A spate of new Non-Islam Theories of Islamic Extremism about to be unleashed

Technically this new wave of a well established means of explaining away the Islamic cause of Islamic extremism has already been unleashed. But it will take us some time to quantify and delineate between the various (new) theories in written form. In the meantime, let's review the characteristics common to the existing and documented Non-Islam Theories of Islamic Extremism per Lawrence Auster:

LA writes:

Islam in its concrete particulars is too alien and threatening to liberal Westerners for them to acknowledge its existence as it really is. So they keep putting Islam into this or that Western-centric conceptual box in order to make Islam seem familiar and assimilable. But because these non-Islam theories of Islamic extremism are all false or inadequate, new theories, or new variations on old theories, must keep being invented. The never-ending compulsion of Western intellectuals to explain uniquely Islamic beliefs and institutions in non-Islamic terms expresses the very essence of liberalism, which is to deny the existence of human differences that really matter.

The prerequisites:

(1) Denial by liberal Westerners that Islam is what it is in its concrete particulars. Resulting in,

(2) a propensity amongst leading Western writers and thinkers to place Islam, or a particular instance of Islamic violence or terrorism (such as Hasan's recent jihad on Ft. Hood), inside a sort of walled-in Western-centric conceptual framework in an attempt to explain it in terms other than the unacceptable, disallowed framework of Islam being the cause of Islamic extremism.

(3) But since every single Western-centric theory of Islamic extremism, or any combination thereof has proved, thus far, to be inadequate or utterly false, and since admitting the actual truth about Islam as the source of Islamic extremism would at once destroy the leading and dominant principles of modern liberal society, which itself is unacceptable, therefore,

(4) such individuals engage themselves in a continual and frantic search for, and discovery of, new Western-centric conceptualizations of Islam by which to explain, in acceptable (i.e., liberal) terms, the propensity of its adherents towards acts of violence.

Hence we see with this latest Islamic attack on Ft. Hood -- an attack committed by an individual who doesn't fit the current Western-centric profile formerly established in the preceding Non-Islam explanations for Islamic extremism, i.e., he wasn't poor or marginalized, he wasn't uneducated, etc. -- the introduction of a spate of new Non-Islam Theories of Islamic Extremism unleashed in verbal form. Of which the preceding blog entry contains but one.

Read More

Call Me Mom on the Islam problem

This problem with the incompatibility of Islam with Western civilization is, of course, a subject of intense interest to yours truly. Indeed, I created, a couple of years back, a webpage dedicated entirely to this very problem, and I've written about the subject numerous times since this blog has been in existence.

Frequent commenter here and sole proprietor of Irate Tireless Minority Call Me Mom has a new and interesting perspective on this problem, here. Don't neglect Lawrence Auster's Separationism-consistent solution to the Islam problem here, here, and here.

Read More

Rifqa Bary

Yes, I know about the case and I support the ongoing efforts to protect this young girl from her father who has apparently threatened to murder her, in accordance with Islamic law (and as has been done before in America), because she is an apostate. But protecting Rifqa from her father, noble as the cause is, does nothing to protect the West from the influence of Islam, which is altogether bad. Let us recall that the whole purpose of CAIR is to empower Muslims in America. As I've pointed out any number of times before, empowering Muslims in America equals disempowering non-Muslims. Because, you see, the whole is exactly equal to the sum of its parts. Let Muslims be empowered in their own homelands. There ain't enough room for us and them on the same continent.

Auster writes about the Rifqa Bary case in this VFR entry, from which I extract the following important passage:

While every effort must be made to protect Rifqa, I cannot refrain from pointing out that as long as the main emotional energies of anti-jihad activists such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller go to protecting individual Muslims who are threatened by other Muslims, they are scooping water with a thimble while the sea is pouring through the dikes. The main emphasis of the anti-jihad movement must not be on protecting individuals who are threatened by Islam in the West, but on removing Islam from the West, by stopping and reversing the immigration of Muslims into the West. If your main concern is to protect our society from Islam, then your main agenda must be to stop and reverse the growth of Islam in our society. If your main concern is to protect individuals from Islam, then you will ignore that larger picture and allow our society to continue to be Islamized, and the individuals you want to protect will be lost in any case, along with all the rest of us.

Read More

View From the Right (VFR) -- Home of Traditionalist-Conservative Apologetics

I've written, since the inception of this blog, any number of favorable items about Lawrence Auster's VFR. I've also written several items critical of VFR. But I make no bones about the fact that I've written many more of the former than of the latter.

I don't comment as much at VFR as I used to, but it doesn't mean that I have some problem with Auster or his site. Nor does it mean that I neglect keeping up with VFR articles as they're posted. As you all know, there are a number of factors which govern whether we make a contribution to a site or not; opportunity, time, whether one is knowledgable enough (or, possesses humility enough to admit it) on a given subject to speak intelligently on that subject, etc., these are all factors which govern when and how, and to what extent one makes (or doesn't make) such contributions.

Mr. Auster often delves into subjects that are, quite frankly, beyond my personal ability to add anything of any real significance. In such cases, though I often find the articles interesting, informative, and intriguing (the three-I's?), I'm really not able to add anything comment-wise, so I just keep my proverbial trap shut like a good little reader. ;-) But here's the point...

I've often said of VFR (and Lawrence Auster), that it is, in my opinion, the Premier Trad-Con site on the internet, notwithstanding the naysayers, the critics, the Auster-skeptics and detractors (Yes, I'm aware of them and their arguments -- some of them have apparently made it their life's purpose to refute virtually anything and everything Auster has to say on any subject).

I maintain today that VFR is the Premier Trad-con site. And here is a good (singular) example of why I say so.

Update: I've been informed that the second link goes to VFR's main page, instead of to the VFR article I intended. I've tried to correct this, twice, but to no avail, so, the title of the article, posted May 22, 2009, 10:40pm, is: Tyrannical Atheism. Scroll down the main page to access the article. At present it is the fourth article listed.

Read More

The problem with non-discrimination as the ruling principle for any society --

--Civilizational Suicide.

Excerpted below are a few paragraphs selected almost at random from Lawrence Auster's excellent speech -- A Real Islam Policy for a Real America -- given at the Preserving Western Civilization Conference, February 8, 2009 in Baltimore, Maryland (The full text of the speech is here.):

The key to this liberal ideology is the belief in tolerance or non-discrimination as the ruling principle of society, the principle to which all other principles must yield. We see this belief at work in every area of modern life. The principle of non-discrimination must, if followed consistently, destroy every human society and institution. A society that cannot discriminate between itself and other societies will go out of existence, just as an elm tree that cannot discriminate between itself and a linden tree must go out of existence. To be, we must be able to say that we are us, which means that we are different from others. If we are not allowed to distinguish between ourselves and Muslims, if we must open ourselves to everyone and everything in the world that is different from us, and if the more different and threatening the Other is, the more we must open ourselves to it, then we go out of existence.

[...]

The dilemma suggests the solution. What is now unthinkable, must become thinkable; what is now unsayable, must become sayable; and ultimately it must replace non-discrimination as the ruling belief in society. I know that this sounds crazy, utterly impossible. But fifty or a hundred years ago it would have seemed crazy, utterly impossible, that today's liberalism with its suicidal ideology would have replaced the traditional attitudes that were then prevalent. If society could change that radically in one direction, toward suicidal liberalism, it can change back again. It's not impossible.

[...]

What I'm saying here is nothing fancy or metaphysical, it's something that all people know by common sense. We live within these two dimensions--the better and the worse, the more like and the less like--in everything we do.

That is, we did live within them, until modern liberalism came along and said that it's wrong to discriminate between higher and lower, it's wrong to discriminate between better and worse, it's wrong to discriminate between like and unlike.

[...]

The equality principle of modern liberalism says that unassimilable immigrants must be permitted to flood our society, changing its very nature. It prohibits normal authority such as the authority of parents and teachers over children. It banished the very idea of a morality that men ought to follow. And even God is banished if he's a God who has any claims on us.

This is the ubiquitous yet unacknowledged horror of modern liberalism, that it takes the ordinary, differentiated nature of the world, which all human beings have always recognized, and makes it impossible for people to discuss it, because under liberalism anyone who notes these distinctions and says that they matter has done an evil thing and must be banished from society, or at least be barred from a mainstream career.

This liberalism is the most radical and destructive ideology that has ever been, and yet it is not questioned. Communism and big government liberalism were challenged and fought in the past. But the ideology of non-discrimination, which came about after World War II, has never been resisted--it has never even been identified, even though it is everywhere. What is needed, if the West is to survive, is a pro-Western civilization movement that criticizes, resists, and reverses this totalistic liberal belief system that controls our world. ...

I just became aware that Auster has posted a permanent link to the speech in the sidebar of VFR only an hour or so ago while visiting the site and trying to catch up a bit. It's good to see the speech posted at VFR in its entirety. And perhaps we might think of adding it to the Lawrence Auster on Islam page in the near future.

Speaking of which, if you happen to be new to Webster's and you've not yet become familiar with the articles and pages I have permanent links posted to in the sidebars of the blog for ease of accessibility, if you will look under the heading On Islam in the left sidebar there is a permanent link to the page in question which we created over a year ago.

If you are familiar with the page but haven't been there in a while, you will notice during your next visit that the page has undergone something of a facelift in recent months. This was not my idea, nor am I particularly satisfied with the looks of the page by comparison with the original. But I do give some latitude to the individual who handles the technical aspects of putting these kinds of things together for me. And on that latter note, I have some other ideas for additional pages to add to the blog (not related to Islam) hosted by my own website in the relatively near future that I'll be sharing with you. Stay tuned.

Read More

Lawrence Auster on Islam back up and running permanently

As some of you are aware we've had some sporatic problems with the hosting of the page for at least a couple of months now, a more lengthy time period than I originally anticipated. If I had it all to do over again I would have found a permanent solution as soon as it became evident that the original hosting service was no longer going to work for us.

Nonetheless we've now solved the problem and the page is up permanently as the title indicates. Also, we've changed the way in which your comments and suggestions are to get to me. I'll be receiving them directly to my inbox if you follow the url provided under my introduction to the page.

My apologies to all for the inconvenience incurred while the page was down. And recall that I have the page, among others, permanently linked in my left sidebar under the heading "On Islam."

**********

Additionally some of you may have tried and failed to access the "Historic Documents" link provided in my right sidebar under the heading "Links of Interest" recently. The problem there had nothing to do with myself and was out of my control until just recently. But the link is working now.

Read More

Technical difficulties

To readers who use the page from time to time, I'm aware of the recent problems with the Lawrence Auster on Islam page, and I'm working on a permanent solution. The page is temporarily fixed and is usable from its current url which should present readers with no further difficulties, but it will soon be moved to a different url, at which point I will post an update and provide the new address here at Webster's. My apologies for any inconveniences this situation has caused users of the page.

Thanks to the individual who initially made me aware of the problem. You know who you are.

Note: Articles continue to be added to the page as they are discovered from archives or newly written. If you've not used the page in a while you might want to check it out. If you're not familiar with the page at all allow me to present you with an excerpt from my page introduction:

The Purpose of this page:

The purpose of the page is twofold: it is to provide the inquisitive seeker of information concerning Islam with factual material on the nature of the religion of Mohammed which you may have heretofore been unacquainted with or simply unaware of. It is also intended to bring to one central location a collection of Lawrence Auster's best and most important writings on this subject for the convenience of the serious reader who wishes to refer again to one or more of Mr. Auster's excellent articles on the religion of Islam, and how it affects, or potentially affects, you and I and all Americans.

Lawrence Auster has written many articles on the nature of Islam and its incompatibility with Western thought and culture. Can the religion of Mohammed ever be reconciled with Western ideas and expressions of government? Should America's first amendment religious protections apply to Muslims? Moreover, is Islam compatible with the first amendment establishment and free exercise clauses? How about the freedom of speech, and of the press, or of the right of the people peaceably to assemble for a redress of grievances? Are there moderate Muslims? Is there such a thing as a moderate Islam? Is Islam, as President Bush says, truly a "religion of peace?" These are just a few of the questions Mr. Auster explores in his numerous and broad writings on this subject.

Be sure to check it out in any case. There's a broad range of titles from which to choose covering the problem with Islam from several interesting and informative angles.

Read More

First Amendment Terrorism

I've written before about Paul Sperry's book Infiltration, How Muslim Spies and Subversives have infiltrated Washington. Below is an excerpt from the book's Afterword:

Years ago in Philly, the FBI secretly recorded suspected Hamas operatives stating that the United States provides a secure legal base and a perfect haven from which to operate, because they can disguise their activities as religious activities protected by the Constitution and no one will question them because of the politically tolerant culture.

I.e., liberalism. I present to you exhibit A.

Read More

Let's at least try to get our facts right, shall we?

I was going to write about this yesterday as I had received, over the last several days, a number of anti-Obama emails from a couple of senders who shall remain unnamed, but now I'm glad I saved it for such a time as this.

Regarding the anti-Obama emails, I get these things quite frequently, as I'm sure many of you do, and always interspersed among them are claims about Mr. Obama that in no way can or have been substantiated. In fact, in many cases, most even, these claims have long since been debunked. Look, people, it ain't that hard to check it out with Snopes, and it's a good sign, by the way, that it's very possibly an untruth if in fact it contains no attribution to back it up. Whatever you think of Mr. Obama, let's at very least give him the benefit of stating only those things about him that we know beyond a reasonable doubt to be true, good, bad, or indifferent.

Now that I got that off my chest, here's another case in which one individual is making false claims about another individual, most notably for our purposes here, about this person's profession. Evidently the person making the claim does not recognize the fact that doing so without substantiation discredits him. I just wonder why a writer would do this, discredit himself, when it is such an easy task to avoid it in so many cases?

It puts me in mind of an incident which occured months back on another site and in which I became involved. An individual wrote in a comment of another individual that the latter was married and that his wife had converted him to a particular brand of Christianity. When I interjected, asking where he got his information and explaining that my understanding was that this individual was in fact not married, and never had been married, the individual responded with something to the effect that "well, I may have been wrong about that, but it's irrelevant to my point." But it wasn't irrelevant to his point, it was in fact part of the basis on which he was establishing his point about this individual and the reason he disagreed with and disliked him.

C'mon people! Let's try to get our facts straight about others, though they may be our political enemies, before we go about broadcasting them all over the internet. It's the least we can do. And like I said before, it really just discredits the person, whether he's the originator of the claim or merely an agent who propagates it, who engages the practice of making false claims about others.

As to the person who made the false claim concerning the other's marital status, I've never since been able to read him without reflecting on that incident. Likewise, when I receive these emails from the "usual suspects", whether they're about Mr. Obama or whomever, I'm automatically put on guard. Is this really necessary?

Read More

GoV supports CAIR's mission?

Am I picking fights unnecessarily with those who are largely in agreement with me on the issue of Muslims in the West? I don't believe so, but maybe you do.

Under this GoV thread Auster pointed out that Dymphna had wrongly asserted that many Muslims are American citizens of several generations, showing that in point of fact few Muslims are American citizens of several generations. Like Auster, I had also picked up on the falsity of Dymphna's statements, and intended to respond, only to find that I had been railroaded by Mr. Auster who beat me to the punch. ;-)

Nah, as I've written before, one of the fundamental tenets of CAIR's mission -- openly announced in so many words in each and every of their articles -- in America is to empower American Muslims. And as I've questioned, rhetorically, before, how are Muslims in America to do this, and to what purpose do they seek empowerment? The answers to those questions are very obvious to my mind.

But the implications of Dymphna's statements to the effect that we cannot even discuss removing Muslims, and thus the Muslim threat, from America and the West because they are already well established third and fourth generation citizens here, when in truth they are not, are what compelled me to respond the way I did in the thread. As I said, when you boil it all down to its fundamentals, what Dymphna is basically saying is that she supports a permanent Muslim presence and empowerment of Muslims in the West; what her position means, if followed, is that while her statements are false at the moment, they will become truthful a couple of generations down the road, at which point our progeny will be in a much weaker position to deal with the Muslim threat than we in our generation are.

What is fundamentally different, then, about Dymphna's position as she stated it in the thread, and that of CAIR as they incessantly state it under every article they post at their site? Both positions lead to the very same results -- a permanent empowered Muslim presence in the West -- which is, from any truly conservative pro-Western perspective, unacceptable.

Read More

A female German reader takes me to task for my reply to another reader

Nora wrote to me yesterday from Germany, under the thread "BadEagle.com on Indian Gaming" that my reply to jdogg in that thread -- in which I asked jdogg what I was supposed to take from his comments -- left a little to be desired, and that she probably shouldn't have read further than my compilation of Auster's writings on Islam, which she mentions approvingly, and by which she came to find Webster's.

Let me say first of all that this entry is in no way intended as an attack on Nora who makes a fair point if indeed her interpretation of my remarks to jdogg is the correct one. But Nora's assessement of my remarks to jdogg is inaccurate. As I explained to Nora in my reply to her under that thread, I wasn't calling jdogg an "extreme left-wing liberal democrat" or any derivative thereof. I was simply pointing out to jdogg the inadequacy of his accusations against me and my site, using his same style of argument, or hyperbole as it were.

Anyway, if you're interested in the discussion between Nora and I, you may read it via the link provided above. Nora has a lot of negative things to say about Dr. Yeagley and she's provided links to her own compilation of Dr. Yeagley's "hate-filled" rhetoric which you may be interested in.

Also, I should mention, since Nora brought it up, that the Lawrence Auster on Islam page which CTO and I created months ago, judging by the number of hits it receives per month, has been a greater success than we originally anticipated, particularly in the short term. Last we checked it was receiving an average of something like 1,500 or 1,600 hits per month. Not too shabby for a page that was created no more than six or eight months ago.

Thanks to Nora, though, for her compliments.

Read More

The Spencer-Auster debate

I sent LA an email this morning concerning this matter in which I wrote as simply and concisely as I could possibly muster at that moment:

Let's all agree on this, the problem with Islam is Islam. There's nothing that non-Muslims can do to change Islam, and there's nothing that Muslims will do, anytime soon if ever, to change Islam. Therefore, Islam, being inherently and uniquely hostile to the West is inherently and uniquely incompatible with the West, and in order to protect ourselves from Muslims we must eventually remove them from the West. It's as simple as that. End of story.

However, in my haste I forgot to add: "...and the quicker the better." Meaning, the quicker we get on with this business, the better off we all are, including the Muslims.

LA replied to my email by saying simply "I like this!" To which I replied "Thanks. But isn't this essentially what you've been saying for ... ever?" Not literally, but you know what I mean. He's been saying it for a long time.

But I wonder, can we all agree at least to the terms I've written above, and try to build on that, for the common good of us all in the West, and, yes, even for Muslims? But when it comes down to it, I'm really concerned with my country first and foremost. You disagree?

Read More

Update to Lawrence Auster on Islam

A new VFR article, Ron Paul's Blindness, is to be added to this page. Specifically, it will be added under the heading "Non-Islam theories of Islamic Extremism." The background for this addition is summed up in my only comment to the article where I state the following in response to something LA wrote early on in the discussion:

You wrote:

"Paul is an ideologue. His ideology is libertarianism. Libertarians see the state as the source of all evil, in the same way that Communists see private property as the source of all evil, and Nazis see the Jews as the source of all evil. Everywhere a libertarian looks, he finds confirmation of his ideology."

Good point. I'm reminded of your "Non-Islam theories of Islamic Extremism," where you speak of the Western-centric conceptual box Westerners keep putting Islam into in order to make it more familiar and assimilable and its problems more solvable. Paul's own non-Islam theory of Islamic extremism states that American big government is the source of Islamic extremism.

As with the other articles under this heading, this one also requires a bracketed explanation since the title of the article is not instructive in this regard. I've asked Mr. Auster to provide this for us and he has done so. And my first thought being to share it with you here, I've decided now to withhold it from you until I have a chance later this evening to post the article on the page. I'll add an update to the entry when this is done.

Read More

After you've read Islam 101, then what?

Well, I would recommend (though others may disagree) that you make use of the Lawrence Auster page on Islam, specifically The Search for Moderate Islam, Part I, Does it exist?

The entire series is posted at FrontPageMag and linked up over at the aforementioned Lawrence Auster on Islam page. But just to wet your appetite, I'll extract a passage from Part I of the series and post it here.

Mr. Auster writes:

The issue is momentous. If we subscribe to the promise of a moderate Islam, we will make its cultivation the central focus and goal in the war against militant Islam. If this moderate Islam in fact exists, our efforts may help Muslims transform their civilization for the better and relieve the world of the curse of Muslim extremism. But if moderate Islam does not exist, yet we delude ourselves into thinking that it exists, we would inevitably find ourselves trapped in a cultural equivalent of the Oslo "peace process," forever negotiating with and empowering our mortal enemies in the pathetic hope that they will turn out to be friends. Alternatively, if we understand that there is no such thing and can be no such thing as moderate Islam, that would obviously result in very different policies.

As I said before, this article (among many others) is provided for your convenience in the left sidebar of this blog in a handy-dandy easy to use format. Enjoy!

Read More

Comments or Suggestions to Lawrence Auster on Islam

Please leave your comment or suggestion here. Thank you.

Read More