Recently I published a pair of articles proposing in the first a series of severe legislative measures to curtail, if not eliminate, the carnage of jihad inflicted upon innocent people in all walks of life, and suggesting in the second that Islam, unlike Christianity, Judaism, and other faiths, should not be entitled to the protection of the First Amendment. In the sequel, I received a couple of messages accusing me of promoting a “final solution.” One from a former colleague read: Bravo. Your final solution is so simple and elegant. Another from a friend read, in part: Implicit in all your articles is that Islam…should or be made to disappear. The case against Islam taken to its extreme begins to sound very close to a “final solution.” Do we want or should we want to go there?
My former colleague appears never to have read the Islamic scriptures and ancillary texts and obviously has little knowledge of Islamic history. My friend is considerably more erudite but seems, nonetheless, to believe that direct and aggressive confrontation is not the proper route to take. To imply that I, a Jew, am advocating a “final solution,” an Endlösung, is at the very least rather tactless. It is also, as I hope to show, the height of folly. What I said in my articles is that the terror apparatus needs to be dismantled without delay or equivocation, and that we have to go to the source of the violence, Islam itself. I was not advocating killing anyone, or rounding Muslims up in cattle cars and shipping them off to concentration camps, or burning ghettoes and no-go zones to the ground.
I said in particular that terror mosques have to be investigated and if necessary shut down (military-grade weapons have been found in a German mosque, but jihadist-inspired sermons are also heavy weapons), that no-go zones have to be disarmed and opened to safe public dwelling, that Sharia, a draconian atavism incompatible with our constitutions, should be outlawed, that unscreened immigration simply has to stop, and that the status of Islam as a “religion” entitled to the shelter of the First Amendment is a legitimate issue to be debated—at least until the Koran, Hadith, Sira, schools of jurisprudence, etc. are sanitized, if ever.
My friend replied to a stern rebuke in partial walkback fashion. Of course, I’m not suggesting that you’re advocating an actual “final solution,” that’s absurd…Explicit in your many articles is that any decent, self-respecting, tolerant Muslim should…defect from Islam (reject the Koran, for all the reasons you have been laying out for years). Their example, taken to the extreme, would have Islam disappear gently into the night, which would be like a “final solution.” That’s all I’m saying. He continued: What your latest article doesn’t allow re. religious protection is a reformation within Islam, which I believe has already begun.
The question is: how long are we willing to wait for this putative reformation to bear fruit? I see a few “moderates” here and there trying to effect change, but they are having little appreciable impact, and most still adhere to the adulation of Mohammed, turn a blind eye to the dictates of their faith, or pretend the offending passages, with which the scriptures and commentaries are replete, mean something other than what they explicitly say.
A substantial and rooted reformation of Islam is the pipe dream of the cowed and complaisant who cannot face the indigestible fact that Islam is at war with us, has been at war with the Judeo-Christian West (and other civilizations) for fourteen hundred years, and shows no sign of relenting. I’d also suggest—assuming reform were conceivable—that my proposals, if taken seriously, might accelerate the reform my correspondent is piously wishing for. With terror mosques closed and fundamentalist Islam in official disgrace, true reformers might gather momentum. But this is only a thought-experiment.
The exception to the rule of Islamic hegemony, according to Supra Zaida Peery, executive director of Muslim World Today, appears to be Azerbaijan, with its history, at least since independence from the Soviet bloc in 1991, of “egalitarianism, democracy, and rule of law.” Such advancements are possible only where the Islamic scriptures are studiously disregarded, which reinforces the argument that canonical Islam is anti-freedom and an ever-present danger.
Ms. Peery admits that traditional Islam, honor codes and all, is making a comeback. Azerbaijan also enjoys strong relations with Erdogan’s Turkey, a political alliance that provokes a degree of skepticism respecting Ms. Peery’s claims. Everything considered, I would agree with Danusha Goska’s critical review of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Heretic: Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now—a book which claims that Islam is susceptible, however tardily, to modernization. Goska writes: “We must confront jihad for what it is: a timeless and universal threat that requires an equally timeless and universal response.”
I have nothing against Muslims practicing their faith in their homes, as long as they don’t take its injunctions to rape, enslave, subjugate and murder in the name of Allah literally, and I have nothing against imams sermonizing from an extensively expurgated Koran—though their temples should have no greater legal status than, say, a Masonic clubhouse.
Meanwhile we line up at airports, remove our shoes, wait interminably to be processed, and expect to be groped—followed by the apprehension, shared by many, that the flight we have boarded may disappear off the radar. Meanwhile the French police are patrolling the beaches lest some “scantily clad” woman or child is knifed by some offended Muslim, as happened not long ago, a Jewish man in Strasbourg is stabbed by an Allahu Akbarist, seven people including a six-year-old child are injured in a “fire and knife” attack on a Swiss train, and an American tourist is stabbed to death in London’s busy Russell Square by a Somalian. “He’s still here, he’s still here,” were the dying woman’s last words, and indeed he is.
Meanwhile entire cities go into lockdown and people are warned to stay indoors after another jihadist onslaught. Meanwhile Pew polls report that young, second-generation Muslims—those we thought were Westernized “moderates”—increasingly favor death for apostates and gays and harsh punishment for criticism of Islam. Meanwhile countries are being swarmed with military-age “refugees,” a troubling number of whom are estimated to be ISIS plants or sympathizers; German intelligence official Manfred Hauser warns that ISIS has infiltrated the migrant hordes and set up a command structure in the country. Patrick Poole reports that the first two weeks of August 2016 have seen five dozen incidents of Muslim-related domestic insurgency in Europe. (As I write, a Muslim convert armed with detonation devices has just been shot by the RCMP in an Ontario community.)
The very conduct of our lives has changed—it’s called the “new normal.” We now hear from the lips of French Prime Minister Manuel Valls that we will have to “learn to live with terrorism.” Is this OK? Are we prepared to accept the limitations upon our traditional freedoms and the ever-present threat of violence upon our persons as a customary aspect of daily life in the hope that one day in the indefinite future the “religion of peace” will become a religion of peace? As things stand, our enemies are laughing all the way to the future.
More to the point, the irony very few observers wish to acknowledge—and certainly not my interlocutors—is that it is no one and nothing but Islam that is pursuing a “final solution “—and not only for Jews. Read the Koran and the Hadith. Consider, among many other passages and commands:
- Koran 2:191-193 (And kill them wherever you find them…)
- Koran 2:216 (Fighting is prescribed for you…)
- Koran 3:151 (Soon shall we cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers…)
- Koran 4:74 (Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other…be he slain or victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward)
- Koran 8:39 (And fight with them until there is no more unbelief and religion is all for Allah)
- Koran 9:5: (When the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them…—though jihadists today do not wait for the sacred months to pass)
- Koran 9:21 (Fight those who believe not in Allah…even if they are People of the Book—i.e., Jews and Christians)
- Koran 9:41 (Go forth, light armed and heavy armed, and strive with your wealth and your lives in the way of Allah)
- Koran 9:73 (O Prophet! Strive hard against the unbelievers and the hypocrites and be unyielding to them…)
- Hadith, Sahih Muslim 041,6985: (Abu Huraira reported Allah’s Messenger [may peace be upon him] as saying: The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him…)
- Hadith Sahih Muslim 020,4712: (You shall conquer many lands and Allah will grant you victories over your enemies in battle, but none of you should stop practicing for war.)
- Hadith Sahih Bukhari 4,52,196: (I have been directed to fight the Kafir until everyone admits “There is only one god and that is Allah.”)
- Hadith Sahih Muslim 020,4681: (Certainly the gates of Paradise lie in the shade of swords), and 020,4696: (The man who dies without participating in jihad, who never desired to wage war, dies the death of a hypocrite.).
This is a radically abbreviated gazette; the litany does not stop there. And one must remember that these are the words of the Prophet and his God; as such they are incumbent upon every believing Muslim, and form the basis for the war of civilizations that began in the early 7th century and has not abated since. If we insist that this does not constitute a “final solution,” then we are quite simply lying to ourselves and deserve the fate that will befall us. To adapt the Islamic terminology, we are “unbelievers” in the sense that we refuse to believe our eyes and we are “hypocrites” in that we condemn others both for our cowardice and for the very crimes of Islam.
Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of the political magazine Chronicles, author of The Sword of the Prophet, and professor of international relations at the University of Banja Luka in Bosnia and Herzegovina, foresees the Islamic conquista of a “soft, genderless” Europe, expedited by “an implacably suicidal ruling class.” Trifkovic is worth attending to. The last paragraph of his chilling and premonitory article, “Europe’s Dark Hour,” reads in part: “The lesson of Europe for America is clear: The emergence of an autonomous and politically untouchable Muslim diaspora must be prevented. It is in the American interest for the U.S. government to introduce an open-ended moratorium on Muslim immigration now, while those who are present still lack the numbers and infrastructure to wreak havoc. In addition, Islamic activism should be treated as grounds for the exclusion or deportation of any alien…The alternative is the predictable pattern of terrorist violence, social corrosion, and cultural decline that we are witnessing in today’s Europe.”
Meanwhile the killings and atrocities will continue, increasing in frequency and scale. At the same time Islam is embedding itself in our governments and social institutions. So how long are we willing to wait? I suspect that if we ourselves are harmed, if the people we love are maimed or murdered, our patience might run out. I suspect that if we are hauled into court by some Muslim organization (I speak from experience) for exercising our free-speech rights and speaking truth backed by evidence, and emerge beaten, humiliated or nearly bankrupt—because the plaintiff is flush with Qatari cash and we have only a salary and a suborned judiciary–we might find ourselves short of tolerant forbearance. I suspect that if we are on the receiving end, not of counter arguments but of death threats and salvos of unspeakable vulgarity (I speak from experience), we might think this has gone on long enough. I suspect that if we find ourselves fired from our jobs or fined large sums of money because of a Facebook post deemed offensive by our Islamophilic authorities, we might find ourselves less forgiving.
But those who have so far managed to keep a safe distance from the looming storm cannot be expected to think clearly and soberly. Living inside the beltways, gated communities and ivory towers of an obsequious serenity is only a temporary arrangement. Of this we can be sure: complacency is the mother of false immunity. Thus, it comes as no surprise to read Ottawa Citizen editor-in-chief Andrew Potter’s recent article in the National Post in which we are smugly informed that, in the face of multiple casualty attacks, “Canadians should keep calm and carry on” since it would be “an enormous mistake to panic.” After all, he concludes, “the Canadian model is working…much better than it is in the U.S. or in parts of Europe.”
The witlessness on display here is stunning. The Muslim population in Canada is roughly 3.2% and growing worrisomely; the Canadian multicultural model does not inspire prolonged confidence. In the U.S. estimates tend to vary but the ratio appears to be between 1% and 2.2%, though the raw numbers are larger than Canada’s, somewhere in the vicinity of 3 to 6+ million; in the UK the census proportion is 4.6%; in Germany 5%; and in France it is approximately 10%. Has Potter never heard of the rule of numbers, which Raymond Ibrahim defines as: “The more Muslims grow in numbers, the more Islamic phenomena intrinsic to the Muslim world—in this case, brazen violence against ‘infidels’—appear.” The evidence Ibrahim provides is irrefutable. Incidentally, Potter begins his article by referring to Daniel Pipes as the “all-round scourge of Islam,” which should instantly discredit anything he has to say, given Pipes’ misplaced trust in so-called “moderate” Islam as an antidote to “radical” Islam and his peroxide distinction between “Islamism” and Islam.
Of course, Potter is no Trifkovic but a representative figure of a culture that has received its talking points from a myopic and self-destructive progressivist zeitgeist. The rhetoric in play in such boilerplate productions comes far too easily, flatters one’s sense of righteousness, and renders us increasingly vulnerable. Its effect is to lull us to sleep while the house is catching fire.
Furthermore, Islamic violence does not derive from a list of presumably justified complaints and resentments against the West, as many of us have been schooled to believe, and will not cease if we apologize, withdraw or provide reparations. As Ibrahim writes in The Al-Qaeda Reader, Islam’s war with the West “is not finite and limited to political grievances—real or imagined—but is existential, transcending time and space and deeply rooted in faith.” If more proof were needed aside from commonsense attention and a modicum of knowledge, a recent document issued by ISIS, Why We Hate You & Why We Fight You, cited by Ibrahim, makes it strikingly clear: “We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers; you reject the oneness of Allah…we have been commanded to fight the disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims, or by paying jizyah [poll tax]…and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims.”
Let there, then, be no more talk of a “final solution” except where it applies. Meanwhile, there’s nothing like a dose of reality to awaken the sleeper and alert him to Islamic Jihad’s chief weapons, our own ignorance and complacency. So far most of us have been pretty well spared. But if our bedtime reverie continues, that’s not going to last forever.
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