TERMS
-- Islam is the monotheistic Abrahamic religion articulated
by the Koran.
-- A Muslim is a believer in or adherent of Islam.
-- An Islamist espouses orthodox Islamic beliefs.
-- The Arab League defines an Arab as a person "whose
language is Arabic, who lives in an Arabic speaking country,
who is in sympathy with the aspirations of the Arabic speaking
peoples."
HIJACKERS, HOOKERS &
PARADISE NOW
9/11/2001/ Only days prior to
his rendezvous with 72 virgins in Islamic heaven, Mohamed
Atta, before piloting his plane into the North Tower of
the World Trade Center, was reported to be seen drinking
and gambling. Some of the other hijackers spent their last
hours on earth in strip clubs paying for lap dances; others
sought solace in the arms of sex workers. And while much
ink has been spilled analyzing the political underpinnings
and psychological profiles of the hijackers, very little
attention has been paid to their whol(r)esale embrace of
Western decadence just prior to takeoff. Could it be that
what they did and why they did it in the hours leading up
to their Sept. 11th, 2001 suicide mission has a significance
beyond the death and destruction they wrought?
What are we to read into their
decision not to pass their final hours in the mosque of
their choice and receive divine blessings, but to spend
them in the naked bosom of the culture they would attempt
to bring down in the following days?
Letting the pre-flight facts
speak from themselves -- that is from the boudoir -- they
were observably not concerned that their earthly desires
and subsequent fulfillment would compromise their good standing
with the Almighty. More likely, they had long since ceased
believing in Him in Whom the name of thousands were going
to be brutally murdered. To state the obvious, the hijackers
were manifestly inner conflicted, just as the transference
of their enormous self-loathing onto the West is the necessary
red herring that unites the brotherhood of jihadists and
terrorists everywhere in the world.
For Westerners endeavouring
in good faith to understand the meaning and implications
of what Samuel Huntington has termed “the clash of
civilizations,” the lifestyle choices of the hijackers
before bringing down the Twin Towers offer a telling example
of Islam’s growing inability to hold sway over its
flock, and the growing incommensurability of Western and
Islamic values; which makes jihad and its terrorist operations
nothing more -- or everything more -- than desperate, last-ditch
efforts to hold on to a way of life that is being undermined
by Western global culture. Islam, as an all-embracing ethos
conceived to provide for the spiritual, psychological and
moral well-being of a people, is on its way out because,
in the words of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, from the book Nomad,
“Islam is built on sexual inequality and on the surrender
of individual responsibility and choice. This is not just
ugly; it is monstrous.” She argues that millions of
Muslims, despite their reluctance to enter their apostate
views into the public domain for fear of reprisal, have
already signed on to that declaration.
Before the entire world,
the hijackers laid bare their radical estrangement from
Islam as well as their twisted, schizophrenic mindset. Where
actions speak louder than either words or prayers left unsaid,
the Koran was no match against the consolations of the flesh;
Islam’s heavenly heights could not compete with the
high guaranteed by the triple Scotch. Well aware of the
publicity and scrutiny their lives would generate following
their voluntary demise, they couldn’t be bothered
to wait even a day or two for the promise of 72 heavenly
houris because the promise was a lie that had been drained
of purchase. Prior to and a condition of their hatred of
the West was their manifest self-hatred. The big lie they
foisted on themselves was to hold the West culpable for
their pathologically alienated selves, when in fact their
religion and culture -- de facto prisons -- kept them locked
out and strangers to their nature which, incidentally, flowered
upon contact with the West. What sustains and propagates
the big lie is that the terrorist believes defeat of the
West will resolve his inner conflict, when in point of fact
there are only two practical solutions: either to recognize
and embrace the baseball-capped person he sees when he looks
into the mirror -- or Paradise
Now.
Small wonder Islam looks upon
the West as the great temptation (evil incarnate). Islam’s
spiritual leaders are rightfully concerned that once exposed
to the virus of Western values the good Muslim can never
be as good as he once was. For sure, the hijackers succeeded
in bringing down the Twin Towers in spectacular fashion,
but the West had already won the day just as the West is
winning the great clash. Like all the major religions before
it, Islam is an idea whose best days are long gone. The
age of secularism, whose reach is global, is upon us and
the new god in the starless, byte-bright sky is the www.,
whose infatuated faithful are legion.
Never has the relationship between
Islam and the West -- the Great Satin -- been so asymmetrical.
And so much so the West can’t even be bothered to
introduce an equivalent demonizing moniker for Islam because
there is nothing in the latter’s ethos that tempts
or appeals to the Western mind. If it weren’t for
their oil, the West wouldn’t give the Arab world and
Islam the time of day – and both sides know it. And
even though it dare not be thought, much less whispered,
the West regards much of the Muslim-Islamic way of life
-- its systematic debasement of women and barbaric judicial
system -- as infra dig. Hirsi Ali writes: “My Muhammad
says my husband can beat me and that I am worth half as
much as a man. Is it I who am being disrespectful to Muhammad
in criticizing his legacy, or is it he who is disrespectful
to me?”
Which isn’t to say that
when we allow ourselves to think outside the box we can’t
sympathize with the Muslim mother who shudders when his
teenage daughter announces she wants to go shopping for
a G-string, or that by the age of 12 her son will have witnessed
every kind of sexual act imaginable on a computer screen,
and there’s a 70% chance that her children will experiment
with drugs before they turn 15.
As to our sexual mores, manner
of dress, religious conduct and Western law versus Sharia,
the divide between the West and Islam is gaping –
and there is no middle ground -- just as there is no such
thing as moderate Islam or moderate any religion for that
matter. When it comes to the gods and their commandments,
you either believe or you don’t, that is you either
comport yourself as if there will be theological consequences
to your actions or there won't. And if you don’t believe,
you’re a heathen, and Islam rightfully regards the
West as a haven for heathens, and that includes lapsed Muslims
who wear that secular badge with pride and without prejudice.
The moderate Muslim or Islamist
is a fiction the West has invented in order to conceal its
hidden agenda: to have Islam turn upon itself, to cajole
the apostate Muslim, the presumed moderate, to undertake
the West’s bidding. We’re now seeing that long-term
objective begin to bear fruit as more and more westernized
Muslims, especially women, are speaking out against Islam.
The Western Front is comprised of millions of Muslims who
have been told they are moderate when in fact they have
already been co-opted by the West but are in denial for
as long as it takes them to resolve their inner conflictedness,
at which point they come to recognize that their shame and
rage against what is ‘tyrannical’ in Islam is
authentic, and that they are now uniquely qualified to speak
comparatively and confidently of new-found Western values
they deem more commensurate with their own.
Without his language, we must
ask what remains of the Arab or Muslim who has made his
love of basketball, gambling, late night cable TV, mini-skirted
women, wine with his meal and pre-marital sex his permanent
abode, for whom the Koran is just another book on a reading
list, and prayer, even once a day, a downright noose-ance.
For much of its history and prior
to the world-transforming revolution in communications,
Islam was geographically vaccinated against the ways of
the West. But with the introduction of the Internet all
that has changed – forever. Mere exposure to the West
is all that is required to collapse Islam’s once indomitable
pillars of faith. Nowadays, we hear much of stealth jihad,
a term introduced by Robert Spencer in his book of the same
title. Stealth Jihad outlines Islam’s not so secret
agenda to overthrow the West and establish an imperial world
caliphate.
What we don’t hear about
is Western Jihad, the West’s long-term plan to overwhelm
Islam by Western culture. Not only is Western jihad more
insidious than any Islamic stealth equivalent, it is working
so well the response to it, of necessity, has been radical
and fraught with violence. But even the terrorist, who in
good faith has volunteered to fight for the honour and integrity
of his culture and religion, knows that once exposed to
the ways of the West there’s no going back. The West
merely has to inject a single aspect of its culture (its
freedoms, gender equality, music, decadence) into the Islamic
sphere and the good Muslim becomes instantly vexed, exercised,
even tormented – and, alas, in some instances, radicalized.
In large urban centers like Tehran, democratic reform movements
have necessitated desperate, totalitarian responses. But
if history is a reliable indicator, those measures, however
brutal, will fail because it is a law of human nature that
we would all rather be free --no matter what the consequences
-- than not. Not 'if' but 'when' Western Jihad wins the
day, Muslims will eat, dress, think and get mad at their
computers like everyone else. In this godless future, enmity
will be based on the usual suspects: economic disparity,
race, colour and geo-politics.
Any system or ideology that undertakes
to regulate human behaviour but ill-considers human nature
in its calculus does so at its own peril. Communism, flouting
the DNA-writ territorial imperative, collapsed because it
short-shrifted man's basic makeup. Islam, steadfast in its
refusal to lend an ear to the cry of freedom, has similarly
prepared the ground for its own demise, the fact of which
does not excuse the West for what until now has been a meek
and propitiatory response compared to its relentless and
methodical denunciation of communism that was ganged up
on until its walls came tumbling down in 1991. Since then,
the protocols of political correctness have become such
that we are afraid to offend, as our hard-earned values
wither thin in compromise. Hirsi Ali writes: “The
thin fingers of self-censorship begin to tighten around
individual minds, then groups of people, then around ideas
themselves and their expression. When free speech crumbles
in this way, when Westerners refrain from criticizing or
questioning certain aspects of Islam, they abandon those
Muslims who seek to question them too. They also abandon
their own values.”
Since the effects of terrorism
and suicide bombings cannot begin to compete with the Internet
as a hegemonic tool, the spectre of the development and
launching of a terrorist nuclear attack -- the dirty bomb
-- is debatably the most pressing matter of our times. And
even though the writing is on every screen, we’re
not staying on the page. Islam wall's are beginning to crumble.
Radical Islam recognizes that the conventional terrorism
it sponsors will not bring about a new world order, which
makes the apocalyptic solution -- if I’m going to
go I’m going to take everyone with me -- a threat
the West must take more seriously. Is Iran’s nuclear
program an on-going development that should be allowed to
be brought to completion?
What we learn from the 9/11 hijackers
is that once exposed to freedom there is no turning back,
and that the real infidel is the Muslim who cannot refuse
Western values, which makes the great "clash of civilizations"
an inner conflict that has been outed and unleashed on the
world.
