Of a Jumbo Sized Caliphate and the Jaws of Hell

Since Pope Benedict's visit to Turkey in November I have been staunchly resisting any temptation to write about Islam or - to be more precise - Islamo-Nazism, meaning unabbreviated Islam-inspired National Socialism (it is very apt, if you think about it - more later). First of all, how many times can you write khafir while still being remotely funny, original or informative? I'll leave that to the specialists, my intrepid co-bloggers at Gates of Vienna and The Gathering Storm, collectors of these up-beat news items.

Secondly, I think the subject is over-exposed: my mother used to tell my over-indulgent father "leave the child, the more attention you give her, the more she'll come asking for it".
I also think our salvation lies more in educating our own misguided relativist, multicultural idealists that have produced the capitulating mind-set of Down With Us, rather than with the guys who glorify death, blood and violence in the service of Islamic hegemony.

But now things are piling up a bit. And some of it is even interesting. Let's start with the good news, with the caveat for those with a bit of an off day, that from there on things will go down faster than you can say Fall of Constantinople.

NewsMax' January issue (keep reading! remember PMF #11. Good things, bad people say) carries an article which I was hoping I could legibly scan, but technology let me down once again. Obviously I cannot reproduce the whole item here, but this is the gist: Muqtader Khan, author and assistant professor Political Science at the University of Delaware responds to Bin Laden's call for "martyrdom operations" with a letter carrying the subject title "Go to Hell". A similar memo can be found on the site of Islam For Today. The moderate Muslim community in America is taking the action Europeans have long asked and vainly waited for, which is another thing to think about for the boys in Brussels!

National Catholic Reporter's John Allen on 18th January wrote an article on an inter-faith meeting, held recently at the U.N. The Iranian scholar Seyyed Hossein Nasr was his own usual optimistic self, declaring "We are standing on the edge of a precipice", and "We may well fall into the jaws of Hell". But then - I've noticed this more than once - the Shiites are the Calvinists of the Islamic world, a conclusion that sadly doesn't help us one iota.

But we're drifting off-topic ... what we are up against with the Islamo-Nazist mentality is exemplified by a post on the site of the Dutch leading Elsevier Magazine, to the effect that Folia, a University of Amsterdam weekly, is reporting Muslim death threats against a young law student - ironically the son of an Arabist of some repute - who, moonlighting as a stand-up, happened to do some innocent jokes on Islam. But he should have known, there's no humor beyond the pillars of Hercules. Enquiries at one of the local mosques learns that it only stands to reason. A spokesperson, asked if death threats are condoned, replies: "Yes, a Muslim is obliged to act, if it's too much he (the perpetrator) can be put down (meaning, be killed). Insulting Islam is not allowed". Referring to the ritual slaughter of cuddly enfant terrible and film producer Theo van Gogh, he adds ominously that he (Theo) didn't heed the warnings either. So that we know ... But what else is new? By now it is no problem to easily fill a hundred blogs a day with reports of Muslim aberrations, as measured against the post-modern Western norms and values that have lost so much of its backbone that it no longer can stand up straigtht.

Another reason I don't like writing about this subject is, that it is utterly fruitless: the discourse doesn't go anywhere. After 9/11 everybody still wondered bewilderedly why these people hated us and went to raide the bookshelves for an explanation. Now we know what's dhimmitude and what they want is a jumbo size caliphate from Jakarta to Reykjavik - we don't - full stop. An excellent article by Henryk Broder, "Hurray! We're Capitulating!" on the site of the German Magazine Der Spiegel sums it up nicely: "At issue is freedom of opinion, one of the central tenets of the Enlightenment and democracy. And whether respect, consideration and tolerance are the right approach to dealing with cultures that, for their part, behave without respect, consideration or tolerance when it comes to anything they view as decadent, provocative and unworthy ...".

That things are not nearly as innocent and spontaneous as they seem is highlighted by the Mohammed cartoon row, that was carefully stage-managed and directed by the forces of Islamo-Nazism. Let me wrap this up by stressing the following paragraph from the article:

"Nowadays acts of terrorism are not committed for their own sake, but in the name of an ideology one could call Nazi-Islamism," Romanian-American author Norman Manea told the German daily Die Welt in March 2004. The only difference, in Manea's view, is "that this ideology invokes a religion, whereas the Nazis were mythical without being religious." Manea believes that what he calls a "World War III" has already begun. "The Europeans are putting off the recognition - as they did in the 1930s - of the tremendous tragedy that awaits them and that has, in fact, already arrived ... The willingness to submit to self-deception is as widespread today as it was (then)"

... so we have no such an excuse ... what's ours ...?