Islam Across The Pond

BY MICHAEL REISIG –

As America struggles with it’s own internal demons, from healthcare and unemployment to illegal immigration, Islam is steadily slipping in through the cracks and securing beachheads in territories that would have been considered impregnable just 10 years ago.  If any of us were really paying attention we would be watching Britain – actually we should have been watching Britain for years now. They are the pilot for the main movie, they are us a few years from now. They bought into this “Islam is an innocent, loving religion whose followers just want to live in other countries,” hockey years before us, and they are hip deep in a social and religious disaster.

I’m going to draw from some remarks by the remarkably gifted columnist Daniel Greenfield, who like Paul Revere in days of old, is telling us the Redcoats aren’t just coming, they’re here. He writes about the brutal beheading of a British soldier by Islamist extremists and the delicate dance around the affair by the British government.

Greenfield says, “A century ago the murder of a British soldier in broad daylight in London would have been an act of war. In this post-imperial and post-everything age, an atrocity leads to a task force which produces a report which is then filed in a desk drawer by the undersecretary for something or other. The report is seven pages long. It’s possible to read it in much less than the twenty minutes.

“Like so many of the more ‘serious’ and ‘sincere’ efforts at tackling the biggest threat to civilization in the twenty-first century, the report on this event mixes occasional good ideas with politically correct absurdities. It starts off by equating Islamophobia with Al Qaeda and rolls out a plan to fight back against Islamism.

“As the greatest risk to our security comes from Al Qa’ida and like-minded groups, we believe it is also necessary to define the ideology of Islamist extremism,” the report states. And then it goes on to carefully avoid defining it except to contend that, whatever it is; it is not Islam.”

To me, this is where Greenfield’s commentary really strikes home. We keep trying to separate Islamism from Islam, and as long as we do this we can never effectively fight the enemy that is radical Islamism, because it hides in the forest of “peaceful” Islam.

Greenfield adds a powerful definition when he says, “Beyond that, the only further definition of Islamist extremism is that, “they seek to impose a global Islamic state governed by their interpretation of Shari’ah as state law, rejecting liberal values such as democracy, the rule of law and equality. Islamism is simply the organized political implementation of Islam in the same way that Nazism was the implementation of National Socialism and Marxism is the attempted implementation of Karl Marx’s ideas.”

Greenfield adds, “Unlike its Christian and Jewish antagonists, it (Islam) hasn’t been liberalized or secularized. And it insists on being a public religion because theocracy is what it was built to do. Islam was not the religion of the oppressed. It was the religion of the oppressors. It equates morality with authority. If it doesn’t control the public square, then it has no function.

“True to form, the UK report tries to fight Islam with more Islam. It rightly calls for more thorough inspections of religious schools and urges universities to choose their speakers more wisely, but then it throws in proposals to equip every university and prison with more Muslim chaplains. Nowhere on earth has an increase in the number of Islams led to a decrease in theocratic violence. It’s like trying to slow down left-wing violence by importing more Communist agitators. It can’t ever work.

“In totalitarian movements, the difference between the moderates and extremists lies only in the paths that they take to the same final goal. Here, both the moderates and the extremists are Islamists. They both want an Islam that is a public religion. And that is not only a public religion, but THE public religion.

It is not only the extremism of means by those who wish to make Islam into the religion of the state rapidly and violently that ought to concern Prime Minister Cameron; but it is also the extremism of ends that is Islam regardless of whether its rule is achieved by the bomb or the ballot box that ought to worry him.

The unlicensed beheaders are the short-term threat. The long-term threat is a Britain in which the beheaders are licensed by the state.”

The views and opinions expressed in this column do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of the ownership and staff of The Polk County Pulse. Michael Reisig is a freelance writer and published author whose works are reproduced throughout the globe.

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