October 8, 2003

JIHAD, THEN AND NOW, PT. II

by Srdja Trifkovic

Islam, the West, and the Serbs: Matica Srpska, September 11, 2003
JIHAD TODAY

Fast-forwarding to our own age, it is remarkable that in this era of rampant victimology the persecution of Christians by Muslims has become a taboo subject in the West. A complex web of myths, outright lies, and deliberately imposed silence dominates it. Thirteen centuries of religious discrimination, causing suffering and death of countless millions, have been covered by the myth of Islamic "tolerance"-a myth is as hurtful to the few descendants of the victims as it is useless as a means of appeasing latter-day jihadists. The silence and lies, perpetrated by the Western academe and media class, facilitates the perpetuation of religious discrimination and persecution even today.

The upholders of the myth of Islamic tolerance are secular Western freethinkers who hate persecution and discrimination, sexual, racial, religious, or any other, with one exception: when Christians are the victims. Recent attempts by some apologists for Islam in the West-notably a British journalist by the name of Noel Malcolm-to present the sordid and cruel Ottoman overlordship in southeast Europe as "tolerant," or even enlightened, are as intellectually dishonest as they are factually insupportable.

Even after September 11 the myth lives on all over the Western world, perhaps even more strongly than before. Attempts by Islamic apologists to assure the West of the "spiritual" definition of Jihad brush up centuries of very physical "striving" by generations of Muslim warriors. It is true that "Muslims are called by the Qura'an and the example of the Prophet of Islam to strive for Peace through all available means," but the "Peace" that is called upon believers to implement is impossible unless it is established under Islamic rule ("A Christian Perception of Islam: the Struggle for Dialogues and Peace," Palestine Times, 8/1997). This is exactly the same definition of "peace" as that used by the Soviet empire in the period of its external expansion (1944-1979). The jihadi campaigns fought by the Muslims in Spain, France, India, Iran, throughout the Balkans or at the gates of Vienna, were as defensive as Stalin's war with Finland, or the "counterattack" against Poland by his German colleague.

While Islam differs in its details from other utopian ideologies, it closely resembles them in scope and ambition. Like communism and fascism, it offers a vanguard ideology; a complete program to improve man and create a new society; complete control over that society; and cadres ready, even eager, to spill blood (Daniel Pipes. "There Are No Moderates: Dealing with Fundamentalist Islam." National Interest, Fall 1995). In all cases the lust for other people's possessions and sheer power over their lives have been justified by a self-justifying ideology that perverts meanings of words, stunts the sense of moral distinctions, and destroys souls.

The Western world has refused for decades to take stock of this phenomenon and to devise defensive strategies. Wore still, in the final phase of the Cold War the strategy of effective support for Islamic ambitions in pursuit of short-term political or military objectives of the United States has helped turn Islamic radicalism into a truly global phenomenon. The underlying assumption was that militant Muslims could be puffed up, used, and eventually discarded-like Diem, Noriega, the Shah, the Contras.

The Kaiser lived to regret giving passage to Lenin on that sealed train in 1917, but in Washington the lessons of that episode remained unlearnt. In 1998, former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski described how the Carter Administration had instigated Islamic resistance to the pro-Soviet government in Afghanistan and thus maneuvered Moscow into military intervention (French original is here). Asked if he had any regrets about the consequences of that operation almost two decades later, Dr. Brzezinski was indignant: "Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? … What matters more to world history, the Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?" But isn't Islamic fundamentalism a world menace today?-he was asked. "Nonsense!" he replied, "There is no global Islam."

Dr. Brzezinski would probably choose his words more guardedly today, but it is a matter of amply documented record that, despite the Islamic revolution in Iran that had taken place only months earlier, the policy makers in Washington had not treated Islamic fundamentalist ideology in adversarial terms until it started attacking America. Having enlisted militant Islam in the destruction of communism, the ruling establishment used it to erode the reliquiae reliquiarum of Christian roots in the Western world through Muslim mass immigration. The assumption has been that the Islamic genie released by Dr. Brzezinski's excellent idea could be controlled through Muslims' immersion in the consumerist subculture, and through their children's multicultural indoctrination by state education.

For most Muslim countries demography is a political weapon. They will gladly export their surplus population to Europe and America, aware that the bigger the diaspora, the greater the political influence it will exert. Maintaining the loyalty of the diaspora has been a top priority. The result is that Islam is today the fastest growing faith in the Western world, and 20 million inhabitants of the European Union are self-avowedly Muslims. If present trends continue, by 2020 Muslims will be over 10% of the population of Europe, and exceed ten million in America. This population is expanding by immigration and an enormous birth rate that far exceeds that of the indigenous population. In 30 years the Muslim population of Great Britain rose from 82,000 to two million. In Germany there are four million Muslims, mostly Turks, and over five million across the Rhine in France, mostly North Africans. There are a million Muslims each in Italy and the Netherlands, and half-a-million in Spain-that is, more than in the last two centuries of the Caliphate of Cordoba. A tenth of all babies born in EU countries are Muslim, and in the moribund Brussels the figure was over 50%. With the expanding numbers and the creation of distinctly Muslim neighborhoods in many European cities, the initial detachment of culture from territory has been reversed and the bold notion of conquest by demographic rather than military means entered the activists' minds.

The blueprint was developed over two decades ago, in 1981, when the Third Islamic Summit Conference of Kaaba adopted the "Mecca Declaration." It stated, inter alia,
We have resolved to conduct Jihad with all the means at our disposal so as to free our territory from occupation. We are convinced of the need to propagate the precepts of Islam and its cultural influence in Muslim societies and throughout the world.
In the ensuing two decades a new mosque was opened somewhere in the Western world. Pledges to propagate Islam were advanced irrespective of the fact that the signers of the Declaration openly oppressed non-Muslim communities in their own lands, or prevented them from being established at all. Radical Muslims dominate the Islamic life in the West, to the point that moderates, even if they exist, hardly have a voice. They control major Muslim organizations, a majority of mosques and newspapers. They manipulate the public and politicians hiding under non-profit ‘religious charities,' and the buzzword of human rights.

This reality is denied by western secularists. The old liberal-secular antipathy to Christianity has converged with political correctness to produce a climate wherein it is easy for the Muslims to lie about the true nature of Islam. Defense against such lies is difficult when it is deemed "insensitive" to respond to them with facts and in plain language. This refusal is justified by "sensitivity" and "multiculturalism." Post-national, secular host governments do not see their countries as real communities, rooted in the continuity of shared memories and cultural legacies. They do not see them as entities that ultimately belong to the majority of people inhabiting them and bearing their name, and not to whatever random melange happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment in time. This extends to both sides of the Atlantic. In America, two years ago today, it had fatal consequences.

Is defense possible? The totalitarian nature of Islam makes the threat different in degree to that faced during the Cold War, but not in kind. It demands a similar response. Perhaps only one in a hundred communists was an active Soviet spy; maybe not one in a hundred Muslim immigrants is an active bin Laden asset. Nevertheless, managing the communist risk fifty years ago entailed denying entry visas (let alone permanent residences or passports) to self-avowed Party members. Like communism, Islam relies on a domestic fifth column to subvert the enemy. It also relies on an army of fellow-travelers, on "liberal academics and opinion-makers [who] sympathize with Islam because it is a leading historical rival of the Western civilization they hate" (Philip Jenkins in Chronicles, September 2001). But once it is accepted that Islam does not recognize a priori the right of other religions or outlooks to exist-least of all atheistic secular humanism-a serious anti-terrorist strategy will finally become possible. It would need to include an immediate moratorium on all immigration from the risk-nations. Westerners are being indoctrinated into the dogma that unceasing immigration on a vast scale is unstoppable because it is due to inexorable global market forces. This is not true. Free citizens must not submit their destiny, and that of their progeny, to a historicist fallacy. Immigration can and should be subject to the democratic will of the people.

In longer-term strategy a wider paradigm shift in the U.S. foreign policy is needed, based on the need for a genuine Northern Alliance of Russia, Europe, and North America, coupled with either the abolition of NATO or Russia's inclusion in it as an equal and welcome partner. The prerequisite is to revise Samuel Huntington, who mistakenly puts Orthodoxy in the same league with Islam vis-a-vis "the West." This is absurd. Cold War nostalgists of Paul Wolfowitz's ilk should discard their blinkers. Their overall attitude toward Orthodox nations today is strongly reminiscent of that of the West toward the East as the dying Byzantine, Bulgarian, and Serbian states faced Ottoman conquest in the 15th century. The West then was explicit: We will help you if you submit. The Serbs are being told today, again, that unless they unquestioningly submit to the West's tutelage in political, social, moral, and economic matters, they again will be thrown to the wolves.

What are the prospects for restoring-or rather creating-a sense of unity among Europeans, East and West (including trans-Atlantic ones)? A pessimist view holds that nothing much can be done: the regimes of all the major states of the West are controlled by revolutionary elite classes that hate Christianity and European civilization. To many of them the enemy is not Islam but the traditional culture and belief systems. The only way for the West to reclaim its identity and refuse to allow itself to be infiltrated and finally destroyed by Islam is for the Christophobic elites-the real enemy within-to be subjected to democratic control. Only then will it be possible to contain Islam. The first task, then, is to expose the enemy within the West, manifested in the neo-imperial hubris and globalization that destroys identities and thus paves the way for Islam. The second is to help people trapped in Islam to become free.

There is a huge problem for all Muslims-the violent message of the Koran. We cannot solve it for them, and we should not be asked to deem the problem solved by pretending that the Koran is a pacifist tract. Humans are perfectly capable of reintepreting scripture when necessary, but until Muslims themselves renounce the ideals of jihad, terror, tax and subjugation we must have the guts to call a religion of war by its right name.

"As a man thinketh, so is he." The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural recourses or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest "what was divine in human nature," ended it-a quarter o a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later-by concluding that "Muslims are the first victims of Islam" and that, therefore, "to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him."

The West is yet to learn, fully, the lesson that the Serbs were forced to learn six centuries ago: that Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to compromise with madness is to become part of the madness oneself. The quarrel is not of our choosing, and those who submit to that faith must solve the problem they set themselves. Until they explicitly and permanently renounce jihad, Serbs and Westerners would be well advised not to allow their differences-real and complex as they are-to prevent them from acting together before it is too late.

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