Motus Mentis

We’ve been just about completely mum on the clash-of-civilizations front for the past couple of months, so here’s an update.

The blasphemy trial of Geert Wilders resumed in Holland today. No sooner had it got under way than the presiding magistrate, Jan Moors, made a snarky comment about the defendant, prompting Mr. Wilders’s attorney to ask that the judge recuse himself on account of bias. (What a splendid bit of onomastics, by the way, that the judge overseeing the trial of a European man who dares to defy the conquest of his homeland by Islam should be named “Moors”!)

Read about today’s doings here.

Meanwhile, Mr. Wilders gave a speech in Berlin over the weekend. (For offering the invitation to Mr. Wilders, his host, René Stadtkewitz, was expelled from Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrat party. Ms. Merkel’s official position is that Germany had better just get used to accelerating Islamization.)

Here is some of what Mr. Wilders had to say:

We must realize that Islam expands in two ways. Since it is not a religion, conversion is only a marginal phenomenon. Historically, Islam expanded either by military conquest or by using the weapon of hijra, immigration. Muhammad conquered Medina through immigration. Hijra is also what we are experiencing today. The Islamization of Europe continues all the time. But the West has no strategy for dealing with the Islamic ideology, because our elites say that we must adapt to them rather than the other way round.

There is a lesson which we can learn in this regard from America, the freest nation on earth. Americans are proud of their nation, its achievements and its flag. We, too, should be proud of our nation. The United States has always been a nation of immigrants. U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt was very clear about the duty of immigrants. Here is what he said: “We should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else ”¦ But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. ”¦ There can be no divided allegiance here. ”¦ We have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.’

It is not up to me to define what Germany’s national identity consists of. That is entirely up to you. I do know, however, that German culture, like that of neighboring countries, such as my own, is rooted in judeo-christian and humanist values. Every responsible politician has a political obligation to preserve these values against ideologies which threaten them. A Germany full of mosques and veiled women is no longer the Germany of Goethe, Schiller and Heine, Bach and Mendelssohn. It will be a loss to us all. It is important that you cherish and preserve your roots as a nation. Otherwise you will not be able to safeguard your identity; you will be abolished as a people, and you will lose your freedom. And the rest of Europe will lose its freedom with you.

Is this a message, as many would characterize it, of “hate”? No, it is nothing of the sort. Mr. Wilders makes clear that he bears no ill will toward Muslims as human beings (in sharp contrast to the revilement, for example, of Jews as “apes” by both the Nazis and many Islamist ideologues):

Before I continue, and in order to avoid any misunderstandings, I want to emphasize that I am talking about Islam, not about Muslims. I always make a clear distinction between the people and the ideology, between Muslims and Islam. There are many moderate Muslims, but the political ideology of Islam is not moderate and has global ambitions. It aims to impose Islamic law or Sharia upon the whole world. The way to achieve this is through jihad. The good news is that millions of Muslims around the world ”“ including many in Germany and the Netherlands ”“ do not follow the directives of Sharia, let alone engage in jihad. The bad news, however, is that those who do are prepared to use all available means to achieve their ideological, revolutionary goal.

What Mr. Wilders understands — and what Western political and academic elites have either failed to see, failed to accept, or failed to acknowledge — is that not all jihad takes the form of violent assault, and that terror attacks may indeed, for some time to come, be global jihad’s least effective tactic. Under the rubric of “outreach”, Western leaders warmly embrace “moderate” Islamic organizations such as OIC, CAIR, and others, because these groups have officially distanced themselves from terrorist jihad, and are therefore seen as natural allies to be wooed by Europe and America. But the goal of these institutions is nevertheless the same as that of violent Islamist outfits like al-Qaeda, al-Shabab, Lashkar-e-Taiba, and the Taliban: namely the expansion of Islam into every corner of the dar-al-Harb, the disestablishment of decadent Western culture, and the replacement of secular law by sharia the world over. The rift between such “moderate” Islamists and the terrorist fringe is little more than a dispute over tactics and timing. (Please note the distinction between “Islamists” and “Muslims”.)

The aim of this non-violent, “dawa” jihad is clear enough, as can be seen in this internal memorandum from the Muslim Brotherhood (the ideological engine behind organizations like CAIR, MSA, ISNA, OIC, IIIT, NAIT, Hamas, etc.):

The process of settlement is a “Civilization-Jihadist Process’ with all the means. The Ikhwan [the Muslim 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 by their hands and the hands of the believers so that it is eliminated and Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions.

You can read the rest of Mr. Wilders’s speech here.

Finally, and with a hat tip to Bill Vallicella (who has been writing often lately about the West’s relations with Islam), here is an excellent essay by Joseph Bottum on the Ground Zero mosque.