“TERROR AND REFUGEES.”
By Paul Merkley.
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The Humanitarian Response to the Muslim Swarm.
Millions are fleeing the Middle East today because it has became, for the most part, an ugly cockpit of poverty, disease and death. These millions are fleeing into our world — which, we quickly acknowledge, also has much ugliness about it. Our daily discourse ranges from crude cynicism to vigorous blasphemy, with a swath of outright pornography in the middle. Our popular culture – most clearly reflected in the content of our entertainment media — boxes the compass from idiotic to depraved, with never a glimmer of decency along the way. Yet no thinking person among us would trade our world for theirs; and, more important for the moment, while millions of people born in the Arab world are fleeing their world in order to live in ours no one has fled from ours to theirs in recent memory.
There is nothing in our present culture that provides any clue to the philanthropic spirit with which the public appears to be embracing the challenge of admitting very large numbers of these fugitives to our country and to our way of life. All of this is to our credit. But humanitarian sensitivity is not the beginning and the end of wisdom. Those who insist that it is – with the President of the United States at their head and our new Prime Minister prominently located in the chorus – are now heaping abuse upon those who are calling for a curtailment, or at least a pause, in the influx of the fleeing hordes.
It is surely reasonable to ask: What are they fleeing from? Why is no one fleeing from our world into theirs?
What Is the Muslim Swarm Fleeing From?
Those who call for a halt to further immigration from the Arab world until we have found a satisfactory answer to these questions are not xenophobes nor are they inhumane. In fact, they have a better claim to the title of “humanitarian” than those who deny that these effects have a cause.
The fact is that these people are fleeing from chaos – which, in turn, is the product of a religion that, as fourteen centuries of history amply prove, has no resources within it for stable government and secure civilian life – the religion which, as four years of “Arab Spring” prove conclusively, cannot provide the basis for democracy.
Republican U.S. Congressman Trey Gowdy, angered by the latest round of abuse on this theme from the President, has suggested that “maybe where he [President Obama] ought to start … is a foreign policy in the Middle East, including Syria, where people can go back to their homelands, which is their preference … Maybe he ought to defeat that JV team that you [Obama] thought you had contained. [See https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2014/09/03/spinning-obamas-reference-to-isis-as-a-jv-team/] “That would be the very best thing you could do to help people who aspire to a better life.”
Now, there’s a thought! Why do we assume that the largest kindness that we can offer is to settle Arab people thousands of miles from the world in which they have lived and found their identity for several thousand years?
A New Season of Terror Has Begun in Europe.
Most people guess that there is a connection between the burial of all hopes for an Arab Spring and the havoc that has been wreaked upon European life over the last two or three weeks by gangs of madmen claiming that they are giving up their lives because they are soldiers of Allah and that they are required, whatever we may think about the matter, to change our world into something resembling the life that Muhammad recommends in the Qur’an.
Taken together, the absolute failure of the Arab Spring and the gigantic ruin that faces public order throughout Europe at this moment should be leading our politicians to address the war that has been initiated against the civilized world by people and movements that declare themselves to be serving Allah¸ the God of the Qur’an.
On Friday November 20, several gangs of professed soldiers of Allah, carried out co-ordinated assaults upon the people of France. Since then, the first item of world news each day has been another terrorist attack – or a plethora of co-ordinated attacks — conducted in the same spirit, under the same slogans, some of whose perpetrators are in each case still at large. Major European cities have closed down major public events in response to “credible terror threats.” All of Western Europe is on edge. As I write (November 24) Brussels is undergoing lockdown for a fourth day – all schools and universities closed, subways not operating, business and government offices severely curtailed.
In most cases the persons associated with these incidents had previously been well-known to police as declared Islamists and several had lengthy arrest records on account of failed exercises in the same cause; these records did not prevent them from remaining at large, moving in and out of the homes of friendly neighbours in their home communities and moving across several borders in Europe and in and out of the Arab world. At least two of the now-defunct suicide bombers had recently entered Europe via the Greek Island of Leros, embedded in the swarm of Muslim refugees.
The fountainhead of their motivation is in the efficient and unambiguous instruction that Muhammad gives in the Qur’an: “Slay the idolators wherever you find them…”
The Debate Over Immigration.
The United States appears ready to take action to stop the accelerating Muslim swarm. When I last checked, thirty-one governors and a large majority of state legislatures were declaring their intention to refuse to accept Syrian refugees. Responding to the President’s accusation that these politicians have no sympathy for suffering Muslims Jeb Bush hits the nail on the head: “We all have sympathies for people who have been uprooted. … But we have a duty to protect our country as well. And that’s the point.”
Last week, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the American Security Against Foreign Enemies Act, which aims to stop indefinitely resettlement of Syrian and Iraqi refugees in the United States. The New York Times denounces this action as an expression of “emotion”, and contrasts it to the President’s dedication to “facts”: “YOU CAN’T FIGHT EMOTIONS WITH FACTS,” explains the New York Times (“Editorial: The Price of Fear,” November 20, 2015.)
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State did not compel us to shackle ourselves to a security state, or to disgrace our values by vilifying and fearing refugees and immigrants.
This bitter truth is lost on the politicians now grasping for the Republican presidential nomination, whose guiding principle seems to be a crowd-pleasing strain of bullying cowardice.
This strain of thought follows the example of President Obama, who excoriates opponents of unlimited immigration from Middle East as vicious wimps who cower at the prospect of confronting more “widows and orphans.” (“Critics of Syrian refugees are ‘scared of widows and orphans,’ Obama says,” USA Today, November 18, 2015.)
Could there be a clearer example of the evasion of “facts” than this? The present open-ended war of the terrorists against civilians everywhere on earth cannot be understood apart from the elephantine fact that it is conducted exclusively by persons who declare that their all-inclusive motivation is to strike down infidels in the cause of Allah.
The President has denounced politicians who claim that limits must be set upon immigration from the Middle East: these people “seek to exploit the idea that there’s war between Islam and the West, and when you start seeing individuals in position of responsibility suggesting Christians are more worthy of protection than Muslims are in a war-torn land that feeds the ISIL narrative.”
The President has consistently denied the reality that throughout the Arab world Christians have always endured severe limitation on what we regard as basic human rights; but today a new chapter has now opened: Christian communities are being annihilated outright by Islamic armies answering to a “Caliph”. Merely drawing attention to the gigantic fact of Muslim persecution of Christians as the reason for their being homeless and destitute in the very lands of their birth has been construed by Obama – and by both the Liberal and the NDP candidates in the recent Canadian election – as insensitive preference for Christians over other suffering human beings.
Why shouldn’t we put our enthusiasm for large-scale social planning into helping the Arabs of the Middle East change conditions their own world, rather than undertaking the open-ended and highly problematical task of changing our own rules of life so that (in theory) they can learn to live happier lives here?
Who Are the True Muslims?
It is impossible to separate the Qur’an from these deeds. The perpetrators believe and insist that they are warriors of Allah – the true Muslims. On what grounds, and by what right, do we dare to deny them the title they claim? It is realistic to note that loyalty to Islam is the one absolutely clear constant feature in all description of the terrorists. Therefore it must occur to clear thinkers that the last thing we need is to import more Islam.
Throughout our part of the world, the first response of local politicians to the Paris massacres and subsequent Islamist terrorist actions was to rush to local mosques and assure the Muslim people that they understand that these assassins “do not speak for Islam … a religion of peace.” It seems to me the height of arrogance for our non-Muslim politicians to characterize any body of self-professed Muslims for acting against the “true” spirit of Islam.
The fact is that the fragments of Islamic teaching that the Islamist terrorists throw in our faces as they set off their suicide vests can be found without difficulty in the Qu’ran. The bromides about Islam as a religion of peace cannot be defended out of the Qur’an — nor out of the history of Islam — and most significantly not out of the most recent pages chapters of that history.
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The Bayview Review 