“Bleak” and “dark” — according to the New York Times in an extraordinary piece of pro-Muslim agitprop the other day, this is the view of Islam held by President Trump and his top aides. And this, needless to say, is a very bad thing:
It was at a campaign rally in August that President Trump most fully unveiled the dark vision of an America under siege by “radical Islam” that is now radically reshaping the policies of the United States.
On a stage lined with American flags in Youngstown, Ohio, Mr. Trump, who months before had called for a “total and complete shutdown” of Muslim immigration, argued that the United States faced a threat on par with the greatest evils of the 20th century. The Islamic State was brutalizing the Middle East, and Muslim immigrants in the West were killing innocents at nightclubs, offices and churches, he said. Extreme measures were needed.
“The hateful ideology of radical Islam,” he told supporters, must not be “allowed to reside or spread within our own communities.”
Mr. Trump was echoing a strain of anti-Islamic theorizing familiar to anyone who has been immersed in security and counterterrorism debates over the last 20 years. He has embraced a deeply suspicious view of Islam that several of his aides have promoted, notably retired Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, now his national security adviser, and Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s top strategist.
Please read the story at the link and parse it carefully, for this is how the mouthpieces of the Left masquerading as news organizations will henceforth attempt to take down the Trump administration, strangling the baby in its cradle if it can, but promising four years of biased, negative coverage. It’s all part of the “Resistance,” the movement to delegitimize the new president even before he has fully taken the reins of office.
This worldview borrows from the “clash of civilizations” thesis of the political scientist Samuel P. Huntington, and combines straightforward warnings about extremist violence with broad-brush critiques of Islam. It sometimes conflates terrorist groups like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State with largely nonviolent groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood and its offshoots and, at times, with the 1.7 billion Muslims around the world. In its more extreme forms, this view promotes conspiracies about government infiltration and the danger that Shariah, the legal code of Islam, may take over in the United States.
Those espousing such views present Islam as an inherently hostile ideology whose adherents are enemies of Christianity and Judaism and seek to conquer nonbelievers either by violence or through a sort of stealthy brainwashing.
Islam’s inherent hostility toward the West seems to me utterly inarguable. From the time the Arab armies swept out of the desert, the adherents of the Religion of Peace have waged continual war upon Christendom, the formerly Christian middle east, Hindu India, Zoroastrian Persia, and Indonesia. To deny that is simply irresponsible.
Of course, Not All Muslims, etc. But that doesn’t matter. A good Muslim, as many good Muslims have pointed out, including Erdogan of Turkey, must believe in the triumph of Islam, forcible or otherwise; a good Christian must perforce resist. Hence the Left’s partially successful attempt to de-Christianize the West, and why a latter-day Restoration or Reconquista is so important. The West has done it before — with punishing victories over Islam Tours, Lepanto, Vienna, Omdurman — and it can do it again. All that’s needed is the will.
But the cultural sappers at the Times and elsewhere cannot have that, of course. And so they persist in framing the issue of Muslim “immigration” to America as some kind of civil-rights issue; they cannot be bothered in defending the very culture that gives them the liberty to do so. Since the attacks of 9/11, Muslim bylines have flourished in the America media, Muslim “charities” have been left largely alone, and creeping shariah has begun to spread from colonized England to the States.
And is where George W. Bush so signally failed his country, by going into the kind of defensive crouch that has given us vastly increased immigration from the ummah and the TSA here at home. Barack Obama, of course, only pushed the pedal to the metal even harder. That the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan continue to this day is to America’s everlasting shame.
Beyond the restrictions the order imposed on refugees and visitors from seven predominantly Muslim countries, it declared that the United States should keep out those with “hostile attitudes toward it and its founding principles” and “those who would place violent ideologies over American law,” clearly a reference to Shariah.
Rejected by most serious scholars of religion and shunned by Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, this dark view of Islam has nonetheless flourished on the fringes of the American right since before the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. With Mr. Trump’s election, it has now moved to the center of American decision-making on security and law, alarming many Muslims.
Who cares what “most serious scholars of religion” think? The question of what to do about Islam is not primarily “religious” — in which case the liberals will use the Constitution as a sword, citing the text but not the meaning or the context of its proscription of religious tests for public office and pretending that applies to immigration — but historical and cultural. Islam, unchecked, destroys everything it touches — representational art, painting, music, libraries (“Boko Haram” translates as “Western education is forbidden”). Churches are demolished or, with the great cathedral of Sancta Sophia in Constantinople, turned into mosques. And all Western notions of secularism are eliminated in favor of an established “faith.”
This is what the new administration is fighting. That the Left now openly sides with our religious, political and cultural enemies is something with which every American must reckon.
“They’re tapping into the climate of fear and suspicion since 9/11,” said Asma Afsaruddin, a professor of Islamic studies at Indiana University and chairwoman of the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy. “It’s a master narrative that pits the Muslim world against the West,” appealing to Trump supporters who know nothing of Muslims or Islam beyond news reports of terrorist attacks, she said.
Since 9/11, Americans have seen all they need to know of Islam. The great question of our time is what to do about it.
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