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Defeating Jihad: How the war on terror may yet be won, in spite of ourselves

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Serge Trifkovic is fast becoming a leading authority on Islamic militancy and how to respond to it. His The Sword of the Prophet (2002) was an important look at militant Islam. In this sequel volume to that incisive work, Trifkovic continues his hard-hitting analysis coupled with a sober realism about the struggle we are in.

This volume is broken into five parts: a brief review of Islam, its founder, its beliefs and practices, with special reference to Jihad; a lengthy examination of the crisis in Europe; an assessment of conditions in America; the global situation; and a series of proposed solutions.

Taken together these five sections offer a comprehensive and informed overview of the nature of Islamic Jihad and the response of the West. The book offers, in short, a workable understanding of, and plan for, an effective response to the war on terrorism.

And the author is quite right to begin by assessing the threat. A good deal of the problem lies in the fact that many Western intellectualoids refuse to even admit that there is a problem, or are much more inclined to blame the West for the current crisis.

For example, the "9-11 Commission", the US Government report on terrorism, does note that Islamist terrorism is the main worry, but then goes on to argue that the reformist wing within Islam needs to be encouraged while the fundamentalist wing needs to be resisted.

But Trifkovic argues that this distinction between a real, peaceful Islam and an a violent Islamic aberration is false. Jihad and terrorism, argues the author, are intrinsically imbedded in the Koran, hadith, and Sharia. The jihadists are fully acting in accord with their faith. Thus the real question is not, Are there moderate Muslims? Yes there are. But the question to really ask is, Is Islam itself moderate and peaceful? Trifkovic thinks not. Thus talk of reforming Islam becomes a questionable, if unobtainable, goal.

It is this understanding of the real nature of Islam that explains so much about the current crisis in Europe and the incredibly weak and short-sighted Western response. Europa is quickly becoming Eurabia because most Westerners do not understand the real nature of Islam. Peace in Islam can ultimately come when all of the Dar-al-Harb (world of unbelievers) is converted - one way or another - into the Dar-al-Islam (the world of Islam). Thus Islam is in a permanent state of war with the Western infidels until it finally reigns throughout the globe.

While the European response has been woefully inadequate, the American response has not been much better. Basically a policy of appeasement at home and saber-rattling abroad is in place. Fear of offending American Muslims has resulted in a superficial response at home. Foolish notions of tolerance, diversity and multiculturalism have failed to deal with the Islamic threat. Moreover, the West fails to understand that Muslims are unable or unwilling to properly assimilate and integrate into the West. Instead, Muslim conclaves are springing up all over the West, with the inevitable tensions which follow.

And US foreign policy has been confusing at best. Washington seeks to placate and cozy up to various Muslim states, often with counterproductive outcomes. Trifkovic doubts that the democratization of the Middle East is possible. Just as it was delusional to believe in détente with the former Soviet threat, so the idea of exporting democracy to the Islamic world is fraught with danger.

Like the Marxist world before it, the Islamic world is totalistic and implacably hostile to co-existence with the West. And for democracy to be exportable presupposes a framework of ideas that are amenable to it. Islam is fundamentally anti-democratic. The rule of Sharia law alone is the Islamic ideal - democracy is simply heretical.

Trifkovic offers a number of proposals to at least contain the Islamic threat in the West. He favours racial and ethnic profiling as a sensible and necessary feature of our security. He believes mosques should be monitored, sermons examined, and all preaching be conducted in the host-nation's language.

He believes that Islamic activists should be denied citizenship, or that it be rescinded if already given. He urges Western nations to follow the lead of Switzerland which has one of the toughest naturalization policies in the world. You cannot even apply for citizenship in Switaerland unless you have first lived there for 12 years, paid your taxes, and have no criminal record.

Other get-tough measures are proposed. But the author concludes with a more important requirement. The West needs to know itself. What does it believe? What are its values? What does it stand for? And it needs to realize that the historic, core Western values are ultimately not compatible with the Islamic worldview. Say Trifkovic, "Islamic beliefs, ideas and intentions as such pose a threat to our civilization and our way of life".

Thus the author reminds us that the first step in dealing with the war of terrorism is to recognize the fundamental differences between Western ideals and Islamic ideals. And then we need to ask ourselves, which are worth preserving and defending? Which are worth fighting and resisting? Unless the West can accurately and carefully answer those questions, it will not be well prepared to cope with the terrorist threat - nor with any other major threat for that matter.

The author patiently describes the problem and spells out why it is a problem. In the last chapter, he proposes solutions. Most of our problems center around false beliefs that have been put out by the Muslims and assiduously taught by the academics and the mainstream media.

For instance, the riots in France. Our media told us they were "French youths" unhappy over jobs, a very palatable and understandable problem. In fact, the rioters were French Muslim youths expressing their hatred for the West.

Few Americans know that Islam teaches its members that they are not only permitted to lie to nonbelievers but that they have a positive duty to do so when it advances the cause of Islamic domination.

Pursuant to this, Muslims say that Islam forbids killing innocents. That's true. What they don't tell you, is that no unbeliever is innocent. All deserve to die if they do not convert.

Islam is a religion of peace. Yes, but only after the entire world has been subdued and converted to Islam.

And on and on it goes, repeated and sanctioned by the mainstream media and even by the Republican Administration. For the Democrats, these lies are self-evident truths.

The policies proposed to deal with these problems are bold but are common sense. But none of these policies will ever be implemented. The reason is the reason why they have not already been implemented: a bizarre belief system hiding under the glorified title "multiculturalism." Nobody ever asks what this word means. But looking at the practices carried out in its name, it clearly means: Except for Western culture, which is bad, all cultures are good, no matter how cruel, unfair, and inhumane some of them are.

If this belief system is ever to be uprooted, we must understand how it came about and what continues to sustain it. This information can be found in While America Sleeps: How Islam, Immigration and Indoctrination Are Destroying America From Within. This belief system is still being taught to all Americans beginning at the grade school level and enshrined in common grammar-school textbooks put out by the mainstream publishers such as Houghton-Mifflin, McGraw-Hill and Prentice-Hall (under the advice of Muslim consultants).

As long as the majority believes this nonsense, we have no chance to win. And a larger and larger majority will believe them as long as they are taught to innocent children.

This book is not for liberals who think that more toleration will stop a holy waged in the name of a fanatically-intolerant ideology. Neither is it for conservatives who think a bigger Homeland Security budget and invading a few more countries will solve the problem.

It is, quite simply, for people who want the truth: both left and right are clueless against jihad, because they haven't seriously faced its causes, methods, or objectives. Dr. Trifkovic has, and the War on Terror will never look the same to you again, after you read this book.

It is both readable and erudite, practical and profound. Ignore the reviewers who say Dr. Trifkovic is biased: you won't think this when you've read it.

Robert Locke
www.robertlockearchive.com

I would consider Serge Trifkovic's "The Sword and the Prophet" along with Ibn Warraq's "Why I Am Not A Muslim" and Bat Ye'or's "Islam and Dhimmitude" in the category of those rare books capable of lifting the fog on a subject and changing your mind definitively.

"Defeating Jihad" is as precise and concise as "The Sword and the Prophet" was. .Of the two dozen books on Islam I have read , I have not come across a more clear history on Muhammad's life and legacy.

The gist of the Koran are two sets of emphasized injunctions: (a) belief in Allah, and (b) violent antagonism towards non-Muslims.

This is the reason Muslim extremists are willing to kill and to die for their cause; it is also the reason decent Muslims have problems in condemning terrorism: they do not want to be seen by their co-religionists as opposing the Koranic injunctions.

The crux of the problem the West thus faces is: on the one hand it believes in tolerance and in the inherent worth of all religions; on the other hand the Koranic injunctions on violence (coupled with believing Muslims' unconditional faith in every letter of the Koran) and certain pronouncements of the Prophet Muhammad (as recorded in the Hadiths - for example his requirement that Muslims be executed for apostasy) are not merely a religious issue for Muslims but a social and political matter of vital relevance for non-Muslims.

The way out of this bind that Trifkovic proposes is the following: Just as for decades immigrants were obliged by US law to sign in their application papers that they are not members of the Communist Party (not by way of gratuitous political discrimination but because Communists parties world-wide in their charters called for the violent overthrow of democratically elected "capitalist" governments), so also in likewise manner Muslims should be monitored for their adherence to those political principles of violence that stem from - and indeed are stipulated in - the Koran and pronouncements of Muhammad the Prophet. "The precondition is to accept that a practicing Muslim who comes to the United States cannot be "absolutely and entirely" loyal to the United States by definition". Emigration laws would be reformed to exclude Jihadists and citizenship would be refused or rescinded to all Islamic activists.

Whether Trifkovic's recommendations will be taken seriously will be seen. More likely there will be another catastrophe of the magnitude of 9/11 that will trigger the change.

The book has one flaw, however. Israel, the country which since September 2000 had been subjected to 147 Muslim Palestinian suicide bombers (and zero Christian Palestinian suicide bombers) and more than 26000 terror attacks (after it had offered at Camp David a peaceful resolution), the country which has by its policy of targeted killings, superb intelligence, and by erecting the anti-suicide bomber fence effectively prevailed in the war on Islamic terror, does not figure in the book. Instead , Trifkovic chooses Russian handling of Chechnya as the model of a successful anti-Jihadist war. This is bizarre. One can only imagine the world's outcry if Israel had used Putin's methods in Jenin. Recently Russia's invitation to Hamas and the subsequent Mashaal - Lavrov meeting looks more like a throwback to the days of the 1939 Ribbentrop - Molotov Pact than a serious effort towards defeating jihad.

Mladen Andrijasevic , Israel

While the sounds of One World-mantra are echoing ever more macabre in this age of the insurgent jihad, every glimmer of light in the mist of the Brave New World-correctness amounts to triumph.

This book is an indispensable step toward the sane and honest dialogue on global Islam, which - at the moment - seems to be out of reach to the most of Europe's and America's political opinion-makers.

Many had wondered that the West has so indolently ignored the inexplicably terrifying scenes of beheaded Serbs in 1990's Bosnia and Kosovo, both civilians and POWs, having been videotaped by their executioners as the examples of jihadic gruesome "achievements" at the "battlefield for Islam" (moreover, the most of Western governments openly took sides with the Bosnian Muslim and Kosovo Albanian "armies" which have included the mujahedeen fighters and ideologues). Many had also argued that "the West" has distastefully failed to hide the political malevolence toward the tragedy of Beslan and jihadic terror in Moscow. The notion that the very same "Western" politicians, media and academe remained completely deaf to the REAL causes and motivations behind the New York September 11th plane hijackers, London (Madrid, Bali, Tel Aviv...) bombers, ritual executions of Daniel Perle and Theo van Gog, gives an answer to their questions.

On the other hand, I've always failed to understand the point of critiques, not so rarely shouted in Dr.Trifkovic's direction, about his alleged "Islamophobia". He's not sugarcoating the facts with diversity-claptrap (which I'm deeply grateful for), that's obvious. But, it hardly makes "The Sword of the Prophet" and "Defeating Jihad" the "anti-Muslim" books; if the memory serves right, Dr. Trifkovic was highly critical toward the US millitary approach in Iraq from the very beginning (on the other hand, "anti-Muslim" could mean anything in this Brave New World of ours, esp. in the light of the EU's new set of imposed Orwellian standards of the "hate speech", which make any viable academic discussion on the history of Islam simply impossible).

If we want the generation of our children to live (as Andrew G.Bostom, MD, the co-author and editor of another, recently published, seminal work in the contemporary studies on Islam, "The Legacy Of Jihad", had put it) "in a world where the devastating institution of jihad has been acknowledged, renounced, dismantled, and relegated forever to the dustbin of history by Muslims themselves", we must, for a change, to come to terms with the facts first. Then, and then only, there might be a different perspective for the moribund post-civilization we live in.

Trifkovic cuts through the foolishness that has blinded Westerners for so many years, to show us what we're really up against - and what it will take not to just win but to survive.

Brian Mitchell
Washington Bureau Chief, Investor's Business Daily.

* * * * *
Transcending predominant canards, Serge Trifkovic identifies with precision the existential threat to both Western and other modern democracies--global Islamic terrorism, as perpetrated by Muslims following the uniquely Islamic dogmas and historical practices of jihad. Trifkovic pursues the logic of this conclusion with a plan to neutralize jihadism by acknowledging its organic connection to so-called Islamic "activism", strictly regulating Muslim immigration to Western societies, and rediscovering Western cultural and moral values. His book is an indispensable work of erudition and uncompromising intellectual honesty which should be read attentively by elites in policymaking, the media, and the academy.

Andrew G. Bostom, MD, author of "The Legacy of Jihad"

* * *
This is an important and timely book that addresses the key issue of where Islam REALLY stands vis-a-vis terrorism. The author asks us to set aside our politically correct inhibitions and look at the evidence. The book outlines a strategy for meeting the threat that might well serve as a model for Western governments to follow in their war on "global terrorism."

Ambassador James Bissett
Former Head of Canada's Immigration Service

* * * * *
Dr. Trifkovic offers important advice in our post-9-11 struggle. Success requires focusing on the strategic problem, not on the tactics used by our antagonists. The threat to our security comes not from the perpetrators of terrorist acts but from the philosophy that sets them in motion. Until we deal with this reality, success will elude us.

Professor Col. Ronald L. Hatchett
Schreiner University, Kerrville, TX
Arms negotiator under Reagan

This book is a timely and important work. I highly recommend it to all interested readers who are curious about the nature of Islam its regular political consequences.The author along with author Robert Spencer who himself has published a well researched and documented, work "The Truth about Mohammed Founder of the World's most Intolerant Religion" is worthy of praise for tackling this difficult and sensitive subject.

This particular work , "Defeating Jihad" is the second book by Mr. Trifkovic that I have purchased and I recommend this one more than his first one. This man along with Mr. Spencer are doing us all a great service,and we should support them, especially for the sake of those not well informed on the subject of Islamic thought and its foundations. True Islam naturally breeds a nearly inescapable dilemna for both modern Muslims and Non-Muslims alike.

The dilemna as Mr Trifovic informs us is due to the powerful foundational and authoritative textual support that the Muslims (aka terrorists) we do not like or approve of have as the basis for their actions. I mean these Muslims want to be true Muslims according to their authoritative, foundational and traditional standards which include the Koran,the Sharia,and the Sunnah or Hadith--not the Bill of Rights, or Thomas Paine's "The Rights of Man" or even the constitution of the country where any may have been allowed to migrate to and now reside, often living on welfare as a matter of principle. How so?As just another way to rape and disrespect that which they consider blasphemous and their soon to be God given inheritance.

Moderate Muslims,so called because they do not wish to practice their historic faith according to its historic form, as it was delivered to them by their alleged prophet himself, stand on shaky ground really because they have no case at all to make for themselves except to appeal to non-muslim, Christian, Western, Secular, or Rationalist sources and try to make them their own. Purists will not go for that, nor many so called moderates who just want to be true to the religion in its historic form and who do not want to insult the memory of their prophet and model Mohammed who taught them to raid and pillage and do such things himself, by questioning his behavior, or merits as a prophet.

Now while we may see this as potentially dangerous to our peace, considering how many Muslims we foolishly indiscriminately are at this very moment letting into our country, these purists are not bad in their own eyes or when evaluted according to pure Islam, rather they are sincere and consistent followers and are secretly seen as such in the eyes of many, indeed they can make a more powerful case for themselves than that which is called moderate or peaceful Islam and that is everybody's problem.

At this particualr stage of human development,it simply doesn't fit in with other societies(non-muslim).Islam will always be at war with others as long as it is not on top, for there will always be unbelievers and unworthy idolaters to be made to see and feel the truth of Islam through the terror of Allahs judgement! Inflicted by his human instruments. They are relentless in their will to subjugate other non muslim societies, non muslims are meant to be made to feel uncomfortable and inferior. We instantly perceive the potential evil. They are indeed perceived to be evil or bad, by us, who are made to feel the hate of their self righteous zeal, and to any who do not agree with them and are on the receiving end, but they are in their own eyes -- noble, faithful,brave, and true. This image they have of themselves of powerful, brave soldiers of Allah even has a powerful sway over most Muslims who do not want to do it themselves. We have to know that this is most serious for the many involved on both sides, for we are all affected.

There is another issue that coincides with the first one. That is the smell of blood and rot that is coming from America and Western Civilization right now while Islam is experiencing a sort of revival as is customary in the rise and fall of nations,cultures, modes of thought and peoples. Demographic shifts and aging empires of thought are crumbling,even as we see in our own culture, the past is deteriorating before our eyes and something new is going to come out, something inexperienced and ripe for shock.
The truth presented in this book and in Robert Spencers "Truth about Muhammed Founder of the Worlds most Intolerant Religion" is helpful to us who must decide how we are going to deal with Muslim immigration and what we are going to tell our sell out politicians about it. The facts presented are undeniable by anyone who knows their stuff and who doesn't have a pc agenda or pc mandated conclusion at which they must arrive.

Trifkovic reviews key principles and footnotes in Islamic history and then he updates the reader event by event on the incidents of the last decade or so. He provides a thoughtful perspective regarding each of the many Islamic flashpoints of the world, from North Africa, Turkey, Germany, France, Indonesia, USA, etc. Even the problems in Sweden and Denmark are brought to light (Sharia law prevailing in Scandinavia).

This book has useful material for those who seek perspective on Islam today.

"Defeating Jihad" is the only book, in fact the only piece of writing I've read that dares to tell the truth about the so-called War On Terror. "Defeating" honestly lays out what the real problem is: radical Islam. And the author tells us what to do to stop the spread of this doctrine of repression and terror.

For any reader sick and tired of Bush, Blair, the Democrats, the Republicans, all these "leaders" in the War On Terror, and who wants a fresh honest look at what really is going on from riots in France, to bombings in London and Spain, from Iraq to Washington, Defeating Jihad is a must read.

I have just finished reading Trifkovic's book "Defeating Jihad", which is very well structured and written.
There are majority of people, Europeans and North Americans alike, who do not know and do not care what Islam is about and what it teaches, and the consequences of it. And that is dangerous! This is why both Trifkovic's books, "The Sword of the Prophet" and "Defeating Jihad" are important: to teach and inform; hoping that people will listen, read and act upon it.