Note from Robert Spencer:
The illustrious and deservedly beloved Hugh Fitzgerald has sent me this precise, perceptive, and courageous address by Singapore's Prime Minister Goh Chok Tong. Notes Hugh: "Goh Chok Tong has given no indication of being a devout follower of Pat Robertson. Nor is there any record of his changing his name from something reminiscent of Perle or Wolfowitz... He does, however, live between Malaysia and Singapore, and has a lifetime of experience with Islam."

Ethelred Note: It is a must to read the whole speech!

Nor can one endorse Go Chok Tong's expressed belief that the current sisyphean undertaking in Iraq (as opposed to the essential disarming of Iraq, which also had the unintended consequence of getting Libya to yield up its secrets, and most -- not all -- of its weapons), is as important as he makes it out to be. It is not self-evident that any further stay in Iraq is the best allocation of men, materiel, money, and attention. Perhaps he was being a gracious guest in Washington. Perhaps he allows himself to believe that the problem of the Muslim countries is lack of democracy, without further inquiring if there is something in the nature of Islam itself that makes democracy untenable for long. Could it be that the problem of the Muslim coutnries is -- Islam?

And in any case, as the example of Turkey shows, even quasi-democracy requires several decades of preparatory secularisation. Ataturk was a semi-enlightened despot, who tackled Islam and the ulema head on, and everything he did was intended to constrain and limit the practice of Islam, from the Hat Act to replacing Arabic with Latin script, to supporting female suffrage, to discriminating against those who had received Muslim schooling from rising in the army or in government service. That could only be done from within Turkey, by an enlightened despot sure of himself, and with the aura of military hero to protect and sustain him. Had British troops tried to do what Ataturk did, it would never have worked.

Surely Go Chok Tong knows that the most important thing now is to bomb Iranian nuclear installations. It would be both stupid and cruel to wait for Israel to do it; how much more must Israel be expected to do for the Infidel world, given the way that Infidel world treats it? This is a task for the United States. And that can be done with much greater ease if Iraq does not continue to soak up all of our attention, our soldiers, our tanks and Humvees and helicopters, our money.

A great deed has been done for the Iraqis. Perhaps, as they founder, some of them will realize, with a pang, just what America did for them. The removal of Saddam Hussein should, and in any non-Muslim context would, have earned undying gratitude. But we are Infidels, and not only is there no gratitude for that, but all the rest of what we have done -- the 4.5 million Iraqis who now have potable water, the thousands of schools repaired, hosptials equipped, roads and bridges and electricity grids built and re-built, repaired and re-repaired,the vast sums of American taxpayers' money being distributed madly all over the country -- for what? No, Go Chok Tong begins well, but he does not dare to see the problem as one of Islam itself. How could he -- he lives squeezed between Malaysia and Indonesia. He has to believe -- though reading between his lines one can see what he thinks -- that somehow Infidels can work with "moderate" Muslims whom, he nonetheless recognizes, share the same ideological roots as the "extremists." He still does not allow himself to come to the unavoidable conclusion: If Islam itself is the problem, and one never knows when "moderate" Muslims may metamorphose into the other kind (as they remain outwardly the same), far more drastic measures are needed.

Muslim countries should not be kept any longer on the life-support system of Western aid, disguised jizya (as in Malaysia, a country whose Bumiputra policy, by which non-Muslims must subsidize all Muslims, is well-known to Go Chok Tong), or that greatest transfer of wealth in human history-- the oligopoly rents taken in by OPEC. Foreign aid can be ended, and should be, to Egypt, to Jordan, and of course to the Palestinian Authority (there is still too much money available to buy weapons, propaganda, and so on; if 80% of the population favors, as it does, suicide bombings, then that population has transformed itself into a menace for the entire Infidel world, and nothing must be done to support it; the "Palestinian" Arabs still have too much free time on their hands, given the support from the EU and even American government aid; subsistence living should divert time and attention from suicide-bombing, rocket-launching, and similar hobbies.

Go Chok Tong does not note that the West has always had the power to recapture through taxation, beginnning in 1973, OPEC oligopoly rents. That it did not do so is a tribute to Saudi cunning, and the use of a small army of American and other Western hirelings (no need to pay the antisemites, of course -- they work for free), who managed to create an atmosphere of fog and confusion, and convinced successive administrations that Saudi Arabia was "our friend" and in any case, there was nothing to be done about OPEC prices. It was nonsense, easily demonstrated to be nonsense. One did not have to be a specialist in oil economics, Eliyahu Kanovsky or Morris Adelman, to see that ever-increasing taxes at the pump, and taxes on oil imports, could have captured most of what the Saudis and their brethren took in. That money paid for madrasas and mosques, and huge stockpiles of armaments. It now provides the wherewithal for the Jihad, a doctrine always in posse, ready to rock and roll whenever and wherever it becomes possible. What transformed the doctrine, and duty, of Jihad into its current, in-esse state, was that OPEC money. But the Arab lobby, with all those ex-ambassadors, ex-CIA agents (such names as Raymond Close, Andrew Kilgore, Eugene and Mrs. Bird, James Akins, John C. West come swimmingly to mind) and other figures of influence, throughout the West, are responsible, in their promotion of the idea that the Arabs, especially the Saudis, are our "friends" and wish us well,and can always be persuaded to do good things for us in OPEC, and that the only thing standing in the way of our "friendship" is that annoying little business of Israel. These people, in the United States and in Western Europe, have over three decades prevented any clear understanding of how OPEC's oligipoly rents could be recaptured by the Western consumers themselves.

Those agents of influence have cost us hundreds of billions of dollars that might never have left American shores, might never have been available to fund tens of thousands of madrasas and mosques all over the world. Without OPEC money, the economic and political failure of Islam might have become more apparent to Muslims themselves. Congressional committees, investigative journalists, even business schools, should be studying, researching, writing about how the West was suckered, over so long, and who helped to do the suckering, and and how cheaply, relative to what the Saudis took in, these Western agents were bought. It is an extraordinary story, one of the most amazing in the world.

In the part of the world in which he lives, Go Chok Tong cannot be completely candid. But he, like Lee Kuwan Yew, comes far closer to telling home truths about Islam than any leaders in Europe. Even if one quarrels with his proferred remedies (and one suspects that there is a good deal more he could say, and would say, but not in public), one should be grateful for this speech. How would Chris Patten explain it away?