Waiting for the War That Is Already Here

We shall not flag or fail.  We shall defend our homeland, whatever the cost may be.  We shall fight in the town councils, we shall fight in the workplaces and in the school boards, we shall fight in the courts and state legislatures.  We shall never surrender.  Or will we?

Older readers will recognize this as a (not very elegant) paraphrase of Winston Churchill’s “We shall fight on the beaches” speech.  It was delivered in the summer of 1940 when a Nazi invasion of Britain seemed imminent and British morale was at a low point.  Except there was no equivalent of “Or will we?” in Churchill’s address.  Churchill left no doubt that the final victory would belong to Britain and its allies.

There is no similar resolve today in our fight against stealth jihad—neither in Britain nor in America.  That’s partly because our situation is considerably murkier than that which faced England in 1940.  There is no Wehrmacht on the other side of the Channel, no Luftwaffe, and no battleships to concentrate the mind.

Many American citizens are well-armed and well-trained in the use of firearms.  Many are, no doubt, prepared to “fight on the beaches” in order to save their country from subjugation.  But that is not where the battle against cultural jihad will be fought.  It will be fought—is now being fought—in workplaces, in school boards, in town councils, and, most of all, in courts.  And very few are prepared to fight the battle on that level.

Why not?  Well, for one thing, very few realize that the struggle for the soul of the country is being waged at that level.  Newspapers and news reports do not headline stories such as “School board approves Islamic-friendly curriculum at Lakewood Middle School.”  On the other hand, the Muslim Brotherhood, which has been active in our society since 1963, understands the nature of the battle all too well.  A 1991 Muslim Brotherhood memorandum puts it this way:

[The Brotherhood] must understand that their work in America is a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying the Western civilization from within and ‘sabotaging’ its miserable house…so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

How is this victory over Western civilization to be accomplished?  Not with bombs and bullets, but through sabotage. According to the memorandum, the “brothers” must work to infiltrate and influence key social institutions with the aim of subverting them.

Many Americans are unaware that this “grand jihad” is underway, and, consequently, they are unprepared to resist it. The other reason that the average American is ill-prepared for this civilizational jihad is that Muslim Brotherhood groups such as CAIR, ISNA, MAS, and MPAC have successfully framed their long march through the institutions as a struggle for civil rights. And, as many have learned from hard experience, you don’t want to be on the “wrong” side of that struggle. If, for example, you disagree with the “right” of a transgender person to use whatever restroom he or she desires, you may soon be in trouble with the DOJ, the NBA, and NBC.

And if you resist a Muslim employee’s request for special toilet facilities, you may soon be in trouble with the EEOC.  Muslims have been quick to take advantage of civil rights laws that require employers to make reasonable accommodations for the religious beliefs and practices of their employees. But what do toilet facilities have to do with religion? Well, Muslims are required to perform ablutions before prayers, and foot-washing –which is not easy to do in your standard sink – is part of the ritual. Hence, the need for special foot-washing facilities. Of course, the foot-washing facilities wouldn’t be needed except that many Muslim employees demand paid breaks for their required daily prayers. And, of course, you can’t say your prayers in any old place, so employers are increasingly expected to set aside special rooms or spaces for Muslim prayer. Nor should the employer expect a Muslim woman to pray without a hijab. And so on.  Employers who resist such demands can expect to find themselves in a courtroom face-to-face with a CAIR-provided legal team.

Looked at from one point of view, the ever-expanding accommodation of Islam in the workplace can be seen as an advance for civil rights.  Looked at from a different perspective, it can be seen as an advance for Islam.  Since Islam is a religion that doesn’t give a fig for civil rights (witness the wholesale rejection of the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights by numerous Muslim nations), we can assume that CAIR et al look at the matter from the second perspective.

While some of our better-armed citizens are awaiting the pitched battles in the streets, the pitched battles in the courts have begun.  The outcome of these courtroom battles may already be determining the final outcome of the civilizational jihad.  The Brotherhood’s preferred method of “eliminating and destroying the Western Civilization” is not warfare, but lawfare.  And it has already chalked up numerous victories.

In addition to the workplaces and the courthouses, this one-sided culture war is also being fought in schoolhouses, publishing houses, and apartment houses (where a steady stream of unvetted Muslim refugees are being accommodated by the federal government despite local opposition). But one kind of house deserves special attention. When it comes to spreading Islamic civilization, there’s no substitute for houses of worship. Hence the proliferation of mosques on the American scene—many of them connected to the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and many of them financed by the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT), another organization with close ties to the Brotherhood.  Mosques are centers of prayer and worship, but, as has been shown time and again, they can also be used as centers of recruitment and radicalization, and even as munitions depots.  According to a popular poem in the Muslim world, “the mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets, and the faithful our soldiers.”

Americans find it difficult to resist the introduction of mosques into their communities because they think that the mosque, like the church or temple, is all about offering worship to God.  It is in a sense—except that Allah is an altogether different sort of God who places a different set of demands upon his people.  One of those demands is the obligation to wage jihad against unbelievers.  According to one of the more authoritative hadiths, when Muhammad was asked what deed equals jihad in heavenly reward, he replied, “I do not find such a deed” (Bukhari 4. 56. 2785).  Moreover, there are several verses in the Koran that make it clear that acts of charity and worship are not nearly as important as acts of jihad (for example, see 9: 19-20).  

Like Christians, devout Muslims are aiming for a “heavenly reward” Unlike Christians, they believe that the surefire method of achieving that goal is jihad.  Let’s qualify that (for the millionth time) by adding that not every Muslim plans to jihad his way to paradise.  But, because jihad is baked into Islam, a small but significant number will take that route.  And, armed with AK-47s and high explosives, it only takes a small number to create mass casualties.  That’s why so many communities in the West are not anxious to have mosques constructed in their midst.

With a few exceptions, these people are not racist or bigoted.  They realize that most of their Muslim neighbors mean them no harm.  Moreover, they don’t suffer from “Islamophobia”—an irrational fear of Islam.  Whatever fear they have of Islam is quite rational and is thoroughly vindicated every day by the everyday atrocities that are commonplace in the Islamic world and wherever Islam gains a foothold (as in Europe).

But even though these mosque resisters may intuit that a civilizational struggle is taking place, they dare not frame their resistance in those terms. The issue of mosque proliferation has already been framed for them. It is, according to the bien pensants, a civil rights issue. Thus, if you oppose the construction of a mosque, you are a foe of civil rights—in this case, a foe of religious liberty.

The irony is that once Islam becomes the dominant religion, it doesn’t have any use for religious liberty. In the Muslim world, non-Muslims enjoy few if any religious liberties. In Saudi Arabia there are no churches and Christians can be jailed merely for holding a prayer service in a private home. In large parts of the Muslim Middle East, Christians face extinction. Throughout the Muslim world, Christians live in fear not only of losing their rights but also of losing their lives. As Geert Wilders has observed in reference to the Islamization of the Netherlands, the more Islam, the less freedom for everyone else.

The proper lens through which to view the “mosque wars” in America is not the American tradition of civil liberties, but the Islamic tradition of conquest and subjugation. Nevertheless, opponents of mosque construction dare not make their case in terms of civilizational jihad. Our society’s narrow focus on context-free civil rights forces them to rely instead on more mundane arguments about land use, zoning laws, and traffic patterns. But, no matter how valid such concerns may be, they will usually be overruled by the argument for religious liberty. The irony—which is lost on all but a few—is that the “civil rights” side of the case will likely be argued by lawyers for Muslim Brotherhood organizations. And what’s the motto of the Muslim Brotherhood? “Allah is our objective. The Prophet is our leader. The Qur’an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope. Allahu akbar.”

It pays to understand the times you live in. If you don’t get that straight, you will be overtaken by events for which you are unprepared. Civil rights are important, but it’s also important to understand that we no longer live in the Civil Rights era. This is the era of civilizational survival, and if our civilization doesn’t survive, neither will civil liberties.  This is not the 1960s and Martin Luther King, however admirable, is not nearly as relevant to our times as such defenders of Western and Christian civilization as Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, Victor Orban in Hungary, and Milos Zeman in the Czech Republic. If we want an historical analogy to our present situation, we must cast back not to the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, but to the civilizational struggle that Churchill spoke of in his “on the beaches” speech.

The Muslim Brotherhood effort to impose an oppressive social system on Western nations comes wrapped in the guise of a civil rights movement. In America, it also takes advantage of the traditional American habit of rooting for the underdog. Thus, CAIR and other Islamist groups take pains to portray Muslims in the U.S. as victims of discrimination and hate crimes, despite the fact that there is little evidence that Muslims are singled out for hate crimes more than other groups, and much evidence that some of the “hate crimes” are manufactured for the purpose of winning sympathy and special concessions for Muslims.

Fighting for the underdog is (usually) an admirable thing to do. But, once again, we seem not to have noticed that the times have changed. The underdog of yesterday often turns out to be today’s overdog—and vice versa. If you are Christian, if you cherish the Western tradition and the unique benefits it confers, you are now the underdog.

Muslims may be a minority in America, but worldwide, Islam is well on its way to regaining its former status as a great world power. As that power expands—for example, into Germany, France, Belgium, and Sweden—the rights of average citizens in those places shrink. I’m thinking not only of the right to freely criticize a dangerous ideology, but also of more mundane rights that Europeans could once take for granted: the right to take an evening stroll, the right to swim in a municipal pool without fear of being assaulted, and the right of Jews to openly wear the yarmulke without fear of bodily harm.

Here in the U.S., any attempt to resist Islamist demands is met with the objection that “that’s not who we are.” Over in Europe, however, the accession to Muslim demands and Muslim migration has created a situation in which Europeans can no longer be who they were. They once lived in societies where, by and large, they could trust their neighbors to be peaceable and law-abiding. Now, after decades of “cultural enrichment,” they can truthfully and ruefully say, “That’s not who we are anymore.”

If they wish to retain their freedoms, Europeans may very soon be forced to fight on the beaches and in the streets and the hills. That’s because they failed to resist Islamization when the fight could still be won by meeting cultural encroachment with peaceful but firm resolve. If we wish to avoid their fate, we must be willing to fight in the school boards and planning boards and in the courts. If we don’t, we will someday have a much grimmer fight on our hands.