PrintFebruary 8, 2011
Bill Kristol, Stand for Truth
Bill Kristol has opened the French doors of his ivory tower, stepped out and deigned to address the great unwashed conservative quarter. High above the people and reality, he admonishes those on the right for not embracing the catastrophic events unfolding in the Middle East.
In his opinion piece, Stand for Freedom, he dismisses or summarily denies the concrete facts on the ground. Of course, we all want freedom. Of course, we support voices yearning to be free. We fought for and believed The Bush Doctrine, and still do. But there is far more at work here, as evidenced by the fierce behind-the-scenes jockeying and arm-twisting by the on-the-ascent Muslim Brotherhood, an organization created after the fall of the Ottoman Empire for the purpose of restoring the rule of political Islam.
The left-wing lemmings are eating up this discourse among us like maggots on dead flesh, but that is their only joy, so let them have it. They are overjoyed to see one conservative attack another, as Kristol goes after Glenn Beck:
When Glenn Beck rants about the caliphate taking over the Middle East from Morocco to the Philippines, and lists (invents?) the connections between caliphate-promoters and the American left, he brings to mind no one so much as Robert Welch and the John Birch Society. He's marginalizing himself, just as his predecessors did back in the early 1960s.
But Kristol is so wrong, inexcusably so. Glenn Beck nailed it. The advance of Islamic supremacism is exactly what is at play here. And we are right to be cautious. Nobody expects Mubarak to survive -- we only care about what comes after.
Finally, someone had the guts to speak to Islamic supremacism and its global project nine years after September 11, and Kristol smacks him down. Many of us have been covering this for years, perplexed and disturbed that no one in the mainstream media dared touch it.
The left always aligns itself with the totalitarian ideology of the day (i.e., Stalinism, Communism, National Socialism, etc.), and so it is with Islamic supremacism. Those of us covering the anti-America, anti-war, anti-Israel movement have documented this for years. CODE PINK, ANSWER, Al Awda, the Socialist Workers Party, the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), CAIR, ISNA, If Americans Knew (IAK), Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA), the Muslim American Society (MAS), and Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) have been working and agitating together for years.
Trust me, Mr. Kristol, Beck did not "invent" that.
There is nothing that Beck said that was inaccurate. It's all there. You don't have to look for ghosts. There is vast historical, political, and judicial evidence of the global jihad and its ties. As for the existence of the violent goals of the caliphate, read the Qur'an and Hadith. Tally the daily death toll of non-Muslims in Muslim countries around the world. Or better yet, take a quick look at the past millennium and the 270 million victims of jihadi wars, land appropriations, cultural annihilations and enslavements.
There is Kristol-lite and there is reality. The Muslim Brotherhood has been open about demanding a restoration of Islamic law. They're calling for democracy in Egypt because they know they have the votes for establishing an Islamic state. And yet William Kristol writes that "the idea that democracy produces radical Islam is false: Whether in Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, the Palestinian territories, or Egypt, it is the dictatorships that have promoted and abetted Islamic radicalism. (Hamas, lest we forget, established its tyranny in Gaza through nondemocratic means.)"
Is that so? So please, Dr. Kristol, explain why Hamas won the elections in Gaza. And explain why all of the jihadists and homegrown terrorists who were born and raised in Western nations. Quoting Robert Spencer, "Muslims are the first immigrant group that has ever come to this country with a ready-made model of society and government they believe to be superior to what we have here."
Kristol also charges that conservatives are opposing freedom, saying it is not a "sign of health when other American conservatives are so fearful of a popular awakening that they side with the dictator against the democrats. Rather, it's a sign of fearfulness unworthy of Americans, of short-sightedness uncharacteristic of conservatives, of excuse-making for thuggery unworthy of the American conservative tradition."
We welcome freedom. We are not siding with dictators, but fighting against the tyranny of Islamic totalitarianism, and so should you, Mr. Kristol. Shame on you.
Kristol laments what he claims is a change among conservatives, saying that "it was not so long ago, after all, when conservatives understood that Middle Eastern dictatorships such as Mubarak's help spawn global terrorism. We needn't remind our readers that the most famous of the 9/11 hijackers, Mohammed Atta, was an Egyptian, as is al Qaeda's number two, Ayman al Zawahiri."
Indeed. Islam produces jihad, Mr. Kristol. Islam produces fundamentalism. The Qur'an commands it, demands it. Millions of jihadis are reading the same playbook. Blaming Mubarak or U.S. policy for jihad is like blaming a woman for being raped (ah, if only she didn't have that vagina, all would be well).
We are not naive. We saw Western liberals usher in the reign of the Ayatollah Khomeini and that, too, changed the world forever, for the worse. Much worse.
Kristol concludes: "An American conservatism that looks back to 1776 cannot turn its back on the Egyptian people. We should wish them well -- and we should work to help them achieve as good an outcome as possible."
Please Dr. Kristol, stop lecturing us on 1776. We live it. Every day. I have for the past nine years since 911. I strongly recommend that Dr. Kristol step back and read Ibn Warraq, Wafa Sultan, Sir Martin Gilbert, Mark Durie, Jewish history, the Muslim Brotherhood Project, the news accounts of the jihad in Thailand, Somalia, the Philippines, Ethiopia, China, Beslan, Moscow, London, Madrid, Israel, Lebanon, Sudan, Tunisia, Kenya...you get the picture.
My blog AtlasShrugs.com has 20,000-odd posts reporting on jihad across the world. The Middle East was once a Christian region; it is now all Islamic save for the tiny Jewish state, and outside of Israel, non-Muslims in the Muslim world suffer brutalities unimaginable, sanctioned by Islamic law.
This is not an attack on Kristol. This is in defense of our position against William Kristol's attack. It is the lack of backbone on the right that has gotten us into such a position of weakness and compromise.
Pamela Geller is the editor and publisher of the Atlas Shrugs website and former associate publisher of the New York Observer. She is the author of The Post-American Presidency.
