Redstate

By Charles Bird Posted in War — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

In the last few weeks, I've been mulling over the idea that Islam is not a religion of peace, but of submission, by its very definition.  It is a noble concept for a person to voluntarily submit himself or herself to God and to put into practice the tenets of the faith.  But it's another thing altogether when a person decides that others must also submit.  When self-described Muslims decide to militantly force their religious ideology down others' throats, then we have a War Against Militant Islamism.

While we've long heard and read from many on the Left about American imperialism and hegemony, there is also an imperialism problem with large numbers of Muslims throughout history, as documented by Efraim Karsh of the University of London.  The history of Islamic imperialism and subjugation neatly play into current events.  For instance, just in the last week or two:

Bangladesh.  From the Khaleej Times:

An Islamic militant leader accused of waging a bloody bombing campaign to impose Islamic laws in Bangladesh told a court he ordered the murder of two judges because it was Allah’s will, police said on Tuesday.

"The judges were murdered at the instruction of Allah. We should be rewarded, not punished for following the order of killing judges," Shaikh Abdur Rahman was quoted as saying by investigating officer Munshi Atiqur Rahman.

Iran.  Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush, as interpreted by Hillel Fradkin of the Weekly Standard:

Liberal democracy, the letter says, is an affront to God, and as such its days are numbered. It would be best if President Bush and others realized this and abandoned it. But at all events, Iran will help where possible to hasten its end.

Turkey.  From TurkishPress.com:

A senior judge was killed and four others wounded when a man shouting "I am a soldier of Allah" stormed into the court and sprayed bullets on judges who were in the middle of a legal session, officials said.

Court members described the attack as retaliation for rulings confirming a ban on Islamic headscarves in public insititutions and universities in Turkey.

Fortunately, Turkey has a decades-long tradition of secular government, and people are taking to the streets to resist this barbarism.

Saudi Arabia.  Government-approved Saudi textbooks, after they've removed inciteful and intolerant materials from their curriculum:

The problem is: These claims are not true.

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government's statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the "monotheists") and unbelievers (the "polytheists" and "infidels").

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to "spread the faith."

The Wahhabi kingdom also runs academies in nineteen world capitals, and sends religious tracts to mosques worldwide.

Iraq.  Ayatollah Ahmad al-Baghdadi:

Jihad in Islam, from the perspective of Islamic jurisprudence, is of two types: Jihad initiated by the Muslims, which means raiding the world in order to spread the word that "there is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah" throughout the world. But this raid will not materialize in our era - the era of barbaric American capitalistic globalism -unless the Infallible, peace be upon him, is present.

But there are jurisprudents, both Sunnis and Twelver Shiites, who said the presence of the Infallible is not a prerequisite. If the objective and subjective circumstances materialize, and there are soldiers, weapons, and money - even if this means using biological, chemical, and bacterial weapons - we will conquer the world, so that "There is no God but Allah, and Muhammad is the Prophet of Allah" will be triumphant over the domes of Moscow, Washington, and Paris.

The Netherlands.  Immigration minister Rita Verdonk joined the community of intolerant Muslims to shut Hirsi Ali down.  She wrote the script for Submission: Part One.  Filmmaker Theo Van Gogh was murdered for his efforts and Ms. Ali still requires bodyguards for her protection.  Welcome to America's shores, Ms. Ali, if your visa problems continue.

Denmark.  Anger for the Prophet cartoons still remains:

A man believed to be a top al Qaeda militant who escaped from a U.S. airbase in Afghanistan urged Muslims in an Internet video to launch attacks in Europe as revenge for cartoons that lampooned the Prophet Mohammad.

A Web site often used by militants posted a video from a man identified as Abu Yahya al-Libi in which he called for Muslims to "send rivers of blood" down the streets of Denmark, Norway and France for publishing the cartoons that caused a global furor earlier this year.

The United States.  For the crime of voicing concerns about a new mosque being built by the Islamic Society of Boston, Ahmed Mansour is getting sued for defamation.  Jeff Jacoby:

When Ahmed Mansour learned a lawsuit had been filed against him by the Islamic Society of Boston, he had one urgent question: "Will they put me in jail?"

The answer was no -- in America, people don't go to prison for publicly expressing their views. But Mansour had good reason to worry. He had learned the hard way that Muslim reformers who speak out against Islamist fanaticism and religious dictatorship can indeed end up in prison -- or worse. It had happened to him in his native Egypt, which he fled in 2001 after receiving death threats. He was grateful that the United States had granted him asylum, enabling him to go on promoting his vision of a progressive Islam in which human rights and democratic values would be protected. But would he now have to fight in America the same kind of persecution he experienced in Egypt?

Mansour is just one of many people and organizations being sued for defamation by the Islamic Society of Boston, which accuses them all of conspiring to deny freedom of worship to Boston-area Muslims. In fact, the defendants -- who include journalists, a terrorism expert, and the founder of the American Anti-Slavery Group, plus the Episcopalian lay minister and the Jewish attorney who together with Mansour formed the interfaith Citizens for Peace and Tolerance in 2004 -- appear to be guilty of nothing more than voicing concerns about the ISB's construction of a large mosque in Roxbury.

The examples of subjugation and violent jihad obviously mean that we have a long struggle ahead of us.  We are pitted against a sizable contingent of Muslims who seek to subdue western civilization, putting their own version into primacy, rather than live peaceably alongside as equals.  The frustrating part is that there are moderate, tolerant Muslims out there, but more needed to step up.  In a response to Dean Esmay, Robert Spencer articulated that the real problem with moderate Muslims is that the moderates don't have the Islamic grounding to back up their positions, thus they are ineffective at convincing the hardliners.  I don't know if that's true or not.  In another post, Spencer writes:  "What I have said many times is that there is no large-scale organized movement within the Muslim world against the radicals.  Certainly there are many individual voices."  Perhaps he's right, which is a depressing thought.  I do know of the American Islamic Congress and the As-Sunnah Foundation, but whether they're in the category or "major" or not, I don't know.

Time will tell if the democratic experiments in Afghanistan and Iraq will indeed work.  Another favorable model can be found in Morocco.  Finally, in a back-and-forth with Bernard Lewis:

So, limited, contractual, consensual government is part of the Islamic tradition, and was a living part of it until the process of modernization came and destroyed everything. Therefore, I think we have a good chance of getting back to that. But we must be realistic. As I say, they must develop their own form of limited, moderate, contractual, consensual government. What they don't have, which is an essential part of ours, is the idea of elected representation. They have representation in the sense of the leader of a group, who comes from within the group, but the idea of elections on the corporate bodies is new; and this is difficult, but not impossible.

While it's unclear whether freedom, in the vehicle of representative government, will prevent dhimmitude, second-class status for women and abrogation of human rights, at least there's a shot that they won't happen in freer societies.