The Dark Side of the Muslim Mind
By Alan Caruba (02/10/03)
In the first Star Wars film, Ben Kenobi, the old Jedi knight, tells young Luke Skywalker that Darth Vader had given himself over to the dark side of the Force, putting himself in service to the evil Galactic Empire. When seven other 'sky walkers,' our astronauts, died there were news dispatches about the immediate reaction in Baghdad. The responses reported tell us a lot about the Muslim mind.
"God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. God is avenging us," said a government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi. Noting that Israeli air force Col. Ilan Ramon was among the dead, a car mechanic, Mohammed Jaber al-Tamini, said, "Israel launched an aggression on us when it raided our nuclear reactor without any reason, now time has come and God has retaliated to their aggression."
In London, Abu Hamza al-Masri, a Muslim cleric wanted in Yemen on terror charges related to the bombing of the USS Cole, said that the shuttle's loss was "a sign from God," adding that it represented "a trinity of evil because it carried Americans, an Israeli and a Hindu." It is unwise to dismiss such rabid nonsense too quickly because it reflects a broad base of comparable thought among Muslims determined to harm the United States and other nations.
Let it be said that, among Muslims, there are those who are calling for reform, for a self-examination of those ways of thinking that have kept Muslims from instituting changes in education, in the way they treat women, and in the way they perceive the world. Nor is Islam the same everywhere in the world. In this analysis, the many shades of gray will fade against the necessary judgement of good and evil.
There are surely many good Muslims, but their voices are a tiny minority, vastly overwhelmed by the so-called 'Arab street,' a name applied to those Muslims for whom the strict interpretation of Wahhabism poses the threat to the Western world. We know there is cause for fear and cause to destroy this form of Islam. IWahhabism is fostered and paid for by the Saudis. This remains their fixed goal to impose this puritanical form of Islam on the world.
Thus, standing against the voices of modernity is a huge psychological wall of resistance. It is to be found in the hundreds of thousands of mosques and madrasses that teach nothing more than the word of the Koran, a book held to be holy and immutable by Muslims. In Middle Eastern nations in particular, their most formative years are determined by the mastery of the Koran.
For the true believer, the Muslim's world is bounded by strict laws requiring their submission to the dictates of the Koran and the Hadith, the traditions based on interpretations of Mohammed's life and its meaning for the way life must be lived. When there is any doubt of interpretation, a Muslim asks a local Koranic cleric. Life is not lived outside of the Koran and, for those outside of Islam who have read it, the Koran in effect authorizes almost any act of barbarity done in the name of Allah. It draws its dictates from the seventh century world of desert tribes, constantly at war with one another, a world of slaves, concubines, and booty.
This is why educated Saudis and others could commandeer four commercial airplanes and crash them into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and attempt to do the same with either the Capitol Building or the White House. Nothing in their knowledge and experience of the modern world kept them from their 'sacred' mission. Nothing short of extreme vigilance will deter others who share their beliefs.
Over and over again, Muslims are reassured that their pathetic position in the world will be reversed by the will of Allah. "Don't be sad, Allah is with us." When Europe is conquered, India will be next, and so on. A Sudanese Sheik, preaching in Khartoum, told his followers, 'The Prophet said that the Muslims would take India, saying "Allah saved two groups of my nation from the fire of Hell: one group that attack India and a second group that would be with Jesus the son of Mary [in the battle of Judgement Day.]" To this day, India remains divided between its Hindu and Muslim populations and threatened by Muslim Pakistan, a nation carved out to be a homeland for the Muslims who fled India when it gained independence.
As Daniel Pipes, one of the leading authorities on Islam, has written, "While most Muslims are not Islamists, all Islamist terrorists are Muslims. Islamic terrorists do not appear spontaneously, but emerge from a milieu of religious sanction, intellectual justification, financial support and organizational planning."
That is why, despite official denials, we are engaged in a religious war and it frankly does not matter whether we wage it in Afghanistan or Iraq, Iran or Indonesia or here in America.
Everything about the American character and creed opposes the kind of scrutiny and actions that must be taken to protect our nation against the handful of Islamic fanatics capable of wholesale mass murder in the name of Allah. Everything about our culture resists having to make war far from our home to bring about an end to a Muslim mindset that justifies killing Americans because we are Americans.
It is this Muslim mindset that has made it impossible to achieve any kind of peace in Israel, a nation that rose from the ashes of the European Holocaust that deliberately killed six million Jews in the last century, gathering them in from the conquered nations of that continent for slaughter. For fifty-four years, the Israelis have striven to find a measure of peace with the Arabs within and beyond their borders. Now they wage their own war to secure their lives against an implacable enemy. Their enemy is our enemy.
This is the new Crusade. It is a war against the Dark Side of Islam, Wahhabism; a religion based on conquest by the sword or any other means.
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