Tuesday, January 24, 2012

Andrew McCarthy: "Islam Is Islam, and That's It"

Interesting. McCarthy is convinced that Islam has something to do with Muslim behavior, especially when that behavior has been openly displayed for the past fourteen centuries and is grounded in Islam's most trusted sources.

FAMILY SECURITY MATTERS--The tumult indelibly dubbed “the Arab Spring” in the West, by the credulous and the calculating alike, is easier to understand once you grasp two basics. First, the most important fact in the Arab world — as well as in Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and other neighboring non-Arab territories — is Islam. It is not poverty, illiteracy, or the lack of modern democratic institutions. These, like anti-Semitism, anti-Americanism, and an insular propensity to buy into conspiracy theories featuring infidel villains, are effects of Islam’s regional hegemony and supremacist tendency, not causes of it. One need not be led to that which pervades the air one breathes.

The second fact is that Islam constitutes a distinct civilization. It is not merely an exotic splash on the gorgeous global mosaic with a few embarrassing cultural eccentricities; it is an entirely different way of looking at the world. We struggle with this truth, which defies our end-of-history smugness. Enthralled by diversity for its own sake, we have lost the capacity to comprehend a civilization whose idea of diversity is coercing diverse peoples into obedience to its evolution-resistant norms.

So we set about remaking Islam in our own progressive image: the noble, fundamentally tolerant Religion of Peace. We miniaturize the elements of the ummah (the notional global Muslim community) that refuse to go along with the program: They are assigned labels that scream “fringe!” — Islamist, fundamentalist, Salafist, Wahhabist, radical, jihadist, extremist, militant, or, of course, “conservative” Muslims adhering to “political Islam.”

We consequently pretend that Muslims who accurately invoke Islamic scripture in the course of forcibly imposing the dictates of classical sharia — the Islamic legal and political system — are engaged in “anti-Islamic activity,” as Britain’s former home secretary Jacqui Smith memorably put it. When the ongoing Islamization campaign is advanced by violence, as inevitably happens, we absurdly insist that this aggression cannot have been ideologically driven, that surely some American policy or Israeli act of self-defense is to blame, as if these could possibly provide rationales for the murderous jihad waged by Boko Haram Muslims against Nigerian Christians and by Egyptian Muslims against the Copts, the persecution of the Ahmadi sect by Indonesian and Pakistani Muslims, or the internecine killing in Iraq of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa — a tradition nearly as old as Islam itself — which has been predictably renewed upon the recent departure of American troops.

The main lesson of the Arab Spring ought to be that this remaking of Islam has happened only in our own minds, for our own consumption. The Muslims of the Middle East take no note of our reimagining of Islam, being, in the main, either hostile toward or oblivious to Western overtures. Muslims do not measure themselves against Western perceptions, although the shrewdest among them take note of our eagerly accommodating attitude when determining what tactics will best advance the cause.

That cause is nothing less than Islamic dominance. (Read more.)

1 comment:

Tom ta tum Tom said...

McCarthy is wrong in at least one point. Perhaps Islam is a culture but Islam is NOT a civilization. And actually, Islam is an Orwellian NIGHTMARE of hate-filled oppression, racist anti-humanity and outright blasphemy against the Only Living God. There is nothing civilized about Islam.

Islam cannot be appeased and Islam cannot be tolerated. Islam must die - must be utterly crushed and eradicated - for the sake of the future of the human race (just as sin must die on the Cross with Christ Jesus - for the sake of the future of the sinner).

Our energies must be expended on behalf of helping Muslim people ESCAPE from Islam and then further and further constricting the presence of Islam until it is entirely choked off from existence. The price for the eradication of Islam will be enormous. The price for the continued existence of Islam will be horror.

No hatred for Muslims.
No tolerance for Islam.

KAFIR AND PROUD!!