SEPTEMBER 2007

Editorial

(You have to play it where it lies, and play the hand you are dealt.  These are two well-known and well-worn statements from golf and poker respectively.  Keeping these in the forefront of one’s mind keeps one’s feet on the ground, one’s keel in the water, and a steady focus of reality, of what is and is right in front of you.  I bring these up to provide some explanation for why we have seemed to be so long “off line” with this website this summer.

Surgical and medical illness came seemingly from nowhere to strike again and again.  Since it affected my wife, I gave her my fullest attention.  Neither time nor energy were available for writing articles and keeping up with a website.

She is convalescing; every day, she improves over the previous day.  She still has a very long way to go to get back to her old self, full of energy and vitality.  It is coming, and as hers returns, so does mine.

This time away and being consumed with matters right at the core of being made me think in different ways.  I am still sorting this out to come to know just how my mind-set has changed.  My principles are the same, but the emphases have shifted.

Perhaps the following editorial starts to tell some of these changes.

GMason)

Over the seemingly endless weeks of total concern with the health of my wife, I stopped thinking about most other things. 

One thing, of many, that occurs to me is how grateful I have been not to think significantly about Islam and Muslims.

There would be little reason to think about these anyway were they to have a more “Christian-like,” live-and-let-live policy toward themselves and others--also, if the President of the United States, his cabinet, particularly the State Department and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Congress were not sycophantic about Islam and Muslims.  The same cloying sycophantia comes from people who ought to know better, in Canada, Oceana, the United Kingdom, America, and Europe.  All these sycophants are pumping up these Islamic jihadists into thinking that Islam is correct, and they are omnipotent, omniscient, and infallible.  The abased Western attitude accelerate probabilities for more greater, severe external conflicts with Islamia and more and more severe internal conflicts with Muslims, over-inflated with their own (irrational) sense of importance.

These are not new ideas, of course.  They play a different role in my mind these days.

For example, if someone wants to believe in and actually practice something as nutty as Islam, fine.  The same applies to Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, and so on.  There are lots of frankly irrational sets of ideas floating about and plenty of people glomming onto them as life-rafts in the dark nights of their lives.  By contrast, there are also fully rational, fully integrated ideas fully suited to the nature of humankind, able to serve as grand conductors for living rational, happy lives.  They are there simply for the taking.

The rub comes in, particularly with Muslims, is that they just cannot stop minding other people’s business.  They want to stuff their damned crazy Islam down everyone’s throat in a one-size fits all exercise of dominion over others.  They seem incapable of any live-and-let-live behavior. 

Again, if I am wrong, if there are live-and-let-live Muslims here or abroad, I would love to meet some.  Since 11 September 2001, I have found none.

Oh yes, some say they are living only the great jihad, i.e., the struggle for inner perfection in accordance with Islamic doctrines, while only a few Muslims insist on the lesser jihad of in your face, bow down and accept Islam, or I will conquer you, enslave you, or behead you, I don’t care which.

However, try to engage such a “great jihad” Muslim in critical examination of the tenets of Islam, and he becomes more and more defensive, very quickly, and soon shows his dark side.  Just as you cannot be a little bit pregnant, you cannot be a “moderate Nazi,” nor can you really be a “moderate Muslim.”  Such are impossible.

The ideal state of affairs lets Muslims do unto themselves with Islam and continue to perpetuate their centuries long stagnation.  Properly, they inflict this on themselves, not others.  If they want an unlimited supply of crap, then more power to them—provided that they keep it to themselves.

For weeks this summer, I was in an Islam-free zone mentally.  This was in and of itself pleasant.  I did not feel like I was living defensively in my own country any longer.  No one “wanded” me for concealed weapons.  No one examined my bottles of water to see if I was really carrying nitroglycerin or some liquid form of nerve gas.  The only unwelcome intrusions into my psyche came from seeing a couple of Muslim women in the medical center.  Note, however, that I did not rush up to attack or harass them or demand they apostatize, become dhimmis, or be beheaded on the spot.  When the sight of them went away, I forgot them entirely.

For a few weeks, I was Islam-free, Muslim-free, and not living defensively in my own country.

Why should we in America, Canada, the UK, and Oceana have to live defensively because of Muslims?  Why do we not neutralize their threat to the quiet exercise of our rights as human beings to live according to our values, not theirs?   Why must we do the changing?  Why must we abrogate our holidays?  Why do we have to worry when getting onto jetliners?  Why do we have to see their faces spitting venom at us on the various news interview channels?  Frankly, who in the hell cares about them, other than getting them the hell out of our faces?

You want to wear a tent over your face and head?  Fine, but not for things like driver’s license photographs.  You want to kiss rugs five times a day?  Fine, on your own time.  You want not to assimilate, then go home, and home for that is not here.

We have got to make Islamists as a threat to our lives go away.  We must stop giving up our civil liberties to accommodate Islamists.  They can give up theirs, as long as they are threatening.  If they want to run hate-centers in mosques, then they get surveilled continuously.  If they want to move into arenas where they can cause immense harm, such as airports, then they can get profiled, not us.  Protection of their rights must never be more than protection of ours, and our rights do not mean that we bend over to kiss their derrieres.  If they want an Islamic society so badly, then they must go to Islamia, to North Africa, the Levant, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf countries, to the “paradises” of Afghanistan and Pakistan, or to that “halcyon archipelago” known as Indonesia.

If they come our way, and there is a huge question about allowing that, then they must adapt to our civilization, not us to their non-civilization.

Seeing how President Bush, the leader of the USA, grovels before Muslims, spouting clichés and lies endlessly, and how he thinks sand savages just love “democracy” tells me what it tells everyone.  The problem, dear Brutus, lies with us.

Visualize a country without Islam, then a country that will not tolerate threats from Islam and Islamists.  Let’s make it happen.

George Mason