Marked for Death: Islam's War Against the West and Me (21 page)

The Saudis have not forgiven or forgotten Giuliani’s extraordinary statement. In a 2003 interview with former U.S. Ambassador to Saudi Arabia Chas Freeman, the Saudi-American Forum cited Giuliani’s rejection of bin Talal’s money as an example of America’s “great... reluctance to examine the roots of terrorism, especially in terms of US foreign policy.”
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Disgracefully, Freeman all but agreed with this malevolent insinuation and even advised the Saudis on how to educate Americans about the wonders of Islam. Freeman replied, “Well, that [Giuliani’s rebuff of bin Talal] was of course the classic example of this, but it’s far from the only one. Also, I think with better organization, with better funding, with a commitment to a long-term effort in education, some of the slanders that have been put forward about Saudi Arabia or Islam—there are many in the United States—would find a more effective rebuttal.”
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The false accusation that America is as bad or worse than Islamic terrorists, unsurprisingly, is a popular one within Islam. The aspersion was cast by Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who conceived of the project to build a thirteen-story Islamic center and mosque next to Ground Zero in Manhattan—a callous and obnoxious scheme that is overwhelmingly opposed by a majority of Americans.
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In 2009, once he came under the public spotlight for the Ground Zero mosque project, Rauf spoke like a true American patriot and a life-long moderate. But he sang a different tune in an interview he gave weeks after the 9/11 attacks, when he argued that “United States policies were an accessory to the crime that happened... because we [the United States] have been accessory [sic] to a lot of innocent lives dying in the world. In fact, in the most direct sense, Osama bin Laden is made in the USA.”
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Similarly, in March 2004, after 191 travellers were killed in the jihadist bombing of four commuter trains in Madrid, Rauf told the congregation at his New York mosque that the United States and the West must acknowledge the harm they have done to Muslims before terrorism can end, and that the U.S. president should give an “America Culpa” speech to the Islamic world.
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Summing up Rauf’s moral equivalence between the United States and the terrorists who attack it,
National Review
observed, “While he cannot quite bring himself to blame the terrorists for being terrorists, he finds it easy to blame the United States for being a victim of terrorism.”
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I agree, which is why I went to New York on September 11, 2010, to speak at a rally opposing Rauf’s Ground Zero mosque project. “His ‘Blame the West, Blame America’ message is an insult,” I told the thousands of demonstrators, including many families of 9/11 victims. “Americans—and by extension, all of us whose civilization was also attacked on 9/11/2001—are not to blame for what happened here nine years ago today. Osama bin Laden is
not
made in the USA. The West never ‘harmed’ Islam before it harmed us. It was Islam which took the Middle East, Christian Northern Africa and Constantinople by aggressive wars of conquest.”
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These are simple and obvious facts, yet far too many Westerners refuse to acknowledge them.

The Big Lie is a propaganda technique commonly used by totalitarian regimes. British psychiatrist and cultural commentator Theodore Dalrymple explains how communists employed it to corrupt their own people:

In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself.... I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.
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This is the tried and true tactic Islam has been using against the dhimmis for fourteen centuries. As stated in the document recovered from Rabbi Kahane’s assassin, the jihadist El Sayyid Nosair, it is for that same purpose—to demoralize the enemy—that jihadists attacked and eventually destroyed the twin towers.

As Dalrymple notes, in the West today, political correctness pressures people into assenting to lies. Because those who reject or even question the dogma of multiculturalism are condemned and ostracized, our discussion of Islam, immigration, and other topics is severely constrained. Westerners who disdain cultural relativism, who are willing to denounce barbarism when they see it, and who believe that the West, indeed, is the centerpoint of civilization today, are dismissed as haters. Denied the right to ask the most important questions and express even the most self-evident observations, the West humiliates itself before our enemies and endangers our own civilization.

We are told we must “respect” the freedom of those who do not respect ours—and that when necessary, we must limit our own freedom so as not to “offend” others. By chipping away at our own liberty in this way, we will eventually lose it. As Karl Popper noted, “Unlimited tolerance [leads] to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”
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Those who blame Islamic terrorism on the West and on America often claim that we invite jihad because we are allegedly responsible for the poverty of Islamic countries. This comes straight out of the Marxist playbook, which blames free-market capitalism for all the world’s troubles. The argument, however, is undermined by the fact that Islamic terrorists tend to be relatively well off.
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Osama bin Laden, of course, came from a family of Saudi plutocrats. Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the “underwear bomber” who tried to blow up a flight over Detroit on Christmas Day 2009, was the son of a wealthy Nigerian banker and lived in a plush London apartment.
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As the
Economist
notes, a 2008 Princeton University analysis of academic studies “found little evidence that the typical terrorist is unusually poor or badly schooled.”
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Nevertheless, a July 2011 survey by the Pew Research Center shows that a depressingly large share of Westerners blame the West, at least partially, for our strained relations with the Islamic world. The poll found more than 29 percent of Americans and 26 percent of the French and British place “most of the blame” on Western countries, while 29 percent in Spain and 24 percent in Germany and Britain say that both sides “share responsibility” for the poor state of Islamic-Western relations. Strikingly, the survey showed that moral equivalence and self-blame is far less common in Islamic countries: “Across the Muslim publics included in the survey, fewer than one-in-five believe Muslims are mostly to blame for the poor state of relations.”
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The Islamic threat has grown so dire largely due to our denial, our apathy, and our fear, as we give in again and again to Islamic demands and mask our capitulations as “tolerance” or “sensitivity.” Western politicians simply refuse to see that this “religion” is nothing but a political ideology whose fundamental document, the Koran, exhorts fanatics to violence. Paralyzed, they ignore looming threats to masses of innocent people.

U.S. authorities for some time thought the United States was safe from the threat—on 9/11, we saw they were wrong. As President Woodrow Wilson commented in 1916 as war spread across Europe and beyond, “America cannot be an ostrich with its head in the sand.”
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The West’s appeasers of Islam suffer from a peculiar malady that combines ignorance with Stockholm Syndrome. Some justify their faintheartedness through hollow theoretical concepts and other phony rationalizations. For example, Richard Nixon’s last book,
Seize the Moment
(1992), written after the fall of the Soviet bloc, shows that the former U.S. president simply could not acknowledge Islam’s malevolence and thus rejected the logical and historical conclusions to be drawn from the facts. Nixon writes,

Some observers warn that Islam will become a monolithic and fanatical geopolitical force, that its growing population and significant financial power will pose a major challenge, and that the West will be forced to form a new alliance with Moscow to confront a hostile and aggressive Muslim world. This view holds that Islam and the West are antithetical and that Muslims view the world as two irreconcilable camps of Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb—the house of Islam and the house of war where the forces of Islam have yet to prevail. It foresees the forces of resurgent Muslim fundamentalism orchestrating a region-wide revolution from Iran and other states and prompting the need for a comprehensive... policy of containment.
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This was largely correct, but Nixon categorically dismisses “this nightmare scenario” and then repeats the familiar litany of soothing half-truths and flattering lies about Islam. He claims that “Islam has no doctrine of terrorism,”
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that in the Middle Ages Islam “made enormous contributions to science, medicine, and philosophy,”
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that for many centuries Islam “led the Christian world in terms of... religious toleration,”
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that relations between America and Islamic countries are strained because of “the perception that the United States backs Israel uncritically,”
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that we must show “respect and understanding for peoples who feel that they have been misunderstood, discriminated against, and exploited by Western powers,”
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and that “our civilization is not inherently superior to theirs.”
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Based on these false premises, Nixon concludes that the West should “contribute to a renaissance of the Muslim world”
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and “support the modernists in the Muslim world” who are seeking “to integrate the countries of the Muslim world into the modern world.”
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In order to help the so-called modernist states “become economic and political magnets,” Nixon advocates American disengagement from Israel’s “extreme demands.” He argues, “The Arab-Israeli conflict poisons our relations with the Muslim world and undercuts our ability to cooperate with countries with modernist, pro-Western leaders.”
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Although Nixon began his career as a stalwart anti-communist, as president he was a classic foreign policy “realist” who advocated detente and appeasement with the Soviet empire. Ronald Reagan vanquished the Soviets by doing the opposite: he rolled back detente and exploited communism’s chief weakness—its lack of innovation. Today, most of the Western foreign policy establishment subscribes to a Nixonian policy of appeasing Islam when what we really need is a Reaganite policy of pressuring and challenging it.