George Rebane

There are a lot of people talking past each other today about Islam and the west.  A major book on the subject seems to miss the point completely – see Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think by J.L. Esposito and D. Mogahed.  The authors document and analyze the results of multiple Gallup polls conducted on worldwide Islamic populations.  They conclude that Muslims, as Christians, all want the same essentials out of life – essentially security, sweetness, and light.  Therefore, there really is no clash of civilizations or geo-strategic terrorist problem.

What seems to be missing is the understanding of how large populations are marshaled and directed by small minorities willing to sacrifice themselves and the common weal for an end-game ideology.  The reported results of Esposito and Mogahed dovetail with the vanilla interviews and talking heads that show how peace loving and innocent are 999 out of a thousand (pick your own fraction) Muslims.

What is overlooked is the underlying and continuing clash of civilizations along with its current resurrection in the form of Islamo-fascism.  On countless online and worldwide broadcast media outlets, the Islamists are telling their brethren that the degenerate west must and will be conquered and converted – the hiatus since the Vienna of 1683 is over.

Small cohorts of active and sacrificing ‘believers’ have always been able to move the masses to their way of thinking, especially when two prerequisites are first firmly planted in the minds of these masses.  First, they have to be convinced that the existing order, even if benign, is not to their best interests, and that marked improvement can be had with relatively little application of ‘correct’ effort.  Second, they must be made to believe that not going along with change will socially and visibly isolate them, or worse, will be dangerous to their continued well-being.  If you won’t march with us, then just huddle behind your curtained windows.

This paradigm has worked since biblical times, and was most certainly a key element in the launch of the American Revolution.  In later times the Bolshevik communists used it in Russia, the Brown Shirt Nazis in Germany, and Castro’s communists in Cuba.  Large docile masses are always surprisingly easy to control, especially when their normalcy is snipped away bit by piece.

Today one major global contention is between Islam and non-Islam.  The peaceful and pre-militant Muslims will never reveal the content of their hearts or minds through the kinds of polls that Gallup conducts.  Instead they do serve as the fertile source of volunteers and resources that keep the Islamo-fascists in the business of terror.  And they will fill the streets in a heartbeat to celebrate the latest terrorist victory or condemn the latest ‘slight to Islam’s honor’.

The madrassas that educate their unemployed and undirected youth spew a level of anti-western vitriol that is largely incomprehensible to the non-Muslim.  Those in the west who contend that the ignorance, hatred, and atrocities on both sides is symmetrical may be unreachable in their current state of ignorance or perfidy.  What is clear is that no peaceful body of Muslims in the west or elsewhere has ever risen up against their own Islamo-fascists.  The explanation for this absence is simple – either such Muslims form a vanishingly small fraction of their society, and/or they know they will be murdered if they attempt to organize a public show of opposition.

So they huddle behind their curtained windows instead, and game the growing conflict.  As a Muslim, it is entirely possible that any new Islamic order (Caliphate?) will not be all that bad – Turkey comes to mind – so the best bet is to keep down and let those that will, take the fight to its conclusion.  In short, they can play both sides of the street.  That’s what the Russian and German middle classes did in the similar stages of progress toward their respective autocracies.  Of course, for them it didn’t go as planned – hopeful change turned into a personal and national disaster.

And all this is relatively easy to pull off, especially when led by the terminally ignorant (‘Peace in our time.’) elite.  Today in England, Germany, France, and Spain Islamic populations are openly behaving as settlers.  They make no pretense of being immigrants seeking to adopt the values and mores of their new homelands.  The opinion leaders of the indigenous populations tell them daily that everything will be alright – tomorrow will be like today.  And it is, until it isn’t.

In our own multi-cultural land, we have been educated out of the notion that immigrants should assimilate and not settle our land – retaining separate cultures on public display is today lauded as a part of our revised history.  We recall that settlers seek to impose their culture on new lands they occupy – the whites settled the American west, they did not immigrate to learn and practice the established Indian cultures – while immigrants assimilate, and bring change in a slow and measured way to their new homeland, a way that allows its citizens to pick and choose what of the new they will incorporate into their established lives.

Today in America we too are chided by our intellectual elites when we ask importune questions about our Islamic future.  Whenever we murmur, we get into fruitless dialogues such as in the recent comment thread (here) on NC Media Watch.  So who does speak for the billion plus tolerant, peace-loving, and silent Muslims?  Time is not on our side.

[update] You can read and view President Obama’s Cairo speech to Islam here.  I was struck by the places where he drew equivalence between the contributions of the Muslim-based and western cultures, and how he positioned America’s stance in the world viz that of the Islamic states.