Muslims must give up the right of religious “defense”

The crux of the problem and menace which Islam poses to the West (and to the rest of the world) is the religious sanctification of the necessity for defense—“defending” Islam and Mohammed against “offense” and “oppression”—through qital, which is in Islamic tradition the physically belligerent form of jihad.

Most Muslims probably think that Infidels themselves would think it counter-intuitive to balk at the idea of a People’s “self-defense”. And most Muslims, in this respect, would be mostly correct.

But balk we should—for two reasons:

1) Most of the “defensive jihad” touted by Muslims either masks offensive military or paramilitary enterprises, or depends upon unacceptable definitions of what requires defending by means that include physical violence—including the sanctity of Mohammed and the Koran, as well as the right for Islam with its Islamic laws to flourish and expand unimpeded (a kind of Islamic version of the Nazi concept of geopolitical supremacist expansionism, Lebensraum).

2) Furthermore, no religion or cult deserves the right for its members to “defend” their organization physically. Muslims qua followers of Islam must, like all other individuals and groups do in our modern world, entrust their defense to the secular authorities of the police and military of their respective nation-state. (In extraordinary circumstances, member states of the international community will agree to step in to defend some people being unusually threatened or attacked; though this principle has too often been abused—e.g., when the West made the grave mistake of intervening with military force to help the Muslims of the Balkans, rather than the non-Muslim Serbs.)

Note to sophomores: when I call for Muslims to give up their right to “defense”, I am obviously not including the basic self-defense of, for example, an intruder breaking into one’s home to rob or attack one’s family. The Muslim idea of defense grandly transcends this level and accords itself the unique and bizarre privileges of a Super Nation (the Khilafat)—an idea that sociopolitically and globally is, in our era as in eras past, increasingly fomenting fitna for the rest of the world as its votaries increasingly try to revive it, ever since it was dismantled approximately 80 years ago in the aftermath of World War One, dismantled both by the West and by the revolutionary efforts of the Western-inspired Ataturk.

My proposal, however, does not merely run into the obstruction presented by its counter-intuitiveness on the basic level of logic (however misinformed that logic may be). The faulty intuition which my proposal counters is, in addition, buttressed by Politically Correct Multi-Culturalism (PC MC), which tends to put the issue in an obfuscatory framework, consisting of two axioms:

1) Anytime or anyplace Muslims are fighting religious combat, the PC MC framework tends to ennoble them as “freedom fighters” with a vaguely Che Guevara-esque aura of poor heroic Third World peoples fighting against some nebulous “oppression” (usually reducible, ultimately, to inept or malicious policies of Western nations, mostly America).

2) Aside from the ennoblement aspect, there is the stubborn PC MC tendency to ignore or refuse to acknowledge the religious—and, in the case of Islam uniquely, the ideologically trans-national—dimension of Muslim violence around the world.

The second point above would contextualize the vast majority of Muslim violence around the world as purely motivated by politico-economic factors with nothing to do with Islam; while the first point furthermore tends, at worst, to laud it as a noble struggle against oppression, and at best, to find excuses for it.

In our Western context of the mainstream dominance of PC MC (which, if the reader recalls, also has its flip side of excessive Western self-criticism), the mere ascription of the term “defense” to any military, paramilitary or vigilante violence perpetrated by Muslims tends to trigger the two axioms noted above.

Needless to say, it is highly unlikely that a sufficient number of Muslims will abandon this intrinsic and inveterate dimension of their super-culture. Given that high unlikelihood, it will become incumbent upon the West to extract that politico-military aspect of out of Islam, like a giant, throbbing, bloody molar that is infecting the world. The sooner we perform this necessary dentistry, the better, the less costly, and the less messy.