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.”
