This is an open letter sent to Farzana Hassan at Easter, taking issue with her apologizing for Islamic terror to Christians:
Dear Farzana Hassan,
I was
touched by your Easter/Passover offer of apology for violent jihadism (Ottawa
Sun 25/3) though I think it is a rhetorical exercise which does not does not
match the value of the regular contributions of yourself, and the likes of Salim
Mansur, Tarek Fatah, Raheel Raza, and others. Actually, I believe it is counter-productive
to your (and their) posture, for which I am personally grateful, as your
perspective gives hope, that maybe, just maybe, we can stay “civilized” without
rivers of blood in the streets. Because, I have this terrible hunch, that this
is where we are headed.
So let me say this: You do not
represent the larger Muslim religious community by dint of the fact that you
are a believer. You cannot possibly have an intelligent reply to a Toronto imam
with islamist connections all over the world, who says that. It is as though a German emigré in 1938 Paris wanted to
apologize to Jews on behalf of Germans for Kristallnacht unleashed by the
Nazis. The sad fact is that the majority of Muslims today are as much led by
their Islamist elites (with the same goals, but different methods of a) trying
to achieve them, and b) disguising them) as Germans were led wholesale by
Hitler in the thirties. The problem with
you speaking “for the Muslim community at large” is that inevitably some clever
islamist propagandist (say ‘Reza Aslan’), will come around and say that the
fact Raheel Raza does not wear hijab and that you feel ashamed for what ISIS
does in the Levant, is a proof positive that women under Islam are free to do
as they please. You know Ben Affleck’s
moral indignation about “stereotyping” Islam and Muslims. You are simply a proof to him that the vast
majority of Muslims are not terrorists, but in fact, peace-loving and friendly
folk, so much so, that some misguided sisters are even willing to apologize for
the homicidal psychos who misread their Koran, and think that when it says “go
and cut off the heads of the kuffar” that it means one should buy an airplane
ticket to Istanbul and then cross by bus to Syria, to do God’s will there
by cutting off the heads of the kuffar.
You see, I may shock you by
saying this, but islamism is only a secondary problem here. The real problem
speaks through as the Ben Afflecks, les
Belge who lower the threat level
forty-eight hours after a jihadi massacre in their capital, and our idiot minister
for immigration who sets the limit of refugees to be admitted into Canada in
2016 proportionally to that of Germany’s last year’s million of them, where
they overran the social service capacities almost everywhere. John McCallum
says we need 300,000 of them this year because our labour force ages. But we still have over 7% unemployment, and
it is 13% among youths. How does mass immigration (at this moment !) help that
problem ? What is it that forces that sort of drooling idiocy ? I am sure it is not pressure from political
Islam.
No, the West’s problems are deeply
internal and its response to political islamism, is but a symptom of an
underlying disease which openly invites external catalysts for the destruction
of its institutions and values. It is
very interesting to observe how this disease manifests itself. It never ceases
to amaze me how certain points of view –
and in my mind those that should be ‘common-sense’ among us - do not make it
through the mass media outlets, and if they do, they are immediately “owned” by
the elitist pseudo-liberal shibboleths.
Or, how the supposed ‘cures’ of the disease are always dumb and not
doable. For example, Trump’s vowing to stop immigration of “Muslims,… until we
figure out what is going on ?” But
Donald, how can anybody aspire to be the president of the United States and not
have figured out what is going on in the Middle East, ahead of his inauguration
? Pray, tell ! Why is it not obvious to
the Donald that this is a stupid idea, and that he should have advocated
instead “minimal immigration from the Middle East”, until the civilized world
cleans the place up and restores a measure of civility there? Why is it not obvious to Ted Cruz, that
“surveillance of Muslims” is an overkill ? He could have simply said that
mosques and political organizations should be monitored for islamist propaganda, and
jihadi advocates thrown out of the country. No ? Why would that not be ‘radical’
and ‘anti-establishment’ enough ? Perhaps,
someone should be asking why some American citizens need to organize themselves
in an organization which wants to have “relations” with America based on their
religion ? Isn’t the name “Council on
American-Islamic Relations” (CAIR) a
self-described misapprehension how a country like the United States operates ? You are a bloody American citizen: who the hell
gives a damn about what you worship, as long as you behave like an American ? Duh!
But, as I said, the problem runs
much deeper than islamism. Actually, islamism can only thrive with a
severely self-damaged democracy, which agrees to replace the idea of citizenry
with equal access to the institutions of governance, by “identity politics” which
claim that this is impossible and disadvantages by design their particular
group, that is discrimniated against and seeks to create special relations with
the state to reverse the perceived historical molestations. Under communism,
this practice of differential treatment of individuals based on belonging to a
certain social group was known as ‘nomenklatura’. Needless to say, this system, creates a sense
of injustice and oppression in groups that do not rank high or are openly despised
and excoriated as the “problem”. In time, nomenklatura, destroys people’s
loyalty to the social order, and causes deep
disdain for it. This, in the nutshell, is the secret of Donald Trump’s
popularity.
The problem however runs even
deeper than that. The global economy has changed everything. The one unpreceived effect is the decline of
the value-add accelerators of the GDP, vis-à-vis services and above all
resources. The US dominated the world economically between the world wars and
three decades after because of its unmatched industrial base, highly skilled
and well-paid labour, and cheap energy and raw materials. This situation has
changed drastically in the last thirty years. Manufacturing has moved out of
the US, because of labour costs, and raw materials – oil especially – became
relatively expensive, or at any rate, allowed the “resource based” economies,
and “low-cost labour” economies to surge ahead and dramatically change the
relationships among the major players. The US has become net importer of both manufactured goods and energy. Again, much of the
growth of the political clout of Islam is due to the financial clout that the
Saudis and Gulf states. They simply have no tradition of a productive industrial
economy, (and the social development that goes with it ) or view of
manufacturing as the creator of wealth. They are socially backward, but extremely
rich, and with the US economy in the boondocks (never mind the Dow Jones
Potemkin village) , much of what we observe in the US and Europe as a
culturally suicidal policy vis-à-vis the world of Islam, is actually the
function of the financial clout of the Sunni Xanadu states, buying political
influence in Washington (and through Washington in Brussels). There is no two
ways about it. That the two parties in
the US so much resemble each other in foreign policy, may not need explanation
other than the king and emirs pay both of them. Finally, the inequalities in wealth in the US
have become simply too great, and resemble more and more the inequality of
feudal societies. This again foists a
sense of injustice, distrust and disgust especially among the young, who it
seems mostly abandoned the classical dream of American Way of Life. (Note that
CAIR is very active in the Social Justice movements, and advertizes Islam as a
system with social egalitarian roots – which it hasn’t been since the death of
the Prophet.)
So allow me to be skeptical. I am appreciative of your gesture, but it is not from
you that one should seek a sense of contrition.
As a matter of fact, I don’t believe that sense helps at all in resolving
our problems. It is not the islamist terrorists
that should preoccupy us most. It is my lawyer friend who believes that the
problem is a direct consequence of imperialist aggression of the West in the
Middle East. When I asked her if she read the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human
Rights in Islam, she had no idea what I was talking about. I told her I was
talking about us as a culture which
can babble about human rights from dawn to dusk but no longer has any idea what that is, a culture
which no longer stands for anything, and a culture which has no idea what is
going in the world around it. Someone
should apologize for that but I have no idea who that should be.
I can explain how the collage has been constructed, and I already did that. I can show you the original plate and you will find it to the right of the text here. I can tell you all that you need to know about the original illustrator and I am going to do that. I can also tell you about the fleeing figures in the collage chosen to replace of the cast in the original. All of that I can do and you probably will get an inkling of what was going on in the mischievous mind of the person who modified the picture. But it will not be enough to create the "cultural shock" that your brain will produce if you are a Czech by birth and grew up in the land and if you as a child (and an adult after) learned how to imagine the world painted by the artist.
