Steyn on Islam and the West

Mark Steyn
Well worth a read:

National Review: Happy Warrior

Denial Is a River in Washington, and London:

‘Any attempt to identify a murderous ideology with a great faith such as Islam is wrong, and needs to be denied,” declared Jacqui Smith, the new British home secretary, starting her job with a bang, or near-bang, as a flaming Jeep Cherokee (doing a fine impression of a Chevy Blazer) crashed through the terminal at Glasgow Airport, with one of its passengers staggering from the wreckage screaming, “Allah! Allah!” Two days later, nine persons, including seven Spanish tourists, were killed by a somewhat more efficient suicide bomber in Yemen.

Nevertheless, the new British prime minister, Gordon Brown, has banned ministers from using the word “Muslim” in connection with terrorism. As the Daily Express reported, “The shake-up is part of a fresh attempt to improve community relations and avoid offending Muslims.”

The world’s prime ministers and presidents have been “avoiding offending Muslims” for five years now. The first reaction of almost every Western leader to September 11th was to leap in the limo and hie himself to the nearest mosque. As President Bush said the other day in a return visit to the Saudi-funded Islamic Center of Washington, “To underscore America’s respect for the Muslim faith here at home, I came to this Center six days after the 9/11 attacks to denounce incidents of prejudice against Muslim Americans.”

It wasn’t entirely clear that there ever were significant “incidents of prejudice against Muslim Americans,” and among those assembled for the president’s post-9/11 Islamoschmoozing sessions there were more than a few chaps with a long track record of prejudice against non-Muslims.

You’ll recall that Mr. Bush’s line back then was that “Islam is peace.” The president is not to my knowledge a practicing imam. (I would hesitate to issue so definitive a pronouncement about the Prince of Wales.) So it is not clear on what authority the infidel-in-chief issues such statements. But a good basic rule in those early days was: Whether or not “Islam is peace,” whenever Mr. Bush says it is, the particular Muslims in his immediate vicinity are not the best exemplars of it.

At the prayer service at the National Cathedral on September 14, 2001, the principal representative of the religion of peace, Muzammil Siddiqi, could muster only the vaguest, most imprecise condemnation of terrorism. Which is hardly surprising given his track record of support for Hamas and Hezbollah. Another honored guest, Abdurahman Alamoudi, a longtime adviser to the Pentagon, founder of the organization that supplies Muslim chaplains to the U.S. armed forces, and designer of a course on Islam taught in the California school system, is now serving a 23-year jail term for his part in a Libyan terror plot.

There are many peaceful Muslims, but not always the ones in the presidential photo-ops. CAIR’s head honcho has made admirably plain his ambition to live under sharia in the United States: The followers of the religion of peace, in that sense, share exactly the same goals as their more incendiary coreligionists.

For his encore performance at the Islamic Center, President Bush was betting on the Organization of the Islamic Conference, a sort of European Union or British Commonwealth for 57 of the world’s Muslim nations. He announced that America would be appointing its first ever envoy to the OIC, who “will listen to and learn from representatives from Muslim states and will share with them America’s views and values.”

Just for starters, try to imagine an “Organization of the Christian Conference,” with presidents and prime ministers meeting at summits. Those lefties who profess concern for what America is doing to provoke “the Muslim world” would go bananas if any Western politician started referring to “the Christian world.” The fact that one formulation slips off their tongue so carelessly while the other would cause them to gag on their words is a revealing example of how easily Western secularists accept Islam’s political sovereignty.

And to put it another way: Regardless of whether Islam is a religion of peace, is it a politics of peace? The Organization of the Islamic Conference is the largest bloc on the new U.N. Human Rights Council, which explains why that pitiful joke of a transnational body does nothing for human rights. True, the OIC issued a “Declaration on International Terrorism” in 2002, and it’s fine as far as it goes, which would seem to be as far as the Baader-Meinhof Gang and the Red Brigades:

“5. We reject any attempt to link Islam and Muslims to terrorism as terrorism has no association with any religion, civilization or nationality;”

Fine. Whatever. Religion-of-peace boilerplate.

“10. We reject any attempt to link terrorism to the struggle of the Palestinian people in the exercise of their inalienable right to establish their independent state with Al-Quds Al-Sharif as its capital;”

Er, okay. That gives a pass to Hamas and the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades and whatnot . . .

“11. We reject any attempt to associate Islamic states or Palestinian and Lebanese resistance with terrorism, which constitutes an impediment to the global struggle against terrorism;”

. . . and that pretty much absolves Hezbollah, Islamic Jihad, and everybody else. So are there any actual terrorists operating anywhere today that this “International Declaration” is designed to cover?

“12. We condemn Israel for its escalating . . .”

Of course.

Somewhere out there, there may well be an Islam that’s a bona fide “religion of peace,” but it’s not to be found among the shifty dissemblers of the OIC. Six years into the “War on Terror,” if we have learned anything, it should be the impossibility of trying to win without taking on the ideology. The president should not be fawning on the OIC, he should be disabusing them of their illusions.

Instead, we continue to embrace them. Jacqui Smith wants any link between terrorism and Islam to be “denied.” Just because denial is a river in Egypt is no reason it can’t be diverted into the Thames and the Potomac.