Fitzgerald: We don't need to be friendly with Muslim countries

“The US really needs to be friendly to Muslim countries,” he [Foreign Minister Syed Hamid Albar] told retired Malaysian diplomats. “This is not a good development as they have just appointed a special envoy to OIC.” Malaysia heads the 57-nation Organisation of Islamic Conference.-- from this news article

Why do we "need to be friendly to Muslim countries"? Muslim countries need to explain themselves, and the contents of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. For these are now widely available to Infidels for intelligent inspection and study without the apologists -- whether Muslim (those safis, those nasrs, those khalidis) or non-Muslim (those armstrongs, those espositos, those ernsts). We have available the writings of the great Western authorities on Islam, who studied and wrote in the period 1870-1970, before the Arab money came on the scene to buy up pre-existing, or to even start up, academic "Centers" for the study of Islam or matters related to Islam, before Muslims and non-Muslim apologists for Islam began their steady creep into and rise within the academic ranks until now they hold all but a few places firmly in their grasp -- long before the publishers got scared, long before academic standards collapsed, long before all kinds of things.

We can read Schacht and Snouck Hurgronje and Jeffery and Lammens and Zwemer -- there is no preventing it. And we can see that what they write makes so much sense, and has such obvious explanatory value as compared to the vaporings of John Esposito, or Gilles Kepel, or Noah ("After Jihad") Feldman. They make more sense than any of the other entrepreneurs who have made their fortune (Esposito) directly or indirectly through Arab support. They make more sense than the thrusting young academics (Noah Feldman) who have presented themselves as Constitution-writing "experts" and have been given jobs and even tenure by others who haven't looked into Islam themselves and may be mightily impressed by letters of reference from Roy Mottahedeh and John Esposito and, of course, someone in the American government thanking someone for his "important work in drafting the Iraqi constitution." No, we don't have to go for them for our information or understanding.

And that is why we owe the Muslim countries nothing. We understand, now, what explains in a place like Malaysia, for example, the disguised Jizyah of the Bumiputra system, or the malevolence of the O.I.C. speech which Mahathir Mohamad delivered, to great applause, a few years ago. We know now more about Malaysia and other Muslim countries. "But they're not monolithic" -- no, they're not, in dress and food and a few things like that, but the ideology makes them all into Arab wannabes, and the ideology stamps out, and would stamp out everywhere if it could, anything but Islam.

Neither the U.S. nor any other Infidel country "needs to be friendly" to Muslim countries. Quite the reverse. They had better start understanding that in our understanding, there is no going back, and it is they who have a great deal of explaining to do -- if they can do it.

And yet in another perfect illustration of the misunderstanding of Islam, or rather of Muslims, that prevails among those who lead us, Bush is going to send an ambassador to the “Organization of the Islamic Conference.” In his shallow calculation, and that of Rice, sending an envoy to the O.I.C., which has 57 "Muslim countries" as members, will be an intelligent way to "engage" the world's Muslims. It will help to win those hearts and those minds that seem always to need winning, no matter how many Muslims are rescued, as in Bosnia or Kosovo, or given huge sums of money, as with ungrateful Egypt, meretricious Pakistan, and the ungrateful, meretricious, corrupt, and completely transparent "Palestinians," or both rescued from a tyrant and been given all kinds of aid, with the whole enterprise costing more than all the wars, save World War II, the United States has ever fought -- as in Iraq.

This sending of an envoy will be taken as a sign of appeasement and desperation. Either Bush and Rice have it right, or Winston Churchill, and John Quincy Adams, and Tocqueville, and every serious Western scholar of Islam up to the past forty years had it right. What do you think?

http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/017303.php

July 10, 2007