Fitzgerald: What the presidential candidates should do
Fred Thompson has denounced CAIR. Good. Now Thompson has to inject into the public discourse the word "Jizyah" -- he, or Tancredo, or others. That word, and what it means, has to be introduced into the national consciousness. Merely using it in a speech, or in speech after speech, and explaining its meaning, will do much to rectify the complete failure of the Bush Administration -- from which all Republican candidates, to be successful, should be distancing themselves as noisily and publicly as possible -- to educate, to instruct, the public about Islam.
Instead, Administration officials continue nattering on about how splendid Islam itself is. Only a "handful," they say -- oh, they're a handful all right of the "radical wing of the Islamist wing of the extremist wing" (fill up the page, printer, with more of the same) have "hijacked a great religion." That is why we are apparently, as long as Bush and Rice and others are in power, condemned to being instructed that we are fighting a "war on terror."
Those candidates for President who demand an end to the "payment of the disguised Jizyah of aid." They should explain that the forcible diversion of non-Muslim taxpayers' money by their own government elites (who are ignorant, confused, not knowing what or how to deal with Islam, either abroad or within the Western world) is wrong. The diversion of money from non-Muslim states to Muslim regimes and peoples is exactly the wrong thing to do. For that aid simply increases the opportunities for corruption, and corruption, in turn, always leads to those who are not in on the corruption to turn to Islam as their solace.
As Islam is the belief-system, the only one possible, that serves as a prism through which to view that corruption, they declare it un-Islamic -- to which the only answer is not merely more honesty but rather more Islam. And the answer -- of Hamas, of the Ikhwan in Egypt -- of more Islam always makes things more dangerous for Infidels, whatever its effect within the states of Dar al-Islam. When that aid from Infidels is not only squandered, but pocketed by the Arafats and Mahmoud Abbases, the Mubaraks (father and son) and others in the ruling group, this wins no hearts and minds among the population. That population sees the corruption. For that matter, it wins no hearts and no minds among the corrupt rulers themselves.
There is no gratitude and there cannot be, given the hostility toward Infidels inculcated by the Total Belief-System of Islam, which divides the world uncompromisingly between Believer and Infidel. And the payment of this Jizyah does two other things. It sets up the idea in the minds of Muslims who receive the aid that it is theirs by right, it is owed to them by the Infidels. And they act according to that belief. Just look at the Palestinian Arabs using such absurd terms as embargo and boycott to describe the refusal of Infidel states to give aid to Hamas, or to a Hamas-linked government. What a peculiar definition -- though not too peculiar, apparently, for Western media not to repeat without question such words -- to apply to a halt in foreign aid that the Muslim recipients have done nothing to deserve. They have been on the permanent UNRWA dole for nearly sixty years, with the roles constantly expanding. They now exhibit the bland assumption that they will always be taken care of by others. This assumption comes naturally, as do those long hours of idleness, with hubble-bubble pipes and dominos and endless hours of television relieved only by marching around and constantly planning attacks, and sometimes carrying them out, against the perfidious Israelis. Those Israelis, meanwhile, were without any aid at all before 1967, and took in millions of impoverished Jewish refugees from the Arab lands (more Jews fled Arab lands than the reverse), from Russia, from Ethiopia, and several dozen other countries.
The payment by Infidels, the further transfer of wealth beyond the ten trillion dollars paid to OPEC Muslim nations since 1973, also has a bad affect on the donors. They have come to act as if, and apparently to believe, that they simply must continue such payments if at all possible, for it is their duty. The absurdity of this, when Saudi Arabia alone takes in, quite undeservedly, nearly one billion dollars a day, and when the money piles up in Kuwait and the Emirates and Qatar, and yet the Muslims lift not a finger to help their fellow Muslims except for payments to suicide bombers and for every kind of weaponry and propaganda campaigns directed against Israel or other Infidel states, needs to be recognized.
Everyone is waiting for a Presidential candidate to start speaking about such things truthfully. And if he does so while also distancing himself from Tarbaby Iraq, showing why it makes no sense in the larger scheme of things in the war of self-defense against the Jihad, such a candidate is likely to be unbeatable.
And should be.
