Everybody Wants to Rule the World (But Islamists Are Planning for It!)

"I have complete faith that Islam will invade Europe and America, because Islam has logic and a mission.” – Muhammad Mahdi Othman ‘Akef, Muslim Brotherhood General Guide and Supreme Leader

One present area of study for me are the many cultural strategies developed by Islamists for the eventual Islamization of the West and the rest of the world. I have previously written about the Muslim Brotherhood "Project" and have provided for the first time an edited translation of that document for American readers. The Project, drafted by MB "researchers" in 1982 when the organization was rechartered, is part of an entire genre of Islamist literature of that period dedicated to the strategic takeover of the West inspired by the birth of the Islamic "Republic" of Iran and the reinstitution of shari'a law there.

In my analysis of The Project, I described it thus:

What makes The Project so different...is that it represents a flexible, multi-phased, long-term approach to the “cultural invasion” of the West. Calling for the utilization of various tactics, ranging from immigration, infiltration, surveillance, propaganda, protest, deception, political legitimacy and terrorism, The Project has served for more than two decades as the Muslim Brotherhood “master plan”. As can be seen in a number of examples throughout Europe – including the political recognition of parallel Islamist government organizations in Sweden, the recent “cartoon” jihad in Denmark, the Parisian car-burning intifada last November, and the 7/7 terrorist attacks in London – the plan outlined in The Project has been overwhelmingly
successful.

Rather than focusing on terrorism as the sole method of group action, as is the case with Al-Qaeda, in perfect postmodern fashion the use of terror falls into a multiplicity of options available to progressively infiltrate, confront, and eventually establish Islamic domination over the West.

While some have questioned the authenticity of The Project (one critic responding to my analysis of dubbed it "The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Mecca" and therefore an apparent fake), the fact that a number of these Islamist strategic plans have been documented coming from several different organizations should give some evidence that acknowledging the existence of such is hardly conspiratorial. Rather than revealing some secret cabal exercising power globally, this genre of Islamist cultural strategic studies is dedicated to obtaining power. The Project is no more conspiratorial than Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals was for the New Left in America during the 1960s (it is worth noting that 2008 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Hillary Clinton dedicated her senior thesis at Wellesley College to Alinky's political and social thought - a thesis that is currently under seal thanks to Wellesley administrators).

In Europe, of course, they are much more aware of the intentions of the Islamists since the large Muslim communities throughout Western Europe have attained much greater social and political influence there than here in America, where the Muslim population is still quite small (around 1 percent of the overall population). One recent analyst of the present situation in Europe is Egon Flaig, who had an article published by Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung entitled, "Islam Wants to Conquer the World" (English translation thanks to Western Resistance; the original article in German can be found here at the FAZ site). Flaig's article (which was banned in Egypt) provides some historical context from the history of Islam itself, from the rapid conquest and domination of North Africa, followed by Islamization efforts in Spain, Anatolia, and the Balkans - all at the expense of Christianity. Despite the revisionist attempts by 19th Century European scholars to whitewash this history, Islam has plenty of experience transitioning from minority community to ruling community through the escalating use of violence against non-Muslims. In his conclusion, Flaig warns against ignoring this reality:

To ignore the past means to re-live it. He who keeps on spreading the fairytale of Muslim tolerance, stands in the way of those Muslim intellectuals, who seriously work towards a reformation of islam, which started out so promisingly in the 19th century. He steals away their chance to overcome a past, which threatens to become a horrible present. If the reformers could achieve a radical de-politicization of Islam, the Muslims could become real citizens of their states.

Another scholar that presents the European dilemma in stark detail is Dr. Patrick Sookhdeo, an Anglican cleric and Christian convert from Islam. In his August 2005 article, "The Islamization of Europe", he cites a book published in 1980 by the Islamic Council of Europe, Muslim Communities in Non-Muslim States, which offers a comprehensive program for the eventual domination of Muslims throughout Europe:

When Muslims live as a minority they face theological problems, because classical Islamic teaching always presupposed a context of Islamic dominance; hence the need for guidance on how to live in non-Muslim states. The instructions given in the book told Muslims to get together and organise themselves with the aim of establishing a viable Muslim community based on Islamic principles. This is the duty of every individual Muslim living within a non-Muslim political entity. They should set up mosques, community centres and Islamic schools. At all costs they must avoid being assimilated by the majority. In order to resist assimilation, they must group themselves geographically, forming areas of high Muslim concentration within the population as a whole. Yet they must also interact with non-Muslims so as to share the message of Islam with them. Every Muslim individual is required to participate in the plan; it is not allowed for anyone simply to live as a “good Muslim” without assisting the overall strategy. The ultimate goal of this strategy is that the Muslims should become a majority and the entire nation be governed according to Islam.

Regardless of the means and ends they recommend, as an outside observer, I have to give Islamists credit for their shrewd cultural strategy and the effectiveness and discipline they have demonstrated in implementing their agenda in Europe and America. They are well ahead of the game, aided in no small part to the spiritual vacuum created by militant secularism and the decline of the Christian faith.

In coming weeks I hope to expand on this theme of Islamist cultural strategic studies and discuss other variants on the theme of the Islamist takeover of the West in addition to The Project of the Muslim Brotherhood, including similiar plans by the Islamic Foundation (UK)/Jamaat-e-Islami (Pakistan) and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. This is part of my preparation for the speech I will be delivering at the upcoming International Intelligence Summit, March 5-7, in St. Petersburg, FL. Stay tuned!

Should We Read Richard Dawkins Literally or Allegorically?

Update: Welcome to everyone visiting today from WorldMagBlog! Feel free to look around and stay a while.

As a Christian, there are few things I detest more than an atheist pontificating to me on the subject of religion. Self-professed atheists and agnostics are testaments to the loss of nerve for living life as human beings; rather than seeking meaning and purpose in life as humans have done for at least as long as recorded human history, they decidedly abandon the project altogether. In lecturing the rest of us with absolute certainty on the meaning of life and the necessity of human freedom, in the end all they have to tell us is that there is no meaning, certainty or freedom in the universe.

This is precisely what nauseated me while reading University of Texas physicist Steven Weinberg’s Times of London review, “A Deadly Certitude”, of fellow atheist Richard Dawkins’ new book, The God Delusion. (HT: Worldmagblog) In grotesque display of condescension and bigotry, Weinberg – a Nobel Prize-winner and recipient of the US National Medal of Science – so wantonly wallows in his ignorance of the Christian faith and Christian history that it betrays his blind faith in the dark dogmas of doubt.

(For a devastating analysis of Richard Dawkin’s The God Delusion, see Terry Eagleton’s article in the London Review of Books, “Lunging, Flailing, Mispunching”)

Weinberg doesn’t get past the first paragraph of his review before making several glaring (and self-serving) factual errors. He mockingly cites the Second Century Church Fathers Theophilus of Antioch and Clement of Alexandria as examples of dim-witted biblical literalist Neanderthals who believed that the earth was flat. But this is flatly (pardon the pun) not true. Rather than being biblical “literalists”, Theophilus and Clement were two of the more prominent advocates of an allegorical approach to Scripture – a position that Weinberg seems to accept as not quite as detestable as biblical “literalism”. In fact, it is Theophilus’ explanation of Genesis 1-3 that is perhaps the section he subjects most to his allegorical reading of the Bible.

One wonders if Weinberg reads Darwin’s Origin of Species, James Watson’s The Double Helix or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time literally or allegorically? If he takes these texts literally, can’t we just dismiss him as some secular fundamentalist crank?

Having read the Bible regularly for almost twenty years, I have yet to come across anything that advocates a flat earth. That must be why he has to qualify his position that “verses could be interpreted to mean that the Earth is flat” (my emphasis), an admission that a non-literal approach to Scripture – Weinberg’s preferred method – is what is required to arrive at a very conclusion he deplores.

The acceptance of helio-centrism in Christian Europe is the next straw man that Weinberg sets ablaze. He states that “the more radical idea that the Earth moves around the Sun was harder to accept.” This is partially true, but again, the culprit was not biblical literalism. Galileo’s tormenters were not literalist zealots, but rather, Renaissance Humanists unwilling to discard the ideas of the Greek rationalists, in particular Aristotle and Ptolemy. It was Aristotelianism and Ptolemy’s terra-centric universe that Pope Urban VIII was so desperate to protect against Galileo’s ideas, not the biblical literalism that Weinberg is so quick to deride. Exactly how did he win a Nobel Prize with such shoddy scholarship?

Of course, secular humanism has been such an advancement to humanity over monotheism, hasn’t it? What with the Reign of Terror and its goddess of Reason, Napoleonic total war, Prussian militarism, Marxist revolutions, Darwinian eugenics and racism, Bolshevik communism, Stalin’s collectivization of the kulaks, Italian fascism, German Nazism and the gas chambers of Auschwitz, Stalin’s purges, Third World “liberation” movements, Nasser’s Arab socialism, Soviet gulags, the brutal crackdown on the Prague Spring, Pol Pot’s killing fields, Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the Baathist regimes of Syria and Iraq, Sandinista death squads, Nicolae Ceausescu’s Securitate, and those atheistic paradises on earth, Enver Hoxha’s Albania and Kim Il-Sung’s North Korea, it is amazing that religion exists at all these days and that atheism hasn’t been universally embraced for the empowering and humanizing idea that it is.

Then again, the estimated 100 million people murdered in the name of atheism in the 20th Century alone so far surpass the collective abuses and persecutions launched in the name of Christianity over the past two millennia that the two are entirely incomparable – not really a record of the joys of secularism that Dawkins or Weinberg are really interested in revisiting.

Perhaps the most striking feature of atheism is the self-loathing manifested by the most strident atheists. In all of my travels, I have never met a happy-go-lucky atheist. This is only natural; as creatures created in the image of God, to be consistent they must not only hate the reflection of that image in others, but themselves as well. This explains the unparalleled butchery of the 20th Century: as a measure of sheer survival, atheists must vent their rage homicidally to avoid its suicidal implications; only when there is no one else left to kill will they finally eat their own ideological bullet.

Much like a man whistling past a graveyard, Weinberg assures us that all is well with atheism. This, too, is an article of his blind faith. He chides Dawkins for “he does not seem to realize the extent to which his side has won. Setting aside the rise of Islam in Europe, the decline of serious Christian belief among Europeans is so widely advertised that Dawkins turns to the United States for most of his examples of unregenerate religious belief.”

The simple fact is, however, that both atheism and the Europe “inspired” by it are dying a rapid death. Inevitably, atheism like Cronus is forced to eat its own. This is the subject of Oxford scholar Alister McGrath’s recent volume, The Twilight of Atheism (I should note that McGrath, now a theologian, holds a doctorate in molecular biophysics from Oxford).

After reading Weinberg’s review of Dawkins, I was prompted to pick up G.K. Chesterton’s devastating critique of modern thought, Orthodoxy. Chesterton long ago had seen the end of atheism:

It is vain for eloquent atheists to talk of the great truths that will be revealed once we see free thought reign. We have seen it end. It has no more questions to ask; it has questioned itself. You cannot call up any wilder vision than a city in which men ask themselves if they have any selves. You cannot fancy a more skeptical world than that in which men doubt if there is a world…Free thought has exhausted its own freedom. It is weary of its own success. If any eager freethinker now hails philosophical freedom as the dawn, he is only like the man in Mark Twain who came out wrapped in blankets to see the sun rise and was just in time to see it set…We have no more questions to ask. We have looked for questions in the darkest corners and on the wildest peaks. We have found all the questions that can be found. It is time we gave up looking for questions and began looking for answers. (1990 Image edition, p. 37)

Atheists have long ago worn out their welcome to flog the rest of us on the matter of religion, particularly those of the rabidly bigoted variety represented well by Richard Dawkins and Steven Weinberg (among many others). In their malicious handling of Christianity and its history we find that they are not intellectually honest; this should be no surprise to us, however, as they don’t have any reason to believe in honesty.

Bereft of anything meaningful or insightful, they must resort to the tired secular mythologies and endless litany of errors to tear down the Christian faith in order to make it appear that they have actually built something on their own. In the end, all atheism leaves us with is nothing more than a pile of intellectual rubble. The demise of atheism would be so much more fun to watch if they didn’t keep trying to dismantle the rest of humanity in the endeavor.

Gov. Schwarzenegger Goes to Nashville

UPDATE: Thanks to Nashville-area political blogger Bill Hobbs for the plug!
UPDATE #2: And thanks to Lynn Vincent at WorldMagBlog for the link as well. As she told me today, I'm "world famous and totally unknown." How true!

Just a quick note to let my regular readers know about my article published today by The American Thinker, "Governor Schwarzenegger Should Go To Nashville". In light of the Govenator's plan for universal health care scheme for all Californians, I note:

But before riding the universal health care train too far, Gov. Schwarzenegger might want to make a stop in Nashville to see exactly how such a plan has actually worked for Tennessee, where that state's abysmal TennCare program has forced dozens of hospitals out of business, pushed thousands of doctors and other health care professionals out of the state, destroyed any semblance of competitive health insurance market, and nearly drove the state government into bankruptcy.

This is based off my experience dealing with TennCare while I was a policy analyst for the Tennessee Institute for Public Policy. My published study of the TennCare system can be found here (though it is quite dated at this point, but the first section about the failures of Tennessee's experiment with universal health care are still valid).

For my previous articles at The American Thinker, go here.

Ohio State: From Heroes to Zeros

Absolutely stunned and embarrassed is about all I can say about my Buckeyes' performance tonight. All credit due to Florida for playing a solid game and not making any mistakes. It was clear that they showed up ready to play and they represented their school, fans and the SEC in fine fashion. The Buckeyes, however, were the perfect picture of a team self-destructing. About the only saving grace of the game is that the score doesn't really reflect how badly Ohio State played. Fourteen points makes it seem that they were actually able to put together one or two offensive series, but the simple fact is that they couldn't. The majority of Ohio State's offense came in the first six seconds of the game. And Troy Smith - don't get me started.

I seriously doubt that all the hand-wringing and second-guessing in the days and weeks to come really will be able to fully answer the question of exactly how the wheels fell completely off the Ohio State Buckeyes. Not really much more I can say other than to tip my hat to the Florida Gators for a game well played. Congrats.