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National NewsConservative News
Islam Is not a Religion of Peace
By Mike Scruggs
Posted on: August 23, 2005
The Bush Administration to its credit knows that winning the war on terrorism at home and in Iraq, Afghanistan, and around the globe requires the support of the American people. However, they are making two critical errors that may rob them of that support and victory on both fronts.
The first error is the Bush Administration’s de facto open borders immigration policy and a curious blindness to the economic and social damage it is causing. Homeland Security seems like an incredibly bad joke, when the Bush Administration will not enforce border security, while a virtual tidal wave of illegal immigrants are crossing our borders. Furthermore, our internal immigration enforcement is purely nominal. Once illegal immigrants are in the country only arrest for a felony is likely to get them deported.
Once in the country our internal immigration security is pretty much “don’t ask don’t tell.” The nominal manpower resources committed to internal immigration law enforcement are not even adequate to handle the felony cases. Occasionally, a few illegal immigrants will be rounded up to make a good press release, but there is no substantive, on-going commitment to internal immigration security. It is not that the Bush Administration faces considerable frustration in enforcing immigration policies; it is that they will not attend to anything but minimal enforcement. There is a reason for this, and it is not pretty.
The Bush Administration’s de facto immigration policies, like those of several administrations before it,
are not geared to the security and welfare of average Americans. For the last twenty years, growing considerably worse with the Presidency of George W. Bush, an unlegislated and unspoken priority has been to insure a steady stream of cheap labor to American businesses that prefer to compete in the political arena rather than a free economy for competitive advantage. This has resulted in fewer jobs and lower salaries for most Americans. On the surface the economy may look prosperous. But who is it that is prospering?
It is the political entrepreneurs and their companies, but not many Americans. This is a scandal that may bring down the Republican Party, unless the many honest Republicans now in office insist on real immigration reform.
Real immigration reform would immediately secure our borders and implement vigorous internal immigration law enforcement over the next few years, including severe penalties for employers that deliberately violate U. S. immigration or labor laws. It would not tolerate any sort of amnesty by whatever euphemism or duplicitous gimmick. Amnesties by whatever name always attract vast numbers of additional illegal immigrants. We cannot solve our immigration problems by calling illegal immigrants guestworkers. True immigration reform would also reduce legal immigration to reasonable levels of assimilation. It would then provide mechanisms to insure rigorous implementation and visible accountability to the American people.
Meanwhile the Bush Administration and many in Congress seem blind to the high costs of illegal immigration and the suffering it is causing American workers and their families. The increasing state and local taxes, higher medical costs, higher crime, higher risks of disease, weakened and more costly public education and other fruits of out of control immigration evidently cannot be seen from Washington. The bitter irony, of course, is that our current immigration policies make many Homeland Security efforts pathetically ineffective. Washington may not want to acknowledge these problems, but they are becoming very clear and visible to the American people. Washington may be complacent, but the people are becoming angry, as well they should be. If the Bush Administration wants to maintain the trust and good will of American voters necessary to fight a war in Iraq and Afghanistan and have a credible Homeland Security program, they had best look to cleaning up their scandalous immigration policies and very soon.
The second serious error the Bush Administration is making is their blind adherence to multiculturalist ideology in regards to the nature of Islam. I have no doubt that most Muslims would prefer peace and prosperity to Jihadist war. But that is because most Muslims are only cultural Muslims and not serious students of the Koran and the teachings of Muhammad. While most Muslims may prefer to live their lives in peace, Islam itself is not a religion of peace and tolerance. This is self-evident to anyone who reads the Koran with the basic interpretation guidelines set down by Muslim scholars themselves. It is brilliantly clear to anyone who studies the Sunna, the sayings and example of Muhammad himself. It is also abundantly clear to anyone who looks at the history of Islam and current events around the fringes of the Muslim world today. How can anyone outside of a madhouse believe that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance? It takes considerable miseducation and self deception.
It is understandable that the Bush Administration needs to be cautious about public utterances on Islam.
The U. S. has many predominantly Muslim allies. We are largely dependent on Arab oil. Much of the press and public have bought into the multiculturalist nonsense that the Clinton and Bush Administrations have helped to instill. Probably the less said the better, but we should not determine our foreign policy and strategy in the Mideast on the utterly false and laughable proposition that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. The West cannot reform Islam by cutting Jihad out of the Koran and Sunna. It is one of the primary ideologies of Islam. The Jihadist terrorism we are dealing with is not just the crack pot idea of a small minority of fanatics with absurd interpretations of the Koran. Jihad is rooted in the Koran and Sunna and has alarmingly wide acceptance among Muslims.
Jihad in its many forms includes unrelenting war against all who oppose Islam. Islam is not a purely defensive religion. Its ideology is strongly expansionist. Those who resist their expansion are counted as enemies of Allah. The Koran also teaches Muslims not to cooperate with or make treaties with infidels unless there is a clear Muslim advantage and then only so long as the Muslim advantage continues and not a minute longer. Furthermore, Muhammad taught that deception of non-Muslims is permissible to defeat the enemies of Allah, which includes anyone or nation that opposes the dominance of Islam in every land.
Another reality that must be faced is that democracy is not in favor with Muslim clergy. To a large segment of Muslim clergy and to Islam, democracy is government by people in contrast to government by Allah. They insist Muslim nations must be governed by the Sharia or Islamic Law. They consider democracy an arrogant claim that majorities know better than Allah as revealed by his Prophet, Muhammad. All this demands a hard-headed realism in dealing with Islam and Muslim peoples.
President Bush’s naïve misunderstanding of Islam may hinder his diplomatic policies, but many of his war critics have an even more naïve and far more dangerous misunderstanding of Islam. They believe that if we just pull out of Iraq and Afghanistan, remove our military and naval presence from the Middle East, repent of all the real and imagined past sins they attribute to America and Western culture, and be nice, all dangers of Jihadist terrorism will dwindle to insignificance. Not a chance. Islam and Jihad would simply advance to the next war zone and the next battle, perhaps in Europe or the United States. I commend President Bush for ignoring that sort of advice, but he needs to be more realistic himself.
Islam is not a religion of peace and tolerance, and our foreign policies, economic policies, and global defense strategies must be based on the reality of what Islam is, not what we wish it were. We may be able to visualize Islam as a religion of peace and tolerance, but that visualization is not reality. We must deal with the world and Islam as it really is. That means casting aside the intellectual chains of political correctness and multiculturalist nonsense. Before we can defeat or contain an enemy, we must recognize and know that enemy.
In order to win the war in Iraq and Afghanistan and the war against terrorism at home the Bush Administration must maintain the confidence of the American people. It cannot do that with a corrupt and out of control immigration system becoming more and more visible, especially when our borders are so obviously unsecured. It must change course and make real and vigorous immigration reforms. It must also come to a realistic understanding of Islam that is based on the Koran, the teachings of Muhammad, and history, rather than multiculturalist ideology. The real nature of Islam is beginning to be more evident to the American people. Regardless of the diplomatic delicacies involved, their support will not be strong or deserved unless they believe their leaders fully understand and truthfully convey the nature of the enemy. At the very least they should not be told some sophistic and no longer credible tale that Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance. These are not small issues. Unless they are corrected they could bring down the Republican Party after much damage to the nation.
Mike Scruggs is a retired financial consultant and corporate business executive. He holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BS from the University of Georgia. He is a USAF combat veteran of the Vietnam War, holding a Distinguished Flying Cross and Purple Heart. He was recently Chairman of the Board of a Classical Christian School and is a former Republican County Chairman. He lives in Hendersonville, NC.
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