Saturday, January 21, 2006

The Caliphate

Are we standing before an abyss which we cannot comprehend and refuse to admit the very existence of?

Go here to read the entire article.

3 comments:

Kiddo said...

Excellent article, and instead of a comment I'd like to leave a much more beautifully written quote by Victor Davis Hanson from his book Carnage and Culture:

"It is often forgotten that Islamic dynamism between the eighth and tenth centuries represented a reconquista of territory that had been ruled largely by others from Persia or Europe. Despite nearly seven hundred years of Greek and Roman power in northern Africa, local populations still maintained indigenous religious, linguistic, and cultural practices, and vastly outnumbered Europeans and their own Western educated elites. All these Islam swept away."

They do not seek solely the revival of the caliphate or the submission of the whole world to Islam, they are the ultimate imperialists as well. They seek the Arabization by subjugation and cultural genocide within all conquered territories added to Dar al Islam. Just as they always have.

p.s. if Mr Hanson would like to speak to me about possible copyright infringement, I'd like to request that he do so in person, as I'd very much love a personal chat with him.

Always On Watch said...

Pim's Ghost,
David Hanson often cuts through all the distractions and well explains his points: They do not seek solely the revival of the caliphate or the submission of the whole world to Islam, they are the ultimate imperialists as well. They seek the Arabization by subjugation and cultural genocide within all conquered territories added to Dar al Islam. Just as they always have.

"Just as they always have." But does what has always been have to continue to be?

The hopes of many are pinned on Islam's coming into the 21st Century. Can that happen? Lord knows how I lose sleep over this matter! Pastorius has posted on a way to foster the arrival--reformation, modernization, whatever you want to call it--and he has specifically addressed jihadism (aka Islamofascism). What worries me about the WaPo article is the "regular" Muslims' yearning for the caliphate. As I understand the concept of the caliphate, it is a Shari'a-law system. Does it have to be? That's an important question, I think.

At the end of Diana West's commentary, which I cited over at my own blog, she said this:
if the pope is right and Islam is not reformable along the lines of a Western model, it's not a Western problem — meaning a problem the West is responsible for fixing. It is perhaps the ultimate Western chauvinism that even considering the failed overhaul of Islam, being beyond Muslim doctrine and beyond our own capabilities, should plunge us — infidels, non-Muslims, Jeffersonian deists, whatever — into the abyss. With apologies to Pygmalion via Lerner and Lowe, the question shouldn't be: Why Can't Islam Be More Like the West? It should be: How can the West prevent itself from becoming more like Islam?

One obvious answer is an immigration policy aimed at preventing the kind of Islamic demographic shifts we already see transforming Europe, although our policy makers, Republican and Democrat alike, aren't even asking the question. Maybe they, like my military penpal, prefer to hope for the Islamic reform the pope is said to have ruled out. Hope may well spring eternal and all that, but it's not the stuff on which military strategy or national destiny should hang.


I have to say that those words gave me almost an hour of consideration. I almost included them in the article I wrote, then backed off. Maybe I shouldn't have backed off, but I didn't want the focus of my piece to be an immigration matter but rather an ideological one.

Kiddo said...

I'd stick with it, AlwaysOnWatch. It's an intriquing new issue that we will have to face now in America, and all of the West, the issue of immigration. There will have to be mass mental reformation of the entire concept and how our laws deal with it.