The Tundra Tabloids was just waiting for Andrew Bostom’s take on the Fox News’s pundits trashing of the honorable Dutch MP, Geert Wilders, and Andy delivers as only Andy Bostom can. KGS
NOTE: Don’t miss Diana West’s “Fox’s Beck, Krauthammer & Kristol: Wrong on Wilders (Much to Talal’s Delight)
“When Glenn Beck, Charles Krauthammer and Bill Kristol each from their respective Fox News perches branded Dutch political phenom Geert Wilders as beyond the political pale, it was shocking and outrageously so, and for several reasons.
One. I’ve grown used to Fox News and all other media ignoring not just the Wilders story but also the cultural story of the century, altogether – namely, the Islamization of Europe, something Wilders, a great admirer of Ronald Reagan and a committed supporter Israel, is dedicated to halt and reverse. The survival instinct of the Dutch, who, earlier this month gave unprecedented electoral victories to Wilders and his party, is a strong indicator that this civilizational transformation is not irreversible. But covering the Islamization of Europe, as readers of this column know, usually makes for bad news.And worse, at least according to the powers-that-be, even half-way competent reporting on the subject puts Islam in a bad light because it reveals exactly what happens to Western-style liberty when Muslims enter a non-Muslim host country in sufficient numbers to enact and extend sharia (Islamic law) over a heretofore Judeo-Christian-humanist society.”
Educating Charles Krauthammer on Islam—Again
March 12th, 2010 (49 minutes ago) by Andrew Bostom |
Krauthammer’s “Take” on Islam and Wilders is the Wrong Take
Last May, I blogged about Charles Krauthammer’s fundamental ignorance of mainstream, classical Islamic Law—evident in a naïve column he wrote discussing Hamas’ “truce offer,” which was oblivious to over a millennium of Muslim jurisprudence, the precedent being Muhammad’s temporary “treaty” of Hudaybiyyah.
My essay from this Wednesday (3/10/10) , and another recent essay on the abuse of the terms “Islamism” and “Islamist” , and a piece (from 2/22/09) which clarified Geert Wilders’ arguments about a “Koran Ban” under existing Dutch Law, address Krauthammer’s latest uninformed, incoherent musings on Geert Wilders and Islam, which aired Monday evening (3/8/10) on Fox News.
Please see these replies to Krauthammer’s misguided remarks on Fox News by Mark Steyn, Paul Mirengoff, and Roger Simon, as well as these particularly trenchant rebuttals (here, and here) by my colleague Diana West.
And below are comments on Muslim attitudes, and Islam, including a remarkably prescient warning from 1925, which the author Aldous Huxley—who actually spent time living in Muslim North Africa—left for the seemingly impenetrable Krauthammer and his ilk to learn.
From Religion and Temperament (1948)
Mohammedanism…is hard, militant, and puritanical; it encourages the spirit of martyrdom, is eager to make proselytes, and has no qualms about levying “holy wars” and conducting persecutions. Some centuries after the prophet’s death it developed the Sufi school of mysticism—a school whose strict Islamic orthodoxy its theologians have always had some difficulty in defending.
From a Letter to Norman Douglas, June 26, 1925
One winter I shall certainly go and spend some [more] months there [in Tunisia], about the time of the date harvest—tho’ I have no doubt that the site of the Arabs picking and packing the dates would be enough to make one’s gorge turn every time one set eyes on that fruit for the rest of one’s life. How tremendously European one feels when one has seen these devils in their native muck! And to think that we are busily teaching them all the mechanical arts of peace and war which gave us, in the past, our superiority over their numbers! In fifty years time, it seems to me, Europe can’t fail to be wiped out by these monsters. Intanto…
From “In a Tunisian Oasis” (1936)
Talking to an Islamically educated Arab is like talking to a pious European of the fourteenth century. Every phenomenon is referred by them to its final cause—to God. About the immediate causes of things—precisely how they happen—they seem to feel not the slightest interest. Indeed, it is not even admitted that there are such things as immediate causes: God is directly responsible for everything. “Do you think it will rain?” you ask pointing to menacing clouds overhead. “If God wills,” is the answer. You pass the native hospital. “Are the doctors good?” “In our country,” the Arab gravely replies, in the tone of Solomon, “we say that doctors are of no avail. If Allah wills that a man die, he will die. If not, he will recover.” All of which is profoundly true, so true, indeed, that is not worth saying. To the Arab, however, it seems the last word in human wisdom. For him, God is the perfectly adequate explanation of everything; he leaves fate to do things unassisted, in its own way—that is to say, from the human point of view, the worst way.
It is difficult for us to realize nowadays that our fathers once thought much as the Arabs do now. As late as the seventeenth century, the chemist Boyle found it necessary to protest against what I may call this Arabian view of things. “For to explicate a phenomenon,” he wrote, “it is not enough to ascribe it to one general efficient, but we must intelligibly show the particular manner, how that general cause produces the proposed effect. He must be a very dull inquirer who, demanding an account of the phenomena of a watch, shall rest satisfied with being told that it is an engine made by a watchmaker; thought nothing be declared thereby of the structure and coaptation of the spring, wheels, balance, etc., and the manner how they act on one another so as to make the needle point out the true time of the day.”
