"We Liberated Islam"
The title is quoted from frequent Front Page Magazine contributor Lawrence Auster's recent blog entry:
Have any of the war supporters who keep telling us that if we withdraw from Iraq there will be a blood bath ever once acknowledged that two million people including a half-million Christians have already fled Iraq out of fear for their lives, and that another two million people have become internal refugees inside Iraq for the same reason? No. Instead, the neoconservatives sweep away every specific horror resulting from their and Bush's mistakes with the slogan that "There are always mistakes in wars," which is the moral equivalent of saying, "Don't blame me. I just work here. No one's perfect!" Nothing better demonstrates their unfitness for any position of influence in our polity. This is all the more the case when the mistakes they wave off have resulted in the uprooting of millions of people, including the Christians who lived in relative safety under Saddam Hussein.
Furthermore, it wasn't just generic mistakes that were made here. It wasn't just a tactical detail or a strategic direction that was wrong here. It was the very premise underlying the whole operation that was wrong here: the belief that Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people like ourselves, who, when liberated from tyranny, will behave in a peaceful and tolerant way. That's not the way it's worked out, is it? There is no future in Iraq for the Christian community that has existed there for almost 2,000 years, and this is because, in the act of liberating Muslims from tyranny, we liberated their violence and intolerance as well. Meaning, we liberated Islam.
When a neocon is willing to admit these realities, and not just say that tactical or strategic mistakes were made, then he will be worth listening to.
This is the sad fact that the Bush administration still can't bring itself to face, yet it keeps repeating the mantra of, "Democracy is the solution to radical extremism" in the hopes that it will become true, along with other intellectually dishonest neocon war slogans:
- "If we don't fight them there, we'll have to fight them here."
- "Iraq's problems are overstated, since things are going well in most of Iraq."
- "Iraq's problems are overstated, since mistakes are made in all wars."
- "Iraq's problems are overstated, because we forget the terrible losses we took in the Pacific in World War II."
- "Iraq's problems are overstated, since it took a long time for America to achieve democracy."
- "Iraq's problems are overstated, because people keep forgetting our great three-week victory in 2003."
I guarantee you that, because of our immigration policy, we'll be fighting them here too. For example, jihadists are training in rural America as you read this, and are engaging in other forms of low-intensity warfare throughout the country. We hear of disrupted terrorist cells and plots almost every single day, though less often than in Britain.
Despite the inability of Muslim Iraqis to establish a peaceful, orderly society, Western leaders have thought it wise to import many of them (not the Christians, of course) into the West. Sweden has taken in twice as many Iraqis as the US, and look at the results (via Gates of Vienna):
I’ve mentioned Södertälje to you previously. It has become a ghastly place, as the town — on its own — has taken in more than twice as many Iraqis as the entire U.S.A.
Youth gang blocks ambulance in emergency
I’ve decided to translate a few articles from the town’s local paper Länstidningen, which almost every day has astonishing new reports on the cultural enrichment of Södertälje.
From LT on September 21st:
An ambulance in a hurry was about to evacuate a woman who had become ill at a grocery in Hovsjö town center. But it didn’t get there - some 30 youths blocked it. When hospital staff told them to move aside, the youths replied “Why? We live in a free country!”
It was around three o’clock Thursday afternoon when the ambulance was summoned to an ill woman at the grocery. But it turned out to be a job more difficult than anyone would have assumed.
The ambulance had trouble getting through. Some thirty guys blocked it and refused to move. Also the police were called.
The staff begged for them to move. At last, they did, but when the police arrived, they were already gone.
"Why? We live in a free country?" Get it? Islam was liberated in Sweden and is just acting out its cultural presuppositions: low-intensity warfare against women and the police, persecution of everyone not Islamic, and increasing poverty. Without infidels, the Muslims would quickly starve in Sweden, but the Swedish will only respond with more concessions in an attempt to appease Muslims. The Bush administration has decided to allow several thousand Iraqis to come here not to mention the ones who've already snuck in through Mexico. The situation will play out largely the same here, as geniune Americans make up fewer and fewer of the local populations of the areas where Muslims settle, as in Dearborn, MI.
Though America has a powerful military in a Clauswitzian sense, Muslims and other terrorists (such as Latino gangsters), see know reason to play by the rules of warfare found in a Clauswitzian universe. They prefer to act asymmetrically, attacking weak points in our infrastructure and population. As we allow more people into our population with such cultural presuppositions, we can expect more low-intensity conflict. The City Journal develops this idea a bit further. Yes, there are means of counteracting the terrorism threats we face, but why let such people into the country in the first place? It's insane. If you liberate people with a rotten belief system and don't teach them otherwise, you can expect a rotten society.
Robert Spencer explains more of these Islamic cultural presuppositions:
The second half of the Qur’an’s fifth sura continues to expound upon the wickedness of the Jews and Christians. Verses 61-86 criticize the Jews and Christians for refusing to follow Muhammad. Why don’t the Jews’ rabbis stop their evil behavior (v. 63)? They even dare to say that “Allah’s hand is fettered” (v. 64).
Allah’s hand is fettered? It is unclear what Jewish concept, if any, the Qur’an is referring to in this case. Ibn Kathir comments: “Allah states that the Jews, may Allah’s continuous curses descend on them until the Day of Resurrection, describe Him as a miser. Allah is far holier than what they attribute to Him.” He is also absolute will, with hand absolutely unfettered: Allah’s unfettered hand is a vivid image of divine freedom. Such a God can be bound by no laws. Muslim theologians argued during the long controversy with the heretical Islamic Mu‘tazilite sect, which exalted human reason beyond the point that the eventual victors were willing to tolerate, that Allah was free to act as he pleased. He was thus not bound to govern the universe according to consistent and observable laws. “He cannot be questioned concerning what He does” (Qur’an 21:23).
Accordingly, there was no point to observing the workings of the physical world; there was no reason to expect that any pattern to its workings would be consistent, or even discernable. If Allah could not be counted on to be consistent, why waste time observing the order of things? It could change tomorrow. Stanley Jaki, a Catholic priest and physicist, explains that it was the renowned Sufi thinker al-Ghazali who “denounced natural laws, the very objective of science, as a blasphemous constraint upon the free will of Allah.” The great twelfth-century Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides explained orthodox Islamic cosmology in similar terms, noting that Islamic thinkers of his day assumed “the possibility that an existing being should be larger or smaller than it really is, or that it should be different in form and position from what it really is; e.g., a man might have the height of a mountain, might have several heads, and fly in the air; or an elephant might be as small as an insect, or an insect as huge as an elephant. This method of admitting possibilities is applied to the whole Universe.”
Relatively early in its history, therefore, science was deprived in the Islamic world of the philosophical foundation it needed in order to flourish. It found that philosophical foundation only in Christian Europe, where it was assumed that God was good and had constructed the universe according to consistent and observable laws. Such an idea would have been for pious Muslims tantamount to saying, “Allah’s hand is fettered.”
Ultimately, Allah's laws are an expression of Allah's character. Allah is completely fickle, therefore his decrees can completely contradict themselves whenever he wishes. Whatever Allah has created, he can destroy, replace, or annul anything or any physical laws in the universe he's created, therefore there's no point in studying any of them. Allah is completely unknowable, other than the fact that "he is not bound."
Contrast this with the Christian worldview, which states that God is the Author of both the Creation and the Bible, and both are an expression of his character and they do not contradict one another. God can be known because he is there, he has revealed himself generally to man through creation and conscience and specifically through the Bible, he is personal, and he is immutable. Christianity and Islam are two opposite ways of thinking.


Reader Comments (1)
Bush liberated (as in legitimized) Isalm when he claimed, and continues to wrongly claim, that Islam is a religion of peace.