Peace With Islam in Our Time
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
Abdallah Bulgasem Zehaf-Bibeau, the crackhead
turned Jihadist spawned by the mating of a Canadian
immigration official and a Libyan Muslim Jihadist,
just wanted peace.
He
told a co-worker, “There can’t be world peace until
there’s only Muslims.” Then he tried to usher in
peace, the Islamic way, by opening fire near the
Canadian parliament.
Meanwhile in Israel a reporter interviewing Arab
Muslim settlers in Jerusalem found that they too
wanted peace. On their terms. “Yes we want peace,”
one of them said, “but peace means no Jews.”
When negotiating peace with other cultures it’s a
good idea to make sure that the words you are using
mean the same thing. Most Muslims and Westerners
want peace. But to Westerners peace means
co-existence. To Muslims, peace means the end of
your existence.
Ideas carry heavy cultural baggage. Peace in the
West summons up images of Armistice Day, of the
Christmas Truce of WW1 in which French, German and
English soldiers could share meals and play soccer
together. It carries with it the subversive idea
that both sides realize the war isn’t worth
fighting.
Such a subversive idea has no place in Islam. The
Jihad is at the heart of Islam. To question the holy
war is to also question the faith. When war is
religion then peace through setting aside war is
heresy.
The Western idea of peace is a wholly alien one to
Islam. In Islam, peace does not come from men
transcending their differences, but from destroying
men who think and live differently. That is the
function of the religious police of our allied
“moderate Muslim” countries who seek out the
practice of other religions and other ways of living
in places like Saudi Arabia and suppress their
practitioners.
Islamic peace does not come from diversity, from
accepting the existence of other nations, religions
and peoples, but from unity through Islam and
eliminating as many differences as possible. If
Islam is the source of peace, then all that which is
“not Islam” is the cause of war.
Kill the Jews. Kill the Christians. Then there will
be peace.
The Islamic idea of peace was aptly expressed by
Zehaf-Bibeau and our anonymous Jerusalem Jihadist.
It is not based on a recognition of the humanity of
one’s fellow man, but on a rejection of their
humanity.
As Mohammed curtly put it in missives to the leaders
of non-Muslim countries in the region, “Aslim,
Taslam.” Convert to Islam and you’ll have peace. The
same message has been dispatched by Muslim leaders
today to popes and presidents. It’s a message of
peace on the only terms that Islam allows.
Islam is the religion of peace. For there to be
peace, Islam must be supreme. Within the Islamic
worldview, conflict is caused by the existence of
dissent. The only way to achieve peace is by forcing
the submission of every human being to the correct
strain of Islam. “Moderates” may agree to let Jews
and Christians live as inferior second-class
citizens if they submit to Muslims. “Extremists”
will skip straight to raping and beheading them. And
once that ugly business is done, there will be
peace.
Or there will be peace once the “moderates” and
“extremists” have finished killing each other, once
the Sunnis and Shiites have finished beheading each
other, and once every single Muslim has finished
slaughtering every other Muslim who in any way
dissents from his understanding of Islam.
That’s the brand of peace we’re seeing in Iraq and
Syria today. Or the peace process between Israel and
the Arab Muslims who were rebranded as
“Palestinians” because it made them seem like a
local flavor.
Islam rejects the idea that mutual empathy should
transcend conflict. Instead it believes that war
should transcend humanity. Or as the Koran puts it,
“Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful
unto you; but it may happen that ye hate a thing
which is good for you, and it may happen that ye
love a thing which is bad for you. Allah knoweth, ye
know not.”
The Western tradition is biased toward the peace of
co-existence. It applies the logic of armistice
toward all areas of life leading to the championing
of multiculturalism and immigration. Its siren song
is John Lennon’s Imagine with its call for an end to
borders, nations, religions and property. Its ideal
of peace comes from the end of structure and
separation between people.
The Islamic idea of peace however affirms a
structure and separation based on the Koran. It
believes that there will be peace when everyone is
forced to live within the strictures of Islam. And
therefore there can be no genuine peace with
non-Muslims who do not submit to Islam.
These two incompatible notions of peace continue to
collide. Imagine if French soldiers had clambered
out to sing and play soccer only to be gunned down
by German soldiers who had a fundamentally different
idea of peace. This was actually how WW2 was shaped
as the victorious side played by outdated rules
while Nazi Germany, Japan and the USSR shifted to a
thoroughly totalitarian mentality.
Munich was a disaster because Hitler was not the
Kaiser. The other side was no longer willing to play
by any rules, even in diplomatic negotiations, or to
accept anything short of total victory. The Allies
were forced to match their enemies in a ruthless war
that saw entire cities destroyed.
The Nazis and Communists were the products of years
of indoctrination that taught them to see opponents
as less than human and peace as being obtainable
only through their destruction. Japan, which had a
longer history of dehumanizing outsiders, proved to
be an even tougher nut to crack.
Islam has a history of over a thousand years of
continuously dehumanizing non-Muslims and
identifying peace and their enslavement as one and
the same. It is impossible to live in peace with
Muslims who think that there can be no peace as long
as non-Muslims continue to live independent lives.
In the Muslim worldview, war happens because
non-Muslims exist. War is caused by the infidel, the
disbeliever and the Muslim hypocrite who does not
truly commit to the practice of Islam. The Jihad
purifies the world of non-Muslims; it eradicates the
“moderate” Muslims who have been compromised by
Western culture. It is a war of extermination
against the un-Islamic.
When
Westerners propose peace, Muslims reject them as
hypocrites for speaking of peace, but refusing to
accept the only religion that can bring peace. They
feel no obligation to honor any peace agreements
since peace can only come from Islam and the Western
rejection of Islam proves our deceitfulness and bad
intentions. This dynamic is inherent in the Koran
and the entire history of Islam.
Islam does not obtain peace through peace, but
through war. It seeks a world without conflict by
killing anyone who might disagree with its
totalitarian ideology.
Proposing the peace of co-existence to an ideology
to which peace means its own supremacy is a foolish
and deranged act. Our outreach to the Muslim world
does not lack for a common language, but for common
ideas. Both sides may speak of peace, but for one
side peace really means war.
Languages are not only made up of words, but of
values. It is not enough to bring a dictionary to a
negotiation if the two parties are reading from
different moral and ethical traditions. Just because
we translate “Salaam” as peace and agree that we
both want peace does not mean that we have the same
idea of what peace is.
The West sees peace as living side by side with
Muslims. Muslims see peace as the end of the West.