timeimmortal

Tens of millions of internet users across the Middle East and Asia have been left without access to the web after a technical fault cut millions of connections.

The outage, which is being blamed on a fault in a single undersea cable, has severely restricted internet access in countries including India, Egypt and Saudi Arabia and left huge numbers of people struggling to get online.

Observers say that the digital blackout first struck yesterday morning, with the Egypt’s communications ministry suggesting it was caused by a cut in a major internet pipeline linking it to Europe.

The line in question runs under the Mediterranean, from Palermo in Italy to Alexandria in Egypt. It is not clear what caused the break. The cable is one of only a handful of connections, and part of the world’s longest undersea cable, 24,500 miles long, running from Germany, through the Middle East and India before terminating in Australia and Japan.

Oops.

On the plus side, though, I’m willing to bet that incidences of DDOS attacks launched against anti-jihad websites went down a point or two.

David Warren provides a quick, three-paragraph summation of the challenges that the Western world is facing today. In what can’t really be called a surprise (except perhaps by a progressive mind to crippled by multicultural pieties), Islam takes the lead role:

We (the U.S. and allies) are winning in Iraq, and Afghanistan, and losing everywhere else. The Syrians are now murdering independent Lebanese politicians with impunity. The pressure on Iran has been relieved. Pakistan is teetering towards a civil and military collapse from which only the Islamists can gain. Islamist demands for the imposition of Shariah, and for the legal persecution of religious minorities, have entered the mainstream of political life in countries that were once free of religious zealotry — Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia. Islamist terrorists are winning effective control over the remoter Muslim-settled regions in many countries of Asia and Africa, creating streams of Christian refugees from the southern Philippines, of Buddhist refugees from southern Thailand, of Christians and Animists fleeing south across the breadth of Africa.

Saudi-sponsored Wahabi Islam is consolidating its hold over the mosques of the West, and radicalizing the huge Muslim immigrant communities that have congregated in almost every major European city. Across Europe, and increasingly in North America (and as we’ve seen in Canada in the obscene “human rights” trials of Mark Steyn and Ezra Levant), the most radical Muslims are exploiting state multiculturalism, to score victories over free speech and win pathetic apologies from anyone accused of the thought crime of “Islamophobia.”

Islam is a broad and ancient religion — we are not discussing that, today. We are discussing instead the contemporary reality. For internationally, Islam has been morphing into a violent and puritanical cult. Yet this very large and very hard fact is being rendered undiscussable, in historical or any other terms.

And a quick note on the current state of affairs in Egypt, a concept which is broadly applicable to the whole of the Muslim world at present:

In Egypt as elsewhere, to say that “the great majority of Muslims are peaceful, unaggressive people, just trying to get on with their lives” is to utter something deeply fatuous. The great majority of Germans were likewise, in the 1930s.

As Kathy Shaidle is fond of pointing out, Paul Revere was not credited with shouting “Some of the British are coming!” And that is because he did not need to, nor did the Minutemen need to be alerted to the impending onslaught with a wordy explanation that the Redcoats about to descend upon them were not representative of the wider majority of British folk world-wide. Likewise, in World War II, we didn’t go to war against some of the Germans, or some of the Japanese.

The common thread between those two examples, which is unfortunately missing from many peoples’ analysis of the current situation of the West vs. the Islamic world, is the concept of war. Whether a war for independence, or a globe-spanning war against fascism, it’s easier to look at the historical examples above and note that while it may be true that while our forebears weren’t so careful as to classify the enemy beyond using broad cultural categories, that is explicable because of the urgency of the conflict taking place at the time. The extension of such an argument, then, is that we in the West today are not currently embroiled in a war with Islam.

Which is true, in a sense…that is, in the sense that no war has formally been declared by means of the normal diplomatic channels. But in a more important sense — objective reality — the war is already on, and has been for some time. If, under Sharia, the average Muslim (even though s/he might otherwise be a decent sort, and quite personable), regards the world as divided into two realms — that of Islam and that of harb (War) — then whether or not any Islamic nation or group has formally issued a declaration of war is irrelevant. If in fact it is the religious obligation of Muslims everywhere to “fight those who do not believe in Allah, nor in the latter day, nor do they prohibit what Allah and His Messenger have prohibited, nor follow the religion of truth, out of those who have been given the Book, until they pay the tax in acknowledgment of superiority and they are in a state of subjection,” (Sura 9:29), then whether or not any war has been formally declared is irrelevant. Under Sharia, it is the religious duty of every Muslim to strive to bring about the day when Islam rules over all other faiths and demands their submission.

And even the rather typical sidestep that some will attempt to do in regard to the opening like of the passage above — that is, make the argument that the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are the same being, so the above passage does not apply to other monotheistic religions — is, at best, a half truth. Even if it were completely true, and even if Christians and Jews get a pass (and if one believes the rhetoric coming out of the two major players on the global Islamic scene, Iran and Saudi Arabia, there is no way that Jews will get a pass), that still wouldn’t bode well for many people in Western society, and so is still an idea which cannot be tolerated.

But here’s the thing: the Muslim Allah and the Judeo-Christian God are, theologically, not the same being. Oh, I’m willing to grant that in the final summation, they may well be the same, but unfortunately that is beyond the scope of human knowledge. And if one looks at the revelation that has come to Christianity (which inherits directly from Judaism), and if one then looks at the teachings that purportedly came to Muhammad through the angel Gabriel, there is no way to reconcile the Judeo-Christian conception of who and what God is with the Islamic one.

So even Jews and Christians aren’t exempt from Sura 9:29, if in fact they, and Muslims, stick to their theological traditions and exegesis.

War may not have been declared, but there is a war going on, pitting the ideals of the West — which, unfortunately, few enough people in the West have the necessary courage to defend — against those of the jihad. Already, this war has claimed many lives. But mere exchanges of casualties are but a small part of any war. Territory is what matters. And, as has been pointed out on this blog and elsewhere, in many parts of the West, the West is losing ground to radicalized forms of Islam, especially in Europe. That trend may already be irreversible, as well as the trends being seen in places like Pakistan, which even now teeters on the brink of falling into Islamist hands. When nuclear-armed nations like Pakistan fall into the hands of the jihad, and when nations like France begin to adopt an ever more Islamic character — and then of a decidedly Islamist bent — what will that do for the safety and security of the rest of the Western world?

Update: Welcome, Steynians!

I’m thinking that Philip Carl Salzman’s article may see its author charged with a hate crime before too long.

Today’s religious map of the Middle East traces to the unification of the Arabian tribes under the banner of Islam in the 7th century, and their subsequent conquest of much of the known world. Muhammad’s genius was in finding a way to unite the myriad of fissiparous, feuding Bedouin tribes of northern Arabia into a cohesive polity. Just as he had provided a constitution of rules under which the people of Medina could live together, so he provided a constitution for all Arabs, but this one had the imprimatur not just of Muhammad, but of God. Submission — Islam — to God and His rules, spelled out in the Koran, bound Arabian tribesmen into the community of believers, the umma.

Building on the tribal system of “balanced opposition” — the subject of yesterday’s essay — Muhammad was able to frame an inclusive structure within which the tribes had a common, God-given identity as Muslims. But unification was only possible by creating a tribalized enemy against which Muslims could make common cause. This Muhammad did by opposing Muslims against infidels; and the dar al-Islam, the land of Islam and peace, against the dar al-harb, the land of infidels and conflict. Through the precepts of Islam, traditional Bedouin raiding was sanctified as an act of religious duty.

With every successful battle against local unbelievers, especially after the critical early battle against the Meccans, more Bedouin joined the umma. Once united, the Bedouin warriors of the umma turned outward, teaching the world the meaning of jihad, holy war. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Arabs, in lightning thrusts, challenged and beat the Byzantines to the north and the Persians to the east, both weakened by their continuous wars with one another, thus imposing their control over the Christian majority in the Levant and the Zoroastrian majority in Persia, and therefore over the entire Middle East. These stunning successes were rapidly followed by conquests of Christian and Jewish populations in Egypt, Libya and North Africa’s Maghreb (Arabic for “the West”), and, in the east, central Asia and the Hindu population of northern India. Not content with these triumphs, Arab armies invaded and subdued much of Christian Spain and Portugal, and all of Sicily. Since the Roman Empire, the world had not seen such power and reach. All fell before the Saracen blades.

Most accounts of Islamic history, even that of the Lindholm’s esteemed The Islamic Middle East, glide over these conquests, as if they were friendly takeovers. But the truth was very different.

The evidence is overwhelming that vast numbers of infidel male warriors and civilians were slain, and that most of those spared, particularly the women and children, were enslaved for domestic and sexual servitude. While men who willingly converted were spared, their wives and children were taken as slaves. In conquered regions, children were regularly taken from parents, while on the borders — especially in Central and Eastern Europe, Central Asia and Africa south of the Sahara — raiding for slaves was normal practice. Of the male slaves, a substantial number were made eunuchs by the removal of sex organs, in order to serve in harems. This account of the Arab campaign in northern India illustrates the usual procedures:

“During the Arab invasion of Sindh (712 CE), Muhammad bin Qasim first attacked Debal. It was garrisoned by 4,000 Kshatriya soldiers and served by 3,000 Brahmans. All males of the age of 17 and upwards were put to the sword and their women and children were enslaved. “[Seven hundred] beautiful females, who were under the protection of Budh (that is, had taken shelter in the temple), were all captured with their valuable ornaments, and clothes adorned with jewels.” Muhammad dispatched one-fifth of the legal spoil to Hajjaj, which included 75 damsels, the other four-fifths were distributed among soldiers.”

The multitude of reports from Muslim, indigenous and other sources of the Islamic conquests are equally detailed and equally daunting to a modern reader. It is true that throughout history intergroup relations in most of the world were exploitative and repressive, and not infrequently brutal and bloodthirsty. The world of Islam was not so much an exception to this, as exemplary of it.

The theological foundation of the Arab Empire was the supremacy of Islam and the obligation of each Muslim to advance its domination. The notion of Jihad, in particular, served to establish the Muslim community’s permanent state of war against the dar al-harb until the infidels’ conclusive submission and the absolute world supremacy of Islam.

Yet even as Islamic armies were coming to dominate the known world, fissures emerged within Islam, which would give rise to the bloody internecine battles that continue to this day in Iraq and elsewhere.

Most notably, the relentless oppositions within tribal life have been reflected on a large scale in the battles between Sunni vs. Shiite, a battle originating in a squabble between closely related kin groups over the leadership of the Islamic empire following Muhammad’s death. Their divergent philosophical orientations are based on two tribal principles: Sunnism recognizes leaders based on consent; Shiism recognizes leaders based on descent. The continued anatagonism between the two groups constitutes one of the many ways in which the tribal spirit continues its dominance in the Middle East.

The history of the Middle East, and of Islam, is fascinating, but it is also blood-soaked beyond even the wildest excesses of the Crusades (although it admittedly pales in comparison to the body-counts of the Soviets and the Chinese). But we may yet see a day come in Canada where it is a punishable offence to even mention that fact. Until then, though, I’ve re-posted the length of Salzman’s article here, because it contains in it too much detail to pass up losing once the National Post website cycles it out of the archive.

Blog as newspaper clipping folder.