Reality Shock

Paper Tigers Face Up to Jihad

World views matter.  Tacitly believed world views are as profoundly influential as the world view of the self-aware.  When however the tacit believer is confronted by an alien world view most often confusion results.  A normal reaction is for the tacit believer to retreat to the old "certainties", like "Nobody believes that", or "What an extreme view", or "Everybody agrees that's wrong".

We are seeing this every day in the confrontation between Islamic world views, on the one hand, and sophisticated secular humanists in the West who have spent most of their adult lives in the thrall of the fallacy of argumentum ad populum.  Everyone believes the mores and principles of secular humanism, so it must be right.  Islamic believers are a devastating threat because they don't give a fig for the Western world-view.  Moreover, because Islamic believers are far more self-conscious about the foundations and fundamental principles of their world-view, their militancy comes as a great shock to the fellow-travellers of Western secular humanism.

Here is an example of one writer expressing his bewilderment over the behaviour of Islamic migrants:  Karl du Fresne opines--

Let me see if I can get this straight. Millions of oppressed, dispossessed Muslims have risked their lives fleeing the Middle East and North Africa.  They are mostly victims of Islamic regimes from a part of the world where democracy is virtually unknown (Israel aside). They are escaping sectarianism, persecution, civil war, anarchy, corruption and starvation.  None of them want to go to other Islamic countries. Why would they, when Islam represents all that they’re trying to get away from?

Besides, hardly any Islamic regimes offer them refuge. With the honourable exceptions of Lebanon and Jordan, most Islamic countries – including some that are fabulously wealthy – appear impervious to the suffering of their co-religionists.  No, the place these Islamic refugees want to be is Europe – Western Europe, to be precise. And what attracts them there? Presumably freedom, for a start. Western Europe is democratic. People actually elect their governments. The rule of law is enforced not by religious zealots but by courts that apply principles of fairness and impartiality.

In Europe, people’s prospects don’t depend on having been born into the right sex, religious sect or clan. They enjoy civil rights – the right to dress the way they want, to vote, to speak their minds, to have educational opportunities, to drive cars and enter into romantic relationships without fear of being murdered in “honour” killings.   And presumably these refugees are also attracted to capitalism, because more than any other “ism” it gives them the greatest chance to fulfil their human potential.  So, having been drawn to this benevolent part of the world where people enjoy freedom, opportunity and prosperity, what do they do? 

You can see where this is going.  Given all the freedoms and rights and protections available in the West, why would anyone want to turn back to a belief system which caused the "sectarianism, persecution, civil war, anarchy, corruption and starvation" in the first place.  And it is at this point that Du Fresne shows he has completely missed the Islamic worldview.  Yet it's not that hard.  As has been frequently pointed out, Islam means submission.  The "peace" of Allah is the peace that comes from submission--forced submission if necessary--to this false deity. Moreover, peace is not just something internal, like the mental vacuity of transcendental meditation.  The peace of Allah is a societal peace.  It is achieved when everyone submits to the rules of Allah and his prophet.

In this sense the "peace of Allah" is akin to the peace of any totalitarian state. As long as you don't step out of line you are safe.  And what of the migrants?  Many (if not the majority) have been oppressed and their cultures destroyed by other Muslims, to be sure, but their oppressors are another (false, heretical) sect.  "Their Allah" is the god of heretics.  "Our Allah" is the true god.

So, when these migrants come into the West, replete with its human liberties long stripped of attendant responsibilities, they welcome the liberty and freedom to practice their version of the  "peace" of Allah.  They welcome the freedom to bring everything around them into submission to Allah.  They always start modestly.  They will demand freedom to have up to four wives, freedom to arrange marriages for underage daughters, freedom to divorce their wives at will, freedom in the work place to pray five times a day on a prayer mat facing Mecca, freedom to have government funded Islamic schools in which they can teach their children, freedom to be judged by sharia law,  and so forth.

Moreover, as they become established, they will increasingly demand their new host nation succumb to their demands.  They will demand that "infidels" (other citizens) not be allowed into their ghettoes and boroughs.  Their sect is not any less totalitarian than the particular sect which made them refugees in the first place.  Rather, the West is sought out as a destination because it offers a safe haven to begin to re-establish their own particular sectarian practices of Islamic totalitarianism.

As Du Fresne continues his lament, he shows that it is dawning upon him that the conflict emerging within Europe between Islamic migrants and citizens won't be fixed by sending many migrants to "good behaviour" schools:

A large number of them, it seems, immediately want to replicate the conditions that they’ve just fled from. This is the bit that I just don’t get.  As events in Germany on New Year’s Eve showed, the first impulse of many young Islamic men is to abuse the hospitality extended to them.   Some, of course, go much further than orchestrated sex attacks on young women. They want to murder the infidels who have given them shelter and succour.

Things just don’t add up here. Why would anyone flee a cruel and repressive society, then seek to undermine the democratic institutions of their host country so that it might become another Muslim theocracy? How perverse is that?

No, not really perverse at all.  If you genuinely respect the world views of Islam--that is, take them into serious account, instead of paternalistically dismissing them as harmless fables--you expect them to endeavour to establish Islamic theocracies in their host countries.  Anything less would be heretical, by their lights.

They say Islam isn’t to blame for the barbaric acts carried out in its name, but that’s only partly true.  Yes, many Muslims respect Western institutions and want only to live in peace in the countries that have accepted them. They understand that freedom to practise their religion is one thing; the right to impose it on their host society is quite another. These Muslims are welcome.

But Islam cannot be exonerated of responsibility for the mayhem and slaughter in the Middle East, nor for the creeping contamination of Europe. The tenets of Islam provide a theological framework that enables groups like the Taleban, Al Qaeda and Isis to flourish.

Apologists say that what these groups do is a perversion of Islam, but they are all part of the Islamic tradition. They didn’t spring out of a vacuum.

Du Fresne has got to the point where he issues strong cautions about indiscriminately accepting Islamic migrants.

There are lessons here for New Zealand. Our natural impulse as a humane, liberal society is to take pity on Islamic asylum-seekers and give them refuge. But we can’t ignore what’s happened in Germany, where young Islamic men have repaid their host country’s generosity by abusing its young women.

There is ample evidence that male Islamists can’t handle the sexual freedom of liberal western societies. Their view of females as inferior, an attitude sanctioned by Islamic law, becomes fused with desire for the women they see walking in the streets wearing makeup and revealing clothing. It’s a poisonous mix: one part old-fashioned lust, one part repressive religious zealotry that teaches them to regard such women as whores who deserve to be punished.

Closer to home, we’ve seen the trouble caused in Australia by young Middle Eastern men with a strong sense of entitlement and an obvious resentment of their adopted country. Large groups of young Muslim men on the loose in Western society almost always spell trouble.  It must surely be only a matter of time before even tolerant, liberal Europeans get provoked to the point where they rise up in retaliation and defence of their own values. So far the resistance is coming mainly from the ugly Far Right, but it may not stay that way.

We in New Zealand, as is so often the case, have the good fortune to be able observe all this from a safe distance and absorb the lessons. But will we?

Sadly, the odds are not great.  The West, including New Zealand, is as fiercely committed to its secularism as Islamic migrants are committed to Allah and the prophet.  It is the clash of two dystopian civilisations.  In this clash, however, the West is the weaker, ideologically and practically.  It believes that underneath the skin of every Islamic migrant is a Western secular liberal just waiting to spring forth.  But the Islamic migrants believe that before the West submits to Allah, jihad must be waged.  Both are horribly wrong.