Trifkovic on Islam - Radio interview transcript

http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/Islam/Islam_as_the_Agent_.html?seemore=y

ChroniclesExtra! Friday, April 07, 2006

ISLAM AS THE AGENT OF REVOLUTIONARY CHANGE

The following is from an interview with Srdja Trifkovic broadcast live on April 7, 2006, on The Right Balance http://www.therightbalance.org/ (abbreviated transcript)

* The show’s presenter Greg Allen first asked Dr. Trifkovic to draw a distinction between Islamic terrorism and other varieties of the same problem: What makes Jihadist terrorism different? *

TRIFKOVIC: All other forms of terrorism use it as an instrument in pursuit of some wider objective. The Bolsheviks were blowing up banks in 1905 and assassinating political leaders, and their purpose was to undermine the structure of the system so that when the revolutionary moment comes, as it did in 1917, you go a stage further. With ETA in Spain, the IRA, Sendero Luminoso, Tamil Tigers, or the Sighs in India, you have terrorist outrages but they are not an integral part of the mindset, the world outlook of the given group. With Islam, terrorism is not only an instrument, a tool, it is also the core of policy itself. Terrorist violence is not only divinely sanctioned, it is divinely ordained. We don’t have time for the details, but suffice to say that the condoning and overt advocacy of violence both in the primary texts of Islam, such as the Kuran and the Hadith, the traditions and sayings of the “prophet,” and in more than 13 centuries of Islam’s historic practice, make that record pretty straightforward. For people to still debate the allegedly peaceful nature of Islam, its “true character,” is plainly absurd. The truth is out there and those who want to deny it are the same ones who, 50 years ago, would have been the apologists for Uncle Joe, or 30 years ago would have claimed that the bold experiment of Chairman Mao was paving the way for the future. [...]

The mindset of appeasement, even after Munich 1938, is at work. It’s not only that those who had claimed that Mein Kampf was a pacifist tract, or that Uncle Joe’s Moscow trials were an exercise in impeccable legality, are now acting as the apologists for Islam. They are actively importing the jihadist fifth column! It is the particular emphasis of my book that we need an absolute moratorium on the immigration of Muslims into both Western Europe and North America, coupled with the denial of citizenship to all practicing Muslims, the denial of security clearances, and the policy of systematic deportation of all jihadists activists. Once we realize that jihad is a political mindset and that jihadist activities—which are inherently discriminatory against women, against Jews, against so-called infidels—are a political, subversive and radically seditious activity with a revolutionary objective, i.e. turning the World of War into the World of Faith, Dar al-Harb into Dar al-Islam, then we’ll realize that the First Amendment no longer applies. To all intents and purposes Islam ought to be regarded as a violent political ideology rather than just a religious cult.

* The next question concerned the curious tendency of the Left to overlook, ignore, or even deny Islam’s mistreatment of women, homosexuals, and other “protected minorities.” *

TRIFKOVIC: The explanation is fairly simple, and we see the same syndrome all over the place. For instance in Scandinavia you have literally a rape epidemic, perpetrated by Muslim immigrants against Swedish, Norwegian and Danish women. And yet, very active, very well organized and financed feminist movements in those countries are keeping quiet—both about the epidemic itself, and about the identity of its perpetrators.

The reason is that the Left sees Islam as a de facto ally—as Marxists would say, an “objective ally”—in the destruction of the vestiges of the traditional society based upon Christianity and its moral code, and traditional cultural patterns. So what they are doing is using Islam as the battering ram and as a would-be fellow-traveler, in their grand anti-Christian, Christophobic design. They hope that once they create their brave, new multiculturalist Utopia, Islam can be tamed, that soft porn and state education will convert the Muslims’ offspring to the general multiculturalist melange.

We know they’re wrong because we know that second and third-generation Muslim immigrants in Western Europe, particularly in France and Britain, are far more radical and far more Islamic-minded than their parents and grandparents. The explanation is very simple: the tepid, non-descript multiculturalist pap that is being offered by the dominant elites cannot inspire these young men and women. They need something that gives meaning to their lives, and so they fall back upon the religion of their forefathers—and once they do that, they cannot do otherwise but turn against the multiculturalist host-society. So the Leftists are making a colossal miscalculation. Far from being the clients of their future global welfare state, the Muslims—in the Western world in particular—will be the agents of revolutionary change not only against the remnants of Christianity today, but also against the secularist, multicultural Utopia of tomorrow.

* Greg Allen’s next question concerned the difference between Islam’s basic tenets and the teaching of other monotheistic religions, Judaism and Christianity: do we all worship the same God, as some claim? *

One of the clichés that are endlessly repeated by those who seek to conceal the true nature of Islam is that Muslims “believe in the same God” as Christians and Jews. This is a severe distortion of the truth. What Muslims believe is that they know the true nature of God that Judaism and Christianity tell lies about, and have a distorted picture. The fact that Muslims share a Levantine monotheism of sorts with Judaism and Christianity only makes them more, not less antagonistic to us… The concept of an utterly transcendent Allah that cannot be “known” and doesn’t “reach out” to man or man to him. There is no “contact” with God that is essential to the Judaic and Christian tradition. In fact, the forlorn call, repeated five times a day from every minaret in the world, sounds more like the cry of an abandoned child for an absentee father.

At the practical level, the notion that Muslims award Christians and Jews some level of respect as “the people of the book” is also greatly distorted. In practice it only means that for as long as they accept the status of second-class citizens, and pay the poll tax with “the hand of humility,” their security will be guaranteed—but not their equality of rights.

At the theological level, the fundamental difference is the absence of love. It needs to be understood that Islam’s denial of the Trinity creates a completely different world outlook. “Allah begets not,” i.e. he is no Father, and “is not begotten,” i.e. he is no Son, and no one is like him, i.e. no Holy Spirit. The utterly . . . not only “monotheistic” but monistic image of the world under an unreachable, unknowable god, creates the kind of spiritual uniformity that ultimately results in both cultural and social-economic wasteland that is the Muslim world today. [ . . . ]

What is known as Islam’s “golden age” happened largely in spite of Islam, rather than thanks to it. Connecting the brief blossoming of arts and sciences in Baghdad and Cordoba with the “benevolent” influence of Islam is the same as saying that the high level of scholarship on Pushkin or Tolstoy in Moscow in the 1950s was the result of Stalinism and dialectical materialism, or that the Berlin Philharmonic under Furtwaengler was as good as it was in the late 1930s thanks to Nazism. But the true causes of squalor and corruption in the Muslim world are indeed moral and cultural, rather than economic. After that brief period of flowering its had very little to offer to the world, either in the sphere of ideas or in the sphere of material production—even though it had that unique geographic position at the crossroads of civilizations . . . The problem cannot be resolved by seeking to import Western technology and Western know-how, while retaining the old mindset. We’ve already seen it with the Ottoman Turkey in the 19th century. They’d brought in Western engineers and military officers, and doctors, to train their Muslim students, but the latter never managed to produce more than what was imparted to them.

The problem remains insoluble to this day. The Christian world’s discipline, cohesion, ingenuity and prosperity are rooted in certain aspects of the Western psyche that cannot be easily transplanted. It has a lot to do with the notion of delayed gratification as opposed to instant gratification and sensuality that is the hallmark of the Muslim world.

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Dr. S. Trifkovic, Foreign Affairs Editor
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