WHERE TO FROM HERE?

Papua New Guinea recently celebrated its 41^st Independence. On Monday 19^th September 2016, the Post Courier ran a story of Muslims in Jiwaka Province, celebrating Independence with the rest of the country. It saddens me after reading stories from a book “Why We Left Islam” - Former Muslims Speak Out. Stories compiled and edited by Susan Crimp. It took 50 years for conservative and radical Muslims to take over Iran, once a peaceful and democratic country through strategic planning and coordination. Islam is a cancer that eats into the very fabric of freedom and democracy. Below is a finishing chapter from the book. Hope you read this and the book itself. Wake Up!! Papua New Guinea must wake up and burn out this cancer before it takes root and destroys it.

WHERE TO FROM HERE?
By GREGORY M. DAVIS

THOSE WHO HAVE SEEN ISLAM from the inside know better than anyone its true colors. It is their testimonies—more than the politically correct sophistry of contemporary Western commentators—that we must heed if we are to survive the resurgence of Islam on the world stage. The mounting news accounts of apparently unrelated acts of violence, “unrest,” and terrorism from around the world alarm many, but few possess the patience or clarity of thought to bring such apparently disparate events into focus. In fact, the overwhelming preponderance of organized violence on the world stage today—from Nigeria to Thailand, from Bosnia to Bali, from Chechnya to the Philippines, from Sudan to Indonesia, from Israel to Kashmir, to Paris, London, Madrid, Moscow, Washington, and New York—has its roots in the simple faith of Mohammad.

Across the globe, now as in Islam’s heyday (from roughly the Muslim invasions of the Holy Land and Spain in the seventh and eighth centuries A.D. to the Turks’ near-capture of Vienna at the end of the seventeenth), Islamic jihad is making itself felt. While there is no “central command” that orchestrates the global jihad, there is a common playbook: the Qur’an and the life and example of Mohammad, the Sunnah. If the West continues to misunderstand this basic fact, there can be little hope that it will take the necessary measures of self-defense. We are not threatened merely by the occasional terrorist but by a cohesive ideology, which for a thousand years threatened to overwhelm the West and managed to overcome other civilizations manifestly more advanced than itself. Ask the Persians or the Byzantines.

Much today is written and verbalized about terrorism, but little about Islam itself. We must understand that terrorism as such is not the enemy. Islam is not terrorism and terrorism is not Islam. Terrorism is a tactic to destabilize a political order and, ultimately, replace it with something else. There is no substitute to discerning the ultimate objectives of one’s adversary. It is the goal of Islamic terrorism that we must come to understand if we are to counter it. Like the casual use of “religion,” the flinging about of “terrorism” serves to obscure the specifically Islamic nature of the problem. The jihadis’ goal is not a united Ireland or an end to animal testing but the realization of the global order of Allah, Sharia law, as dictated by their holy book and the example of their Prophet. We must be willing to get our hands dirty in the sources of Islamic inspiration—the Qur’an and the Sunnah—if we are to respond effectively to Islam’s war against us.

The reasons that an individual Muslim will one day awaken to the call of jihad are surely as varied as individuals themselves. In any ideological community, there will always be a subset of true believers willing to sacrifice themselves for their beliefs. This subset moves and draws strength from immersion in a sympathetic milieu of other, perhaps less orthodox, faithful. The great mass of believers need not practice, or even subscribe to, the full tenets of their faith to afford a space in which true believers can and will. And it is these true believers who serve as the community’s vanguard in its efforts to realize its ultimate goals. Why are there so few “moderate” Muslim voices? Precisely because they would necessarily clash with the voices of their orthodox coreligionists who, in any Islamic context, must get the better part of the argument. While there may have been many “moderate” Mensheviks in the early Communist movement, it was inevitable, in light of the very assumptions of Communist ideology, that the more ruthless Bolsheviks would gain the upper hand. The upshot is that, as the general Muslim population in the West continues to grow—and its growth is only being encouraged by the Western secular powers—so will its nuclei of true-believing jihadis.

It is important to realize that the subversion of Western secular government by the Sharia agenda may be furthered through means other than terrorism. In the West, Muslim activists are increasingly availing themselves of other, legal forms of subversion and intimidation. Those for whom the ends justify the means can readily force an open society, which extends the benefit of the doubt as a matter of course, back on its heels. One of the ongoing debates in Muslim communities, both in the Islamic world and in the West, is whether a more Fabian strategy would serve the long-term jihad better than the bin Laden approach. Already, substantial parts of major European cities—Paris, London, Rotterdam, Malmo—are effectively ruled by Sharia law, enforced by local imams and their true-believing followers. And while Islam continues to grow in leaps and bounds, the native European populations are collapsing, a trend that has been underway for decades. Never in the history of the world has a materially sated civilization simply refused to reproduce. It seems that Europe, having jettisoned its Christian spirituality in order to glory the more in this life, is finding it difficult even to stay alive.

But to those ensconced in the halls of power, it is unimaginable that the edifice of modern civilization could be seriously threatened by an ancient religion from the wastelands of Arabia—an attitude one might have found in Cairo, Antioch, Persia, Spain, Constantinople, and countless other places before they were overrun by Mohammad’s “primitive” followers. We must bear in mind that, for most of the past thirteen centuries, Europe and Christendom had to battle for their lives against Islamic imperialism. At times, it was a close-run thing. However permanent it may seem, the relative quiet we have enjoyed on the Islam front since the Roman Catholic victory at Vienna on September 11, 1683—a day on the calendar to be remembered forever for a victory of a very different sort—is more the exception than the rule. We are not today facing Arab or Ottoman armies massing at the gates; rather we are witnessing the transformation from within of Western centers of strength into Islamic centers of power, permitted by a ruling class if not actually collaborationist then at least criminally incompetent. Political struggles invariably subtend factors of both capacity and will; while weaker in the former, Islam’s growing confidence—its faith—more than makes up for it in the latter.

While, on the one hand, Islam possesses the dynamism and staying power of a major religious faith, it shares the political objectives of modern totalitarian projects such as Communism and National Socialism—an exceptionally dangerous combination. Like Communism and National Socialism, Islam seeks the conquest and submission of territory to a particular political and legal regime, in its case, Sharia law. Like Communism and National Socialism, Islam divides the world into two warring spheres, one intrinsically good, the other evil. Dar al-Islam, the House of Islam, is the territory enlightened by Sharia law; dar al-harb, the House of War, the rest of the world upon which war is to be made until it is brought permanently into the Sharia fold. It is one of the great ironies of our time that tremendous political energy is expended on keeping Western public life thoroughly sanitized of the West’s traditional religion, Christianity, while Islam, an ideology that explicitly conflates—or rather never distinguishes in the first place—between the political and the religious, is blithely allowed in through the front door.

Despite its political nature, Islam continues to shelter under the rubric “religion,” a vague, sentimental term used to forestall rigorous inquiry into the thing itself. Among elite circles today, “religion” connotes quaint mythologies and rituals of more primitive, and therefore morally unimpeachable, peoples. (The exception, of course, is Christianity, the white man’s perennial instrument of tyranny.) The “orientalism” decried by that scourge of honest scholarship, Edward Said, is more alive today in the minds of his intellectual progeny than anywhere in the more serious Western scholarship of days gone by.

One of the difficulties for Westerners in coming to grips with the Islamic danger is that, since the French Revolution, the dangers that have threatened the West on a civilizational scale have arisen from within its own intellectual traditions. Communism and National Socialism, for example, were tumorous growths that perverted aspects of Western thought to catastrophic lengths. Such “-isms” of modernity are rightly characterized as “extreme,” having distorted the West’s own traditions of communal and national ideals. But such labels have little meaning in the context of Islam, an ideology with a decidedly non-Western pedigree. In the struggles against Communism and National Socialism, the healthful part of the Western organism managed to beat back the disease, and has since built up immunity to such forms of political cancer. But like the effects of chemotherapy, the treatment, while fighting the malignance, has enfeebled the body. The hypersensitivity in the West today—especially in Western Europe—to anything invocative of national pride or civilizational identity has crippled its ability to assert the legitimacy of its own traditions against those who would destroy them. The danger today comes not from some new perversion of the Western tradition but from an alien ideology whose lineage stems not from Athens and Jerusalem but Mecca and Medina. As usual, many are still fighting the last war.

But the most salient manifestations of the Islamic tradition today, the terrorist and the suicide bomber, are no “extreme” distortions of a benign Islamic tradition; rather they are manifestations of that tradition itself. The “-ism” that political correctitude requires appended to “Islam” and “jihad” whenever there is mention of Muslims and violence is both entirely redundant and fundamentally misleading. Unlike the case of true Western radicals, there is no hope of recapturing Islam’s true believers back into the Western fold; there is no error to be corrected that will set them back on their true, benign path. The gravest mistake of the West today is its insistent hope in a fictive “moderate” Islam.

The persistent myth of a peaceful Islam, which lacks any doctrinal or historical basis, serves to forestall any decisive remedial action and, if not soon relinquished, will doom both the West and those individual Muslims susceptible to transformation. The only “peace” afforded with respect to Islam derives from a calculation of force: either overwhelming superior force, which keeps Islamic predations contained, or abject surrender, which slates the jihad. The prime fault of the progressive Western mind is ever to look toward what might be rather than to accept what is. Islam is what it is: a violent, expansionary political program with aspirations of world conquest. If it ever transforms into something else, it will not be by virtue of infidel hopes and blandishments, however earnest.

The West’s continuing self-deception that its liberal political ways may be squared with Islam is the basis for its ongoing policy mistakes, both foreign and domestic. In the belief that Iraq could be transformed into a Western-style “democracy,” America has expended significant blood and fantastic treasure on replacing a largely secular dictator (and former ally) with an Islamic theocracy. Similarly, the Western European powers are setting themselves up for a severe disappointment in trying to mold what is now tragi-comically referred to as the “Euro-Mediterraean Union,” i.e., Eurabia. Indeed, the growth of Islam in Europe is rapidly confronting the European populations with a choice of catastrophes: (a) continue to treat Islam as a “lifestyle choice” and quietly slip behind the iron veil of Sharia sometime in the latter half of the century; (b) summarily abandon the modern assumptions on which the welfare state and its suicidal concomitants, multiculturalism and revolutionary levels of immigration, are based; (c) manage the rising tide of European Islam and jihadi terrorism through the construction of a police state. In light of European history of the past few centuries, the importation of Islam into Europe precisely to serve as a pretext for constructing an Orwellian society cannot be ruled out. Indeed, such a hypothesis explains quite neatly why it is that the European elite would so willingly sign the death warrant of their own civilization. It may be that the mousey Eurocrats are quietly effecting what the Communist and fascist revolutionaries failed to accomplish on a permanent basis—a pan-European police state. The only other alternative, (d), increasingly likely, is what we have seen so many times before, in Lebanon, in Bosnia, in Kosovo: civil war. While it may be hard to imagine urban warfare in London and Paris, it was hard to imagine in Sarajevo and Beirut, too.

If a serious defense of Western civilization is to take place, it must first begin with a frank acknowledgement of the political nature of Islam. It is imperative to reclassify Islam as a political system with religious aspects rather than as a religion with political aspects. Islam is in fact an alternative form of government in competition with Western governments that seeks to weaken and, ultimately, destroy and replace them. It is both false and perilous for Western societies to regard Islam as a “religion” and afford it the special protection associated with that term. Under the guise of “religious freedom,” Muslim activists will continue to subvert Western governments first politically and then by force. Such has become commonplace in Western Europe in which acts of violence are used to intimidate and cow populations in order to prepare the way for political demands.

Islam must not be afforded the protected status of a religion precisely because it does not recognize the separation of religion and politics on which Western-style government and religious freedom are based. Any recognition of legitimacy must be reciprocal: It is illogical—and suicidal—for Western governments to regard Islam as a legitimate “religion” when Islam is unwilling to recognize the legitimacy of those same governments.

The West must awaken to the fact that it is facing nothing less than the resurgence of the greatest war machine in world history: an ideology that holds the killing of others, the plundering of their wealth, the conquering of their lands, the enslavement of their people, and the destruction of their institutions to be among the highest virtues and the stepping stones to salvation. The only appropriate policy will be one of containing Islam: keeping it out of our own societies while being very realistic about our ability to influence affairs in its sphere of influence. First and foremost, we must abandon the fantasy that asymptotic globalization will somehow prove the cure to Islam’s fourteen-hundred-yearold antipathy to the rest of the world. Those reluctant to accept the bleak truth should ask themselves: Is their reluctance the result of careful study of the Islamic sources and history, or is it due to their unwillingness to accept a grim reality that will necessitate sacrifice and struggle? Almost invariably it seems, Islam’s non-Muslim apologists lack even a basic understanding of the subject they so imperiously pronounce on. For those who know better, we must not hesitate to take such people to task, to expose their ignorance, their dishonesty, and their intellectual laziness.

It is a paradox, but no society that has survival as its highest goal will survive: It must possess a higher, transcendent end to motivate its people to defend the social order against potential attack. Belief in a higher reality that transcends this world reassures the warrior, whether his art is scholarly or martial, that fighting—and, if necessary, dying—is worth it. Facing a spiritually denuded West, this is Islam’s great strength. Today, everything that once made the West great and that distinguished it from other civilizations—overseas expansion, Christianity, superior cultural achievement—has been delegitimated by decades of relativist battering. Recovering the great cultural inheritance of Western civilization—so carelessly squandered by its supposed guardians—will be the great requisite to Western survival.

It is evident that Islam has its true believers—do we have ours?

Gregory M. Davis, Ph.D.
Author of Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World
Producer and director of Islam: What the West Needs to Know