STOP THE JIZYA NOW!

Hugh Fitzgerald complains rightly that America should not be footing the bill for the ummah, not with all the money they have in their coffers, and especially not when bucked up by a pernicious ideology that calls for and works toward the death of the West, by any means necessary. These nations, mislabeled "allies on the war on terror" are nothing of the sort. But please read on. Despite the crushing debt load we are carrying to help bring civility to these regions dominated by totalitarian Islam, our ignorant or outright dhimmi leaders continue to betray our American future for a ridiculous pittance in their own pockets today. Stop this obscene and civilization-crippling jizya now! Fitzgerald's article:

"Gulf oil producers are expected to earn a record $562 billion in 2008…"—from this news article.

That nearly $600 billion is just this year's take. And it just counts the Gulf Arabs, not other Muslim states with plenty of oil dough to make mischief—think of Iran, or Libya. Since 1973 alone (there was plenty coming in before that, even though the real bonanza had not started for the likes of Saudi Arabia) the Muslim oil states have received—by now—about eleven billion dollars. They have done nothing, and they do nothing, to deserve this money. No hard work, no clever entrepreneurial ideas. They simply sit on top of it.

And they are supposedly loyal to fellow Muslims, so one would think that they would share that wealth. But of course they don't. Or rather, some of the rich Arabs and Muslims "share" the teeny-tiniest amounts for very specific purposes. For example, sums are raised to supply a little money to those paladins of the most immediate neighborhood Jihad, the suicide bombers in Israel. But save for one or two ostentatious transmittals of money—say, to Hariri's party in Lebanon—there is no sharing of wealth with poorer members of the Umma. Instead, the rich Arabs have been able to inveigle the world into ignoring their incredible greed.

And Saudi Arabia, according to J. B. Kelly, has for decades carefully inflated its population numbers in order to lower the published per-capita income figures as well as to engage in a little froggy throat-swelling. The rich Arabs deflect calls for wealth-sharing within the Umma, and most amazing of all, they convince the Western world, that is, the Americans and the Western Europeans, that it is they who should be shelling out aid to Egypt, to Pakistan, to Jordan, to the "Palestinian" warlords and "authorities."

Egypt is not an "ally," no matter how often that noun is misapplied. It is a world center of antisemitism that ran on state television a series based on "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion." It is a country that makes life hell for its Christian Copts. It is a country that runs diplomatic interference for the Arab regime in Sudan, all the while pretending to be "applying pressure" to it, and to utter, for Western ears only, an occasional cluck-cluck of fake disapproval. It is a country where the corrupt Mubarak, with his Family-And-Friends Plan, continues to batten on American aid shelled out by those whose notion of an Arab ally these days—the definition keeps shifting, but it is always a ludicrous one—is any country that is not openly allied with Iran and that does not call for Israel's immediate destruction, preferring the Slow Jihad as more certain and less dangerous to itself.

Why has Egypt, whose Muslim Arabs so dislike the West (even if they would delightedly flood into the West if they could), received $70 billion from the Americans and who knows how many more billions from Europeans, when the Saudis, the Emiratis (especially Dubai and Abu Dhabi), the Qataris, the Kuwaitis, are all dripping with gold, and the money just keeps piling up, with no end in sight, even as they buy up as much as they can, at firesale prices, American companies or American stocks or American real estate?

And then there are the billions shelled out for Afghanistan, a country which might better be handled through local proxies, who can deal as they wish with those whom we identify as enemies at far less expense, and with far less tensions caused among NATO members. They are in a much better position than Western forces to fight, and know whom to fight—while the NATO forces have yet again apparently been fooled into bombing an anti-Taliban group, thinking they were the enemy. They may not have American weaponry, but such weaponry is not really needed. Long knives against long knives, Tadzhik and Uzbek in the north holding fast against Pushtuns, Hazara armed sufficiently to protect themselves from the uber-Sunni Taliban, and so on, with shifting patterns of (most temporary) Western weapons drops and supplies.

And let's not forget Iraq, where the Americans removed a monster, and for five years have been moving heaven and earth to make Iraq a decent place—which means ignoring the inshallah-fatalism, and the victor/vanquished dualism, that Islam encourages and that helps explain why the American effort, no matter how prolonged, and no matter how many men, how much money, how much materiel is expended or rather squandered, will not succeed in building a different Iraq, something recognizably advanced and Western. If there were a million Mithal al-Alusis, it might happen, but there is only one, or at best, only a handful. And it is this that General Petraeus and the "counter-insurgency manual" colonels from Leavenworth keep forgetting, or rather never knew, because they haven't deeply felt what they cannot see—and Islam, in the minds of men, cannot easily be seen. You have to study it. You have to study the texts and tenets and then what Muslims have done with those texts and tenets over time and through space—how they have behaved toward Infidels. But you can't just "see" it. And that is why the Americans have now squandered nearly two trillion dollars in Iraq.

And what has Saudi Arabia done? Has it paid for the Sunni Awakening? Has it paid to keep the Americans somewhere in the area to help protect those Sunnis, or to protect Sunni regimes from Iran-sponsored Shi'a aggression? No, not a cent. And not only that, but it is only the Infidel states that have forgiven nearly one hundred billion dollars in Iraq's pre-2003 debt, while neither Saudi Arabia nor Kuwait has done so, and the Emirates have only done so in part. Why is that, do you think, that only the Infidels have cancelled in any major way the debt of a Muslim debtor state, and not fellow Muslim states?

Oh, we could go on, with a tour of the globe, showing how here, and how there, Infidels end up footing the bill. Who paid for relief in Muslim Aceh, in Indonesia? Not the Saudis. Who pays for Muslim relief everywhere? Not the Saudis, not the Kuwaitis, not the Emiratis, not the Qataris. No, it's always the Infidels.

This has to stop. There has to be screaming, all over the Western world, to demand that members of the Umma start showing their "loyalty" to fellow members of the Umma in ways other than giving grants to the families of suicide bombers in Israel. They have all the money in the world. The more they contribute to poor Muslims, the less they will have to conduct those well-financed campaigns of Da'wa and propaganda in the West, the fewer Western hirelings they will be able to hire, the fewer mosques and madrasas spewing hate they will be able to build all over the West.

Why is the State Department, why is Congress, why is the President himself incapable of demanding that others, fellow Arabs, start paying us back for our efforts everywhere to make things better in Iraq and Afghanistan? And pay us, as well, for the "insurance" policy we provide to oil tankers in the Gulf? There is no reason for the Americans to foot the bill for all that. It is the oil sellers who should be paying. And at the very least, why are all other oil-consuming nations off the hook—such as China—leaving America to finance and do the whole job?

It makes no sense. But then, so little of what is going on does. And because it is so absurd, most people cannot quite believe it and assume there is something behind it, some modicum of sense, if only we knew. We are, they think, being kept in the dark as to the real reasons for such on-the-face-of-it idiocy.

No, I'm afraid. That idiocy on its face is just that—idiocy.

DETERRANCE BY ANY OTHER NAME

Okay, all that other stuff failed. Carrots and honey only brought us more vicious rabbit holes and nasty bee stings. Why not let bygones be bygones, shift gears, and come back running with something else, say like, the Big Stick Theory? The continuing saga of a nation without clarity, a people without leadership, the damage that surely must be done, and emphatically shall be done, one way or the other, in this campaign to set the record straight about man, and god, and law, is once again nailed to the door of our awakening in an article written by the impetuously comprehensive Hugh Fitzgerald of Jihad Watch.

Read it, comprehend it, pass it along:

And what is the deterrence going to be, and how will that deterrence be made known? Surely any further attack on Americans has to be answered not by means of what is essentially a glorified police action, attempting to round up only those immediately involved, those who trained and supported them. Retaliation must he very large, and must do equal damage to the Camp of Islam. The Al-Saud, the Al-Thani, the Al-Sabah, the Al-Maktoum, and all the others must be made aware that their economic and other interests will be damaged, damaged far more severely than we have so far been damaged, and that such damage will be inflicted in all kinds of ways, including a halt to the availability of goods and services, the seizure of enemy-owned assets (just as such assets were seized during World War II), and that will include the privately-owned real estate of various Saudi princelings (could that be why Prince Bandar is selling off his Aspen estate for $135 million, the estate for which he had blown to bits the top of a mountain to improve his view") and whatever can be reached by American and other NATO allies. The days of visiting the West for medical care and education should come to an end—wouldn't you, if you were told you could no longer go to any Western doctors, begin to worry, begin to think about modifying your behavior so that you could see the best oncologists and cardiologists and bring your children to Western doctors instead of Arab ones? You would.

And that's a start. Other measures could include seizing the very large, and very conveniently placed, oilfields of Saudi Arabia, holding whatever oil revenues are obtained piously "in trust," after first deducting the amount of economic damage that Saudi support, over the past 30 years—support for mosques and madrasas where the most fanatical Wahhabi propaganda has been available and been distributed, support for campaigns of Da'wa targetted at the psychically and economically marginal, campaigns to buy up Western hirelings in all the capitals of the West, and much more—amounting to nearly $100 billion in the past 30 years—has caused, for there is a direct relationship between the Saudis and the spread of the most virulent form of Islam.

Deterrence, to be effective, must be understood on all sides. The Western world has not made clear to the rulers and peoples of Muslim states, nor to Muslims now living in the Bilad al-kufr and working night and day at their Taqiyya-and-Tu-Quoque in order to prevent Infidels from learning just a bit too much about Islam, and about the history of Islamic conquest over 1350 years, that all kinds of measures can be, and will be, taken. The Western publics are far far ahead of their governments, and the deep unhappiness with both parties in this country, with the hallucinating Bush bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" and the Democrats who oppose the war but apparently not for the right reasons—that is, in order to more intelligently constrain Islam that can be achieved best by leaving, not staying in, Iraq.

Western governments, led by the Americans, should start consulting with one another on this collective threat (surely the recent elections should mean that NATO will have to meet without Turkey, no longer a fit member of an organization that will have to direct its main efforts at constraining Islam) of the world-wide Jihad, and on the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest within the Bilad al-kufr, especially in the hitherto negiligently compliant states of Western Europe. One wants the Muslim would-be terrorists, and those who support them, to be made aware of what, beyond physical destruction to certain Muslim lands, will take place, what damage will be done to the interests of Muslims in Paris and London, in Dearborn and Falls Church, what will be done with some—not all—of the oilfields, what will be done with reachable Arab and Muslim assets in the West, what will be done to close down Muslim insetitutions all over the West that inevitably offer support and encouragement for the Jihad.

The leaders of the Soviet Union knew what would happen if they did thus and so. The Muslims have been led to believe that very little will happen—oh, hundreds of billions may be spent, in vain attempts to cure Muslim "poverty" (see Afghanistan) and to "reconstruct" an entire country (see Iraq), and to bring Western ways, and the pollyannish panacea of "free elections" which are the main way that "freedom" can be brought, in Bush's view, to "ordinary moms and dads" in the Middle East. But the Iraqi body politic has already clearly rejected the attempt to successfully transplant the organ of Western freedom. Time to try something that makes sense.

The reason the Arab states do not attack Israel at the moment is because of the deterrent effect of the IDF, and what the IDF can do. That's it. It has nothing to do with the Camp David Accords, nothing to do with a change of heart—how could Muslims, if they were true believers, ever accept an Infidel state such as Israel, on land once part of Dar al-Islam, a state that furthermore is in the middle of that so-called "Arab world"? It is simply impossible, not thinkable. Deterrence, however, is not unthinkable—it exists, and it works.

The same can and should be done by the American and other Western governments. They have to start dropping all kinds of hints, as to the damage that can be inflicted on Muslim interests, everywhere. And they might do best to talk about reducing the Money Weapon (or inflicting economic damage in turn on the Muslim states), closing down campaigns of Da'wa and countering the effect of past campaigns, and recognizing demographic conquest as a key instrument of Jihad, historically and at present, and not only calling a complete halt to Muslim immigration into the West, but reversing it, by means that are not only perfectly justifiable when one is fighting such a comlicated war of self-defense in which, in a move without precedent in history, large numbers of people who are by unshakeable faith unalterably opposed to the continued dominance, in our own, Infidel lands of our own legal and political institutions, our own solicitousness for the individual rather than the collective, and for freedoms that are the product of centuries of thought and statecraft, have been allowed by the millions to settle within our lands, in a collective fit of ignorance and historical amnesia. In such circumstances, those who sense their own responsibiity, even in the midst of such present decadence, to preserve a civilizational heritage that can be undone by mere numbers, will take what measures are necessary, and will do well to learn of how often, in the past, even the most tolerant and advanced regimes—such as that in Czechoslovakia in 1946—undertook measures (the Benes Decree) that no one at the time, and no one respectable since, has criticized, much less deplored.