When asked at the end of Pope John Paul II’s long pontificate if the Catholic Church might change its stance on Islam, Archbishop Michael Fitzgerald, president of the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, replied, “There may be a greater insistence on religious liberty. But I don’t think we’re going to go to war. The times of the Crusades are over.”1
Guess what?
· Europe could be Islamic by the end of the twenty-first century.
· In order to defeat the international jihadist threat, the U.S. must reconfigure its alliances on the basis of where countries stand on Islamic jihad.
· Converts from Islam to Christianity must live in fear even in the United States.
This surely goes without saying. Despite the fevered fantasies of jihadists around the world, the Crusades of the history books are definitely over. But the jihad that the Crusaders faced is not over. The thousand-year-old Muslim dream of an Islamic Europe is definitely not over. In fact, in a certain sense, it is now closer to fulfillment than at any time in history.
The Islamization of Europe
Will tourists in Paris in the year 2105 take a moment to visit the “mosque of Notre Dame” and the “Eiffel Minaret?” Through massive immigration and official dhimmitude from European leaders, Muslims are accomplishing today what they failed to do at the time of the Crusaders: conquer Europe. How quickly is Europe being Islamized? So quickly that even historian Bernard Lewis, who has continued throughout his honor-filled career to be disingenuous about Islamic radicalism and terrorism, forthrightly told the German newspaper Die Welt: “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the century.”2
Or maybe sooner: If demographic trends continue, France, Holland, and other Western European nations could have Muslim majorities by middle of this century. Meanwhile, these growing Muslim minorities are increasingly assertive and disruptive. Consider some recent indicators from other European nations:
Sweden’s third-largest city, Malmö, has become a Middle East outpost in Scandinavia. A quarter of the city’s population is now Muslim, and that number is rapidly growing. Nor are the Muslims of Malmö inclined to be peaceful and tolerant. Even the police are afraid: “If we park our car it will be damaged—so we have to go very often in two vehicles, one just to protect the other vehicle,” reported a police officer in Malmö. Meanwhile, Swedish ambulance drivers will not enter some areas of Malmö unless police accompany them.3
The Nordgårdsskolen in Aarhus, Denmark, has become the first Dane-free school. The students now come entirely from Denmark’s fastest-growing constituency: Muslim immigrants.4
Also in Denmark, the Qur’an is now required reading for all upper-secondary school students.5 There should be nothing wrong with requiring students to read the Qur’an, but given the current ascendancy of political correctness on the Continent, it is unlikely that critical perspectives will be included.
Pakistani Muslim leader Qazi Hussain Ahmed gave an address at the Islamic Cultural Center in Oslo. He was allowed into the country despite that fact that, according to Norway’s Aftenposten, he “has earlier made flattering comments about Osama bin Laden, and his party, Jamaat-e-Islami, also has hailed al-Qaeda members as heroes.”6 In Norway, he declined to answer questions about whether he thought homosexuals should be killed.7
Elsewhere in Europe, jihad is taking a more violent form. Dutch officials have uncovered at least fifteen separate terrorist plots, all aimed at punishing the Netherlands for its 1,300 peacekeeping troops in Iraq.8 And in Spain, Moroccan Muslims, including several suspected participants in the March 11 Madrid bombings, took control of a wing in a Spanish prison in fall 2004. From there, they broadcast Muslim prayers at high volume, physically intimidated non-Muslim prisoners, hung portraits of Osama bin Laden, and boasted, “We are going to win the holy war.” What was the guards’ response? They asked the ringleaders to please lower the volume on the prayers.9
What Europe has long sown it is now reaping. In her book Eurabia, Bat Ye’or, the pioneering historian of dhimmitude, chronicles how this has come to pass. Europe, she explains, began thirty years ago to travel down a path of appeasement, accommodation, and cultural abdication in pursuit of shortsighted political and economic benefits. She observes that today, “Europe has evolved from a Judeo-Christian civilization, with important post-Enlightenment/secular elements, to a ‘civilization of dhimmitude,’ i.e., Eurabia: a secular-Muslim transitional society with its traditional Judeo-Christian mores rapidly disappearing.”10
If Western Europe does become Islamized, as demographic trends suggest, before too long America will be facing a world that is drastically different and more forbidding than it is today.
What is to be done?
Archbishop Fitzgerald is right; the time of the Crusades is long past. The idea that a modern pope would summon Christians to a military defense of the Holy Land or anything else against Muslims is inconceivable. It is even more inconceivable that a significant portion of the Western world would respond to such a call. Not only is the West riven with a disunity that makes the fissures of Crusader times seem like love fests, but there is little or no unanimity of outlook and purpose. While America fights a war on terror that has included the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the occupation of Iraq, France and Germany have pursued a different strategy, attempting to establish the European Union as a global counter-weight to the United States—a strategy that involves close cooperation with the Arab League.
The situation in Europe has grown quite grave, and something must be done. It may be that the world needs a new Crusade, though of a kind different from those led by Richard the Lionhearted and Godfrey of Bouillon. We have seen in this book that the Crusades were primarily an act of defense against the encroachment of Islam. In that sense a new Crusade is not only possible but desirable.
Am I calling for a war between Christianity and Islam? Certainly not. What I am calling for is a general recognition that we are already in a war between two vastly different ideas of how to govern states and order societies, and that in this struggle the West has nothing to apologize for and a great deal to defend. Indeed, the struggle against sharia is nothing less than a struggle for universal human rights, a concept that originated in the West and is denied by Islam. Everyone in the fractured and fractious West—Christians, Jews, other religious believers, atheist humanists—ought to be able to agree that this is a concept worth defending, even if they disagree about its particulars.
What we are fighting today is not precisely a “war on terror.” Terror is a tactic, not an opponent. To wage a “war on terror” is like waging a “war on bombs”; it focuses on a tool of the enemy rather than the enemy itself. A refusal to identify the enemy is extremely dangerous: It leaves those who refuse vulnerable to being blindsided—as proven by the White House access granted by both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush to now-jailed jihadists such as Abdurrahman Alamoudi and Sami al-Arian.
A forthright acknowledgment that we are facing a renewed jihad would go a long way to preventing that sort of diplomatic and intelligence embarrassment. This is not really as far-fetched as it may seem. Jihad terrorists have declared war on the United States and other non-Muslim nations—all the U.S. and Western European countries need to do is identify the enemy as they have identified themselves.
Defeating the jihad internationally
After the September 11 terrorist attacks, President Bush warned the world, “You’re either with the terrorists or you’re with us.” But because of official Washington’s persistent refusal to acknowledge exactly who the terrorists are and why they are fighting, that bold line in the sand has been obscured time and again. And few, if any, are even asking the right questions.
During her Senate confirmation hearings, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice was grilled about Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and how long our troops will be in that strife-ridden country. But no one bothered to ask her a more important question: When and how will American foreign policy be adjusted to defeat the goals, not just the tactics, of our jihad opponents?
Three years after September 11, this has still not been done. It should have been the first order of business. Other nations take this as axiomatic—including our enemies. Article 3 of the Iranian constitution stipulates that Iran must base its foreign policy on “Islamic criteria, fraternal commitment to all Muslims, and unsparing support to the freedom fighters of the world.”
I recommend that the United States do the same: state its goals and interests regarding the global jihad. This would involve a serious reevaluation of American posture around the globe.
A few modest proposals to this end: In the first place, it is scandalous that so many years after President Bush announced that “you’re either with the terrorists or with us,” the United States still counts as friends and allies—or at least recipients of its largesse—so many states where jihadist activity is widespread.
Tie foreign aid to the treatment of non-Muslims. A State Department that really had America’s interests at heart would immediately stop all forms of American aid to Kosovo, Algeria, Somalia, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, the Palestinians, Pakistan, Indonesia, and even Iraq and Afghanistan, and any other state, until each demonstrably ends all support—material, educational, and religious—for jihad warfare, and grants full equality of rights to any non-Muslim citizens.
Reconfigure our global alliances on the same basis. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and the other exporters of jihad should be put on notice. Continued friendly relations with the United States absolutely depend on an immediate and comprehensive renunciation of the jihad, including a reformation of schools that teach it. It cannot be enough for a state to denounce or renounce terror; each must stop Islamic jihad as a means of undermining the integrity of other states. At the same time, the United States should try to cultivate closer ties with states that have been victims of jihad violence—most notably, Russia. So far, Russia’s resistance to the global jihad has been even more inconsistent and shortsighted than our own. However, if the U.S. were to acknowledge that we are up against a worldwide jihad and seek closer ties on that basis, this might start to change.
Call on Muslim states to renounce sharia’s expansionist imperative. To be a friend of the United States, each state must renounce any intention to try to realize the Islamic goals enunciated by Pakistani Islamic leader Syed Abul Ala Maududi, who declared that when Muslims are ruled by non-Muslims, “the believers would be under an obligation to do their utmost to dislodge them from political power and to make them live in subservience to the Islamic way of life.”11
His comments were in full accord with Islamic theology and history, as well as with the Qur’an as it has been read and understood by Muslims for centuries. This is the goal of the jihadists today; it should be the fundamental defining point of U.S. alliances with Muslim states.
Initiate a full-scale Manhattan Project to find new energy sources—so that the needed reconfiguration of our alliances can be more than just words. President Bush took a first tentative step toward this in April 2005, when he called for the construction of new nuclear power plants and oil refineries to decrease American dependence on foreign (i.e., Saudi) energy supplies.13 But this was to propose only a stopgap when a total overhaul is needed; much more needs to be done. The “Manhattan Project” is a deliberate choice of analogy. During World War II, the United States invested millions and set the brightest scientific minds in the world on the atomic bomb project. Is a similar effort being made today to end our dependence on Saudi oil?
Muhammad vs. Jesus
“So whatever you wish that men would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets.”
Jesus (Matthew 7:12)
“None of you will have faith till he likes for his (Muslim) brother what he likes for himself.”12
The Muslim version of the Golden Rule extends only to fellow Muslims, not to unbelievers.
In a larger sense, does anyone in the State Department have the will to advocate these and other measures? Or is it only regimes like the bloody mullahocracy in Tehran that are allowed to speak openly about their principles and goals, and take all the necessary measures for their own defense?
Secretary Rice needs to ask and answer these questions. The State Department’s bureaucracy has been playing realpolitik for so long that it reflexively thinks it can work with the Islamic jihadists—as if dropping care packages into Indonesia will somehow blunt the force of the Maududi dictum that “non-Muslims have absolutely no right to seize the reins of power.”
The State Department needs to come to grips with the fact that it is facing a totalitarian, supremacist, and expansionist ideology—and plan accordingly. Not only has it not been done, but it is so far off the table that it never even occurred to Democratic senator Barbara Boxer to use it as another partisan stick with which to batter Dr. Rice’s competence and veracity at her confirmation hearing.
Now it is up to Secretary Rice herself to demonstrate whether she has the vision to do what is needed.
Defeating the jihad domestically
The first thing we need in order to defeat the jihad at home is an informed citizenry:
A Book You’re Not Supposed to Read
Infiltration: How Muslim Spies and Subversives Have Penetrated Washington by Paul Sperry; Nashville, TN: Nelson Current, 2005. Sperry details just how bad things have gotten in America: Muslims with clear ties to jihad terrorists have entrenched themselves deeply in our political system and military establishment. This book underscores the urgency of mounting a full and effective resistance to the Islamic jihad—before it’s too late.
Read the Qur’an.
In 1141, Peter the Venerable, the abbot of Cluny, had the Qur’an translated into Latin. After that, every preacher of the Crusades was required to have read it.14 If Europeans were going to go to the Middle East to fight Muslims, it was clear to virtually everyone that they needed to have a working knowledge of their opponents’ mindset. Yet in the United States, the idea that knowing something about Islam and the Qur’an might help clarify some issues regarding the War on Terror meets with ridicule, indifference, or charges of “racism.” Mahmood Mamdani, Herbert Lehman Professor of Government in the department of anthropology and school of international affairs at Columbia University, recently heaped contempt on the idea that the Qur’an had anything to tell us about modern terrorism:
I was in New York City on 9/11. In the weeks that followed, newspapers reported that the Koran had become one of the biggest-selling books in American bookshops. Astonishingly, Americans seemed to think that reading the Koran might give them a clue to the motivation of those who carried out the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center. Recently, I have wondered whether the people of Falluja have taken to reading the Bible to understand the motivation for American bombings. I doubt it.15
It was astonishing indeed—that Mandani and his publishers evidently thought this is a cogent argument. Was it really astonishing that Americans would read the Qur’an to discover the motivation of men who cited the Qur’an repeatedly in their communiqués to explain their actions? It was more astonishing that Mahmood Mamdani would think that Fallujans reading the Bible was an appropriate reductio ad absurdum to dispose of this idea, despite the demonstrable fact that for all the dark suspicions of the PC crowd about Bush’s Christianity, modern American foreign policy has never proceeded according to Biblical or Christian precepts, either explicitly or implicitly—except perhaps in the military’s zeal to avoid civilian casualties as much as possible (a principle that has been contravened more than once). The contrast with Osama bin Laden’s Qur’an-filled messages should be immediately obvious—except to all who don’t wish to see it, or who wish to obscure it.
Report honestly about jihadist activity in the U.S. and the West.
An informed citizenry doesn’t just read the Qur’an and other Islamic sources. It also demands responsible reporting from the media and honesty from law enforcement officials about jihadist attacks in the United States. We saw in chapter sixteen how common it is for such attacks to be explained away. This obfuscation no doubt stems from an official fear of stirring up vigilantes who will victimize Muslims in America. But this insults the intelligence and decency of the American public. Official unwillingness to draw obvious conclusions hinders our ability to make informed decisions about how to conduct the War on Terror. It has to stop.
Reclassify Muslim organizations.
Any Muslim group in America that does not explicitly renounce, in word and in deed, any intention now or in the future to replace the Constitution of the United States with Islamic sharia should be classified as a political rather than a religious organization, and should be subject to all the responsibilities and standards to which political organizations must adhere.
Take pride in Western culture.
It’s time for all the schools that dropped “Crusaders” as their team name to readopt it. The corrosive effects of multiculturalism have bred a suicidal hatred of the West among our own children. It’s time to roll this back through a concerted effort to extirpate the multiculturalist ethos from school textbooks and the culture at large. Western civilization has given the world notions of human rights that are universally accepted (except in the Islamic world), technological advancement beyond the wildest dreams of people of previous ages, and a great deal more. Yet our own leaders and teachers tell us we must stand before the world in a posture of shame.
It’s time to say “enough,” and teach our children to take pride in their own heritage. To know that they have a culture and a history of which they can and should be grateful; that they are not the children and grandchildren of oppressors and villains; and that their homes and families are worth defending against those who want to take them away, and are willing to kill to do so.