Note from Robert Spencer:
Hey, that's swell. I can't wait to pray in the new State Department chapel for Christians.

What's that you say? There is no such place? How's that again? Establishment clause, you say? What's that?

From AP, with thanks to Ali Dashti

No. The Muslim model for all treaty-making is the Treaty of al-Hudaibiyya. It is clear, from all the Arab strategy manuals that have been written since 1967, that the salami-slicing technique is -- and must be-- part of an attempt to reduce Israel to a size that will, in a final assault, be susceptible to defeat. One assumes that this cannot happen, because of Israel's nuclear capability. But Israel may not get a chance to use those weapons, or it may be too late, or the Muslim powers arrayed against it may think the nuclear weapons it does manage to drop will cause casualties, but in the grand Islamic scheme of things, it will be well worth it to wipe out the Jewish sovereign state that is such an affront to Muslim sensibilties -- smack dab in the middle of dar al-Islam.

That is why, if peace is to be preserved, any further "peace process" is to be avoided. Let Israel be so overwhelmingly strong -- and seen to be by the Arabs and other Muslims -- that they, in turn, may with their excitable, even hysterical populations, clamoring for war whenever a glance at the map leads them to believe it might succeed, invoke the doctrine of darura, or necessity. King Hussein of Jordan wanted to stay out of the 1967 war, but Nasser spoke of great Egyptian victories (in that famous, and famously taped, phone call), and King Hussein was unable to invoke the excuse of "darura" to stay out of the fray, and that is how he lost the "West Bank" (known to Jesus Christ, among others, as Judea and Samaria).

As for the other part of Powell's remark -- the "war on terrorism" -- that little phrase just has to go. For it cannot be repeated too often: if all we care about is ending terrorism, then we apparently can have no objection to, or make the preventing of it a central goal of our policy, the islamization of Europe. But stop it we must, and use all of our energy and cunning and resources to do so -- and if that means Bush must send out others (given how he has been depicted in the European press) to speak for this policy in his stead, so be it. What matters is that the European climate be changed, the appeasement ended, and the malign French influence, with all that silly talk about the "deux rives" of the Mediterranean -- as if the differences between the Maghreb and Europe were merely geographical, and did not involve an entire unbridgeable civilizational divide deeper and longer-lasting than any other, come to an end. It is not America, but France, that should be the odd man out. It is the insufferable Hubert Vedrine, the swanning sociologist-pretending-to-be-a-scholar-of-Islam Gilles Kepepl, the preening poseur Dominique de Villepin, and Mr. Big himself, counting his loot and enjoying the simultaneous services of three poules de luxe, Jacques Chirac, who have to be isolated, investigated, mocked, and relieved of any influence, power, or position they have, or might have. Ditto, of course, for the E.U. retinue -- Patten, Solana, Prodi et al.

And if someone says -- but "that was then, and this is now" -- point out to them that observations made about Islam 50 or 100 or 150 or 500 or 1000 or 1200 years ago remain equally valid. What is in Qur'an and hadith and sira does not change. The belief that "war is deception" -- as Muhammad says in several hadith in both Bukhari and Muslim -- has not changed. The insistence that Islam "must dominate and is not to be dominated" does not change. The insistence that Muslims must rule, and all non-Muslims either be killed, converted, or put into a status of deliberate humiliation that will confirm, at every step, their lower status -- because they are Infidels, and not Believers -- has not changed.

The ONLY things that have changed are:

1) the ability, through OPEC oil revenues, to finance mosques and madrasas and to buy huge amounts of Western arms

2) the new phenomenon, unheard-of in human history, when those carriers of a belief-system completely inimical to non-Believers in that system, are nonetheless allowed in large numbers to settle deep within the lands of those non-Believers, those Infidels -- in the Bilad al-kufr.

3) a refusal to consult the texts, or the history, of that belief-system, by those who have, through their laxity and laziness, permitted their own lands, and their own societies, and their own peoples, to create -- quite unnecessarily -- a threat to themselves which, already, has created a world far more unpleasant, constrained, expensive, and physically dangerous than it would have been, had the elites of Europe (and above all of France, which possesses the most self-deluded and simultaneously self-assured ruling class, the products of a narrow examination system, and of an assumed "understanding" -- presumably born of French rule in North Africa -- that actually is no "understanding" at all, because the real French scholars of Islam who profited from its rule, and did understand Islam -- Edmond Fagnan, Bousquet, Dufourcq, and even that precursor of Sania Hamady and Raphael Patai, Andre Servier -- are long dead, and have been studiously ignored.

Meanwhile, a fool like Gilles Kepel, really a sociologist offering up a gallimaufry of observations that make him a handmaiden of Tariq Ramadan -- with his bright little predictions of a kindler, gentler "European" Islam -- what can he be thinking of? based on what texts? and on what historical parallels -- oh, the "convivencia" of Andaluz, and similar romantic tales? -- swans about the Sorbonne, and attends conferences, and is solemnly treated as an experts. Dufourcq, Abel, Fagnan, Bousquet, and so many others -- or rather, their shades -- must be rolling their eyes in haughty disbelief.

As long ago as 1988, the French writer Jacques Ellul complained that "it is not possible to criticize Islam" any longer in France. Think of what has happened since 1988, with the steady rise of Muslim power, and Arab hirelings (Chirac, let me repeat, has been a recipient of Arab favors of the most obvious kind for more than two decades -- one would still like to know more about that jewel-encrusted falcon he received from Arab admirers, a little tribute for his services rendered -- another one was made for Bouygues, or some French contractor doing business in the Gulf -- a kind of "Kniphausen Hawk" -- see the Chatsworth Collection of the Dukes of Devonshire, a la francaise). Le Monde prevented Peroncel Hugoz from continuing to write about Islam (oh, but you can read him on travelling to Portugal whenever you want), because he was too acute, too understanding ("The Raft of Muhammad" though it is out of print, is still available, and worth it).

Just as policymakers in Washington have still neglected to brush up on the letters of Gertrure Bell, or the best book on modern Iraq -- written in 1939 -- Philip Ireland's Iraq -- so they, and those in Europe who were supposed to worry about immigration matters, have all failed to find out what this strange thing called "Islam" is all about. They have not really thought through what Muslims are taught to believe (some may reject those teachings, or not take them quite so seriously, or live in a country where the mosques are monitored, as Turkey, but that does not mean that the canonical texts do not, if uncensored, lead inexorably to inclucating a hostlity, even a murderous hostility combined with contempt, toward all non-Muslims).

How about a little retreat for everyone in the State and Defense Departments? We pass out copies of Peroncel Hugoz, and Ibn Warraq, and Bat Ye'or, and a large number of articles, taken from the most meticulous scholars of Islam (no, I'm afraid John Esposito will not make the cut, nor many of his friends and fellow apologsts). Then a few lectures -- bring in Ibn Warraq and Ali Sina and Bat Ye'or. Yes, Muslims will be offended if such takes place -- but so what?

Eventually, there is going to have to be a meeting of NATO Defense MInisters to discuss the threat of European Muslim populations, and their ability to rise in the local security and military services, and the possible danger of their acquiring access to major weaponry. This is no joke, no hypothetical.

So whether such meetings offend or not, they had best be taking place now, not in 10 or 20 years. The West, let it be repeated, owes the Muslim world exactly nothing. The West has no need to commit suicide. Everyone can recognize things that are wrong with our own countries -- god, we could fill up 26 volumes, could we not, with our complaints -- beginning with the collapse of higher education, and celebrity worship, and the idiocy of modern musical lyrics, and ....no, there's no time to go on. But that should not be first in our minds -- this impulse to believe that " everyone is the same, we all want the same things, all cultures and belief-systems are of equal value and significance." This is a Western cult, with its high priests and sacred rigmarole, called by some "multiculturalism." But since that word is so deplorable, too deplorable even to be used in order to deplore it, kindly overlook the fact that it has been used here. And may the Gods of the Lexicon -- Webster, Littre, Dal', Henry Fowler -- forgive me.