For example, on November 23, 2009, round about Thanksgiving (a non-Muslim holiday and thus one Muslims are instructed not to observe), Laurie Goodstein published a piece entitled "Three Clergyman, Three Faiths, One Friendship." The title alone promises naive nonsense. The loaded phrase of "three faiths" - seemingly so neutral, so innocent -- must cause your heart to sink, as it caused mine. You steel yourself, don't you, perhaps taking a walk around the kitchen, before actually plunging into the promised idiocy. And you think of Laurie Goodstein writing this stuff, and her editors vetting this stuff, and the readers, the unwary and ill-prepared readers, that is, being subject to this deeply sinister stuff.

And here is Laurie Goodman in "Three Clergymen, Three Faiths, One Friendship" article:

What distinguishes the "amigos," who live in Seattle but make presentations around the country, is a unique approach to what they call "the spirituality of interfaith relations." At the church in Nashville, the three clergymen, dressed in dark blazers, stood up one by one and declared what they most valued as the core teachings of their tradition The minister said "unconditional love." The sheik said "compassion." And the rabbi said "oneness."

The room then grew quiet as each stood and recited what he regarded as the "untruths" in his own faith. The minister said that one "untruth" for him was that "Christianity is the only way to God." The rabbi said for him it was the notion of Jews as "the chosen people." And the sheik said for him it was the "sword verses" in the Koran, like "kill the unbeliever."

"It is a verse taken out of context," Sheik Rahman said, pointing out that the previous verse says that God has no love for aggressors. "But we have to acknowledge that 'kill the unbelievers' is an awkward verse,' " the sheik said as the crowd laughed. "Some verses are literal, some are metaphorical, but the Koran doesn't say which is which."....

As the crowd laughed.

And a good time was had by all. And Laurie Goodstein has refrained from informing us as to whether that "awkward verse" is in fact ever taken as metaphorical by Muslims, or whether they receive it -- Reader Response is not just for MLA papers anymore -- as literal. And surely that is important. Why didn't she? Some try, as Sheik Rahman did, to confuse unwary Infidels, in this case not by hiding the verse, but by deliberately quoting it, and in so doing, making his audience think that of course it cannot possibly mean what it appears to mean, for if it did, he -- Sheik Rahman -- would certainly not quote it, would he? In this case, and in so many others, the audience apparently has failed to understand the most obvious trick in the book. When you know that sooner or later, one way or another, your audience is going to find out about something despite your best efforts to prevent that, you might as well give it to them yourself, and at the same time provide such a mountebank's accompanying patter-and-chatter that the "reception" of that new information will be molded by Groupthink, as it was in this case: "As the crowd laughed."

And that is how, in this telling case, Rahman, the Muslim amigo, handled, or rather manipulated, his Christian amigo, and his Jewish amigo, and all his mainly potential amigos laughing away in the audience.

Rahman is a Sufi, and from Bangladesh, the son of a Bangladeshi diplomat. For all I know he may well be one of the Muslim handful of "nonviolent extremists" - that is, at the very far, and completely unrepresentative end of the spectrum. But being a Sufi means nothing as far as peace and tolerance and so on go; it describes a manner of worship, and not the contents of belief. Many Sufis have engaged in violent Jihad over the past 1350 years, and some of the most dangerous Muslim groups, such as the Deobandis, are Sufis.

But whatever Imam Rahman really is, or whatever his own position, he clearly misstates and misrepresents what is in the Qur'an and what 99% of Muslims take to be the meaning of that phrase, and of another hundred Jihad phrases, in the Qur'an. In other words, whether or not he himself would engage or even approve of Jihad through qital (conventional warfare) or terrorism (which Muslims regard not as we do, but as a justified means to "even out" the playing-fields of war since Infidels now enjoy military superiority), Rahman is conducting Jihad of the "pen, tongue."

In early August of this year, Laurie Goodstein wrote another article about Muslims in America. This was as heartwarming as the "three amigos" one: it was all about nine Muslims in America who had taken it upon themselves to make a video as part of what Goodstein credulously reported, without a syllable expressed of possible doubt, as an effort to appeal to fellow American Muslims to abjure "extremism." Unfortunately Laurie Goodstein apparently did not look into a single one of the nine. She did not do even the kind of research any of us could and would do were we covering such a story, which is simply to look into the nine Muslims who claimed to be working against "extremism" and doing their bit. Shouldn't it be the duty of a reporter to find out what the views of these people, their previous works and days, insofar as the information is relevant to their having a hand in a video that counsels against "extremism" -- what kind of "extremism"? "Extremism" by whom, against whom? None of this matters to Laurie Goodstein. One wonders just how taxing her job must be, when she only has to write a story or two a week, and can't be bothered, apparently, even to do the most elementary checking, to see if there is anything that might illuminate further the story for her readers.

And what about her layers upon layers of editors, at that famously self-celebratory "newspaper of record" (whatever that phrase means or could mean nowadays), that is, The New York Times, those editors who presumably read and re-read, meticulously, Goodstein's story about the nine American Muslims who made the video?

Why did they not find out what Robert Spencer discovered quite quickly and posted urbi et orbi? That was the question I posted in discussing what Spencer had so quickly discovered, what Goodstein had apparently never discovered, and what The New York Times, I felt, now had a journalistic duty to supply to its readers.

Here is what I wrote more than a month ago, on August 2, 2010. Neither The New York Times, nor Laurie Goodstein, has seen fit to correct the record about these nine men:

If only those who write for The New York Times, such as Laurie Goodstein, could understand that they have a responsibility not to credulously accept such efforts as this transparent propaganda video at face-value, but to find out about the Muslims who actually appear on it, as is done here. Read what The New York Times reported about this video, under the title "Muslims Make Video to Rebut Militants." That title parrots exactly the Muslim line that this is a heartfelt attempt to "rebut militants" rather than what it in truth is, a video in the main directed not at Muslims but at non-Muslims. It is an effort to show non-Muslims that "we, the Muslims in America, are doing the right thing, taking the right stand, and you'd better take note of this and not question the efficacy or the omissions in our video, you'd better be more than satisfied, and stop suspecting us, or else."

If you read Laurie Goodstein's article, you would remain entirely in the dark about those who took part in it. And since you would not have been informed about the religiously-sanctioned doctrines of Taqiyya and Kitman, and you might not be as suspicious as anyone who has either studied Islam and the (mis)representation of Islam or lived as a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim-ruled country, you might not question that report.

But now that Robert Spencer has set out here, for easy reference, some of the unsavory connections and self-damning remarks, and examples of blatant lying about the contents of the Qur'an, and what Islam inculcates. He has set out, even so a reporter for The New York Times can understand, what the Taqiyya Nine -- Suhaib Webb, and Maher Hathout, and Ihsan Bagby, and Mohamad Magid, and Zaid Shakir, and Jamal Badawi, and Hamza Yusuf (who is shown in a photograph, with three prayer rugs, one already turned Mecca-wards, and a bookshelf full of row upon grim row of Islamic books) and Yasir Qadhi -- are truly all about.

Now The New York Times has a choice.

It can do a follow-up story, in which the reporter takes the information about these nine people, listed one by one above, with information about them, and quotations by them, and that reporter then investigates, studies the evidence that such remarks were made, that such connections can be made.

And then that reporter should report both what is given by Robert in the article above, and what those nine figures say to him when asked to explain those remarks.

Otherwise The New York Times will be guilty of having participated in a transparent fraud, in what for those who are knowledgeable appears unambiguously to be a fraudulent and, for the wellbeing of this country, and its citizens, a dangerous effort.

I do not know, and I hate to think, of how the New York Times covered the propagandists for Fascists and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. Why, no sooner had Mussolini made his March on Rome, and the Ventennio just started, than a certain Count Constantini was telling the society ladies of Boston about how wonderful that splendid fellow and his wonderful Blackshirts were: "Tells Mussolini's aims and progress; Count Constantini Speaks at the Chilton Club Italy's leader Has Won Whole Nation's Confidence, He Says." (Boston Daily Globe. Jan 16, 1923, p. 13)

And of course the Germans could count on such people as Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Harvard Class of 1909, and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club (both biographical details are important, and would come in handy for Hanfstaengl, and for Hitler, later on), and others, so well connected to America's ruling circles at that time. Why, so many were classmates. They arrived on these shores to spread misinformation about Herr Hitler and his National Socialist program. And within this country, Fritz Kuhn's Bund was also doing yeoman's service as it stood up for Hitler and wailed about the injustices done to Germany which he, Herr Hitler, had protested. And wasn't it right and proper that the "Sudeteners" (never "the Sudeten Germans") should be given "self-determination" (the Wilsonian phrase that nowadays has been distorted and misapplied to the case of the local Arabs, the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, who for obvious propaganda purposes -- when such propaganda became necessary after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War -- were carefully renamed as "the Palestinian people")?

Now The New York Times has reported, without a scintilla of skepticism, about this effort to "refute" the "militants." And not a syllable of Goodstein's sober prose is devoted to actually reporting on any of the views expressed elsewhere by these nine people who made this video elsewhere - views about America, about the political and legal institutions of the Infidel nation-state of America, about Jews and the "myth" of the Holocaust, or about what they see as the right role, and right goals, for Muslims now living in this country. There is nothing about the company they keep, or about their very own heartfelt expressions, made mostly to fellow Muslims, and mostly earlier, before they realized that they had to go into full taqiyya-and-kitman mode.

Will the New York Times publish a follow-up account, based on the information even cats and dogs can now acquire, if they only have a computer, and a little time?

Many Muslims, and their unthinking supporters, believe that they can intimidate well-prepared critics of Islam, or of mosques being built hither and yon, by shrill cries about "freedom of religion" when Islam is, in the main, quite unlike any other religion. It is a Total Belief-System that in large part makes political and geopolitical claims, the claims of Allah to the whole world, that is, the claim or insistence that Islam must everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

And if "freedom of religion" is a red herring, so is this absurd cry about "racism" that is flung about, as if Islam, an ideology, can be compared to a "race," and Muslims forever be entitled to hide behind that cry of "racism" even where it so obviously does not apply. There is a "racism," however, that does apply - and that is the "racist" sense of superiority exhibited by Muslim Arabs against non-Muslim Arabs. For Islam, despite its universalist claims, is and has been a vehicle for Arab supremacism, in the ways I have many times discussed here.

No one should be embarrassed, much less apologetic, for daring to consider the evidence of his senses - that is, the Jihad news that mounts and mounts, from all over the world, and especially that which demonstrates the cruel treatment of non-Muslims by Muslims wherever Muslims rule, save in a handful of cases where special circumstances have allowed for a taming or constraining - possibly temporary - of Islam, as in Kazakhstan or Kemalist Turkey. Nor should we be apologetic about becoming aware of the evidence provided in books, rather than newspaper dispatches, by the historians of Islamic conquest: that is, the 1350-year history of the conquest of non-Muslim lands, and the subsequent subjugation of the autochthonous non-Muslims. And we should be unapologetic about reading the scholars of Islam, such as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Arthur Jeffery, and dozens of others, who wrote before Arab money and influence and other factors aided the Muslim takeover of many academic departments in the West having to do with Islam and related studies. And finally, we can read Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Nonie Darwish, and a growing list of other Defectors from the Army of Islam, whose articulate works, whose morally and intellectually advanced temoignages, can be compared with the deceit practiced by those listed as participating in the Feelgood video that is given such credulous treatment by the New York Times reporter, and by those who vetted, but did not change, the story about the "Muslim video."

The West is now imperiled in a way unique in its history, mostly from an ideological pressure brought from within, and not by military pressure from without. Not everyone thinks we should simply throw up our hands and wail "but what can we do?" and "there's nothing to be done." There are those who are not, sometimes out of a mere want of imagination and intellect, able to figure out the many things that they could legitimately and rationally do to preserve (and perhaps even extend) the civilisational legacy they inherited. But there are also those who wish to protect it from its present-day most dangerous enemies, those who have not lost their senses, those who refuse to make burnt offerings of themselves or their children on the Altars of the Idols of the Age, Tolerance and Diversity - a limitless and unintelligent and even suicidal "Tolerance," a diseased conception of "Diversity." The latter group must regard with alarm and disgust the irresponsibility of The New York Times.

The irresponsibility of a great part of the media is beginning to alarm, beginning to disgust. Nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and several decades after the slow but steady growth, seemingly unstoppable, of the Muslim presence in the historic heart of the West, the countries of western Europe, and after these great and costly and squandering military-cum-reconstruction efforts first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, how much do we in the United States need to rely on The New York Times. Does anybody, anymore, still "rely" on the New York Times after the display of its non-coverage of Islam? How often, in the New York Times, have you seen any intelligent discussion or explanation of what the word "Sunnah" means? Have you had any inkling of what the Hadith are, or what the different collections of Hadith are, or how individual Hadith have been ranked as to presumed "authenticity," or even how the different muhaddithin are regarded, and why Bukhari and Muslim stand above all the rest? Have you been informed properly by The New York Times as to what is in the Qur'an concerning Unbelievers? Have you seen, in the pages of The New York Times, even a single mention of the murders of Abu Afak and of Asma bint Marwan, or about what happened at the Khaybar Oasis and why, or about what Muhammad did when the 600-900 members of the Banu Qurayza, taken prisoner and bound, were decapitated? Have you ever, even once, in the pages of The New York Times, read anything about little Aisha, and why virtually the first act of that learned theologian, the Ayatollah Khomeini, when he came to power, was to reduce the marriageable age of girls to nine years?

Oh, I could fill up the page and printer, and so could you, with what The New York Times has, in nearly a decade, chosen not to tell its readers, willfully refused to enlighten them about -- that is, the ideology and the practice of Islam. And this is curious, because the best way to convince the public to support what the New York Times supports - a pullout from Iraq and Afghanistan - is to make them more aware of what Islam inculcates, what Islam contains, what Islam means.

It is wrong, it is unjust, it is cruel to its readers, it is dangerous, it is a dereliction of journalistic duty, for those reporters and editors on the New York Times, to sanction this deception by their inattention, their nonchalance amounting to criminal negligence, their unwillingness to dig just a little bit on such things as the real views behind the for-the-camera smiles and wiles of those Nine Supernumeraries of Islam who took part in this video charade, this tableau-vivant of taqiyya-suffused viciousness. Those reporters and editors are doing what The New York Times, in its embarrassing history, did in the past to aid and abet propagandists for totalitarian ideologies - including one of its most famous reporters, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for his efforts at hiding the reality of the famine-ravaged Ukraine.

This time it is not Walter Duranty, doing his best for Joseph Stalin. Nor is it some suave mustachioed well-tailored Count Constantini talking to untouchable Brahmin wives at the Chilton Club on Beacon Street. And this time it isn't Ernst Hanfstaengl telling his old classmates from the Harvard Class of '09 - perhaps even some fellow members of the Hasty Pudding Club, with whom good old Putzi may have high-kicked-it in drag for one of those Hasty Pudding Theatricals -- about how Hitler was merely a useful tool of Krupp and Thyssen, a tool to beat back the Bolsheviks, and in America they had nothing to worry about, for the National Socialists just wanted to get Germany back on its feet, to give it its self-respect. No, this time it is another Total Belief-System, with many similarities to the totalitarian ideologies of the previous unappetizing centuries, and another set of adherents to an ideology that flatly contradicts, in letter and spirit, the American Constitution and everything else that makes America America. Adherents who want to make sure we do not find out much about the ideology of Islam, or about those who work to undermine the legal and political institutions of this country.

Let's all wait right here -- at this very website, Jihad Watch -- and see if The New York Times will indeed, under the circumstances, feel it has an obligation to run another story, a follow-up, where the information presented above about the nine participants in this video - most of them well-versed in the arts of taqiyya and kitman - is no longer omitted, but becomes the very subject of the story.

Perhaps you'd like to make a wager on what The New York Times will do.

So go ahead. Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs. And do it fast, because any moment now the croupier at this website is going to announce that "les jeux sont faits."

And les jeux sont faits, for many Americans, in another sense. Yes, for many of us, when it comes to trying to get people to meet their responsibilities and report adequately on the contents of Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and to analyze truthfully the content of Muslim propaganda and campaigns of Da'wa, for us les jeux sont faits, which in English means -- the chips are down.

And when those chips are really down in every sense, who will be there to defend the political and legal institutions of this country, its social understandings, its art and science and literature, its political freedoms, and the conditions that make those manmade laws, those political institutions, that art, that science, that literature, those individual freedoms, possible? Those conditions could not possibly exist for one minute under Islam. Who will defend these things, if not those who, even if in some cases hesitatingly, begrudgingly, not really wanting to find out what they suspect they will find out, finally decide to learn about the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam? And then, too, they must learn also about all the ways that Muslim propagandists in the West attempt to keep non-Muslims unaware and thus unwary, confused and thus unable to see things clearly.

Okay, New York Times. You have one last chance. You didn't do right when it came to Walter Duranty and the misreporting on the Soviet Union. Your coverage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, throughout not only the 1930s, but right through the war, was laughable, and cruel, and had consequences. It resulted in many deaths, for there must have been many readers of The New York Times who, unaware of what was really going on, did not do enough either to save their own relatives, or to raise holy hell, wherever and whenever they could, because they relied on The New York Times, and the Sulzberger family was not about to let its paper be tarred as "too Jewish." In other words, that family cared more about itself, and its own position, then it did about reporting the truth. And right now, I suspect, those who run The New York Times have no desire to let themselves be open to charges of "racism" or "Islamophobia" or some other such obvious nonsense. Apparently they lack the wit, they lack the imagination, they lack the knowledge, to be able to respond appropriately to such charges.

Well, I've had my fill of analyzing or psychoanalyzing those who report for, those who are columnists for, those who edit for, those who run, those who own, The New York Times.

I repeat, one last time, the question I asked more than once above: having published that story about this Muslim propaganda-vehicle video as a splendid attempt to "rebut militants," will The Times now publish a follow-up article, one that gives full weight to the information supplied by Robert Spencer in his article above, about the nine Muslims who appear in that video, or will it not?

Now Laurie Goodstein has done it yet again. She's not an idiot. She has an attractive demeanor, an intelligent mien. She seems, when she appears on the Colbert Report, even winning. But when it comes to Islam, she retreats into a world quite familiar to all of us: the world of those who cannot or do not wish to do the work necessary to grasp the Total Belief-System of Islam, and who would rather continue to soothe herself, say, with the anecdotal evidence that this or that charming, friendly, altogether misleading Muslim colleague or friend - one who perhaps doesn't take Islam to heart, but cannot reveal that that is the reason that the laurie-goodsteins of this world can, and precisely to the degree of their inattention or laxity about Islam, find them inoffensive, whereas if they took Islam to heart, it would be a different matter.

But here is what she wrote about Islam most recently, in a piece that was as saccharine as it was misleading: "American Muslims Ask: Will We Ever Belong?" And in order that you not think I am being unfair to Laurie Goodstein, to her tone and her way of phrasing things, I will present phrases from the article.

It begins thus:

For nine years after the attacks of Sept. 11, many American Muslims made concerted efforts to build relationships with non-Muslims, to make it clear they abhor terrorism, to educate people about Islam and to participate in interfaith service projects. They took satisfaction in the observations by many scholars that Muslims in America were more successful and assimilated than Muslims in Europe.

Now, many of those same Muslims say that all of those years of work are being rapidly undone by the fierce opposition to a Muslim cultural center near ground zero that has unleashed a torrent of anti-Muslim sentiments and a spate of vandalism. The knifing of a Muslim cab driver in New York City has also alarmed many American Muslims.
"We worry: Will we ever be really completely accepted in American society?" said Dr. Ferhan Asghar, an orthopedic spine surgeon in Cincinnati and the father of two young girls. "In no other country could we have such freedoms -- that's why so many Muslims choose to make this country their own. But we do wonder whether it will get to the point where people don't want Muslims here anymore."

Eboo Patel, a founder and director of Interfaith Youth Core, a Chicago-based community service program that tries to reduce religious conflict, said, "I am more scared than I've ever been -- more scared than I was after Sept. 11."

That was a refrain -- a phony refrain, since there is not the slightest reason for Mr. Eboo Patel, who routinely appears on NPR, to be "scared" of anything other than that Americans might actually find out too much about what is in the texts, and too much about the tenets, and the attitudes, and the atmospherics, of Islam. But Patel's baseless complaint was echoed by many American Muslims in interviews last week. They said they were scared not as much for their safety as to learn that the suspicion, ignorance and even hatred of Muslims is so widespread. "This is not the trajectory toward integration and acceptance that Muslims thought they were on."

This is reported, with a straight face. But what is the duty of Laurie Goodstein, the reporter? Is it to accept these tales of self-pity and baseless victimization? Does Laurie Goodstein know how many attacks there have been on Muslims since 2001, in the United States, or in any Western country? Does she know how many attacks, by Muslims, on Jews especially but also on other non-Muslims, have taken place not in Muslim-dominated lands, but in the advanced countries of the West, since 2001? Does she know that no Muslims have been killed, but Jews have been killed, by Muslims, in the United States, in Canada, in France, in Belgium? Does she know, by the way, the record for Muslim integration in the hyperbolically tolerant countries of Western Europe? Does she have any idea at all what has happened in those two countries that have elevated Tolerance to the level of a state religion - that is, the Netherlands and Denmark? Does she think that Americans are forever going to ignore what has been happening with Muslims - alone among all the many immigrant groups? What has been happening with them is that more non-Muslims are becoming familiar with the texts and tenets of the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, and observing the unceasing demands for changes in our own legal and political institutions, and the aggression, even violence, of Muslim mobs on the streets of Paris and London, of Milan and Madrid. Does she think this does not have an effect, or that it should not have an effect, on non-Muslims everywhere?

Does Laurie Goodstein not know what has been happening to Christians in Indonesia and Pakistan and Iraq and Egypt, at the hands of Muslims who, in Muslim-ruled states, can get away with whatever they want? Does she know what has happened to Hindus in Pakistan, too, or to both Hindus and Buddhists (in the Chittagong Hills) in Bangladesh? What does she, Laurie Goodstein, know about the killings by Muslims of Buddhists in southern Thailand? Does she think that this kind of thing is irrelevant to the judgments we make here in the United States as to the nature of Islam?

What does Laurie Goodstein make of what happened since 2001 in London? In Madrid? In Amsterdam? In Beslan? What does she think of the effect on Americans of Muslims killing 450 Yazidis in northern Iraq, or murdering and driving out of Iraq Christians (Assyrians and Chaldeans)? What does she think of the repeated reports of attacks - kidnappings, forced conversions, rapes, killings, of Copts by Muslims in Egypt?

Well, there are many things happening here in the flood-tide of Muslim propaganda, in which Laurie Goodstein is so tendentious a reporter as to be, practically, a participant in that propaganda effort.

And Laurie Goodstein is hardly alone.

On NPR, for example, the other day, we were treated to an enthusiastic report about two bright young Muslims, speaking the American demotic, who traveled this great land of to seek out mosques everywhere. And why was that? Oh, for several reasons. One was to give non-Muslims a strong impression of the "rich diversity" in those mosques. But that "rich diversity" turns out to be a matter of outward and visible things (some mosques have Pakistani Shi'a, others Arab Sunnis, others Somalis who are not made welcome either by Arabs or Pakistanis), and funding (we are carefully told that "Muslim doctors and engineers" are paying for these mosques, though we all know that tens of billions in Saudi and other Gulf Arab money is being used around the world to buy land, and build mosques, and pay for their upkeep). In other words, we are to avoid grasping the ideological unity, or oneness, of those who base their lives, to take as their guide in everything, Qur'an and Sunnah. We are supposed to be impressed by trivial outward differences in ethnic background, dress, food.

And another part of this NPR report - one that I mention here because it was instinct with the themes that Laurie Goodstein likes to offer - was the transparent attempt to backdate the Muslim presence here. Oh, NPR didn't go as far as those Muslims, such as "Professor" Al-Hibri (of the University of Richmond Law School), who insists that Muslims were here with, or even before, Columbus. Nor did it go as far as those Muslims who tell us, and expect us to believe, that because there is a single record of a single slave (Job Ben Solomon) who spent two years in Maryland, and during that period apparently would prostrate-pray in the woods, this must have meant that he attended a mosque. Perhaps a little more about Job Ben Solomon should be given, just to clear things up once and for all.

The story about Job Ben Solomon (Ayuba Suleiman Diallo), even if we were to accept it at face value from the single source in which it occurs -- Thomas Bluett's History (and for all I know the whole story may have been made up, for there is no other confirming source), does not, as Edward Curtis IV in a recent Washington Post story seem to think, offer any proof of the existence of a mosque. No mosque is mentioned, or even hinted at. How then can Curtis adduce as evidence of a mosque a single passage, in a single book, when no mosque is mentioned? This is absurd.

The entire story is this: Job Ben Solomon lived in Maryland for only two years, and during that time he supposedly retired to the woods to pray. End of story. It may be true, it may be false. But whether false or true, it has nothing to do with the existence of a "mosque." The first mosque in this country for which there is the slightest evidence dates from the 20th century, and until recent decades, save for the Black Muslims who, under the Honorable Elijah Mohammed, were never regarded as real Muslims by real Muslims, and even today have certain practices and attitudes that are far from Muslim orthodoxy, there were not more than a half-dozen mosques in all of America, and those half-dozen quite small.

The mosque building that has taken place frenetically over the past few decades is everywhere the result of Saudi (and to a much lesser extent, other Arab) money, which has been spent at a rate, all over the Western world, ten times greater than the Soviet Union spent to spread propaganda on behalf of Soviet Communism.

The attempt at nunc-pro-tunc backdating of Islam in America goes on all the time among Muslims and their apologists. Remember when Muslims claimed that they had been on Columbus' crew, when there was not the slightest proof, though five Jews were in fact on Columbus' first trip to the New World, including the Torres brothers, and the trip itself was financed by Luis Santangel, a Spaniard of Jewish descent. Then this preposterous claim (Columbus was happy to claim the New World for Christendom) was echoed by some State Department wretch who then, when called on it, never uttered a word about it again.

Yes, here in America for two years, Job Ben Solomon attended an entirely imaginary One-Man Mosque. But in Muslim retelling that open-air prostration becomes a "mosque" that "proves" that Muslims were here, and thriving, and striving, centuries ago. This is, bien entendu, a fabulous fabrication.

No, these two young Muslims sweetly reporting their trip-to-mosques-around-America for NPR did not do this kind of thing. They date the first mosque from 1921, from a little town -- pop. 48 -- in North Dakota. But there is no mosque there. There is the story, the dim memory, of a possible mosque, because a handful of families came from Lebanon, so they said, and some have believed a mosque was once there. Since the Lebanese immigrants -- who never called themselves Arabs, but always Lebanese (and their cards of identity would sometimes identify them as "Turks" or "Syrians" because they came from the Ottoman Empire) -- were almost without exception Christians. But let's accept, in any case, that a mosque for five or six or ten people was built in North Dakota in the 1920s. What does this prove? Does it prove, as Barack Obama would have it, that Muslims have always "been a part" of American history? Or does it, rather, prove the opposite: that until the last few decades there has been no Muslim presence, and certainly no Muslim influence on or participation in American history? And now, with 1% of the population being Muslim, can one say that there has been any positive participation in American life, in the furthering of American liberty, or American art, or American science, or American anything, beyond a handful of people who, precisely because they ignore many of the strictures of Islam, can contribute in a way that would not have been possible, for one minute, in a society where Islam dominated?

Oh, and along with the attempt to find examples of the venerable and richly-diverse mosques all over America (how many of those mosques -- excluding the Nation of Islam variant -- have been built in just the last decade, and with Saudi money playing a major role? 80%? 90%?), there is still another theme which you can now hear being presented, and pressed, especially by the non-Muslim Defenders of the Faith, who are not so much enamored of Islam, one suspects, as they are full of distaste for the other views of some of those who are skeptical of the wonderfulness of Islam. The theme of these Defenders is this: Muslims are "just the latest" in a long series of victims of bigotry and intolerance. So Catholics suffered, or Quakers, or Jews, or homegrown Mormons, or others, and now, you see, it's "the turn of the Muslims." How very comforting for all of us to be encouraged to believe that just like those Catholics, those Quakers, those Jews, those homegrown Mormons, Muslims too will - once the bigots and the haters are stilled - fit right in.

But is this true? Is it true that Muslims just "fit right in" even in the most tolerant countries, the very countries that have elevated Tolerance and Diversity to State Religions, as in the Netherlands and Denmark? Is it true that Muslims are "just like" all the other groups, and there is nothing about their Total Belief-System that might, upon study and reflection, give one pause? Is it true that all over the world, Muslims Play Well With Others? Or are there grounds for thinking that Islam is itself a faith concocted out of pre-Islamic pagan Arab lore and bits and pieces - mostly stories, and famous personages, distorted beyond - well, beyond the belief of those who understood them in their original setting and frame, in Judaism and Christianity?

I think Laurie Goodstein has a duty to start learning about the subject she claims to be reporting on: that is, on Islam. And she should not look only at Muslims in this country, listening to their factitious tales of woe and their feelings, as they are so quick to tell her, that they have been "made to feel" unwelcome. Made to feel? Made to feel? After every conceivable chance over the past nine years to explain themselves, not slyly, not in the context of those chicken-and-oily-pita-and-baklava Mosque Outreach Sessions that never, ever, discuss what is in the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira, and in which such words as "Jizyah" and "dhimmi" are never uttered - it is they who claim that they are "made to feel" unwelcome, when we can see, all over the world, Muslim mistreatment, including murders, mass murders, of non-Muslims, of Copts in Egypt, of black Africans in the southern Sudan, in central Nigeria, in Pakistan and Bangladesh, in southern Thailand. And those who in the countries of Western Europe speak out are either killed, as were Pim Fortuyn and Theo van Gogh, or live in conditions of permanent physical insecurity, as is the case with Geert Wilders and Ayaan Hirsi Ali in the Netherlands (and everywhere), and Robert Redeker, the brave lycee teacher, and Magdi Allam (the apostate who converted to Christianity, and who is now a Eurodeputy from Italy), and many dozens of others. "Made to feel unwelcome" when practically the entire country, beginning with NPR and The New York Times, has been falling all over itself depoting feelgood stories to Muslims (especially around Ramadan and Iftar dinners), and the Interfaith Healing Racket continues apace (three amigos, four amigos, n-amigos). And because of the political parti-pris and maladroitness of many of those who have taken it upon themselves not to accept the victimization narrative and to tell some home truths about Islam, and the deliberate downplaying of those who are the most valuable witnesses to what Islam is all about - Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, and others - we understand that it is, and will always be, difficult to make those who, in the media, presume to instruct us, and those who, in political life, presume to protect us, to begin to assume their responsibility to study both Islam and the history of Islamic conquest, in order to better judge the meaning, and the potential menace, of Islam and of those who take Islam most to heart.

Laurie Goodstein seems to think she can continue to report on the claimed woes of Muslims in this country without giving any attention to how Muslims behave toward non-Muslims in those countries where Muslims dominate, and without giving any attention, either, to the fact that Muslim immigrants are the only group, in the tolerant and generous countries of Western Europe, who appear to have problems, permanent problems, in integrating, and in accepting the legal and political institutions, and social arrangements, of those countries where they have been allowed to settle, by the millions, behind what Muslims themselves are taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb. Why is it that Chinese, Hindus, Vietnamese Buddhists, Andean Indians, and sub-Sarahan but non-Muslim black Africans, all more or less seem able to fit in, to adjust, after a period, but that Muslims, wherever they come from, including those who come to Great Britain knowing English, or those who come to France knowing French, simply present problems that do not diminish with time, but actually increase, as the first generation, having to work for a living (while later generations have mastered the art of soaking the Infidel welfare-state of every conceivable benefit, and then some) gives way to even more implacable, hostile, and dangerous Muslims determined not to fit in, but to work, in ways little and big, to ensure that the Infidels among whom they settle do not acquire either the knowledge of Islam, or the will to act on that knowledge? For such knowledge, once acquired, acted upon by those who do not share in the general anomie, would - Muslims understand - be a threat to their own relentless work in pushing, pushing, pushing, to undermine Infidel morale, and to convince us that we should here and there and everywhere remove whatever obstacles to the spread, and dominance, of Islam may remain.

Jihad, the struggle to work to remove all such obstacles to that spread and to that dominance of Islam, is furthered by a combination of instruments. Terrorism and the threat of terrorism - seen by Muslims as a subset of qitaal, or combat -- may receive the most attention, but that attention often gets in the way of recognizing all the other, widespread, and more effective ways to conquer not through outright military means, but through means that were unavailable to Muhammad in the way that they are to Muslims today. These include deployment of the Money Weapon - supplied above all by the Saudis, but also by Emirates, by Kuwaitis, by the Islamic Republic of Iran, and by the inimitable Colonel Qaddafy -- which is used to fund mosques and madrasas and propaganda all over the world. There are also campaigns of Da'wa, targeted first toward the socio-economically marginal (such as black prisoners), and to the psychically marginal (including the Spiritual Searchers who wander like Leibnizian monads through the universe, until they latch on to Islam, that faith which Supplies All The Answers). Finally, and most important, there is demographic conquest, sheer and ever-increasing numbers, both through immigration as yet largely unchecked, and through breeding at a rate that is three or four times that of the indigenous non-Muslims, a breeding moreover - in Western Europe - subsidized by the generous policies of the state.

None of this ever swims into Laurie Goodstein's conventional ken, the one from which all disturbing possibilities are routinely blocked. Her tale is one of completely inexplicable animus toward wonderful Muslims, who do nothing wrong, who think nothing wrong, who have nothing in common with those Muslims who for some unaccountable reason maim and murder non-Muslims in Egypt, Iraq, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indonesia, Thailand, Sudan, Nigeria, and a dozen other places, or who plot, and sometimes manage to carry out, not ten, but rather tens of thousands, of terrorist acts or would-be terrorist acts, foiled only by the vast and expensive and ever-increasing security edifice that has had to be erected since September 11, 2001.

I wonder how long Laurie Goodstein can keep this up. Forever? Or is she going to begin to conclude that perhaps some of those alarmed by Islam might actually have a point. Then she may stop relying on the personal charm of Muslims she has met, and their mastery of the arts of taqiyya and tu quoque. And of course they deploy the furrowed brow, and liquid eyes, bespeaking a woundedness, an anguish, a pain that we are all supposed to take at face value. What's more we are supposed to regard as baseless and cruel the idea that these "wounded Muslims" are now "unsure of their position in American society." They're not unsure; they know exactly what they want. They want to never have to discuss, never have to explain, much less apologize for, what hundreds of millions of Muslims read everyday in the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira, and what has fashioned their attitudes, their worldview.

Perhaps she'll change. I don't know if she could be another Lincoln if she only had a brain. But she's not a target made up out of whole cloth. She's not a straw man presented only to knock down. She really exists. She really appears in The New York Times, inflicting all kinds of unchallenged nonsense on us, about Islam and about put-upon - as she presents it - Muslims.

She has yet to discuss, in a single article, any of what is actually in the texts of Islam. She has yet to discuss such words as "Jizyah," "dhimmi," "taqiyya," or to discuss Muhammad as the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, and some of the piquant details of that Perfect Man's life.

Laurie Goodstein substitutes feelgood sympathy, rather than attempting to explain truly the growing hostility toward Islam, and those who take Islam to heart as their Guide to Everything, in the United States. She is unable, among so many other things, to accept the responsibility, as a journalist covering such matters, to set herself to studying Islam, or seeing about the slow development, against the magical irrealism that Western governments and the media have tried so determinedly to impose, in Western Europe of anti-Muslim attitudes based not on bias, but by those no longer willing to deny the growing evidence of their own senses. And among those senses is included the sight with which we are able to take in the written word, the works of scholars of Islam such as Snouck Hurgropnje, Schacht, Jeffery, and others, as well as the written work of the apostates -- witnesses who were born into, and raised up within, a world suffused with Islam, and only in the mental freedom of the West began to see things differently.

No, Laurie Goodstein is not up to the task.

But then, The New York Times itself is not up to the task.

Both reporter and paper have been weighed. I did it myself, in this piece, and a half-dozen others at this site that you might look over at your leisure.

Yes, they have been weighed, and found wanting.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf told CNN that the discourse surrounding the center has become so politicized that moving it could strengthen the ability of extremists abroad to recruit and wage attacks against Americans, including troops fighting in the Middle East.

"The headlines in the Muslim world will be that Islam is under attack," he said, but he added that he was open to the idea of moving the planned location of the center, currently two blocks north of the World Trade Center site.

"But if you don't do this right, anger will explode in the Muslim world," he later said, predicting that the reaction could be more furious than the eruption of violence following the 2005 publication of Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad..." -- from this story

Now that Feisal Abdul Rauf has chosen - most unwisely I think-- to obliquely threaten us all with violence if we do not surrender to his demands and the demands of those who in "anger will explode in the Muslim world," let's go back and make sure we know not what the websites devoted to presenting him as a "moderate" say, but what Feisal Abdul Rauf is on record as saying. He is, this Feisal Abdul Rauf, slippery as he is, unambiguously on record as refusing to denounce a clear terrorist group devoted entirely to destroying an entire Infidel nation-state, that is, Hamas. Furthermore, he is also on record as wanting Muslims in the countries of the non-Muslim West to temporarily accept the secular laws but to work to change those laws and replace them, where they in his view need replacement -- that is, when they do not conform to the Shari'a -- so that the secular laws of the country become more and more those of the Shari'a. People do not understand what that means. That means he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is calling for the overthrow -- not, given current circumstances, the violent overthrow, but still the overthrow -- of the American Constitution, that is, of our legal and political institutions.

He couches it in a way that those used to the smooth cunning of the cleverest Muslim spokesmen cannot apparently fathom, just as it took a while for the French to fathom Tariq Ramadan. But thanks to a number of those who carefully examined Ramadan's various statements to Muslim and non-Muslim audiences, and his writings, it was clear what he was up to, and Caroline Fourest's Brother Tariq helped make it impossible for Tariq Ramadan to continue to operate as before in France. So he took himself off first to the Netherlands, and then to Great Britain, where he landed first as a temporary lecturer at that center of Arab and Muslim propaganda, the Middle East Centre of St. Anthony's. (For years the Middle East Centre of St. Anthony's was the preserve of the late Albert Hourani, who helped make it a diploma mill -- no courses, no waiting, and no real scholarly vetting -- of such people as Rashid Khalidi.) But when Tariq Ramadan grew tired of that, the rich Arabs of the Gulf (the Emir of Qatar, I believe, ultimately did the financial honors) bought him a professorship -- bought it, outright -- at Oxford.

Now Feisal Rauf, a cunning man and an evil one, knowing just how ignorant Westerners are of Islam and of the history of Muslim triumphalist mosques, and of course of the role of the mosque, which is not only or merely a "house of worship" but much, much more, and playing on the personal devils and pretensions to high-sounding statesmanship (shades of Washington to Moses Seixas) of Mayor Bloomberg, and also knowing, of course, the ineffable editorial views of The New York Times and its willingly collaborating reporters (see Laurie Goodstein's reporting on Muslims in America, do), has come far. Very far.

But those who have read Rauf's books, who have parsed Rauf's sentences (such as that, in an Op/Ed yesterday, where he spoke about the principle of the Golden Rule, a rule never observed by Muslims), and who are not quite as impressed with Mayor Bloomberg as Mayor Bloomberg appears to be, and who believe that practical wisdom (the kind called for by Mr. Justice Jackson in a celebrated passage in his dissent in Terminiello) rather than dogmatic adherence is called for, those people know exactly what Rauf is all about, and are willing and able to inform others.

And now, just before September 11, when what would be the largest in a series of anti-mosque protest meetings was just about to be held, Feisal Abdul Rauf issued his threat of worldwide Muslim violence. Only a fool or a willing collaborator could possibly maintain that it was not a threat. But when Feisal Abdul Rauf uttered it, a few, including - nota bene - smiling Fareed "The Skull Beneath the Skin" Zakaria, who has become a star on the lesser screen as well as in his new-found position at Time, accepted this astonishing statement without quarrel or quibble or cross-questioning.

But - this might surprise Fareed Zakaria too -- I'm delighted Feisal Abdul Rauf has made his oblique threat about worldwide Muslim "anger," the kind that leads to mass riots, and killings of hapless Infidels if they happen to be around to be seized and killed. It can happen for any reason, or a made-up reason, or no reason at all. Remember when Shi'ite Muslims seized the Great Mosque in Mecca in November 1979. Maddened Muslims in Pakistan rioted and attacked, murderously, the American Embassy in response. For the Infidels, you see, are always and everywhere to blame. So in a sense we are permanently in a condition of "causing" Muslim anger, because it is through the prism of Islam that Muslims regard the universe. No matter what happens, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Egypt, in god-knows-where, the Infidels Are Behind Everything, the Infidels Are To Be Blamed.

Now it becomes more difficult for those who kept wanting to give this Feisal Abdul Rauf the benefit of the doubt to keep calling him a "moderate" without any supporting evidence, or to fall back on his self-description as a "Sufi" as if that implied some kind of Gandhian satyagraha, when Sufis can be just as determinedly bent on Jihad, that is, the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread and then the dominance of Islam as any other Muslim group. Sufis have been just as murderous as other Muslims; they differ slightly not in content, but in the form of their worship, and that's it. The Deobandis - militant and violent as all get out - are Sufis.

Now, with the utterance by Feisal Abdul Rauf of this threat disguised as a warning from someone deeply sympathetic, someone who abhors the "extremists," which in his telling means, bien entendu, "extremists on both sides" (and apparently Hamas is not included in those "extremists"), we have, for all to see, what lies under the smiles and the wiles. He is a cruelly determined man, but at long last, not quite as clever as I thought him to be. I'd already written, two weeks ago, a speech to be delivered by Feisal Abdul Rauf when he returned from his State-Department tour, a speech in which he would decide, in more-in-sorrow terms, to withdraw his proposal for the mosque, because he "cared so deeply about this country" and did not wish it harm. Now I see that he is taking that theme, and using it as part of an extortion plot: we have to go through with this mosque, you see, much as I, kind Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, sweet Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, golden-rule-observing Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, at this point would gladly withdraw it myself, because the acts of "extremists" (i.e., the non-Muslim "extremists" who have clearly drawn the line, made this mosque a point of great symbolism -- as if it did not already possess a great, and for non-Muslims, intolerable symbolism of Muslim triumphalism) have now made that impossible. For were the mosque not to go through, then Muslims everywhere -- oh, I have nothing to do with it, I wish it were otherwise (so implies kind, sweet, golden-rule-observing Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf) -- would be very very angry, and you know how Muslims can be when they get very, very, angry, and so it has now become, this triumphalist mosque, a matter of national security.

And so it is, in truth, a matter of national security. But not in the way that Feisal Abdul Rauf wishes you to believe. No. Now the lines have been drawn. Now the symbolism of the mosque has been established, its importance even magnified. The Muslim threat of violence Feisal Abdul Rauf himself raises and waves about in order to require submission to what is now, clearly, for Muslim and non-Muslim alike, a symbol of Muslim triumphalism akin to those mosques built smack on the Temple Mount, or in Damascus out of the Church of St. John the Baptist, or Istanbul, where the Hagia Sophia was turned into a mosque. And the same sense of triumph was observed during the ceremonies marking the opening, less than 20 years ago, of the mosque built on land donated by the Italian government, not a mile from the Vatican. Similar triumphalism, a sense that Europe would inevitably yield to Islam, and to Muslims, was evident in the dedication of the mosque in Cordoba that the Spanish government allowed to be built on the highest point in that city, right next to the Alhambra, overlooking and disturbing a convent just below. No one should have been surprised, either in Rome, or in Cordoba, or in New York, if that mosque, having acquired the symbolism it has acquired, is allowed to be constructed.

And that symbol is to be constructed a block or two from the greatest act of civilian mass-murdering in the history of the United States, the most powerful Infidel land. Even now that land, far from "making a war on Islam" as Muslims for 1350 years have been making war on Non-Islam and continue to do so, through various means including non-military ones today, has squandered and is squandering trillions of dollars trying vainly to help Muslim countries. It does this in order, so it is wrongly believed, to make them "less vulnerable to Al Qaeda" and therefore, presumably, less of a threat. This policy does the very opposite of what should be done, which is to let Muslim states crumble, and their peoples suffer from that crumbling, as they are forced, as Ataturk once was forced, to understand that Islam, unconstrained, and unchallenged, is the cause of their miseries and not the solution to them.

In Jerusalem, in Damascus, in Constantinople, and in many places where there were once Hindu temple complexes all over India, mosques replaced the pre-existing Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Jain, Buddhist structures, which were destroyed in whole or in part and used as building material for these mosques. Those mosques were symbols of military conquest.

But today, outright conquest through military means is neither necessary nor possible. Because Infidels are not hampered in the enterprise of science, they are and will always remain technologically superior to the Islamic world -- what Churchill in his famous passage about Islam in "The River Wars" described as "the strong arms of science." But Muslims have been allowed to settle deep within non-Muslim lands, behind what they have been taught to regard as enemy lines, and from within, they are exploiting the very freedoms that developed in the advanced West and that could not for one minute exist in Muslim lands. They are determined to change those countries from within, to weaken their resolve, by confusing their understanding, and to work to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.

I assumed that Feisal Abdul Rauf was going to do the cleverest thing, and to return from his trip abroad, and to make a speech, in a more-in-sorrow tone, that would have him withdrawing the mosque proposal, "because I love this country too much to rend it asunder" or some such.

Here is the kind of thing I thought Feisal Abdul Rauf might come up with:

I have just returned from a trip to Muslim countries undertaken on behalf of my own country, the United States. This was my second such trip. My first trip was during the Administration of President George Bush, and my second is during the Administration of President Barack Obama. Both men wanted me to take to the world's Muslims the message of a proud American Muslim, to tell them of how America works, of how our policy of tolerance ensures that someone such as I, for example, can be entrusted with such a mission even at a time when American forces are engaged in two Muslim countries, engaged of course not to harm Islam, but to help Muslims find their true path, their true destiny, without succumbing to the violent extremists within Islam, as within other faiths, who have lately been so much in the news, and who we all know are our common enemies.

When I left, just a few weeks ago, I knew there was some opposition afoot, and some plans hatching in certain political circles, to attempt to whip up popular sentiment against what some keep calling, though no Muslim I know ever did, the "Ground Zero" mosque. I invite anyone - anyone - to look at a map of lower Manhattan, and to tell me that the building that was bought would be a "Ground Zero" mosque. Our intention was to create a Muslim community center that would contain a mosque. It would also contain lecture halls, and a library, and rooms for social events, and all the other things that would benefit not only the Muslims who would attend the mosque, but all the people, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, who would be invited to many of those lectures. They would be invited to social events too, in order to find out more about Muslims who apparently are such a source of agitation and worry. I want - we all want - to put any misunderstandings to rest.

And just before I left, I had heard the magnificent speech of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who called upon all of us to remember just who, as Americans, we are and what America is all about. He reminded us of the great defense of religious freedom that our first President, George Washington, had sent to a member of the Touro Synagogue, in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. He said that he stood by those of us who wanted to build a Muslim Center that would also be a center for outreach, for mutual understanding, for tolerance. He said it would be a travesty of all that he, and that we, hold dearest, if those who would divide us - the dividers, the haters - managed to have their way, to stop this Muslim community center, which has now been demonized as part of some kind of plot to establish Muslim supremacy, when it is nothing more and nothing less than what I, and my wife Daisy, and so many others always wanted it to be, a place where people could pray, could learn, could listen, could laugh, could come together in this vibrant metropolis, with all its splendid diversity.

And as I made my way through one Muslim country after another, I read, and heard, the echoes of what was going on at home, and I thought about what would be best for everyone, and finally I decided that I had to make a decision along with fellow members of the Muslim community. I listened with great respect, too, to Mayor Bloomberg and to others. And so today, it is with a heavy heart, but with a feeling of deep relief and continued belief in the goodness and rightness of this country, that I announce that the project that was to be built, so many of us had hoped, in lower Manhattan, will not be built where we had, in our innocence, planned to build it. Instead, we have decided to accept the gracious offer of Governor Paterson for a site elsewhere. And it is on that site that we shall build our Muslim center, as that model place of tolerance and outreach that we had always had in mind. And all those who visit us will be reminded, merely by its placement, of the kind of attitudes we have had to overcome, and that they, or their own ancestors, once had to overcome in the same way.

I hope - I do not expect, but I hope - that this will forever end what the dividers, and the mockers, and the haters, have tried to encourage, in order to suit their own small-minded political goals. And during this difficult time, when a plan for a community center was twisted by talk-show hosts and others hoping to cash in into some kind of beachhead for an invading army, thankfully tens of millions of Americans have stood by us, have reaffirmed the noblest traditions of this country. And now that we have decided to remove the source of such controversy, let us hope that those talk show hosts, and those hate-site bloggers, who will no doubt savor their victory, and crow over it, but at least may have the decency to now let us get on with the business of building, slowly and quietly, as men of good will, a truly diverse United States of America, and that there will be no further hate-filled opposition whipped up against a mosque or a community center with a mosque, anywhere in these United States.

And let us build an America where there is no compulsion in religion, and where all shall be free of the shackles that prevent them from learning how to approach, from every angle, that path, so wide and so welcoming, that inevitably takes mankind on the best and truest way to know God, and to fulfill his will, and his directives, here on earth.

Thank you.

Well, I was wrong. It turns out that Feisal Abdul Rauf is determined that nothing shall put him off. He senses American confusion, naivete, ignorance. And who, given Mayor Bloomberg, and the editorial board of The New York Times, and reporters such as Laurie Goodstein, can deny he has grounds for so thinking? He's a dab hand at manipulating such people. And assorted rabbis and ministers, ignorant of Islam and consequently of the real meaning of what Feisal Abdul Rauf is saying, are apparently naively impressed, even at times ecstatic, because of a statement he once made at a memorial service for Daniel Pearl, at Temple B'nai Jeshurun in Manhattan, addressing Judea Pearl:

We are here to assert the Islamic conviction of the moral equivalency of our Abrahamic faiths [Muslims use this "Abrahamic faiths" business only with non-Muslims; they know that the Muslim Abraham is the only one who counts, and that Judaism and Christianity are false religions, and their adherents Kuffar, the ungrateful ones, who refused to recognize the message delivered to the Seal of the Prophets, Muhammad]. If to be a Jew means to say with all one's heart, mind and soul Shma` Yisrael, Adonai Elohenu Adonai Ahad; hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is One, not only today I am a Jew, I have always been one, Mr. Pearl. If to be a Christian is to love the Lord our God with all of my heart, mind and soul, and to love for my fellow human being what I love for myself, then not only am I a Christian, but I have always been one Mr. Pearl. And I am here to inform you, with the full authority of the Quranic texts and the practice of the Prophet Muhammad, that to say La ilaha illallah Muhammadun rasulullah is no different. It expresses the same theological and ethical principles and values.

Now Feisal Abdul Rauf has enough practice at this sort of thing to know that he would be willingly misunderstood, especially at such an event, reeking of interfaith-harmoniousness, and knows few in his audience that day, or perhaps later, will understand what it is he means. And what he means, what he meant, is the opposite of what others will assume. He means: "If to be a Jew means NO MORE THAN to say 'hear O Israel,' then I am a Jew," because a good Jew would "hear" and no longer call himself a Jew but call himself a Muslim, for we are all born Muslim, and to hearken properly for Jews -- or to hearken properly for Christians, in his next treacly but apparently not to all transparent phrase, is to be a Muslim, and Feisal Abdul Rauf knows this perfectly well. In Feisal Abdul Rauf's world, to be a "good Jew" or a "good Christian" who hearkens to the Lord is necessarily to be a Muslim. That is his meaning, and he who grew up in this country has spent his life figuring out how to say one thing and cloak it so that Infidels will misunderstand, and apply their own frame of reference to that which he says, and endow it with their own soothing meaning. He's gotten away with it for so long, and no doubt, with an ever-diminishing group of the willingly credulous, this will continue as before.

He has stated, in a tricky way not immediately evident to all, perfectly orthodox Islam: everyone is born a Muslim. If I am a true Jew, or a true Christian, I will necessarily be true to what those words mean by becoming a Muslim. Replacement theology is what Islam is all about. It is, after all, a Total Belief-System concocted out of pre-Islamic Arab pagan lore, with bits and pieces taken from Judaism and Christianity: mostly names and stories, appropriated in greatly changed, even distorted out of all recognition, fashion. It is designed to both justify and promote conquest, by primitive Arabs, of far more settled, wealthy, populous, and civilised Christians and Jews (and subsequently Zoroastrians in Sassanian Persia). Just as Christianity came to contain anti-Judaic themes (which later, over time, became antisemitic ones), for it was important for the early Christians to present Christianity as a new, improved faith, and that required, if they were to obtain market share, to denigrate the prior-in-time monotheism, Judaism, so Islam had to denigrate, and did so to a much greater extent, the two prior-in-time monotheisms of Judaism and Christianity. And that is why Islam is based so much on a division of humanity between Believers and Unbelievers, Muslims and Infidels.

Feisal Abdul Rauf's new theme is that "if I am not allowed to build this mosque right where I wish to build it, despite the opposition of almost all of those related to those murdered by Muslims on 9/11/2001, that novemdectet of Muslim Arabs inspired by the texts of Islam and their own unhappinesses or insufficiencies that led them to take those texts, and the hatred those texts inculcate, even more deeply to heart than usual, then Muslims all over the world will be very very angry, and take it out (as if they are not already taking out their own Islam-caused miseries and aggression on all kinds of helpless non-Muslims in their midst, and under their power) on Americans and other non-Muslims."

With this threat, Feisal Abdul Rauf has made a fatal mistake. He has so clearly shown that behind Muslim demands lies the threat of Muslim violence. He couches his own demands, that continue without modification, in the most cunning way he can, like some extortionist saying to a potential victim "hey, I'm not violent, but my brother-in-law, you know, I can't be responsible for what he might do, and he can get very very angry."

He's not a good man, Feisal Abdul Rauf, not a man who believes in the Golden Rule -- a claim he amazingly made in an Op/Ed the other day in The Times, as if we in the Western world are unaware that 2000 mosques have been built in the U.S., and 6000 in Europe, and in all that time churches and Hindu temples and Buddhist statues and so much more have been steadily destroyed all over the Muslim countries. And for all the millions of non-Muslims who make the Gulf Arab states work, and are indispensable to them, exactly one -- or is it possibly two? -- tiny structures have been put up, without any crosses or identifying signs whatsoever, or Christian worship: one in Qatar and one in Bahrain.

And yet he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, dares to talk about doing unto others as.... Well, perhaps we should behave as Muslims do, and do unto them as they do, all over Dar al-Islam, to us. Or would that, in Feisal Abdul Rauf's eyes, be illegitimate? And if so, what has he done, what single thing has he done, to make the vast Muslim lands safe for thousands of churches, Hindu and Buddhist temples, Zoroastrian centers, even (dare we even hope it?) a synagogue or two, for the pathetic remnants of Jews left in a handful of Muslim countries?

Anything? Nothing?

Oh, with this threat, and the implication that he will "save American lives" by proceeding with the mosque, this forked-tongue extortionist has uncovered himself.

No matter how this is now may be handled, or mishandled, it is Feisal Abdul Rauf who has inflicted the most damage to himself.

I'm delighted.

Aren't you?

Well, it hasn't worked out that way, because his attempt to liken himself to George Washington reassuring Moses Seixas of the Touro Synagogue is one based on Bloomberg's complete and total ignorance -- a willful ignorance, and ignorance that he insists upon -- of Islam, of what a mosque is, of what a triumphalist mosque is, of what Islam is, and in this case, more specifically, of what Feisal Abdul Rauf means when he says Muslims in America must be free to work to change our secular laws so that they no longer come into conflict with the Holy Law of Islam, the Shari'a. That effort -- along with the usual tom-lehrerish old-dope-peddler desire of "doing well by doing good" -- is now Feisal Abdul Rauf's public, and possibly private, too, reason for being.

But except for being that celebrated thing, A Self-Made Man (not all Self-Made Men are as willfully ignorant, or as obstinately so, as Michael Bloomberg is, with his private childhood demons and his bland unexamined assumptions about so many things), rather than "beginning with a good inheritance," Michael Bloomberg in this New York Mosque affair is proving to be a Podsnap, forsooth, to the life -- as so many others are also proving themselves.

You've forgotten Mr. Podsnap, have you? Well, then, let me remind you of how in two paragraphs Charles Dickens described him, and endowed him with immortality:

Mr. Podsnap was well to do, and stood very high in Mr. Podsnap's opinion. Beginning with a good inheritance, he had married a good inheritance, and had thriven exceedingly in the Marine Insurance way, and was quite satisfied. He never could make out why everybody was not quite satisfied, and he felt conscious that he set a brilliant social example in being particularly well satisfied with most things, and, above all other things, with himself.

Thus happily acquainted with his own merit and importance, Mr. Podsnap settled that whatever he put behind him he put out of existence. There was a dignified conclusiveness - not to add a grand convenience - in this way of getting rid of disagreeables which had done much towards establishing Mr. Podsnap in his lofty place in Mr. Podsnap's satisfaction. "I don't want to know about it; I don't choose to discuss it; I don't admit it!"

Here's Mayor Bloomberg:

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo should not investigate the financing of the proposed Islamic community center near ground zero, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said on Tuesday, reiterating his support for the project.

"I think it's a terrible precedent," he said. "You don't want them investigating donations to religious organizations, and there's no reason for the government to do so."

Yes, that's Mayor Bloomberg, with his easy assumptions that it's merely a matter of "religious freedom," which, furthermore, he appears to think is absolute. His Counsel has apparently not told him that the Free Exercise of Religion is not absolute at all, and there are a long series of Supreme Court decisions to prove it. The Counsel should remind him that while we have democracy and free speech in this country, too, we also look into who is behind certain kinds of free speech. Imagine if Mayor Bloomberg said it did not matter, for example, if some group of oil companies, say Saudi-owned Aramco, along with the Libyan Oil Agency, and a Kuwaiti oil company, and an Emirati oil company, were paying for a very expensive global-warming-denial ad campaign and also contributing to all candidates who agreed that global warming was simply a fiction. Imagine if in that case Bloomberg insisted "You don't want them investigating donations to political organizations, and there's no reason for the government to do so."

"No reason," Mr. Podsnap of Gracie Mansion?

No reason at all?

In America, with its easygoing tolerance, Muslims such as Feisal Abdul Rauf are free to work, to exploit our hard-won guarantees of individual freedoms - freedoms such as those of speech and conscience that could not for one minute have been developed in the Muslim-ruled lands, and that would not last, for one minute, in this country if Feisal Abdul Rauf were to attain his wish, and the Shari'a, that codification of Islamic law that he finds so thoroughly winning and convincing, were to be imposed.

And what would an "Arab state with a Jewish minority" look like, if Feisal Abdul Rauf has his wish? It would be a state, given that the Arabs who call themselves "Palestinians" are 98% Muslims, that of course would try to live under the Shari'a, as Feisal Abdul Rauf devoutly wishes the United States would do so. He tells his fellow Muslims in this country that while for now they should obey the secular laws of the United States, no one should prevent them from working to undo those laws, and replacing them with those that are Shari'a-compliant.

An Arab state with "a Jewish minority" under Shari'a would of course treat those Jews as non-Muslims have always been treated, over the past 1350 years, under Islam. If you want to find out exactly what happened to the Hindus (Jains, Buddhists) under Muslim rule in India, read the Indian historian K. S. Lal, or Francois Gautier, or Koenraad Elst. If you want to find out what happened to Eastern Christianity under Islam, one wonderful book -- possibly her masterpiece -- is Bat Ye'or's The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam.

And if you want to find out what happened to Jews, even the Jews in supposedly wonderful (see Maria Rosa Menocal, and all who swallow her fantasy-history whole) Islamic Spain, see Evariste Levi-Provencal; for Jews elsewhere, see the multi-volume work, using in part the historical treasure-trove of the Cairo Geniza, of Eliyahu Ashtor on the Jews of Egypt and Syria Under the Mamluks; more generally, for a work on the Jews under Muslim rule, see Georges Vajda.

Of course for those who have decided that history, and consequently the truth, do not matter, even the listing of such scholars is somehow an insult, an offense, an impolite reminder to the ignorant, such as Mayor Bloomberg, of their own ignorance and their obstinate refusal to recognize their responsibility, before they presume to speak about Islam or about such things as the New York Ground-Zero Mosque, to find out a lot more both about the doctrines (the immutable texts and tenets) of Islam, the attitudes and atmospherics of Islam, and the history of Muslim conquest of non-Muslims. They need to learn about the history, too, of how those many non-Muslim peoples were treated over many centuries of subjugation to Muslim rule.

Mayor Bloomberg could, with a flick of his finger, employ someone to translate Antoine Fattal's great work on the legal status of non-Muslims under Muslim rule. Why doesn't Mayor Bloomberg do that? If he needs a good French translator, I can suggest three right off the bat who have native commands of both French and English, and who would be delighted to take on the task.

We have been finding out a lot about Feisal Abdul Rauf this last month or two. We know he refuses to condemn Hamas, claiming lamely that this would interfere with his attempt to "build bridges." Presumably those who are on the Muslim bank of the river or divide he, Feisal Abdul Rauf, is attempting to bridge would have nothing to do with him if he were to forthrightly condemn a terrorist group that exists for the sole purpose of destroying the tiny Jewish state, and of pushing Jews back into the condition of permanent degradation, humiliation, and physical insecurity that was their lot as dhimmis -- see Maimonides for his description of how Jews were treated in Islamic Spain -- under Muslim rule.

And that is exactly what Feisal Abdul Rauf wants for the Jews of Israel. He wants an end to the only Jewish state that exists, on one-fifth of one-one-thousandth of the territory that the Arabs now possess. He wants a "single state" that will become an Arab state "with a Jewish minority." And he has never mentioned, never opposed, the treatment of non-Muslims under the Holy Law of Islam, that is, the Shari'a. On the contrary, he has made clear that he reveres that same legal system that means unending and cruel inequality (that degradation, that humiliation, that physical insecurity that, over the centuries, led so many Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, Hindus, Buddhists, and others to join the "party of the masters" -- that is Islam, in order to escape their otherwise at-many-times unendurable fate).

This is what the begetter of this mosque, Feisal Abdul Rauf, wants for the Jews of Israel. He wants them to be stripped, but by "peaceful means" rather than immediate and open warfare, which as a Slow Jihadist he knows will not work. He wants a state in which the Arabs, by demography, will take over. In this respect he is similar to Houari Boumediene, who in 1974 at the U.N. declared that the men of the South, and he meant by this the Muslims of North Africa, would conquer Europe through "the wombs of our women." Qaddafy has repeated this claim many times since, and so have Muslim clerics and journalists and diplomats and "intellectuals" all over the place -- you can catch some of them at www.Memri.org, and others you can find as far afield as the letters pages of the English-language "Dawn" in Pakistan.

Oh, Muslims are keenly aware of how demography is working in their favor, because the elites of Western Europe, with a carelessness, a nonchalance, an indifference that amounts to criminal negligence on a civilisation-wide scale, allowed into their own countries many millions of Muslims, without first finding out what Islam inculcated, and what the chances were, therefore, of a happy integration into the host countries. They didn't bother to find out if, instead, these Muslims -- with a few exceptions -- would constitute a permanently hostile force, working to undo, as best it can, the legal and political institutions and social understandings of the advanced Western democracies whose worship at the Altars of the Idols of the Age, Diversity and Tolerance, is unfortunately accompanied by the sacrifice of their own achievements, in political and legal institutions and in political and social and above all mental freedoms. All that can be undone, as everything else that over three thousand years has been achieved in the West can be undone, merely by numbers -- by Muslims simply coming to be such a large presence, one constantly replenished with funds for mosques and madrasas from the Saudis and other rich Arabs. The local Muslims have found the way to take advantage of every benefit offered and paid for by the Infidel taxpayers of these Western European nation-states -- free education, free medical care, free or heavily subsidized housing, and much more.

Feisal Abdul Rauf is not, pace Mayor Bloomberg, a genuine moderate, someone, that is, who though Muslim chooses to ignore much of it, has decided not to take it to heart. Rauf is not someone who, through his very laxity, his nonobservance of the tenets of, and dislike for the anti-Infidel attitudes that are inculcated by, Islam, may be considered a "cultural Muslim" or, still better, a "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only." Such a Muslim may even be an apostate who chooses for obvious prudential considerations not to make his inward apostasy known to others. Feisal Abdul Rauf is someone who glories in Islam, who loves it, who wishes it to spread everywhere, and especially to see it spread in the United States where he believes, and has openly said he believes, that Muslims need only work to change the secular laws of this country so that they may be compatible with the Shari'a. And then Muslims, who enjoy our comforts and our freedoms right now, will be happy to continue to enjoy those comforts of a well-run Infidel nation-state (for whatever our many defects in the Western world, by comparison with Muslim countries we are models of political and civilisational deportment) with Islam being dominant and Shari'a, or a version of it, coming more and more to be the law of the land. Feisal Abdul Rauf is one more beneficiary of American generosity who does not understand what makes America tick, what makes it work, what makes it, by comparison even with the richest Gulf Arab statelet, so much more interesting and decent a place to live. It is such a place because Islam had no part in its founding or its subsequent development.

Should Islam ever come to play such a part, as Feisal Abdul Rauf so ardently wishes, the very things that make America pleasant for him would come undone. But he does not, and cannot, understand this. In similar fashion, Muslims want the goodies that the Western world provide, but they fail to understand the civilisational conditions that made for the production of such goods and the services that often accompany them. They want the stuff, but without even thinking that they might ask themselves why it is that the advanced West is the advanced West, and why it is that despite the more than fourteen trillion dollars that Muslim oil states have received since 1973 alone, none of them has a real economy that impresses. Instead, they all remain dependent on Western (and Eastern, and Third-World) engineers, doctors, teachers, contractors, builders, domestic workers, day laborers. Were those non-Muslim wage-slaves to be pulled, even the richest kingdoms or sheikdoms would collapse.

Feisal Abdul Rauf is like those cargo-cultists. He wants the good things he sees in America, but he does not connect those good things with the political and legal institutions that he is working to undo, by making America safe for those who like him will work full-time to change our secular laws, work to bring about a legal system more and more consonant with Shari'a. He has written that Muslims must remain free to work to make the secular laws of this country consonant with Shari'a, not to work to make Shari'a consonant with the laws of this country. He sees nothing about the Shari'a that is worthy of being criticised. As a loyal Muslim, as a "slave of Allah" who accepts the idea that the object of true worship in Islam is Islam itself, he could not possibly question the Shari'a. If he did, he might become emotionally or mentally unhinged. He is stuck with his rigid orthodoxy, hidden behind a thin veil of affability and deep sincerity, the kind of thing that the naive and unwary -- Mayor Bloomberg being among them -- fall for, and the rest of us, thank heaven, no longer do, or never did.

Mayor Bloomberg, some may think, is influenced by economic considerations -- apparently his company is hoping to expand into the Gulf statelets. But I disagree. I do not think that he is, with his sixteen billion dollar fortune, influenced by economic interests. He is at the stage of his life where, having acquired sixteen billion dollars, he wants - in that phonily self-sacrificing do-good way of a certain self-aggrandizing subset of the very rich -- to now "give something back." And what better way for these people to "give something back" than to win political office, and thus some kind of glory, for themselves? Bloomberg does not give the impression of having acquired the habit of reflecting on, or studying deeply, history, that record of men and events. And as a very rich man, too, he is at a great disadvantage, as many very rich people are, of always being surrounded by people whose economic wellbeing is tied to his, and who are unlikely, therefore, to disagree with him on anything of real substance, though jokily round-the-office disagreements over choice of a tie, or somesuch triviality, is not only plausible but likely, because it provides the façade of "daring to not be a yesman" while of course doing exactly as a practiced yesman would do.

Instead of winning contracts in Dubai, his motives are likely connected to his own private demons, that is, to his childhood worries about antisemitism, which have been recognized and cleverly exploited by Feisal Abdul Rauf and his ilk. They have no doubt played on the fashionable, for Muslims and their apologists, theme of "Muslims-are-the-New-Jews." This is an appeal that such people as Feisal Abdul Rauf pull out for Jewish interlocutors, when we all know that the "new Jews" are the same as the "old Jews." Their persecutors in the world today are not antisemites who come out of the Western world, but rather Muslim antisemites who are the main carriers of Islamic antisemitism, with its own history and traditions.

Bloomberg has spent his life making money and not on cultivating his understanding of men and events except in the narrowest possible, money-making way. He is ignorant of Islam. And the oily and ingratiating Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy have made it a point to exercise all their wiles to win over Mayor Bloomberg, a self-righteous, stubborn, and not very intelligent man (save for his ability to make money, which some not very intelligent people can do quite well at, for reasons that deserve to be pondered). Rauf is a "moderate-sounding" Muslim for Mayor Bloomberg. But Mayor Bloomberg cannot keep dismissing and dismissing every new bit of evidence that shows just how unpleasant (as, for example, a slumlord) Feisal Abdul Rauf is, or how strange his refusal to discuss funding. Mayor Bloomberg claims he "doesn't care" where the funds come from, and no one should even inquire. How can he possibly say that, when in every area of politics we need to find out where the money comes from, and this 100-million dollar mosque is all about politics, and nothing to do with an inoffensive "house of worship"?

For god's sake, Mayor Bloomberg, you are not dealing here with the Amish. A little world-historical reality has got to enter your head. You don't have to remain ignorant of Islam. You don't have to keep your misplaced faith in Feisal Abdul Rauf and his wife Daisy. You are entitled to read, to study, to listen to others who know a bit more, and are willing to lucidly present the broad outlines, and some of the details too, of Islam. You could take a short text -- I'm going to unblushingly recommend my three-part "Islam For Infidels" -- and start there, and then continue with books, including the testimonies of ex-Muslims such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Nonie Darwish, Anwar Shaikh, Magdi Allam, Ali Sina, and a dozen others. You have a duty to rectify your ignorance, not to obstinately and imperiously remain almost defiantly unwilling to make yourself less ignorant.

You owe it to the three-quarters of the New York City population that is dead-set against this mosque, with a large part of the remaining percentage consisting of those who think that the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause must surely be absolute (how wrong such people are, constitutionally, intellectually, and morally), and who are not in favor of the mosque but as a matter of "constitutional right" do not oppose it.

Yes, you owe this to them, to those whom you presume to preach to and to protect. And you owe it to yourself to, to show to Posterity that you are capable, when necessary, not to behave like a stubborn billionaire unused to not getting your way, no matter how ill-considered that way may be, and that there is more to you than, at the moment, there appears to be. You must think of that Posterity, which does not forgive those who made mistakes in the past about other, similar threats. Those who have misread the Communists, or the Nazis, who were deeply impressed with the New Order that was being built in Germany, because Fritz Hanfstaengl told them not to worry, that the "right people" would still come out on top, or who were deeply impressed with the kindly, crinkly, face of Uncle Joe Stalin, knocking the dottle from his pipe (humble pipe, humble Joseph Stalin), are now, whatever else they did, remembered only for their grotesque miscalculation.

And unless Mayor Bloomberg decides, coute que coute, to learn a lot more about Islam, and learns to question everything, including that ingratiating act of his New Best Friend Feisal Abdul Rauf, Posterity will not be kind.

He could still change things, change his mind, or at least give some sign that he is willing to learn, willing to find out more.

If not now, when?

Really? Is that what happened? Was there a "first known iftar at the White House" given by none other than President Thomas Jefferson for the "first Muslim ambassador to the United States"? That's what Barack Obama and his dutiful speechwriters told the Muslims in attendance at the 2010 "Annual Iftar Dinner," knowing full well that the remarks would be published for all to see. Apparently Obama, and those who wrote this speech for him, and others who vetted it, find nothing wrong with attempting to convince Americans, as part of their policy of trying to win Muslim hearts and Muslim minds, that American history itself can be rewritten. A little insidious nunc pro tunc backdating, to rewrite American history. And that rewrite of American history has the goal of convincing Americans, in order to please Muslims, that the United States and Islam, that Americans and Muslims, go way back.

As Obama so unforgettably put it in his Cairo Speech (possibly the most inaccurate, the most cavalier about historical truth, of any speech by any President in American history):

As a student of history, I also know civilization's debt to Islam. It was Islam -- at places like Al-Azhar -- that carried the light of learning through so many centuries, paving the way for Europe's Renaissance and Enlightenment. It was innovation in Muslim communities -- (applause) -- it was innovation in Muslim communities that developed the order of algebra; our magnetic compass and tools of navigation; our mastery of pens and printing; our understanding of how disease spreads and how it can be healed. Islamic culture has given us majestic arches and soaring spires; timeless poetry and cherished music; elegant calligraphy and places of peaceful contemplation. And throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. (Applause.)

I also know that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States. They have fought in our wars, they have served in our government, they have stood for civil rights, they have started businesses, they have taught at our universities, they've excelled in our sports arenas, they've won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building, and lit the Olympic Torch. And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson -- kept in his personal library. (Applause.)

We could go through those two appalling paragraphs with such historians and keen students of history as Gibbon, John Quincy Adams, Tocqueville, Jacob Burckhardt, and Winston Churchill, but that is for another occasion. We could point out that the highly selective quotation - for example from John Adams, whose views on Islam are falsely implied by quoting such a statement as "the United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims" which was mere pleasing rhetoric, and that phrase "in itself" left open the possibility of other reasons for enmity, including Muslim hostility. Not John Adams himself but his son John Quincy Adams (our most learned President), who was far more knowledgeable about Islam, was to write about that:

The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.

But John Adams himself drew conclusions about Muslims and Islam that were far from favorable. John Adams' unfavorable view of Islam was obscured and turned on its head by Obama, in quoting that single phrase that was part of negotiations-cum-treaty designed to free American ships and seaman from the ever-present threat of attack by Muslim pirates in North Africa (known to history as the Barbary Pirates). John Adams' unfavorable view of Islam was shared by all those who, in the young Republic, had any dealings at all with Muslim envoys. Thomas Jefferson had a copy of the Qur'an in his library not because he was an admirer of that book, or the faith of Islam, but because he was both curious and cultivated. Muslim Congressman Keith Ellison used Jefferson's own copy of the Qur'an. Yet that copy, since it was translated into English by George Sale, has for most devout Muslims no validity whatsoever, for the Qur'an must be read and understood in Arabic. A Qur'an in a language other than Arabic cannot even be called the "Holy Qur'an," though apparently Obama, and his speechwriters, did not know this, in their fulsome description of Jefferson's copy of the Sale translation that was appropriated by Representative Ellison for his own crude and transparent political ploy. Obama wrongly refers to Sales' version as the "Holy Qur'an," and every Muslim at that dinner knew such a book could not possibly be called that. A small mistake, but then there are so many mistakes, and Obama and his speechwriters are so eager to please, and yet so ignorant withal, that these mistakes add up.

There is not a single American statesman or traveler or diplomat in the days of the early Republic who had a good word for Islam. Look high, look low, consult whatever you want in the National Archives or the Library of Congress, and you will not find any such testimony. And the very idea that someday Muslims, adherents of the fanatical faith of Islam, would be here and would dare to invoke the Freedom of Conscience that is guaranteed by our First Amendment, through both the Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses, would have struck them as impossible. For everyone knew then, as so many now apparently do not know, that Islam itself inculcates not freedom of conscience, but blind, unquestioning submission of the individual Muslim to Authority, that is, the Authority of the Qur'an, as glossed by the Sunnah, and the Authority of the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam to which all Muslim law codes are supposed to aspire and, ideally, to be modeled on, the Holy Law which embodies, in codified form, the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam. This, too, Barack Obama and his speechwriters, and such people as John Brennan, Deputy Special Assistant For Homeland Security and Terrorism to the President, apparently do not know.

But let's return to that assertion about Jefferson's "Iftar Dinner," or rather, to that dinner that Barack Obama would have us all believe was the first "Iftar Dinner" at the White House way back in 1805. What actually happened was this.

The American navy, fed up with the constant depredations by Muslim corsairs, who were not so much pirates as Muslims who were encouraged to prey on Christian shipping, and who at times even recorded the areas of the Mediterranean where they planned to go in search of Christian prey, seized a ship that belonged to those who were ruled by the Bey of Tunis. And the Bey of Tunis wanted that ship back. He sent to Washington, for six months, a temporary envoy, one Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, who was not, pace Obama, "the first Muslim ambassador to the United States," but, rather, a temporary envoy.

Here, from the Thomas Jefferson Encyclopedia, is a bit of the background to the story:

The crisis with Tunis erupted when the USS Constitution captured Tunisian vessels attempting to run the American blockade of Tripoli. The bey of Tunis threatened war and sent Mellimelli to the United States to negotiate full restitution for the captured vessels and to barter for tribute.

The backdrop to this state visit was the ongoing conflict between the United States and the Barbary states, autonomous provinces of the Ottoman Empire that rimmed the Mediterranean coast of North Africa. Soon after the Revolutionary War and the consequent loss of the British navy's protection, American merchant vessels had become prey for Barbary corsairs. Jefferson was outraged by the demands of ransom for civilians captured from American vessels and the Barbary states' expectation of annual tribute to be paid as insurance against future seizures. He took an uncharacteristically hawkish position against the prevailing thought that it was cheaper to pay tribute than maintain a navy to protect shipping from piracy.

Jefferson balked at paying tribute but accepted the expectation that the host government would cover all expenses for such an emissary. He arranged for Mellimelli and his 11 attendants to be housed at a Washington hotel, and rationalized that the sale of the four horses and other fine gifts sent by the bey of Tunis would cover costs. Mellimelli's request for "concubines" as a part of his accommodations was left to Secretary of State James Madison. Jefferson assured one senator that obtaining peace with the Barbary powers was important enough to "pass unnoticed the irregular conduct of their ministers."

Despite whispers regarding his conduct, Mellimelli received invitations to numerous dinners and balls, and according to one Washington hostess was "the lion of the season." At the president's New Year's Day levee the Tunisian envoy provided "its most brilliant and splendid spectacle," and added to his melodramatic image at a later dinner party hosted by the secretary of state. Upon learning that the Madisons were unhappy at being childless, Mellimelli flung his "magical" cloak around Dolley Madison and murmured an incantation that promised she would bear a male child. His conjuring, however, did not work.

Differences in culture and customs stirred interest on both sides. Mellimelli's generous use of scented rose oil was noted by many of those who met him, and guards had to be posted outside his lodgings to turn away the curious. For his part, the Tunisian was surprised at the social freedom women enjoyed in America and was especially intrigued by several delegations of Native Americans from the western territories then visiting Washington. Mellimelli inquired which prophet the Indians followed: Moses, Jesus Christ or Mohammed. When he was told none of them, that they worshiped "the Great Sprit" alone, he was reported to have pronounced them "vile hereticks."

So that's it. Sidi Soliman Mellimelli installed himself for six months at a Washington hotel, for which the American government apparently picked up the tab. And as to that request for "concubines," apparently Jefferson asked the Secretary of State, James Madison, to attend to the matter. It's amusing to note how little the behavior of Muslim and Arab rulers has changed. It is only we who do not see them, or allow ourselves to see them, as primitive and exotic creatures to be amused by or often contemptuous of, but not as creatures to whom we need accord any undo respect, for their sole claim on our attention is that some of them, through an accident of geology, have acquired a lot of money. And there are people in Washington who are happy, in their desire to do well themselves, to convince the American government that it must bend over backwards in treating of Arabs and Muslims. There is no need to do so, and it is easy to show why not. In fact, the description of Mellimelli's requests may put many in mind of how so many Muslim and Arab rulers, including "plucky little king" Hussein of Jordan, when they used to come to Washington, would have round-the-clock escort girls service them in their hotel rooms. But what was most maddening was that the bills were paid by the ever-compliant C.I.A. I presume the oil money has made that, in some cases, no longer necessary.

Sidi Soliman Mellimelli was quite an exotic specimen:

The curious were not to be disappointed by the appearance of the first Muslim envoy to the United States - a large figure with a full dark beard dressed in robes of richly embroidered fabrics and a turban of fine white muslin.

Over the next six months, this exotic representative from a distant and unfamiliar culture would add spice to the Washington social season but also test the diplomatic abilities of President Jefferson.

During the six solar months Mellimelli was here, the lunar month of Ramadan occurred. And as it happens, during that Ramadan observed by Mellimelli, but naturally unobserved, hardly noticed, by the Americans, President Jefferson invited Sidi Soliman Mellimelli for dinner at the White House. He probably during that six-month period had done it more than once. Mellimelli replied that he could not come at the appointed hour of three thirty in the afternoon (our ancestors rose much earlier, and ate much earlier, and went to bed much earlier, in the pre-Edison days of their existence). That time fell, for him, but not for Thomas Jefferson or anyone else in the United States of America, during the fasting period of the month of Ramadan. He replied that he could not come at the hour set, that is, at half-past three, but only after sundown.

Jefferson, a courteous man, simply moved the dinner forward by a few hours. He didn't change the menu, he didn't change anything else. And moving the dinner forward by a few hours hardly turns that dinner into a soi-disant "Iftar Dinner." Barack Obama's trying to do so, trying that is, to rewrite American history, with some nunc-pro-tunc backdating, in order to flatter or please his Muslim guests, is false. And, being false, is also disgusting. It is disgusting for an American President to misrepresent American history to Americans, including all the schoolchildren who are now being subject to all kinds of Islamic propaganda, cunningly woven into the newly-mandated textbooks, that so favorably misrepresent Islam, as here.

Now there is a kind of coda to this dismal tale, and it is provided by the New York Times, which likes to put on airs and think of itself as "the newspaper of record," whatever that means. The Times carried a front-page story on August 14, 2010, written by one Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and no doubt gone over by many vigilant editors. This story contains a predictably glowing account of Barack Obama's remarks at the "Annual Iftar Dinner." Here is the paragraph that caught my eye:

In hosting the iftar, Mr. Obama was following a White House tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson, who held a sunset dinner for the first Muslim ambassador to the United States. President George W. Buswh hosted iftars annually.

Question for Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and for her editors at The New York Times: You report that there is a "White Hosue tradition that, while sporadic, dates to Thomas Jefferson." I claim that you are wrong. I claim that there is no White House Tradition at all about Iftar Dinners. I claim that Thomas Jefferson, in moving forward by a few hours a dinner that changed in no other respect, for Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, was not providing the first of the "Annual Iftar Dinners" that, the New York Times tells us, has since Jefferson's non-existent "Iftar Dinner," have been observed "sporadically."

When, then, was the next in this long, but "sporadic" series of iftar dinners? I can find no record of any, for roughly the next two hundred years, until we come to the fall of the year 2001, that is, just after the deadliest attack on American civilians ever recorded, an attack carried out by a novemdectet of Muslims acting according to their understanding of the very same texts -- Qur'an,Hadith, Sira -- that all Muslims read, an understanding that many have demonstrated since that they share, not least in the spontaneous celebrations that were immediately held in Cairo, and Riyadh, and Jeddah, and in Ramallah, and Gaza, and Damascus, and Baghdad, and all over the place, where Muslims felt that they had won a victory over those accursed kuffar, those ingrates, those Infidels. And it was President George Bush who decided that, to win Muslim "trust" or to end Muslim "mistrust" -- I forget which -- so that we could, non-Muslim and Muslim, collaborate on defeating those "violent extremists" who had "hijacked a great religion," started this sporadic ball unsporadically rolling. And he did it, by golly, he did. He hosted an Iftar Dinner with all the fixins. It was held just the month after the attacks prompted by Islamic texts and tenets and attitudes on the World Trade Center, on the Pentagon, on a plane's doomed pilots and passengers over a field in Pennsylvania.

And thus it is, that ever since 2001, we have had iftar dinner after iftar dinner. But it was not Jefferson or any other of our cultivated and learned Presidents, who started this "tradition" that has been observed only "sporadically" -- i.e., never -- until George Bush came along, unless we are to count as an "iftar dinner" what was merely seen, by Jefferson, as a dinner given at a time convenient for his not-too-honored guest.

Yes, and how splendidly Bush, and now Obama, have proven to Muslims that there are no hard feelings. Do you think the three trillion dollars spent in Iraq and now in Afghanistan (not counting the hundreds of billions that, over time, have gone to Pakistan, Egypt, Jordan, even the "Palestinian" territories), have done that? It has all been designed to improve the lot of Muslims on the unproven assumption that this will make them less attentive to the texts, the ideology, of their Total Belief-System, and hence more willing to grandly concede to us Infidels a territory of our own, a place in the sun of our own. Yes, George Bush, that profound student of history and of ideas, kept telling us, in those first few months after 9/11/2001, that as far as he was concerned, by gum, Islam was a religion of "peace and tolerance." And just to prove it, by golly, he'd put on an Iftar Dinner with all the fixins. And that's just what he did. And that's how the "tradition" that Sheryl Gay Stolberg, and her many vetting editors at the newspaper of comical record, The New York Times, began. It's all of nine years old, through the disastrous presidencies of Bush and now of Obama.

And stop rewriting history, in ways little and big, about the American "connection" to Islam - including that absurd attempt on the front page of The New York Times just yesterday, to run a story on Christians from the Middle East, fleeing Islam and Muslims for the United States (as they fled, too, to South America, or to Australia) and appropriating the history of Arabic-speaking Maronite and Orthodox immigrants in that story on "Little Syria" to make American readers think that "see, Arabs, Muslim Arabs, go a long way back in New York City, so let's not get so hot and bothered about a little mosque someone wants to build." Was there ever such deceit, day after day, than in the way The New York Times has become a willing collaborator with the O.I.C., and others who want nonstop Mister Feelgood stories about Islam in America?

I have a request for The New York Times. It's a most modest one. All I ask -- I never ask, or expect, very much -- is that the editors of The New York Times apologize for that paper's misapplication of the adjective "sporadic" in the front-page story by Sheryl Stolberg on the "Annual Iftar" dinner.

Put up, or shut up, dear newspaper of record. Tell us when that "tradition" of "Iftar Dinners" truly began. Cite those Presidents who held dinners that they considered to be "Iftar Dinners." Give us chapter, give us verse. And if, as I believe, that hollow and recent and transparently determined-to-win-Muslim-hearts-and-minds "tradition" began in 2001, then tell us. And since your story was on the front page, do what the lawyers do when they have to make legal announcements, and put your retraction, eat your humble pie, right on the front page.

A failure to do so will be further, and for some the final confirmation, of the sorry record of The New York Times in its coverage of Islam. Most readers with some sense of what Islam is all about, even those who lack detailed knowledge, are now ready to take any coverage of the matter in The New York Times with a grain - with a Pinch - of salt.

Mnemosyne, Muse of History, is a stern mistress. Subscribers to stories that live and die between editions may forget or forgive, but Mnemosyne does neither. If I were the "newspaper of record," I'd want to propitiate not the gods, but the most vigilant and meticulous of muses. If I were Pinch Sulzberger, I'd be mortally embarrassed, and determined to make amends. But then, I have standards.

How many mosques have been built in this country already, thanks in large part to the nearly one hundred billion dollars that Saudi Arabia alone has spent to spread Islam over the past few decades, in the United States? How many tens of thousands of mosques in recent decades all over the countries of the West have been built, and how many madrasas? Who pays for such things as the mosque, for only 100 families, that cost fifteen million dollars, in Billerica, Massachusetts? Who pays for all of those lavish palaces all over the place, that could not possibly have been put up by those who go to them? Who pays for the campaigns of Da'wa targeted at prisoners? Who pays for the Qur'ans sent out by the millions in the Western world? Who understands that a mosque is far more than a "place of worship" as some fondly believe but is, rather, a place where far more than that goes on, where politics, and geopolitics, are inculcated, where -- at least in Western Europe and in south Asia -- again and again and again it has been observed that people are whipped up at the khutbas (the sermons at the Friday Prayers), so much so that maddened Muslims coming out of mosques have gone on rampages against non-Muslims.

A particularly memorable example is that of the helpless Hindu who, happening to pass by as Friday Prayers were being let out, was beaten to death by Muslims who were just coming out of that "house of worship." How many raids, on how many mosques, have been conducted in Western Europe, where false papers of all kinds, and weapons, and explosives, were found, some in false ceilings and other hiding places? When Erdogan said that "the mosques are our barracks," he was quoting a well-known line, one that expressed a view that many Muslims have -- the "mosque" is not only or merely a "house of worship" but the "barracks" in the permanent war that exists, that must exist, between Muslim and Infidel.

How many mosques have been deliberately built deliberately using the remains of temples, churches, synagogues? How many mosques were built in India, after Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples and temple complexes, including many of the most important ones, and quarried the stone to make mosques? Nor were Hindus the only ones to suffer. Hindu temples and temple complexes disappeared by the hundred, by the thousands. Sita Ram Goel published a two-volume work that simply listed, name by name, those Hindu temples and temple complexes known to have been destroyed by Muslims, and the stone quarried for use in mosques.

We all know, because of the diligent scholarship of Indian and British scholars, along with others from other Western lands, such as Koenraad Elst and Francois Gautier, what the Muslim invaders, the Muslim conquerors, the Muslim masters of India, did to India's Hindus, so damaging "the wonder that was India" that it became what V. S. Naipaul famously called a "wounded civilization." Everywhere the Muslims went they destroyed the monuments, and especially the temples and temple complexes, of the Hindus.The more famous and important the Hindu temple, the more important it was for Muslims to destroy it, to build right on its ruins, to declare - through such destruction followed by such building - that they indeed were visibly and permanently there, and there to stay, as the masters of the land. We have all heard about Babri Mosque built over the temple at Ayodha, but how many other celebrated temples and vast complexes were destroyed?

This practice of deliberately destroying the monuments and artifacts of non-Islamic civilization began at the very beginning of the Muslim conquest of India. Indeed, the very first mosque known to have been built in India was built using stone from a Jain temple (the Jains are those who refuse to kill, to hurt a fly). One opens "The World of Islam" by Ernst J. Grube (Curator, Islamic Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art), part of the series "Landmarks of the World's Art," and finds on p. 165 a picture of the "Kutb Mosque (Quwaat al-Islam) Delhi" shown and described:

"Built by Kutb al-din Aibak in his fortress of Lallkot near Old Delhi in 1193. This mosque is the earliest extant monument of Islamic architecture in India and its combination of local, pre-Muslim traditions and imported architectural forms is typical of the earliest period. The mosque is built on the ruins of a Jain temple..."

So the earliest "extant monument of Islamic architecture in India" was "built on the ruins of a Jain temple" -- that temple being made into "ruins," of course, by the Muslim invaders.

Wherever Muslim invaders went and conquered, they did not do so always by outright military means with an invading army, as in the case of the East Indies, where Hadrami traders came and settled, bringing Islam with them. What began as trading outposts became settlements that, in turn, became fortified, and places from which the Muslims would conduct campaigns of Da'wa. They deliberately targeted local rulers in the East Indies that were once entirely Hindu and Buddhist. And if those rulers, as in Java and Sumatra, could be persuaded to convert to Islam, their people would, in those simpler days of cuius regio, eius religio, would then "convert" their people, who would have little choice but to follow their lead. It happened in Java. It happened in Sumatra.

You can still find, especially on Bali, with its considerable Hindu population, Hindu and Buddhist structures. You can even find the celebrated Borubudur stupa, and you are delighted - are you not, but now with a pang knowing what you know, and what you fear could happen - to find such structures. After all, the two gigantic Bamiyan buddhas seemed exempt from destruction by the Muslims who reduced so much of the Greco-Bactrian civilization to rubble. Why did they wait so long? Because they had to, because until recently they didn't have the right explosives, nor the proper expertise, until Pakistani and Saudi engineers came along to help them.

How many Buddhist structures remain in the most heavily Muslim parts of the East Indies, that is, Indonesia, such as Aceh? Where are all the Hindu and Buddhist temples that once could be found everywhere in the East Indies, for they were Hindu and Buddhist, until the forces of Islam conquered -- not by direct military conquest as in the Middle East, North Africa, and India, but through other means. Where did they all go?

An early Umayyad caliph decided that "the furthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aksa), that mysterious place from which Muhammad was said to ascend to the Seventh Heaven on his winged horse Al-Buraq, and then return within the same 24-hour period, should be located in Jerusalem, a city never of Muslim interest (not mentioned even once in the Qur'an). Why did he decide that surely the place referred to must be Jerusalem, and the very spot from which the "Miraj" or Night Journey took place must surely be right on the highest spot, the one holiest of all those in the world to Jews, that is, the Temple Mount? It was there that the Mosque of Omar and the Dome of the Rock lay claim to Jerusalem for Islam, as over against the claims of the prior-in-time monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity.

If the association and significance of the Temple Mount for Jews is clear, it might be noted that the celebrated Arabic-and-Aramaic philologist Christoph Luxenberg studied closely the Arabic-language inscriptions that are inside and very high up in the dome itself of the Dome of the Rock. He has argued that these are not, as everyone seems to assume, Qur'anic -- i.e., Muslim -- in nature but are, rather, Christian in their content, which suggests a Christian origin for the building.

What Muslims did in placing a mythical mosque ("al-masjid al-aksa") right there, and then building on the holiest site to Jews, in a city holy to Jews and Christians, was staking a claim that only other Muslims might believe. After all, you have to believe that a man named Muhammad had a fabulous creature, Al-Buraq, upon which he went back and forth to the Seventh Heaven, and then you further have to accept that "al-masjid al-aksa" must be a reference to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

But you do not have to be a Believer in Judaism to know that for more than a thousand years the Jews had made their capital, spiritual and political, in Jerusalem, where their history was made. You do not have to be a Believer in Christianity to know that Christianity has its origins in what Christians call the Holy Land, and especially in events that took place in Jerusalem. That difference matters.

In Damascus itself, the famous Umayyad mosque, the one that is shown to all visiting dignitaries, turns out to have been built on the ruins (or in some cases parts of the church left not in ruins, but simply incorporated) of the famous church dedicated to St. John The Baptist. It took a while, however, for this to happen. After all, whenever the marauding Arabs, bringing Islam with them, conquered, they found established communities of Christians, Jews and, in Persia, Zoroastrians. These people did not disappear; they were not converted in large numbers overnight. It took centuries of having to endure Muslim rule, and the status of being reduced to tolerated dhimmis, that is, a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, that led inexorably to more and more people converting to Islam, to join the group of permanent overlords and masters. The pace of such conversion quickened as those who had remained steadfast saw so many others convert, thereby changing their status and at once improving their treatment. In the 7th century, after the Muslim Arabs had conquered Damascus in 635 A.D., local Christians (who were by far the majority still) continued to worship in several churches. They even continued to worship at St. John's, though now confined only to the western aisle, while Muslims used the eastern. The Muslim overlords were still vastly outnumbered, as they were everywhere in the lands the Arabs conquered, and had to proceed slowly. Eventually, about seventy years after the initial conquest, the Umayyad caliph Abd el-Melek took over the entire St. John's for Muslim use - that is, St. John's became an Umayyad mosque, and with building, and rebuilding, and destruction of parts that had been St. John's, and the use of the stone, and the turning to other uses of some of its walls, what had been the Church of St. John became the Umayyad Mosque we see today, a symbol of Umayyad power and might and of the victory over the local Christians.

In Constantinople, which for a thousand years was the largest, richest, most populous city in all of Christendom, there were hundreds of churches. The greatest of them all was the Hagia Sophia.

On May 29, 1453, after centuries of first the Seljuk, then the Osmanli Turks seizing control of ever larger parts of what had been the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim invaders finally conquered Constantinople. They razed many of the churches in the city. Western visitors can find a diorama of Constantinople, showing its hundreds of churches before the Muslim conquest, and be amazed at how on every corner there seemed to be another church. That diorama is discreetly tucked away on an upper floor of the Museum of Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the Topkapi complex, in present-day Istanbul. But not all the churches were razed. And the Hagia Sophia was not razed, but was turned into a mosque, a sign of what Mehmet Fatih, Mehmet the Conqueror, had done, a symbol of Muslim triumph.

Two decades ago, as Muslims began to make their demands on the host countries that had so generously and heedlessly allowed them to settle deep within Western Europe, that is, behind the borders that Muslims themselves were taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, in Italy President Pertino thought that Muslims in Italy might respond with gratitude, and Muslims outside of Italy might even make it more possible for the millions of Christians, both indigenous and among the millions of guest-workers in the rich oil states of the Gulf, to open churches and to practice their faith. It was not to be. Government land was donated for the building of a huge mosque, not a mile from the Vatican, but when it was built, and when the Arab Ambassadors arrived at the ceremonies to open the mosque, there was no talk of gratitude, and certainly no talk of any reciprocal gesture, by any Arab or Muslim state, anywhere. Italian witnesses of the event spoke of the air of triumphalism, the palpable feeling that a beachhead for Islam had, with this giant mosque, been created. Those Italians who watched, with growing unease, would have been still more uneasy, had they known that among Muslims there is a belief, based on a story, or Hadith, about Muhammad predicting that first Constantinople or Rum (Byzantium) would fall to Islam, and then Rome, the Rome in Italy, would fall to Islam. The giant mosque was a symbol for Pertini, and other Italians, of Western, of Italian, tolerance and goodwill and trust. But for the Muslims present, the giant mosque built on land donated by the Italian state had nothing to do with tolerance, or trust, or good will that needed to be, or might be, reciprocated by the Muslim beneficiaries of that tolerance, that trust, that good will.

And Mayor Bloomberg, who has confused himself with President George Washington, and the Grand Zero Mosque with the Touro Synagogue in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, a most cunning and most sinister man (to fully understand both adjectives, however, you would have to know him not as Mayor Bloomberg knew him, as an ingratiating, even oily, interlocutor, but through his books, the Arabic and English versions of which can be compared) with Moses Seixas, is now making the same mistake.

How many mosques have been built in this country already, thanks in large part to the nearly one hundred billion dollars that Saudi Arabia alone has spent to spread Islam over the past few decades, in the United States? How many tens of thousands of mosques in recent decades all over the countries of the West have been built, and how many madrasas? Who pays for such things as the mosque, for only 100 families, that cost fifteen million dollars, in Billerica, Massachusetts? Who pays for all of those lavish palaces all over the place, that could not possibly have been put up by those who go to them? Who pays for the campaigns of Da'wa targeted at prisoners? Who pays for the Qur'ans sent out by the millions in the Western world? Who understands that a mosque is far more than a "place of worship" as some fondly believe but is, rather, a place where far more than that goes on, where politics, and geopolitics, are inculcated, where -- at least in Western Europe and in south Asia -- again and again and again it has been observed that people are whipped up at the khutbas (the sermons at the Friday Prayers), so much so that maddened Muslims coming out of mosques have gone on rampages against non-Muslims.

A particularly memorable example is that of the helpless Hindu who, happening to pass by as Friday Prayers were being let out, was beaten to death by Muslims who were just coming out of that "house of worship." How many raids, on how many mosques, have been conducted in Western Europe, where false papers of all kinds, and weapons, and explosives, were found, some in false ceilings and other hiding places? When Erdogan said that "the mosques are our barracks," he was quoting a well-known line, one that expressed a view that many Muslims have -- the "mosque" is not only or merely a "house of worship" but the "barracks" in the permanent war that exists, that must exist, between Muslim and Infidel.

How many mosques have been deliberately built deliberately using the remains of temples, churches, synagogues? How many mosques were built in India, after Muslim invaders destroyed Hindu temples and temple complexes, including many of the most important ones, and quarried the stone to make mosques? Nor were Hindus the only ones to suffer. Hindu temples and temple complexes disappeared by the hundred, by the thousands. Sita Ram Goel published a two-volume work that simply listed, name by name, those Hindu temples and temple complexes known to have been destroyed by Muslims, and the stone quarried for use in mosques.

We all know, because of the diligent scholarship of Indian and British scholars, along with others from other Western lands, such as Koenraad Elst and Francois Gautier, what the Muslim invaders, the Muslim conquerors, the Muslim masters of India, did to India's Hindus, so damaging "the wonder that was India" that it became what V. S. Naipaul famously called a "wounded civilization." Everywhere the Muslims went they destroyed the monuments, and especially the temples and temple complexes, of the Hindus.The more famous and important the Hindu temple, the more important it was for Muslims to destroy it, to build right on its ruins, to declare - through such destruction followed by such building - that they indeed were visibly and permanently there, and there to stay, as the masters of the land. We have all heard about Babri Mosque built over the temple at Ayodha, but how many other celebrated temples and vast complexes were destroyed?

This practice of deliberately destroying the monuments and artifacts of non-Islamic civilization began at the very beginning of the Muslim conquest of India. Indeed, the very first mosque known to have been built in India was built using stone from a Jain temple (the Jains are those who refuse to kill, to hurt a fly). One opens "The World of Islam" by Ernst J. Grube (Curator, Islamic Department, Metropolitan Museum of Art), part of the series "Landmarks of the World's Art," and finds on p. 165 a picture of the "Kutb Mosque (Quwaat al-Islam) Delhi" shown and described:

"Built by Kutb al-din Aibak in his fortress of Lallkot near Old Delhi in 1193. This mosque is the earliest extant monument of Islamic architecture in India and its combination of local, pre-Muslim traditions and imported architectural forms is typical of the earliest period. The mosque is built on the ruins of a Jain temple..."

So the earliest "extant monument of Islamic architecture in India" was "built on the ruins of a Jain temple" -- that temple being made into "ruins," of course, by the Muslim invaders.

Wherever Muslim invaders went and conquered, they did not do so always by outright military means with an invading army, as in the case of the East Indies, where Hadrami traders came and settled, bringing Islam with them. What began as trading outposts became settlements that, in turn, became fortified, and places from which the Muslims would conduct campaigns of Da'wa. They deliberately targeted local rulers in the East Indies that were once entirely Hindu and Buddhist. And if those rulers, as in Java and Sumatra, could be persuaded to convert to Islam, their people would, in those simpler days of cuius regio, eius religio, would then "convert" their people, who would have little choice but to follow their lead. It happened in Java. It happened in Sumatra.

You can still find, especially on Bali, with its considerable Hindu population, Hindu and Buddhist structures. You can even find the celebrated Borubudur stupa, and you are delighted - are you not, but now with a pang knowing what you know, and what you fear could happen - to find such structures. After all, the two gigantic Bamiyan buddhas seemed exempt from destruction by the Muslims who reduced so much of the Greco-Bactrian civilization to rubble. Why did they wait so long? Because they had to, because until recently they didn't have the right explosives, nor the proper expertise, until Pakistani and Saudi engineers came along to help them.

How many Buddhist structures remain in the most heavily Muslim parts of the East Indies, that is, Indonesia, such as Aceh? Where are all the Hindu and Buddhist temples that once could be found everywhere in the East Indies, for they were Hindu and Buddhist, until the forces of Islam conquered -- not by direct military conquest as in the Middle East, North Africa, and India, but through other means. Where did they all go?

An early Umayyad caliph decided that "the furthest mosque" (al-masjid al-aksa), that mysterious place from which Muhammad was said to ascend to the Seventh Heaven on his winged horse Al-Buraq, and then return within the same 24-hour period, should be located in Jerusalem, a city never of Muslim interest (not mentioned even once in the Qur'an). Why did he decide that surely the place referred to must be Jerusalem, and the very spot from which the "Miraj" or Night Journey took place must surely be right on the highest spot, the one holiest of all those in the world to Jews, that is, the Temple Mount? It was there that the Mosque of Omar and the Dome of the Rock lay claim to Jerusalem for Islam, as over against the claims of the prior-in-time monotheisms, Judaism and Christianity.

If the association and significance of the Temple Mount for Jews is clear, it might be noted that the celebrated Arabic-and-Aramaic philologist Christoph Luxenberg studied closely the Arabic-language inscriptions that are inside and very high up in the dome itself of the Dome of the Rock. He has argued that these are not, as everyone seems to assume, Qur'anic -- i.e., Muslim -- in nature but are, rather, Christian in their content, which suggests a Christian origin for the building.

What Muslims did in placing a mythical mosque ("al-masjid al-aksa") right there, and then building on the holiest site to Jews, in a city holy to Jews and Christians, was staking a claim that only other Muslims might believe. After all, you have to believe that a man named Muhammad had a fabulous creature, Al-Buraq, upon which he went back and forth to the Seventh Heaven, and then you further have to accept that "al-masjid al-aksa" must be a reference to Jerusalem and the Temple Mount.

But you do not have to be a Believer in Judaism to know that for more than a thousand years the Jews had made their capital, spiritual and political, in Jerusalem, where their history was made. You do not have to be a Believer in Christianity to know that Christianity has its origins in what Christians call the Holy Land, and especially in events that took place in Jerusalem. That difference matters.

In Damascus itself, the famous Umayyad mosque, the one that is shown to all visiting dignitaries, turns out to have been built on the ruins (or in some cases parts of the church left not in ruins, but simply incorporated) of the famous church dedicated to St. John The Baptist. It took a while, however, for this to happen. After all, whenever the marauding Arabs, bringing Islam with them, conquered, they found established communities of Christians, Jews and, in Persia, Zoroastrians. These people did not disappear; they were not converted in large numbers overnight. It took centuries of having to endure Muslim rule, and the status of being reduced to tolerated dhimmis, that is, a status of humiliation, degradation, and physical insecurity, that led inexorably to more and more people converting to Islam, to join the group of permanent overlords and masters. The pace of such conversion quickened as those who had remained steadfast saw so many others convert, thereby changing their status and at once improving their treatment. In the 7th century, after the Muslim Arabs had conquered Damascus in 635 A.D., local Christians (who were by far the majority still) continued to worship in several churches. They even continued to worship at St. John's, though now confined only to the western aisle, while Muslims used the eastern. The Muslim overlords were still vastly outnumbered, as they were everywhere in the lands the Arabs conquered, and had to proceed slowly. Eventually, about seventy years after the initial conquest, the Umayyad caliph Abd el-Melek took over the entire St. John's for Muslim use - that is, St. John's became an Umayyad mosque, and with building, and rebuilding, and destruction of parts that had been St. John's, and the use of the stone, and the turning to other uses of some of its walls, what had been the Church of St. John became the Umayyad Mosque we see today, a symbol of Umayyad power and might and of the victory over the local Christians.

In Constantinople, which for a thousand years was the largest, richest, most populous city in all of Christendom, there were hundreds of churches. The greatest of them all was the Hagia Sophia.

On May 29, 1453, after centuries of first the Seljuk, then the Osmanli Turks seizing control of ever larger parts of what had been the Byzantine Empire, the Muslim invaders finally conquered Constantinople. They razed many of the churches in the city. Western visitors can find a diorama of Constantinople, showing its hundreds of churches before the Muslim conquest, and be amazed at how on every corner there seemed to be another church. That diorama is discreetly tucked away on an upper floor of the Museum of Greek and Roman Antiquities, in the Topkapi complex, in present-day Istanbul. But not all the churches were razed. And the Hagia Sophia was not razed, but was turned into a mosque, a sign of what Mehmet Fatih, Mehmet the Conqueror, had done, a symbol of Muslim triumph.

Two decades ago, as Muslims began to make their demands on the host countries that had so generously and heedlessly allowed them to settle deep within Western Europe, that is, behind the borders that Muslims themselves were taught to regard as enemy lines, the lines of Dar al-Harb, the Domain of War, in Italy President Pertino thought that Muslims in Italy might respond with gratitude, and Muslims outside of Italy might even make it more possible for the millions of Christians, both indigenous and among the millions of guest-workers in the rich oil states of the Gulf, to open churches and to practice their faith. It was not to be. Government land was donated for the building of a huge mosque, not a mile from the Vatican, but when it was built, and when the Arab Ambassadors arrived at the ceremonies to open the mosque, there was no talk of gratitude, and certainly no talk of any reciprocal gesture, by any Arab or Muslim state, anywhere. Italian witnesses of the event spoke of the air of triumphalism, the palpable feeling that a beachhead for Islam had, with this giant mosque, been created. Those Italians who watched, with growing unease, would have been still more uneasy, had they known that among Muslims there is a belief, based on a story, or Hadith, about Muhammad predicting that first Constantinople or Rum (Byzantium) would fall to Islam, and then Rome, the Rome in Italy, would fall to Islam. The giant mosque was a symbol for Pertini, and other Italians, of Western, of Italian, tolerance and goodwill and trust. But for the Muslims present, the giant mosque built on land donated by the Italian state had nothing to do with tolerance, or trust, or good will that needed to be, or might be, reciprocated by the Muslim beneficiaries of that tolerance, that trust, that good will.

And Mayor Bloomberg, who has confused himself with President George Washington, and the Grand Zero Mosque with the Touro Synagogue in Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, a most cunning and most sinister man (to fully understand both adjectives, however, you would have to know him not as Mayor Bloomberg knew him, as an ingratiating, even oily, interlocutor, but through his books, the Arabic and English versions of which can be compared) with Moses Seixas, is now making the same mistake.

There was, to begin with the end, the final stark stop-talking-nonsense put-up-or-shut-up challenge to Obama and his speechifying crew, that is the challenge that they provide supporting evidence, chapter and verse, local habitations and names, for this assertion:

"And here in the United States Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country."

This phrase is one more illustration of a larger problem: when it comes to Islam, Barack Obama apparently does not intend to abandon, bur rather to continue to employ, that Get-Me-Rewrite approach he used in his Cairo speech to the world's Muslims, possibly the falsest, least-true-to-history speech ever delivered by an American president. In trying to get or be, as he likes to say (with his handful of favorite phrases, this is certainly among them), "on the right side of history" (as if, you see, history has a pre-determined "right side" and we had all "better get on it" coute-que-coute or we will be judged accordingly), he, Barack Obama, is perfectly willing to rewrite history. That is, he is willing to rewrite history in the true, and not historical determinist sense -- that is, as the record of the past, as best as we can determine that record, and to make sense of it, to give the accumulated facts meaning. A little more undiluted Thucydides or Gibbon or Macaulay, and a little less watered-down historical materialism or castroesque ("history will absolve me") derivations thereof, might be nice.

There is no "right side of history." There are only fallible men, who should do what they can, learn what they can, prepare themselves as best they can through study of history, and observation of the men and events today, to better prepare themselves when they achieve high office, and presume, then -- as we too often presume they are ready to do so -- to be able to properly instruct and protect us.

No, Barack Obama must learn that his Get-Me-Rewrite approach to history, that is, what happened in the past, and his banal sense of "a right side of history" meaning History, meaning the fates, meaning the inexorable movement and development of peoples ever Upward and Onward (as the New Yorker used to put it), are inadequate to the task at hand. Obama appears to believe, ten years into what promises to be what I have frequently called here the Century of Sauve Qui Peut, that History majusculized, History in the future, is something already foreordained. And it is up to All Of Us to Get On Its Right Side, or else be condemned to "being on the wrong side," which is to say the dustbin, of - what else? - History, and also history.

Now do you want to entrust your destiny to someone who plays so fast and so loose with the history of your own country, in the service of what he sees as a higher goal, the Rodney-King goal of Why Can't We All Get Along? It is deemed necessary, in furtherance of that goal, to misrepresent or to lie about the Muslim "contribution" to the United States, or the supposed wonderfulness and tolerance of Muslims and Islam. This is done in the hopes of somehow winning them over. How well that has been working out, all over the world? It also manages to deceive Americans about their own reality so that they will not be properly equipped to deal with that reality. Obama and John Brennan, Special Deputy Assistant to the President for Homeland Security and Terrorism, and so many others in this monumentally ignorant-and-confused-about Islam administration - though smug as all get out in its own certainties as to how to proceed -- are dangerous when it comes to Islam, and to the history of their own country. And that country, this self-proclaimed Citizen of the World may need to be reminded, is the United States.

And finally, in the article above, perhaps the most important theme for practical purposes is that of Islam as a vehicle of Arab supremacism. It is a theme which could be exploited in a hundred sundry ways, if the American government -- in this Administration or the next -- chose to halt the squandering of men, money, materiel, in Iraq (get out, and don't come back, and let the local games begin) and Afghanistan (get out, and only come back, from time to time, in the air, intermittently, leaving calling cards as the need arises). It could be exploited in an attempt to weaken the hold of Islam on the 80% of the world's Muslims who are non-Arab. Some of those non-Arabs are already well aware of how the Arabs, bringing the "gift of Islam," tried to impose a cultural and linguistic imperialism. Indeed, in Iran, where the disenchantment with Islam is widespread and growing, and the contempt for Arabs of long standing, the awareness of Arab indifference to, or even contempt for, the language, literature, history of Persia, and the national narrative includes, even emphasizes, the extra-literary feats of Persian poets, above all Firdowsi, who with his epic of the Persian kings, the Shahnameh, is believed to have helped Iran preserve the Persian language from Arab cultural imperialism. And there are others, too, intellectuals in Malaysia and Indonesia, who have occasionally written in anger about what they see as the makeover, by Muslims, of their own selves, to make them into little Arabs, with Arab names and Arab ways that so obviously come from the desire to conform to the dictates, that is in this case the Sunnah, of Islam.

The article above mocks, rightly, Obama's nonsense, and that whole business about "a faith known for great diversity and racial equality," which any Kurd knows to be false, as well as any Berber, or any black African Muslim in Darfur or Mali or Mauritania or for that matter in Egypt, or possibly those black African Muslims who were held as slaves in Saudi Arabia right up until 1962, when pressure from Western, non-Muslim nations, forced Saudi Arabia to formally give up slavery, thus "officially" freeing not a few, but hundreds of thousands of black slaves. Does Barack Obama know nothing about the greatest slave trade of all, the Arab slave trade in east and central Africa? Does he not know that it started centuries before, and ended -- only under the pressure of the Great Powers of Europe -- far more than a century later, and that the numbers of those taken away were far greater than in the Atlantic Slave Trade? Is he aware of the study, "The Hideous Trade," of the Arab slave trade mainly devoted to the seizure, by the Arabs, of young black boys who were then castrated in the bush, and then forced by slave coffle to march to the coasts, where they would be taken by dhow to Muscat and Oman, or other ports, and then on to the slave markets of Islam -- in Jeddah, in Cairo, in Damascus, in Istanbul? Does he know, or not know, that only 10% of those seized actually survived to arrive at those slave markets? Does he know that it was the Royal Navy (see J. B. Kelly, Britain and the Persian Gulf, 1795-1880) that suppressed the Arab slave trade, by interdicting it, though the Arabs did what they could to keep carrying on that trade? And of course they did not end the practice of slavery -- sanctioned by the practice of Muhammad himself, that Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil.

Barack Obama had an absentee father from Kenya who called himself a Muslim, but, given his time and place of origin, observed a version of Islam that was a hazy and easygoing affair, not the full, undiluted version, the truest one. The truest one is the one we find all over the Arab lands and, presently (but possibly not for long) in Iran, and in such places as have no other non-Islamic identity to cling or appeal to, as in Pakistan, or in some parts even of sub-Saharan Africa where the easygoing syncretists have been replaced, thanks to sums provided by the Saudis or by Colonel Qaddafy, or by the unyielding, intolerant, and deeply-hostile-to-Infidels, by the real Islam that for so long we did not understand.

Compare, for example, the practice of the Muslim Yorubas, and their attitude toward Christian Yorubas, in Nigeria, with the practice and attitudes of the Fulani and the Hausa. Or compare the mosques now in Niger with what were there, before the Saudi money arrived, even five or ten years ago. Or compare the Muslim population in formerly largely Christian Togo, a population now being given subventions by Khaddafy. He has been supplying electronic amplification for the Call to Prayer, and building mosques, and sending many of the Christian Togolese into quiet despair over the situation, as the present dictator of the country, Mr. Son of Former Dictator, runs his Libyan-supplied Lamborghini back and forth over the few dozen miles of paved road.

And Obama has met, even made sure were placed, in his Administration, a few young smiling American Muslims, with occasional walk-on parts for such examples of adult-onset Islam as Ingrid Mattson, or the well-pleased sincere pleasers such as young Master Rashad Hussain, who tried to rewrite a little history himself in attempting to efface mention of his own past statements from a magazine article, and only fessed up when he absolutely had to, when he knew he was caught. Now I don't know what emotional and mental desarroi lies behind the phenomenon of adult-onset Islam, and I suspect there is a long list of reasons, but I would not take Ingrid Mattson's version of Islam, the one she offers to students at the Hartford Seminary, as anything like what C. Snouck Hurgronje or Joseph Schacht or Arthur Jeffrey, or for that matter the Sheikh Al-Azhar, or Yusuf al-Qaradawi, or the Ayatollah Khomeini, or a half-million Muslim clerics all over the world, take it to mean. And I would be skeptical of the deep knowledge of Islam to be provided by Rashad Hussain, who according to reports was apparently genuinely shocked at his first encounter with Muslims abroad, as part of his new duties as the American envoy to the world's Muslims -- a roving commission indeed -- and particularly with their virulent hatred of Jews, based on Islamic texts. His surprise is telling, and if sincere, it reflects his naivete and his deep ignorance of Islam. But he is a Muslim of Indian descent who grew up in the United States, and apparently not in a community, or a society, suffused with Islam -- though his own family may be another matter. His Islam, then, may not be a guide to him as to how a billion other people take their Islam, and it is unclear, even though he proudly proclaims that he is a hafiz, if the text he spent so long memorizing in Arabic meant much to him, if he understood any of the Arabic, or if on his own he has actually found out the meaning of that text, has studied the Hadith, has carefully considered Muhammad and his words and acts, and his role as the Perfect Man, for all Muslims, for all time. I am willing to believe that he really was "shocked" -- and that tells you that he is not a guide to Islam, for Obama or even for himself. He does not know how to deal with those Muslims who, unlike himself, are not prepared to make compromises, are not prepared to take their Islam on the rocks, diluted by ignorance and the requirements of careerist self-interest which no doubt play a considerable role in the calculations of Rashad Hussain.

He is not the only court Muslim, either. In New York, at the Court of the Mayor, there have recently been the Raufs, Feisal Abdul and Daisy, who so cleverly courted the naïve (there are few so naïve as the very very rich) Mayor Bloomberg and his current public consort, deploying the usual weapons - soft voices, liquid brown eyes of great sincerity - and artfully hiding their deep of contempt for the Infidel. How this deeply impressed Mayor Bloomberg, with his own private demons from his youth, and memories of anti-Semitism. They played on that, encouraging his emotional - and intellectually confused - conflating of the victims of antisemitism in childhood Medford with today's leading carriers of antisemitism, who in Bloomberg's simpleminded understanding, should be seen as "the new Jews" who are themselves victims of a cruel and baseless "Islamophobia."

And the final source of Obama's knowledge about Islam, the one which he thinks entitles him to talk about it (I'm leaving out the smiling Arab diplomatic corps, with all those protestations about the "real Islam") is his childhood, or three years of it, in Jakarta, Indonesia. He attended a school there, but it was a most unrepresentative school, with plenty of foreign, Christian children along with the Muslims, which meant that those Muslim parents of those children were of the most secular and easygoing kind, and so too was the atmosphere in the school. And the school was in Jakarta, the most urban and urbane part of Indonesia outside of Hindu-peopled Bali. And Jakarta is in Indonesia, which not only has been far less ferociously pure in its Islam - but under Arab influence, Arab money, the dissemination through modern technology of the full message of Islam, that appears to be changing --- partly because the heritage of pre-Islamic civilizations, the Hindu and Buddhist monuments, and the pre-Islamic customs that are sweetly maintained, and even the music of gamelans that bespeak a refusal to enforce all of the prohibitions (including that on music) in Islam, as taken straight. And of course, almost all of us, including those who grew up in the Soviet Union and then grew to hate Communism - have fond memories of our childhood, as long as one or both parents were reasonably decent. Why should Barack Obama be any different? But it is up to him to realize that, and not to confuse happy childhood memories in a most unrepresentative only quasi-Muslim school, in a most unrepresentative Muslim city, in a most unrepresentative Muslim country (and at a time when secularism was at its height, and Islam most subdued), with the Islamic mainstream. It is up to Obama himself to read the texts of Islam, to spend a few days with the Jihad verses of the Qur'an, and to understand that Muslims take this seriously, that hundreds of millions of people take the Qur'an as the literal and uncreated and immutable Word of God. And it is up to Obama to read, over a few weeks, a few hundred Hadith, and to learn about the distinctions in levels of "authenticity." It is up to Obama to read 5.32 with, instead of without, 5.33, and to come to understand how Muslims interpret that verse 2.256 ("there is no compulsion in religion"), and not to rely on the smiling plausible people, or the confused and shallow machiavels, the john-brennans, who think we can misrepresent Islam to Muslims, and have them believe it, and misrepresent Islam to non-Muslims, and convince them that their history, their civilisation, and the Islamic threat to that history and that civilization, are not what the intelligent and well-prepared know them to be.

We've had it with Obama's lesson in American history, and we've had it with his lesson in Interfaith Healing Through Nonsense and Lies. We've had it. Not just the holy-rolling tea-partiers, as he and his wildest supporters may fondly believe, but many others, with their numbers swelling, refuse to participate in the farce and insist on learning at least as much about Islam as a billion other, not terribly literate, people have managed to do.

This has got to stop. Obama has got to do what Gabby Hayes once suggested: Come on in and set a spell. Set a spell, and set yourself to school about Islam. Your ignorance, your refusal to learn and to make policies on the basis of reality, is costing us trillions, and in both a figurative and a literal sense, is killing us.

It's Reading Period. Get cracking. Do all the work you didn't you during the regular term. Remember, soon enough it will be Exam Time. We'll let you know when.

And then you might be able to get not on the "Right Side of History," but -- a little more modestly -- on the right side of history. It's worth the old college try.

Do you know of anyone putting up a church or community complex costing an estimated $100 million who is quite so certain that the funding will be found? But since we know where that money is coming from - and it is not coming from taxi drivers and ice cream truck salesmen in Brooklyn and the Bronx - we understand Feisal Abdul Rauf's confidence.

And even now he is apparently off in Saudi Arabia, on a trip paid for by the American State Department, where no doubt he will be speaking to interested parties about this mosque-and-meeting-room complex. He will be telling them their "support" would be a good way to demonstrate to the world's Muslims that even in the heart of the most powerful Infidel state, even a stone's throw, or a metal shard's throw, from the greatest attack by foreigners on American soil, a mosque can rise. And those foreigners were Muslims from Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

But if they had been devout Muslims from the United States, would they be any less foreign to everything that the United States is about? Would their attaining of citizenship mean that they had been transformed, that they had ceased to do their duty, to participate, in any way they knew how and found effective, in the Jihad to undo the legal and political institutions and social arrangements of this country, because they are flatly contradicted by the letter and spirit of the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam?

And don't we also know that while churches sometimes have to close, as Catholic churches have been doing in even well-off suburbs of Boston, because the Church, and the parishioners, cannot afford the expense, the most extraordinarily expensive mosques keep opening all over the Western world. Why, in Billerica itself, a modest town outside of Boston, a fifteen million dollar mosque opened a few years ago, and no one appeared to wonder about this, given that about 100 families at most attend the mosque, and they were locals, hardly well-off. Where did the fifteen million come from? And where does all the money come from that pays for that huge mosque in Rome, and others all over Italy, including one that Muslims have been trying to build in the Val Col d'Elsa, the most Tuscan spot in the Siennese countryside that can exist, a place especially dear to the late Oriana Fallaci? She would go into paroxysm of deep fury when she thought of that mosque, with those minarets, rising in the middle of the most beautiful Tuscan spot. If you need to think of a similar aesthetic and moral offense, think of a giant mosque with four minarets being built right beside the Bridge in Concord, say, right near to the house where Emerson lived, and Hawthorne too, for awhile. Think of that mosque, and those minarets overlooking that bridge. And since we are talking about the area around Boston, think of the giant mosque that has been put up, on land bought at way-below-market prices, from the City of Boston, in a deal engineered by a Muslim working at the Boston Redevelopment Authority, a man who, having arranged the deal, for some reason suddenly disappeared and went off to Saudi Arabia to....well, you know what he went to do.

And the money for the land, and for the building went for a mosque built right smack in the middle of Roxbury, the better to be a place from which to lead campaigns of Da'wa targeted at the black population centered in that city, as a horrified friend, a Christian Yoruba, now living in Roxbury, told me about in wide-eyed horror the other day. For he knew exactly what the Muslims had in store for the people of Roxbury.

And we also know that the same funds, mainly from the Saudi rich (though other Gulf Arabs have also contributed funds), have been used to build in London, and Paris, and Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, and Brussels, and Antwerp, and Strasbourg, and Marseille and Lyons and Toulouse, and in Berlin and Frankfurt and Hamburg, and in Copenhagen, and Oslo, and Stockholm, and many hundreds of other cities. And so often a special deal is made. Special consideration is given to the Muslims. In Boston, that below-market deal may have been proposed by a Muslim working in the city government, but he could not have done it alone - it had to have been approved by others higher up, some of them no doubt congratulating themselves on their hypertrophied sense - a sense beyond all common sense - of what should be done to show Muslims that we in the United States had absolutely no qualms about Muslims, or mosques, or Islam, and by gad, we were going to prove our Tolerance and our Respect For Diversity, every step of the way. And a little thing such as information and warnings from the well-informed were not going to stop us.

What a good way to demonstrate to the world's Muslims the certainty of their coming inevitable triumph: to give them a great symbolic victory which, given the opposition that has had to be overcome, will be even more important to the world's Muslims than those victories achieved when a mosque was built in Rome, on land donated by the Italian state, not a mile from the Vatican, or when a mosque was allowed by the Spanish government to be built in Grenada, on the highest spot in that city, right next to the Alhambra, overlooking, or rather overshadowing in every sense, the nunnery just below the cliff on which the mosque is built.

All kinds of people are opposed to this mosque. They are opposed to it because they grasp the essence of Islam, because they have read, and re-read, and re-read, the Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. And they have read others, too, including the great Western scholars of Islam, and those who in the West came into contact with Muslims, and were students of history. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson wrote about what the Moroccan envoy had explained to them about the right of Muslims to make war on non-Muslims; it was not only their right, it was their duty to do so. And later, our most learned President, John Quincy Adams, wrote a devastating longer work on Islam that deserves to be read by all those in American public life who presume to comment on Islam. And Alexis De Tocqueville, too, had his say, after he had encountered Muslims in Algeria, and studied what their texts said, what their tenets were, what their deeply held, unshakable attitudes were, and why this all so disturbed him. And Winston Churchill, a lifelong student of history, but also of the men and events of his time, famously wrote, based on what he had experienced in the Sudan - he took part in the Last Charge at Omdurman - about Islam in a way quite similar to, or at least understandable to, Jefferson and John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and to Alexis de Tocqueville and to Winston Churchill, and also to such figures as Bertrand Russell and Andre Malraux.

And you know something? Neither Jefferson nor Adams nor Quincy Adams, nor Tocqueville nor Churchill, nor Bertrand Russell nor Andre Malraux, nor for that matter the French Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul, nor the Italian Catholic writer Marcello Pera, nor the celebrated atheist and famous anti-Fascist Oriana Fallaci -- not one of them is, was, could ever be, described as a holy-rolling Christian fundamentalist tea-party no-tax Obama-is-a-Muslim figure of fun. Not one of them. Nor could any of the great scholars of Islam - Joseph Schacht, C. Snouck Hurgronje, Arthur Jeffrey, William St. Clair Tisdall, Henri Lammens (who spent his life in Lebanon, and wrote and read Arabic perfectly, as - come to think of it, did quite a few of the great Orientalists, including Schacht, who lectured in Arabic in Cairo).

And we have, now, as we never had before, a great many articulate people who live in the West, who are able to take advantage of the mental freedom that the West offers, and the (relative) physical security that the West offers as well from Muslims who might wish to harm them. These people were born and raised as Muslims. They breathed the air of families and societies and states suffused with Islam. They understand how, as a Total Belief-System, it maintains its extraordinary hold on the minds of its adherents, and all the ways that it prevents them from learning to exercise their own moral judgment, because they are required to accept the Rules of Islam, the Complete Regulation of Life and Total Explanation of the Universe that Islam does not merely offer but insists upon. They must accept, and not question, using any independently acquired moral sense, What Is Prohibited and What is Commanded. These people who are Defectors from the Army of Islam are now among us, and their testimony - and the testimony of many others who have left Islam but do not wish to be publicly identified, for the obvious reasons - have written and spoken. We are free to read Why I Am Not A Muslim by Ibn Warraq, and Infidel and Nomad by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and A God Who Hates by Wafa Sultan, and Now They Call Me Infidel by Nonie Darwish. And there are many other books too, by Magdi Allam, who for years tried in Italy to hold onto his identity as a Muslim, who kept trying to convince himself that it was not Islam that was wrong but only some bad people. For Magdi Allam was deeply attached to his humble and loving parents, both Muslims, and the tug of filial piety made it hard for him to realize that Ibn Warraq's lapidary formula is true: "There are moderate Muslims, but Islam itself is not moderate."

And then there is a last class of people, not the celebrated Western scholars of Islam, and not the Defectors either, but rather, people who - Muslims and non-Muslims - grew up in the Muslim Middle East, in a Muslim environment, and have written forthrightly about the doctrine of Jihad and about the condition of non-Muslims in lands where Islam dominates. These people include the Lebanese writer Antoine Fattal, who wrote the single best study of the legal status of non-Muslims under the Shari'a, Le status legal des non-musulmanes en pays d'Islam, a work that can still be ordered from Beirut. But despite the trillions spent in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, the American government has not seen the need to pay for a translation of Fattal's text into English. Priorities, priorities. And they include Bassam Tibi, from Syria, who has lived and taught for many years in Germany, and who understands Islam, and fears that the Western world, or much of it, is finding out just a little late, or rather re-discovering what it once knew and then started to take for granted, and then started to forget, and then just at the moment when immigration from Muslim lands started up, completely forgot: that Islam is a belief-system quite unlike that of any Western, or indeed any Eastern, religion, and is based on the opposition of Muslim to Infidel, Dar al-Islam to Dar al-Harb, and on the inculcation of hostility toward Infidels, who are the "ungrateful ones" and who have no right, anywhere in the world, to erect barriers to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.

And finally, there is Majid Khadduri, from Iraq, who wrote on the legal theory of war and peace in classical Islam, and explained exactly what the duty of Jihad, that "struggle" to remove all those obstacles to the spread and then the dominance, of Islam, means to Muslims who take their beliefs to heart. He also explained why there can be no reliance on peace treaties between non-Muslims and Muslims, on the model of Muhammad's dealings with the Meccans in 628 A.D. at Hudabiyya, for Muslims a splendid act of deception. "War is deception" said Muhammad, and the doctrines of Taqiyya, and Kitman, which are two closely-related forms of religiously-sanctioned dissimulation about Islam and about what the Believers truly believe, may be seen as elaborations upon that celebrated remark by the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil. That deceptive treaty serves as a model for all subsequent treaty-making with non-Muslims. In other words, the Muslim side is not only justified, but has a positive duty to mimic the model of Muhammad and break such treaties - which to Muslims are not genuine peace treaties, their provisions to be scrupulously adhered to ("Pacta Sunt Servanda" is a notion in Western public international law, and has nothing to do with the law of war and peace in Islam), but rather, "hudnas" or "truce treaties," to last no longer than ten years (for that was the approximate length of Muhammad's treaty with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya, and Muhammad is the model for all things). However, if conditions required, they could be renewed for the same length of time. These treaties were to be violated, by the Muslim side, whenever they felt strong enough to do so, felt they could get away with doing so.

And now we come to Mayor Bloomberg. He's the man who, upon first hearing about the would-be mass-murderer in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, and without knowing a thing about the case, was quick to say that it "could be someone with a political agenda," "someone who didn't like the health care bill," in fact, "it could be anything."

No, I don't think those phrases on the page do Mayor Bloomberg justice. I think you have to see his irresponsible, lightheaded, casually deflecting nonsense, so I'm going to give you the link right here, making this a multi-media presentation.

And then there was, there is, the Ground-Zero Mosque controversy.

Mayor Bloomberg got together a group of people - some Muslim clerics, some holier-than-thou Interfaith Healing rabbis and ministers and possibly a priest or two -- and he had them all stand beside or just behind him as he delivered, his hair windswept and the Hudson hovering somewhere in the back, what he no doubt fondly believes was a noble reaffirmation of The American Way. He was practically Fiorello La Guardia and the year was 1941, and this was an "I Am An American Day." Well, in fact, those Muslims who follow the faith fully are not terribly interested in "being Americans," though they have a great interest in being in this land, and in building more and more institutions, and increasing their numbers and influence, in order to remake this country so that it conforms to, and no longer contradicts in every important way, the Shari'a. Anyone who wants to--the exercise is not hard - can simply set what the First Amendment (let's just stick to that for the moment) says beside what the Shari'a says about freedom of speech and freedom of conscience (which is the overarching theme linking the Establishment and Free Exercise Clauses), and see how very different they are. Or one could take the "equal protection" clause of the Fourteenth Amendment (and, through later decisions that have found the same "equal protection" guarantees in the Due Process clause of the Fifth Amendment, as against the power of the Federal government) and ask if Muslims still believe that the ideal society, that is, one that adheres as closely as possible to the dictates and requirements of the Shari'a, is one in which non-Muslims (or, in the strict sense, only Christians and Jews as Ahl al-Kitab, "People of the Book") can continue to live, and even to practice - very quietly, and subject to all manner of restrictions -- their faiths, but must live as dhimmis (from Ahl al-Dhimma, People of the Pact, that "Pact" being the so-called Pact of Omar) in conditions of humiliation (including the humiliating circumstances in which the Jizyah, or tax on non-Muslims, is to be paid to the Muslim state), degradation, and permanent physical insecurity - all conditions that the great scholar S. D. Goitein discovered were far harsher, far more onerous, than he had realized. And this was after a lifetime of believing sentimental stuff about a special understanding or even sympathy between "Jews" and "Arabs" that turned out to be a figment of his imagination. At the very end of his scholarly life, in his introduction to his masterpiece, based on a study of the papers in the Cairo Geniza, he had the integrity to admit this.

Mayor Bloomberg is cushioned by his own billions. He spent doing nothing for years but getting those billions, rising ever higher and ever richer, devoting his every waking minute to business, so that he would be ever farther away from the modest means of his childhood in Medford, Massachusetts. Is it one, or two, or three, or five, or six, or just how many billions is it that Mayor Bloomberg now possesses? That is the main reason he is used to being treated with such absurd deference, and which has allowed him to misunderstand his own intrinsic merit. The only kind of authority that should count is based on intelligence and education. But Bloomberg has devoted, and perhaps in the devoting even deformed, his own intelligence to the getting of money and then to the acquisition of power, so that he, Michael Bloomberg, might make a name for himself, might be thought well of. But even in the plutocratic gilded age that we live in, there are still many people unwilling to play along with that, unwilling to defer to the authority of Bloomberg, or Soros, or Gates, or any number of other people whose claim on our attention is intimately related to the size of their bank account.

Michael Bloomberg does not have to make his own bed or wash his own dishes. He's got time, even as the busy busy Mayor of New York, to have done some studying over the past nine years since the 9/11/2001 attacks caused sensible people to start learning about the texts, tenets, attitudes and atmospherics of Islam. But he hasn't done that. He shows no signs of having done that. I doubt if he can define the words "dhimmi" and "Jizyah." I doubt if he understands the meaning Muslims give to 2.256, "there is no compulsion in religion," as opposed to what they want us to think they take it to mean. I doubt if he has read, or even heard about, the "Jihad" verses of the Qur'an, as they are listed, for example, in the Calcutta Qur'an Petition. I don't think he knows why quoting (as both Bush and Blair liked to do) Qur'an 5.32 without 5.33 makes no sense. I don't think he knows much, if anything, about the contents of the Qur'an, and what, for example, 9.29 and 9.5 - indeed, all of Sura 9 - are about, or how the Suras are arranged, or what the interpretative doctrine of "naskh" or "abrogation" means. I don't think he knows what the word "Sunnah" means. I don't think he's read a single Hadith of the many thousands that exist, or knows who studied and winnowed them, and how that study was conducted, and how these Hadith were declared "inauthentic" or, if considered to be "authentic," how differing ranks of likely authenticity were assigned to them. I don't think he knows any of this.

And I know he knows nothing, has read nothing, has learned nothing, about the 1350-year conquest of non-Muslim lands by Muslims, and the ways in which those non-Muslims were subsequently subjugated, with many Islamized and then, though not in all cases (see Iran) arabized. I don't think he knows why the late Anwar Shaikh, the apostate writing in his Welsh redoubt, titled his most famous book "Islam: The Arab National Religion." I don't think Michael Bloomberg, bland, literal-minded Michael Bloomberg, has any idea of the symbolic importance of this Mosque, and of how it relates to what is called - what the Muslim lady writing in the Washington Post the other day called - Muslim Triumphalism. For Islam depends on a narrative, much like Fascism and Communism, of inevitable future triumph. It is not only Al Qaeda, and Lashkar-e-Taiba, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, and Hamas, and Hezbollah (its green-headscarved bezonians raising their arms in unison as they turn every rally into a scene from Nuremberg), and Sunna al-Islam, and all the other groups, the dozens upon dozens of them. All take their prompt - their prompt-book, as it were - from the same texts, Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, that is, from the Uncreated and Literal and Immutable Word of God in the Qur'an, and from the life and times of that Model of Conduct and Perfect Man, Muhammad.

No, but Mayor Bloomberg knows - just the way George Bush knew - that Islam is a "religion." He never stops to ask himself if it is a "religion" just like, or very unlike, other faiths, or other ideologies, we call "religions." He never asks if a Total Belief-system that punishes those who wish to leave it with death - the kind of thing we associate with a Koresh or Jonestown cult leader, not with a venerable religion - might be just one among many aspects of this faith that might make an intelligent man hesitate, and begin to ask himself questions (the ones that never occur to the likes of Michael Bloomberg). Those questions include, what exactly would be good definition of a "religion" and how shall we distinguish it, for First Amendment purposes, from a cult? And while we are defining "religion" for First Amendment purposes, shouldn't we also examine all those parts of Islam that amount to a politics and even a geopolitics? If Islam uncompromisingly divides the world between Muslim and Infidel, and requires Muslims to participate, directly or indirectly, in a "struggle" to push back the Infidel, to shrink the borders of Dar al-Harb and steadily increase the size of Dar al-Islam until it covers the whole globe, how does that worldly ambition differ from what the Nazis or the Soviet Communists had in mind? And doesn't it differ substantially from what all the other faiths we call "religions" contain? Are we not to exercise that important function - some say the most important function - of the intellect, that is, the ability to make distinctions, and with it, the complementary ability to make connections, too?

Mayor Bloomberg has spent most of his life making money, and now has spent the last decade or so, with the selfsame single-mindedness, acquiring political power. And he's quite happy with that. He's content with his life, and his understanding of things. And he's also content to think that he has no responsibility to others - the others whom he claims to be able to instruct in what constitutes the American Way. His banal adoration turns rather toward what are really two recent Idols of the Age, Diversity and Tolerance, both of them in a diseased modern form. Upon their twin altars he would readily sacrifice the real United States, a country with real people and not abstractions, people who will stand with Justice Jackson in declaring that the Constitution is not a suicide pact--surely one of the most memorable formulations in American Constitutional history - and who are not sentimentalists, as Michael Bloomberg so self-evidently is, and who will not put up with this powerful but ignorant man who gives no sign of having studied, even in the most rudimentary fashion, Islam. He gives no sign of understanding the aims of Islam, or rather of Jihad. He does not know the province and function of the Mosque, which is hardly limited to that of being, as Bloomberg so naively puts it, just one more "House of Worship." In many countries in Western Europe, in these houses of worship plots have been laid. In these houses of worship fiery sermons hurling abuse at the Infidels, especially Jews, and the local Infidels, whoever they might be, have been known to be delivered as the khutba during Friday prayers. In these mosques the police forces of many nations have found weapons, explosives, false papers in false ceilings. In these mosques the texts of Islam that call for killing the Unbeliever, striking terror in the heart of the Unbeliever, are not ignored, for they cannot be ignored. It is practically impossible to deliver a sermon that will not be instinct with hatred for the Infidel.

Now the phrase "instinct with hatred of the Infidel" and of those who "have aligned themselves with the Infidels," does describe a great many of those khutbas that accompany Friday prayers. And Muslims can be so whipped up that they do as some did in Bangladesh, emerging from Friday prayers so full of hatred that they immediately grabbed a poor Hindu who happened to be passing by at that moment when the mosque emptied, and beat him to death. Hysteria is so often a feature of those mass rallies - the rallies in Cairo to express delight, in May 1967, that the Jews would soon be destroyed, or the hysteria in Baghdad when Saddam Hussein put on quite a show for a million Iraqis, who were invited to watch and enjoy seeing thirteen "Zionist spies" - most Jews, with a few Christians thrown in - hanged. Or there are the terrifying rallies, or rallies intended to terrify, of Hamas in Gaza, or Hezbollah in Lebanon. Islam is a collectivist faith; it is uninterested in saving an individual soul or in saving souls at all. Da'wa, the Call to Islam, is really akin to Recruiting for the Army of Islam. You are promised instant companionship, and what's more, you can stop thinking, for all decisions, all questions of what you do and what you don't do, have already been decided for you. What a relief, to be relieved of the need to think for yourself.

Well, Mayor Bloomberg's comments on the Mosque demonstrate that he can't think for himself. For he accepts all the easy pieties, the things that if you do not question, and simply accept, allow you to avoid difficult questions, troublesome worries. He is sure that Islam is just like any other religion, and Muslims are just like non-Muslims, and they are going to integrate into our societies "just like" all other immigrants have done, and they are, "just like" those immigrants, going to exhibit a deep gratitude and loyalty to this country, and to be delighted to have been accepted by it, and deeply impressed with our freedoms, our art, our science, our literature, our music, and our laws and our customs and above all, perhaps, with the Constitution that is -- oh hell, that constitutes -- our civil religion. Yes, "just like," "just like," "just like." Mayor Bloomberg may not stare across the ocean very much, and for all of his billions he remains a complete and hopeless provincial, but he really ought to take the trouble to see what has been happening in the countries of Western Europe during the last few decades. He ought to ask himself two questions about Western Europe. The first is this: why do Muslim immigrants alone appear to be incapable of integrating into the countries which have so generously allowed them not only to settle there, but have allowed Muslim immigrants free education, free health care, free or heavily subsidized housing, and every other benefit that generous welfare states can offer, while Chinese, Hindus, Indians from Bolivia, non-Muslim blacks from sub-Saharan Africa, all manage ultimately to do so? And why, too, does this situation exist not in one country, or two, or several, but in every single country in Western Europe? Are they all countries where right-holy-rolling-troglodytic-Palin-worshipping-Fox-watching primitives live, or are they places where the most advanced people, the best educated people, are the ones who are now most alarmed, and unwilling any longer to accept the nonsense and lies that they have permitted up till now? Travel may not broaden the likes of Michael Bloomberg, but he really ought to find out what is going on. He ought to find out why so few Europeans, whatever differing views they will now express on what is or can be done, will not disagree with the assertion that "the large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has led to a situation, both for the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants, that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence."

I doubt if Mayor Bloomberg can even stand to read that sentence; I doubt that he could even begin to allow himself to consider if part, or all of it, might contain some truth, a great deal of truth, or even be perfectly, almost at this point, self-evidently, true. No, he can't allow himself the greatest luxury of all: the leisure, and pleasure, and supreme luxury of uninhibited thought. He can't ever allow himself that.

But he is the Mayor. And for all I know he has even higher ambitions. It wouldn't surprise me. Should it surprise me? And if he wishes to be powerful, then he has certain responsibilities a little more taxing, of a different kind, than making the subway trains run on time or draining the Queens marshes. Above I used a famous phrase - "instinct with obligation" - that Benjamin Cardozo, back in 1917, and not yet on the Supreme Court, used in his opinion in Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon. It's a phrase that every lawyer who took Contracts class is likely to have heard, and a great many, if they hear it now, will remember it. And it's useful here, and I used it above to talk of Muslim sermons that were "instinct with hatred for the Infidel." But now I'd like to use that word "instinct" in another way, and apply it to Mayor Bloomberg himself.

He holds an office, that of Mayor of New York, which is at the present moment in the history of the world, "instinct with the obligation" to learn about Islam. He has an obligation to consider the facts that are known by those who are alarmed by what they have found out, in many hours of self-study, about Islam, those who are alarmed by the triumphalist symbolism of the proposed mosque just around the corner from the site of the largest mass-murder in American history. That mosque is to be built by those who embrace the same faith, and read the same texts, the very same Qur'an, the very same Hadith, the very same Sira - nothing left out, nothing extraneous needed to be added - that were read by Mohammed Atta at the Hamburg mosque that has at long last been closed, and by the others in their mosques, in Saudi Arabia, or elsewhere in the Muslim Arab lands. And the Qur'an in Arabic is much more virulent and violent, so the scholars tell us, than it is in any other language.

When Cardozo wrote his opinion in Wood v. Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, he used the phrase "instinct with obligation" to describe the promise of a certain Mr. Wood to promote and distribute in the United States the products produced in England by Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, a promise of "good faith" and "best efforts" which to non-lawyers might seem to be no promise at all, or at least not a promise sufficient to serve as "consideration" that would allow Mr. Wood to go to court and keep Lucy, Lady Duff-Gordon, from breaking her promise to give him the exclusive rights, in a particular territory, to distribute and promote her goods.

Why this little excursus that only a first-year law student could find fascinating? Well, because Michael Bloomberg, as Mayor of New York, and Schumer and Gilibrand, as its Senators, and all of the Senators, and all of the Representatives, and all of the members of the Executive Branch of our government, and all of our Supreme Court Justices, including those recently appointed, wield powers that are "instinct with obligation" - the obligation of Good Faith and Fair Dealing with all of us, the citizens, who do not wield but in one way or another, directly or indirectly, entrust these others with executive, legislative, and judicial power, to do right by us, to protect us, to preserve this country and not to allow it to be rendered unnecessarily vulnerable to rising threats coming from within as they once came, and could come again, from without.

In this article I described the kinds of things Mayor Bloomberg has not done. He has not read the Qur'an, Hadith, or Sira. He has not read the commentators, Muslim and non-Muslim, on those texts. He has not read any of the many books now available to guide him through these texts. He has given no evidence of having become a sudden scholar, now versed in the history of Islamic conquest and subjugation of non-Muslims. He shows no awareness of what has been happening to Hindus and Christians in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, or what has happened to Buddhists, those in southern Thailand, and those who remain in the Chittagong Hills area of Bangladesh. He shows no understanding - does he even know about - the 2.5 million victims of Arab Muslim aggression in the southern Sudan and Darfur, and the millions more who were not killed, but who fled. He does not understand the steady pressure on Christians in Nigeria (even now the last Muslim ruler, Bibangida, is planning his comeback). He has no idea, I'm sure, why Colonel Ojukwu in 1969 denounced the "Jihad" against the Christians of Nigeria. He has not read the Western scholars of Islam, nor read or heard any of the apostates from Islam. Yet he can find Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan right on Youtube, and could spend an hour or two in their intelligent company. He has not met his obligations. He has not engaged in Fair Dealing with us. He has not made Best Efforts. And so many others are just like them.

These scholars are the ones who could explain to Bloomberg his failure to grasp the symbolic value, the triumphalist value, of this mosque. If built, it will not be seen by Muslims as Mayor Bloomberg thinks, as a self-assured monument to American values and goodness and so on and so forth. Instead, it will be seen as the mosque in Rome was seen by the Arab Ambassadors who according to Italian witnesses turned its dedication into something more fitting for the establishment of a beachhead, during the invasion of an enemy's territory, rather than merely as the dedication of an innocuous "house of worship." And if the Rome mosque was bad, the one that the Spanish allowed to be built next to the Alhambra, on the highest point in Grenada, was even worse. It was the occasion for triumphalist talk by various heads of Muslim communities that came from the outside, and insisted that Muslims boycott the use of Western currency, and use only gold, in order to "bring down" the West, and to replace it with...Islam. But of these triumphalist displays, Mayor Bloomberg apparently knows nothing.

Michael Bloomberg, and all of these big and little shots, in all branches of our government, not only took an oath of loyalty and swore to uphold the Constitution. That oath was "instinct with the obligation" of fair dealing, of good faith, of best efforts.

He, and they, are not dealing fairly with us.

He, and they, are not exhibiting good faith.

He, and they, are not making, when it comes to finding out about the texts, tenets, attitudes, and atmospherics of Islam, their Best Efforts.

He, and they, have not shown us consideration. And we, in turn, are thinking of ignoring that Social Contract which we once thought we had with them, but they are letting us down. And few have let us down with such a disappointing thud as Michael Bloomberg, formerly of Medford and now of Gracie Mansion, has done over the last few weeks.

Well, I'm not content to leave it at that. I find the statement vague. I want it to be fleshed out, by Mr. Gibbs, or by someone else - possibly John Brennan, Deputy Special Assistant To The President For Homeland Security and Terrorism, or even, just possibly, by President Obama himself.

I want to know what that idea is that has "corrupted the religion" of Islam.

Is it the idea that the Muslims are the "best of peoples"?

Is it the idea that under the Shari'a, the Holy Law of Islam, non-Muslims at best can expect to endure life as dhimmis, that is, as people who are locked into a permanent status that guarantees deliberate humiliation (as in the conditions that accompany the payment of the Jizyah), degradation, and physical insecurity? (See Antoine Fattal, Le status legal des non-musulmanes en pays d'Islam).

Is it the idea that the world belongs to Allah, but that right now, that world which belongs to Allah is divided between those parts where Muslims already rule, the Dar al-Islam (the House, or Domain, of Islam), and Dar al-Harb (the House, or Domain, of War, where Infidels not yet subject to Islam still dominate), and that it is the duty of all Muslims to participate, directly or indirectly, in the Jihad or struggle to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam?

Is it the idea that a state of permanent war, though not always of open warfare, must exist between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel?

Is it the idea that women and non-Muslims are permanently inferior to Muslim males in a well-ordered society, that is, one where the Holy Law of Islam, the Shari'a, prevails?

What is it, exactly, that Mr. Gibbs, and behind Mr. Gibbs the Administration for which he stands, thinks is the "idea that has corrupted a religion," the "religion" (a Total Belief-System really, which offers a system of Complete Regulation of Life, and is not only a "religion" as we carelessly use that unexamined term, but also a politics and a geopolitics) being Islam?

We all want to know.

And we all want to know, once you have stated that "idea" that has corrupted that religion, what Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Magdi Alam, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, and many other former Muslims, articulate and well-educated Defectors from the Army of Islam, think of your -- Mr. Gibbs', President Obama's, Deputy Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security and Terrorism John Brennan's, und so weiter -- understanding of what Islam inculcates, what Islam, taken straight up and not on the rocks, is all about.

And then we shall be examining what the most authoritative scholars of Islam and of its history wrote about Islam, and what Jihad means, and what the attitude is in Islam toward non-Muslims, and toward the lands of those non-Muslims -- beginning but not ending with Goldziher, Schacht, Snouck Hurgronje, Jeffrey, Lammens, Lal, Vajda, St. Clair Tisdall, Vryonis, Dadrian, and many dozens of others who wrote in the period 1870-1970, before the Great Inhibition set in. They spent decades learning the necessary languages, and then devoting decades of their lives to disinterested study.

And then, all of us by now - you, and me, and Mr. Gibbs, and Mr. Brennan, and Mr. Obama, and the entire American public - can, instead of being content with vague vaporings about those who would "hijack" or "corrupt" or do something unspeakable to "one of the world's great religions," intelligently discuss what it is that Islam contains, what its texts say, what its tenets require, and how it is that some Muslims participate one way in Jihad, and some another way. We can discuss how some Muslims -- for how long we do not know, and cannot predict - appear not to wish themselves to engage in Jihad, out of all kinds of calculations that also need to be examined, studied, discussed.

And then we can all, with our government having helped to instruct us (or we having helped in some cases to instruct our government) can all talk about it, and compare notes, and then, one assumes, come to some conclusions as to those who utter such things as this:

"We are not at war with a religion but an idea which has corrupted a religion."

And it is not only that we have to stop being content, or letting those who in the government presume to instruct and protect us, with this kind of vagueness. We also want the press, radio, and television to stop using such bland vacuities as "they were radicalized" or "they underwent a process of radicalization" without explaining to us what that means. What does it mean, Pontificators United Of The Mighty Editorial Board of The New York Times? How can we stop the "radicalization" of Muslims, or even know how to detect it, if no one tells us as they speak confidently to us about this stuff and about the "corruption of a religion"? That religion, apparently, when not corrupted is perfectly innocuous in its texts and tenets, and in the attitudes and atmospherics of societies suffused with that "religion" or better, faith, or better still, Total Belief-System.

Don't we have a right to know? Haven't we been forced to spend three trillion dollars in Iraq and Afghanistan, with more squandering to come, on a notion that Islam and Muslims are just fine if we support them, if we rescue them from their own wretchedness (a wretchedness that is a result of Islam itself, and so will remain as long as Islam remains, and is not constrained by a local ataturk)? I have waited, you have waited, we have all waited here and at similar websites or simply out in the great world. We have continued to wonder just what passages have been interpolated into the Qur'an and then relied on, as part of the "corrupting of a religion" strategy, to inveigle the naïve and ill-informed Muslim to believe that this is the real Islam, when anyone knows that of course it can't be. If it were, well then, we really would be in a difficult situation, requiring an entirely new way of looking at things, and certainly not relying on a strategy of building up Muslim armies and police forces and countries in order to make those countries immune to the siren-song of those "corrupters of Islam" we must defeat.

But there are so many different terrorist groups, not only the mediagenic Al Qaeda that gets far too much attention, but also Lashkar-e-Toiba, and Hamas, and Hezbollah, and Jaish-e-Muhammad, and Sunna Al-Islam, and dozens of similar groups. Their local habitations and names can be confusing, but it hardly matters, for they are all able to inveigle people, to "radicalize" Muslims in exactly the same way. That means that they must be using exactly the same authorities, the same made-up Qur'anic passages, the same concocted-for-the-occasion Hadith, the same absurd stories that someone just recently wrote about Muhammad, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, to convince Muslims they must behave in a way particularly dangerous for the existence of Infidel societies and peoples.

I don't know how long the Obama Administration, or the one to follow it, can carry on this farce. I don't know if they realize that, when they utter nonsense about the matter of Islam and Jihad, they lose whatever residual respect they still have among large numbers of people, not necessarily right-wing tea-partying holy-rolling [your favorite dismissive and to some, clichés can be put right here] people, but those who have gone to the trouble not to accept the comforting pieties that are being offered, but have, on their own, examined the evidence that accumulates as to Muslim attitudes and behavior. They lose the respect of those who have read and re-read the texts and studied the 1350-year history of Islamic conquest of non-Muslim lands, and the subjugation of many non-Muslim peoples, and have listened to the Defectors from the Army of Islam. And the more those people educate themselves, the more obvious is the nonsensical quality of the kind of thing that Mr. Gibbs, and those for whom he serves as mouthpiece, offered the other day, when he declared - keep it mind, memorize it, mock it to kingdom come - that we are fighting, in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Pakistan, in Somalia, in Yemen, in Saudi Arabia, in Iran, and on the streets of London and Bradford, Paris and Marseille, in Antwerp and Amsterdam, not the adherents of the true, the good, the beautiful Islam, but rather, those who have come to believe in a false "idea that has corrupted a religion."

One last time, Mr. Gibbs, so there is no ambiguity or room for more vaporings.

What is that "idea"?

We just have to know.

If you read Laurie Goodstein's article, you would remain entirely in the dark about those who took part in it. And since you would not have been informed about the religiously-sanctioned doctrines of Taqiyya and Kitman, and you might not be as suspicious as anyone who has either studied Islam and the (mis)representation of Islam or lived as a non-Muslim citizen of a Muslim-ruled country, you might not question that report.

But now that Robert Spencer has set out here, for easy reference, some of the unsavory connections and self-damning remarks, and examples of blatant lying about the contents of the Qur'an, and what Islam inculcates. He has set out, even so a reporter for The New York Times can understand, what the Taqiyya Nine -- Suhaib Webb, and Maher Hathout, and Ihsan Bagby, and Mohamad Magid, and Zaid Shakir, and Jamal Badawi, and Hamza Yusuf (who is shown in a photograph, with three prayer rugs, one already turned Mecca-wards, and a bookshelf full of row upon grim row of Islamic books) and Yasir Qadhi -- are truly all about.

Now The New York Times has a choice.

It can do a follow-up story, in which the reporter takes the information about these nine people, listed one by one above, with information about them, and quotations by them, and that reporter then investigates, studies the evidence that such remarks were made, that such connections can be made.

And then that reporter should report both what is given by Robert in the article above, and what those nine figures say to him when asked to explain those remarks.

Otherwise The New York Times will be guilty of having participated in a transparent fraud, in what for those who are knowledgeable appears unambiguously to be a fraudulent and, for the wellbeing of this country, and its citizens, a dangerous effort.

I do not know, and I hate to think, of how the New York Times covered the propagandists for Fascists and Nazis in the 1920s and 1930s. Why, no sooner had Mussolini made his March on Rome, and the Ventennio just started, than a certain Count Constantini was telling the society ladies of Boston about how wonderful that splendid fellow and his wonderful Blackshirts were: "Tells Mussolini's aims and progress; Count Constantini Speaks at the Chilton Club Italy's leader Has Won Whole Nation's Confidence, He Says." (Boston Daily Globe. Jan 16, 1923, p. 13)

And of course the Germans could count on such people as Ernst "Putzi" Hanfstaengl, Harvard Class of 1909, and a member of the Hasty Pudding Club (both biographical details are important, and would come in handy for Hanfstaengl, and for Hitler, later on), and others, so well connected to America's ruling circles at that time. Why, so many were classmates. They arrived on these shores to spread misinformation about Herr Hitler and his National Socialist program. And within this country, Fritz Kuhn's Bund was also doing yeoman's service as it stood up for Hitler and wailed about the injustices done to Germany which he, Herr Hitler, had protested. And wasn't it right and proper that the "Sudeteners" (never "the Sudeten Germans") should be given "self-determination" (the Wilsonian phrase that nowadays has been distorted and misapplied to the case of the local Arabs, the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel, who for obvious propaganda purposes -- when such propaganda became necessary after the Arab defeat in the Six-Day War -- were carefully renamed as "the Palestinian people")?

Now The New York Times has reported, without a scintilla of skepticism, about this effort to "refute" the "militants." And not a syllable of Goodstein's sober prose is devoted to actually reporting on any of the views expressed elsewhere by these nine people who made this video elsewhere - views about America, about the political and legal institutions of the Infidel nation-state of America, about Jews and the "myth" of the Holocaust, or about what they see as the right role, and right goals, for Muslims now living in this country. There is nothing about the company they keep, or about their very own heartfelt expressions, made mostly to fellow Muslims, and mostly earlier, before they realized that they had to go into full taqiyya-and-kitman mode.

Will the New York Times publish a follow-up account, based on the information even cats and dogs can now acquire, if they only have a computer, and a little time?

Many Muslims, and their unthinking supporters, believe that they can intimidate well-prepared critics of Islam, or of mosques being built hither and yon, by shrill cries about "freedom of religion" when Islam is, in the main, quite unlike any other religion. It is a Total Belief-System that in large part makes political and geopolitical claims, the claims of Allah to the whole world, that is, the claim or insistence that Islam must everywhere dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere.

And if "freedom of religion" is a red herring, so is this absurd cry about "racism" that is flung about, as if Islam, an ideology, can be compared to a "race," and Muslims forever be entitled to hide behind that cry of "racism" even where it so obviously does not apply. There is a "racism," however, that does apply - and that is the "racist" sense of superiority exhibited by Muslim Arabs against non-Muslim Arabs. For Islam, despite its universalist claims, is and has been a vehicle for Arab supremacism, in the ways I have many times discussed here.

No one should be embarrassed, much less apologetic, for daring to consider the evidence of his senses - that is, the Jihad news that mounts and mounts, from all over the world, and especially that which demonstrates the cruel treatment of non-Muslims by Muslims wherever Muslims rule, save in a handful of cases where special circumstances have allowed for a taming or constraining - possibly temporary - of Islam, as in Kazakhstan or Kemalist Turkey. Nor should we be apologetic about becoming aware of the evidence provided in books, rather than newspaper dispatches, by the historians of Islamic conquest: that is, the 1350-year history of the conquest of non-Muslim lands, and the subsequent subjugation of the autochthonous non-Muslims. And we should be unapologetic about reading the scholars of Islam, such as C. Snouck Hurgronje, Joseph Schacht, Arthur Jeffery, and dozens of others, who wrote before Arab money and influence and other factors aided the Muslim takeover of many academic departments in the West having to do with Islam and related studies. And finally, we can read Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, Ibn Warraq, Magdi Allam, Nonie Darwish, and a growing list of other Defectors from the Army of Islam, whose articulate works, whose morally and intellectually advanced temoignages, can be compared with the deceit practiced by those listed as participating in the Feelgood video that is given such credulous treatment by the New York Times reporter, and by those who vetted, but did not change, the story about the "Muslim video."

The West is now imperiled in a way unique in its history, mostly from an ideological pressure brought from within, and not by military pressure from without. Not everyone thinks we should simply throw up our hands and wail "but what can we do?" and "there's nothing to be done." There are those who are not, sometimes out of a mere want of imagination and intellect, able to figure out the many things that they could legitimately and rationally do to preserve (and perhaps even extend) the civilisational legacy they inherited. But there are also those who wish to protect it from its present-day most dangerous enemies, those who have not lost their senses, those who refuse to make burnt offerings of themselves or their children on the Altars of the Idols of the Age, Tolerance and Diversity - a misapprehended "Tolerance," a diseased conception of "Diversity." The latter group must regard with alarm and disgust the irresponsibility of The New York Times.

The irresponsibility of a great part of the media is beginning to alarm, beginning to disgust. Nine years after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and several decades after the slow but steady growth, seemingly unstoppable, of the Muslim presence in the historic heart of the West, the countries of western Europe, and after these great and costly and squandering military-cum-reconstruction efforts first in Iraq and now in Afghanistan, how much do we in the United States need to rely on The New York Times. Does anybody, anymore, still "rely" on the New York Times after the display of its non-coverage of Islam? How often, in the New York Times, have you seen any intelligent discussion or explanation of what the word "Sunnah" means? Have you had any inkling of what the Hadith are, or what the different collections of Hadith are, or how individual Hadith have been ranked as to presumed "authenticity," or even how the different muhaddithin are regarded, and why Bukhari and Muslim stand above all the rest? Have you been informed properly by The New York Times as to what is in the Qur'an concerning Unbelievers? Have you seen, in the pages of The New York Times, even a single mention of the murders of Abu Afak and of Asma bint Marwan, or about what happened at the Khaybar Oasis and why, or about what Muhammad did when the 600-900 members of the Banu Qurayza, taken prisoner and bound, were decapitated? Have you ever, even once, in the pages of The New York Times, read anything about little Aisha, and why virtually the first act of that learned theologian, the Ayatollah Khomeini, when he came to power, was to reduce the marriageable age of girls to nine years?

Oh, I could fill up the page and printer, and so could you, with what The New York Times has, in nearly a decade, chosen not to tell its readers, willfully refused to enlighten them about -- that is, the ideology and the practice of Islam. And this is curious, because the best way to convince the public to support what the New York Times supports - a pullout from Iraq and Afghanistan - is to make them more aware of what Islam inculcates, what Islam contains, what Islam means.

It is wrong, it is unjust, it is cruel to its readers, it is dangerous, it is a dereliction of journalistic duty, for those reporters and editors on the New York Times, to sanction this deception by their inattention, their nonchalance amounting to criminal negligence, their unwillingness to dig just a little bit on such things as the real views behind the for-the-camera smiles and wiles of those Nine Supernumeraries of Islam who took part in this video charade, this tableau-vivant of taqiyya-suffused viciousness. Those reporters and editors are doing what The New York Times, in its embarrassing history, did in the past to aid and abet propagandists for totalitarian ideologies - including one of its most famous reporters, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer for his efforts at hiding the reality of the famine-ravaged Ukraine.

This time it is not Walter Duranty, doing his best for Joseph Stalin. Nor is it some suave mustachioed well-tailored Count Constantini talking to untouchable Brahmin wives at the Chilton Club on Beacon Street. And this time it isn't Ernst Hanfstaengl telling his old classmates from the Harvard Class of '09 - perhaps even some fellow members of the Hasty Pudding Club, with whom good old Putzi may have high-kicked-it in drag for one of those Hasty Pudding Theatricals -- about how Hitler was merely a useful tool of Krupp and Thyssen, a tool to beat back the Bolsheviks, and in America they had nothing to worry about, for the National Socialists just wanted to get Germany back on its feet, to give it its self-respect. No, this time it is another Total Belief-System, with many similarities to the totalitarian ideologies of the previous unappetizing centuries, and another set of adherents to an ideology that flatly contradicts, in letter and spirit, the American Constitution and everything else that makes America America. Adherents who want to make sure we do not find out much about the ideology of Islam, or about those who work to undermine the legal and political institutions of this country.

Let's all wait right here -- at this very website, Jihad Watch -- and see if The New York Times will indeed, under the circumstances, feel it has an obligation to run another story, a follow-up, where the information presented above about the nine participants in this video - most of them well-versed in the arts of taqiyya and kitman - is no longer omitted, but becomes the very subject of the story.

Perhaps you'd like to make a wager on what The New York Times will do.

So go ahead. Faites vos jeux, mesdames et messieurs. And do it fast, because any moment now the croupier at this website is going to announce that "les jeux sont faits."

And les jeux sont faits, for many Americans, in another sense. Yes, for many of us, when it comes to trying to get people to meet their responsibilities and report adequately on the contents of Qur'an, Hadith, Sira, and to analyze truthfully the content of Muslim propaganda and campaigns of Da'wa, for us les jeux sont faits, which in English means -- the chips are down.

And when those chips are really down in every sense, who will be there to defend the political and legal institutions of this country, its social understandings, its art and science and literature, its political freedoms, and the conditions that make those manmade laws, those political institutions, that art, that science, that literature, those individual freedoms, possible? Those conditions could not possibly exist for one minute under Islam. Who will defend these things, if not those who, even if in some cases hesitatingly, begrudgingly, not really wanting to find out what they suspect they will find out, finally decide to learn about the texts, tenets, attitudes, atmospherics of Islam? And then, too, they must learn also about all the ways that Muslim propagandists in the West attempt to keep non-Muslims unaware and thus unwary, confused and thus unable to see things clearly.

Okay, New York Times. You have one last chance. You didn't do right when it came to Walter Duranty and the misreporting on the Soviet Union. Your coverage of the Nazi persecution of the Jews, throughout not only the 1930s, but right through the war, was laughable, and cruel, and had consequences. It resulted in many deaths, for there must have been many readers of The New York Times who, unaware of what was really going on, did not do enough either to save their own relatives, or to raise holy hell, wherever and whenever they could, because they relied on The New York Times, and the Sulzberger family was not about to let its paper be tarred as "too Jewish." In other words, that family cared more about itself, and its own position, then it did about reporting the truth. And right now, I suspect, those who run The New York Times have no desire to let themselves be open to charges of "racism" or "Islamophobia" or some other such obvious nonsense. Apparently they lack the wit, they lack the imagination, they lack the knowledge, to be able to respond appropriately to such charges.

Well, I've had my fill of analyzing or psychoanalyzing those who report for, those who are columnists for, those who edit for, those who run, those who own, The New York Times.

I repeat, one last time, the question I asked more than once above: having published that story about this Muslim propaganda-vehicle video as a splendid attempt to "rebut militants," will The Times now publish a follow-up article, one that gives full weight to the information supplied by Robert Spencer in his article above, about the nine Muslims who appear in that video, or will it not?

Let's start with how the speech itself starts:

Thank you, Mr. President, and thank you for that very warm welcome. I can tell from your enthusiasm and the enthusiasm of the entrepreneurs that I met outside this incredible building that there is an enormous spirit of enterprise and entrepreneurialism and industry and business and trade here in Turkey, and that is one of the reasons that I want our two countries to build this incredibly strong relationship that I will be speaking about this morning.

I have come to Ankara to establish a new partnership between Britain and Turkey. I think this is a vital strategic relationship for our country. As Prime Minister, I first visited our two largest European Union partners, then Afghanistan, then North America and now, I come to Turkey. People ask me, 'Why Turkey?' and, 'Why so soon?' Well, I can tell you why: because Turkey is vital for our economy, vital for our security and vital for our politics and our diplomacy.

Let me explain. First, our economy.

So: The Economy.

That's really the main point of Cameron's speech. It is that Great Britain wants economic ties, wants to make money, from the Turkish market. That's it. And he comes not as the representative of a country that is equal to, much less conceivably superior to, that of the country and regime he is visiting, but as a supplicant, kowtowing rhetorically to Erdogan.

For David Cameron has very little sense of statecraft as being about something other than markets or money. He is not a leader of Great Britain, but the current C.E.O., and his disturbingly youthful face - and that of his able assistant Mr. Clegg - remind one not of farseeing Churchill scanning the London sky with binoculars, or good old Macmillan on the links, or even of pipe-puffing Harold Wilson, but of public school boys who have sown their wild oats previously, but are now having a slightly more sedate yet still excellent adventure, something like the old stories about "Tom and Jerry in London."

He is the apotheosis of modern with-it politicians, who do not have much knowledge of their own, or other people's histories, and who seem to have been born yesterday and proud of it. The most telling remark that David Cameron has ever made is that about 1940. That was the most important year, save possibly for 1215 or 1066, in British history. It was the year that, with the Nazis having overrun the Continent, and the United States not yet in the war, Great Britain stood alone. Some may remember the famous Low cartoon of that day: "Very well, then. Alone." But David Cameron spoke a few weeks ago about the United States fighting fiercely in 1940 - in other words, he could not even remember that in that year the British were alone and trying to persuade the Americans to enter the war, until the bombs at Pearl Harbor made such persuasion unnecessary. Some may call it a mere slip, the oral equivalent of a typographical error. They are being too kind.

David Cameron, like his Tweedle-twin Clegg, has the soft expression that one too often sees in American highschool yearbooks, the expression of people who have not known adversity, are not schooled in the ways and wiles of other peoples who are possibly wiser and less trusting and less innocent. The impression one has is of a permanent naïf.

And what does David Cameron know about what he talks about Islam, when he courts Turkey, or rather courts those who now rule Turkey, and whose good will he thinks he needs? There have been so many eviscerating articles that one hardly knows what to add. When he tells Erdogan, and tells the world, that he, David Cameron, knows what the "real Islam" is, and that the "real Islam" has nothing to do with what those whom Bush and Blair used to describe as those who "had hijacked a great religion," he offers no evidence. He invites ridicule, and ridicule has accepted the invitation, and has moved in to 10 Downing Street, I think for quite a long stay, perhaps for as long as David Cameron the ephebe continues to discharge, as best he can, the responsibilities of rule from there.

We all know - even those who do not visit this site know - that whatever else may be said, no one can say that those who conduct violent Jihad are acting in a way of which Muhammad, the Perfect Man, al-insan al-kamil, would not approve. We all know that the doctrine of Jihad refers not -- as Karen Armstrong and John Brennan, two peas in the same laughter-causing pod, would have it -- primarily to some "interior struggle" to be "good Muslims." Rather, it refers to the "struggle" that must go on, permanently, between Believer and Unbeliever, between those who are Muslims and those who are Infidels. For a state of permanent hostility or war must exist between the two, and Muslims must use whatever instruments of Jihad are available and effective - which may, but need not, include terrorism and qitaal. In early Islam, however, before such things as the Money Weapon and propaganda and demographic conquest without any need for military conquest were developed, terrorism ("strike terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers") and qitaal were the only instruments available. Now there are so many other ways to conquer the enemy's lands from within.

Cameron did not appear to realize that he had damaged the cause of the best people in Turkey, the secularists, the ones who more or less share the same intellectual and moral universe as does Western man, and who are being subject to every form of persecution and harassment that the sinister Erdogan regime and its henchmen think they can get away with, including trumped-up charges which, for all I know, will be followed by Show Trials in the grand tradition of Andrey Vishinsky, in Moscow, circa 1938. He seems to think there is this place called "Turkey" which is to be thought of only in terms of its current, Kemalism-undoing rulers, when it is entirely possible that that regime has come to the end of what it can do, and now must draw back. And even so, it has so alarmed the secularists, and so alarmed, too, the Alevis who do not like the way the regime has heartened Sunni Muslims to take a more aggressive stance toward them, that they may help vote Erdogan out at the next election. And a Turkish regime run by secularists will not forget the craven nonsense that David Cameron uttered, which only helps Erdogan and his party to present themselves, like those who rule in the Islamic Republic of Iran but in a minor key, as winning over the Infidels, as forcing them to come to terms with them.

David Cameron, on the basis of no known knowledge of Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, but only on the basis of some bullet-riddled Executive Summary prepared for him by some Deputy Assistant Underling For Pious Nonsense, someone seconded from the Foreign Office to the Circumlocution Office and at last, sent to the Office of the Prime Minister, said not something like this but actually this:

They [those in the West who are worried about the ideology of Islam, and therefore worried about the adherents and spreaders of that ideology in the West] see no difference between real Islam and the distorted version of the extremists. They think the values of Islam can never be compatible with the values of other religions, societies or cultures.

Now among those doubters, those naysayers, those "right wing" or "extreme right wing" impugners of wonderful Islam, which David Cameron has been studying for years and any minute now will produce those verses that prove that Islam is as he says, are such people as Wafa Sultan, Magdi Allam, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Nonie Darwish, Ibn Warraq, Afshin Elian, and many others. And among those doubters and skeptics and worriers, too, one can find, among many others, Alexis De Tocqueville and John Quincy Adams. One can even find former Prime Ministers of Great Britain. There was Gladstone - he was the last Prime Minister to speak at length about the Turks, when he wrote and agitated about the Bulgarian Wars. Does Mr. Cameron know what Gladstone said about the Turks, in pre-Ataturk period of their existence? And does he care? And then there was one other Prime Minister who wrote memorably not about the Turks, but about the votaries of Islam. That was Winston Churchill, the man whose bust was removed by Obama from the White House and returned to the Embassy of Great Britain, for reasons that have yet to be explained, and whose memory, apparently, has been largely effaced from the mental hard-drive of young David Cameron.

Let's just put that by-now well-known statement here, so that David Cameron can find it, and read it, and think about it:

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property -- either as a child, a wife, or a concubine -- must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen: all know how to die. But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytising faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science -- the science against which it had vainly struggled -- the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.

But, David Cameron may splutter, things are different now. Islam has changed, changed utterly. A terrible beauty is born, and so on and so bloody forth. Or he might simply ignore what Churchill had to say, or tell us "what the hell did that old fuddy-duddy know about anything? He knew nothing. He didn't have the education I did." True. Winston Churchill did not have the "education" that David Cameron did.

Nowhere in the speech of David Cameron was there any sense of Europe, or of the West. He surely knew, but did not care, that the French and the Germans would be furious at his remarks about Turkey's admission to the. E.U., an admission which he not only said should take place, but that he, David Cameron, would personally "fight" for. And one wonders if even now he realizes how many European governments, and how many people in Europe, horrified at the prospect of Turkey entering the E.U., have decided that they cannot count on the British government, under the two callow philo-Islamic Tweedle twins, Cameron and Clegg, and certainly cannot count on the Obama Administration, which like the one before it thinks that Turkey's admission to the E.U. would be a swell idea. Americans, if they have no special personal ties to Europe, even at the level of a vacation house in France or Italy, seem blandly indifferent to the menace to the survival of Europe as Europe of the large and growing Islamic presence in Western Europe, what that presence means now, and what it will mean, if not vigilantly diminished, in the future.

There was talk about the economy.

And there was talk about "security." Apparently David Cameron is under the mistaken impression that Turkey is a valued and loyal member of NATO. It might once have been that, or might once have had its uses, but that was during the Cold War, when the Soviet Union was, in Turkish eyes, merely Russia, the hereditary enemy of Turkey, and thus to be opposed. When 5,400 Turkish troops took part in the Korean conflict, and Turkey was amply rewarded, too amply, by membership in NATO, that did not mean that Turkey was now a member of the West. And what's more, those troops were under the command of secular officers, and sent by a secular government, and the North Koreans and Chinese were not Muslims, so could be fought without any second thoughts. Successive Turkish governments, or rather the Turkish military, have cooperated with the Americans, who were allowed then the base at Incirlik. But to the great surprise of many in the Bush Administration who completely misunderstood the power and tug of Islamic solidarity, the Turks did not allow a fourth division to enter Iraq from the north, from Turkey, that might, just possibly, have made things in that north quite different early on.

Does David Cameron not know about the Turkish political figures who compared American troops in Iraq - unfavorably - to the Nazis? Does he not know of the popularity of "Valley of the Wolves," of that Der-Stuermer-like movie, about Americanazis stormtrooping their way through Iraq, and about a Jewish doctor, a regular Mengele, who harvests the organs of murdered Iraqis for re-sale to his clients in Los Angeles, New York, and Tel Aviv? Wikipedia tells us that "the Wall Street Journal characterized it as 'a cross between 'American Psycho' in uniform and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, while Turkey's parliamentary speaker Bulent Arinc described it as 'absolutely magnificent.'"

Has he noticed that his host, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been spending a lot of time in Arab countries lately, and also with the leaders of the Islamic Republic of Iran, for whom he has attempted to run diplomatic interference with the West, and whose "right" to acquire nuclear weapons he wholeheartedly supports? Does he not know that Erdgoan has turned to the Muslim lands not because he feels that "Europe is rejecting him" but because even if, or perhaps especially if, Turkey were admitted to the E.U., he would do so, and help Muslims outside of Turkey to use Turkey's membership in the E.U. to the advantage of Islam, and of Muslims, worldwide? Does David Cameron know -- have those who tell him what they think he should know about Turkey in three, or perhaps four, pages, told him? -- that Erdogan has talked of granting Turkish citizenship to Muslims outside of Turkey? Were that to be the policy, were Turkey to be - as various Muslim leaders including the occasionally truth-telling Qaddafy have suggested - a stalking horse or rather a Trojan Horse for Muslims inside Europe (that was what Qaddafy called it), there might be no way to stop not only millions of Turks from moving freely about the cabin of the E.U., but of millions or tens of millions of other Muslims, now "Turkish citizens," perhaps some of them paying the government of Turkey for the privilege of doing the same, of becoming "citizens of an E.U. member" entitled to move and live anywhere in any of the constituent member-states of the E.U.

Has David Cameron been made aware that the Erdogan regime, the one that hosted him, the one that now rules in Turkey, was deeply implicated in the publicity stunt directed by the I.H.H., a group that Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the French terrorism expert and former magistrate, has linked directly to Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups such as Hamas? The Mavi Marmara incident was a set-up to pressure Israel to abandon its nautical checkpoint designed to keep out weapons and those goods that have a dual-use as war materiel. No, Cameron didn't know that? Why not?

One has an awful feeling about David Cameron that, as a thoroughly callow and shallow product of the most up-to-date blackberry-and-computer world, he's not much of a reader of history. Oh, you'll tell me, didn't he study PPE, Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, at Oxford, and didn't he get a First? Well, if at this point you still can be impressed with those of presumably high degree, you haven't been spending enough time with the "well-educated" who are churned out at Harvard, Yale, and similar places, and you fail to imagine the dons, and the circumstances, that would allow Old Etonian Mr. Cameron to smirk-swagger his way through Oxford, and the kind of examinations that demand not thought but regurgitation, a simulacrum of thought. And even if we were to concede - I don't - that at one point David Cameron was capable of taking in things, and capable of thinking about them, that was three decades ago. What has he thought for us lately?

Cameron has no idea that an "Idea of Europe" exists. He does not understand Islam, as many have already said. If asked, he could not adduce textual evidence for his assertion that the "real Islam" has nothing to do with those people the Obama administration likes to call "violent extremists." There is not a single passage from the Qur'an, not a single story in the Hadith, not a single detail from the life of Muhammad, the Model of Conduct for all time, that is made up by those who are propagandists, or members of, Al Qaeda. The texts are on their side. Some Muslims choose not to act upon those texts, out of ignorance of Islam, or more often out of the human desire to simply get on with their lives. This is combined in the West with the prudent decision that now is not yet the time to rock the boat or to show too obviously what Islam is all about, and that it would be better to conduct Jihad slowly by other means. All this is, writ large, a little like the quarrel over tactics and timing, but not on ultimate goals, that separate the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, who are most impatient, from the Slow Jihadists of Fatah, who realize that the war against Israel must for now continue to be conducted through such means as diplomatic pressure, unceasing propaganda, economic boycotts, and whatever else comes to hand short of outright warfare on the battlefield, at least as long as Israel has not yet been pushed back to the 1949 Armistice Lines, which will make going-in-for-the-kill much more immediately attractive an option.

What does matter to David Cameron is money, trade, the great business of buying and selling. That would be understandable if he were merely the head of the British Board of Trade, akin to the head of the American Chamber of Commerce, visiting Turkey to drum up more trade. But he is not that. He is the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and his country is part of the West, and the West is now threatened by the large-scale and growing presence of Muslims within that very West. David Cameron, instead of discreetly avoiding the topic, took it right on - took it right on, and came down firmly, boldly, uncompromisingly, on the side of the Muslims. He will fight for Turkey's admission to the E. U. He will ignore the fact that Turkey is now ruled by the most Muslim and, therefore, the most anti-Infidel, anti-Western, government, since the days of Abdul Hamid. He knows nothing of the "real Islam" whose spirit and letter he so self-assuredly, and baselessly, invokes. He offers not one shred of evidence to show that what every decent Western scholar - from Schacht and Snouck Hurgoronje to Jeffrey and Dufourcq - understood about Islam, he acts as if Wafa Sultan and Magdi Allam and Ibn Warraq and Ayaan Hirsi Ali had not provided ample and convincing testimony, as defectors from the Army of Islam, as to what it is all about. He instead is merely a Commercial traveler, unpacking his wares, making his pitch, a Podsnap who wants to know nothing at all about those who interest him for one reason and one reason only: they are to be his customers. That's what counts.

For David Cameron there is no West, there is no Europe with a distinct history, and achievements in every sphere that could not have been achieved in any place where Islam dominated -- in art, in science, in literature, in music, in the development of the idea of the individual and the solicitousness for the rights of individuals.

He doesn't care. He's unpacking his wares. That's the great business of British living, according to the Minister of the Board of Trade, masquerading as Prime Minister, Mr. David Cameron, this New Man, this homo purely economicus who is now, and alas, for a few years to come, the head of a country without which the West cannot be said to exist.

In his remarks about "real Islam," and about his determination to "fight for Turkey's admission to the E.U.," and in his snarling viciousness -- not for the first time -- about Israel, Cameron managed to antagonize people all over Europe who are terrified of Turkey's admission to the E.U. He managed to promote Erdogan and thus antagonize Turkish secularists who must wonder what got into him. He managed to signal that his understanding of the war -- the Jihad-- being waged against Israel, and Israel's attempts to defend itself against an unceasing onslaught, was abysmal. (It is not the Gazan Arabs, but the Jews of Israel who are under a worldwide and without-end siege, by Arabs and Muslims who follow their lead, conducted through all possible means, to weaken the state before going in for the kill.) It was, in a sense, a Trifecta in reverse: he said everything wrong, he did everything wrong. His tone was wrong, his content was wrong. He's the wedding-cake groom, or the eager salesman in the blue suit which, even if bought bespoke at great expense, looks as cheesy as the worst 7th Avenue knockoff.

So in the chanceries of France and Germany and Italy, in the banana-skin-lined corridors of power in the Pentagon and the State Department, and in Great Britain itself, those who know what's what will not exactly ignore him, but having now taken his measure, and taken as well the measure, or rather the remarkably similar measurements (just look at their identical suits, ties, shirts, expressions, minds) of his nearly identical twin, the apologist for all that is not Western, Mr. Clegg, Tweedledee to his Tweedledum (and this allows us to think of them both as the Tweedle Twins), we all learn to hold him at a distance and in contempt, and work around him, around both of the Tweedle Twins.

That's the way it's going to have to be, apparently -- unless the Conservatives can figure out a way to remove this embarrassment. So be it.

She shows en passant that she continues to believe, or at least pays lip service to, the myth of Cordoba, that is, the myth of an Islamic Spain where Christians and Jews lived under benign Muslim overlords, a splendid example of "Convivencia" - and one presumably with implications for the brave-new-world we are allowing to be created, if we do nothing to halt it, in Western Europe.

But is this "convivencia" stuff true? Was Montgomery Watt, the Anglican clergyman who was, as his former student Ibn Warraq testifies, philo-Islamic because he had a horror mainly of atheism, correct in his depiction of Islamic Spain? And what about Maria Rosa Menocal, with her Ornament of the World? You can read about her at this site. Was Cordoba, was Islamic Spain itself, a place where "Muslims, Christians, and Jews" all lived in splendid harmony? Apparently the Christians didn't feel so, because otherwise why would they have spent 500 years in attempting to throw back the Muslim invaders? And what about the Jews, who had no army? Well, consider the most famous of those Jews -- there is a statute of him, by the way, in Cordoba, in the Juderia. What did Maimonides think of Cordoba, where he lived, as a place where under Muslim rule Muslims, Christians, and Jews lived in "harmony"? In his "Epistle to Yemen," Maimonides described his experience. The Jews were treated so well? If so, why did Maimonides denounce the hideous treatment of Jews by Muslims in Spain, and why did Christians tirelessly engage in the Reconquista over 500 years?

But other than that conventional unwisdom about Cordoba, Georgie Ann Geyer appears to have come, at least somewhat, to her senses. It will be interesting to see if she can ever drop her anti-Israel animus. She was offended, and rightly, by the display of arrogance and contempt for the feelings of non-Muslims, demonstrated by the not-quite-as-suave-as-necessary Muslim spokesman who appeared on television to attack those who question the motives, the funding, the goals, the everything, of those behind the Ground-Zero Mosque:

One organization is the Cordoba Initiative, which has a good reputation as an Islamic group that wants to meet with Christians in an atmosphere reminiscent of an Islamic "Y." (It is named after the liberal Islamic caliphate in Cordoba, Spain, ruling from the eighth to the 15th centuries, which respected Christians and Jews -- a good sign.)

But no one has revealed where the $100 million for the mosque has come from, who is behind the idea, or who are the people leading the entire project. [...]

The so-named "spokesman" and "founder" for the Ground Zero Mosque initiative, interviewed on CNN, was far from courteously trying to convince other Americans of his group's good intentions. He was arrogant, smug and derisive of non-Muslim Americans. One came away from his interview feeling that he really wanted to, as the kids rather eloquently say, stick it to us.

Given these chasms of information -- and the attitude of the Muslims involved -- one can only be against this Ground Zero Mosque. The unequivocal fact is that the grounds where so many died so terribly is no place at this moment of history for any mosque....

And she ends her piece thus:

And here's perhaps the most important point. If the planners of this mosque, like the arrogant one on CNN, really consider themselves Americans, they would not bring up such an aberrant idea at such an emotional time, when the United States is fighting two wars against radical Islam, and when American Muslims remain a largely unknown quantity.

Last weekend, for instance, a conference of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was scheduled to be held at the Dulles Expo Center near the capital, in Virginia, with 5,000 set to attend. The theme was: "Are Muslims required to obey non-Muslim governments?" The radical Hizb ut-Tahrir America (HTA) was also scheduled to hold a conference in Chicago earlier this month to hype the idea of spreading an Islamic state to the entire world, but it was suddenly canceled by the Marriott Oak Brook hotel for reasons unknown.

That these questions could even be asked among people who have taken citizenship oaths to defend the United States, and who enjoy all the benefits of this country, tells you that we must carefully observe the players to be sure we are playing with the same rules.

Keep in mind that there are few Christian churches, much less Jewish synagogues or other religious temples, anywhere in the Islamic world. Until Muslims are willing to provide for others, in countries where they are dominant, what they so arrogantly demand for themselves in the West, it would be the height of folly to allow such a dramatic and intrusive development as the Ground Zero Mosque.

But this note of "no one can say us nay" and "we are here to stay" and "we'll do what we want- if not right now, then soon enough, when our numbers and our power increase," is a theme that Muslims have been sounding for a long time, and quite deliberately. It is only recently that Infidels have noticed this theme, thanks to the Muslims' behavior toward non-Muslims all over the world. This behavior includes the many reported acts (and just how many similar acts do you think are never reported, that we never hear about?) of persecution and humiliation, and attacks on, and even murders of, non-Muslims in lands ruled by Muslims. It also includes the demands, each more outrageous than the next, for changes in the ways of life, in the laws and customs, of non-Muslim peoples and lands, into which - in a fit of nearly criminal negligence, Muslims in large numbers have been admitted and allowed to settle, by those who simply relied on pious assumptions about Islam. They had no real knowledge or understanding of either the ideology of the Total Belief-System of Islam, or of the goals of Jihad. It is only just now that many are prepared to listen carefully, and no longer to overlook such statements, and to begin to grasp how such attitudes arise naturally from the texts and tenets of Islam.

Take that Muslim "scholar" Tariq Ramadan. He is, in truth - see Frere Tariq by Caroline Fourest, which is now available in English -- a sly propagandist for Islam. He has had a chair specially endowed for him at Oxford by Arabs spending some of their oil-and-gas revenues. Oxford has done this to its shame and, one hopes, to its great and permanent dismay, once potential contributors, non-Arab and non-Muslim, find out about this bought-and-paid-for well-upholstered chair supplied to Tariq Ramadan. Listen closely to Tariq Ramadan. One of the things he keeps saying is the phrase: "It's over." Yes, he repeats it too: "It's over. It's over." What does he mean when he says that to opponents? He means that we Muslims are here, and what's more, there is nothing you can do about it, so don't even try to stop us in any way, and don't even think about halting our arrival, or dislodging us, or taking away the benefits we exploit or refusing to meet the demands that we make: "It's over. It's over."

This is a rhetorical weapon, the weapon of the triumphalist bully, attempting to demoralize Europeans into throwing up their hands in despair, and not being able to summon the will to halt Muslim immigration and then even to reverse it, through a series of intelligent, carefully-crafted, and perfectly-justified measures. No other group of immigrants poses anything like the implacable and permanent danger that Muslim immigrants so clearly pose to the political and legal institutions, the art, science, literature, freedoms, of the advanced West. That large-scale Muslim presence has created a situation for the indigenous non-Muslims (and for other, but non-Muslim, immigrants) that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without such a large-scale Muslim presence. No one should hearken to, though we all should listen to, the implied threats and menace underneath soft-spoken, but deeply sinister Tariq Ramadan with his "It's over. It's over."

One year ago, the city was buzzing when the newspapers published a letter by Bouchra Ismaili, a Rotterdam city councilman: "Listen up, crazy freaks, we're here to stay. You're the foreigners here, with Allah on my side I'm not afraid of anything. Take my advice: convert to Islam, and you will find peace."

It is not over. It is just now that people are educating themselves and waking up. Tariq Ramadan does not want that to even be considered as a possibility. He wants - and many other Muslims want - us to believe in historical inevitability, and in the inevitability of their triumph. This is exactly what Hitler and the Nazis believed; it is exactly what the Marxists believed. And it is, I'm afraid, present even among us, with those who obliquely invoke something called "History" as demanding this or requiring that, in that dangerous phrase that Obama likes to use: "getting on the right side of history." There is no "right side" of history. There is one damn thing after another, and some things are much more worrisome than other things, and require different kinds of analyses, a shouldering of different kinds of burdens. The historical inevitabilists, even in the weak or etiolated form of that "getting on the right side of history," are always dangerous, and especially so if they allow the tariq-ramadans of this world to keep the peoples of Western Europe from rousing themselves and admitting that over the past few decades they made colossal errors in their immigration policies, and in their domestic policies that have permitted, and even encouraged, Muslim colonies within the West to expand, and to do so at the expense - in every sense - of the indigenous non-Muslims.

But the halting of any growth in, and the peaceful, legal, and orderly reversal of the size of, the Muslim presence in Europe, is exactly what people are coming to understand has to be achieved. And achieved with or without the understanding, help, and support of the benighted American government, at least as presently constituted. (And Tariq Ramadan's suavity, by the way, can turn to hysteria in a New York minute, and I have seen or heard it happen repeatedly. In this respect he is like a great many of the seemingly smoothest Muslim propagandists, who when challenged by the well-prepared falls apart, and starts to rant, in tel qu'en lui-meme fashion.)

Listen carefully to Muslim rhetoric in this country and elsewhere in the West. It is always not-quite-what-it-seems-to-be: we hear, for example, the phrase "we are here to stay." What does that ambiguous phrase mean? Is that a rousing sign of loyalty to the American political and legal system? Or is it, rather, an aggressive and defiant expression -- we're here, we're not going anywhere, and we will do exactly as we please, in putting relentless pressure on the American legal and political system, on its educational system, on its social understandings, and will never give up, and don't think about trying to stop us -- because "we're here to stay" and the lands that, for now, you possess do not really belong to you, but belong to Allah and to the "best of peoples," that is, the Muslims. You have only temporary possession, perhaps not even a life estate; the fee simple belongs to us, the Umma, the people who received rightly the message, from the Seal of the Prophets, that Perfect Man (al-insan al-kamil), Muhammad. And while some Muslims say no Infidel laws should be obeyed, others, more prudent, think that for now such a demonstration would not be in Islam's best interests. They take a different tack: we will obey your silly manmade Infidel laws insofar as they either do not contradict any part of the Shari'a. And they then add, in a sub-rosa coda meant to be understood only by fellow Muslims: "and only because it makes more sense for now to temporarily do so, in the same spirit of Muhammad treating with the Meccans at Hudaibiyya, that is, insofar as our present relative weakness in the West requires that we temporarily must, in order to bide our time and fortify further our position."

Earlier in July there was a big furor in Great Britain about another planned mosque. There have been so many furors, so much anguish caused by Muslims all over as they conduct their campaign of conquest-from-within, one whose goals the less-prudent or more certain-of-triumph among them have not hidden:

DEFENCE chiefs are fighting plans to build a giant mosque overlooking Britain's top military academy. They claim the new centre poses a security threat to budding Army officers at world-famous Sandhurst.

The building would have a huge dome and two 100ft minarets towering over the soldiers' parade ground.

The minarets will be sited within 400 yards of the Royal Military Academy in Surrey....

Campaign leader Alan Kirkland said: "A lot of people are questioning the size of the minarets which will overlook the whole of the academy."

Local MEP Nigel Farage said: "I am appalled at such an idea. Many fear it could pose a grave security risk."

A Ministry of Defence spokesman said: "Sandhurst has put in an objection on the grounds of security."

Look at the comments by Muslims in any controversy, whether over this or that mosque, whether they are an affront to our sentiments, as with the Ground-Zero mosque, or a real threat to security, as with the mosque-and-minarets proposed to overlook the grounds of Sandhurst. You will find, once the slyly sweet-reason blague is not accepted at once, quite a different tone, one of triumphalism. A Jihad Watch poster ("dumbeldore's army") brought to my (and others') attention the comments that accompanied this article. "Dumbledore's Army" describes those comments thus:

There are plenty from native non-Muslims who have 'woken up' and are most alarmed and angry; but there are also some truly appalling remarks by obvious Mohammedan spin-doctors and brazen liars...as well as sneering Muslim triumphalists, boasting and taunting.

The most telling of those is this one, by an identified Muslim, from which the sneering triumphalism blasts like heat from a furnace. I'm reproducing it here, because it's a classic of its kind.

"get over it. This is multicultural Britian in case you haven't noticed. Muslims are here to stay. If you don't like it, you should leave."

"There are not enough Mosques as it is.

"There are churches everywhere. We should be able to have just as many places to worship as all the other religions have."

"We have the right to do what ever our religion says"

"and there isn't a single thing you can do about it."

Think about that. It connects to Tariq Ramadan's "it's over. It's over." It connects to the predictions made by Houari Boumedienne, the ruler of Algeria, back in 1974, at the U.N., when he said that Europe would be conquered not through outright military conquest, but "through the wombs of our women." That triumphalist theme has been repeated by so many Muslim clerics, Muslim political figures, Muslim journalists, in the press, on the radio, on television - see that indispensable site, www.MEMRI.org, for many examples.

And you who come to this site often, are not surprised. You are not surprised, as perhaps Georgie Ann Geyer was surprised, at the arrogance and contempt shown by that Muslim spokesman on television:

The so-named "spokesman" and "founder" for the Ground Zero Mosque initiative, interviewed on CNN, was far from courteously trying to convince other Americans of his group's good intentions. He was arrogant, smug and derisive of non-Muslim Americans. One came away from his interview feeling that he really wanted to, as the kids rather eloquently say, stick it to us.

Nor are you surprised when you learn, from Geyer's same piece, that the Ahmadiya Muslims - yes, the so-called famously "moderate" Ahmadiya Muslims, who are even considered in Pakistan not to be real Muslims, so unorthodox are their beliefs said to be - held a meeting just outside Washington, D.C.:

Last weekend, for instance, a conference of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community was scheduled to be held at the Dulles Expo Center near the capital, in Virginia, with 5,000 set to attend. The theme was: "Are Muslims required to obey non-Muslim governments?"

No, you know. But you have a task. You must make sure that everyone you know also knows what you have come, slowly, and with effort, to understand about the Total Belief-System of Islam, and that those others, in turn, having properly informed themselves, will begin to inform, and alarm, still others. Our government is not helping. Those who think they know better have so far proven that they are far behind many whom they presume to instruct and protect; they are not helping.

So it's up to you. It's all up to you.

And if you do not accept this task, in the United States, in Canada, in Australia, in the countries of Western Europe, then -- I'm afraid -- "it's over."

To wit:

1) The government of Hamid Karzai, at every level, is hopelessly corrupt, and this corruption inflames the populace, and causes more to support the Taliban they once had grown to despise. But the corruption occurs because there is now something to be corrupt about - the very money that flows in from donor nations that do not know how to tell the Americans no, do not know how to analyze the situation correctly, and feel as though, if they did not send troops, or are refusing to send more troops, or are intending to withdraw the troops they have, then the least they can is send a few hundred million or a billion. It's madness. It makes no sense. Were no money to come from the outside, Karzai and Karzai's brother and all the other warlords would be disappointed, but at least the spectacle of their corruption - they would now have so little to be corrupt about - would be over, and the Taliban could not use that as a rallying cry.

2) There is no winning of Afghan hearts and minds. They are Muslims and we are Infidels. A handful of people may wish to cooperate with us, may sense that we wish them well, and are far more to be trusted than the sinister Pakistanis, but these people cannot possibly influence the mass of primitive Muslims who will always see us as what, in fact, we are - Infidels. That puts a limit, a very low limit, on any collaboration beyond temporary overlaps of self-interest. Money will not do it.

3) We must come to understand that what keeps Afghans economically down is a combination of things that all come from Islam - the habit of mental submission, the habit or duty of submission to authority, if that authority is Muslim; the hatred of Bid'a or innovation, the deep inshallah-fatalism; the insistence that women are an inferior species and must remain uneducated and be kept down; the deep belief that Muslim and Infidel can never be friends, that Muslims have a duty only to other Muslims, and cannot possibly be loyal to Infidels; and the deep belief that Muslims have a duty, the one that gives most meaning to their lives: to support, to defend, to protect, to lie for, and to tear down all obstacles that stand in the way of, Islam and the spread of Islam and the dominance of Islam.

But let's return to the country that matters more than Afghanistan, and that is Pakistan. Just this week, Hillary Clinton was visiting. She was there, the State Department trumpeted, to announce a "massive" package of aid, of very kind, at every level, from water treatment and supply plants, to projects to improve the Port of Karachi. Why, the Pakistanis needn't worry about all their problems, or about the diversion of billions to all kinds of other causes -- including that of producing the nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them - because the Americans were not content with having spent the last day or two, before the comic farce in Kabul opens and more billions are handed over from the Infidels to the Muslims, and went back to neighboring Pakistan.

And what was the purpose of Hillary Clinton's visit? Oh, it was to try to do things that would "minimize the mistrust." Which "mistrust" is that, you ask? Is it, by any chance, the mistrust that has formed in the minds of every sane American, at every level, of Pakistan's reliability as a "staunch ally" of the U.S.? Meanwhile, in Pakistan, Hillary Clinton has announced another half-billion dollars in aid in order, so we are told, to offer tangible evidence of our friendship -- apparently the last $30 billion, since 9/11/2001, has not been enough -- and, above all, to "overcome Pakistani mistrust" of the United States. It is we who have every reason to mistrust meretricious Pakistan, that has been leading on, inveigling, fooling, diddling the American government for the past fifty years.

But it is we -- you and I -- who are now contributing still more money so as to "overcome Pakistani mistrust." And, not incidentally, to relieve the rich Arabs -- Saudi Arabia in the lead -- of any requirement that they contribute to the wellbeing of fellow members of the Umma. Oh no, that's always and everywhere a task for Infidels, no matter how many trillions the Saudis and other rich Arabs pile up, and pile up, and pile up. It wouldn't do to have them share the wealth with Pakistan or other Muslims. That's a task for the Infidels, that's a task that calls for more and ever more Jizyah, pocketed without gratitude and a sense of entitlement beyond anything non-Muslims can possibly understand, and a craven willingness to give and keep on giving, that should be beyond anything non-Muslims should possibly tolerate.

But our ill-prepared rulers, who may have forgotten that among the responsibilities of rule is that of thoroughly informing themselves of what they need to know, nonetheless have never forgotten how to give away, almost on whim it sometimes seems, huge sums. $440 million here, to Mahmoud Abbas, pour ses beaux yeux, and now something more for Hamid Karzai, and of course how could we overlook Pakistan, whose government and people, it seems, mistrust us. And what better way to overcome that mistrust than to give Pakistan still more aid, aid that the papers described as "massive"?

It's fun to give away large sums. You feel important. You feel you've done good. You sometimes earn, if not any gratitude for the American people (the ones footing the bill) at least some gratitude toward you and your family. And that kind of thing can come in handy: how many countries helped contribute to Bill Clinton's accumulation of more than one hundred million dollars since leaving office? And even if Kuwait did not receive economic aid, Kuwaiti gratitude for the Gulf War's outcome was expressed later on, with million-dollar fees to George Bush, Sr. for a short lecture. It's fun to give away money, and if you don't have a carefully wrought and clever policy, then giving money away is the next best thing. Why, the American government has been giving vast sums away for more than sixty years. For some - for the countries of Western Europe and for Israel - this money has gone to organic allies, unshakable members of the West whose loyalty is not being bought because it need not be bought, it is already there. And there are some impoverished countries or peoples who do express gratitude to the Americans. But no Muslim country or people have demonstrated any gratitude to any Infidel donors. They take, as by right, whatever they can get, and keep trying to inveigle the Infidels into giving some more.

And one way to get more is to be displeased with what you have been given so far. Pakistan has no cause, and no right, to "mistrust" the American government. But the natural enmity, at times rising to hysterical hatred, felt for Infidels, as exhibited in Pakistan, is presented not as a result of Islam - no, Islam shall be the Great Unmentionable whenever Americans in high office worry about the attitude of Pakistanis - but as simply a result of American mishandling of this or that situation.

And thus it is, nearly a decade after the most fantastic, and fantastically heedless, transfer of American wealth to Muslim states and peoples, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, to Pakistan, to Egypt, to Jordan, to the "Palestinians," nowhere in any of those countries can one find the slightest gratitude, or friendship, or anything like those feelings that we think we have a right to expect, because we keep applying understandings that have no application to the closed mental world of Islam. This American and other Western aid made, and makes, no difference. Indeed, it is likely that the more they think they can count on such aid, and want to inveigle more, the more likely it is that they will show displeasure - for it is displeasure that causes us not to re-examine the whole policy of aid to "win Muslim hearts and minds" but, rather, to think we've done wrong, we must do right, and the way to do right is with some "massive" aid projects that will help the "ordinary Pakistanis." But the ordinary Pakistanis will never like us, not as long as Islam retains its hold upon their minds. You can be sure that the Christians in Pakistan do not hate or fear or mistrust the American government; they wish it well. They only wish that that government would come to their rescue, would force the Pakistani government not to join in the anti-Christian persecution by letting malefactors off, but actually protect the Christians (and Hindus) of Pakistan.

But to give away money is fun and feels good, because you are not wasting money but Doing Good, when you are the Secretary of State, or the President, and you are Doing That Good in the easiest possible way, with someone else's money - with that of the long-suffering taxpayers who have no say, who cannot make themselves heard, though one doubts that Americans wanted to spend tens of billions on "reconstruction" in Iraq (when Iraq has all the oil, and thus all the money, in the world, and if it doesn't have those trillions yet, it could certainly have borrowed against that future flow), and Afghanistan, and hopeless primitive meretricious Pakistan. And there may be just a little gratitude, from the rulers at the top, who are good at skimming a lot of that American aid off for themselves and their families. And so, at a later date, when you are out of office and need to make "real money," you may find that you, and your spouse, and even your children, will be especially welcomed by the elites - still in power of course, since they never leave - in the Muslim lands you so benefitted. And of course, you can always justify the money you handed over, and convince yourself - you don't take much convincing, that it was worth the effort, that effort to "win" Muslim hearts and minds" by what are essentially bribes.

But we already have the evidence. We already know, we should have learned a long time ago, what Pakistan is all about. Pakistan has been the favored Third-World recipient of American military aid for the past half-century. It started to receive this aid beginning in the mid-1950s as part of that ill-fated - some, less charitable, would call it farcical -- military "alliance," CENTO, which was supposed to block the Soviet Union to its south as NATO did in Europe. CENTO was a military alliance without any value to us, in which the Americans and British supplied all the money and all the military equipment, and such supposedly true-blue unshakable Islamic allies as Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Pakistan stood by. They were regarded as allies because the Dulles brothers, John Foster and Allen, had so often been told that "Islam is a bulwark against Communism" that they came to deeply believe it.

After Qassem's coup in Iraq, with the death of the Prince Regent, Faisal, and the murder and mutilation of "strong man" Nuri es-Said, Iraq left CENTO and it became clear that CENTO was worthless. But Pakistan never lost its most-favored-nation status in Pentagon eyes. Pakistani generals, with their studied expressions of deep sincerity, their fly-whisking pukka-sahib fake-Sandhurst manner, always impressed American generals, who knew no better. And what was still worse, the State Department proved a pushover -- not least, perhaps, because of the suspicion that Nehru and his Foreign Minister, Krishna Menon, with more than a hint of the Faiban Society and Victor Gollancz's New Left Book Club, were entirely too Marxist, and didn't those steel mills the Indian government let the Soviets build prove it?

Pakistan has been inveigling weapons and money out of the Americans ever since. So outrageous, however, was Pakistan's behavior, that those who had been following it closely -- including Senator John Glenn and Senator Larry Pressler -- finally passed the Pressler Amendment, designed to force the Executive Branch (including the Pentagon and the State Department), to start to make Pakistan observe its solemn commitments as to the use of American weaponry. The Pressler Amendment passed, but the Executive branch continued to do as before. And Pakistan's rulers, the military (with occasional zamindars allowed to pretend to govern), continued to prepare for the One Cause That Mattered: aggression and war against India and Hindus.

We have all heard about General Zia ul-Haq. General ul-Haq is the man whom suave anglophone Pakistanis (and their children in private schools and universities in the West who have too often had such an influence on their impressionable roommates and classmates) always assure us was the one man responsible for bringing "fanaticism" to formerly nice, kind, peaceful, tolerant, Pakistan. This is utter nonsense, though no doubt found plausible by some of their unknowledgeable and unwary auditors. It's true, even among Pakistan's generals, that Zia ul-Haq was unusually fanatical, but fanaticism in Islamic Pakistan was always there, from the get-go. Even if Mohammad Ali Jinnah himself was not a fully observant Muslim (he drank wine, some say he even touched pork), Islam itself was never moderate, and that meant that the primitive Pakistani masses would always accept, and not veer from, Islam as we in the West have now come, haltingly and reluctantly, to understand. Their Islam was and is fanatical as all totalitarian Total Belief-Systems are fanatical. Since Pakistan was born as the "Land of the Pure," of, by, and for Muslims -- just look what happened to the Hindus who had been present at Partition, and what happens to the Christians now -- Zia ul-Haq was only an extreme example, one who hastened the madrasizaton of Pakistani education, such as it was.

But there are so many others. Who paid for the project, based on nuclear secrets stolen from Western labs by the thieving metallurgist A. Q. Khan, if not the Pakistani military? And where did they get the money? Well, directly or indirectly, the money came from American taxpayers, for it was our money that allowed the freeing up of other sums to be spent on special projects by Pakistan's military.

And A. Q. Khan did not limit himself to building, on the American dime, the "Islamic Bomb" that is the only thing in Pakistan that should matter to the American government - that is, who has possession of those bombs, and where they are stored, and whether they can be transferred, and what delivery systems the Pakistani military possesses or is developing. No, he also offered nuclear know-how, it appears, to North Korea, to Iran, and possibly to Libya. Which of those countries received his aid has not been made public, but it is known that offers were made. And what happened to A. Q. Khan? The answer is: He's a national hero. He's the Great Man of Pakistan, and the Americans have not been, despite endless entreaties - entreaties to those to whom they have given tens of billions of dollars - able to question A. Q. Khan. The Pakistani government gives him protection. The Pakistani public worships him. The only one who rivals A. Q. Khan in popularity is Aafia Siddiqui, the fanatical Muslimah who, after having been shown every kindness, having been admitted to MIT and then, for graduate work, to Brandeis (with generous scholarships at both places), became involved with Al Qaeda, and fled to Afghanistan, or Pakistan, where eventually the Americans found her. She, of course, has accused the Americans of torture, and has feigned innocence, and no matter what is carefully explained by the American authorities, it doesn't matter. Aafia Siddiqui is a heroine, a glorious example of how a Muslimah should treat the Infidels. By their National Heroes ye shall know them. In Pakistan, the National Heroes are A. Q. Khan and Aafia Siddiqui.

But none of this has stopped the Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, from arriving in Islamabad on Sunday, and then on Monday proudly announcing all the "massive" new aid - part of the package of $7.5 billion that had been approved by Congress - that would now go to Pakistan. But why? The Pakistanis at this very moment are continuing to expand their nuclear arsenal. And that costs money. And they are demanding, and perhaps getting, new jet fighters from the Americans. And they continue to plan for war on India, their enemy - the word "hereditary enemy" might be tempting but even that would not adequately describe why India is the enemy. India is the enemy because India is largely Hindu, and India once was possessed by Muslims, and therefore should once again be possessed by them. It is not India that has been making war on Pakistan for the past fifty years, it is not India that has supported terrorist groups to set off bombs and to kill people all over Pakistan, but rather, Pakistan that has allowed to flourish, and its military even encouraged as a useful adjunct to its own anti-India campaign, all sorts of terrorist groups. Just yesterday an Indian minister announced that the terrorist attack in Mumbai had, from first to last, been under the control of Pakistan's Interservices Intelligence Unit, or I.S.I.

But we are supposed to worry, while the Pakistanis keep us away from A. Q. Khan, and while they make a Pakistani Idol out of Aafia Siddiqui, and while their press continues to be full of the most astounding and absurd charges against the Americans, and while the I.S.I. continues to support the Taliban, save perhaps in one or two places - as Swat - where it seems that the economic interests of the zamindars and the generals are threatened. But there is no indignation, moral or otherwise, against Al Qaeda or against the Taliban when they stick to attacking Americans or other Infidels. There cannot be. Pakistan is Muslim; its people, or the people who count, are Muslim. The non-Muslims are non-persons, who can be used, as child labor (weaving rugs), as domestics who can be cruelly exploited, as the poorest of the poor, but who cannot be treated as citizens equal to Muslims. That would be impossible. And it would be impossible, too, for Pakistan's government to protect Christians and Hindus from Muslim wrath, from trumped-up charges, from extrajudicial killings by Muslims putting the Shari'a into practice on their own, or policemen determined to see Shari'a, not secular, justice done.

So here we are. It is Pakistan that "mistrusts" us. It is Pakistan that must yet again be given billions. Why? Because those who rule over us cannot do otherwise. They are not clever, they are not cunning, they lack the imagination to figure out what Islam means, and how to best weaken the Camp of Islam. They are going to try the mixture as before: handouts to Muslim states, which will become indefinite, a kind of Jizyah that the Americans do not dare end for fear of the reaction of the Muslim recipients.

That's where we are in the pitiful history of American efforts to deal with Pakistan. So as better to deal with Afghanistan. So as to keep this group in power. Yet they are far less significant, in the Muslim scheme of things, than they seem to be, with the dozens of terrorist groups that exist, and with the many other instruments, aside from terrorism and combat, or qitaal, through which Muslims worldwide are pursuing the struggle, or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam.

And we are funding them. And it has apparently not occurred to anyone in high office that we should demand that Pakistan apply for aid not from us, but from the fabulously rich fellow Muslims, that is the Arabs of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, U.A.E., Qatar, and so on. Where is the solidarity of the Umma? And since the Arabs will never come through as the endlessly generous and gullible Americans and Europeans do, the only result will be resentment, building in Pakistan, at those Arabs, and the theme may be introduced that is badly in need of introduction. To wit, that the Arabs see themselves as clearly superior to non-Arabs, and Islam itself, the realization may start to dawn if we help, just a little, to talk about it amongst ourselves, and let ourselves be overheard, that Islam has been, is, and always will be a vehicle for Arab supremacism.

And with that, possibly the Pakistanis, who won't stop for a minute "mistrusting" us until such time as the hold of Islam upon the minds of Pakistanis lessens, may at long last start to "mistrust" us less, and then Arabs who use Islam for their own purposes, a bit more.

Wouldn't that be good?

Wouldn't that save hundreds of billions or even trillions?

Isn't it, really, the only way to stop the endless squandering that has defined our policy toward Muslim states and peoples, based on ignorance and vain hopes, up to now?

If you understand Islam, and you wish Muslims well, what is it you wish for them if not to break the hold that this Total Belief-System has on so many of them? Does it make sense for Infidels to give money to support Muslim peoples and states, so that they will continue to hobble along, with Islam unweakened, but the West economically weakened by such endless aid, and such crazed attention to a problem -- the Jihad -- that requires other means, other ways to check the forces of Jihad in the countries of Western Europe, imperilled by an ideological assault, by the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, and demographic conquest?

Given the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan and Pakistan -- do we still need to wait to use that term? -- isn't what I suggest worth at least a try?

And George Casey, Chief of Staff of the Army, immediately expressed his concern that the "real tragedy" would be if, because of this event, harm were done - hadn't another kind of harm already been done? - to the Great Aim And Only End Of American Life, Diversity: "As great a tragedy as this was, it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well." He was severely and properly criticized for this, but not by any of those in power. No, in the face of such criticism, they didn't dare rush to his rescue - after all, he was merely mouthing the Party Line - but they did nothing to suggest that they in any way found his remark remarkable. And Casey did not learn a lesson. He did not ponder the idiocy of what he had said, for a few months later, in a February 2010 interview, Casey warmed again to the theme: "Our diversity not only in our Army, but in our country, is a strength. And as horrific as this tragedy was, if our diversity becomes a casualty, I think that's worse."

It was one more Burnt Offering on the Altar of An Idol of the Age - "Diversity" - and one more example of assertions being made without any evidence at all to support them, such as that "Diversity is our strength." (In the mighty contests to come, including possibly one with China, a country that, like Japan and Korea, does not worship or admire or have any great desire to enforce or bring about "diversity," we shall see just how much "diversity" turns out to be "our strength.")

Well, sometimes one almost feels a certain sympathy for General Casey, the hapless political general, because it is unclear if he is simply mouthing the script or if he really believes it. He was back in the news, fleetingly, and far too unremarked upon, two weeks ago, with what he said at the Aspen Institute, meeting in a bucolic setting. Here is the important part of what he said:

General George Casey, the Chief of Staff of the Army, said today the United States could face another "decade or so" of persistent conflict in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In two months, the U.S. will have been at war in Afghanistan for nine years.

The four-star general said the U.S. military moved beyond conventional warfare in Iraq and Afghanistan "long ago," and that the focus is now on the people. Casey highlighted job, education and economic growth as essential to success in Iraq and Afghanistan.

When asked if enemies of the U.S. have to be a part of the reconciliation process for it to be considered a success, Casey said that is a "matter of debate," but that enemies have to be convinced they will lose.

In a follow-up statement to CBS News, a spokesperson for Gen. Casey, Lt. Col. Rich Spjegel, said that "General Casey was speaking of the types of conflict we will be fighting for a decade or so. He did not, nor did he intend to, imply that we would be fighting in Iraq or Afghanistan for 10 more years.

The general's comments were made at a session moderated by the New York Times' David Sanger at the Aspen Institute's Ideas Festival. Former Secretary of Homeland Security Michael Chertoff was in the audience, and his wife Meryl Chertoff, the Institute's Co-Director of Justice and Society Programs, introduced Casey.

Now there are two distinct parts to what Casey said. Both need to be examined.

First, without any hint that he might find the prospect intolerable, the head of the U.S. Military blithely said that the U.S. faced another ten years if fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan. And did the audience rise up and rage, as it should have? Or was the response tepid, among all these complacent souls at one of those depressing meetings of the Great and The Good? They all know each other. It was the kind of thing that used to be mocked when it was Just Boys Having Fun at Bohemian Grove, but then was taken solemn-seriously when the boys added girls, and they all became Rulers of the World, meeting at Davos. And now the Aspen Institute has gotten into the game.

We, however, who are not part of the game, and would never be invited to Aspen, or Davos, or the Bohemian Grove, and who take as dim a view of our ruling class or classes as did Mark Twain (though he did have a fondness, let's face it, despite his contempt for those who made out like gangbusters, because they were respectable businessmen-gangsters, during the Gilded Age, for Henry Huddleston Rogers, of Fairhaven, Mass.), can express - please join me in doing so - our rage at this kind of remark. It was made by someone who can no longer be taken seriously on any matter having to do with fighting the Jihad. It is appalling that he would dare to contemplate another five or ten years of squandering of men, money, materiel, so wastefully in distant, remote, hopeless, quite unnecessary Afghanistan.

Five or ten years more?

So what do you think they think is the duration of the "war" we are fighting?

Former Vice President Cheney famously said that this would be a "Long War."

And now General Casey, and those behind and above him, say that at the very least, this war in Afghanistan alone may go on for another five or ten years. And hearing this, we may ask ourselves where else will this war, fought this way, be taken - will it go to Somalia, or to Yemen? Will these be the next Stations of the National Cross we are collectively made to bear, because those who rule over us do not know, and do not want to know, and may even not know that they do not know, what is necessary if a sensible policy of managing the war of self-defense against all those who take the duty and doctrine of Jihad seriously can be constructed and applied?

That war of self-defense is not a "Long War." It is not a war that might go on for "five" or maybe "ten" more years, in Afghanistan or anywhere else, and then be over with.. It is a permanent war, a war without end, because the doctrine of Jihad is a permanent, and central, not tangential, part of Islam. The duty to engage, directly or indirectly, in Jihad - which should not be thought of only as involving terrorism or other forms of violence - does not disappear. It did not disappear in the century-and-a-half, from roughly 1800 to 1950, when Muslims were so obviously weak that those who wanted to engage in Jihad simply could not. But now things have unalterably changed: the OPEC trillions (more than 13 trillion dollars since 1973 alone to the Muslim members of OPEC), with more piling up every year, and the millions of Muslims foolishly allowed in, through the casually criminal negligence of political and media elites, to the countries of Western Europe. All this, and then the exploitation of Western technology that is useful in the dissemination of the message of Islam, both to Muslims (some of whom might heretofore have been unaware of the full message of Islam, but can remain so now only with difficulty) and to non-Muslims who might be seduced by the siren-song of whatever melody (e.g., "social justice") that Muslims conducting Da'wa might wish to underhum.

Far from being "realistic" in their supposedly "glum" assessments, Cheney with his "Long War" and General Casey with his "five or ten more years in Afghanistan" are actually misleading themselves, and us. For they are refusing to grasp the nature of the war. They are thinking in terms that do not make sense. To wit: It might take us "five or ten years" to stamp out Al Qaeda, and the Taliban, in both its Afghani and Pakistani versions, and then, supposedly, we will have our "victory," we will have "won." But no "victory" in the conventional sense is possible. And there is to be no "winning" but only, rather, the minimizing of the threat and the conceivable damage, from Muslims. Why? Because there is no sell-by date to the doctrine and duty of Jihad. It goes on forever. And when anyone tells you, with a sober mien that is supposed to convey the message that "I'm not naïve, I'm a grim realist, I know this is going to be a long hard slog and it might take five years, ten years, twenty years, in Af-Pak and the Horn of Africa," you should not think to yourself that at long last someone has dared to tell the truth, someone in authority is leveling with you.

Not at all. It is the same misleading view as before, and anyone who gives you a date by which Jihad will "come to an end" is a fool. Why, the very title of the book by the academic entrepreneur Noah Feldman, After Jihad, is evidence enough of his misunderstanding of Islam, the very subject which he was said to know so much about. And how he played that, and his brief role "in writing Iraq's constitution," into a tenured position at Harvard Law School, where for obvious reasons he's now busily distancing himself from the Islamic law shtick and presenting himself in new, improved guise as an expert on American Constitutional Law which, he now is careful to let his colleagues know, was "always my real interest."

There is no such thing as "After Jihad." Jihad is the duty on Muslims to participate, directly or indirectly, in the "struggle" to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam. It will go on as long as Islam exists. There is no end, therefore, to the war of self-defense - a war which must recognize the major instruments of that Jihad, and counter them. The major instruments are not, at this point, violence but, rather, the Money Weapon, campaigns of Da'wa, propaganda on behalf of Islam, and demographic conquest. And the main theatre of war is not Iraq, not Afghanistan, not Af-Pak, not Yemen, not Somalia, not anywhere in the Muslim-ruled lands, but the imperiled countries of Western Europe (the Jihad against Israel being a given, though as yet most Israelis still are unwilling to grasp - perhaps they find the notion too disheartening - that the war against them is permanent, and not to be assuaged by further surrenders of territory).

Anyone - a Vice-President, a General -- who gives you a date, no matter how far in the future, when the "victory" will be achieved, or the "war" will end - is misleading himself, is misleading you. And the question then becomes: why would George Casey say such a thing?

And the reason is that he really does not understand. Nor do those whose views he is careful to reflect. They do not believe, they cannot allow themselves to believe, that Jihad is a central part of the ideology of Islam. Or they may, like the comical and execrable John Brennan, choose to believe the most obvious nonsense, that business about Jihad being an "internal fight to be a good Muslim." That's the kind of thing only a real idiot - a Karen Armstrong or a John Brennan - could allow himself to believe. But when John Brennan, the Deputy Special Assistant For Terrorism and Homeland Security to President Obama on Terrorism, told the world that Jihad means merely that "internal struggle of Muslims to master themselves and to be good Muslims," that was a statement he made to an audience of Muslims who surely knew the truth. Though they were happy to hear the falsehood, no doubt they were also secretly contemptuous of Brennan for this display of idiocy and appeasement. Arabs and Muslims do not display contempt for, though they have much more to fear from, those non-Muslims who do grasp the meaning and menace of Islam.

When Brennan told us that Jihad was really an internal struggle, and what's more, a worthy one, one that we should all admire, this Special Advisor on Terrorism to President Obama chose to ignore - could it be that he does not know? - what all the great Western scholars of Islam (not the espositos of today, the venal and/or true-believing apologists, and Defenders of the Faith) have written about Islam, and what Muslim clerics and scholars have written and said about Islam for audiences of fellow Muslims, and what the Defectors from the Army of Islam - Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Anwar Shaikh, et al. - have said about Islam.

And then there is General Casey, who may think that as a simple military man, he must defer to the brilliant likes of the "experts," such as John Brennan, and if they don't see this as an unending conflict, if they think that Jihad is not what the Muslim clerics and scholars, and the Western scholars of Islam, and the defectors from Islam, that is the apostates, all say it is - well, who am I, simple good soldier George Casey wishing to tow the line and not rock any boats, and to endorse at every step what those above me want me to think and say - well, who am I to bring anyone's attention to the meaning of Jihad, and the duration - forever, without end - of Jihad?

That's the business of "five or ten more years" in Afghanistan. Anyone who gives a date, meant to imply that at a certain point the "war is over," is misleading himself, and misleading us, and does not understand the nature of the conflict.

And a second part of the Aspen speech by George Casey also merits attention: "Casey highlighted job, education and economic growth as essential to success in Iraq and Afghanistan."

This is what we are so drearily familiar with, the idea that we should do with Muslim lands what we did with the countries of Western Europe after World War II with the Marshall Plan (indeed, Al-Jaafari and others in Iraq have more than once called for a "New Marshall Plan" for Iraq, in which the United States taxpayers foot the bill; "Marshall Plan" is a phrase strangely familiar to many Arabs and Muslims). We have an official unemployment rate of nearly 10% in this country (and more, if one counts those who have given up looking for work, and still more, if one counts all the greatly under-employed). We have a collapsing educational system. We do not have economic growth. But Casey, and those for whom Casey also speaks, thinks that Americans should pay for "jobs and education and economic growth" in Iraq and Afghanistan. Never mind that Iraq has the second or possibly first largest reserves of oil in the world, and thanks to the United States had its entire debt of nearly $100 billion cancelled by the Western nations (but notice that the Arab creditors did not cancel what was owed to them), and will be raking in hundreds of billions. Never mind that "education" may make an enemy more formidable, not less, and if "education" never questions the teachings of Islam, but merely makes Muslims more dangerous because better educated, why is this something we should encourage?

And as for "economic growth," Casey apparently has not noticed that what "prosperity" has come to Saudi Arabia, because of unmerited revenues from the sale of oil, has not made Saudi Arabia less but more dangerous. Nor has he apparently noticed that Iran is now more dangerous, thanks to four decades of oil-fueled "economic growth," than it was, say, a half-century ago. "Economic growth" means more money to play with, more money to buy Western arms, to finance WMD projects, to export Islam by funding mosques and madrasas and propaganda and campaigns of Da'wa. It is not only counterintuitive to wish the Muslim countries well, to hope that they will experience "economic growth." It is also wrong.

Finally, even if one thought somehow that countries not mired in poverty would be less of a threat to us, even, that is, if one joined the camp of believers in the usefulness of "economic growth" in limiting the appeal of Jihad, if one fails to take into account the nature of Islam as a break on economic growth, because of the hatred of Bid'a, innovation, and the inshallah-fatalism that colors the outlook of individuals in societies suffused with Islam, and dampens their desire for hard work - given that Allah giveth and taketh away whenever the whim occurs - what does General Casey and the Brigade of Nation-Builders in Washington make of that? Anything? Nothing?

And the same goes, but in spades, for remote, tribal-riven Afghanistan. The Afghans will not be less of a threat if they acquire televisions and computers, for those televisions and computers will merely disseminate the message of Islam, and are already doing so. There is no reason to think that the illiterate and poor Afghan villager is more of a threat than those to whom, thanks to American billions, become less poor, and find out more about Islam. And in any case, how does General Casey or those for whom he speaks think they will manage to undo the real break on Afghani development - Islam itself? If one truly wished the Afghans well, wouldn't you wish for the power of Islam to be broken? What, secretly, do Sarah Chayes, and Greg Mortensen, and all those people who are trying to help Afghans think or know? Do they allow themselves to recognize that the problem in Afghanistan, the thing that makes life hell for girls and women, and not only for them, is the power of Islam? I wonder if they could ever allow themselves to recognize that truth, to reach that conclusion.

Americans are supposed to provide for Afghans, at great and endless expense, both "jobs' and "education." What kind of jobs? With what infrastructure? What kind of education? Would schools for girls be built, and then be blown up? And will the curriculum have to fit with Islam? For if so, the teaching of history will be most peculiar, and the teaching of science, which depends partly on encouraging an attitude of questioning, of skepticism, will not be possible. In short, an education of Muslims in a Muslim-ruled land will mean an education that stunts mental growth. No amount of new buildings or teachers' salaries paid by the long-suffering Americans will change that, even if we have photographs of smiling, eager children - the kind that are always used to encourage charitable giving. Yes, basic literacy may be increased, but so what? What happens when an illiterate villager becomes literate? Does he become more, or less, aware of what Islam teaches? Is he more likely to be favorably inclined toward Infidels, or less, as he reads the propaganda of those who, round the clock, are disseminating the message of Islam?

Casey's prediction as to the duration of the conflict, and his prescription as to what will work to end it - more "jobs and education and economic growth" - bespeak a failure to even start to grasp that this is, as so many apostates keep telling us, an ideological war. And in this war, it is up to us to demoralize the enemy, to shake the resolve of those who are Muslims. And that shaking of that resolve does not require boots on the ground, and planes flying expensively overhead, in Afghanistan or anywhere else. It does require our own ability to grasp the meaning of Islam, and to relate what Islam teaches, and the effect it has on the minds of its adherents, and on their observable attitudes and behavior, so that we - not they - can understand how the many failures, political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral, of Muslim societies and states are a result of Islam itself. And if we keep talking about this, here and there and everywhere, Muslims will overhear us. Some will angrily deny the connection, but the argument that makes that connection is just too strong, and too convincing, to be gainsaid by many, for long. And if, in addition, we spread the word - the word happens to be true - that Islam is and always has been a vehicle for Arab supremacism, then among the 80% of the world's Muslims who are not Arabs, some will hearken, some will begin to think, and that too, will have its effects.

General Casey, I'm afraid, is not among the clear-sighted few, but among the dim-witted many. Whether he has suffered from years of being just too dutiful in his climb ever upwards, and not allowed himself the great luxury of ferociously independent thought that might even get him in trouble, I don't know. But it's too late for him. And his statements in Aspen reflect the same mental failure as do those remarks of the amiable Charles Bolden, blandly telling an Al Jazeera interviewer of the important task that Barack Obama had entrusted to him as the administrative head of NASA, that, of convincing or reassuring Muslims of their great history of achievement in science, in math, in engineering. But in both cases, behind Bolden and behind Casey, there lie or loom others, more powerful - the President and those whom he has disastrously selected to advise him, such as John Brennan, on the matter of Islam.

Is there time for Obama to begin to see things differently, and to get rid of the brennans and bring on others, less ignorant and less self-deceived? Yes. There is time. But only just.

In this piece I am only going to deal with the first statement, and in a subsequent piece I will discuss the second statement. Then, though those who made these statements have both provided enough rope to hang themselves, it's not rope but string we need, and I need enough - or at least that's my string theory -- to make a double knot, so that by the time we are done neither one will get loose from the box, or escape hanging.

The first remark in question was made by Charles Bolden, a former general who for reasons that are still unclear was appointed by the Obama Administration to be the head of NASA, though his knowledge of or interest in space exploration and the relevant science is unclear. Bolden was being interviewed by Al-Jazeera, and he was forthright about his mission. He said that once he became the NASA administrator, Obama gave him three main tasks:

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

No one paid attention to this statement when it was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. No one thought to register or relay astonishment - it was, after all, on Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera has such a tiny audience in the U.S. Who cares what its Arab and Muslim audience hears? That may explain the silence. Or was it perhaps that those who noticed didn't want others to notice, for fear of what political damage it might do to Obama?

Bolden's remark is astonishing. His own complacent cluelessness is bad, but what he fails to understand about those three tasks, and especially about the last of them, is hardly as bad as the fact that those from on high told him that these were tasks fitting and proper for the head administrator of NASA. Are they? Is it really the task of the head of NASA to encourage children? "Re-inspire" implies that they once were inspired, but somehow lost that inspiration. Might it be because once those who naively think that there is nothing to it find out that there is a great deal they will have to learn, and cease to be "inspired" to continue in math and science because of its rigor, a rigor that does not deter students who are not coddled or suffering from all kinds of social engineering and affirmative action and Leaving No Child Behind that taken together constitute a war on excellence? This mistake is not made in societies more intelligently ruthless and yes, "elitist." (That word is not to be shunned but embraced, for without a properly-educated intellectual elite implacably maintaining educational standards, if you take away degree, untune that string, just hark what discord follows, and cultural desarroi). Students of mathematics and science in an older and wiser America, or in Russia, China, India today, are not confused in their classrooms by the dumbing-down and dilution of offerings, nor do their official scientific bodies find themselves spending time on "inspiring" or "re-inspiring" students. The students, through reading, through parents, through their own talents that somehow emerge, are noticed, and then nurtured not by feelgood self-esteem crapola, but by an examination system that implacably winnows wheat from chaff, and does not tell the chaff it really is the wheat, or perhaps even better.

"Re-inspiring" students - the word presumably means that we are all born trailing clouds of glory, and then somehow fall away, lose that native enthusiasm that we once all possessed for studying Minkowski space and fractals and aeronautical engineering and tensor calculus and -- you name it. Every Man Is, If Not A Dirac, At Least A Von Karman, if only, only, properly "re-inspired." And who better to "re-inspire," who with more time on his hands to do the "re-inspiring," than Charles Bolden, the head administrator of NASA? Nor need we stop to hold up for examination and mild ridicule the business about Bolden's second task, the one about having him "expand our international relationships," as if the American government were not Laocoon-like tied in the coils of those entangling foreign ("international" as we now say, as for example those who were once "foreign students" have become "international students") alliances and more often misalliances. Take, for example, that respect for the non-existent, but nonetheless quite dangerous construct - precisely because it does not exist - the "international community.") We can hardly miss these coils, everywhere we slip and slide along the corridors of power in the self-hobbling West.

No, it's the third of these tasks, these un-labors of Hercules, that has raised eyebrows and hackles zeugmatically all over the Western world. Here it is again:

"third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

Let's stop and take that in. Yes, I know, you've already done that. You've been indignant already. You don't have to do it again. Oh yes you do. You have to look again. You have to keep your indignation, your fury, and your fear, and you have to keep having the reasons for this reaction brought to your attention, and you then must bring it to the attention of others, lest you and they allow yourselves to forget what a mess this country and above all its educational system is in, and what tremendous misallocation of resources is involved in that mess.

We live in the Age of Ekwilism in this country, in an Age of Levelling that in matters of intellect, and the transmission of knowledge, rivals - though prompted by different reasons - what the Soviet or Chinese Communists at their most malevolent sometimes managed to implement.

And part of the Ekwilism of the Age is the growth of Self-Esteem studies. The Self-Esteem in question does not come from any effort or perceived merit on the part of those who are encouraged simply to believe in their natural wonderfulness. They are discouraged from believing that they will have to work like dogs, as do the Chinese and Indian students in their best schools of math and science, or as French students do since France has remained sure of itself, in its system of competitive examinations, and as yet unwilling to dilute that system, as some have urged. They are not told that they have to work hard in order to achieve anything. No, Everyman A King, said Huey Long, and the fashionable version today is Everyman A Professor, or at least Every Student A Keen Intellect, and anyone who would touch a hair on the head of a fellow man's Self-Esteem deserves...well, if not death, at least let's make sure he doesn't find a teaching job, lest he upset some of the students in suggesting that both native ability and industry matter, and will out.

But if the Self-Esteem business always means trouble - the same kind of trouble you sense is coming from someone capable of using the word "wholistic" in an article or a speech - still worse is the encouragement of Self-Esteem on the part of a particular group. And worst of all, given the mighty ideological contest, one that has gigantic consequences for the survival and well-being of the art, science, and political freedoms achieved in the Western world, is the administrative head of NASA encouraging Self-Esteem not by all peoples, but especially by Muslims.

But what is the likely effect of this new NASA mission, and what does its existence tell us about the Obama Administration's grasp of the meaning, and menace, of Islam?

And even before we attempt to answer that, what should others, that is, non-Muslims living around the world, start to think when they find out that the mighty and all-powerful President of the fabled United States, Barack Obama, has told the administrative head of NASA that perhaps his most important task will be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering"?

Imagine you are a Hindu, living in India, or perhaps in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Will this news fill you with delight, or anguish? What if you are a Christian black African, living in, say, the southern Sudan, and you are aware that over the past 40 years Muslim Arabs have killed, or created the conditions (mass starvation, diseases untreated and unchecked in refugee camps) for the mass deaths of black Africans because they were not Arabs or Muslims? Or suppose you were a Buddhist living in southern Thailand, subject to the murderous Jihad that, almost entirely unreported in the West, steadily goes on? Would you be heartened by this news? Would it fill you with hope that someone - the President of the United States, no less - was going to modify Muslim violence and aggression by making sure that Muslims felt good about themselves, not least by being reminded of all the wonderful contributions of Muslims to math, science, and so on?
And still worse, what if you were a Hindu in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, wondering whether you should continue to hold onto your own Hinduism or give in, succumb to the blandishments and the threats, cease to hold out, and - like many before you--convert to Islam? You might consider this even though you did not believe in Islam, even though you disliked or even detested what it did to the minds of men, even though you were convinced it would in the end stunt the mental and moral growth of your children. You might convert or consider conversion despairingly, because if even if the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, thinks this way, perhaps there is no use resisting. And now you read his name and endow it with new and worrisome meaning, joining the ranks of others who have made too much of it as they accuse Obama of being a "secret Muslim." This accusation, though false, begins to acquire credence given the many acts by Obama that, in my view, are not those of a "secret Muslim" but of an arrogant provincial who thinks he "knows" about Islam and who, as a provincial ill-prepared to deal with foreign and military policy, is unduly deferential to foolish advisers who, themselves ignorant of Islam, continue to pursue policies, dressed up as "reaching out to the Muslim world," that are in fact simply appeasement, as the clear-minded can see.

And if you are a black African living in sub-Saharan Africa, a Christian in southern Nigeria, say, and you have endured persecution and murder at the hands of Muslims, before, during, and after the Biafra War of 1967-69, would you be heartened or disheartened by the glad tidings brought to you by Charles Bolden? Might you not wonder where, oh where, you will be able to find in the Western world, which abandoned Biafra once, those who understand what Islam means for all non-Muslims, what it has meant for so many black African Christians, from Nigeria in the West to Sudan in the East? Might you too be tempted to give up, to convert to Islam yourself, if only because at this point, you suspect that the way to attract American aid is to be a Muslim country, or a Muslim tribe, or a Muslim individual, and then you will be taken care of, while those who are Christians cannot count on aid, or on protection against Muslims?

Isn't this the likely effect of the policy of Reaching Out To Muslims, in the manner described by Charles Bolden?

Note, by the way, that Muslims do not appear anywhere in the world to suffer from a great lack of self-esteem. Read the Muslim and Arab press. Watch the Muslim and Arab television. Again and again they speak of Muslim greatness and Infidel weakness. Again and again they keep telling us about the wonders of the Arabs and Muslims. How many times, in Iraq, did American soldiers hear that "all of civilization began here"? How often, all over the Muslim and especially the Muslim Arab world, do we hear exaggerated claims made, such as "we Arab Muslims are responsible for the Renaissance" (Tariq Ramadan' likes to make this claim) and "we Muslims invented science" or "we Muslims made modern medicine possible" and on and on und so weiter.

Muslims are inculcated with the belief - does Barack Obama not know this? - that the real division of humanity, the only division that counts, is that between Muslim and non-Muslim, Muslim and Infidel. The "ungrateful" Kuffar is ungrateful because he refused to accept Islam, even though born as a Muslim, just like everyone since time began (even before Muhammad). He did not receive, refused to receive, received incorrectly, the message of Islam. And for that he deserves permanent ill-treatment, that is, the regime, or status, of dhimmi - which is the only alternative to death or immediate conversion, and is a status available, in strict terms, only to Christians and Jews as People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), though in order to preserve the Jizyah-base, the Muslim masters found ways to treat as dhimmis both Zoroastrians in Persia, and - after tens of millions of murders of Hindus - Hindus in India. After all, you don't want to kill or convert everyone. Who would be left to pay the Jizyah, on which the Muslim rulers and state depended?

Muslim newspapers, radio, television, Internet sites, are not full of stories that demonstrate that a lack of self-esteem is worrying Muslims. It is true that they are keenly aware of their deficiencies in one area, and would like to receive instruction from the West in that area: that is, in the area of military technology. It is about that that Mahathir Mohamed spoke to a rapt crowd, delegates at a meting of the O.I.C., some years ago. Zakir Naik, the Muslim proselytizer based in India, has also said that "we Muslims are willing to learn about military technology" from the West. No interest in, and certainly no worry about, the failures or absence of Muslim contributions to basic science. No, what Muslims want are the planes and the missiles and the weapons of mass destruction to be delivered with those planes and those missiles; they don't want to know the reasons for the failure of the Muslim world, for more than a millennium, to contribute to science.
But should we participate in this farce? Should we make Muslims feel good about themselves when so many of the 1.2 billion Muslims are constantly told - in the Qur'an, hadith, and Sira - that they are the "best of peoples," and that as the "best of peoples" they have a right and even a sacred duty to engage in the struggle, or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam? Is not Obama, in telling Bolden "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering" not sending coals to Newcastle, something like trying to add to the Self-Esteem of some World Conqueror like Jeffrey Sachs or others - Tom Friedman comes to mind -- of that comical ilk? Isn't trying to further encourage Muslims in their misreading of their own history and their exaggerated narrative about supposed "Muslim" contributions to this and to that, exactly what we do not need, what we need less of? Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Ibn Warraq do not think we should pull our punches in talking about, or to, the world's Muslims. They think they are entirely too confident, too triumphalist, and tell us that such Muslim arrogance and triumphalism is dangerous for us.

Besides, there is one other thing that needs to be considered. And that one thing is the truth. I don't suppose that Obama, during his twenty years as a political organizer, or in his busy life as a Senator for two years, and then as candidate and then as President, has read widely in the history of science, mathematics, and technology, but had he done so, and had he also read such historians of science as Toby Huff, he would have had a better sense of the very tiny contribution of Muslims to these fields. He would have discovered that a great many of those who used Arabic were not Muslims at all, but Jews and Christians; he would have discovered that among the few dozen names - always the same few dozen - that are listed (Avicenna, Averroes, Rhazes, etc.) - by those claiming great things for High Islamic Civilization, some were dangerously freethinking, practically non-Muslims (as the greatest man of science, Rhazes), while others had been raised within a milieu that was only a generation or two removed from non-Muslim culture. (Though not a scientist, the celebrated Ottoman architect Sinan, it turns out, was an Armenian who converted to Islam, which gave him the chance to exercise his art.) Is not aiding their own inability to see things truthfully doing exactly what Muslims do not need?

Obama, one has the suspicion, may be applying to Muslims views on Self-Esteem that have grown out of domestic views that have been applied closer to home. But does Obama think that the whole Jesse-Jackson "I AM SOMEBODY" mantra, and all that goes with it, or what he has observed of the followers of Farrakhan, have been a success? Does he think such things are a valid substitute for, or even a useful supplement to, achievement that is based on ability rightly directed, and hard work? Isn't Obama capable of casting a beady eye on such things, and seeing them correctly, as merely one more derisory, meretricious, and even cruel scheme that, in the end, tends only to line the pockets of those mountebanks who batten on the government and foundation aid, or on the forced tithing of followers, of these new incarnations of Marcus Garvey and Father Divine?

Wouldn't it make more sense to work to make Muslims more aware of the real reasons for the brief flourishing, and then the sudden disappearance, of their "contributions" to mathematics and science? This would take into account the rapid diminishment in the presence, and influence, and power, of the non-Muslim communities that continued to exist for the first few centuries after the Arab conquest. And wouldn't it make more sense to point out -- not to Muslims, but to "talk amongst ourselves" so that Muslims will overhear us, and have to come to mental terms with what they overhear - that Islam is based purely on authority, that it does not admit of questioning of doctrine, but encourages the habit of mental submission and discourages, and punishes severely, the practice of free and skeptical inquiry, and it is exactly that practice of free and skeptical inquiry that makes the enterprise of science possible?

That's the way to proceed.

This is not merely different from what Obama, according to Charles Bolden, asked Charles Bolden to do. It goes completely in the other direction. 180 degrees. That's a bit of math. That's a bit of science. That business of 180 degrees is useful, I'm told, in engineering. Well then, the use of such a phrase has helped me with my shaky self-esteem.

So now, if you'll briefly excuse me, as I'm plumb tuckered out, I'm going to set a spell. Oh where? Right here, in my bedsitter space. Or my De Sitter space. Or my Minkowski space. And then, after a short break, and an hour spent with Courant's "What Is Mathematics," I'll be back shortly with Part II of this essay. After all, the Obama policy on Islam isn't, alas, going anywhere. It's still right there.

In this piece I am only going to deal with the first statement, and in a subsequent piece I will discuss the second statement. Then, though those who made these statements have both provided enough rope to hang themselves, it's not rope but string we need, and I need enough - or at least that's my string theory -- to make a double knot, so that by the time we are done neither one will get loose from the box, or escape hanging.

The first remark in question was made by Charles Bolden, a former general who for reasons that are still unclear was appointed by the Obama Administration to be the head of NASA, though his knowledge of or interest in space exploration and the relevant science is unclear. Bolden was being interviewed by Al-Jazeera, and he was forthright about his mission. He said that once he became the NASA administrator, Obama gave him three main tasks:

"When I became the NASA administrator -- or before I became the NASA administrator -- he charged me with three things. One was he wanted me to help re-inspire children to want to get into science and math, he wanted me to expand our international relationships, and third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

No one paid attention to this statement when it was broadcast on Al-Jazeera. No one thought to register or relay astonishment - it was, after all, on Al Jazeera, and Al Jazeera has such a tiny audience in the U.S. Who cares what its Arab and Muslim audience hears? That may explain the silence. Or was it perhaps that those who noticed didn't want others to notice, for fear of what political damage it might do to Obama?

Bolden's remark is astonishing. His own complacent cluelessness is bad, but what he fails to understand about those three tasks, and especially about the last of them, is hardly as bad as the fact that those from on high told him that these were tasks fitting and proper for the head administrator of NASA. Are they? Is it really the task of the head of NASA to encourage children? "Re-inspire" implies that they once were inspired, but somehow lost that inspiration. Might it be because once those who naively think that there is nothing to it find out that there is a great deal they will have to learn, and cease to be "inspired" to continue in math and science because of its rigor, a rigor that does not deter students who are not coddled or suffering from all kinds of social engineering and affirmative action and Leaving No Child Behind that taken together constitute a war on excellence? This mistake is not made in societies more intelligently ruthless and yes, "elitist." (That word is not to be shunned but embraced, for without a properly-educated intellectual elite implacably maintaining educational standards, if you take away degree, untune that string, just hark what discord follows, and cultural desarroi). Students of mathematics and science in an older and wiser America, or in Russia, China, India today, are not confused in their classrooms by the dumbing-down and dilution of offerings, nor do their official scientific bodies find themselves spending time on "inspiring" or "re-inspiring" students. The students, through reading, through parents, through their own talents that somehow emerge, are noticed, and then nurtured not by feelgood self-esteem crapola, but by an examination system that implacably winnows wheat from chaff, and does not tell the chaff it really is the wheat, or perhaps even better.

"Re-inspiring" students - the word presumably means that we are all born trailing clouds of glory, and then somehow fall away, lose that native enthusiasm that we once all possessed for studying Minkowski space and fractals and aeronautical engineering and tensor calculus and -- you name it. Every Man Is, If Not A Dirac, At Least A Von Karman, if only, only, properly "re-inspired." And who better to "re-inspire," who with more time on his hands to do the "re-inspiring," than Charles Bolden, the head administrator of NASA? Nor need we stop to hold up for examination and mild ridicule the business about Bolden's second task, the one about having him "expand our international relationships," as if the American government were not Laocoon-like tied in the coils of those entangling foreign ("international" as we now say, as for example those who were once "foreign students" have become "international students") alliances and more often misalliances. Take, for example, that respect for the non-existent, but nonetheless quite dangerous construct - precisely because it does not exist - the "international community.") We can hardly miss these coils, everywhere we slip and slide along the corridors of power in the self-hobbling West.

No, it's the third of these tasks, these un-labors of Hercules, that has raised eyebrows and hackles zeugmatically all over the Western world. Here it is again:

"third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering."

Let's stop and take that in. Yes, I know, you've already done that. You've been indignant already. You don't have to do it again. Oh yes you do. You have to look again. You have to keep your indignation, your fury, and your fear, and you have to keep having the reasons for this reaction brought to your attention, and you then must bring it to the attention of others, lest you and they allow yourselves to forget what a mess this country and above all its educational system is in, and what tremendous misallocation of resources is involved in that mess.

We live in the Age of Ekwilism in this country, in an Age of Levelling that in matters of intellect, and the transmission of knowledge, rivals - though prompted by different reasons - what the Soviet or Chinese Communists at their most malevolent sometimes managed to implement.

And part of the Ekwilism of the Age is the growth of Self-Esteem studies. The Self-Esteem in question does not come from any effort or perceived merit on the part of those who are encouraged simply to believe in their natural wonderfulness. They are discouraged from believing that they will have to work like dogs, as do the Chinese and Indian students in their best schools of math and science, or as French students do since France has remained sure of itself, in its system of competitive examinations, and as yet unwilling to dilute that system, as some have urged. They are not told that they have to work hard in order to achieve anything. No, Everyman A King, said Huey Long, and the fashionable version today is Everyman A Professor, or at least Every Student A Keen Intellect, and anyone who would touch a hair on the head of a fellow man's Self-Esteem deserves...well, if not death, at least let's make sure he doesn't find a teaching job, lest he upset some of the students in suggesting that both native ability and industry matter, and will out.

But if the Self-Esteem business always means trouble - the same kind of trouble you sense is coming from someone capable of using the word "wholistic" in an article or a speech - still worse is the encouragement of Self-Esteem on the part of a particular group. And worst of all, given the mighty ideological contest, one that has gigantic consequences for the survival and well-being of the art, science, and political freedoms achieved in the Western world, is the administrative head of NASA encouraging Self-Esteem not by all peoples, but especially by Muslims.

But what is the likely effect of this new NASA mission, and what does its existence tell us about the Obama Administration's grasp of the meaning, and menace, of Islam?

And even before we attempt to answer that, what should others, that is, non-Muslims living around the world, start to think when they find out that the mighty and all-powerful President of the fabled United States, Barack Obama, has told the administrative head of NASA that perhaps his most important task will be "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering"?

Imagine you are a Hindu, living in India, or perhaps in Pakistan or Bangladesh. Will this news fill you with delight, or anguish? What if you are a Christian black African, living in, say, the southern Sudan, and you are aware that over the past 40 years Muslim Arabs have killed, or created the conditions (mass starvation, diseases untreated and unchecked in refugee camps) for the mass deaths of black Africans because they were not Arabs or Muslims? Or suppose you were a Buddhist living in southern Thailand, subject to the murderous Jihad that, almost entirely unreported in the West, steadily goes on? Would you be heartened by this news? Would it fill you with hope that someone - the President of the United States, no less - was going to modify Muslim violence and aggression by making sure that Muslims felt good about themselves, not least by being reminded of all the wonderful contributions of Muslims to math, science, and so on?
And still worse, what if you were a Hindu in Pakistan, or Bangladesh, wondering whether you should continue to hold onto your own Hinduism or give in, succumb to the blandishments and the threats, cease to hold out, and - like many before you--convert to Islam? You might consider this even though you did not believe in Islam, even though you disliked or even detested what it did to the minds of men, even though you were convinced it would in the end stunt the mental and moral growth of your children. You might convert or consider conversion despairingly, because if even if the President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama, thinks this way, perhaps there is no use resisting. And now you read his name and endow it with new and worrisome meaning, joining the ranks of others who have made too much of it as they accuse Obama of being a "secret Muslim." This accusation, though false, begins to acquire credence given the many acts by Obama that, in my view, are not those of a "secret Muslim" but of an arrogant provincial who thinks he "knows" about Islam and who, as a provincial ill-prepared to deal with foreign and military policy, is unduly deferential to foolish advisers who, themselves ignorant of Islam, continue to pursue policies, dressed up as "reaching out to the Muslim world," that are in fact simply appeasement, as the clear-minded can see.

And if you are a black African living in sub-Saharan Africa, a Christian in southern Nigeria, say, and you have endured persecution and murder at the hands of Muslims, before, during, and after the Biafra War of 1967-69, would you be heartened or disheartened by the glad tidings brought to you by Charles Bolden? Might you not wonder where, oh where, you will be able to find in the Western world, which abandoned Biafra once, those who understand what Islam means for all non-Muslims, what it has meant for so many black African Christians, from Nigeria in the West to Sudan in the East? Might you too be tempted to give up, to convert to Islam yourself, if only because at this point, you suspect that the way to attract American aid is to be a Muslim country, or a Muslim tribe, or a Muslim individual, and then you will be taken care of, while those who are Christians cannot count on aid, or on protection against Muslims?

Isn't this the likely effect of the policy of Reaching Out To Muslims, in the manner described by Charles Bolden?

Note, by the way, that Muslims do not appear anywhere in the world to suffer from a great lack of self-esteem. Read the Muslim and Arab press. Watch the Muslim and Arab television. Again and again they speak of Muslim greatness and Infidel weakness. Again and again they keep telling us about the wonders of the Arabs and Muslims. How many times, in Iraq, did American soldiers hear that "all of civilization began here"? How often, all over the Muslim and especially the Muslim Arab world, do we hear exaggerated claims made, such as "we Arab Muslims are responsible for the Renaissance" (Tariq Ramadan' likes to make this claim) and "we Muslims invented science" or "we Muslims made modern medicine possible" and on and on und so weiter.

Muslims are inculcated with the belief - does Barack Obama not know this? - that the real division of humanity, the only division that counts, is that between Muslim and non-Muslim, Muslim and Infidel. The "ungrateful" Kuffar is ungrateful because he refused to accept Islam, even though born as a Muslim, just like everyone since time began (even before Muhammad). He did not receive, refused to receive, received incorrectly, the message of Islam. And for that he deserves permanent ill-treatment, that is, the regime, or status, of dhimmi - which is the only alternative to death or immediate conversion, and is a status available, in strict terms, only to Christians and Jews as People of the Book (ahl al-kitab), though in order to preserve the Jizyah-base, the Muslim masters found ways to treat as dhimmis both Zoroastrians in Persia, and - after tens of millions of murders of Hindus - Hindus in India. After all, you don't want to kill or convert everyone. Who would be left to pay the Jizyah, on which the Muslim rulers and state depended?

Muslim newspapers, radio, television, Internet sites, are not full of stories that demonstrate that a lack of self-esteem is worrying Muslims. It is true that they are keenly aware of their deficiencies in one area, and would like to receive instruction from the West in that area: that is, in the area of military technology. It is about that that Mahathir Mohamed spoke to a rapt crowd, delegates at a meting of the O.I.C., some years ago. Zakir Naik, the Muslim proselytizer based in India, has also said that "we Muslims are willing to learn about military technology" from the West. No interest in, and certainly no worry about, the failures or absence of Muslim contributions to basic science. No, what Muslims want are the planes and the missiles and the weapons of mass destruction to be delivered with those planes and those missiles; they don't want to know the reasons for the failure of the Muslim world, for more than a millennium, to contribute to science.
But should we participate in this farce? Should we make Muslims feel good about themselves when so many of the 1.2 billion Muslims are constantly told - in the Qur'an, hadith, and Sira - that they are the "best of peoples," and that as the "best of peoples" they have a right and even a sacred duty to engage in the struggle, or Jihad, to remove all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam? Is not Obama, in telling Bolden "to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science ... and math and engineering" not sending coals to Newcastle, something like trying to add to the Self-Esteem of some World Conqueror like Jeffrey Sachs or others - Tom Friedman comes to mind -- of that comical ilk? Isn't trying to further encourage Muslims in their misreading of their own history and their exaggerated narrative about supposed "Muslim" contributions to this and to that, exactly what we do not need, what we need less of? Wafa Sultan, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and Ibn Warraq do not think we should pull our punches in talking about, or to, the world's Muslims. They think they are entirely too confident, too triumphalist, and tell us that such Muslim arrogance and triumphalism is dangerous for us.

Besides, there is one other thing that needs to be considered. And that one thing is the truth. I don't suppose that Obama, during his twenty years as a political organizer, or in his busy life as a Senator for two years, and then as candidate and then as President, has read widely in the history of science, mathematics, and technology, but had he done so, and had he also read such historians of science as Toby Huff, he would have had a better sense of the very tiny contribution of Muslims to these fields. He would have discovered that a great many of those who used Arabic were not Muslims at all, but Jews and Christians; he would have discovered that among the few dozen names - always the same few dozen - that are listed (Avicenna, Averroes, Rhazes, etc.) - by those claiming great things for High Islamic Civilization, some were dangerously freethinking, practically non-Muslims (as the greatest man of science, Rhazes), while others had been raised within a milieu that was only a generation or two removed from non-Muslim culture. (Though not a scientist, the celebrated Ottoman architect Sinan, it turns out, was an Armenian who converted to Islam, which gave him the chance to exercise his art.) Is not aiding their own inability to see things truthfully doing exactly what Muslims do not need?

Obama, one has the suspicion, may be applying to Muslims views on Self-Esteem that have grown out of domestic views that have been applied closer to home. But does Obama think that the whole Jesse-Jackson "I AM SOMEBODY" mantra, and all that goes with it, or what he has observed of the followers of Farrakhan, have been a success? Does he think such things are a valid substitute for, or even a useful supplement to, achievement that is based on ability rightly directed, and hard work? Isn't Obama capable of casting a beady eye on such things, and seeing them correctly, as merely one more derisory, meretricious, and even cruel scheme that, in the end, tends only to line the pockets of those mountebanks who batten on the government and foundation aid, or on the forced tithing of followers, of these new incarnations of Marcus Garvey and Father Divine?

Wouldn't it make more sense to work to make Muslims more aware of the real reasons for the brief flourishing, and then the sudden disappearance, of their "contributions" to mathematics and science? This would take into account the rapid diminishment in the presence, and influence, and power, of the non-Muslim communities that continued to exist for the first few centuries after the Arab conquest. And wouldn't it make more sense to point out -- not to Muslims, but to "talk amongst ourselves" so that Muslims will overhear us, and have to come to mental terms with what they overhear - that Islam is based purely on authority, that it does not admit of questioning of doctrine, but encourages the habit of mental submission and discourages, and punishes severely, the practice of free and skeptical inquiry, and it is exactly that practice of free and skeptical inquiry that makes the enterprise of science possible?

That's the way to proceed.

This is not merely different from what Obama, according to Charles Bolden, asked Charles Bolden to do. It goes completely in the other direction. 180 degrees. That's a bit of math. That's a bit of science. That business of 180 degrees is useful, I'm told, in engineering. Well then, the use of such a phrase has helped me with my shaky self-esteem.

So now, if you'll briefly excuse me, as I'm plumb tuckered out, I'm going to set a spell. Oh where? Right here, in my bedsitter space. Or my De Sitter space. Or my Minkowski space. And then, after a short break, and an hour spent with Courant's "What Is Mathematics," I'll be back shortly with Part II of this essay. After all, the Obama policy on Islam isn't, alas, going anywhere. It's still right there.

But in all the discussion of economic difficulties, editorialists, columnists, talking heads on television, speak and write about the success or failure of Keynesian economics, the need for spending or for austerity, the need to do this and the need not to do that. They talk and write about the costs of the health care legislation, this year, next year, five years hence. They write and talk about the Looming Crisis in Social Security. They talk about the extension, or failure to extend, unemployment benefits. They talk, and write, and lament, the inability of many recent college graduates to obtain employment. They note the changes in middle-class life, and how shrunken are the chances of those graduating today from those of their parents or their grandparents. They note that the states are now $140 billion in the hole, with the largest states - especially California and Illinois - having to fire hundreds of thousands of teachers, and reduce the salaries of government workers, and how the slashing of state budgets leads to a slashing of aid to cities and towns, and how ineffective have been the measures taken to right things.

But what surely needs to be focused on is the colossal financial drain, the demoralizing drain, caused by the squandering of trillions of dollars in those wars that have been waged to attain exactly the wrong goals (which in any case are unattainable) in Iraq and Afghanistan. We hear different figures for the costs of those wars. The real cost of both wars, leaving out nothing, was estimated by the Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz and his fellow author Linda Blimes a few years ago. They had to make assumptions about when the Americans would withdraw from Iraq, and from Afghanistan. They figured on 2010 for Iraq, 2011 or so for Afghanistan - very close to what has turned out to be, or is scheduled to be. They had to make guesses as to indirect costs associated with both wars, including the rise in the price of oil, and the cost for lifetime care for tens of thousands of severely wounded veterans. Their title proclaims their book-length estimate: The Three-Trillion Dollar War.

That seems a reasonable figure to come up with. What is not reasonable at all is that such amounts should have been spent without holy hell having been raised, raised every day, every hour, by everyone who cares about the future of the United States. The folly of that expense will soon be seen in Iraq to have been largely a waste, and - with a little lapse, a little decalage - it will then be understood to have been equally idiotic in Afghanistan.

And to those three trillion dollars we can add all the other sums that have been given to Muslim nations in addition to the more than thirteen trillion dollars in oil revenues that have been transferred from the oil-consuming nations to the Muslim members of OPEC since 1973 alone. There is the $75 billion that has been given to Egypt by the American government -- for what, exactly? For continuing to give lip service to its "Peace Treaty" with Israel, while Egypt has steadfastly refused, once it had recovered the entire Sinai, to observe its solemn undertakings to end hostile propaganda and acts against the Jewish state. In fact, the government-controlled media in Egypt broadcast programs based on the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as well as non-stop anti-Israel and anti-Jewish conspiracy theories. Egyptian public opinion is as anti-Israel, and in addition as anti-American, as any country could be - despite those $75 billion.

There is also the nearly $35 billion that is the true amount sent, as economic and military aid and debt forgiveness, to meretricious Pakistan. Pakistan for decades has been playing the Americans, since the heady days of the Dulles brothers who believed that Islam was "a bulwark against Communism." Then there are the billions that have gone to Eastern Palestine, that is, Jordan, and to those Arab-occupied parts of Judea and Samaria, renamed by the Jordanians as "the West Bank." There the IDF helps maintain Arafat's successors, formerly his henchman, in pretend-power, so that they can continue to help themselves to a goodly portion of the billions in aid that the Americans and the Europeans continue to give, for some reason that is difficult to understand, to the most spoiled set of fake "refugees" in the world, the "West Bank" Arabs. And other moneys have gone in the past to the Gazan Arabs, the other wing of the "Palestinians" who form the shock troops of the Jihad against Israel.

If one were to add up the amounts that have been received from the sale of oil and natural gas, that alone would make the Muslim Arabs, or a great many of them, the beneficiaries of the largest transfer of wealth in human history - more than thirteen trillion dollars since 1973 alone (and hundreds of billions before that). Yet not a single oil-or-gas-rich Arab state has created a modern economy; not one can afford to exist without vast armies of foreign workers, with the most important ones being non-Muslims, who in some of the smaller sheiklets outnumber the natives by 2-1 or 3-1 or 4-1. No Arab Muslim land can do without access to Western medical care and Western education and Western technology - not one. And they rely completely on their revenues from oil (and to a much lesser extent, natural gas). None of them, and certainly none of the ruling houses or tribes, can even defend themselves adequately. Why then do we continue to believe what a small army of Western hirelings who are in the pay of the Saudis, or profiting from business and other dealings with them, have succeeded in establishing as the dominant belief in the chanceries of the West: that we "need" Saudi Arabia's goodwill, or that we "need" the goodwill of the U.A.E. (threatened in a territorial dispute with Iran) or of Kuwait or Qatar or of any of the other tiny statelets that, like frogs, puff themselves up to appear much bigger than they are, in order to ward off predators.

We are not predators, but we need not be patsies, either, and a policy or policies can be constructed that save money, not least by demanding that these rich oil states pay for the keeping of the peace in their area. They were made to pay, or did pay, for a large part of the Gulf War, for there their interests were immediately threatened. They won't want to pay the Americans for having made possible Shi'a rule in Iraq, or for keeping the Taliban down in Afghanistan, but they can certainly be asked to pay for all the other expenses, including those in Pakistan, a state that exists only because of, and for, Islam.

And it is the rich Arabs, with their trillions still coming in, who should be expected to pay - if anyone is to do so - for Egypt, for Jordan, for the "Palestinians." As a matter of finance, and of psychology, it is important for the Infidels, in North America and Western Europe, to stop paying for Muslims, and above all to end the growing conviction, on both sides, that somehow this further transfer of wealth (beyond the sums that go for oil and gas) is actually somehow coming to the Muslim Arabs, that they are "owed" it -- and that if we stop, they will be angry with us (they will) and things will go hard with us (they won't). That is the classic attitude of both Infidel giver and Muslim taker. It accompanies the yielding-up to Muslim masters by non-Muslims of the Jizyah in the classic Islamic polity.

Because we don't want to take the time to think clearly about the meaning and therefore of the menace of Islam, we have undertaken in the last decade or two to attempt to temporarily buy Muslim goodwill by lavishing vast amounts of aid on many of the Muslim lands that do not have the riches of other Muslim lands, and feel that they somehow are not only entitled to support from American (and other) Infidels, but offer no gratitude in return. Instead, they appear to think that such aid is theirs by right, a kind of Jizyah that the Infidels should offer and continue to offer them. And we, the donors, make matters far worse by acting as if somehow it is right, it is just, that we, and the Europeans, should give that $75 billion to Egypt, a country whose people are virulently anti-American and full of conspiracy theories about Israel and Jews that receive a hearing on the government-controlled television and radio and newspapers. We act as if it is fitting and proper that those tens of billions more should go to meretricious Pakistan, and billions to Jordan, and billions to the shock troops of the without-end Jihad against the Infidel nation-state of Israel, that is the Slow Jiahdists of the "Palestinian" Authority. There are even those in high places who are just itching to extend that aid to the Fast Jihadists of Hamas, that is, to the Gazan Arabs, if only one or two of the right and transparently meaningless phrases were to be uttered with some demihemisemi quaver of pretend-sincerity -- just enough to satisfy, say, the ludicrous likes of Tom Friedman or Nicholas Kristof.

It is difficult to understand why, when the day's news is always about more economic difficulties for Americans and further financial catastrophes looming, that more attention is not paid to the costs of those wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the reasons for these wars. Once you have seen with your own eyes, as so many American soldiers have (and more than a million have served in Iraq and Afghanistan), have seen the pallets of American cash off-loaded by Iraqis, have seen or heard about the local contractors who were paid for doing no or little work, or who destroyed what they had done in order to be hired to do it all again, once you have heard or seen or read about all the ways that Iraqis managed to inveigle more and still more money out of the ever-compliant Americans, then you might begin to think. It was only monopoly money, money that didn't matter to those handing it out, money that seemed not to be real or to have value. And you come home, and you realize, because you were there, what a waste it all had been. If you can avoid that business of telling yourself it was not a waste because you had been part of it and who wants to think he had been sent on and participated in a fool's errand, then you might indeed begin to think very hard.

And if you are following things, and trying to determine where all that money went, nothing will madden you as much as the reports of all the Iraqis who made off with millions or tens of millions, and are now having a high old time in Paris or London on money that came from Americans who are not having a high old time.

As I wrote at the beginning of this article, this endless largesse, these lavishments from Infidels to Muslims take place, and keep being renewed without a squawk -- as when, the other day, Barack Obama simply told Mahmoud Abbas that the Slow Jihadists of Fatah would be getting another $400 million from the American government. There was no consultation with Congress, no discussion, no nothing - just $400 million, poof!, like that, signed over to those who are every bit as dangerous to the survival of Israel, and because more cunning, possibly more dangerous than the Fast Jihadists of Hamas who are now dominant among the Gazan Arabs and, were the IDF not around to prop Abbas up, would likely win favor, being less corrupt than Fatah, in the "West Bank" too.

But why? Why are we spending all this money? Why did we spend all this money, these three trillion dollars and more in Iraq, if not because no one in the Bush Administration wanted to face up to, or was well-prepared to think about, the threat posed by the ideology of Islam? The entire effort in Iraq was based on messianic sentimentalism, the belief that advanced Western democracy could be transplanted - just add Miracle-Gro, and water with American money and blood daily - to a primitive and violent place, its people made violent and kept primitive by Islam itself. For many who call themselves "Republicans" or "conservatives," it was their leader's policy, right or wrong. They were determined to support Bush in Iraq, because.... Well, because it was the "lefties" (the surpassing vulgarity of the discussion needs to be remembered) who were for pulling out, and therefore, pulling out must necessarily be opposed, must necessarily be the wrong thing. It was a crazy quilt, a topsy-turvy world, where objectively a pullout would in fact have left us to see that once the Infidel troops were removed, the sectarian and ethnic fissures in Iraq would not disappear. The inability to compromise (that comes from the atmospherics of Islam) would reveal itself, and the aggression and violence of those fighting over money and power would continue, since aggression and violence are natural to societies suffused with Islam. But it would continue without the Infidel Americans to blame or to take as targets.

The goals sought by the Bush Administration were absurd. Those goals were not only to "bring freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq, but, so it was hoped, to then have Iraq serve as a Light Unto the Muslim nations, or rather to the other Arab states. But all the Arab states, including Iraq until recently, are run by Sunnis, whose views on the Shi'a range from mild dislike to murderous hatred. Why in the world would those in Washington think that any Sunni Arabs would be pleased by the inevitable result in Iraq - a Shi'a-run state? Why would they take inspiration from such a model? The spectacle of such a state merely enrages, and possibly, with Iran's growing threat seemingly unstoppable, it also fills them with fear.

The Bush Administration had been impressed by, even inveigled by, Iraqi Shi'a in exile who gave their American interlocutors the assurances they knew they wanted, in order to make sure that the American army would do what those exiles wanted. All of the exiles who were listened to were Shi'a - Chalabi, Makiya, Rend al-Rahim Francke - but that was not remarked upon. That made no difference to Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz. They were snookered to help transfer power from Sunni Arabs to Shi'a Arabs, but it was all done under the guise of "helping bring freedom to Iraq."

Everywhere you look in the United States, the signs of economic distress and misery are obvious. Look at recent graduates of colleges, and the trouble they have finding jobs. Look at the recent graduates of law schools, of business schools. The problem does not lessen as you go higher up the professional-training food chain, where the amounts borrowed to pay for such schooling mount and mount. We read the human interest stories about the people in their 20s, or 30s, or 40s, or 50s, who have to move back in with parents, or with in-laws, who have to sell this and have to sell that, as they try to figure out how to survive when the unemployment benefits run out.

But in all the talk and chatter about that economic degringolade, it maddens not to hear howls of protest about the vast sums that have been spent and are being spent, and if many in power have their way, will continue to be spent in order to "deal with the problem of Islam" in all the wrong ways - by bringing "freedom" to "ordinary moms and dads" in Iraq, which was supposed to serve as some kind of model for other Arab countries. But what Arab country, all of them ruled by Sunnis, would take any comfort, much less model itself on, Iraq, where the Sunnis have been stripped of their power, which is now firmly in the hands of Shi'a Arabs? And in Afghanistan, the theme is one of "reconstruction," which is certainly an odd word to use about one of the poorest, least accessible, most remote, and least developed countries on earth, a place where whatever is spent is likely to be diverted into the pockets of the endlessly corrupt. For in Afghanistan there is hardly any understanding of the concept of citizenship, of good government, of true patriotism. In Muslim countries, political power has always been the way to seize wealth as well, and then to distribute it to one's family, one's tribe, fellow members of one's village or city or sect.

In America, the very rich, having acquired their wealth, want the glamor and glory of entering politics, and are willing to spend large sums - even hundreds of millions of dollars - to obtain high office. In Arab and Muslim lands, high office is ordinarily obtained by violence and guile and sometimes both. The point of acquiring political power is to acquire wealth for oneself and one's closest associates -- the Family-and-Friends Plan is very popular in the Middle East.

The failure to be well prepared has had many disturbing consequences. The failure, that is, to learn about the doctrines of Islam has had many disturbing consequences. Those doctrines are immutable because they are based primarily on the Qur'an and on the Sunnah. The Sunnah consists primarily of the attitudes and practices derived from the sayings and acts and details of the life of Muhammad, believed by Muslims to have been preserved in written form in the Hadith (the record of his sayings and deeds) and the Sira (his biography, as written for Believers). The people in charge in our political system, and the people who are in charge of our media - that is, the two groups of people who presume to protect and instruct us - have singularly failed to take on the task of learning about Islam. They have not read and reread the relevant texts. They have not read, much less reread, the scholarly material available that has been compiled by dedicated Western scholars from dozens of different lands, in the century of Western scholarship that came to an end round about 1970. At that time, Arab money began buying up, or even helping to open, "academic" centers where only those who toed the apologist's line were hired or promoted.

Hired and promoted were Muslims who were quick to defend the faith, and as part of defending it, to misrepresent it in ways not always detected by the unwary. The membership, for example, of MESA, the Middle East Studies Association, has gone from 7% to over 70% Muslim. Even this figure does not tell the full story, for those non-Muslims who enter the field and expect to survive consist often of those who are self-selected admirers of, say, what they take to be a milder form of Islam (such as Sufism). Others have found a vocationally and socially acceptable outlet for their own otherwise-unacceptable mental pathologies (i.e., antisemitism). Still others may be working out their resentments toward Christianity. The ex-nun Karen Armstrong, though not in academic life, has found a well-paid niche where she can indulge her dislike of Christianity, as well as other antipathies, in her "neutral" treatment of what she keeps telling us are the "three abrahamic faiths." She also provides a sanitized version of the life of Muhammad, and of the tenets of Islam, that at this point appears so grotesque that the need to rebut her may not be as pressing as it once was (see "The Coherence of Her Incoherence").

But just as ideas have consequences, the lack of ideas, or the lack of knowledge, has had consequences. The doctrines of Islam have not changed in 1350 years. While there are certainly differences of sect (Sunni, Shi'a, Ibadi) and differences of approach to God (the Sufis, for example) and differences in emphasis, it cannot be said that the essential irreducible doctrines of Islam vary, even if Muslims themselves may vary in the degree to which they fully accept, or fully apply in their own lives, the doctrines that are inculcated.

The doctrine of Jihad did not disappear between the time Europe entered the Middle East in 1798, with Napoleon's entry into Egypt, and the latter half of the twentieth century. And it did not suddenly reappear in the last few decades. Rather, it was always present, but in a period of perceived Muslim weakness and Western strength, was not, in the West, acted upon. All that has changed, and changed for three reasons. The first is that I have already mentioned - the trillions of dollars in OPEC revenues that the recipients of that colossal wealth did nothing to deserve. But with that money, they have bought trillions in arms, bought the ability to spread Islam through mosques, madrasas, propaganda, Westerners on the payroll. The second are the millions of Muslims who have been allowed to settle deep within the countries of Western Europe, without any thought being given as to whether or not Islam itself, the ideology of Islam, might make it impossible for all but a handful to truly integrate into Western societies.

Those immigrants came not to be loyal and grateful to the Infidels for saving them from the hellholes of their own countries but, rather, came to enjoy what the Western world had created and could not have created had that Western world been Muslim. Yet failing to understand this, these Muslim immigrants held fast to their contempt for Infidel laws and institutions and social arrangements. A great many supported the same goals as the many Muslim terrorist groups, even if they did not participate in terrorism, or indeed in violent acts, directly. The third change that helped to bring about the "return of Jihad" was the exploitation by Muslim propagandists of Western technology - audiocassettes, videocassettes, satellite television, the Internet - to spread the full message of Islam both to those who were always Muslims but knew very little about the faith beyond the Five Pillars. So many illiterate villagers have now, alas, been made more aware of what is required of them as Muslims, and more aware, too, of just how wicked are the Infidels.

Jihad never went away, but the ability to engage in Jihad, and to dream that it might be possible to conquer the hereditary enemy, "Western Christendom," not through military means but through demographic conquest, has been discussed by several Muslim leaders (Boumedienne, Qaddafy) in public, and by others, no doubt more prudent and clever, in private. And the theme is never far from Muslim websites, produced by and for Muslims, but which you may eavesdrop on at any time.

What maddens about the failure to grasp all this is that it has led directly to the squandering of three trillion dollars. Had the American government under Bush, or under Obama, been filled with people who had taken it upon themselves to spend the time to study Islam, then the irrelevance of the outcomes in Iraq and Afghanistan to the real goals and the important theatres of war, and the instruments of war or rather Jihad that matter, would have been seen. Yet Islam is not hieratic, it's not obscure or abstruse, it's not particularly difficult. Almost anyone of moderate intelligence could do it, and in a few weeks learn enough to at least not be fooled so readily.

What result can be achieved for the Americans and other Infidels in Iraq by creating a state that remains relatively free of internecine strife, and able to use its vast oil wealth wisely? What good does that do us? If we build up Iraqi forces by 600,000 men (army and police) how does that help us? If we do everything we can to prevent Shi'a and Sunnis from warring with each other in Iraq and possibly causing similar strife between Sunnis and Shi'a in Bahrain, Pakistan, Lebanon, Yemen, Kuwait, Al-Haza province of eastern Saudi Arabia, how does this help to divide and weaken the Camp of Islam and Jihad? And will this strife not happen inevitably, because the atmospherics of Islam encourage violence and aggression? We'll soon find out, and I am convinced that many Americans will suffer pangs of remorse for having been so foolish as to indulge their nation-making polypragmonic impulse, rather than to follow and even happily embrace the wisdom of exploiting, by doing nothing, the pre-existing fissures, sectarian, ethnic, and economic, within that Camp of Islam.

And the same squandering of resources can be seen in Afghanistan. What is the outcome desired? That the Taliban will cease to exist? That it will allow itself to make peace with the government? That the government of Afghanistan will be, could ever be, a true friend of the Infidel Americans, even though every Muslim in Afghanistan learns that the permanent enemy of Muslims are Infidels, and that no matter how seemingly generous those Infidels may be, it is only to promote their own, Infidel, and therefore unacceptable, interests? And if we supply Afghans with electricity grids so that every village can now be hooked up to the outside world, doesn't that mean that every village will now be able to receive Islamic propaganda, which is far more likely to be listened to and accepted than anything else on offer, because the audience already consists of people who think of themselves as Muslims and, as Muslims, are ready to do whatever they find out that Muslims are expected or required to do? How many Muslims have you heard of who, ignorant of much of Islam, upon finding out more about it, and what it says about the treatment of non-Muslims, recoiled in horror and decided to drop Islam? There are remarkable exceptions, people who did jettison Islam. But how many? Can policies be constructed on the hope that the numbers of the remarkable exceptions will magically increase? Does that make sense? Is that wise?

In Iraq, we will be blamed, we are being blamed, on all sides, for whatever outcome they do not like. If the Sunnis do not acquiesce, the Shi'a will blame us for trying to "foist Allawi" on them. If the Shi'a do not surrender some of their power, the Sunnis will blame us for having given power to "the turbans" and not having supported Allawi (whose party had two more seats than Maliki's slate), whom they claim was "the winner" even though the Shi'a outnumber the Sunni Arabs by 3 to 1, and have shown they will make deals in order to preserve Shi'a dominance. The Arabs will blame us for encouraging Kurdish dreams of independence. The Kurds will blame us for "abandoning them" if we try to force them to accept the Arabs in Mosul or Kirkuk and to abandon dreams of independence, and so on. And the same blame-the-infidels scenario will occur and is already occurring in Afghanistan, where the oily Karzai has turned into the slippery Karzai, threatening to "join the Taliban myself" if the Americans don't watch it - and now he has turned on the charm again, in order to keep the American men and money there.

But we don't have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in one of the most remote and inaccessible parts of the world in order to do the impossible, to give Afghanistan a central government that works and whose writ runs far beyond Kabul. Or rather, we might be able to do it if we are willing to stay for five or ten or twenty years, and to spend another few trillion dollars to make that our little project for the first quarter of the twenty-first century. But should we? Does it make sense? If we refuse to do this, if we leave, are we then forever prevented from vigilantly monitoring the territory of Afghanistan lest "Al Qaeda come back"? And can't we, intermittently, using Special Forces, drones, and missiles from afar, from time to time disrupt any attempt to return Al Qaeda or any of a dozen terrorist groups to Afghanistan? Wouldn't that make better sense? And why should we build up yet another Muslim country, when it is impossible for its Muslim inhabitants to abandon Islam and what it teaches them? And what it teaches them requires them to view us with permanent, deep, if occasionally hidden, malevolence. Even if there are sincere examples of Afghan Muslims who do not feel this way, that is, who ignore a central feature and duty of the ideology of Islam, what comfort should that bring us? Why should we base a policy in Afghanistan on a handful of touchingly charming women trying to be educated, or a seductive warlord, or a Gunga-Dinnish army commander who truly, deeply, madly, wants to be on our side? Such exceptions can, given American sentimentality, cloud the mind. Those who make policy have to sober up.

Why should money be the theme of this article? Because not everyone thrills to the subject of what Islam inculcates. Not everyone quite wants to go through learning about Jizyah, or dhimmis, or naskh, or isnad-chains, or any of the rest. But everyone in the United States knows that we have been having a terrible time economically, and that we are talking about losses of tens or possibly hundreds of billions of dollars, and are regarding these losses with horror - just look at the State of California. Yet we have not focused on the greatest (continuing) expenditure of them all - the wars to protect ourselves against jihad by refusing to see it as primarily an ideological war, and by continuing to fool ourselves into thinking that if we create better (by our lights) societies in Iraq and Afghanistan, that will somehow - no one has ever explained how, or even thought he had an obligation to explain how - dampen the enthusiasm of Muslims worldwide for Jihad. That Jihad, however, is based, let it be emphasized, not on an "interpretation" of Islam that can be changed, but on the immutable text of the Qur'an, and the Hadith that more than a millennium ago were studied, and winnowed. What remained was assigned different ranks of "authenticity" by those deemed to be the most authoritative muhaddithin, such as Al-Bukhari and Muslim. This can't be undone, not by Bright Young Muslim Reformers who keep getting grants from the American government and the Carnegie Foundation, or who keep getting hired and promoted on the basis of their entirely factitious achievements in this line.

Three trillion dollars have been wasted on a misguided policy that is a result of a failure to study, and then grasp the nature of, Islam.

Three trillion dollars is surely enough in squandered and desperately needed wealth to cause some to think, or rethink, about the folly of policies based on confusion, ignorance, wishful thinking -- that is, on a refusal to understand the ideology of Islam.

Panetta noted that Al-Awlaki "had declared war on the United States." This statement, and Panetta's general tone, drew criticism from Robert Spencer here.

I am not convinced that Panetta is akin to one more Brennan or Benjamin, someone who deliberately is avoiding the issue of Islam. He is forced to work within a system that does not, as Obama claims, allow for all sorts of views, but rather, one in which handed down from on high is a view that requires our high officials to misrepresent the nature and scope of the Islamic threat. For Panetta's statement about Al-Awlaki, while true, is also misleading, for it implies that this is surprising, that Al-Awlaki is, if not unique, at least a very unusual case. One would not have understood, that is, that Islam itself has "declared war" on the United States. For Muslims are inculcated with the idea that only one division of humanity matters - that between Believers and Unbelievers, Muslims and Infidels, and that between the two a state of permanent war (though not always open warfare) exists. In other words, it is possible by emphasis on one thing, and omission of a larger understanding, to mislead - and Panetta, who is one of the better members of the Administration, may have unwittingly misled.

But Leon Panetta is not, like John Brennan, a calculatedly appeasing fool (shallow Machiavellianism run amok). Nor does he strike an observer as being akin to others among the "terrorism" experts at the top of the Obama Administration, and Obama himself. That is, Leon Panetta does not strike me as someone who thinks it a brilliant stroke to avoid the subject of the ideology of Islam altogether, keeping Americans in the dark, so that we can, so it is claimed (falsely), not "offend" Muslims by letting them know that we know what is in Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira. Only those sources explain Muslim attitudes and Muslim behavior over the past 1350 years, with time out during those periods, or in those places, when Muslims were so obviously weak that Jihad, through violent means, could not be pursued. Or in the last half-century, it was not pursued by many Muslims because OPEC trillions and Muslim immigrant millions allowed to settle deep within Dar al-Harb, and the exploitation by Muslims of Western technology to more effectively disseminate the full message of Islam, allowed for means of jihad other than qitaal (combat) or terrorism (seen by Muslims as merely an "equalizing" form of qitaal, one perfectly legitimate given Western superiority in conventional weaponry) to be pursued.

Instead of being critical of Panetta's performance, I suggest that he - and others who may secretly wish to introduce several themes into public discussion, and therefore public awareness -- may suffer not from want of love of the Western world, but from a defect or want of imagination, of what may be called "fantasia" (not least because, once I had chosen my title, a play on the wonderful movie "Pane Amore e Fantasia" requires the deliberate use of such a word) in order to introduce what, as a matter of state policy, is apparently not to be introduced.

There are two matters that he, Leon Panetta, might have mentioned, en passant, with studied casualness, in his appearance on Fox. And of course he hasn't really missed his chance because his chance, and that of dozens of others, will come again, at the next interview.

What was it he might have said, of use, in talking about Al-Awlaki?

He might have said that Al-Awlaki's method of pursuing Jihad is one among many, but from the viewpoint of Americans, at present, for Americans if not for all others, is the most dangerous instrument of Jihad.

And what would then have occurred? The interviewer, if half-awake - though some do give the impression of permanent somnolence - would be prompted by such a statement to inquire further: "Mr. Panetta, could you explain what you mean?"

And that would then give Leon Panetta the excuse for expatiating upon the adumbrated theme:

"Oh, what I mean is that terrorism is merely one of the instruments of Jihad, and it is important that we keep in mind that while the choice of instruments may vary, all those who are wedded to the concept of Jihad [at this point there is no need to explain just how many people this includes, in esse or in posse] share the same goals."

Interviewer: "And what are those shared goals? I'm sure listeners would wish to be reminded."

And Panetta could then be given the opportunity to further enlighten his audience of viewers:

"Well, Jihad is merely the word for 'struggle,' and the 'struggle' that some Muslims believe is incumbent upon them to participate in, directly or indirectly, is one to ensure that all obstacles to the spread, and then the dominance, of Islam are removed, everywhere in the world. Some may concentrate on the removal of such obstacles in one country or one geographic area, and others, such as the members of Al-Qaeda, may be an overarching organization that recognizes that the worldwide Jihad is merely the sum of all the local Jihads, whether directed at the United States, or France, or China, or Ethiopia, or Christians in the southern Sudan or Buddhists in southern Thailand or Hindus in Pakistan or Bangladesh, or anywhere else that Jihad is conducted against non-Muslims, in lands where Muslims do not rule, or even, in some cases, in lands where Muslims rule but some feel that the non-Muslims require constant reminding of their permanently inferior status.

"You see, I think we make a mistake in linking 'Jihad' too closely with its more sensational aspects--that is, terrorism. There are many instruments of Jihad, including the deployment of what some call the Money Weapon, and campaigns of Da'wa that are carefully-targeted and well-financed in the West, and also other instruments. In fact, some - such as Colonel Khaddafy of Libya and the late Houari Boumedienne of Algeria, have spoken openly of 'demographic conquest.' And that, of course, is a matter that we cannot, in defending ourselves, ignore, especially as it may apply to the historic heart of the West, that is, Western Europe."

And thus can Leon Panetta, doing his duty con amore, will have introduced a good working definition of "Jihad" that, once it has been offered, will be remembered, and cannot easily be unremembered.

And there is one other thing that Leon Panetta - whom I think is one of the more admirable people in the Obama Administration's national security apparatus - could have done and still can do, the next time he is called upon to discuss Al-Awlaki or any other Muslim terrorist. He can quote - yes, he should dare to quote - from the canonical texts of Islam. He should quote from the Qur'an, 9.29 and 9.5, at least those lines commanding Believers to "strike terror in the hearts of the Unbelievers." He should quote Muhammad, too, on the subject of terror - even if he does so only by prefacing it thus:

"Although it says in the Qur'an 'to strike terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers,' we are fortunate that even among those Muslims who do believe in the goals of Jihad that few, at the moment, seem to think terrorism is the right way to pursue those goals. And that is particularly fortunate because, as you know, the Qur'an is taught as the uncreated and immutable Word of God, so that if many Muslims were to believe that, and to take such passages as those in Sura 9 seriously, we would have a much bigger problem."

Yes, that would be the boilerplate phrasing that would allow Panetta to both introduce the theme, and seem to be exculpating "most Muslims." And what would CAIR and other Muslim groups do? How could they object to Panetta's quoting from the Qur'an directly? On what theory? And since he had gone out of his way to suggest that "most Muslims" cannot possibly take such passages seriously and to heart (of course he knows better, and so will more and more of those who take the trouble to study Islam), CAIR and other Muslim groups will be in a quandary. Do they draw attention to such passages? Do they publicly agree that such passages exist but that "most Muslims" do not take them as part of the literal word of God? Do they stick with the old "taken out of context" nonsense of which we are all getting weary, and which more and more non-Muslims are ready to dismiss as the transparent and desperate ploy, easily rebutted, that it is? And he would have his "deniability" in the accompanying boilerplate which suggests that the numbers of Muslims who actually believe the Qur'an to be the literal word of God to be quite small, when we all know that all Muslims are required to think of the Qur'an as exactly that, and those who do not cannot be considered to be real Muslims. For even those "Bright Young Reformers" who sense what is so dangerous about the Hadith and Sira, and want to jettison them, cannot do away with the Qur'an, or with the Qur'an accepted as the literal word of God, without removing themselves from the Community of Believers.

That is what Panetta, con amore, that is, his love of country that would supersede any careerist sense that he must play ball with those higher-up even if that means colluding in a policy of deliberately keeping Americans in the dark about the ideology of Islam, could do. He could keep the phrases that appear to suggest that he doesn't believe that most, or even many, Muslims, take the Qur'an as the literal word of God. That is quite different from using such phrases as "violent extremists" or "a handful of extremists" or "those who have hijacked a great religion."

And what, really, could Obama or Brennan or the others do? Could they start a fight with Panetta? Because if they do, they will lose that fight, and he will triumph. And he might even, if pushed, resign from the C.I.A., or threaten to, and the whole idiotic policy of refusing to educate those whom our leaders presume to instruct and protect would be exposed to public discussion and ridicule.

It's a fantasy, of course, my little attempt at putting words into the mouth of Leon Panetta. Or rather, it's an attempt to exercise the muscles of my - and your - imagination. The Italian word "fantasia" can mean both "imagination" and "fantasy."

And that's why, when I had to think of a title for this piece, prompted by the C.I.A. director's name, came up with "Panetta, Amore, e Fantasia." I'm sure the ghost of Vittorio De Sica will forgive me. It's in a good cause.

Quite a few people seemed to think they knew why Erdogan was behaving as he was behaving.

There was, for example, quick-off-the-mark Tony Blair. Tony Blair, you may need reminding, has always been an enthusiastic - because uncritical, and unthinking - supporter of Turkey's admission to the E.U. In 2005, just after a vote in Austria that suggested some lack of enthusiasm (could memories of two Ottoman attempts to seize Vienna have anything to do with it?) for Turkey's admission, it was Blair who thought he should remind everyone in Europe, and reassure the Turks too, that Turkey simply had to have a "future" inside the E.U.

In The Guardian for 30 September 2005, under the headline "Blair insists that Turkey's future in the EU," appeared this:

Tony Blair today insisted Turkey's future was in the EU as British officials in Brussels worked to dispel a looming crisis over next week's talks on its membership.

In an interview with Turkey's Hurriyet newspaper, the prime minister said he would work hard to help Turkey realise its EU ambitions.

"I sincerely believe that EU membership is Turkey's future," Mr Blair - a long-time supporter of Ankara joining the 25-nation bloc - told the paper. "We shall work towards achieving that."

Nor in the five years since then, as the nature of Islam becomes clearer and clearer to those willing to take account of reality and the day's daily Jihad News from around the world, has smiling Tony Blair, pocketing his dishonorable honoraria, ever given any hint of rethinking this view. (Like Clinton, with whom he has so much in common, Blair has made 100 million dollars in speaking fees and consultancy work since he left "public service" to make "some real money.") Erdogan's defense of Ahmedinajad, and his repeated visceral denunciations of Israelis (Peres at Davos) and of Israel for daring to defend itself against the Fast and Slow Jihadists of Hamas and Fatah, have made no difference.

So it was no surprise that, a few weeks ago, Blair should come out yet again with his support for Turkey's admission to the E.U., even after the Mava Marmara incident, and even after Erdogan's defense of, and expression of solidarity with, the Islamic Republic of Iran. The Jerusalem Post reported:

Quartet special envoy Tony Blair said in an interview on Channel 10 on Tuesday that the Turkish change was very worrisome. He expressed hope that out of the crisis a new bridge would be built between Israel and Turkey.

Blair, who advocated Turkey joining the EU in 2005, said the cold shoulder the EU gave Turkey led to Ankara's decision to turn in the direction of Iran.

Let's repeat that: "Blair...said the cold shoulder the EU gave Turkey led to Ankara's decision to turn in the direction of Iran."

So it is the E.U. that "pushed" Turkey, or even "forced" Turkey, or rather Erdogan and his fellows in the DKP, to "turn in the direction of Iran."

Astonishing, you may think, in its idiocy, but apparently this idiocy is not Blair's alone.

For on June 10, in the Wall Street Journal, there appeared a piece on p. A15, under the headline "Gates Says EU Pushed Turkey Away." And the sub-headline reads: "U.S. Defense Secretary Blames Bloc's Resistance to Granting Membership for Ankara's Turn from Israel and the West."

And here's more of that article:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates accused the European Union of pushing Turkey toward the East by its resistance to letting the mainly Muslim nation join the bloc, the closest any senior U.S. official has come to saying the West risks losing Turkey.

The comments, made Wednesday to reporters while Mr. Gates was in London and reported by news agencies, came as Turkey voted against a U.S.-backed resolution at the United Nations Security Council mandating new sanctions against Iran. Mr. Gates also expressed "concern" at the sharp deterioration in relations between U.S. allies Turkey and Israel, over the killing of Turkish citizens by Israeli soldiers on a ship bound for Gaza last week.

"I personally think that if there is anything to the notion that Turkey is, if you will, moving eastward, it is, in my view, in no small part because it was pushed, and pushed by some in Europe refusing to give Turkey the kind of organic link to the West that Turkey sought," Mr. Gates said, according to the agency reports.

"We have to think long and hard about why these developments in Turkey [are occurring] and what we might be able to do to counter them and make the stronger linkages with the West more apparently of interest and value to Turkey's leaders," he said.

And now, in a Gogolian vein, from the Simply Idiotic of Blair and Gates to the Idiotic In All Respects of the inimitable Tom Friedman, in his column entitled "Letter From Istanbul" (and sure enough, he was in Istanbul, no doubt staying at the five-star hotel on the Bosphorus, and enjoying the Times expense-account for all it is worth). Of course the column, for all of that "a dispatch from the front" suggestion, could just as easily have been written, say, from a Dunkin' Donuts in Newark, New Jersey. And Friedman has an Explanatory Theory for Turkey's behavior, as tom-friedmans-of-the-times so often do, and this one might be called the Vacuum-Packed Theory.

For Tom Friedman thinks that Turkey's behavior, or rather, the behavior of the Islamizing regime of Erdogan, is explained by "a series of vacuums that emerged [sic] in and around Turkey in the last few years [and] have drawn Turkey's Islamist government - led by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdgoan's Justice and Development Party - away from its balance point between East and West. [Now time for the friedmanian Portentous:] This could have enormous implications. Turkey's balancing role has been one of the most important, quiet, stabilizers in world politics. [!] You only notice it when it is gone. Being in Istanbul [instead of at that Dunkin' Donuts in Newark, or possibly just in his study, and actually reading some relevant material that might enlighten him as to Islam, and the Return to Islam in Turkey] convinces me that we could be on our way to losing it if all these vacuums get filled in the wrong ways."

And the vacuums include a "vacuum" of "leadership in the Arab-Muslim world" which Turkey may wish, according to Friedman, to fill. The vacuum has come about because, for example, Saudi Arabia is "asleep." That will come as news to those on the receiving end of all those mosques and madrasas and non-stop clever propaganda campaigns financed by the Saudis all over the world. And the best way for Erdogan to "fill" that vacuum is to attack Israel, "loudly bashing Israel over its occupation [sic] and praising Hamas [the Fast Jihadists] instead of the more responsible Palestinian Authority [Slow Jihadists of Fatah]..."

And another "vacuum" is that which Friedman discerns inside Turkey itself, a "vacuum" of secular leadership. Well, there is plenty of secular leadership, but naturally, secularists may differ among themselves, while those who seek to Bring Back Islam are working for the same goal and can more easily make common cause. And Friedman appears to be unaware of how Erdogan has used the requirements imposed by the E.U. itself to take away the power of the chief defender of Kemalism, or secularism, that is, the Turkish army. Nor does he say anything about the non-stop campaign to weaken other centers of secular power, including the magistrates, the journalists, the university rectors and the most advanced professors. He is describing the results of this relentless campaign against the defenders of Kemalism as a "vacuum" that just occurred, when it is the result of Erdogan and his supporters plotting and planning, and doing everything they can, to remove the secular opposition from all positions of power and influence inside Turkey.

But the most important "vacuum" according to the egregious Friedman is the first one: the "vacuum" that was created somehow when Turkey was not immediately welcomed, a friend with every conceivable benefit, into the "Christian club." It is nothing of the kind, but it is a club that does not wish 70 million Muslims to enter, as well as all those non-Turkish Muslims too to whom Erdogan has hinted Turkish citizenship might someday be granted. Once Turkey is in the E.U., these Muslims will be able to move freely about the cabin of Schengenland once the takeoff has occurred. And the E.U., unaware of the fatal weight of the Turkish passenger allowed on, turns off the seatbelt sign, and now -- va-va-voom -- anything goes.

Here is Friedman blaming the E.U.:

The first vacuum comes courtesy of the European Union. After a decade of telling the Turks that if they wanted E.U. membership they had to reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations - which the Erdogan government systematically did - the E.U. leadership has now said to Turkey: "Oh, you mean nobody told you? We're a Christian club. No Muslims allowed." The E.U.'s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world.

Friedman's essential emptiness is on display in this little paragraph. First, the chutzpah of the overlooking of the obvious. To wit, the changes that Erdogan made, ostensibly to "comply" with the E.U., were really made in order to break the power of the army and the secular magistrates, his most steadfast and powerful opponents. As always, Friedman misstates and he overstates. He knows that you don't know exactly what Turkey has done or not done to "reform their laws, economy, minority rights and civilian-military relations," and you don't know why, when some of these things were done, they may have been done. But Friedman has no idea, either. He is not a detail man.

Then there is the misstatement of the E.U. supposedly telling Turkey "we're a Christian club." No one in the E.U. could possibly have said or even hinted at that, and no one in post-Christian Europe would do so. Nor did anyone say "no Muslims allowed" when there are now tens of millions of Muslims, alas, already inside the countries of Western Europe, with behavior so different from that of all other, non-Muslim, immigrants, and so very much the same among the different populations of Muslim immigrants no matter what European country they have managed to settle within. But it makes things simpler, snappier, and that's what Tom Friedman likes, that's what, after he does the world-capital-hopping hokey-pokey and turns himself about, that's what he's all about.

And then he says that "[t]he E.U.'s rejection of Turkey, a hugely bad move, has been a key factor prompting Turkey to move closer to Iran and the Arab world."

So here we are again, with Friedman repeating or bleating the same notes earlier emitted by smiling Tony Blair and dour-faced Robert Gates: that it is the E.U.'s "rejection of Turkey" that has been a "key factor" in causing Turkey to behave as, suddenly, many in the Western world have at long last begun to notice after the attempt to run diplomatic interference for the Islamic Republic of Iran, and after the collaboration with Hamas through the Mavi Marmara incident deliberately provoked by the Hamas-and-Al-Qaeda-linked I.H.H.

This is utter nonsense, and it could only be said by someone who has not followed, and does not understand, the slow and steady growth of the party of Erdogan, and the power of people who want to undo the Kemalist constraints systematically placed on Islam as a political and social force in modern Turkey ever since the 1920s, and maintained since sometimes with coups, and only successfully undone by Erdogan and his party over the past decade.

But Erdogan did not arrive at his desire to undo Kemalism, and his dislike of the West, because of the E.U. He may claim that is the case, but by now we should all have learned to ignore that, and to examine the underlying ideology that animates Erdogan and his supporters - that is, Islam. As a young man, remember, Erdogan wrote, produced, and acted in a play, Mas-Kom-Ya, which takes its name from the three "enemies" that Erdogan identified - the Masons, the Communists, and the Jews (Mason, Kommunist, Yahud). In 1998 Erdogan was sentenced to ten months in jail (he served four) for reciting the line about how the "mosques are our barracks, the domes are our helmets, the minarets are our bayonets, the Believers are our soldiers." Erdogan has been fixed in his views for his entire adult life. Only someone who had not followed him, and had remained ignorant because simplification and inattention to detail are that someone's necessary stock in trade, could not know that. That includes Blair and Gates as Permanent Top Bananas in the slips-sliding Corridors of Power, both being too "busy" to study up on Erdogan. It also includes Friedman, last and least, unwilling to change his highly-rewarding modus operandi in order to actually make sense of things for those who still rely on him, or even accord him a respect he never deserved.

Did Friedman not notice how the Turkish government refused to allow a fourth American division to enter Iraq from the north? Did he not notice how high Turkish officials described American soldiers in Iraq as like Nazis or even "worse than Nazis" without any reprimand? Did he fail to notice the way that Erdgoan treated the Armenian matter, and repeated the nonsense about Armenian attacks on Turks as being ignored, and as being morally equivalent to the mass killings of Armenians, both in 1915 and the years following, and - when no war was on - in 1894-96? Did he not notice the popularity of that viciously anti-American and antisemitic Turkish movie "Valley of the Wolves," where American soldiers act like Nazis and a Jewish doctor harvests the organs of Iraqis who had been killed, for sale to clients in Los Angeles, New York, and Tel Aviv?

And while Friedman offers a hint of noting the domestic politics of Turkey in his "third vacuum," he apparently failed to note the attacks, over the last few years, on the university rectors and magistrates, on secular businessmen and their media empires (Dogan), and on all those who might stand up to Erdogan's relentless attempts to reclaim Turkey for Islam. For Islam, as Erdogan rightly says, cannot be divided into "moderate" Islam and another kind (the kind some in the West with their foolish and false Machiavellianism call "Islamism"), "for there is only one kind of Islam."

Turkey is behaving the way it is because the forces of Islam, under Erdogan, have steadily fought to become the molders of Turkish minds, and the shapers of Turkish policy. That - the Return to Islam and the Undoing of Kemalism - is what explains Turkish behavior, including the vicious attacks on Israel, and the full-throated embrace of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anyone can say--and no doubt some will - that this or that act by the West, or some part of the West, is what "turned" Turkey from "West to East." Why, I suppose someone could say that the interest in the Armenian massacres and the resolutions passed by various Western parliaments about those massacres helped to "turn Turkey" to the East. But really, was that it? These are all excuses, and they excuses that have the effect of preventing any intelligent examination of the Return to Islam, and of Islam itself. And that is a pity, because the Turkish example has many things to tell us. It tells us, for example, that any secular class that benefits, as some Turks did, from constraints put in place against Islam, has a duty to vigilantly preserve and defend and extend those constraints, and should not leave it up to the army to defend secular interests against a Return to Islam.

The example of Turkey also shows that Islam is a powerful force. It keeps, like Rasputin, coming back even when you think you have taken care of it. Western polices ought to be based on this understanding, and no permanent trust put in any state peopled by Muslims, even if that state is under the temporary control by secularists, whether in Turkey, before Erdogan, or in Iran, before Khomeini, or in Turkey, after Erdogan (for he may well lose the next election) or in Iran, after the epigones of Khomeini are defeated. No nuclear weapons, no major weaponry of any kind, no reliance on a Muslim state to be a permanent ally. That just cannot be.

Blair doesn't like to think about Islam. He's said to be "deeply religious" - a convert to Catholicism - and thus, like Bush, also someone saved by religion, he's inclined to think that anything that is called a "religion" must be 1) worthy of automatic respect and 2) exempt from any critical scrutiny, or at least from any public expression of the results of such critical scrutiny. And Gates - Gates has never given signs of grasping the nature of the ideology of Islam, for he's a man who thinks war consists of soldiers, rifles, Bradley fighting vehicles, helicopters, tanks, and not of immigration policies, and banning of Saudi money to pay for mosques and madrasas, and vigilant monitoring of Muslim Da'wa efforts in our prisons and among the psychically marginal outside of prisons, where Adult-Onset Islam can turn a nondescript American citizen into a mortal threat.

And then there is Tom Friedman, a clown, a simplifier and snappy-title man, all "The World Is Flat" and never mind if what I say today I will be changing, as the winds change, tomorrow. If you want someone to explain the world to your collected franchise-holders, or bankers, or others too busy to keep informed themselves, without really informing them, and carefully avoiding any need for real thought, then Tom Friedman is, and always will be, your man, until another mountebank with a tireless booking agent comes along to arrange those lectures and gather and process those fat checks. But as for promoting understanding - oh, that you will still have to do on your own.

And one final observation. Turkey has become what it has become because Erdogan, and his followers, are not "cultural Muslims," and not "Muslim-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims, but true Muslims. And a true Muslim, that is, one who takes Islam seriously, will naturally, and inevitably, end up with the kind of attitudes so much on display in Turkey this last week, this last month, this last year, this last decade.

But what if that were not true? What if it were not the Return to Islam, and its effects, natural and inevitable, that explained the attitudes and behavior of many Turks and certainly of the Turkish government, whipping up those Turks, today? What if Blair and Gates and Friedman were right, and it was the reluctance of so many countries in the E.U. to admit Turkey to full membership, that "explained" the behavior of Erdogan and of Turkey? Blair and Gates and Friedman all appear to think that the obvious answer is that the E.U. should drop its objections, and admit Turkey. In other words, the imperiled countries of Western Europe should allow into the E.U., as its most populous member, a Muslim Turkey where Islam is resurgent, and where, it has been suggested, other, non-Turkish Muslims, might even be extended citizenship so that they, too, could become part of the E.U.

Neither Blair, nor Gates, or Friedman, seems aware of what we at this site all know, and that so many Europeans now, to their enormous sorrow, know.

To wit: The large-scale presence of Muslims in the countries of Western Europe has created a situation, both for the indigenous non-Muslims and for other, non-Muslim immigrants, that is far more unpleasant, expensive, and physically dangerous than would be the case without that large-scale Muslim presence. No one can deny the truth of that assertion.

Or rather, only a few can do so, and that is if they refuse to learn, or are incapable of learning, and in detail, about the texts and tenets of Islam, and how those explain the behavior of Muslims in Europe today.

And among those who refuse to learn are Tony Blair, for many years and until recently the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and Robert Gates, the present Secretary of Defense of the United States, and Tom Friedman, a well-known self-promoter and columnist for our best-known newspaper.

And that, you see, is part - a very large part - of the problem.