Maverick Philosopher

McCarthy knows this subject from the inside and sees things with blinding clarity:

. . . the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.

There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.

Permit me a respectful quibble. (I say 'respectful' because McCarthy's qualifications in this area far exceed mine.) A more measured way of putting the point would be by saying that sharia supremacism is at once both a totalitarian political ideology and a religion.  It is a hybrid ideology that blends the religious with the political. The religiosity of sharia supremacism is not a mere veneer.  But this is a mere quibble since, either way, the practical problem remains and the goal of the "single battle" is the same: to keep sharia-based Islam out of the U. S. A.

Intellectually, this should not be a difficult thing to do. Sharia supremacism does not accept the separation of religion from political life (which is why it is lethally hostile to reform Muslims). It requires the imposition of classical, ancient sharia law, which crushes individual liberty (particularly freedom — of conscience, of speech, and in economic affairs). It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. It is cruel in its enforcement. It endorses violent jihad to settle political disputes (since such disputes boil down to whether sharia is being undermined — a capital offense).

What I have just outlined is not a “theory.” Quite apart from the fact that sharia supremacism is the subject of numerous books, studies, public-opinion polls, and courtroom prosecutions, one need only look at life in Saudi Arabia and Iran, societies in which the regime imposes sharia. As I mentioned a few days ago, one need only look at the State Department’s warnings to Americans who travel to Saudi Arabia.

Nevertheless, what should be easy to establish intellectually is difficult as a practical matter. Sharia supremacists and their progressive allies maintain that Islam may not be parsed into different strains. For legal purposes, they insist it is a monolith that is protected by religious-liberty principles — notwithstanding that a) progressives are generally hostile to religious liberty and b) sharia supremacists themselves would destroy religious liberty. Perversely, then, they argue that the First Amendment is offended by national-security measures against anti-American radicals who would, given the chance, deep-six the First Amendment in favor of sharia.

This may well be the heart of the issue. If Islam is a religion like any other, then it is protected by religious-liberty principles. If so, any attempt to keep sharia-supporting Muslims out of the country would run counter to the values enshrined in the First Amendment, specifically, the first clause thereof.  It would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.

The issue, then, is whether Islam is a religion like any other.  Clearly, it is not. If McCarthy is right, then it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; if I am right, it is a hybrid ideology.  Either way, it is a political threat to our political system which is premised on the separation of church/mosque/synagogue and state. 

It is essential to win this debate over the political nature of sharia supremacism. Our law has a long constitutional tradition, rooted in the natural and international law of self-defense, of excluding aliens on the basis of radical, anti-American political ideology. Thus, if sharia supremacism is deemed a political ideology, we can keep out alien adherents of a cause that both inspires the terrorists of today and, wherever it is allowed to take root, produces the terrorists of tomorrow.

Yet, we also have a strong commitment to religious freedom. If at the end of the debate — assuming we ever have the debate — our culture’s conclusion is that sharia supremacism equals Islam, equals religion, equals immunity from governmental protective measures, then the Constitution really will have become a suicide pact. We will have decided that anti-constitutional sharia radicals are just as welcome as any other Muslim.

Sharia supremacists are like communists: they use our values against us. They hypocritically invoke them to subvert them. If we allow them to do this we are fools and we deserve to perish. Our magnificent Constitution must not be allowed to become a suicide pact.

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This from a U. K. reader:

You wrote:

So what measures should we in the West take?  

I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration.  There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements.    We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.

This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test:  do you share our values or not?  Chief among these values is toleration.

I agree with you — it mainly comes down to value systems (I wrote a blog post on just this a couple of years ago). But a couple of points:

1. In my experience there are two types of Muslim immigrants to the West: educated graduates who have no interest whatever in Islam, and who sometimes actively hate it. I have worked with and have close friends fitting this description. The second are uneducated, and are far more likely to embody the kinds of values we mostly find repellent in the West; some of these people commit crimes against women and children thinking them to be normal privileges, and create cultural ghettos (however some have been victims of religious persecution). So I think curtailing Muslim immigration is too coarse a tool; I'd rather deprive totalitarian theocratic regimes of their better people, both for the sake of those individuals, and in the hope of keeping such regimes from gaining greater power (or perhaps their more courageous citizens overthrowing said dictatorships).

BV: The reader's idea is very interesting: take the best and brightest from Muslim countries, thereby causing a  'brain drain'; this will weaken totalitarian theocracies and possibly lead to their overthrow. And of course the reader is absolutely right that not every Muslim is a Sharia supremacist.  

The difficulty, of course, is to separate the sheep from the goats (to employ a New Testament image for the sake of maximal political incorrectness). It's a problem of vetting. This is made difficult by the doctrine of taqiyya which justifies a Muslim's lying to non-Muslims.  Practically, it will be very difficult to separate the assimilable Muslims from the non-assimilable ones.

Given this fact, it would be wise to curtail Muslim immigration, at least for the time being. 'Curtail' does not mean stop.  It means reduce in extent or quantity.  Or one could have a temporary total stoppage which is what a moratorium is. One of the questions that has to be asked, and that people are afraid to ask is this: what is the net benefit to a Western country of Muslim immigration?  I am assuming, as any rational person must, that immigration can only be justified if it works to the benefit of the host country. 

A second problem with the reader's suggestion is that it will have the effect of weakening the Muslim countries that suffer the 'brain drain.' But we want them to flourish, don't we?  If they flourish, then they are less likely to practice and export terrorism.  Happy people don't cause trouble. And happy people don't leave their homelands. Lefties such as Obama and Hillary are not entirely wrong: the more economically prosperous the Muslim lands, the lower the appeal of radical Islam.

2. I think one way to go about dealing with traditional Islam (which is the problem, not so-called 'political Islam' – Islam is inherently 'political') in the West is to find a way to legislate against the promotion of ideologies containing certain features – primarily those the conflict with our basic notions of human rights, i.e. freedom of thought and expression, non-discrimination on the basis of innate qualities (sex, race etc), and so on; ideologies that tend toward fascism. We need to think more on how we would deal with a serious movement of National Socialism or Italian Fascism today. No names of any religion or ideology need be mentioned, just the unacceptable features. Here 'legislate' probably doesn't mean in law, but by other means; it might even mean immigrants renouncing Sharia as you say. But unfortunately, the majority of Jihadist terrorism in Europe comes from citizens born into the cultural ghettos with their alternate value systems and deep resentments. No immigration policy can touch them.

It is interesting to note that we still have the absurd crime of blasphemy on the statute books in the UK, but there is nothing to protect our system of common law or values.

BV: I agree that Islam is inherently political: it is as much a political ideology as a religion. I call it a 'hybrid' ideology.  People who speak of 'political Islam,' however, have in mind the project of a reform of Islam which would render it consistent with Western political principles and values. I am thinking of Zuhdi Jasser, for example. Part of his proposed reform is a separation of mosque and state. I fear that his proposal is utopian; if it could be achieved, however, Islam would cease to be the world-wide problem it is.

As for 'legislation' that is not achieved by passing laws, I just don't understand what that could be.

My reader suggests that no change in immigration policy will affect the jihadis that are born in cultural ghettos in our countries. But that is just false. Suppose that Muslim immigration into the U. K. were stopped. Then no jihadis could be born in the U. K. to the potential Muslim immigrants who would have been stopped.  The young troublemakers already in the U. K. will grow old and become less troublesome.

Meanwhile, you just have to get ruthless with terrorists. That includes the swift and sure application of the death penalty. Do you love your country or not? Do you value your way of life? Are English values and ways worth defending? Or are you a bunch of decadents who don't care whether you live or die?  

As an American who feels a certain piety toward the Mother Country, I hope you grow a collective pair before it is too late.