Someone known as The Saker has written two long essays against Islamophobia, and his basic conclusion is that there is no Muslim threat. (I’m going to assume that The Saker is a he and not a she or a they or whatever.) See here and here. He also believes that the threat is really from AngloZionism or from National Zionism, which are the ones really responsible for the terrorism and getting people to believe that there is an Islamic threat. There are lots of digressions in these two essays, which I’m not going to get into. Some of these are about Christianity versus Islam, or Orthodox Christianity versus non-Orthodox Christianity, and I just am not interested, except for one point which I will mention at the end.*
Let me note that, based on comments from others, The Saker is not a leftist (as most Islamophiles are), but seems to be someone of Russian descent now living in America who is a Russophile. For him, there is no threat because Russia managed to Russify (if that’s a word) its Muslims, and so any talk of all Muslims being a threat can be dismissed. He also admires Iran, presumably because Russia is allied with it. I’ll deal with his peculiar views on Iran later.
Now the first thing to say is that among those of us who are resisting the Islamification of the West, some or perhaps even most have gone overboard and think that Islam is a unitary whole or that it is incompatible with democracy or that most Muslims are terrorists. It is easy to pick apart such claims, and it is perhaps not easy but still possible to imagine that at the end of this century America will have become majority Muslim while at the same time being a very liberal place because those future Muslims will basically be Muslim in name only, like the Christians who show up at church twice a year, with the result that America will hardly be different from what it is like right now. But everything depends on the trends and how people react to them, and right now a majority-Muslim America is likely to be a theocracy rather than a liberal, secular state. So, the fact that Islam is theoretically compatible with democracy doesn’t mean much one way or the other.
Meanwhile, it is important to note that people on the Islamophilic side have gone overboard, too. And they have less excuse for it since they are often in the business of educating people and should be more sure of their facts than random guys on the Internet (which is mostly the case with the Islamophobes). There are now highly educated people, some of whom are educators themselves, who assert the following:
• The very name “Islam” means peace. (It actually means submission.)
• Islam is a religion of peace.
• Islam never engaged in imperialism.
• While Islam engaged in imperialism, it was benign. (Note that this contradicts the last item.)
• Muslims have always been oppressed by the West.
• “Jihad” merely means an inner struggle and not holy war.
• All Islamic terrorism is a response to grievances that Muslims have against the West.
• Muslims are just like us and maybe only about one in ten thousand will become a terrorist.
There are other things which they never assert (as far as I know), but which they obviously believe:
• Engaging in constant criticism of the West while never praising it for its virtues will not hurt us, but will lead to a better future.
• Letting in millions of people who would have a hard time assimilating in the best of circumstances will nevertheless work out.
• The invasion of North America and the killing of many of its inhabitants by white people was a terrible, terrible thing, but the invasion of Asia Minor and the killing of many of its inhabitants by the Turks was not.
• No one has any legitimate grievances against Muslims.
If gross ignorance on the part of Islamophobes means that we shouldn’t take the Islamic threat seriously, what about the similar gross ignorance on the part of the Islamophiles? Shouldn’t that lead us to, on the contrary, take the threat very seriously indeed? To get more nuanced about the situation, let me note that I am not an Islamophobe by The Saker’s definition, who says (among other things) that it means that one takes Islam to be a unitary whole. Yet, I suspect I would still be deemed one by the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Now generally when people claim that there is no Islamic threat, they cannot bring themselves to look at what I take to be the best evidence in favor it, namely the many incidents of Islamic violence (particularly those that were not in response to “grievances”), surveys of Muslims about their attitudes, and statements by leading Muslims (together with our own lack of will in resisting the threat). Instead, they talk about other things. The Saker fits this pattern. He talks a lot about the variety of Muslims in the world, that they are not part of any cohesive whole, that Islam is no worse than Christianity, and that the West has committed terrible sins in the past century or so. We are told about what people said and did a thousand years ago, as though that is relevant to what is happening today. He goes into a long discussion about Western values, which (since it’s directed at conservative Christians) I’m not going to dwell on. But all of this has been said before, and it was no more persuasive then than it is now. As I said above, people discounting the Islamic threat cannot bring themselves to actually look at the best evidence in favor of that threat.
Not only do the Islamophiles ignore the evidence, they are always making claims that show they are wildly out of touch with reality. Martha Nussbaum several years ago claimed that women in Europe, despite the influx of Muslims, could wear whatever they wanted. This was laughable even then, as I noted here, and now every informed person knows it is wrong because they know that young teenagers in Rotherham were trafficked because they were known not to be Muslim (and so were presumably dressed as ordinary Western girls). More recently, our elites have made crazy claims about how Sweden is not in a death spiral but is doing fine, though in the last few weeks they seem to be finally coming around. The Saker, too, shows in several ways that he is wildly out of touch with reality.
The first such way concerns moderate Islamic countries. He claims that “some Muslim states are profoundly reactionary and freedom crushing” and “some Muslim states are pluralistic, progressive and defend the oppressed (Muslim or not).” That is reasonable enough, but what is his example of the latter? Morocco? Indonesia, perhaps? No, Iran. Incredible. “Iran is, in my opinion, the perfect illustration of a pluralistic (truly diverse!), progressive and freedom defending Muslim state.” This is a regime which has murdered many of its citizens, and which recently murdered a few more.
Another way he is out of touch with reality concerns the killing of apostates. He believes that the killing of apostates is something that the state will be doing, and he points out that various Christian communities have had the death penalty for one crime and another. But as far as I know, this isn’t just a state matter, but something which any Muslim is allowed to do to an apostate. That is what was allowed for with the fatwa against Salman Rushdie: any Muslim was allowed to kill him. Likewise, Muslim men are allowed to rape women who are “inappropriately” dressed. They do not have to report such women to the religious police, but can simply rape them. One young rape victim in Scandinavia was told by her attacker that he was allowed to rape her because she wasn’t a Muslim.
Another way he is out of touch with reality concerns the nature of shari’a, which he thinks is as varied as all of the various Islamic countries. That is true enough, but here what is relevant is the trend toward a very rigid and dogmatic version of shari’a, which is seen in Iran and Saudi Arabia and was pushed by ISIS and Boko Haram. Of course, if you think Iran is a moderate place, these examples will not sway you. But for a reasonable person, shari’a is the rule of law that allows Christian schoolgirls to be kidnapped, Yazidi women to be sold into slavery, people to be beheaded, and so on. It is the rule of law that allows a harmless author like Salman Rushdie to be threatened with murder by any Muslim in the world. Given all these awful examples of shari’a, we can say that it is hardly likely that if shari’a is imposed on the West, it will be a wonderful and tolerant variety of it.
Let me repeat what I have said before (here), which is that the threat we face isn’t from all of Islam, but rather is from the fundamentalists of Islam, who have been on the rise for the past fifty years or so. (The exact number of decades varies from place to place.) Oddly enough, these fundamentalists can be from either of the two major branches of Islam, the Sunnis and the Shi’ites, but whatever branch they are from, we can call their movement fundamental Islam or Islamo-fascism or Islamism. I will use Islamism, but I refuse to call it radical Islam because that is what leftists call it, and there is not a shred of evidence that they have any understanding of what they are talking about. Anyway, these fundamentalists have pushed for their more extreme version of Islam to be used in places that have had more moderate versions (such as Turkey), and they have also pushed for non-Muslim societies to become Muslim (mostly the West, which has shown the most weakness before them, but they have made it clear they want to rule the whole world). Some of the Islamist threat comes from leaders who explicitly or implicitly say they want to impose shari’a on us. Some of the threat comes from the migration of so many people to the West whose values we do not share. And some of the threat comes from our elites, who feeling guilty about the sins of the West insist on weakening us, empowering the immigrants, telling us we cannot impose pressure on all these immigrants to assimilate, and calling us racist if we say we don’t want them here.
Let me finish with one last way in which The Saker is out of touch with reality. He believes that Islamic terrorism was begun when America helped some Muslims from Saudi Arabia in their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan. This is quite ridiculous as it ignores many other currents that have fed into the rise of terroristic Islam. Anyone who reads Farahnaz Ispahani’s Purifying the Land of the Pure knows that fundamentalist Muslims in Pakistan were quite willing to use terror against all kinds of opponents, and that was back in the 1940s. Likewise, the Muslim Brotherhood was begun in the 1920s, although its use of terror may have come later. And Ayatollah Khomeini was not sponsored at all by America, though it may be fair to say he was reacting against it. Still, it is hard to explain why Khomeini in his reactions against America felt it necessary to murder so many people who themselves hated America or in any case had nothing to do with us. No, if we hadn’t helped those Muslims fight in Afghanistan, we’d still be dealing with an Islamic threat, part of which would be in the form of terrorism.
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There were lots and lots of comments on The Saker's post, and I did not take the time to look at all or even most of them. But here is one whose content surprised me, from someone named Dmitry:
Actually I was surprised with a significant culture difference in the internet, when there was an attack in a mosque in New Zealand earlier this year. In the English internet forums I visit (which is only this one), everyone has opposed the attack. Whereas in the Russian internet forums (both liberal and conservative), a large proportion of people support it.
That some supported that attack seems quite astonishing and of course is not anything that our media would want known. It also goes against The Saker’s belief that Russia has made peace with Islam and that its citizens are mostly Islamophiles.
* The Saker insists that Christians and Muslims believe in the same God, the reason being that they both believe that God created everything. This is typical sophomoric reasoning. I mean, I assume most of us over the age of thirty have encountered some young adult who says something like this: “I’ve traveled throughout the world, and let me tell you, people are the same everywhere.” Maybe we even said it ourselves when we were young. Unfortunately, there are important differences between people, and saying they are all the same paints over those important differences. A good book on the religious version of this is God Is Not One by Stephen Prothero, and that’s all I’m going to say on this topic.
