Tuesday, July 12, 2005

In the Beginning Was the Fatwa

Wolfgang Bruno breaks down the stages of jihad for us. Taking his cue from Mark Gabriel, an ex-Muslim turned Christian, he divides the stages of jihad into these three:

1.The first is the weakened stage. This is when Muslims are in a small minority and have to dissemble regarding their intentions. Think of Mohammed before Medina.

2.The preparation stage begins when Muslims are a large minority. Here, they have the beginnings of real power and are able to make headway in the political marketplace. Think of Europe and the unrelenting positioning for place and voice in the public debate.

3.This marks the true jihad stage. This is the point at which Muslims begin the process of full scale armed assault. Remember how the Muslim minority in India created Pakistan? There you have the paradigm for jihad.

But it doesn’t end in Pakistan. As Mr. Bruno points out, Islam currently makes up ten percent of the population in France. However, thirty three percent of all babies born in France are Muslim babies. He predicts that when some critical mass is reached – somewhere between fifteen and thirty percent – France may experience civil war just like Lebanon did. All they have to do is wait; demographics are on their side.

Do you think he’s unnecessarily pessimistic? Remember Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses? Who could forget that book? For many of us, it was the dawn of the age of Islam. “What is a fatwa?” we asked one another? To our bemusement, and to Mr. Rushdie's terror, it turned out to be a death sentence. That fatwa was issued sixteen years ago. In 1989 it seemed exotic and not terribly germane to our lives. Sure, some novelist or other had his problems with some religious extremists, but what did that have to do with us? Earlier this year, the original fatwa, issued by the long-gone Khomeni, was re-issued by his political heirs. And now it no longer seems exotic. Now it seems familiar and up close.

Mr. Bruno says that the Japanese translator of Rushdie’s work was assassinated in 1991. Lots of people have died because of the Muslims’ reaction to that book. But as we have also learned, Muslims die for rumors about books.

So far, in America, Islam in is the first stage. But it won’t stay that way unless we stay vigilant. If we go the way of Europe – vacillating, apologizing, excusing terrorists and refusing to call them by their right name – the second stage will be here shortly. Already, for fear of appearing incorrect, we refuse to profile Arabs at airport terminals. What next on the slippery slope to dhimmitude?

The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. We already knew that, but now we're having to learn it by heart and the hard way.

It's just a matter of time.

3 comments:

AbbaGav said...

Any examples of averted Jihads? Or are they only stalled, faster and slower Jihads, all still waiting for the right moment somewhere in the coming centuries?

Dymphna said...

Do you mean particular skirmishes that have been averted? That's like the accident that didn't happen; there's no way to know.

Israel in the canary in the mine: what she is attempting now will play itself out into the rest of the world in various guises. It's hard to tell if the move is a mark of genius or simply feeding the monster.

Things change at too fast a rate now for this to take centuries to play out. The engines of change are too large and move too fast now. In fact, that may be the catalyst that drives the discontent of the fascists: things are changing too fast.

It's too vast for any of us to see all the facets. One of the advantages of the blogosphere is that the combined vision leads to a much wiser response because in the end we all know more...and we are only in the very beginnings of this phase of response.

Jude the Obscure said...

You may be interested in this I find his 'lecture' a mish mash of double talk and wonder how anyone could understand it. What is frightening is the number of people here who want him to stay.