I’m delighted to be able to reconnect the name of the author with this essay.
The following was sent to us as an email by Gates of Vienna reader LS. Based on the email’s headers, it had been forwarded repeatedly. It has also popped up a number of times on the web, although I can’t identify an original source. It’s well-written and to the point, so I’m posting it here in its entirety.
A man, whose family was German aristocracy prior to World War II, owned a number of large industries and estates. When asked how many German people were true Nazis, the answer he gave can guide our attitude toward fanaticism. “Very few people were true Nazis,” he said, “but many enjoyed the return of German pride, and many more were too busy to care. I was one of those who just thought the Nazis were a bunch of fools. So, the majority just sat back and let it all happen. Then, before we knew it, they owned us, and we had lost control, and the end of the world had come. My family lost everything. I ended up in a concentration camp and the Allies destroyed my factories.”
We are told again and again by experts and talking heads that Islam is the religion of peace, and that the vast majority of Muslims just want to live in peace. Although this unqualified assertion may be true, it is entirely irrelevant. It is meaningless fluff, meant to make us feel better, and meant to somehow diminish the specter of fanatics rampaging across the globe in the name of Islam.
The fact is that the fanatics rule Islam at this moment in history. It is the fanatics who march. It is the fanatics who wage any one of fifty shooting wars worldwide. It is the fanatics who systematically slaughter Christian or tribal groups throughout Africa and are gradually taking over the entire continent in an Islamic wave. It is the fanatics who bomb, behead, murder, or honor-kill. It is the fanatics who take over mosque after mosque. It is the fanatics who zealously spread the stoning and hanging of rape victims and homosexuals. It is the fanatics who teach their young to kill and to become suicide bombers.
The hard quantifiable fact is that the peaceful majority, the “silent majority,” is cowed and extraneous.
- - - - - - - - -
Communist Russia was comprised of Russians who just wanted to live in peace, yet the Russian Communists were responsible for the murder of about twenty million people. The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
China’s huge population was peaceful as well, but Chinese Communists managed to kill a staggering seventy million people.
The average Japanese individual prior to World War II was not a warmongering sadist. Yet Japan murdered and slaughtered its way across Southeast Asia in an orgy of killing that included the systematic murder of twelve million Chinese civilians; most killed by sword, shovel, and bayonet.
And, who can forget Rwanda, which collapsed into butchery. Could it not be said that the majority of Rwandans were “peace-loving”?
History lessons are often incredibly simple and blunt, yet for all our powers of reason we may miss the most basic and uncomplicated of points: Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
Peace-loving Germans, Japanese, Chinese, Russians, Rwandans, Serbs, Afghans, Iraqis, Palestinians, Somalis, Nigerians, Algerians, and many others have died because the peaceful majority did not speak up until it was too late.
As for us who watch it all unfold, we must pay attention to the only group that counts; the fanatics who threaten our way of life.
18 comments:
I wrote the essay and posted it on my blog here:
http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2006/02/why-peaceful-majority-is-irrelevant.html
FrontPage magazine published it after I ran it on my blog. Since then it has been published many times in print media around the world. Obviously, my name "fell off" the essay as it got passed around, but I'm glad that it was read as widely as it was.
Cheers!
Paul
Celestial Junk Blog
Canada
Congratulations, Paul.
Peace-loving Muslims have been made irrelevant by their silence. Peace-loving Muslims will become our enemy if they don’t speak up, because like my friend from Germany, they will awaken one day and find that the fanatics own them, and the end of their world will have begun.
It goes beyond this. A huge percentage of Muslims are already well aware of how Islamic jihad has begun in earnest. Those who watch al-Jazeera and al-Manar—or other Islamic media outlets—cannot but be keenly aware of global jihad’s impact upon the greater world. Still—confronted with Islam’s constant atrocities—they remain silent.
There can no longer be any excuse about “waiting for the strong horse to appear”. The patent evil of global terrorism long ago negated such callow fence-sitting. The deafening silence of Islam’s ummah has even gone beyond any notion that, “silence is consent”. As a Spanish journalist once observed:
“After a point, silence is no longer consent.
To remain silent is to lie.”
Such is the position that Westerners are placed in at this time. There has been more than adequate opportunity for huge numbers of Muslims to make clear their displeasure with fanatical Islam’s barbarity. No such thing has happened and such silence is no longer just a form of tacit consent but an overt lie about whose side these silent Muslims really are on.
The fanatic’s don’t “own them”, they own the fanatics. Silent Muslims have bought the fanatics lock, stock and barrel. Through constant outpourings of zakat, thay have bought the fanatics every last kilogram of semtex, cell phone trigger and warferin-coated ball bearing.
Only the most remote, backwater illiterate and off-grid Muslim has any possible claim of ignorance. Even then, the incidence of aggression and jihadist violence in distant locations such as Aceh and Southern Thailand still serve to indict even Islam’s most rustic practitioners. There is little to no evidence that Muslims are anywhere near universal in their condemnation of terrorist violence.
Even if there were such unanimity regarding jihad, Islam would still be damned straight to eternal Hell by its continued practice of shari’a law. Beheadings, stonings, genital mutilation, spousal abuse, murdering of homosexuals, sexual child abuse and de facto slavery all make Islam unfit for participation upon the world stage.
Even more offensive than the foregoing practices is the spectacle of shari’a law’s adherents entering free societies to criticize and threaten those who protect not just their own free speech but that of Muslims as well. The stupendous hypocrisy of such monumental Islamic gall transcends all boundaries of reasonable forebearance or tolerance. Constant Muslim demands for their Religious Freedom in Western lands—despite the complete and total lack of genuine reciprocity in Islamic nations—is nothing less than a declaration of religious war.
It is time to tear up the pavement of this horrendous one-way street. Barricades to further immigration plus the lightning quick expulsion of Muslim law-breakers and extremists should only be the starting point of an increasing violent pushback against Islamic supremacism. Western politicians who abet continued colonization by these savages must be thrust from office, by force if elections cannot achieve any meaningful result.
Responsible patriots must ring down the curtain on this Multicultural farce and put an end to the most egregious social engineering experiment since Soviet and communist Chinese tyrants cheerfully slaughtered untold millions of their own. Muslims who take such obnoxious delight in jabbing knives into the dragon’s hide must be given a taste of scorching flame as their reward. The charred embers of Islam should stand as stark testimony to their idiotic folly.
zenster: It's interesting how much my own views have changed since I wrote the essay. A lot of reading and world events have evolved my own thinking.
At this point, my belief is that the problem with Islam is Islam. Muslims have no doctrine or theoretical basis to go to that would make them fit in with a pluralistic post-modern society. There guide is the Islamic foundational texts ... and these support the jihadists. Moderates have nowhere within Islam to go for doctrine that would support them. Keep in mind, that their supreme example is Muhammad.
I wrote about this here:
http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2008/05/muslim-reformation.html
Paul: Moderates have nowhere within Islam to go for doctrine that would support them.
All of your second comment is exceptionally concise and well-put, Paul. There is no commonality between Islam and the modern world. Muslims can continue pretending all they want that this is the West's fault. All it will get them is their own personal holocaust.
Paul, thanks a lot for this piece. I remember having read it elsewhere and have since used its points in debates.
Good that it's found it's original ownership again :)
Peace-loving Muslims. Please show me one. That is an oxymoron. They won't be peace-loving until every Jew, Christian, Baha'i, Hindu, Druze, Pagan, etc... is eliminated from this planet.
A commenter at Eternity Road once made the pithy observation that we believe in the existence of peaceable Muslims for the same reason we believe in the existence of giant squid: dead ones show up every now and then.
There's a world of insight in that.
Finlandis, bad Muslims can be completely peace-loving.
Only if they study the Quran and discover that they were mistaken and regret it, trouble ensues. These people catch what is called "Sudden Jihad Syndrome" and can become very extreme, very fast.
This is terrible.
We should talk about it on blogs for another twenty years while they smother the planet.
Anyone know exactly how many Muslims Bush had rounded up after 9/11, detained, and they ejected from the USA? It seems to be a forgotten fact that this took place. Wikipedia says:
"Following the attacks, 80,000 Arab and Muslim immigrants were fingerprinted and registered under the Alien Registration Act of 1940. 8,000 Arab and Muslim men were interviewed, and 5,000 foreign nationals were detained under Joint Congressional Resolution 107-40 authorizing the use of military force "to deter and prevent acts of international terrorism against the United States."[132]
That seems like a pretty forcefull response. Detaining 5,000 foreign muslims!
This is throwing sand into the people's eyes.
There are two kind of men:
Great man aka fanatics and Normal man aka cowards.
The fanatics are the ones who make humanity so divine, if not by them, we would be animals who are able to speak.
We here have a say:
"Of a geniuos and a fool, we all have a bit." I'll translate:
"Every man is composed by a percentage of fanaticism and cowardy".
Charles Martel was a fanatical man also.
Exorting the lower levels of Humanity (average) as if it was a great thing, is in my view, dangerously close to Communism.
Yeah! Let's kill the fanatics and we'll all live fine... bullsh*t!
Of course they remain silent. Even if they object to the means, they don't object to the ends.
50 years of emasculation has led to a population of males who will not defend themselves.
now if the ladies wanted protection (which they dont seem to want), they will not get it.
can you picture will of will and grace standing up for all of our rights when the people that they would have to stand up to are not police and just a bit uncooperative, but down right hates them.
the men of the west are standing aside as their ladies want them to. and they will just have to get used to it.
after all, they THOUGHT The west was oppressing them... just wait till they have a version of communist islam...
when the fit hits the shan they will say... oh where are the real men (which they say now any way)?
and the men they are with will point to the invaders and say there they are!!! maybe you should have worked your magic on the enemy outside the gate rather than the enemy you thought you had married in your bedroom.
very aesopian, but there isnt much of anything we can do in the west.
until its a war zone, they wont think they are wrong, and so until it falls down collapses down aroudn them and they are in shackles.
the west was not oppressive...
being from america, and thinking that being a housewife was a form of gulag, they will get a real real rude awakening.
i hope to be retired somewhere far away in a small place that will be years before they are done enough to bother with.
In any violent revolution, less than 1.5% of the population fights, dies, or makes a difference.
The rest just follow the winners.
Unless we can convince that 1.5% to put their lives on the line for liberty, the religious fanatics will accumulate the numbers needed and win Dar Al Islam.
Then we will be forced to put them down. We need to find and support those peaceful arabs before the islamists get a chance to kill them off, or else we will be forced to go nuclear.
Strike peaceful, and replace with pro-liberty.
Peaceful Arabs are why we are here in the first place ... they won't confront the fundamentalists.
Alfonso, we don't have to kill all fanatics. We just have to kill their fanatics.
"Very few people were true Jihadis," he said, "but many enjoyed the return of Muslim pride, and many more were too busy to care."
There, updated.
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