THE FITZGERALD PERSPECTIVE
Tancredo spikes again, after the MSM continues to ignore him as a marginal candidate for for the US presidency. The following article by Hugh Fitzgerald originally posted on Jihad Watch on July 18, 2005, pulls the argument together in an even clearer light for today’s readers. Fitzgerald writes:
A two-year-old posting on the matter, put up the last time Tancredo raised the matter of deterrence and a retaliatory attack on Mecca:
"Congressman Tancredo, a former history teacher, has almost alone in Congress bothered to begin to investigate what Islam teaches, what it is all about. For this he deserves the support of everyone, and everything possible should be done to help re-elect him—if for no other reason, than to ensure that at least one member of Congress will speak the truth about the belief-system of Islam. He deserves to be supported to the hilt, in any possible way.
And the Congressman did not recommend that "Mecca be bombed." While many people have in the past suggested that—see the redoubtable Fred Ikle, for example, he who was so important in the Reagan Administration—Congressman Tancredo said something different, and perfectly understandable.
He was asked about rumors that Muslim terrorists might have already smuggled into the country nuclear devices that they planned to set off, and what kinds of things might deter them. He mused aloud, that one of the things that might deter them would be the threat to bomb Mecca. That was all he said. It was hardly remarkable, and the only thing remarkable about it has been, as has been repeatedly suggested at JW (see, for example, the recent article by Rebecca Bynum)is that all the different ways to inflict damage on the belief-system of Islam have not been discussed. But on the other hand, as long as we are conducting either a "war on terrorism" or a "war on an ideology of violent extremism" that remains carefully unnamed, perhaps in the end it is not surprising that we have no discussion of the kinds of deterrents that would work, and on whom.
For example, there may be no way of deterring the groups and groupiscules of fanatics. But there are ways to threaten, and deter, the Saudis from continuing to send money abroad to support the entire Muslim infrastructure that, as the recent Freedom House report showed, encourages not merely Islam but the most hate-filled brand of Islam—in other words, there are threats of seizure of assets that might get the attention of the rulers of Saudi Arabia (and the U.A.E. riding pillion), to have them cease using the "money weapon" to pay for mosques and madrasas and Da'wa throughout the Western, Infidel world.
But Tancredo was addressing a different problem. and he did not offer an answer. He offered one among many possibilities that he thought deserved intelligent discussion. And he was right. And this is not a clear-cut case. There are many ex-Muslims, for example, who appear to believe that Tancredo is absolutely right—that this may be the one thing which, if threatened, or at least considered, could cause Muslims to rethink. It is already clear that the change in the atmosphere in the Western world, the beginning of a glimmer of an understanding that the very matter of Islam needs to be examined, has caused such things as this absurd public-relations effort in damage-limitation, this so-called "fatwa" to be issued by some Muslim groups in America, and announced by that more than doubtful organization, CAIR—of course the wording will require the closest kind of reading, the kind we ordinarily would reserve for Shakespeare, Keats, or Hardy, applied to the banal taqiyya of Muslim bureaucrats.
But the mere fact that people who have been defending certain acts now feel they must, for Infidel consumption, seem to be distancing themselves, is a sign that when danger is perceived, there is a drawing-back. It is certain that the mere discussion of bombing Mecca has both good and bas aspects. The bad aspect is that it is the kind of remark that allows many to get on their high moral horse, and huff and puff, and "deplore" this wild man, Tom Tancredo. Anyone can imagine what editorials in The New Duranty Times and The Bandar Beacon deploring Tancredo might look like. But in our Infidel hearts, we are all secretly pleased, and relieved—are we not?—that such a discussion of deterrence has at least been begun. For without such a discussion, there is no way to begin to think straight about the problem of Islam world-wide—not of "terrorism" but of Islam.
Every intelligent Western observer has noted what Tocqueville, who had been in Algeria, referred to as the "morbid" quality of Islam. Churchill, in "The River Wars," had nothing good to say about the foaming-at-the-mouth fanaticism of the Muslim warriors, but he did note that they did not fear death, for the sensual Paradise that awaited the warrior who died in Jihad was a reality.
And because the usual kinds of threats might mean little to fanatics, one has to figure out what might work as a deterrent. In Israel the punishment of destroying houses has some deterrent effect, given that the families of the "martyrs" will suffer—and some "martyrs" are willing to die, but don't want their family members left behind to have to build a new home. It is not true that such deterrence does not work. There are other possibilities. Much Muslim behavior inimical to the West can be deterred.
For example, the family that has seized, and treats as its private property, the vast territory of Arabia—the House of Al-Saud—both directly or indirectly helps to support, and even help to create, fanatics in two ways. Within Saudi Arabia, its own despotism and corruption causes young Saudis who are enraged by them to embrace, not Jeffersonian democracy, which is un-Islamic, but rather Al Qaeda or other groups, which provide them with the vocabulary, the imagery, the categories that Islam itself supplies to define opposition to a corrupt caliph or ruler. For it does not do, within Islam, to denounce someone as corrupt, or as a despot. The rulers, after all, are the rulers, and the habit of mental submission that Islam inculcates, and the inshallah-fatalism that is within Islam, helps in large part to encourage submission to the despot, however corrupt—unless that despot can be seen as, defined as, placed in the category of, "Infidel."
Then anything and everything can be done to destroy that "Infidel." And that is exactly what happens among those who oppose the Al-Saud, or the Mubarak Friends-and-Family stratokleptocracy in Egypt—save for a pitiful, nearly nonexistent Western-style secular opposition in the latter, the opposition will always take on a Muslim cast. Muslims can do no other. And the corruption of the Al-Saud helps create the odd scion of plutocrats who, in Muslim terms most nobly, gives it all up to fight for "justice" against the corrupt rulers, but "justice," alas, Muslim-style, with the Muslim worldview, which means that all evil comes from Infidels, and all who are genuinely evil must be defined as, and treated as, Infidels, even if they may claim—falsely, obviously—to be Muslims, as do so many of the corrupt princes and princelings of Saudi Arabia.
That is one way the Al-Saud help swell the ranks of the Muslim terrorist groups.
The second way they do so is in building, and paying for the maintenance of, mosques and madrasas all over the world, but especially in the Infidel lands, the Bilad al-kufr, where those mosques, and those madrasas, can encourage the worst brand of Islam (this does not mean that a "milder" brand does not inculcate hatred of Infidels, for it must—it is a question of with what intensity, with what fervor, with what single-mindedness, the particular brand of Islam inculcates what is common to all of them, part of Islam itself). Nearly $100 billion has gone from the Saudis as part of the propaganda weapon on behalf of Islam, as part of world-wide Da'wa, and to pay for Western hirelings who will do the bidding and promote the interests of, and deflect criticism from, the Saudis as they continue their malevolent activities throughout the world.
The Al-Saud are rational actors. They can be threatened, and forced to cease their support for the mosques and madrasas and hate-filled propaganda. they can be threatened with seizure of their assets abroad. They can be threatened with a total removal of American guarantees, which they assume are permanent, for their safety. They can be threatened with a loss of secure American or other Western refuges if and when they are overturned. They can be threatened with the removal of Western doctors, and teachers, and a refusal to allow their children to study in the West, or for them to find medical care in the West. These are very dangerous threats—imagine if someone threatened you that you would never again be allowed access to advanced Western medical care.
And in the end, if they think they have that ace-in-the-hole, oil—you can show that you are willing to seize the oil in the al-Hasa province, oil conveniently close to tankers in the Persian (Persian, not Arab) Gulf, and that there are a thousand-and-one ways to deal with this situation. But this requires a complete change of tone to get the Saudi attention. Such attention will not be attained if those who continue to prate about a "strategic partnership" with Saudi Arabia, which one finds in such deplorable examples of the appeasement-of-the-Saudis mindset in the Op/Ed of one Flynt Leverett, described—even more disturbingly—as "former senior director for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council"—and someone who has clearly been one of those who fails to understand that Saudi Arabia is not, and never has been, and never can be, the ally of an Infidel country, but that, if treated correctly, certain kinds of behavior on its part can be prevented, and certain other kinds of behavior forced from its rulers.
Congressman Tancredo, in raising the question of what would, or would not, work as deterrence, was performing a great service to discussion. It is of course difficult to predict what bombing Mecca would do. I tend to think it would be far better to discuss all the other kinds of deterrence that one knows will work, on the rational actors or quasi-rational actors within the dar al-Islam. And as for the fanatics, one can consider how to limit access to Mecca, airfield by airfield, port by port, highway by highway, until it should be as remote as the highest Himalayas, or some impassable and steaming jungle, or the frozen wastes of Ultima Thule. Mecca would still be there, but to get to it—that would be the problem. And that kind of deterrence would be a step-by-step affair.
But the question of the psychology of Muslims—of their combination of grandiosity and living in some mythical great past, and resentment over the miserable and obviously miserable present, where murderous hatred of Infidels is so often part of some grotesque ten-step Self-Esteem Program for those Muslims who have tasted the West, may even have used drugs or lived as criminals and now wish to go straight, Islamically straight—needs more examination.
However the debate over this or that kind of deterrence goes, the mere fact that such a debate takes place is good, for it automatically ends certain taboos. It makes clear that this is not a "war against terror" alone but a long campaign, very likely without end unless the migration of Muslims to the West is stopped and reversed (and while hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the U.K. claim to "wish to leave" one does not see any of them leaving—but more significantly, one has not heard, even from the most antisemitic and anti-Israel brigands, any pleas for them to remain), and unless the unearned and entirely unmerited OPEC oil wealth is so diminished that the Saudis, and the rest of them, can be pushed back into that state of obscurity, poverty, and general irrelevance that they were in before an accident of geology gave them power. In the meantime the Infidels, for their own safety, must work to create those conditions—or to do nothing to prevent the creation of those conditions—by which, like those in the Soviet Union who concluded that their own system had failed, Muslims themselves will be forced to confront the evident political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of their own peoples and polities, and will have to attribute those failures, correctly, to Islam itself.
Finally, it is hard for Infidels to judge the effect of a threat on Mecca, or a threat to limit access to Mecca, on Muslims. Who might best have some insight into this? Possibly ex-Muslims themselves, the many articulate and acute students of minds formed by Islam, who managed to undo its manacles, and escape from its closed circle. One wonders what views they would have on the threat to bomb Mecca, or to limit access to Mecca, as something that might work on the groups and groupiscules that, unlike the sneering but carefully calculating members of the Al-Saud, are less subject to the ordinary threats of loss of income, loss of access to all the goods and services of the advanced Infidel world, even loss of life."
A two-year-old posting on the matter, put up the last time Tancredo raised the matter of deterrence and a retaliatory attack on Mecca:
"Congressman Tancredo, a former history teacher, has almost alone in Congress bothered to begin to investigate what Islam teaches, what it is all about. For this he deserves the support of everyone, and everything possible should be done to help re-elect him—if for no other reason, than to ensure that at least one member of Congress will speak the truth about the belief-system of Islam. He deserves to be supported to the hilt, in any possible way.
And the Congressman did not recommend that "Mecca be bombed." While many people have in the past suggested that—see the redoubtable Fred Ikle, for example, he who was so important in the Reagan Administration—Congressman Tancredo said something different, and perfectly understandable.
He was asked about rumors that Muslim terrorists might have already smuggled into the country nuclear devices that they planned to set off, and what kinds of things might deter them. He mused aloud, that one of the things that might deter them would be the threat to bomb Mecca. That was all he said. It was hardly remarkable, and the only thing remarkable about it has been, as has been repeatedly suggested at JW (see, for example, the recent article by Rebecca Bynum)is that all the different ways to inflict damage on the belief-system of Islam have not been discussed. But on the other hand, as long as we are conducting either a "war on terrorism" or a "war on an ideology of violent extremism" that remains carefully unnamed, perhaps in the end it is not surprising that we have no discussion of the kinds of deterrents that would work, and on whom.
For example, there may be no way of deterring the groups and groupiscules of fanatics. But there are ways to threaten, and deter, the Saudis from continuing to send money abroad to support the entire Muslim infrastructure that, as the recent Freedom House report showed, encourages not merely Islam but the most hate-filled brand of Islam—in other words, there are threats of seizure of assets that might get the attention of the rulers of Saudi Arabia (and the U.A.E. riding pillion), to have them cease using the "money weapon" to pay for mosques and madrasas and Da'wa throughout the Western, Infidel world.
But Tancredo was addressing a different problem. and he did not offer an answer. He offered one among many possibilities that he thought deserved intelligent discussion. And he was right. And this is not a clear-cut case. There are many ex-Muslims, for example, who appear to believe that Tancredo is absolutely right—that this may be the one thing which, if threatened, or at least considered, could cause Muslims to rethink. It is already clear that the change in the atmosphere in the Western world, the beginning of a glimmer of an understanding that the very matter of Islam needs to be examined, has caused such things as this absurd public-relations effort in damage-limitation, this so-called "fatwa" to be issued by some Muslim groups in America, and announced by that more than doubtful organization, CAIR—of course the wording will require the closest kind of reading, the kind we ordinarily would reserve for Shakespeare, Keats, or Hardy, applied to the banal taqiyya of Muslim bureaucrats.
But the mere fact that people who have been defending certain acts now feel they must, for Infidel consumption, seem to be distancing themselves, is a sign that when danger is perceived, there is a drawing-back. It is certain that the mere discussion of bombing Mecca has both good and bas aspects. The bad aspect is that it is the kind of remark that allows many to get on their high moral horse, and huff and puff, and "deplore" this wild man, Tom Tancredo. Anyone can imagine what editorials in The New Duranty Times and The Bandar Beacon deploring Tancredo might look like. But in our Infidel hearts, we are all secretly pleased, and relieved—are we not?—that such a discussion of deterrence has at least been begun. For without such a discussion, there is no way to begin to think straight about the problem of Islam world-wide—not of "terrorism" but of Islam.
Every intelligent Western observer has noted what Tocqueville, who had been in Algeria, referred to as the "morbid" quality of Islam. Churchill, in "The River Wars," had nothing good to say about the foaming-at-the-mouth fanaticism of the Muslim warriors, but he did note that they did not fear death, for the sensual Paradise that awaited the warrior who died in Jihad was a reality.
And because the usual kinds of threats might mean little to fanatics, one has to figure out what might work as a deterrent. In Israel the punishment of destroying houses has some deterrent effect, given that the families of the "martyrs" will suffer—and some "martyrs" are willing to die, but don't want their family members left behind to have to build a new home. It is not true that such deterrence does not work. There are other possibilities. Much Muslim behavior inimical to the West can be deterred.
For example, the family that has seized, and treats as its private property, the vast territory of Arabia—the House of Al-Saud—both directly or indirectly helps to support, and even help to create, fanatics in two ways. Within Saudi Arabia, its own despotism and corruption causes young Saudis who are enraged by them to embrace, not Jeffersonian democracy, which is un-Islamic, but rather Al Qaeda or other groups, which provide them with the vocabulary, the imagery, the categories that Islam itself supplies to define opposition to a corrupt caliph or ruler. For it does not do, within Islam, to denounce someone as corrupt, or as a despot. The rulers, after all, are the rulers, and the habit of mental submission that Islam inculcates, and the inshallah-fatalism that is within Islam, helps in large part to encourage submission to the despot, however corrupt—unless that despot can be seen as, defined as, placed in the category of, "Infidel."
Then anything and everything can be done to destroy that "Infidel." And that is exactly what happens among those who oppose the Al-Saud, or the Mubarak Friends-and-Family stratokleptocracy in Egypt—save for a pitiful, nearly nonexistent Western-style secular opposition in the latter, the opposition will always take on a Muslim cast. Muslims can do no other. And the corruption of the Al-Saud helps create the odd scion of plutocrats who, in Muslim terms most nobly, gives it all up to fight for "justice" against the corrupt rulers, but "justice," alas, Muslim-style, with the Muslim worldview, which means that all evil comes from Infidels, and all who are genuinely evil must be defined as, and treated as, Infidels, even if they may claim—falsely, obviously—to be Muslims, as do so many of the corrupt princes and princelings of Saudi Arabia.
That is one way the Al-Saud help swell the ranks of the Muslim terrorist groups.
The second way they do so is in building, and paying for the maintenance of, mosques and madrasas all over the world, but especially in the Infidel lands, the Bilad al-kufr, where those mosques, and those madrasas, can encourage the worst brand of Islam (this does not mean that a "milder" brand does not inculcate hatred of Infidels, for it must—it is a question of with what intensity, with what fervor, with what single-mindedness, the particular brand of Islam inculcates what is common to all of them, part of Islam itself). Nearly $100 billion has gone from the Saudis as part of the propaganda weapon on behalf of Islam, as part of world-wide Da'wa, and to pay for Western hirelings who will do the bidding and promote the interests of, and deflect criticism from, the Saudis as they continue their malevolent activities throughout the world.
The Al-Saud are rational actors. They can be threatened, and forced to cease their support for the mosques and madrasas and hate-filled propaganda. they can be threatened with seizure of their assets abroad. They can be threatened with a total removal of American guarantees, which they assume are permanent, for their safety. They can be threatened with a loss of secure American or other Western refuges if and when they are overturned. They can be threatened with the removal of Western doctors, and teachers, and a refusal to allow their children to study in the West, or for them to find medical care in the West. These are very dangerous threats—imagine if someone threatened you that you would never again be allowed access to advanced Western medical care.
And in the end, if they think they have that ace-in-the-hole, oil—you can show that you are willing to seize the oil in the al-Hasa province, oil conveniently close to tankers in the Persian (Persian, not Arab) Gulf, and that there are a thousand-and-one ways to deal with this situation. But this requires a complete change of tone to get the Saudi attention. Such attention will not be attained if those who continue to prate about a "strategic partnership" with Saudi Arabia, which one finds in such deplorable examples of the appeasement-of-the-Saudis mindset in the Op/Ed of one Flynt Leverett, described—even more disturbingly—as "former senior director for Middle Eastern affairs at the National Security Council"—and someone who has clearly been one of those who fails to understand that Saudi Arabia is not, and never has been, and never can be, the ally of an Infidel country, but that, if treated correctly, certain kinds of behavior on its part can be prevented, and certain other kinds of behavior forced from its rulers.
Congressman Tancredo, in raising the question of what would, or would not, work as deterrence, was performing a great service to discussion. It is of course difficult to predict what bombing Mecca would do. I tend to think it would be far better to discuss all the other kinds of deterrence that one knows will work, on the rational actors or quasi-rational actors within the dar al-Islam. And as for the fanatics, one can consider how to limit access to Mecca, airfield by airfield, port by port, highway by highway, until it should be as remote as the highest Himalayas, or some impassable and steaming jungle, or the frozen wastes of Ultima Thule. Mecca would still be there, but to get to it—that would be the problem. And that kind of deterrence would be a step-by-step affair.
But the question of the psychology of Muslims—of their combination of grandiosity and living in some mythical great past, and resentment over the miserable and obviously miserable present, where murderous hatred of Infidels is so often part of some grotesque ten-step Self-Esteem Program for those Muslims who have tasted the West, may even have used drugs or lived as criminals and now wish to go straight, Islamically straight—needs more examination.
However the debate over this or that kind of deterrence goes, the mere fact that such a debate takes place is good, for it automatically ends certain taboos. It makes clear that this is not a "war against terror" alone but a long campaign, very likely without end unless the migration of Muslims to the West is stopped and reversed (and while hundreds of thousands of Muslims in the U.K. claim to "wish to leave" one does not see any of them leaving—but more significantly, one has not heard, even from the most antisemitic and anti-Israel brigands, any pleas for them to remain), and unless the unearned and entirely unmerited OPEC oil wealth is so diminished that the Saudis, and the rest of them, can be pushed back into that state of obscurity, poverty, and general irrelevance that they were in before an accident of geology gave them power. In the meantime the Infidels, for their own safety, must work to create those conditions—or to do nothing to prevent the creation of those conditions—by which, like those in the Soviet Union who concluded that their own system had failed, Muslims themselves will be forced to confront the evident political, economic, social, and intellectual failures of their own peoples and polities, and will have to attribute those failures, correctly, to Islam itself.
Finally, it is hard for Infidels to judge the effect of a threat on Mecca, or a threat to limit access to Mecca, on Muslims. Who might best have some insight into this? Possibly ex-Muslims themselves, the many articulate and acute students of minds formed by Islam, who managed to undo its manacles, and escape from its closed circle. One wonders what views they would have on the threat to bomb Mecca, or to limit access to Mecca, as something that might work on the groups and groupiscules that, unlike the sneering but carefully calculating members of the Al-Saud, are less subject to the ordinary threats of loss of income, loss of access to all the goods and services of the advanced Infidel world, even loss of life."
Labels: bombings, Hugh Fitzgerald, Islam, Mecca, Tancredo
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