if the truth were offered as an answer it would force Muslims themselves to indict Islam, to admit that what is in the texts is in the texts, and is taken seriously by a billion people -- and that those who do not take the texts seriously are not "moderate" Muslims but essentially bad Muslims, unobservant Muslims, Muslims who do not really believe. And there are far fewer of these than most non-Muslims assume. They are always open to the possibility of relapse, and certainly their progeny are, so that Infidels cannot base their own security and that of their institutions on the "hope" that those "moderate" -- i.e., bad -- Muslims will never change their minds, and that their children will continue in the same vein.

That is a wager that Infidels should not be asked to make: to bet their physical safety and that of their children and grandchildren, and that of their societies on those moderates. For those Infidel societies are already in various states of confusion and disarray, and are facing all kinds of problems. Such a bet could allow them to be done in by this Total Belief-System that originated 1350 years ago as an ideology, compounded of bits and pieces, distorted or misremembered, of both Judaism and Christianity, and with an admixture of pre-Islamic Arab paganism.

No. That should not be expected of us, the Infidels. We are not ready to concede or commit suicide.

[Posted by Hugh on January 26, 2007]