All in the Islamic Family

Twenty years before 9/11, when Saudi nationals hijacked American passenger planes and used them as suicide bombs, the West was warned by one of our main enemies of things to come. The warning was announced in an unsigned Reuters article which appeared in April, 1981, in The New York Times: “Saudis Shield Islam From ‘Alien Values.’”

The headline sums up one half of the truth. A subheading may as well have read: “Values Alien to Islam to be Liquidated.”

A page-two heading could also have paraphrased Vladimir Lenin: “Westerners will sell us the rope with which we will subjugate them.”

The physical rope is the oil-production capacity which the barbarians nationalized (pioneered by Venezuela and Saudi Arabia, which then helped to form OPEC in 1960), which the West refrained from reclaiming. The ideological rope is multiculturalism and cultural relativism. Their ultimatum was and remains: If you Westerners insist there is no difference between our cultural and politics and yours, then it can make no difference to you if we take over and set the terms of your existence. You are willing to tolerate the intolerant and the intolerable. That will be your epitaph. We are intolerant of the tolerant. That will be the message of our victory.

The Times article is a fawning puff piece about our less than benevolent extortionist, the royal kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and about its pseudo-angst over how Western values are no match for a medieval, totalitarian ideology that is insulated from any and all threats from Western civilization.

Saudi Arabia's economic planners believe they can successfully link the West's technology and the Islamic faith without rending society, but acknowledge they face a challenge.

The text of the country's economic plan recognizes that there is concern in the Government and among the populace that ''alien values and the spirit of materialism'' may threaten religion, adding that this is a difficult problem.

''I am an optimist,'' Deputy Planning Minister Faisal Bashir said in an interview. ''I think we came out of the 1970's very well. But we must not compromise our basic principles. I would call those Islam and our belief in the family.''

It is not much of a challenge. Islam is safe. It faces no peril from the West. It has forgotten, abandoned, or disparaged the principles that made it possible. But, to better grasp this point, let us begin by translating the disingenuous opening paragraphs.

The West’s technology and the Islamic faith are not successfully linked. That is, they are not “partnered” or “married” or joined together in holy matrimony. Islam is by nature a parasitical ideology which cannot allow its adherents to create, innovate, or think outside the suffocating box of blind faith. islam cannot allow its elect or anyone else freedom of thought without sabotaging itself. It will not abide criticism ranging from cartoons of its prophet to examination of its central tenets. So, it must feed off the West, which does allow freedom of thought, and freedom of action.

It is not Saudi, or even Iranian, Pakistani, Egyptian, Malaysian, or Indonesian or any other dominantly Islamic society that is being rent by the conflict between Islam and the West. It is the West’s societies, in virtually every Western nation, that are being torn asunder thanks to their pragmatic, tolerant, non-judgmental, and politically correct perception of Islam as just another religion. Europe is experiencing this dissolution first hand.

What are the “alien values” that the Saudis wish to keep – and have successfully kept for decades at box-cutter’s length? The supreme value of the individual. The idea that it is the individual who is the prime mover of his own life, responsible for his own values and actions. The value of that individual to be free to act in his own self-interest. The value of the idea that his rights to exist and to act do not emanate from society, or the state, or any monarchy, but from his nature as a being of volitional consciousness beholden to no dogma or faith.

The “spirit of materialism”? What is meant by that? Ostensively, an overriding concern for one’s material comfort and happiness at the expense of intangible “spiritual” or moral values, which, in the case of Islam, is unquestioned submission to the theology and pseudo-ethics of Islam. However, blind, unquestioning acceptance of any morality is not a moral action. And one does not witness the sacrifice of “material values” in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Kuwait, Dubai, or any other oil-windfall Arab regime. Like the ancient Egyptians, the Saudis have embarked on an “economic plan” which consists of building monumental skyscrapers, housing developments, and other neo-pyramids, all of which, funded by petrodollars, are white elephants that can never earn back their enormous investment. They represent the siphoning off of genuine, productive wealth from the West into unimaginable money pits.

Where did the Saudi planners get their economic and business ideas? In the West’s left-wing dominated universities. Are the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and other Arab regimes outside the usual scale of political economy? Judge for yourself. The Times article contained this revealing confession:

''There are also not very many Saudis - perhaps not more than five million -so it is easier to spread the wealth around,'' a West European diplomat remarked.

The 1980-85 economic plan envisages investments of about $300 billion for social improvements, defense, agriculture and gas-based petrochemical plants to earn foreign exchange when oil income eventually tapers off.

A recent visitor, Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher of Britain, heard the Minister of Planning, Hisham Nazer, declare that all Saudis were entitled to free education and health care, unemployment and injury benefits. Prices for some essentials are subsidized.

''It may sound as if the Saudi Government is following a policy of handouts,'' he told Mrs. Thatcher, who is a vigorous champion of self-reliance and free enterprise. ''But the policy is to insure a minimum standard of living and beyond that the good life will have to be earned.''

“Spread the wealth around”? Where have we heard that before, except most notably from the current, Islam-friendly occupant of the White House, talking down to Joe the Plumber? In terms of economic “planning,” are the Saudis so different from Western socialists, and also have an educated predilection for five-year plans and programs of coercive and extortionate “people management”?

Islam does not discourage making money, provided that the prosperous give alms to the poor. As conservative religious authorities see it, Islam is liable to be at risk when wealthy young Saudis fly off for the summer to London, Paris or Bangkok and cultivate a taste for permissive ways, a diplomat said.

Spiritual values are perceived as further threatened by the presence of many non-Moslems in a foreign work force of at least 1.5 million, required because so far too few Saudis have the technological skills to run a modern economy and very few are inclined to undertake manual labor.

Virtually the only Saudi prince who took Islam seriously – that is, practiced its core, jihadist, Kantian morality of self-sacrifice – was Osama bin Laden, who traded his palaces, limousines, private aircraft, and freedom of movement for the life of a fugitive hobo, living in caves and finally in a rat-trap compound that resembled an abandoned Super 8 motel, courtesy of and with the full knowledge of our “ally,” Pakistan.

The West is on the defensive, Islam on the offensive. As communists in the past have done in pursuit of global socialist state, Islamists are plotting the overthrow of the West and its replacement with a global caliphate right in our backyard. They are quite frank about their ends and means. An Islamic website, Khilafah.com, reported in July 2009:

An international Islamist political group is preparing for its first conference in the U.S. on Sunday July 19th under the theme "Fall of Capitalism & Rise to Islam."

The sponsor of the conference, Hizb ut-Tahrir, is an organization that has been banned in Germany and several Middle Eastern countries because of its views. It is sometimes described as "extremist" and "radical" by analysts and research groups. In a phone interview with CBS News, the conference's deputy spokesperson [Reza Imam] stressed that Hizb ut-Tahrir does not call for violence or spread radical ideas

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Officially, Hizb ut-Tahrir eschews violence. But violence, or the threat of it, is the only way Islam can spread – unless the West abandons the values of freedom and individualism. Reza Imam’s assurances are mere instances of taqiyya, or Muslim double-talk.

Jeremy Binnie, senior analyst for terrorism and insurgency at Jane's, an information group that provides consultancy on intelligence and strategic issues, says the group advocates ideas that are similar to those of militant Islamist groups like al Qaeda, namely the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate state that would be ruled under Islamic law. The difference is that Hizb ut-Tahrir is against achieving this goal through terrorism, says Binnie....

While Binnie says the group is "not very threatening in terms of strategy," he worries that Hizb ut-Tahrir might act as a "conveyor belt." He says members of the group, who are convinced of its worldview, might give up on its strategy, especially given its failure to achieve the goal so far, and decide to join militant groups or engage in violent acts on their own.

Like the Muslim Brotherhood, which our president is cozying up to and which the Saudis are supporting behind the scenes, Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) has been around for a long time and is determined to achieve its goal of world domination by Islam. It would be interesting to know the funding pedigree of HT. We are certain of the Brotherhood’s basic finances. Front Page interviewed a lone Egyptian intellectual and activist about the “Arab Spring,” and who is for freedom and against “democracy.”

The concept of Khilafah [caliphate] is very much alive and well, and functioning stealthily. Egypt is a Saudi colony; KSA has been trying to ideologically control Egypt by supporting the Muslim Brotherhood since the early 1930′s and in the 40′s the Muslim Brotherhood infiltrated the Egyptian army.

Has HT given up? No. Does it know where it stands in “history”? Yes. While one totalitarian system has collapsed of its own ineptness, another has sprung up to take its place. As the Soviet Union depended on Western largesse and often was actively supported by it, Islamic regimes are emulating the same scenario. This month HT held a conference in Chicago, at the appropriately named Double Tree Hotel.

A radical Islamist group which claims a presence in nearly 50 countries is so confident it can help establish a global Muslim government – or caliphate – that it distributed a draft constitution during a recent conference outside of Chicago.

It calls for the death penalty for apostates and for creating a government department dedicated to jihad. The latest Hizb ut-Tahrir (HT) gathering drew more than 300 people to a Double Tree Hotel ballroom June 26.

HT is an international movement to establish a global Islamic state, or caliphate (Khilafah). Although it is officially committed to nonviolence, HT preaches a virulent brand of hatred for the United States, and for Western democracy in general. Its alumni include such violent Islamists as Khaiid Sheikh Mohammad, mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, and the late Iraqi jihadist Abu Musab Zarqawi. Hizb ut-Tahrir has been described as a “conveyor belt” of terrorism.

At the conference, activists portrayed Islam as the only real force in the world standing up to the United States and the West. With Soviet communism gone, the West is now confronted with the threat posed by Islam, said a speaker identified as Reza Imam. He has served as spokesman for the organization. "And they see the return of Islam," he warned. "And this, brothers and sisters, is the shaking [of] the thrones." Islam's foes "see the coming revival of Islam, and they know what that means and they know what it means for their policies," Imam said.

The Times-Reuters article of 1981about the Saudis exhibits its penchant for cultural relativism and its unwillingness to pass a moral judgment, a cowardice that would have consequences twenty years later.

The vast desert land was the birthplace of Islam, so what happens here has meaning to all the world's 600 million Moslems. The Government understands the West's concern over a safe flow of Saudi oil, they said, but it resents ill-informed Western criticism of the stricter practices of Islam, as observed here, such as stoning of adulterers and the veiling and seclusion of women.

The continued stoning of adulterers and the veiling and seclusion of women were but overtures to what was to come to the West when the populations of Muslim immigrants began to swell in Europe. That journalistic and politically correct diffidence continues to this day when the “resentment” of Western criticism has graduated to death fatwas on critics and cartoonists, rising sexual assaults on non-Muslim women in Western countries, honor killings of disobedient girls and women, riots and mass car burnings in “no-go” ghettoes in major cities, a resurgence of anti-Semitism spread by Muslim clerics, brazen calls for sedition and the overthrow of Western governments in mosques, the de facto establishment of Sharia courts in contravention of civil law, the meek accommodation of Muslim “needs” such as foot baths, prayer rooms, and halal food, often paid for by non-Muslim taxpayers (yes, it is jizya, or the Islamic tax on conquered infidels), the Ground Zero mosque…and so much more, all abetted, condoned, or ignored by a liberal news media, our leftist/liberal intelligentsia, and often by our judiciary.

Yes. Saudi Deputy Planning Minister Faisal, quoted early in this commentary, had every reason to be “optimistic.” He believes in “the family.” By “family” he meant the Islamic Ummah or “community” or “brotherhood. Suborning and emasculating the West has been a cakewalk.

Our leaders believe in nothing. Basically, the conflict is between one brand of nihilism and another.