It's the Violence, Stupid

The blurry, ragged (or in hifalutin terms, "amorphous") entity called (mostly only by me, apparently) the Anti-Islam Movement coalesced momentously, if momentarily, in Paris in the last month of the last decade, as -- as its own manifesto put it --

... orators coming from the whole of Europe shared one same platform to denounce the Islamic conquest at work on our continent.

The result of this symposium was that:

... the thirty-two parties, organizations, associations, websites and news blogs which supported this initiative agreed... on a common manifesto.

While I applaud any efforts and events of congregation in the West on the problem of Islam, I cannot sit still when to me important aspects of the problem seem to remain either unclear or inadequately defended by this manifesto.

For now, the glaring defect I see in this manifesto I have seen crop up in the writings and comments of many others in the Anti-Islam Movement, whether vaunted analysts or lowly civilians. It is a concern whose articulation seems predicated upon a strange disconnection between Sharia and Violence. The way this concern is framed, one gets the distinct impression that they think Muslims will be able to take over the West by sheer osmosis, as though the vast majority of Westerners will just stand by like sheep and allow Muslims, craftily but non-violently, to replace our progressive legal systems -- and therefore political systems and societies -- with Islamic Law.

Anyone who thinks this through will realize this is a preposterous scenario. The only reason that "creeping Sharia" is encroaching at all in incipient and tentative toeholds, in varying degrees, in various locations and contexts in the West, is because the Muslims promoting it are putting a false face on Sharia.  Their claim is that Sharia is so wonderfully diverse one cannot reduce it to the crude subtypes practiced by the Taliban, Al-Shabaab, or Boko Haram.  They have never proven this claim, probably because they can't.  Then they add luster to this by reminding the Guilty White West that Sharia is "multicultural" and surely you Westerners wouldn't want to be "intolerant" of other cultures, would you now...?   So whatever Sharia has been creeping its tendrils into the West has not been Sharia Straight -- it has been Diet Sharia, decaffeinated, no sugar, no fat, no headchopping, no handchopping, no stoning, no public flogging for sexual immorality, etc.

I.e., the rubber has not met the road yet, not by a long shot. With the exception of a tiny handful of psychotic Leftists in the West, the vast majority of "liberals" and even of Leftists in the West would not accept for one minute full-blooded (i.e., normative and mainstream) Sharia. The main reason they are being so stupid about it is because they don't have to accept it concretely -- they can continue to have their cake of "tolerance of diversity" while eating too the surrounding dominance of Western laws which continue to protect their liberties and, ipso facto, keep at bay Sharia in any massively intrusive -- let alone dominating (i.e., normative) -- sense.  And meanwhile, the obfuscation of the issue through the false distinction between normative Sharia and some fantasy Sharia Lite gives PC MCs plenty of room to indulge their stupidity on the matter while earnestly believing they are on the side of the angels, doing the right thing, rather than being "haters".

In the meantime, innumerable Muslims pullulating out of the Muslim world are seeking, through various forms of terror, to jump-start the mayhem and misery that, in their minds, will serve to soften up the tegument of this vast "Roman Empire" they see the West as, and prepare it for the desideratum of the final conquest Mohammed predicted in a vision as recorded by Ibn-Ishaq (the Vision of the Third Spark -- see my essay expatiating on this).

Muslims know that they can't institute normative full-blooded Sharia in the West as it stands. They also know it won't happen by sheer osmosis. Some Muslims may boast that the West will succumb to Islam, and they may frame this in ostensibly non-violent terms; but it would be imprudent of us to take such counter-factual asseverations at face value. It is more reasonable to assume that they are deceptive formulations, calculated to reinforce the Good Cop/Bad Cop split which continues to fool the majority of Westerners who persist in believing that, somehow, not all Muslims are dangerous. Muslims know that given the relative sophistication of this monumental and obviously powerful Empire called the West (with America at its vanguard), their desideratum will never become a reality without the use of violence. And after all, this has been the modus operandi of Muslims from day one and throughout the centuries; so why change now, and start doing something that is Bida'ah (dreaded "innovation")?

Indeed, the superiority of the "Great Satan" is so great, Muslims currently are unable to mount a formal military invasion against it. The last time they were able, it was 1683. Thus, the need for various modes of terror attack, in a clever symbiosis with a stealth jihad of false moderation.

So far, a Muslim would not be unreasonable to conclude that this strategy is working. As I have analyzed in a few essays, terror attacks work a paradoxical effect to the advantage of the cause of Islam: the more that Muslims attack in various places in the West (and on its periphery, such as in Bali or Mumbai), the more the West bends over backwards and salaams forward to show more, not less, anxious deference to Muslims. The aforementioned toeholds of "creeping Sharia", indeed, gain traction and lubrication precisely by virtue of the dynamic which Muslim terror attacks create in the Western PC MC psyche.