America Alone (15 page)

"Police are investigating allegations that the four suspected July 21 bombers collected more than £500,000 in benefits payments in Britain."

No-hoper jihadists in their twenties have a quarter-million dollars in welfare cash in their checking accounts. I'm not saying every benefit recipient is a terrorist welfare queen, only that the best hope of reforming bloated European welfare systems is if America declares them a national security threat.

A terrorist wakes up in Baghdad early Monday morning, straps on the old explosives, and toddles off to blow up some infidels at the gate to the Green Zone, dreaming of getting at least a couple of the virgins in before lunch. But the belt jams and U.S. troops arrest him and he's stuck on a plane to Gitmo and forty-eight hours later he's whining to his D.C. lawyer about the quality of the chicken chasseur and plotting his Supreme Court case. When they want to, Islamists can assimilate at impressive speed. So we have fire-breathing imams milking Euro-welfare and litigious lobby groups with high-rent legal teams. Neither of these are features of Arab life. Rather, they illustrate how adept Islam is at picking and choosing what aspects of Westernization are useful to it. Whatever the arguments for and against "gay marriage," there are never going to be many takers for it. But the justifications for same-sex
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marriage are already being used to advance the cause of polygamy, and there are far more takers for that. It's already practiced de facto if not de jure in France, Ontario, and many other Western jurisdictions, and government agencies, such as the United Kingdom's pensions ministry, have already begun according polygamy piecemeal legal recognition for the purposes of inheritance law. Neither feminists nor homosexuals seem obvious allies for Islam, but lobby groups have effortlessly mastered the lingo, techniques, and pseudogrievances of both. For example, Iqbal Sacranie is a Muslim of such exemplary "moderation" he's been knighted by the Queen. Around the time Brokeback Mountain opened, Sir Iqbal, head of the Muslim Council of Britain, was on the BBC and expressed the view that homosexuality was

"immoral," "not acceptable," "spreads disease," and "damaged the very foundations of society." A gay group complained and Sir Iqbal was investigated by Scotland Yard's

"community safety unit" which deals with "hate crimes" and "homophobia." Independently but simultaneously, the magazine of GALHA (the Gay And Lesbian Humanist Association) called Islam a "barmy doctrine" growing "like a canker" and deeply

"homophobic." In return, the London Race Hate Crime Forum asked Scotland Yard to investigate GALHA for "Islamophobia."

Got that? If a Muslim says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for homophobia; but if a gay says that Islam is opposed to homosexuality, he can be investigated for Islamophobia.

As someone who's called Islamophobic and homophobic every day of the week, I can't help marveling at the speed and skill with which Muslim lobby groups have mastered the language of victimhood so adroitly used by the gay lobby. If I were the latter, I'd be a little miffed at these Ahmed-come-latelys. "Homophobia" was always absurd: people who are antipathetic to gays are not afraid of them in any real sense. The invention of a phonybaloney "phobia" was a way of casting opposition to the gay political agenda as a kind of mental illness: don't worry, you're not really against same-sex marriage; with a bit of treatment and some medication, you'll soon be feeling okay.

On the other hand, "Islamophobia" is not phony or even psychological but very literal-if you're a Dutch member of parliament or British novelist or Danish cartoonist in hiding under threat of death or a French schoolgirl in certain suburbs getting jeered at as an infidel whore, your Islamophobia is highly justified. But Islam's appropriation of the gay lobby's framing of the debate is very artful. It's the most explicit example of how Islam uses politically correct self-indulgent victimology as a cover. You'll recall that most Western media outlets declined to publish those Danish cartoons showing the Prophet Mohammed. Thus, even as they were piously warning of a rise in bogus "Islamophobia"--i.e., entirely justified concerns over Islamic terrorism and related issues--they were themselves suffering from genuine Islamophobia--i.e., a very real fear that, if they published those cartoons, an angry mob would storm their offices. It was a fine example of how the progressive mind's invented psychoses leave it without any words to describe real dangers.
THE NON-VISIBLE MINORITY

Still, as we always say, the "vast majority" of Muslims oppose "extremism." These are the so-called "moderate Muslims." One is tempted to update the old joke: a ten-dollar bill is in the center of the crossroads. To the north, there's Santa Claus. To the west, the Tooth Fairy. To the east, a radical Muslim. To the south, a moderate Muslim. Who reaches the ten-dollar bill first?

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Answer: the radical Muslim. All the others are mythical creatures. The "moderate Muslim" is not entirely fictional. But it would be more accurate to call them quiescent Muslims. In the 1930s, there were plenty of "moderate Germans," and a fat lot of good they did us or them. Today, the "moderate Muslim" is a unique contributor to cultural diversity: unlike all the visible minorities, he's a non-visible one--or, at any rate, non-audible. But that doesn't mean we can't speak up on his behalf. So, for example, EU officials have produced new "guidelines" for discussing the, ah, current unpleasantness. The phrase "Islamic terrorism" is out. Instead, the EU bureaucrats have replaced it with the expression "terrorists who abusively invoke Islam."

Who's some white-bread Belgian to say whether Johnny bin Jihad is "abusively" invoking Islam? There seem to be plenty of Muslim scholars and imams who would disagree. We know, because Western politicians and religious leaders tell us so incessantly, that the "vast majority" of Muslims do not support terrorism? Yet how vast is the minority that does? One percent? Ten percent? Here are a couple of examples that suggest it might be rather more. Dr. Mahfooz Kanwar, a sociology professor at Mount Royal College in Calgary, went along to a funeral at the city's largest mosque and was discombobulated when the man who led the prayers--in Urdu--said, "Oh, God, protect us from the infidels, who pollute us with their vile ways." Dr. Kanwar said, "How dare you attack my country," and pointed out to the crowd that he'd known this man for thirty years, most of which time he'd been living on welfare and thus the food on his table came courtesy of the taxes of the hardworking infidels. As Licia Corbella wrote in the Calgary Sun: "Guess which of the two men is no longer welcome at the Sarcee Trail mosque?"

Final score: Radical Islam 1, Moderate Muslims O.

Here's another example: Souleiman Ghali was born in Palestine and, as he put it, raised to hate "Shiites, Christians--and especially Jews." After emigrating to America, he found himself rethinking these old prejudices and in 1993 helped found a mosque in San Francisco. As Mr. Ghali's website states: "Our vision is the emergence of an American Muslim identity founded on compassion, respect, dignity, and love." That's hard work, especially given the supply of imams. In 2002, Mr. Ghali fired an imam who urged California Muslims to follow the sterling example of Palestinian suicide bombers. Safwat Morsy is Egyptian and speaks barely any English, but he knew enough to sue Mr. Ghali's mosque for wrongful dismissal and was awarded $400,000.

So far, so typical. But the part of the story that matters is that the firebrand imams had a popular following, and Mr. Morsy's firing was the final straw. Mr. Ghali was forced off the board and out of any role in the mosque he founded. And, as the Wall Street Journal reported, Safwat Morsy--a man who thinks American Muslims should be waddling around in Semtex belts--is doing a roaring trade: "His mosque is looking to buy a building to accommodate the capacity crowds coming these days for Friday prayers." That's Radical Islam 2, Moderate Muslims O.

What proportion of mosques is "extreme"? And what proportion of "worshippers" is jihadist? Twenty percent? Two percent? Point-two percent? Nobody knows--because we (and most Western legal systems) see them as analogous to Catholic churches or Congregationalist meeting-houses.

At this point it's time to throw in another round of "of courses": of course most Western Muslims aren't terrorists and of course most have no desire to be terrorists. One gathers anecdotally that they're secure enough in their Muslim identity to dismiss the fire-breathing
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imam down the street as a kind of vulgar novelty act for the kids--in the same way that middle-class suburban white parents sigh and roll their eyes when Junior comes home with

"Slap Up My Bitch" or "I'm Gonna Shoot That Cop Right After I F-His Ho" or whatever the latest popular vocal ditty is. But, aside from the few brave but marginalized men like Mr. Ghali, one can't help noticing that the most prominent "moderate Muslims" would seem to be more accurately designated as apostate or ex-Muslims, like the feminist lesbian Canadian Irshad Manji and the California academic Wafa Sultan. It seems likely that the beliefs of Mohammed Atta are closer to the thinking of most Muslims than those of Ms. Manji are. The pseudonymous apostate Ibn Warraq makes an important distinction: there are moderate Muslims, but no moderate Islam. Millions of Muslims just want to get on with their lives, and there are--or were--remote corners of the world where, far from Mecca, Muslim practices reached accommodation with local customs. But all of the official schools of Islamic jurisprudence commend sharia and violent jihad. So a "moderate Muslim" can find no formal authority to support his moderation. And to be a "moderate Muslim" publicly means standing up to the leaders of your community, to men like Shaker Elsayed, leader of the Dar al Hijrah, one of America's largest mosques, who has told his core-ligionists in blunt terms: "The call to reform Islam is an alien call."

And even if you're truly a "moderate" Muslim, why should you be expected to take on the most powerful men in Islam when the West's media and political class merely pander to them? What kind of support does the culture give to those who speak out against the Islamists? The Iranians declared a fatwa on Salman Rushdie and he had to go into hiding for more than a decade while his government and others continued fawning on the regime that issued the death sentence. The Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh spoke out and was murdered, and the poseur dissenters of Hollywood were too busy congratulating themselves on their courage and bravery in standing up to Bush even to mention their poor dead colleague in the weepy Oscar montage of the year's deceased. To speak out against the Islamists means to live in hiding and under armed security in the heart of the so-called "free world."

Meanwhile, Yale offers a place on its campus to a former ambassador-at-large for the murderous Taliban regime.

When you look at the syncretist forms of Islam that endured for many years in Mecca's remoter outposts--from the Balkans to Central Asia to Indonesia--they derived their

"moderate" nature not from any particular school of Islam itself but from the character of the surrounding culture; Soviet regimes, a Chinese mercantile class, European imperialism all successfully tempered the more extreme forms of Islam. It's no surprise that, with the loss of Western confidence, the free world's Muslim populations are growing more radical with each generation.

So within the ever larger Muslim population is an ever larger Western Muslim population and within that ever larger Western Muslim population is an ever more radicalized Western Muslim population. And when you penetrate through all the various layers, there is a very profound challenge at the heart of the Islamic question. It was embodied by Abdul Rahman, a man on trial for his life in post-Taliban Afghanistan because he had committed the crime of converting to Christianity. "We will not allow God to be humiliated. This man must die," said Abdul Raoulf of the nation's principal Muslim body, the Afghan Ulama Council. "Cut off his head! We will call on the people to pull him into pieces so there's nothing left." Needless to say, Imam Raoulf is one of Afghanistan's leading "moderate" clerics. "Even if the government does not sentence him to death, then the people of Afghanistan will kill
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him," declared Maulavi Enayatullah Baligh, a lecturer in Islamic "law" at Kabul University, but evidently one who likes to take his work home with him and practice it ad hoc with the local lynch mob.

Eventually, after a word in Hamid Karzai's ear from various Western prime ministers and Condi Rice and Co., the issue was finessed through back channels and poor Mr. Rahman was bundled onto a plane out of Kabul and dropped off in Rome. But Condi and Co. won't be there for every Abdul Rahman, and so the question at the heart of his struggle remains unresolved: if Nazra Quraishi, quoted above, is correct that one "can embrace Islam but cannot get out," that Islam is a religion one can only convert to, not from, then in the long run it is a threat to every free person on the planet. It cuts to the heart of what the multicultural state is, or believes itself to be. "Radical Islamism," wrote Fouad Ajami, "has come to mock the very principle of nationality and citizenship." But is that really so hard to do? Contemporary Canadian, British, Dutch, and Swedish nationality is to a large extent self-mocking. Alleged "conservatives" like the former prime minister Joe Clark spoke favorably of Canada being a "nation of nations," meaning Indian nations, Inuit nations, the Quebec nation, the Ukrainian-Canadian nation, etc., with nary a thought for what other forces might set up shop in such a wasteland of a concept. The jihad is a functioning version of everything the multicultists have promoted for years. The Left talked up sappy Benetton-ad one-worldism, while the pan-Islamists got on with their own particular strain of one-world ism--strong, unyielding, and slipping across borders with ease. Anjem Choudary, a thirty-nine-year-old British Muslim leader, hailed September 11 as