Fitzgerald on what to do about Muslims in the West

Hugh Fitzgerald has a big article on Islam, entitled “What Is To Be Done?”, at New English Review. As soon as someone sent me a link to the piece, I went to NER and began reading it eagerly … until, that is, I came to the second paragraph, and realized that I’d have to go on a special retreat in the country for three days if I was to work my way through Fitzgerald’s mind-blowingly out-of-control prose.

Below is the second paragraph. Notice how it starts sensibly enough but then quickly runs off the rails.

Is it impossible to halt all Muslim immigration to the West? To return Muslim non-citizens promptly to their countries of origin? To impose restrictions on money coming from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere to fund those mosques and madrasas all over the Western world? To do nothing that would openly demonstrate an unwillingness to change our legal and political institutions in response to Muslim demands or a Muslim presence? To do nothing that would, instead, demonstrate the opposite, that is a steely and well-informed and public refusal, to modify our own institutions and understandings, in order to meet demands from Muslims for changes, demands that, even if not met at first, will always and everywhere continue to be made, and made by appeals both cunningly couched in whatever language is appealing (the appeal to “true diversity” for example), or if that doesn’t work, in the language of threats of violence, and of actual violence. Is it impossible to create the conditions where True Believers in Islam, with all that that implies, may have to make a choice between remaining in the Lands of the Infidels, where a “full Muslim life” will only with great difficulty be lead (and there are ways to let the “whisperings of Shaytan” become louder), and sticking with Islam by remaining in, or returning to, Muslim lands.

How many negatives (double negatives, triple negatives, quadruple negatives) can be squeezed into one endless and syntactically chaotic sentence? It seems to be Hugh Fitzgerald’s mission in life to find out!

But I’m a stalwart type. I didn’t give up. I put on my knee-high boots and plunged into the third paragraph. Here it is:

Islam is not mainly, or merely, a “religion” as we understand that term. It is a Total Belief-System. If we come to see it as the threat it is, to the legal and political institutions that have been created over time, the institutions that we have inherited, and that we have a duty to preserve, then we will be far more willing to consider, and then to take, the kind of measures that have been taken, within recent memory, when a tolerant and advanced people had had enough, had experienced enough, and decided they were under no obligation to continue to endure, for the sake of some theoretical “standard of tolerance” that, after all, is merely a human construct, that they were free to accept or to modify, and not to cling to as a suicide pact. and should not be considered a suicide pact, and indeed did handle such a perceived threat by acting as they did, in the case of the Czechs, with those quintessential Europeans of the civilized old school, Jan Masaryk and Eduard Benes, when they passed, and then put into force, what came to be called the Benes Decree.

Since Fitzgerald evidently couldn’t care less if his writings are readable or not, and since I didn’t particularly feel like working my way through 3,100 words of his disjointed, interminable sentences, even if I had a three day retreat in a country house to do it in, I jumped to the end of the piece to see his conclusions, which, happily, are both readable and sensible.

Fitzgerald writes:

Here is a partial list of measures that should be undertaken immediately:

1. Education of Infidels, so that they are well aware of the contents of the texts of Islam—Qur’an, Hadith, Sira.

2. Education of Infidels, so that they understand how, over 1350 years, those texts have been received, and acted upon, by Believers.

3. Education of Infidels, so that they know a good deal about the history of Islamic conquest, and subsequent subjugation of non-Muslim peoples in the lands conquered—a subjugation that, no matter what the land, or the kind of non-Muslims conquered, the result was always the same.

4. Education of Muslims within Infidel countries, so that they will understand that the failures of Muslim societies—political, economic, social, intellectual, and moral—are the direct result of Islam itself.

5. An end to all Muslim immigration to Infidel lands.

6. Imposition of tests for naturalization that require a detailed knowledge of the history and cultural achievements of the Western country in question—see “Going Dutch” for one, admittedly exaggerated-for-effect example.

7. Inclusion, in the test for naturalization, of a loyalty oath, swearing sole allegiance to the political and legal institutions of the particular Infidel nation-state. In the case of the United States, allegiance to the Constitution would be considered adequate. Subsequent proof of perjury would, in the law, be considered valid grounds for stripping a naturalized citizen of that citizenship.

8. Making any support, direct or indirect, for Jihad—defined as the “struggle” to remove all obstacles to the spread and dominance of Islam, including but not limited to the political and legal institutions of the host country—illegal.

9. Preventing any foreign funds from entering the country to be spent for the building or upkeep of mosques or other institutions connected to Islam, or for campaigns of Da’wa.

10. Curtailing in the prisons campaigns of Da’wa, on the grounds that the evidence shows that those who convert contain a high proportion of people who subsequently present a threat to society.

11. Refusing to bow to any Muslim demands for changes either in schools or in workplaces to accommodate Muslim rituals or Muslim ideas of what is fitting, from the hijab (where banned, as in France) or for extra time off for prayers in the middle of the work-day. This is not the sort of accommodation that Infidels, in Infidel lands, should be expected to make. In other words, the policy should be No Changes For Islam.

12. Reciprocity in the current number of mosques. Taking into account the absence, for tens of millions of non-Muslims in Muslim-ruled lands, of churches, Hindu temples, and other houses of worship, the policy should be to reduce the number of mosques in Western lands until there is a change in the Muslim lands. Reciprocity is a concept most people can understand and justify.

13. Reducing benefits so that large families (likely to be Muslim) cannot continue to be formed by those who assume they will be supported by the state. Muslim women will be expected to work in the same numbers as non-Muslim women, and will no longer be supported by the Infidel state (that is, Infidel taxpayers) to be breeding machines.

14. Enforcement of the laws against polygamy will be increased. Those practicing polygamy will be subject to being stripped of citizenship and returned to that Muslim state from which they, or their closest relatives, came. Since so many Muslims in Western Europe continue to observe, in Muslim enclaves, the mores of the countries that they, or their parents, or their grandparents, came from, the argument that they cannot “go back” can be dealt with. There is no obligation for the countries of Western Europe to live with the colossal error of their immigration policy.

15. There will be not the slightest concession made to Muslim sensibilities on the subject of aspects of Islam, including Muhammad. Those who wish to live in an environment where Islam is to be free of criticism are free to move to Muslim countries. There are many dozens of them. They control vast land areas, and vast natural resources. This is not a case of a tiny people having no place to go.

16. Efforts should be made to publicize the most celebrated defectors from Islam, to publish and distribute their books, to make much of them. This should be done both for the education of Infidels, and for the conceivable education of those who, born into Islam, may be persuaded to leave it.

The countries of North America and Western European countries can do much to make the practice of Islam, and campaigns of Da’wa, harder to support, and to make those Muslims who are intent on adhering to this ideology so dangerous to non-Muslims think again about remaining in the Western world. Benefits can be limited. Foreign sources of aid can be cut. The general atmosphere of continuing refusal to yield, and of ever-increasing Infidel awareness of the texts of Islam and the history of Muslim conquest, will naturally create conditions of suspicion and hostility that are not, to the well-informed, either wicked, or baseless but, alas, entirely reasonable.

While Fitzgerald does not recommend the removal of Muslims from the West, as I do, he is taking seriously the problem of how to keep in check the Muslims who are already here; and, further, his policies would encourage many Muslims to leave voluntarily. Jeff in England, who is always calling for a Plan B to deal with Muslims in the event that we can’t develop a political consensus to make them leave, ought to like Fitzgerald’s proposals, which should certainly form a basis for future discussion.

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Jeff in England writes:

I welcome Fitzgerald’s Plan B, which is more specific than the one I just sent you. I have to spend time reading it carefully but on first glance there is lot there to chew over. One of my main points is that whatever “plan” is suggested it must be realistic. Truly doable in a concrete sense. Not just pleasing to VFR readers.

In addition parallel to any plan B must be a specific outline on how to strengthen Western society and positive Western values in general. Again it must be concrete and doable.

James W. writes:

16 points?

Plan B should be Keep It Simple Stupid, or we will get bogged in the fog of our own making and stretch this into the European Constitution. The perfect is the enemy of the good.

Don’t propose 16 rules to dodge, but three or four that will trip the most careful dancers.

LA replies

A “Plan B” for dealing with Muslims as complicated as the EU constitution. You’re right—that would be something of a problem. Not just that it can be dodged, but that it’s hard to keep straight in one’s head.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 10, 2008 07:17 PM | Send