What Is To Be Done?
by Hugh Fitzgerald
Is it somewhere written that the countries of the advanced West are required to admit Muslims into their lands, or to continue to endure their large-scale presence, no matter what new information may come to light, and greater understanding as a result, of the meaning and menace of Islam? It is by now quite clear, to all who are paying attention, that there is something deeply worrisome about that ever-increasing presence of Muslims in the Bilad al-kufr (Lands of the Infidels). And it is clear to those who are a bit swifter of apprehension than others that this has led to a situation that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous for the indigenous Infidels (and for other, non-Muslim, immigrants) than would be the case were there no such large-scale Muslim presence.
Is it impossible to halt all Muslim immigration to the West? To return Muslim non-citizens promptly to their countries of origin? To impose restrictions on money coming from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to fund those mosques and madrasas all over the Western world? To do nothing that would openly demonstrate an unwillingness to change our legal and political institutions in response to Muslim demands or a Muslim presence? To do nothing that would, instead, demonstrate the opposite, that is a steely and well-informed and public refusal, to modify our own institutions and understandings, in order to meet demands from Muslims for changes, demands that, even if not met at first, will always and everywhere continue to be made, and made by appeals both cunningly couched in whatever language is appealing (the appeal to “true diversity” for example), or if that doesn’t work, in the language of threats of violence, and of actual violence. Is it impossible to create the conditions where True Believers in Islam, with all that that implies, may have to make a choice between remaining in the Lands of the Infidels, where a "full Muslim life" will only with great difficulty be lead (and there are ways to let the "whisperings of Shaytan" become louder), and sticking with Islam by remaining in, or returning to, Muslim lands.
...
one has to make allowances for:
1) Ignorance of the real history of Muslim conquest -- as with the mass killings of tens of millions of Hindus.
2) Ignorance of the actual mechanism of conquest and then, more importantly, of the islamization over time of the conquered populations and of the arabization that frequently accompanied it.
3) Filial piety, including memories of sympathetic older relatives who were quietly pious and did not seem to wish harm to anyone -- such as the parents, for example, of Magdi Allam, who writes about them so touchingly.
4) The desire to spare oneself knowledge of certain truths that would call into question the entire value of what has been, in so many ways, central to one's sense of self, or rather of the self immersed in the umma, or collective, or community of Believers. How difficult it is for those who are essentially not in free societies, subject to the constant din of Islamic propaganda, in lands suffused with Islam, where this total belief-system offers a simple explanation of the universe, a complete regulation of life, and thus a comforting way to organize and make sense of the universe.
5) Among Arab Muslims, their ethnic identity reinforces a desire to protect, to defend, not to question, Islam -- and that can be true of non-Muslim Arabs -- the "islamochristians" -- as well.
These are explanations, not justifications. But they should give slight pause to those who insist that every Muslim everywhere surely must know exactly what the texts and tenets are all about, and should be denounced, therefore, with the same intensity as one would denounce the ideology.
...
Here is a partial list of measures that should be undertaken immediately:
1. Education of Infidels, so that they are well aware of the contents of the texts of Islam -- Qur'an, Hadith, Sira.
2. Education of Infidels, so that they understand how, over 1350 years, those texts have been received, and acted upon, by Believers.
3. Education of Infidels, so that they know a good deal about the history of Islamic conquest, and subsequent subjugation of non-Muslim peoples in the lands conquered -- a subjugation that, no matter what the land, or the kind of non-Muslims conquered, the result was always the same.
4. Education of Muslims within Infidel countries, so that they will understand that the failures of Muslim societies -- political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral -- are the direct result of Islam itself.
5. An end to all Muslim immigration to Infidel lands.
6. Imposition of tests for naturalization that require a detailed knowledge of the history and cultural achievements of the Western country in question -- see "Going Dutch" for one, admittedly exaggerated-for-effect example.
7. Inclusion, in the test for naturalization, of a loyalty oath, swearing sole allegiance to the political and legal institutions of the particular Infidel nation-state. In the case of the United States, allegiance to the Constitution would be considered adequate. Subsequent proof of perjury would, in the law, be considered valid grounds for stripping a naturalized citizen of that citizenship.
8. Making any support, direct or indirect, for Jihad -- defined as the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam, including but not limited to the political and legal institutions of the host country – illegal.
9. Preventing any foreign funds from entering the country to be spent for the building or upkeep of mosques or other institutions connected to Islam, or for campaigns of Da'wa.
10. Curtailing in the prisons campaigns of Da'wa, on the grounds that the evidence shows that those who convert contain a high proportion of people who subsequently present a threat to society.
11. Refusing to bow to any Muslim demands for changes either in schools or in workplaces to accommodate Muslim rituals or Muslim ideas of what is fitting, from the hijab (where banned, as in France) or for extra time off for prayers in the middle of the work-day. This is not the sort of accommodation that Infidels, in Infidel lands, should be expected to make. In other words, the policy should be No Changes For Islam.
12. Reciprocity in the current number of mosques. Taking into account the absence, for tens of millions of non-Muslims in Muslim-ruled lands, of churches, Hindu temples, and other houses of worship, the policy should be to reduce the number of mosques in Western lands until there is a change in the Muslim lands. Reciprocity is a concept most people can understand and justify.
13. Reducing benefits so that large families (likely to be Muslim) cannot continue to be formed by those who assume they will be supported by the state. Muslim women will be expected to work in the same numbers as non-Muslim women, and will no longer be supported by the Infidel state (that is, Infidel taxpayers) to be breeding machines.
14. Enforcement of the laws against polygamy will be increased. Those practicing polygamy will be subject to being stripped of citizenship and returned to that Muslim state from which they, or their closest relatives, came. Since so many Muslims in Western Europe continue to observe, in Muslim enclaves, the mores of the countries that they, or their parents, or their grandparents, came from, the argument that they cannot "go back" can be dealt with. There is no obligation for the countries of Western Europe to live with the colossal error of their immigration policy.
15. There will be not the slightest concession made to Muslim sensibilities on the subject of aspects of Islam, including Muhammad. Those who wish to live in an environment where Islam is to be free of criticism are free to move to Muslim countries. There are many dozens of them. They control vast land areas, and vast natural resources. This is not a case of a tiny people having no place to go.
16. Efforts should be made to publicize the most celebrated defectors from Islam, to publish and distribute their books, to make much of them. This should be done both for the education of Infidels, and for the conceivable education of those who, born into Islam, may be persuaded to leave it.
...
Pertinent Links:
1) What Is To Be Done?
Showing posts with label Hugh Fitzgerald. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Hugh Fitzgerald. Show all posts
Friday, March 14, 2008
Thursday, February 7, 2008
MUST READ: THE ARABS, THE BERBERS & AFRICA
The Arabs, The Berbers & Africa
by Hugh Fitzgerald
It is no mystery as to why Christian missionaries might be having their greatest success in the Kabyle. In Algeria, that remains the Berber heartland. It is where the Berbers are concentrated, that is those who were not forcibly transformed, during the centuries of Arab rule (interrupted by 132 years of French rule) into "Arabs." (How many of those "Arabs" who now persecute the Berbers realize that they themselves are a generation, or two, or five removed from their clearly Berber origins?)
The cause of the Berbers is hardly known in this country. The writer Kateb Yacine, a Berber who refused to write in Arabic, but chose French, is celebrated in France, especially among Berbers -- but unknown in this country, and his anti-Arab rage is not likely to cause his books to be included in the syllabuses of courses on "Francophone" literature given that so many such courses are now taught by French-speaking Arabs.
What is that cause? In the first place, it is linguistic and cultural. In Algeria, where the French rightly saw the Berbers as superior to the Arabs -- one French general wrote a book about the "Europeanness" of the Berbers -- the Berbers were not discriminated against, but as soon as the French left, the forced arabisation of the Berbers started up at once, as if the French interregnum, with the wider possibilities that French education made possible to both Berbers and Arabs, had never existed. Older people in Algeria speak and use French; the younger ones are forgetting. And meanwhile, the Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, Tamazight, in their schools or in their institutions, and even, at times, they could be punished for using it among themselves, on the street. Berber culture was officially ignored.
About twenty years ago, news of agitation began to reach the outside world. There were riots in Tizi-Ouzou that were reported in France, but hardly anywhere else in the Western world. In America, of course, we had all been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO propaganda (performed as a "public service" by the big oil companies, as part of their propaganda payoff to the Saudis for allowing them to find, produce, and then pay exorbitantly for the oil that happens to lie under the malevolent sands of "Saudi" Arabia), to believe that there is something called "the Arab world" and in this "Arab world" there are no Copts, no Armenians, no Assyrians, no Chaldeans, no Turkmen, no Mandeans, no Maronites, and of course no Berbers, no Jews (no, there never were any Jews in North Africa or the Middle East -- they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe), for everyone in the Arab world was an "Arab."
The discovery or re-discovery of a Berber identity (and how many of those North African "Arabs" should begin to realize that they are Berbers?) is or could be an important weapon in unsettling the world of Islam, and perhaps causing the Maghreb to see itself, as it should not as "Arab" but as the victim of Arab imperialism.
For what is Islam if not a vehicle of Arab imperialism, and what are the Berbers, if not the victims of that Arab imperialism, an imperialism far more potent and long-lasting than the European kind, for it attempts to efface the historic identity of whole peoples?
And it makes perfect sense that Berbers in the Kabyle would, having felt along their pulses the Arab imperialism of which Islam is the vehicle, would be more open to the efforts of Christian missionaries, or more likely, are not so much responding to missionary activity, but to their own observations as to what Christianity is like, and what Islam has brought them.
In this respect, one should not underestimate the fact that Berbers now live in France, that they make up most of the membership of such groups as the "maghrebins laiques," and that they, not the Arabs whose ethnic identity is so bound up with Islam, are capable, in some cases, not of identifying with the Arabs, but more closely with the French. And those Berbers communicate with Berbers at home, or through the Internet. And sometimes they return, to Algeria and Morocco, to see their families, and bring with them their own observations on the relative merits of the Islamic world, a world suffused with Islam, and the non-Islamic world, the one they have experienced in France.
The more the non-Arab Muslims of the world, and 80% of the world's Muslims are not Arab, come to realize -- and it would not be hard to help them to realize, for they will not be able to deny the facts, having experienced so much of it themselves -- that Islam is a vehicle for that Arab supremacism, the more likely it is that at least some of them will fall away. And others, who may stick with a kind of "non-Arab" Islam (as if such were possible) will, in so doing, at least help to divide, and therefore to weaken, the Camp of Islam.
...
Pertinent Links:
1) The Arabs, The Berbers & Africa
by Hugh Fitzgerald
It is no mystery as to why Christian missionaries might be having their greatest success in the Kabyle. In Algeria, that remains the Berber heartland. It is where the Berbers are concentrated, that is those who were not forcibly transformed, during the centuries of Arab rule (interrupted by 132 years of French rule) into "Arabs." (How many of those "Arabs" who now persecute the Berbers realize that they themselves are a generation, or two, or five removed from their clearly Berber origins?)
The cause of the Berbers is hardly known in this country. The writer Kateb Yacine, a Berber who refused to write in Arabic, but chose French, is celebrated in France, especially among Berbers -- but unknown in this country, and his anti-Arab rage is not likely to cause his books to be included in the syllabuses of courses on "Francophone" literature given that so many such courses are now taught by French-speaking Arabs.
What is that cause? In the first place, it is linguistic and cultural. In Algeria, where the French rightly saw the Berbers as superior to the Arabs -- one French general wrote a book about the "Europeanness" of the Berbers -- the Berbers were not discriminated against, but as soon as the French left, the forced arabisation of the Berbers started up at once, as if the French interregnum, with the wider possibilities that French education made possible to both Berbers and Arabs, had never existed. Older people in Algeria speak and use French; the younger ones are forgetting. And meanwhile, the Berbers were forbidden to use their own language, Tamazight, in their schools or in their institutions, and even, at times, they could be punished for using it among themselves, on the street. Berber culture was officially ignored.
About twenty years ago, news of agitation began to reach the outside world. There were riots in Tizi-Ouzou that were reported in France, but hardly anywhere else in the Western world. In America, of course, we had all been sufficiently subject to ARAMCO propaganda (performed as a "public service" by the big oil companies, as part of their propaganda payoff to the Saudis for allowing them to find, produce, and then pay exorbitantly for the oil that happens to lie under the malevolent sands of "Saudi" Arabia), to believe that there is something called "the Arab world" and in this "Arab world" there are no Copts, no Armenians, no Assyrians, no Chaldeans, no Turkmen, no Mandeans, no Maronites, and of course no Berbers, no Jews (no, there never were any Jews in North Africa or the Middle East -- they all came to Israel, you see, from Europe), for everyone in the Arab world was an "Arab."
The discovery or re-discovery of a Berber identity (and how many of those North African "Arabs" should begin to realize that they are Berbers?) is or could be an important weapon in unsettling the world of Islam, and perhaps causing the Maghreb to see itself, as it should not as "Arab" but as the victim of Arab imperialism.
For what is Islam if not a vehicle of Arab imperialism, and what are the Berbers, if not the victims of that Arab imperialism, an imperialism far more potent and long-lasting than the European kind, for it attempts to efface the historic identity of whole peoples?
And it makes perfect sense that Berbers in the Kabyle would, having felt along their pulses the Arab imperialism of which Islam is the vehicle, would be more open to the efforts of Christian missionaries, or more likely, are not so much responding to missionary activity, but to their own observations as to what Christianity is like, and what Islam has brought them.
In this respect, one should not underestimate the fact that Berbers now live in France, that they make up most of the membership of such groups as the "maghrebins laiques," and that they, not the Arabs whose ethnic identity is so bound up with Islam, are capable, in some cases, not of identifying with the Arabs, but more closely with the French. And those Berbers communicate with Berbers at home, or through the Internet. And sometimes they return, to Algeria and Morocco, to see their families, and bring with them their own observations on the relative merits of the Islamic world, a world suffused with Islam, and the non-Islamic world, the one they have experienced in France.
The more the non-Arab Muslims of the world, and 80% of the world's Muslims are not Arab, come to realize -- and it would not be hard to help them to realize, for they will not be able to deny the facts, having experienced so much of it themselves -- that Islam is a vehicle for that Arab supremacism, the more likely it is that at least some of them will fall away. And others, who may stick with a kind of "non-Arab" Islam (as if such were possible) will, in so doing, at least help to divide, and therefore to weaken, the Camp of Islam.
...
Pertinent Links:
1) The Arabs, The Berbers & Africa
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
MUST READ: UNDERSTANDING THE RESURGENCE OF ISLAM
Understanding The Resurgence Of Islam
by Hugh Fitzgerald
...
Copying & pasting anymore of this article will not do it justice...
Read it all ! ! !
Pertinent Links:
1) Understanding The Resurgence Of Islam
by Hugh Fitzgerald
"The Islamic nation now faces a great phase of Jihad, unlike anything we knew fifty years ago. Fifty years ago, Jihad was attributed only to a few individuals in Palestine, and in some other Muslims areas." -- Saudi cleric Dr. Nasser bin Suleiman Al-'Omar, which aired on Al-Jazeera TV on April 19, 2006.Why are things different now? The doctrine of Jihad wasn't suddenly invented in the past fifty years. It's been the same, more or less, for 1350 years. It had fallen into desuetude, but did not, and could not, disappear.
...
Copying & pasting anymore of this article will not do it justice...
Read it all ! ! !
Pertinent Links:
1) Understanding The Resurgence Of Islam
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