The ‘Dismal Perception’ in the West of Islam is Well Deserved

A five-year old but enduringly relevant article asserts that “Obsession with Islam blinds West to real problems,” by Omer Taspinar, Asia Times, March 13, 2019.  The idea Taspinar is attempting to express is that anything and everything — except Islam itself — explains the growing “civilizational clash,” which in his telling seems to originate in the West, rather than with the Muslims themselves. But what would he have us make of the 109 Qur’anic verses that command Muslims to wage jihad against the Infidels? Taspinar fails to quote a single verses from the Qur’an. He’s a Muslim, and we can assume he knows those verses. In failing to quote them, his taqiyya is showing. The “angry nationalism” in Europe of which he writes has been neither “angry” nor true “nationalism.” Instead, we have some governments — too few, alas — in response to endless acts of Muslim terror, to the effect of the large-scale and growing Muslim presence in Europe, and to the outrageous pressure from the EU to accept more Muslims — deciding to call a halt to all Muslim immigrants.

This was, and is, not so much nationalism as a desire to defend the continued existence of Western civilization against what now most threatens it — the forces of Islam. If in some cases that desire to defend a whole civilization — the West — takes on the flavor of nationalism, that is because those countries, such as Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Austria, that are resisting taking in more Muslim migrants, are being pressured by, and having to fight, the transnational EU. But their governments know that nationalism won’t do. They who must persuade more countries in the EU to emulate the same policies. The very idea of “the West” is unthinkable without the UK, France, Italy. Orban is not defending just Hungary; he is trying to sound the tocsin for the many other countries in Europe that are still insufficiently alarmed.

Taspinar lumps together “Islam, multiculturalism, immigration and refugees” as “easy targets” of the xenophobic, scapegoat-hunting, altogether deplorable West. He needs to be reminded that it is not “immigration” in general to which Europeans are now opposed, but “Muslim immigration,” and they are not against all “refugees,” but, after so much heartache and alarm, only “Muslim refugees” (very few of whom are real refugees, but are better described as “economic migrants”). He does not attempt to discuss, much less refute, the real reasons for anxiety about Islam. These should be obvious. One reason is the ever-lengthening list of terror attacks by Muslims. We can’t list the tens of thousands of such attacks, which few in the West ever hear about, but major attacks that have left a deep impression have occurred in Europe in these places: Madrid, Barcelona, Paris (many times), Nice, Toulouse, Magnanvile, St. Etienne du Rouvray, London (many times), Manchester, Brussels, Antwerp, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Wurzburg, Copenhagen, Oslo, Helsinki, Turku, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Beslan. Taspinar chooses to ignore altogether the magnitude and frequency of such attacks, as if they couldn’t possibly have contributed to Western worries about Islam. A second reason for anxiety is the behavior of Muslims now living in the West. Too many have been aggressive, violent, criminal, and certainly ungrateful for being allowed to settle in the advanced West, with so many welfare benefits lavished upon them. A third reason for anxiety is the growing familiarity of Westerners with the contents of the Qur’an and Hadith; many who have learned not to trust their own political and media elites on the subject have become students of the Islamic texts, and what they find — as in such verses as 2:191-194, 3:151; 4:34, 4:89, 8:12, 8:60, 9:5, 9:29, 47:4, 98:6 — naturally alarms them.

Unfortunately, the Arab uprisings of 2011 failed to change the image of Islam. Arguably, they made things worse. In Egypt, the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood swept into power, before a military coup removed it. Bloody civil wars in Libya, Yemen and Syria, coupled with the rise of ISIS, contributed to an already dismal Western perception of Islam.”

That “dismal perception” in the West of Islam is well-deserved. But it resulted from far more than just those “bloody civil wars” in Libya, Yemen, and Syria, and that Muslim Brotherhood victory in Egypt, followed by a coup against overturning it. There have been the constant attacks on Nigerian Christians, the burning of churches, the massacre of villagers, the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls, by the fanatical Muslims of Boko Haram. There have been Muslim attacks on Coptic churches, clerics, and pilgrims in Egypt. There have been the massacres of Yazidis and Christians in the Islamic State, the use of Yazidi women as sex slaves, and the training of Yazidi children to kill other Yazidis. The reality is far worse than that “dismal perception” Taspinar deplores.