From Ancient Appeasement to Modern Dhimmitude

[SrWoodchuck]

Pajamas Media-From Ancient Appeasement to Modern Dhimmitude

 

A review of Bruce Thornton’s The Wages of Appeasement. A timely and necessary book, as we flounder in Libya.

 

April 1, 2011 - by Andrew G. Bostom

 

Classics professor Bruce Thornton is a courageous rarity within the academy — an unabashed conservative public intellectual. Rarer still, even when one considers the full universe of conservatives overall, is Thornton’s willingness to expound upon Islam in a scholarly but uncompromised manner.

 

In The Wages of Appeasement, Thornton combines his training as a classicist with singular intellectual honesty to interweave three historical case studies of appeasement: Athens (primarily) and the other Greek city-states that Philip II of Macedon sought to conquer in the 4th century B.C.; England confronted by Nazi aggression in the 1930s; and the contemporary United States and broader West, subjected to the global hegemonic aspirations of resurgent Islam and particularly its most aggressive jihadist state sponsor, Iran.

 

Professor Thornton elucidates his thesis with elegant and remarkably compendious arguments. But prior to describing the salient features of Thornton’s presentation, given the sorry if prevailing state of jihad denial amongst our academic, policymaking, and media elites — the trahison de clercs of our era — I feel compelled (as a working academic physician) to proffer an esteemed “second” (albeit chronologically “first”) opinion by another intrepid academic, the late political scientist professor Samuel Huntington.

 

Huntington’s mid-1990s paradigm of Islam’s “bloody borders” adduces convincing hard data in support of his contention: “Wherever one looks along the perimeter of Islam, Muslims have problems living peaceably with their neighbors.” These germane observations by Huntington were confirmed — one could argue even amplified — subsequently in the wake of the cataclysmic acts of jihad terrorism against the U.S. on September 11, 2001, and their aftermath, punctuated by almost 17,000 additional jihadist attacks worldwide since 9/11:

 

The overwhelming majority of fault line conflicts … have taken place along the boundary looping across Eurasia and Africa that separates Muslims from non-Muslims.

 

…

 

Intense antagonisms and violent conflicts are pervasive between local Muslim and non-Muslim peoples.

 

…

 

Muslims make up about one-fifth of the world’s population, but in the 1990s they have been far more involved in inter-group violence than the people of any other civilization. The evidence is overwhelming. There were, in short, three times as many inter-civilizational conflicts involving Muslims as there were between non-Muslim civilizations.

 

…

 

Muslim states also have had a high propensity to resort to violence in international crises, employing it to resolve 76 crises out of a total of 142 in which they were involved between 1928 and 1979. … When they did use violence, Muslim states used high-intensity violence, resorting to full-scale war in 41 percent of the cases where violence was used and engaging in major clashes in another 39 percent of the cases. While Muslim states resorted to violence in 53.5 percent, violence was used the United Kingdom in only 1.5 percent, by the United States in 17.9 percent, and by the Soviet Union in 28.5 percent of the crises in which they were involved….

 

Muslim bellicosity and violence are late-twentieth-century facts which neither Muslims nor non-Muslims can deny.

 

Thus 15 years ago Samuel Huntington concluded appositely, and with a candor which, like Bruce Thornton’s, is now almost absent:

 

The underlying problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture.

 

 

Comparable trends within Shiite Islam produced the great ideologue and eventual religio-political leader of Iran, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, following the retrograde “Islamic revolution” of 1978-79 which simply reestablished the pre-Pahlavi era norms of the Iranian Safavid and Qajar dynasty Shiite theocracies (of 1502-1724, and 1795-1925, respectively). Khomeini, as Thornton notes, was remarkably forthright and consistent in his calls for jihad to subjugate the infidel, dating back to at least this 1942 statement:

 

Those who study jihad will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world. All the countries conquered by Islam or to be conquered in the future will be marked for everlasting salvation. For they shall live under Allah’s law (Sharia). … Islam says: “Kill [the non-Muslims], put them to the sword and scatter their armies.” Islam says: “Whatever good there is exists thanks to the sword and in the shadow of the sword! People cannot be made obedient except with the sword! The sword is the key to paradise, which can be opened only for holy warriors (jihadists)!” There are hundreds of other Koranic psalms and hadiths (sayings of the prophet) urging Muslims to value war and to fight. Does all that mean that Islam is a religion that prevents men from waging war? I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim. … Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless."

 

Khomeini, Thornton emphasizes, reiterated these views upon assuming power:

 

The great prophet of Islam carried in one hand the Koran and in the other a sword; the sword for crushing the traitors and the Koran for guidance. … Islam is a religion of blood for the infidels but a religion of guidance for other people. … We shall export our revolution to the whole world. Until the cry “There is no God but God” resounds over the whole world, there will be struggle.

 

 

Ominously, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of reestablishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data released April 24, 2007 — from a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007, of 1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians — reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”). This included 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved a proposition: “To require a strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

[Valin]

Appeasement with Bruce Thornton Uncommon Knowledge

[SrWoodchuck]

Appeasement with Bruce Thornton Uncommon Knowledge

Valin!

 

As usual you were way ahead of me........with moving pictures no less! Bump to your posting prowess.

[Valin]

 

 

Ominously, the preponderance of contemporary mainstream Muslims from Morocco to Indonesia apparently share with their murderous, jihad terror waging co-religionists from al-Qaeda the goal (if not necessarily supporting the gruesome means) of reestablishing an Islamic Caliphate. Polling data released April 24, 2007 — from a rigorously conducted face-to-face University of Maryland/WorldPublicOpinion.org interview survey of 4384 Muslims conducted between December 9, 2006 and February 15, 2007, of 1000 Moroccans, 1000 Egyptians, 1243 Pakistanis, and 1141 Indonesians — reveal that 65.2% of those interviewed desired this outcome (i.e., “To unify all Islamic countries into a single Islamic state or Caliphate”). This included 49% of “moderate” Indonesian Muslims. The internal validity of these data about the present longing for a Caliphate is strongly suggested by a concordant result: 65.5% of this Muslim sample approved a proposition: “To require a strict application of Shari’a law in every Islamic country.”

 

 

Did they ask these people to explain just what they meant by Shari’a law? One might be surprised at the answer I would guess.