Daniel Greenfield article:
Competing for Islam's Favor Against Ourselves

Competing for Islam's Favor Against Ourselves

Posted: 21 Apr 2010 08:02 PM PDT

WWI was caused less by the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand,
and more by Germany and Austria Hungary's eagerness to appease the Muslim
Ottoman Empire. Before and during WW2, England and Germany both
assiduously courted Muslim support in the Middle East. The Holocaust was
one of the byproducts of this rivalry, as Germany courted Arab Muslims by
appealing to the genocidal impulses of the likes of the Mufti of
Jerusalem, while England courted them by reneging its agreements, and
shutting the door to Jewish refugees trying to flee Europe for Israel.
While the Holocaust would have happened regardless, it is likely that the
death toll would have been significantly lower, without the presence of
Islam in the equation.

After the war nothing changed
much, except the names of the players. The competition itself however
still went on. Instead of England and Germany competing for Islam's favor,
it was not the US and the USSR. Both sides cultivated patron Muslim
countries, spent and lost huge sums of money on them, and then got a knife
in the back for it, time and time again.

The US courted Saudi
Arabia under the fanatical rule of the House of Saud, America's oldest
partner in the region. In return the Saudi royal family nationalized
American oil companies (for which the US government compensated the
companies with taxpayer dollars) and then used that money to fund a global
Jihad, while the royals incidentally began buying up major chunks of
America. 9/11 was only the topper on a large poisonous cake that had been
baking in the febrile heat of the Saudi desert for a long time, as
petrodollars fed fanatical Islamic pre-medieval beliefs that had been
growing steadily more arrogant and insane in direct proportion to the
amount of wealth flowing in.

The USSR tried to export Communism,
but had to settle for backing the likes of Egyptian dictator Nasser,
despite his casual slaughter of domestic Communists. The heap of
corruption in Cairo was considered such a great prize that both the US and
the USSR competed feverishly for it. The US betrayed England, France and
Israel in 1956 by backing Nasser's seizure of the Suez Canal and forcing
their withdrawal through economic blackmail, an act that Eisenhower would
later admit he deeply regretted. Nevertheless Nasser threw in with the
USSR, which was the most willing to pile on the weapons
exports.

But devotees of happy endings will be glad to hear that
after losing several wars with those same weapons, the United States
finally won the bidding war for one slightly used alliance with Egypt. At
a cost of only a few billion dollars a year and turning a blind eye to the
persecution of Christian Copts. And things have never been better. The
Obama Administration recently slashed funds for promoting democracy in
Egypt by 50 percent off. Which is a discount when you think about it,
because 50 percent off Egyptian democracy is a bargain, when you consider
that it's an item much harder to find than platinum or gold.

When
Obama visited Egypt's Al Azhar University, he naturally made sure to
praise it as a source of knowledge and enlightenment. He may or may not
have had in mind one
Al Azhar scholar who issued a Fatwa which said that a grown man and
woman could be alone together, only if she breastfeeds him first. (This
sort of radical reformism would not fly in Iran, where students of
different sexes studying together are required to get temporarily married
first, a procedure also used to legalize prostitute. One can only imagine
what European educational systems will look like under Islam.)

But
while the breastfeeding Fatwa may seem ridiculous, Al Azhar University is
also the source of far less humorous fatwas. It also happens to be a source of
terrorism and Islamic extremism. But don't worry about your tax
dollars going to indirectly fund terrorism. At least not if you're
British, because then your tax dollars are going directly to Al Azhar
University, to run the The Al-Azhar English Training Centre (AAETC), whose
mission is to "give students the skills to "discuss and explain
Islam". It is certainly generous of British taxpayers to be forced to
underwrite training for Muslim missionaries, because the "Captain Hooks"
of tomorrow can't be expected to set up shop in Manchester with no English
skills. But this program nevertheless needs to be praised for trying to
teach Al Azhar graduates to promote Islam by speaking to people, instead
of blowing them up or chopping off their heads.

This is what courting Islam looks
like. A flattering speech here and there. Loose immigration policies. A
terrorist set free by the British government in exchange for an oil deal.
The US government turning a blind eye to Saudi Arabia and the UAE's role
in terrorism in exchange for more oil deals. The French government shaking
its fist a little at a few rogue imams and then quieting down, hoping that
the 5 million Muslims got the message, and will try and keep the car
burning down on weekends, and then promoting a Mediterranean alliance,
just as Russia is promoting a Bosporus alliance-- as if Muslims would
allow themselves to be ruled by non-Muslims for very long.

Madness?
No, competition. The Muslim world has a lot of oil and a lot of people,
and Western governments want the former, while keeping the latter
peaceable. And that means competing for Islam's favor with each other,
with the newly resurgent Russia which is back to its old ways of shipping
weapons by the fleet, China which is feeling its global oats and poking
its head well beyond its borders now-- but mostly the Muslims
themselves.

Before WW1, Western European nations were competing
with each other for the favor of Muslim rulers. Before WW2, England and
Germany were competing for the favor of Muslim rulers with each other.
During the Cold War, the US and the USSR were competing for the favor of
Muslim rulers. But today the remnants of the civilized world are competing
for the favor of Muslims, against the Muslims. In effect we're bidding up
against ourselves. Because the big threat today is no longer Western, it's
Islamic. The old competition was about forming alliances with the Muslim
world against the enemy of the day. Today the enemy of the day is Muslim.
That phantom menace we call "Islamic Extremism" if we're feeling terribly
politically correct, and "Islam" if we're not.

If the old rivalries
at least provided some rational justification for this gamesmanship, today
it's more like holding up a sign reading, "We're nice. Please don't kill
us." On paper we're competing to uphold "moderate" Muslim regimes against
the Islamists who would otherwise take over. Which means we're competing
with the Islamists to win the favor of Muslim rulers and populations. This
is considered Realpolitik. Meanwhile the left argues that we're only
upholding dictators, and that if we stopped supporting them, the people
would overthrown them, stop hating us and form socialist republics. The
last time this was tried, the Carter Administration gave us
Iran.

But of course this is only two sides of the same insane coin.
Either we pacify the dictators, who already support Islamic terrorism, so
that the real awful Islamist dictators won't come to power... and then
really support terrorism. Or we overthrow the dictators, and let the real
awful Islamist dictators come to power, because maybe they're not so bad
after all. Maybe we can have an oil deal with them. And train some of them
to explain Islam to us in good English, hopefully without chopping our
heads off first.

And that right there is the problem. Our foreign
policy is a debate between the realists who want appeasement, and the
lunatics who think the natural outcome of every revolution is socialism,
and even when it isn't (as in the case of Iran) they'll pretend it is
anyway to avoid looking as stupid as they should feel. Of course there's
always a third option, and I don't mean invading them, rebuilding them,
and then withdrawing in time for them to adopt Sharia law. Stop competing.
Stop courting the good opinion of a backward ideology that still thinks
women are a form of inconvenient bacteria and that non-Muslims should
always defer to Muslims. Stop pandering to them. Stop bowing and scraping
to them. Stop giving them weapons, visas and then wondering what happens
when the bombs begin going off.

Once upon a time we competed against
each other, today we're courting one side of the Muslim world's
schizophrenic split personality, against the other side. We approach the
two-headed hound of Islam, and then argue over which head we should pat
first, to keep the beast from biting us. It's all one beast. And feeding
scraps to one head or the other, won't win us anything except more bites.
The thing to do is to stop feeding the beast and stop being under the
impression that there's more than one hound in question. It's all one
animal. And it hates us. And it will go on hating us. And it will go on
biting us for as long as we let it.

We are no longer bidding for
the Muslim world as an ally. We are bidding to prevent it from being our
enemy. But the problem is that the very people we're bidding for, already
see us as the enemy. We are not going to change that with free English
lessons, weapons and speeches praising their enlightenment, and clapping
with delight when one of their clerics sorta suggests that terrorism is
probably wrong. We're not children and we're not cowards, and we should
stop acting like both. By competing for Muslim favor, we are only bidding
ourselves, and paying up to the very people who are our enemies. By
competing for their favor, we are only undercutting ourselves.