The Challenge of Islam

...But how many people believe that really is the war we are in...

...Our material abundance provides us with a thousand paths away from faith, always distracting us from the Four Last Things—death, judgment, heaven, and hell...

...The Jews (Israelis) are being accused of having introduced foot-and-mouth disease in the Middle East...

...Whether natural or man-made, law seems to impose restraints on the power of God...

...Muslims pray five times daily...

...Alert Muslims must have noticed that they have highly placed, if unwitting, allies in their war on the West...

...Such "sacrifices" would include relinquishing ever-larger portions of their tiny country (less than half the size of San Bernardino County in California) to the Palestinians, dismantling the "settlements" in Judea/Samaria (the "West Bank"), handing the Golan Heights to Syria, and allowing the "return of the refugees" a group that has grown miraculously from about 500,000 to somewhere around 5 million, and the absorption of even a substantial fraction of which would signify the demographic end of the Jewish state...

...At some point in the Middle Ages, time seemed to stop...

...embassies in Africa, a government witness, a former aide to bin Laden, testified about the ways in which the Shari'a is used by "scholars" to decide that whatever they want is permissible...

...That has not remotely been on the minds of our churchmen, whose worldview remains predominantly socialistic...

...Nothing will suffice, except the destruction, the complete disappearance of Israel...

...Its purpose is the research and publication of the facts regarding developments in the Middle East and exposing false propaganda that might harm the interests of the United States and its allies in that area of the world.Your tax-deductible contributions are welcome...

...That this is not some modern theological corruption is indicated by Martin Luther's table talk, recorded in 1542...

...Around the table will stand attractive nude women...

...We should recall, however, that Locke himself assumed in the 17th century that toleration could not be extended to Catholics, whose first loyalty, it was assumed (with good reason in some cases), to be to Rome...

...The imams do not so much repudiate sensual indulgence as promise it in the next life...

...The Arabs do not consider Israel a normal country, but a creation of the devil, an excrescence, a malignant force of aggressors, murderers, infidels and barbarians...

...Fraser concluded that "the principal direct check to improvement and industry" was "the insecurity of life, limb and property, arising from the nature of the government...

...Alan Wolfe, professor of political science and director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College, a dependable voice of establishment sentiment on religious affairs, is relieved to find that "there is no single God for whom the ever more diverse U.S...

...But by now, after over one year of the bloody war against Israel in the Al Aksa Intifada, it is clear to even the most confirmed "doves", to even the most ardent supporters of the "Oslo Peace Process," that absolutely nothing that Israel could do, any further "sacrifice" that Israel were prepared to bring would satisfy the Arabs and would promote peace...

...It's as though we believe that Muslim zeal can be contained, but only if we suppress all traces of its Western, Christian counterpart...

...The separation of Church and State in effect privatizes belief, Sanneh adds, "making religion a matter of individual faith...

...It's a male fantasy...

...What most inflames anti-American passion among fundamentalists may be the American government's lack of religious zeal," writes Larnin Sanneh, a professor of history and religion at Yale University...

...Fearing charges of religious persecution, the FBI has for years hesitated to investigate radical Islamists in the U.S., "despite evidence that their mosques have been used to recruit and fund suspected terrorists," Walter Pincus reported in The Washington Post "The veil of religion has been draped over mosques," an FBI official said...

...The Economist reports that Muslim minorities in Europe have shown little sign of integrating into the larger societies...

...But Islam now, surely, is at least as dangerous as Catholicism once was, and we must hoist our guard against it...

...As long ago as the 14th century, the historian Ibn Khaldun, who lived in Tunis, noted that the Arabs had largely created the deserts in which they live...

...Arab Muslims have shown no signs of being able to reform themselves, or even of much inclination to do so...

...Prime Minister Tony Blair reassures us that Islam had "nothing to do with" the terror attacks, but Osama bin Laden and millions of Muslims think otherwise...

...A year earlier the Archbishop of Canterbury had said much the same thing: "a tacit atheism prevails...

...Berlusconi was called "barbaric," "silly" and "racist...

...In light of the conflict, where there could be casualties both civilian and British, such a tri-umphalist song is inappropriate," the man said...

...Israel's only course in the face of this almost certain prospect is to assume its previous stance of unflinching deterrence and, as it once did in the destruction of the Iraqi atomic reactor at Osirak in 1981, not to be inhibited by "international opinion" to preempt resolutely if it appears necessary to assure survival of the country...

...The dotty obsessions of modern liberalism must be questioned anew...

...Just as the suicide bombers do not vacillate to sacrifice themselves, one can safely expect that, once in possession of such weapons, the Arabs will not hesitate to sacrifice millions of their own people in order to destroy Israel...

...We can no longer assume that American-born, Mosque-attending, Mecca-facing Muslims find no incompatibility between their devotion to Allah and their loyalty to America...

...Throughout his tenure he will lack legitimacy and live in fear of being overthrown by younger power-seekers more ruthless than himself...

...society could enter a war...

...Britain in particular has been a haven for fundamentalists, who enjoy British liberties and a generous social welfare system even as they rail against the culture that has given them refuge," the Washington Post reports...

...Earthly pleasures are postponed until the next life...

...Hefner again—and in the 1540s...

...In Egypt and Jordan (the two Arab countries technically at peace with Israel), government-controlled news sources published that Israel had distributed drug-laced chewing gum and candy to kill children and to make women sexually corrupt...

...They celebrate the destruction of U.S...

...Settlements became depopulated "and the very earth there turned into something that was no longer earth...

...There was no word for it in Arabic...

...This ad has been published and paid for by FLAME Facts and Logic About the Middle East P.O...

...A better criticism is to say that it threatens our souls with abundance...

...This bottomless hatred, a hatred that pervades the Arab world in all strata of society and is incessantly fomented by Arab governments, including those supposed to be "at peace" with Israel, cannot be assuaged by negotiation or by making any further "sacrifices for peace...

...Civil society and the rule of law never developed...

...The Challenge of Islam, The Anguish of the West BY TOM BETHELL In England recently, the words ofElgar's anthem "Land of Hope and Glory" were rewritten for a concert for students at the Royal Albert Hall...

...Berlusconi was joined by an aroused Oriana Fallaci, the celebrity Italian journalist who once interviewed the Ayatollah Khomeini and is now ailing with cancer...

...On the menu: eels and tender liver...

...So the law can be made up on the spot...

...Reuters reported that "Muslims around the world demanded an apology, and the European Union recoiled with horror...

...In parts of Provence near Marseilles, Arabs are suspected of the arson attacks that have burned down whole forests...

...But the hatred of the Arabs against Israel and against all Jews is so abiding and so virulent that peace, at least for the foreseeable future, seems to be most unlikely...

...She denounced the "pleasure-loving, vulgar, evil, stupid and cowardly Italy" she found herself living in...

...It's Hugh Hefner's vision...

...Our instinctive but condescending view that all religions are somehow benign and well meaning is so reflexive that we shrink from questioning it...

...Our faithless, demoralized bishops, mulling over the distribution of income, are fixated on the material realm...

...The discovery of natural laws has allowed us to predict material phenomena so successfully that everything seems to have been explained satisfactorily, without any role for God...

...We have "no need of that hypothesis," as Pierre-Simon de Laplace explained to a puzzled Napoleon, who imagined that God helped guide the planets...

...If that is un-American, so be it...

...Life can return to normal once we have succeeded in rousting bin Laden and his al network from their caves...

...Mortal hatred against Israel and against the Jews is taught to Arab children from the very first grade...

...This is an affront to fundamentalist Muslims, "who are confident that they possess the infallible truth...

...We recognize that God cannot decree that a square may have unequal sides, even that He cannot undo the Ten Commandments...

...During his recent visit to Syria, the Pope listened to Bashar-al-Asad, the President of Syria, declare that "...the Jews have betrayed Jesus Christ, with the same mentality with which they tried to betray and kill the prophet Mohammed...

...In the West, since the Enlightenment, we have been tempted by the opposite extreme...

...Saddam Hussein, the tyrant of Iraq, expressed the wishes of his country and of the Arab world with the succinct entreaty "God damn the Jews...

...Some things are haram, or forbidden by Islamic law, he explained...

...We might expect, then, that further attenuation of religious sentiment in the West will not placate the zealous Muslim, but only arouse him further...

...They enable us to pursue these goals and to publish these messages in national newspapers and magazines...

...Letters to the editor assure us as to the historical tolerance of Muslim rule...

...We have our own embarrassments...

...Daniel Pipes estimates that bin Laden "enjoys the emotional support of half the Muslim world...

...Mosques and Islamic centers, both in Europe and the US, have been used to preach violence—giving vent to what one Muslim cleric admitted was "a discourse of rage...

...They catechize us on the "preferential option for the poor," although what Jesus said about the poor and the rich tells us that it is the latter whose spiritual need is greater...

...The same applies to Syria...

...But that is no longer law...

...In an account of a journey to Persia published in 1825, James Fraser wrote that when the naive European hears the names Baghdad, Bussora or Ispahan, he is apt to imagine columns, minarets and cupolas...

...Our position is almost the reverse: our riches cause us to forget God, and to presume that we are autonomous beings...

...James says in his epistle that God has chosen "the poor in the world to be rich in faith...

...The large pools of oil discovered beneath the Arabian sands have to some extent mitigated and disguised their poverty, but that wealth, too, was created in the West, and it will become less conspicuous over time...

...When the Italian prime minister urged Europe to "reconstitute itself on the basis of its Christian roots," and judged Western civilization to be superior to Islamic rule, European secularists competed with Muslim religionists in their denunciations...

...The head of the teachers' union complained that, at a time of war, the old words were frighteningly jingoistic...

...Those who so optimistically seek to recast it in the image of Christianity keep telling us how peaceful it is...

...Not very fervently, in other words...

...He must be made to submit, preferably by conquest...

...embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and refer to Jews and Americans as "monkeys and pigs...

...said a friend of mine, who likes to ponder these things...

...Unless the West can recover the faith that it has lost, the looming conflict with the Muslim world will be long and difficult...

...Yes," the witness said, "because the scholars in al Qaida—the scholars in the group, they discuss that, and they makefatwa [a religious edict] and they say it's okay...

...tion originating in Czarist Russia, is a steady best-seller in all Arab countries...

...The structure of Islamic rule has always been despotic...

...Throughout Islamic history, Bernard Lewis wrote in 1993, "even a rich man's enjoyment of his property has never been safe from seizure and sequestration by the state...

...We have assumed that the answer is yes, but it is an open question...

...The Arabs, Khaldun said, "recognize no limit in taking the possessions of other people," and when they acquire "superiority and royal authority, they have complete power to plunder as they please...

...Any departure from it sounds like bigotry...

...Now it has perhaps two million adherents in the US, millions more in Europe...

...The virgin-filled vision of Paradise evidently shared by the suicide bombers illustrates a debasement of Islamic theology...

...At least two of the Muslims leaders who were invited to the White House after the attacks turn out to have made incendiary remarks about America, and a White House spokesman commented off the record that it has been difficult to find moderates...

...Our 92 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR • NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 own alienated opinion-shapers have sought to preserve all non-Western identities, Islam included...

...At the trial of those charged with conspiring to blow up the U.S...

...Disappointingly, the Pope did not protest this canard, either right then or at a later date...

...For those who live in conditions of severe material deprivation (think Afghanistan), where physical survival calls for unrelenting labors, God no doubt seems more potent...

...NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 95...

...If groups do not assimilate, liberalism s ideological opposition to assimilation is partly to blame...

...That's not the beatific vision...

...That's because we disapprove of religious wars and think everyone else should, too...

...Despite their material degradation, Muslims have not lost their faith...

...The material impoverishment of the Arab world of Islam has theological roots...

...Can Muslim communities integrate themselves peacefully into Western societies...

...If that's our idea of heaven, we're not going there...

...If there is one idea that the opinion shapers of the Western world, from New York to London and Paris wish to inculcate, it is that we are not facing a "clash of civilizations," to use Samuel Huntington's much fought-over phrase...

...It's time for Christians to move beyond hand-holding, singing children's ditties in place of hymns, and endless choruses of "Kumbaya...

...The sad but irrefutable conclusion is that only the complete disappearance of Israel, its annihilation, its being wiped off the map could satisfy the Arabs and most of the Moslem world...

...Women don't have rights in the Muslim world, as we are often told, but men don't either...

...We are merely in a "war against terrorism...

...Bernard Lewis of Princeton notes that freedom as a political notion does not appear in the Arab world until the late 18th century, and then "patently due to European influence...

...We should not over-romanticize, of course...

...To the Muslim, this is mere blasphemy...

...He is quite unprepared for "the mass of misery, filth and ruins which the best of these cities present to his gaze...

...Americans, God bless them, "tend to practice their faith in distinctly modern ways," he adds...

...He spoke of the "cares and pleasures and riches of life" in the same breath...

...The Arab states, having been unable in over fifty years and in many wars to defeat and exterminate the hated Jews, are now feverishly arming themselves with "conventional weapons" (easily purchased from the West, including, sad to say, from the United States), and are ardently pursuing the development of weapons of mass annihilation...

...And that is more reassuring...

...Polls conducted under American auspices have found that fully one-fourth of Pakistanis and Palestinians consider the attacks on the U.S...

...Children are encouraged to sacrifice themselves as martyrs and suicide missiles, with promises that Paradise with unimaginable pleasures awaits those who sacrifice themselves in the holy cause of killing Jews...

...Among other malevolent fabrications, it accuses "international Jewry" of "limitless ambition, inexhaustible greed, and hatred beyond imagination...

...He wrote in his Introduction to History that civilization "always collapsed in places the Arabs took over and conquered...

...And in polities based on power, men will naturally dominate, and they will do so ruthlessly to survive the competition...

...There is no logical contradiction that God cannot sweep aside if He so wills...

...And yet, and yet...

...We do need to remove that veil, and keep an eye on what is going on...

...It seems that we really are in a religious war, but don't want to acknowledge the possibility...

...Box590359 ¦ San Francisco,CA 94159 Gerardo Joffe, President FLAME is a tax-exempt, non-profit educational 501(c)(3) organization...

...John Locke's lesson of religious toleration was learned so well for 300 years that we tend to take it for granted...

...There was no recourse against bad government either, other than "patience, counsel and prayer...

...The Islamic world congealed and gathered dust, like Lady Haversham's cob-webbed wedding table...

...Mortal Hatred and the "Big Lie": The "big lie," invented by the notorious Joseph Goebbels of Nazi infamy, is a mainstay of Arab hatred and propaganda...

...Visit our website: www.factsandlogic.org person in al Qaeda gave you an order to do something that you know to be haram, would you have to do it...

...Seventy virgins...

...Islam aims to convert the whole world, but as Huntington observed, Western secularism is likewise universalist— a basis for emerging conflict...

...With no Pope and no hierarchy, one might have expected it to break into a thousand pieces, like Protestantism, where every latest fad is embraced...

...But we can no longer feel confident that Western residency inculcates Western values...

...It should be destroyed, for the glory of God, no matter what sacrifices that might entail...

...After over fifty years of statehood, Israel is a lone outpost of Western civilization and its values...

...The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an egregious falsifka"IsraeFs only course...is to assume its previous stance of unflinching deterrence...and not to be inhibited...to preempt resolutely if it appears necessary to assure survival of the country...

...We need not just a restoration of faith, but one that is compatible with material achievement...

...Riches are a hazard that "lure" and snare us, Jesus said...

...Islam increases as Christianity flags...

...That is their great strength...

...to have been consistent with Islamic law...

...Not that much of it remains to suppress...

...When entering a conflict with those who do believe in God, therefore, they become a little nervous and refrain from invoking His name...

...The lines "God who made thee [England] mighty, make thee mightier yet," were turned into: "Bring our world together, make us closer yet...

...The focus on Osama bin Laden in the weeks after September 11 encouraged the comforting notion that our enemies are abroad, while those Muslims at home are our friends...

...Meanwhile, in Birmingham, England's second largest city, where one third of the population is now Muslim, jihad videos are on sale...

...Almost all of our revenue pays for our educational work, for these clarifying messages, and for related direct mail...

...The Turks, or Muslims, Luther said, expect that after the resurrection "they will find a well set table with tasteful salvers and excellent drinks...

...Still, it berates him for not having been thorough enough in his task of extermination...

...Papal social encyclicals from the 1890s to the present have been like guns pointed in the wrong direction, warning us that capitalism threatens our material selves with scarcities...

...Possibly, if Christianity continues to languish, they will become more hostile...

...By coincidence, one week before the attack on the World Trade Center, the Cardinal Archbishop of Westminster gave a speech to his priests, saying that Christianity in Britain "has now almost been vanquished...

...In Arab societies there is simply command from on high, ultimately from the head of state, who himself very probably reached the pinnacle by overthrowing the existing power-holder...

...Law itself is shunned...

...There is something inherently antagonistic to Western values that endures, undiluted, not just in the Arab world, but wherever Islam gains a toehold...

...He had "isolated Italy," said an Italian parliamentarian...

...We might as well admit it," she added, "Our churches and cathedrals are more beautiful than their mosques...

...The age-old calumny of Jews using the blood of Christian children in order to bake their Passover matzos is alive and well in Arab publications...

...It may well be that the rise of Islam is itself made possible by our own moral weakness and spiritual disorder," wrote Fr...

...One little-noted reason why the events of September were so disturbing is that they shook a pillar of the American founding: the idea that the government must observe strict neutrality between all religions...

...We hear talk of the Shari'a, or Islamic law, but that is the law of law professors, not the law of courts...

...In the controlled Arab press, Holocaust denial and accusation of the Zionists having been in cahoots with the German Nazis are regular features...

...Another unpopular thought is that what inflames the Muslim soul is not so much our material wealth as our spiritual poverty...

...The Unrelenting and Virulent Hatred of the Arabs Will peace be possible under those conditions...

...Palestinian-born Abu Qatada lives in a London suburb in a house subsidized by British taxpayers, laughs openly at those (like President Bush) who say the Koran does not justify violence in the name of Islam, preaches jihad himself, and receives $450 a week in child support payments for his four children...

...Lip service has long been paid to it, but scholars have lacked the power to insist on its application...

...The Arab nations surrounding it are a swamp of terrorism, corruption, dictatorship, and human enslavement...

...The truth is that Islam always has been a warrior religion, and bin Laden himself reminds us that it was always spread by conquest, not persuasion...

...Far from being a "religion of peace," as President Bush said, Islam is more nearly a religion of hate...

...The belief that a rainbow of diverse cultures is good, and the melting pot is bad, expresses an oblique hatred of the West...

...But this was true only post-conquest, when the dominant ummah, or Muslim community, felt sufficiently in control to indulge the infidel a measure of tolerance...

...Islam, too, has split into warring sects, but they are capable of uniting behind a single cause: hatred of the infidel...

...James V. Schall, S.J., who teaches at Georgetown University...

...For them, this truth is not a private revelation but a public imperative, and states, like people, are either Muslim or infidel...

...In such a world, the creation of wealth can only be achieved with great difficulty...

...Yemen lay in ruins, while "Persian civilization in Arab Iraq is likewise completely ruined...

...We have virtually no overhead...

...We live "in a totally new time for all Christians," he added, "and the anguish of the Western world is there for all to see...

...No "Sacrifice" Will Overcome the Hatred: Many still believe that the conflict between the Arabs and the Jews could be settled if the Israelis were willing to bring greater "sacrifices for peace...

...What are the facts...

...What is striking about Islam is its quality of enduring sameness over hundreds of years...

...The prosecutor then asked: "If a NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2001 • THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 93 You deserve a factual look at...

...The substitutions reflect the outlook of the shapers and molders of Western societies, who no longer believe in God—not one who plays a role in the affairs of men, at least...

...he "has crossed the limit of reason and decency," said the secretary general of the Arab League in Cairo...

...Civil society never emerged, contracts were unenforceable, and only family members and close tribal allies could be trusted...

...Egypt's government-sponsored Al Akhbar newspaper has expressed fervent thanks to Adolf Hitler for having taken advance revenge on the "vilest criminals on the face of the earth...