FYI; Here is the link to the entire 6+ hours of Defeat Jihad Summit organized by the Center for Security Policy.
You Can’t Protect Islam and Defeat Jihad at The Same Time…
Diana West…Notes from a Defeat Jihad Summit
Posted By Ruth King on February 14th, 2015
Earlier this week, I participated in the Center for Security Policy’s Defeat Jihad Summit.
I find that the several hours of speeches and discussion have distilled into some salient recollections and comments.
1)
There remains a chasm between American “messaging” and that of some of
our European friends who were invited to speak, including the
Netherlands’ Geert Wilders, who contributed a taped message, and Lars
Hedegaard, who addressed the conference via Skype from Denmark.
American
participants in the main demand, even a little truculently, that we
now, finally, break the bonds of “political correctness” and speak
frankly about “radical Islam,” “Islamism,” “ideas of ISIS,” etc.
Wilders,
whose Party for Freedom is No. 1 in the Dutch polls, and Dispatch
International editor Hedegaard both speak, and have always spoken about
“Islam” — pure and very simple.
Indeed,
Wilders has encapsulated everything you need to know about Islam and
the West thus: “The more Islam there is in a society, the less freedom
there is.”
Not “Islamism.”
This difference is more than semantic.
The
primary mechanism of control that Islam exerts over people is Islamic
slander law, Islamic blasphemy law. This is the institutional means by
which Islam protects itself against criticism, even objective facts
about Islam that might be construed critically. The penalty is death.
Not for nothing did Yusef Qaradawi state that Islam wouldn’t even exist
without the death penalty for “apostasy.” We have seen innumerable
instances, particularly since the 1989 publication of Salman Rushdie’s
Satanic Verses, where Muslims have executed, or tried to execute this
death sentence even against non-Muslims, from Europe to Japan, in
efforts to extend the rule of Islam.
When
American lawmakers, generals and security experts omit “Islam” from
their debates and war councils, focusing instead on what they have
dubbed “radical Islam,” “Islamism” and the like, they are succombing to
this same control mechanism. They are protecting Islam. They are
themselves sheltering Islam against the cold light of analysis. By
extension, they are also preventing their own Western societies from
devising means of defense against Islamization. They are accepting and
carrying out what is probably the most important Islamic law.
There
is concrete danger in this. Unless we can come to an understanding that
it is the teachings of Islam — not the teachings of some peculiar
strain called “Islamism,” or of an organization such as the Muslim
Brotherhood or ISIS — that directly undermine our constitutional
liberties, we cannot protect our way of life from these teachings, whose
popularity grows with the increasing Islamic demographic. This is what
the advanced Islamization of Europe shows us. A nominally sensible US
immigration policy would immediately halt Islamic immigration to prevent
a sharia-demographic from gaining more critical mass in the USA,
democratically.
Then
again, we don’t have a national border, much less a sensible
immigration policy. That means many of these questions are moot.
2)
Still, it bears noting: The Left has responded to the current cycle of
Islamic jihad — a recurring blight on civilization, as Andrew Bostom’s
Legacy of Jihad amply documents — by inventing a foe called “violent
extremism.” The Right, scoffing at this euphemism, “pinpoints” the
threat of “radical Islamism.”
What
is the difference? Ultimately, I see none. Both terms protect Islam.
Warning against the dangers of “radical Islam” implies that there exists
some “normal Islam” that is completely compatible, perhaps even
interchangeable, with Christianity and Judaism. Indeed, this ongoing
effort to normalize Islam is equally as dangerous as the institutional
efforts that long ago “normalized” Communism. This officially began when
FDR “normalized” relations with the wholly abnormal Soviet regime in
1933, a morally odious event whose horrific repercussions are treated at
length in American Betrayal.
Just
as it required endless apologetics (lies) to maintain the fiction of
“normal” Communism, so, too, does it require endless apologetics (lies)
to maintain the fiction of “normal” or “moderate” Islam. According to
all of Islam’s authoritative texts, according to the example of Islam’s
prophet, this “moderate” creed does not Islamically exist.
To
turn the notion around, as Lars recently reminded me, when the brave
and splendid ex-Muslim Wafa Sultan was asked several years ago to
distinguish between “Islam” vs. “Islamism” at a Copenhagen conference,
she brought the airy theory back to earth by asking: Based on your
definition of Islamism, was Mohammed a Muslim or an “Islamist”?
3) This brings me to The Best Line of the summit, which was spoken by Lars Hedegaard: “Islamism is Islam and Islam is Islamism.”
4)
The Spirit of ’76 Award goes to retired Admiral James “Ace” Lyons who
inquired of guest speaker and former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich
whether there was any movement in the Congress to censure Obama or
initiate impeachment hearings. The consensus on this burning, patriotic
question is, no, expediently speaking, there is not nor will there be
such a movement. As per the entire US elite’s corruption and complicity
in Soviet crime outlined in American Betrayal, it seems we have arrived
at the point where Obama’s political judge and jury — our elected
representatives in the Congress — is surely complicit in his crimes
against the Constitution, as well as with his identity fraud on the
American people.
5)
The Most Profound New Thought of the summit came from brave and
splendid ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish (who, bonus, I met for the first time
here).
Nonie
conveyed her understanding, having grown up in Egypt the privileged
daughter of an Egyptian shahid (martyr), that terrorism, the threat of
terrorism is a feature of Islamic life at all levels: inside the family,
in the public square, and everywhere in between. I’m paraphrasing, but
what came through her talk was the idea that Muslim “moderates” in
Islamic society (which I am taking to mean human beings who do not have
the seeds of violence within them) have come to take Islamic
terrorism/violence/coercion as a given. This means that they have come
to accept such terrorism/violence/coercion as normal. Her great fear is
that Americans, too, are coming to accept such Islamic violence as
normal — that we, in a sense, are taking on the role of such Muslim
moderates. This is, if it can be imagined, an even darker iteration of
dhimmitude.
6)
Speaking of ex-Muslims, I made a comment about the role of the apostate
in the great ideological battles of our time. Today, it is the
ex-Muslims who offer special insight into totalitarianism of the Islamic
kind. Many of my American colleagues, however, still prefer to lean on
guidance from Muslim “moderates” — despite the fact, referenced above,
that Islam’s own sacred texts, including the example of Islam’s prophet,
support no such “moderation.” As they wish, they may await, or even
themselves lead an Islamic reformation, but this in no way protects free
speech or preserves public safety in our country now — especially when
there are indicators that an alarming level of support for curbing and
even criminalizing free speech about Islam exists among American Muslims
— punitive measures, again, that find support in Islam’s texts.
In
the 20th-century-battle against totalitarian Communism, anti-Communists
did not embrace “moderate Communists.” Rather, they embraced
ex-Communists who understood the totalitarian teachings and practices of
Communism in Moscow’s gangster-quest for global dominance — a
“caliphate” a la Lenin & Marx. It was mainly the Left and Center —
the anti-anti-Communist Left and Center — that made common cause with
“moderate Communists,” i.e., Social Democrats, Communist apologists,
also Soviet agents among others, engendering meaningless treaties,
defeats and loss. Even more pernicious, though, was the resulting
“postmodern” rot across the political spectrum, which tells me, as I
argue in American Betrayal, that the West lost the “struggle of ideas”
in the “Cold War.”
This
spectral shift is interesting in and of itself. I see its patterns
repeat in the past decade of military disaster in which it was US
military strategy to ignore the teachings of Islam and instead lean on
perceived Muslim moderates, or just bank on a hoped-for emergence of
Muslim moderation, in the Islamic nations of Iraq and Afghanistan.
Terrible defeats ensued.
As
former FBI special agent John Guandolo pointed out at the summit, we’ve
tried this type of thing for 15 years and it doesn’t work.
Nor
does it make sense — logically, doctrinally, strategically. But then
neither does seizing on “radical Islamism” and other terms of art that
exclude and thus protect Islam.
The Moral of this summit: You can’t protect Islam and defeat jihad at the same time.
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