Six years ago I delivered a talk I titled “Strategies of Denial.” As it did not appear at Jihad Watch but at another site, New English Review, many who come here may not have seen it. And since what I noted at that time does not date, I am taking the liberty of reprinting it here, in segments, with some updated comments interpolated throughout. There is really nothing new to say about Islam; it demands of commentators that they keep repeating themselves, in slightly different words, to put into context each new manifestation of Islamic behavior, whether it be an attack on Infidels, or something less dramatic. There are new attacks, new outrages, but there are no new explanations of Muslim behavior. Each new attack bears mentioning, and each new attempt to explain it away as “un-Islamic” deserves comment, but the generalizing about the subject — the overview — does not need revision, merely constant repetition and, where appropriate, new application.
My reason for breaking up the piece is simple: the new material throughout; I have expanded on what was given in a somewhat lapidary fashion, appealing more to our common experience of what is happening all over the West today. And I would like it not to overwhelm or burden the readers at this website, but to be read.
Now let’s go to the original introduction to “Strategies of Denial”:
Strategies of Denial –the title is ambiguous. Possibly deliberately. What might it mean? It might refer to Muslims, and to all the ways that adherents of Islam, “slaves of Allah,” especially those living in the West, have managed so successfully to distract or confuse or intimidate, morally or intellectually or physically, so many non-Muslims, managed to keep those non-Muslims from finding out too much about what Islam inculcates, and to achieve this despite the fact that the Islamic texts — Qur’an, Hadith, and Sira – are easily accessible, no more than a mouse-click away, and their meaning discussed at thousands of Muslim websites. And though not always a mouse-click away, there is the long record of Islamic imperialism, of the conquest through violence and the subsequent subjugation, also through violence and the threat of violence, of non-Muslims, which had always been known throughout the Western world, discussed by its outstanding figures (see John Quincy Adams, see Tocqueville, see Winston Churchill), and noted as a matter of course by Western travelers to Muslim lands, whose own experiences revealed the clear hostility of Muslims toward them (and toward all non-Muslims). When the great mass of Christians in earlier centuries thought about Muslims at all, they never doubted that those who had studied Islam and those who had encountered Muslims must surely be right: Islam was a ferocious and fanatical faith – for “faith” and not “religion” was the word used until the past century. It was American writers of books for children who first began to use that leveling phrase about “the world’s great religions,” and not until recent decades that the soothingly misleading phrase about “the three abrahamic faiths” began to be used. Never before in the history of the Western world would such a phrase have been invoked, never before would it have been taken seriously or used to convince non-Muslims that there was some kind of shared faith and shared traditions which bound Christians (and Jews) to Muslims. People once understood, even if they could not site sura and ayat, the Muslim injunction to “take not Christians and Jews as friends, for they are friends only with each other.” And even if Sura 9 and a hundred other Jihad verses in the Qur’an had not been read, and the hundreds or thousands of malevolent anti-Infidel hadiths were unknown, inhabitants of the Western world – the chief obstacle to the spread of Islam for a thousand years – did grasp, in the main, the nature of Islam.
But in the last few decades, the very decades in which the political and media elites of Europe have permitted millions of Muslim migrants, in an act of civilisational heedlessness and historical amnesia, to settle within their lands, those same elites failed to reconsider their earlier presumptions and negligence, failed to meet their solemn responsibility to study the texts and tenets of Islam, and their observable effect over 1350 years, from Spain to the East Indies, on the behavior of Muslims. They have instead avoided such study, and still worse, have attacked those who have engaged in such study and, armed with the knowledge of the meaning, and therefore the menace, of Islam, have begun to sound all kinds of tocsins.
It’s an amazing feat, really: the ability of millions of Muslims to settle within the non-Muslim lands, what in Islam is called Dar al-Harb, the House or Domain of War, where the writ of Islam does not yet run, and Muslims do not yet rule, and yet those Muslims have been able to prevent, to stave off, to deflect, any serious and widespread study of Islam, and hence to prevent the understanding of the threat that a large Muslim population unavoidably presents (for a handful of apostates, and a slightly-larger handful of those who become “cultural” Muslims or “Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only” Muslims, do not relieve us from worrying about the 90% or more of Muslims who remain True Believers and Defenders of the Faith).
And as of now — late June 2015 — the movement of Muslims into Europe has reached flood tide. They come from North Africa, but not all of North Africa. Their main point of departure is Libya, where the overthrow of Qaddafi meant that no one despot could control the flow of population, as he was willing to do for the right payment, as from the Italian government under Berlusconi. Even if a Western power wanted to pay someone today to prevent Arab and sub-Saharan Africans from leaving in those boats that head toward Lampedusa (the Italian island where these boats often are taken, or the smugglers easily arrange to have then taken — deliberate sinking or half-sinking of vessels by the smugglers is a common tactic) who, exactly, would he pay? No one controls the coast of Libya anymore; at best, some militias might control in Benghazi, or in Misrata, but even they are so fractured, their leaders so changeable, the ability to make sure that a deal that is struck kept so difficult, that Libyan immigration cannot be stopped unless the boats themselves are destroyed, as has been suggested should be done, but for reasons one cannot fathom, this elementary measure of self-defense has not yet been taken.
And then there is the Syrian, Iraqi, Afghani, Pakistani migration. All of these nationalities, by all reports, are jumbled together, but all of them — all of those Iraqis, Afghans, Pakistanis, Syrians, being Muslims, bear Islam in their mental baggage. And these arrive not from the South, but from the East. All kinds of Muslims find that Turkey is a place to regroup, and then to be smuggled through Anatolia to Bulgaria by land, or to Greece by sea. And thence they continue on, because it is not so much “Europe” that they seek, but those countries within Europe that offer the most benefits. Who wants to stay in Greece when he can be in Sweden?
It is amazing that this clear choice of destination, based on the amount of free health care, free education, free everything that is made available, is not discussed more. Instead, if you listen to NPR or the BBC, you hear endlessly about “immigrants” who are “seeking a better life.” That last phrase is so appealing, and it evokes in others, the descendants of other kinds of immigrants, warm feelings of sympathy. Or if not real sympathy, then at least a feeling that “who am I to deny someone else the right to do what my grandparents or great-grandparents did?” A moment’s thought might have prevented that easy identification. The better life that earlier immigrants sought, remember, was the life in countries that offered no benefits at all to compare with what is now on offer. Why be sentimental about people who “seek a better life” if what that really means is that they seek better benefits?
And the countries they choose to go to demonstrate this truth. They are not satisfied, when being processed in Lampedusa, to remain in Italy, where the benefits are low. Or if they come on the eastern route, no one really wants to remain in Bulgaria or Greece, unless absolutely necessary. The goal is always the same: it’s the United Kingdom, it’s Germany, it’s France, it’s above all the Scandinavian countries. That is the “better life” being sought. While obvious to you and to me, it is not obvious, apparently, to any of the announcers on NPR and the BBC, who almost never discuss the careful choice, by these immigrants, of destinations based on these benefits. Why? Because that would spoil the story that these immigrants are just like those of the old days. But they are not. They are not “seeking a better life” based on their own work, but are going to lands known for their bountiful welfare, where you may not have to work at all. It’s an incredible confusion of immigrations old and new. I have watched on television illiterate and seemingly ill-informed migrants telling the interviewer all about the benefits he knows exist, and in which countries they are to be found.
And there is one more thing. The NPR or BBC reporters always call them “immigrants,” but never “Muslim immigrants,” even though that adjective is a key to understanding the future behavior and permanent attitudes of those immigrants toward those into whose lands they have been, or will be, permitted to settle. Why is this? Don’t listeners deserve to know what kind of immigrants are flowing into their countries, as they try to decide what it all means, and what immigration policies they would support? The vague phrase “immigrants” should be replaced by “Muslim immigrants,” but that would be disallowed by the radio and television censors, or at least has been until now. Perhaps it will change as it becomes so much more obvious: these are Muslim immigrants, not immigrants of all kinds, from everywhere.
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