Monday 13 March 2017

Islam and the West

The issue of Islam is growing each and every year or maybe I should say the problems of Islam are growing each year. When I think back to the 1980's I don't remember people talking about Islam or Muslims, except as something that existed in the Middle East. But a problem in the West? I don't remember people talking about it at all. How times change, today it seems that the issue of Islam is everywhere you turn and growing bigger all the time.

Most Muslim immigration began in most of the West with seemingly secular Turks. Turkey had made a great effort to be more Western and secular and it seemed that it had worked, that Turks were lapsed Muslims. Sort of like lapsed Catholics, except Muslims, they might go through the motions but outside of that they were secular. It was proof that progress worked, that people, all people, were becoming less religion, less superstitious, more secular, more modern.

But in the Middle East something different was going on. It wasn't in plain view and most Muslim Governments made great efforts to keep it out of view. They believed, just like the West that religion was backwards and a sign of the past. They also wanted to be secular and modern, they wanted to be Westerners. However the thing that was being kept out of sight was a religious revival, a rejection of the West and of secularism. And the thing that pushed this revival was the constant failings of political Islam, the fall of the greatest of all Muslim states, the Ottoman Empire, the carving up of nearly the entire Muslim world by the European Empires and the greatest failure of all, the creation of Israel.

Israel was so hurtful because it seemed as if finally things had turned in favour of the Muslim world. But instead here was a Jewish state in it's midst, but worst of all was that it was European. These Jews looked European and everything that they did was European. They were alien in a way Jews who lived in the Middle East were not. But the hatred of the foreign Jews would in time spread to the local ones and when that happened it seems that the Muslims forgot why they hated Israel, because it was European and alien, and instead it became because they were Jews.

Over time the complete and utter failure of ever effort to destroy Israel pushed the Muslims to find a new answer to the problem. They found that answer, not in politics or modernism but in Islam.

Armies had not defeated Israel.

Politics had not defeated Israel.

Technology had not defeated Israel.

What is more powerful than Israel....God is, so they turned to God to defeat Israel. Today this idea is called Islamism.

Islamism is a fusion of a political ideology and Islam and it is the extreme end of Muslim thought. It pushes the idea that Muslims can only triumph in this world by returning to an earlier and in their eyes purer Islam. To put their faith in God, not in the world, instead to reject the world, it's sinfulness, it's hopelessness. To reject the modern world, except in those things that allow it to fight and to defeat it's enemies.

And as all of this is going on the West decides that it will allow Mass Immigration without restrictions on people's Race, Ethnicity or their Religion. That meant that Muslims could come to the West and with them came these ideas and with these ideas came men who wanted to strike out against the enemies of Muslims. This all happened as far back as the 1960's, that's 50 years ago!

For half a century the West has had to live with Islamic terrorism and every decade it has gotten worse. Because while most Muslims who arrived in the West came with the best of intentions, that was not true of all. Things became even more complex as there were now Muslims born in the West who could not reconcile Islam with their Western lifestyles. The so called home grown terrorists.

But of course like nearly everything to do with Mass Immigration it is a lie. This problem and it is a problem, was imported. We have little common history, the people are not of European origin as the people of the West are, their religion is an alien philosophy, it is not our faith. Their way of life is not ours, nor their customs or their often quite strange clothing. It is alien and in many cases hostile.

Islamism adds a new and dangerous dimension to our lives, each day we may be killed or injured because our own Governments have brought in this alien philosophy. Why do we even have to deal with this issue? Why are our lives put in danger? So that Liberals can feel good about themselves....what a pitiful answer!

The burka, the niqab are all alien and to be quite frank offensive to West sensibilities. Ohhh some say they love it, but they are Liberals and Liberals are great destroyers. When there is a terrorist attack we are told that Islam is the religion of peace, that our objecting makes us racist, haters and Islamophobes. As if we have no to right to our own country or to our own life.

Islam has no place in the West, it's home is elsewhere. To the Patriots of each and every Western country the presence of Islam provokes the same reaction as the presence of Israel does in Muslims. An alien people with an alien philosophy and all in the wrong place.

Upon Hope Blog - A Traditional Conservative Future
Another Article You Might Like?
Taxes, Budgets and the Economy

7 comments:

  1. I would agree it is largely a secular struggle with terrorist attacks perpetrated under the guise or lever or so called legitimacy of religion.
    In fact in Islamic culture suicide is forbidden and the taking of a life is only allowed by way of justice with the death penalty for murder, but it is also acknowledged that forgiveness is better. Harming innocent bystanders, even in war, is forbidden under the Qur’an.
    My understanding is Jihad, for instance, means to exert utmost effort, to strive, to struggle, but has been incorrectly used to justify a “Religious War”. This would be an element of the extremism to which you refer.

    So I would pit it that Islamic fundamentalism is an enabler, rather than a motivator to the spread of acts of Terror. But there is also a strong link to territorial conflicts. By way of example when Israel withdrew from 70% of its occupation of Gaza, captured mostly in the 7day war 40 years earlier, the number of suicide attacks by Hamas reduced by 90%. This type of example in the region seems to be duplicated in most conflicts.
    Hence what nearly all suicide terrorist attacks actually have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel modern democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland.

    Religion is a great tool for recruitment to terrorist organizations and in seeking aid from abroad, as you infer.
    But it is rarely the root cause. As far as I can gather just about all suicide terrorist attacks take place in the context of well-organized political and or military campaign.
    The second point to make is our democracies are uniquely vulnerable to suicide terrorists: America, France, and India. Israel, Russia. Sri Lanka and Turkey have been the targets of every suicide attack imaginable.
    But these suicide terrorist campaigns are directed toward a strategic objective from Lebanon to Israel to Sri Lanka to Kashmir to Chechnya. The sponsors are seeking a return to maintain political self-determination based on old past ideologies.

    So the correlation to a secular conflict for territory has also played out in modernity in all theatres of conflict as before Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982 we didn’t hear about Hezbollah suicide terrorists, nor Tamil Tigers prior to the trouble over the Tamil homelands.

    I am quite sure If America had understood better the nature of the true conflicts in the region, when factions were kept at bay by a brutal Dictator, it would not have invaded Iraq in the first place.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Little jihad and big jihad the Muslim will tell you. The former war as that word understood. The latter the person striving for moral perfection. Moral perfection of course not cannot be achieved as long as the "west" with that alluring life-style and appeal to the young people exists.

      Delete
  2. "Islamism is a fusion of a political ideology and Islam and it is the extreme end of Muslim thought. It pushes the idea that Muslims can only triumph in this world by returning to an earlier and in their eyes purer Islam. To put their faith in God, not in the world, instead to reject the world, it's sinfulness, it's hopelessness."


    The Salafists. Those first three generations of Muslims to include those initial followers of Mohammad. As is the ISIL bunch today.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Certainly a picture of a violent jihadist fighter extolling selective verses from the Qur’an is seen as an expression of Isis.

    But what I do think, and what has been alluded to in this post, is the west for far too long sees religion as a private matter. What is taken for granted in modernity, namely the separation of church from the state, is not a precursor for peace in other cultures. Giving assistance to one side or another supportive of such a division won’t work if large sections of the population are against such a principle which is ingrained in western democracies.
    The separation of church and state is a relatively modern idea which has its roots in Protestantism and prior to that religious clashes were all largely political.
    The Crusades for instance was political: Pope Urban II let the knights of Christendom loose on the Muslims, a ruse for religious fervour, but which led to a veritable orgy of bloodsheds to capture the papal monarchy over Christian Europe. The Spanish inquisition was aimed at securing internal order after the civil war during a period of heightened fears over an invasion by the Ottoman Empire.
    The European wars of religion and the thirty years war involved principally Sectarian quarrels between Protestants and Catholics in Europe. Their associated extremes in violence gave rise to modern nation-states.

    What needs more airplay is the fact that the Qur’an also does rally against building a private fortune but instead posits a sharing of wealth aimed at securing a just, egalitarian society. The more controversial sections and interpretations as to which leaders can speak with authority is oft just a product of the deep political struggles that persist in those cultures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. "What needs more airplay is the fact that the Qur’an also does rally against building a private fortune but instead posits a sharing of wealth aimed at securing a just, egalitarian society."


      Spoken as a true communist.

      Delete
    2. Reference: What needs more airplay is the fact that the Qur’an also does rally against building a private fortune but instead posits a sharing of wealth aimed at securing a just, egalitarian society."

      Spoken as a true communist.

      If we can put aside for a moment the quote does suggest a direct link to a communist state many very successful capitalist’s would not find any antipathy with such a statement whilst others may well be nodding in agreement.
      Andrew Carnegie may have been a lonely voice then to insist his wealthy peers largely give back their wealth to the community, but such a notion has gathered apace in modernity. Rather than endlessly building a private fortune many posit one should share it along the way so you end up with virtually nothing before your dead. The principal drivers today are Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, the later who lives very modestly with no expensive toys. I dint have any he said because I notice they end up owning you as I observe in so many of my wealthy friends.
      Although not directly referencing a just, egalitarian society, the second paragraph in the Declaration of Independence states, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”
      Buffet said our Gang’s returns in the past few decades have increased fivefold compared to the middle class, inferring that is not a fair result. As a US equity investor and elsewhere I share that view.

      Delete
  4. Great article, very, very informative, loved it.

    ReplyDelete