What the west needs to know

Monday, 31st March 2008

A propos the Wilders film Fitna, another longer film is now on line which does a much better job at informing people about Islam and exposing the absurd (early) claims by Tony Blair and George W Bush that Islamic terrorism apparently had nothing to do with Islam. Called What the West Needs to Know, it explains in a scholarly, authoritative but nevertheless accessible and balanced manner how the basic tenets of Islam have given rise to the global jihad, their implications and consequences and how they are the principal motor behind major conflicts around the world (the defining battle of Vienna in 1683 which is pictured above and where Europe repulsed the Islamic advance took place on...September 11); and it also explains, not at all comfortingly, how the many millions of Muslims who live entirely peaceful lives relate to these precepts (they are either ignorant of them, says Robert Spencer, or else they reject them on flimsy theological grounds; let's hope that's not the whole story).

Particularly transfixing for me are the observations made by the former Palestinian terrorist Walid Shoebat, a former Muslim who has converted to Christianity and who states categorically that the Arab war against Israel is driven by religion just as it is in Iraq, Sudan and elsewhere — and in Israel is directed not against ‘Israelis’ but against Jews. He describes how he had to ‘kill my first Jew’ in Israel to show himself a ‘worthy Muslim’. Elsewhere another expert observes that what the west simply doesn’t understand is that the Arab war against Israel is driven not by nationalism but by the religious drive to reconquer that territory for Islam, as a part of the medieval Islamic empire that is to rise once again from the ashes of the free world. The war against Israel is not a boundary dispute. It’s a religious war of conquest.

Many Israelis don’t grasp that either.