Someone Has To Stand Up To Intolerance

A few years ago I thought I could write less about Islam. I’d studied it almost non stop since shortly after 9-11 but felt it wasn’t something positive. So I tried to talk about electric cars and other Israeli technology.

Well Islam just refuses to go away. Just recently Mirabelle wrote a new piece looking at the Jizya tax that which mirrors something I wrote almost 6 years ago! It feels like after more than a century of trying to understand the conflict between Muslim Arabs and Jews in Israel in every possible way except as a religious duty of Muslims, people are finally running out of ideas.

The only possible reason we’re still fighting is the last one anybody wants it to be. Muslims see it as a holy duty, given to them by their Allah, via Mohammed, to reconquer first Israel, then the rest of the Caliphate and then the world (and the moon and stars).

This is clearly a political goal but it’s cloaked in a religious wrapper that’s got everybody confused. If it was solely a political movement we’d have banned it and locked up anyone with sympathies for it. Desiring a worldwide, universal, Islamic Caliphate that imposes Islam on people who don’t want to believe it is the antithesis of the liberal and free societies we say we want to live in.

I just came across the following brilliant piece by Raymond Ibrahim, you really need to go read it all, I hope the following extract encourages you to do that. He turns things around a bit: Islam and Jihad will always be there, what’s giving them power today, he says, is those within us who are letting Jihad win.

So what is the root cause of jihadi attacks? Many think that the ultimate source of the ongoing terrorization of the West is Islam. Yet this notion has one problem: the Muslim world is immensely weak and intrinsically incapable of being a threat. That every Islamic assault on the West is a terrorist attack — and terrorism, as is known, is the weapon of the weak — speaks for itself.

This was not always the case. For approximately one thousand years, the Islamic world was the scourge of the West. Today’s history books may refer to those who terrorized Christian Europe as Arabs, Saracens, Moors, Ottomans, Turks, Mongols, or Tatars — but all were operating under the same banner of jihad that the Islamic State is operating under.

No — today, the ultimate enemy is within. The root cause behind nonstop Muslim terrorization of the West is found in those who stifle or whitewash all talk and examination of Muslim doctrine and history; who welcome hundreds of thousands of Muslim migrants while knowing that some are jihadi operatives and many are simply “radical”; who work to overthrow secular Arab dictators in the name of “democracy” and “freedom,” only to uncork the jihad suppressed by the autocrats (the Islamic State’s territory consists of lands that were “liberated” in Iraq, Libya, and Syria by the U.S. and its allies).

So are Western leaders and politicians the root cause behind Islamic terrorization of the West?

Close — but still not there yet.

Far from being limited to a number of elitist leaders and institutions, the Western empowerment of the jihad is the natural outcome of postmodern thinking — the real reason an innately weak Islam can be a source of repeated woes for a militarily and economically superior West.

Remember, the reason people like French President Francois Hollande, U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama, and German Chancellor Angela Merkel are in power — three prominent Western leaders who insist that Islam is innocent of violence and who push for Muslim immigration — is because they embody a worldview that is normative in the West.

….

As Islam retreated into obscurity, the post-Christian West slowly came into being. Islam didn’t change, but the West did: Muslims still venerate their heritage and religion — which impels them to jihad against the Western “infidel” — whereas the West learned to despise its heritage and religion, causing it to become an unwitting ally of the jihad.

Hence the current situation: the jihad is back in full vigor, while the West — not just its leaders, but much of the populace — facilitates it in varying degrees. Nor is this situation easily remedied. For to accept that Islam is inherently violent and intolerant is to reject a number of cornerstones of postmodern Western thinking that far transcend the question of Islam. In this context, nothing short of an intellectual/cultural revolution — where rational thinking becomes mainstream — will allow the West to confront Islam head on.

Read the rest.

Your mission, if you choose to accept it, is to find your friends who are letting the “inherently violent and intolerant”  Islam win in the West and tell them they have to confront it.