Jihadist says the West can kick out the Muslims any time it wants

Ultimately, the Muslims in the West are not the problem. Our seemingly fatal perplexities with Muslims in the West, particularly in Western Europe, have been caused 100 percent by ourselves, namely, by our senseless, suicidal decision to let them in. By the same token, these perplexities can be solved—ended forever—by simply reversing that disastrous and immoral decision and having them leave. The power to do this lies 100 percent in our own hands. There is no fate here. There is not some external force preventing us from acting in our own defense. There is just our liberalism, our horror of admitting to ourselves that not everyone in the world is like us.

Even a hardline jihadist, Abu Qatada, a Palestinian who resides in London and recruits mujahadeen (soldiers for jihad) for Al Qaeda, takes it for granted that the West could make the Muslims leave any time it wanted to. He’s not defensive or angry about the prospect at all. Ironically, this mortal enemy of the West has more respect for Western self-determination than all the Western populations and governments and media organs put together. This is from an interview with the Canadian Broadcasting Company in March 2004 for a program called “The Recruiters”:

CBC:

Should we leave the West? Should we migrate to other countries?

Abu Qatada:

This is not going to be an Islamic decision. This is a Western decision. As long as the Western society has the door open for people to come, people will go. The West can stop people from coming. They can also deport Muslims and ask them to leave. The decision is not an Islamic one. Muslims are weak and it is very difficult for them to take such decisions.

The presence of Muslims in the Western societies is not subject to Muslims, but subject to a decision of the West

On another question, the centrality of jihad in Islam, Qatada is extremely forthright, as so many Muslims are. The interview starts out with his saying:

No doubt that the Koran, the Sunna and the life of the Prophet order the Muslim to carry on jihad and fighting. This is something no Muslim can deny. Any Sheikh tries to deny it or strip it of its real meaning is considered an act of apostasy.

Not only is aggressive jihad to spread Islam divinely mandated, but anyone who denies that it is divinely mandated is an apostate worthy of death.

And that, of course, is the reason Mahmoud Muhammad Taha was executed by the Sudan regime. He sought to make jihad less central to the Koran. He didn’t seek to remove jihad entirely, since he was still a believer in the “jihad of the scalpel,” whatever that means, rather than the “jihad of the sword.” For seeking even this partial re-interpretation of the meaning of jihad in Koran, Taha was killed, and all his followers were forced under threat of death publicly to recant his views.

So the question arises, how can such a religion ever be reformed, unless it first be militarily conquered and subject to an outside power? Indeed, that is one of the things Daniel Pipes has said is necessary, among his myriad contradictory positions on reforming Islam, as I discussed in part one of “The Search for Moderate Islam.” Sometimes Pipes says that moderate Muslims represent the true, historic Islam, so that making Islam moderate, as it was in the past, should be readily achievable; sometimes he says that Islam has never been moderate, and that the moderate Muslims are so powerless in relation to the radicals that, in order for the moderates to prevail within Islam, the U.S. must first defeat all the radical Muslims in the world. But, as we’ve seen in Iraq, for a non-Muslim power to occupy and seek to reshape a Muslim country must lead to an endless terror war; and, in any case, all the reforms will probably be lost within five minutes of the non-Muslim power’s departure.

To return to the comments of Abu Qatada with which we began this discussion, Qatada says that the West alone has the power to decide whether to expel Muslims from its borders; and he says that any Muslim who attempts to lessen the importance of jihad in Islam must die. What do we conclude from these two statements? That the reform of Islam is impossible, but that the removal of Islam from the West is not.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at January 23, 2006 11:10 PM | Send