Curiously, those who advocate aggressive and futile wars against Muslims are equally devoted to promoting the Religion-of-Peace pie-in-the-sky, and the attendant misconceptions about Islam. Yes, neoconservatives, led by the Bush/Blair pair, have managed to anesthetize their subjects to a faith that defies sanitation. As you know, neoconservatives implicate “Radical Islam” in our woes, by which they mean a splinter of Islam. Indeed, an estimated 100 to 300 million Muslims are active adherents of Islamism: small potatoes, right? Yet to listen to our globalists, you’d think that Jihadists are as alien to Islam as edelweiss is to the Kalahari.
Ad nauseam we hear it chanted that the Religion-of-Peace was doing what it does best–inspire serenity and prosperity–when suddenly, ex nihilo, radicals materialized and derailed it. Of course, this nonsensical incantation is both ahistorical and illiterate–it’s easily corrected with the aid of a good history book and a Quran.
The first will show that the sword has always been integral to Islam, and that conversion has invariably meant conquest and untold carnage. The second will prove that, to be fair to Islam’s alleged hijackers, the’ve done no more than act on the dictates of their faith. Bin Laden is an obedient Muslim. He has obeyed the Quran. The Call to Jihad instructs Muslims that, “When you meet those who disbelieve smite at their necks till when you have killed and wounded many of them.” Holy war, which is demanded in Islamic law, is not defensive war as the Western students of Islam would like to tell us, warns Serge Trifkovic, foreign affairs editor of the paleoconservative magazine Chronicles, and author of The Sword of the Prophet.
Islam, moreover, has changed little over 1,400 years. Unlike the Jewish (and no doubt Christian) holy texts which have been reinterpreted by the sages over the centuries, the Quran has not; ”its decrees are not debatable and are to be taken literally.” Bin Laden may not be a perfect Muslim–he prefers bombing to beheading. But the times they have changed. Allowances must be made for technological advances and expediency.
A geopolitical blind spot tops the historical and textual deficiencies characteristic of the administration’s approach to terrorism and Islam. Agree or disagree with it, an aggressive war, launched against a sovereign Muslim nation–Iraq–was bound to serve as a catalyst for Jihadists. But the policy pinheads who extol Islam refuse to factor American foreign policy into the terrorism equation. Supporters of Bush’s foreign policy would do well to remember that, even if they believe, as Bush expects them to, that war in Iraq and terrorism in America are mutually exclusive conditions, they must at least concede that the president’s domestic positions on immigration, border security, and the imperative to be “minimally observant” about America’s enemies (comedian Dennis Miller’s term for racial profiling), amount to a reckless indifference to the sovereignty and safety of Americans.
But as I’ve previously observed, “Inviting an invasion by foreigners and instigating one against them are two sides of the same neoconservative coin.”