Politicians praising Islam? Non-Muslims, seek shelter! And Muslims, too!
Islamophilia
Dr. Koenraad Elst
The
Organization of Islamic Cooperation has launched the term
“Islamophobia”, which was immediately adopted by the US, the EU,
academic bodies like the American Academy of Religion, and then the
media and the chattering classes in the West, in India and elsewhere.
Its users translate it as “hatred of Islam” but it really means “fear of
Islam”. It treats warnings against the threat Islam poses to rival
convictions as well as to freedom and democracy as a psychic disease on a
par with claustrophobia (fear of closed spaces) or arachnophobia
(irrational fear of spiders). It is an excellent way to poison the
debate by declaring your enemies insane. In reply, we will coin the term
“Islamophilia”. Being more generous and open-minded than our opponents,
we have not chosen a psychiatric term to designate them. Like
francophilia, “love of everything French”, it is merely a descriptive
term: love of Islam. We consider this love irrational, but do not
include an intrinsic irrationality in the term chosen. Someone who
whitewashes Islam or shields it from criticism is an “Islamophile”.
When
George Bush spoke to the American people after the bomb attacks of 11
September 2001, he told them to assemble in their churches, their
synagogues and their mosques.
He made it a point to emphasize that the Muslim Americans too were part
of the nation. The revenge invasion of Afghanistan that he was
planning, would merely be a “war on terror”, not a war on Islam.
Meanwhile, American politicians fell over each other to be seen visiting
mosques or celebrating Iftar parties. No, this was not a war on Islam,
eventhough American and British soldiers were killing Muslims in
Afghanistan and later in Iraq by the thousands. Every next bombing in or
invasion of Somalia, Yemen, Pakistan, Libya, Mali and again Iraq would
be accompanied by vows of: “Islam is the religion of peace”, “Islamic
State (of Iraq and al-Sham) is not the true Islam”, nay, “IS are
monsters, not Muslims”. George Bush, Barack Obama, John Kerry, Tony
Blair, David Cameron, Nicholas Sarkozy, François Hollande, all the
killers or Muslim civilians (say, Afghan wedding parties) and of
fighters for organizations explicitly invoking Islam, have praised Islam
to the skies and refrained from criticizing Islam or giving any quarter
to critics of Islam. When a Western politician starts praising Islam,
Muslims had better seek shelter.
One
of the striking things about these Islamophile leaders is their
breath-taking pretentiousness. Whereas IS commander Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
is a doctor of Islamic Studies, Islamophiles like Cameron with his
pompous “monsters, not Muslims” statement are simply zeroes in Islamic
theology and law. Al-Baghdadi can win hands down in any dispute before
an Islamic court. Everything IS has become notorious for, from
kidnappings and rapes through slave-takings to executions of dissidents
and unbelievers, has been prefigured in Mohammed’s own conduct. The new
Caliph knows that the cornerstone of Islamic law, recognized by every
single Islamic jurisconsult or judge, is the Prophet’s precedent
behaviour. What Cameron is saying, effectively comes down to asserting
that “Mohammed was non-Muslim”, or even: “Mohammed was a monster”. Mind
you, I have not said it, but the British Prime Minister has implied it.
Media bias
The
media, in their vast majority committed to shielding Islam from
criticism, will connect the dots in a simplistic and thoroughly wrong
manner. They report on the frequent killings of Muslims by Western
soldiers and drones, and on the other they promote and highlight the
thoroughly false notion of Islamophobia, so they pontificate that
“Islamophobia has caused increasing international violence against
Muslims”. On the contrary, Islamophilia is the professed conviction of
the leaders who kill Muslims. By contrast, critics of Islam like
Raimundus Lullus, Voltaire, the late Sita Ram Goel, Daniel Pipes, Robert
Spencer, including ex-Muslims like the late Anwar Sheikh, Taslima
Nasrin, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, have
never harmed a single Muslim. Even mass-murderer Anders Breivik, the
darling and lonely trump card of the Islamophiles, strengthens our case:
while not actively an Islam critic, he was at least a quoter of Islam
critics (though he reckoned his own act would be used by the
Islamophiles to discredit them by association, which he considered good
as he wanted to eliminate the “illusion” of reasonable and democratic
methods in favour of the violent option) and the killer of 77 people,
but he had spurned the easy option of throwing a bomb into a full mosque
and instead pointed his machine gun at juvenile multiculturalists of
the Norwegian Labour Party. So, even his grisly case confirms that Islam
critics don’t kill Muslims while Islamophiles do.
This
applies even to India: Jawaharlal Nehru presided over the state that
was forced to wage war with Pakistan over Kashmir in 1947-8, Lal Bahadur
Shastri and Atal Behari Vajpayee faced down Pakistani invasion in 1965
c.q. 1999, and Indira Gandhi waged the Bangladesh war in 1971, killing
many Pakistani Muslims in the process; yet none of them can be quoted as
ever criticizing Islam, while some if not all of them have actually
praised Islam. For none of the Western or Indian leaders concerned, it
can credibly be argued that they didn’t mean what they said in favour of
Islam. All of them had to operate in and were groomed by a climate of
Islamophilia. Both the so-called “secularists” in India and the
multiculturalists in the West combat and criminalize any sign of Islam
criticism. Even the “Hindu nationalist” party BJP, to which Vajpayee
belonged, has never criticized Islam. Those numerous secularists who
allege that the BJP hates islam are welcome to quote a statement of that
tendency from the BJP party paper; I at least have never seen one.
Every
single medium considers itself an objective vantage-point from which to
evaluate all the other media. So, they all say that “the media” except
themselves are anti-Islamic and spread a negative view of Islam. This is
another make-believe: the media not anti-Islamic by any means, they
shield Islam from criticism as much as they can and they impose on all
inconvenient facts about Islamic movements the best possible spin. Yet
it is true that nonetheless, the media do spread a negative view of
Islam in spite of themselves, viz. in their raw reporting. What impact
does a newspaper editorial in praise of Islam have, when the next page
reports on kidnappings and forced conversions by Boko Haram or
slave-takings and beheadings by the Caliphate? The public knows by now
that “haram” and “caliphate” are Islamic terms. It can read for itself
that the first thing Boko Haram did with the kidnapped girls was to
forcibly convert them to Islam; clearly they are not “monsters without
religion”. So the negative influence of the media on the public’s
perception of Islam is not due to media bias, on the contrary, it is
only due to reality peeping through in the news reports.
Casus belli
The
Islamophile leaders do not just happen to kill Muslims, both fighters
and civilians (“collateral damage”), they do so specifically for
Islamophile reasons. According to US Foreign Secretary John Kerry, one
of the reasons for sending bomber airplanes to Iraq to fight IS, is to
eliminate the “distortion of Islam”. In reality, the Islamic State is
giving a truthful picture of what Islamic doctrine stands for. It
emulates the Prophet’s behaviour, a model for all Muslims. Not just the
“fanatics” but all deliberate Muslims sanctify the Prophet as the
“perfect man”. So, no distortion there. Yet, Islamophiles propagate the
notion that “IS is not the true Islam”. They like to drown the fish by
claiming that there are many schools of Islam; but none can show us an
Islamic school where it is taught that “Mohammed was wrong”.
Publicity-conscious
Muslims have even tried to support them by issuing a statement
condemning IS. Here at last was proof from the horse’s mouth that the
real Islam is a religion of peace after all; or is something wrong with
this idyllic picture? Caliph al-Baghdadi will have no trouble
repudiating this statement in a court of Islamic law nor in the court of
reason. For instance, among the reasons cited why IS does not live up
to the standards of real Islam, is its practice of slavery. But it is
easy to show that Mohammed took and sold slaves, and that Mohammed took a
captive Jewish woman into his harem after massacring her male family
members. IS’s practice of enslaving non-Muslims, selling them or using
them for sexual gratification is nothing but an emulation of Mohammed’s
model behaviour, by definition valid in Islamic law. What the Muslim
spokesmen are saying, or at least what they want the silly Islamophiles
to believe, is that Mohammed himself was a bad Muslim, a “monster”. The
abolition of slavery was imposed from outside on the Muslim world,
principally by Britain, and was not abolished in the Arabic heartland of
Islam until 1962 The peculiar institution was only reluctantly done
away with in Muslim society, and the Caliphate is merely reviving an
institution intrinsic to Islam – as the authors of this statement fully
well know. But they have no second thoughts about fooling the non-Muslim
Islamophile, especially because these are only eager to be duped.
The
situation now is that pious Muslims (not “monsters” but pious Muslims)
are being killed by the bombers of Islamophile President Barack Obama
and his equally Islamophile allies. Thus, Belgian Defence Minister
Pieter De Crem, who sent six bomber aircraft to Iraq, also parroted the
line that “IS terrorists have nothing to do with Islam”: the same
combination of Islamophilia by conviction with Muslim-killing in
reality. Also among the victims are the Yezidi women being used as sex
slaves, the Assyrians and Yezidis who formally converted to Islam to
save their lives, as well as numerous cases of the fabled “moderate
Muslim” among the civilians of the region. Islamophiles have a lot of
blood on their hands.
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