http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/archives/018769.php#moreThe mere fact that the Saudis are worried enough to be conducting this worldwide charm offensive by Muslims and especially Saudis --e.g., King Abdullah’s meeting with the Pope -- is a good thing. That is, it’s a good thing as long as Infidels maintain a healthy skepticism about that charm offensive, since it comes along with the usual smoke-and-mirrors, delivered by solemn, gravelly-voiced Abdullah or some other among the fungible Al-Saud. (God, what with the daggers and dishdashas, and the double-layer goatee, and the sinister mien, they are so hard to keep apart, aren't they?) In any case, it is not having the effect that the Muslim propagandists and their Saudi paymasters thought it would.
For another example of their failure, look at the intelligent, informed, and therefore highly critical analyses of the contents of that letter signed by those "138 Muslim clerics and scholars." Those clerics and scholars were no doubt hoping their letter would make a huge impression. But the world today is not the world of even a year ago, and too many people can read not only what is written between the lines, but make sense of what is written on those lines, and they weren't having any of it.
How the hell do the Al-Saud think they can indefinitely keep from 85% of the world's population, all of its Infidels that is, the truth about what is contained in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira? How do they think they can indefinitely silence all those who have left, jettisoned, Islam and are here, and there, and now everywhere in the West? How will they deal with the growing list of articulate apostates, who now include Ibn Warraq and Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Ali Sina, and tens of thousands of the most morally and intellectually advanced among those who, through no fault of their own, were born into societies suffused with Islam? These people, whose testimonies are now in print, came to recognize the nature of Islam. And having, in the West, grounds for comparison, they have analyzed its dangerous and retrograde effects on its own adherents. They decided to make the break, being held back neither by fear of retribution by fanatical Believers, nor by some residual filial piety (affection for one's quietly pious grandmother, for example), and with no desire to remain in a Muslim society and work from within for change: to do so they would not have dared to speak the truth about Islam. They have become the witnesses that even the Al-Saud cannot suppress, try as they might.
And the studies of the real scholars of Islam, the ones who wrote during the period before the Great Inhibition that began in the 1960s and has gathered strength ever since, but now, in the face of Muslim behavior, and Muslim activities, around the world, may at long last be itself crumbling. Just as Saudi paymasters are no longer recruiting quite so effectively for that army of Western hirelings they have employed in the capitals of the West, the reputation of the MESA-Nostrans has been damaged. They have been held up for ridicule, and the obviousness of their apologetics, the way in which they have prevented their students from learning about the texts and tenets of Islam and about the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of all the various non-Muslim peoples conquered, is now clear to many commentators.
Those commentators are no longer in a mood to be impressed by academic titles. After all, many of us have been to college and graduate schools ourselves. We know how dismal some of those with titles turn out to be, and certainly know about academic politics and how rigged the game so obviously is, and must be, when it comes to hiring practices in the fields of Islam and the Middle East. "Question authority" is a bumpersticker and an attitude, often unjustified, but perfectly justified when it comes to professors of Middle Eastern and Islamic studies and related subjects. (For more, google "MESA Nostra").
Imagine that you are the Saudi king. How the hell are you going to prevent Infidels from finding out what is broadcast on Saudi television and radio? Now that that wonderful translating service, MEMRI, exists, you can't. And how are you going to prevent Infidels from getting copies of the textbooks used in Saudi schools? You can't. And how will you prevent Infidels from reading, and re-reading with proper understanding, the Qur'an and the Hadith, and analyzing the figure of Muhammad, as presented in the Sira, or the Muslim sacralized biographies of Muhammad, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil, forever? You just can't.
So you send out the fog machines. One of them keeps sending the message that "Islam is not a monolith." This is Tariq Ramadan's old-new tack, meaning "don't you Infidels dare try to say anything about Islam because all generalizations will be untrue" -- a clear confusion between the superficial variousness of dress and Iftar foods, and the clear unity of Islam embodied in the canonical, immutable, straight-from-God-or-His-Messenger texts, that do not change, in time or in space. So when Tariq Ramadan refers to something he likes to call "European Islam," he is making something up. There is no "European" or "American" Islam; there is only one Islam, or rather, because there are Sunni and Shi'a and Ibadi Muslims, and because some 2% of Muslims are called "Sufis" because their approach to God is supposedly whirling-dervishly mystical, there is only one Islam when it comes to the thing that really matters: the attitude of Muslims toward Infidels. And there, there is no disagreement, no variousness, only that "monolithic" attitude that Tariq Ramadan pretends to be unable to find.
The other is the old Tu-Quoque. Just look at what is contained in that bad old Leviticus, apologists for Islam say, what with the ancient Israelites doing this and that. But for several thousand years Jews in their synagogues have not been listening to sermons telling them that they should be smashing the heads of the Canaanites, and the Jewish attachment to the tiny Land of Israel is not exactly equivalent to the Muslim claim to the whole wide world, a world which must ultimately come under Islam and rule by Muslims. And when the Crusades are brought up, it is then pointed out that the Crusades were a response to many centuries of Muslim attacks and conquest of Christian lands, and above all to the attacks beginning with the Caliph al-Hakim's attempted razing of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in 1009 A.D. Then followed a century of attacks, some by Seljuk Turks, on Christian pilgrims and sites in the Holy Land. This response, the Crusades, was limited in time and space to recovering only the Holy Land. It was therefore a campaign quite different from that of Islamic Jihad, which is prompted by the inculcated belief that a permanent state of war that Islam insists must exist between Muslims and all others, and that a central duty of Muslims is to engage in the "struggle" or Jihad to push back the boundaries of Dar al-Islam and reduce those of Dar al-Harb, until Islam dominates everywhere, and everywhere, Muslims rule.
How do the Saudis or other Arabs and Muslims think they will prevent the world's Infidels from finding out about this? How will they prevent them from reading, with understanding, the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira? They can't. They won't.
Topic: Fitzgerald: Why the saudi charm offensive will fail (Read 2217 times)