Countering the Jihad

The eminent Hugh Fitzgerald, a vice-president at JihadWatch reflects upon an interview with Oriana Fallachi and gives us eight ways to limit the damage of the present Jihad.

"When I ask her what "solution" there might be to prevent the European collapse of which she speaks, Ms. Fallaci flares up like a lit match. "How do you dare to ask me for a solution?" --- from a recent interview
The word "solution" is the wrong word. Had the reporter asked, or had Fallaci replied, that "what could be done to limit the damage, to contain or reverse the power of Muslims and the Jihad worldwide" then a coherent answer might have been offered, by Fallaci or by someone else.

The "containment of Communism" worked. Communism collapsed in the Soviet Union, and before that in Eastern and Central Europe, and is now coming undone in China. Why? It collapsed because a sufficient number of people realized it was a farce and a failure, a failure in the very area -- the delivery of material wellbeing to the masses -- where it had most insistently promised it would be a success.

Who created the conditions for that failure to be perceived? The United States, and with the United States, other Western powers that countered Soviet propaganda and produced propaganda of their own, that did everything they could to check Soviet power once they came to their senses in the late 1940s (a little late for those countries already suffering Stalin's presence, or that of his local agents).

The Marshall Plan. NATO. Radio Free Liberty. Radio Free Europe. The Berlin Airlift. The suppression of Communist rebels in Greece. The Korean War. The money that went to non-Communist political parties all over Europe. The money that went to support newspapers and publishing houses all over Europe. The assistance or encouragement of various revolts inside the Soviet Union -- the "Forest Brotherhood" for example (the "Leshiye"). The bases everywhere. The anti-Communist propaganda. Decades of it, and trillions spent. And you know what? It worked. A group of people within the Soviet system came to some conclusions of their own about the moral and economic failures of Communism.

This can be done, more slowly, more deliberately, with Islam, and the Jihad that is central to Islam. The Infidel lands and peoples must first learn about Islam -- not from Muslims, or for that matter from non-Muslim propagandists, some of them hirelings, others ideologically wedded to Islam perhaps because it is now the most obvious vehicle of expressing one's hatred of, and alienation from, the Western world and, especially, the United States. They must thoroughly understand the texts. And then they must learn about Muslim conquest of non-Muslim peoples, and how those peoples were, in time and space, treated. And they must learn the kinds of things that Muslim apologists -- including those who are the most effective of all, the smooth-tongued "moderates" who, while seeming to denounce this or that terrorist act, will immediately be defensive about Islam itself, try to convince unwary Infidels that "Islam" has "nothing to do" with this, whether it is bombs going off, or the murder of apostates and others, or the mistreatment of women. Recently, on The Connection, all three of the "guests" -- one Hussein Haqqani, a former Pakistani ambassador, and the still-clueless-about-Islam Nicholas Kristof, and someone formerly in the State Department -- were quite insistent that the Pakistani lady, Ms. Bibi, who was gang-raped, suffered from people whose acts of course "had nothing to do with Islam." That's right, nothing: not the texts, not the attitudes those texts engender -- Muslims pervaded with Islam but whose actions "had nothing to do with Islam".

Basic Principles:

1. Recognition that the presence of large numbers of Muslims is a security threat and one which Infidels (read non-Muslims), need not inflict on themselves.

2. Recognition that the oil wealth that has provided Arab and Muslim OPEC members with nearly $10 billion in undeserved revenues since 1973 is what finances the world-wide Jihad.

3. Diminishing the oil wealth is not enough. All Infidel aid to Muslim countries, all transfers of wealth that have been based on a misunderstanding, and the belief that "Poverty" is the problem or at least, if Muslims are made richer (ideally, just like Muslims in Saudi Arabia) they will calm down, and turn to other things – all this must stop.

4. Make it impossible for the Arabs and Muslims to acquire major weaponry.

5. Let the rich Arabs and Muslims know that their property in the West is not permanently safe, and that it may be seized -- as the property of German nationals was seized by the American government in World War II.

6. Counter-Jihad: as the Americans during the Cold War paid for Encounter magazine, or for special publishing houses that produced emigre Russian literature (Editions de la Seine, for example), and subsidized Die Monat and other publications, they can do the same today.

(It is ironic that the Al-Jazeera, the anti-American mouthpiece of the Arab world, is now operating in the West as the Arab version of the Voice of America!)

7. Identify those populations whom the Muslim supporters of Da'wa have themselves identified as particularly vulnerable to being "turned" into agents of Islam, into those who will sign up for the Army of Islam, which -- at this point, after all that has happened -- is the only way one can properly view someone who now converts to Islam. Ten or twenty years ago, such conversion might possibly have seemed bizarre, but not necessarily a declaration of war on Infidels and their society. But that was then. And this is now.

8. Wherever there are natural fissures within Islam, or wherever such fissures can be created -- as by removing Western aid, and forcing Egypt, Jordan et al to go hat in hand to the rich Arabs of the Gulf, which can only increase intra-Arab tensions (think back to Nasser's hatred of the Saudis, and of how that played out in the early 1960s, with that proxy war in Yemen between left-wing Nasserites and monarchists backed by Saudi Arabia) -- let them widen. Do nothing to narrow them.

A worthwhile read.