"I'm a policy guy and excuse the directness but when folks in Jihadwatch's world make Islam the problem they are indirectly helping the violent extremists out there." -- from a Muslim apologist, doing his sly damnedest in the comments field here
No, Jihadwatch does not "make Islam the problem." Islam itself -- what is in the Qur'an, the Hadith, the Sira -- is what makes Islam the problem. That, and the tenets that naturally arise from those texts, and that, over 1350 years, in many different lands, with many different sets of non-Muslims, have been acted on, by Muslim conquerors determined to kill, or convert, or permanently reduce to that subjugated status of "dhimmi" all those conquered non-Muslims.
If we ignore history, and ignore the texts of Islam, then we can all play the game of "Let's Pretend." But playing the game of "Let's Pretend" is what has gotten the countries of Western Europe in the fix they are in. Playing "Let's Pretend" simply allows non-Muslims to continue to ignore reality, continue to turn their heads away, as people in the last century, and more than once, turned their heads away until the reality could not be denied.
In the case of Islam there will not be an invasion of Poland or a Pearl Harbor attack or a seizing of Manchuria, but rather a slow and steady conquest. That is why it is important to alert, using nothing more amazing than the most banal and obvious of truths about Islam -- truths that no non-Muslim growing up under Muslim rule, and no apostate from Islam can fail to be aware of. See Wafa Sultan, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali, see Ibn Warraq, see hundreds of others, with their numbers swelling in the Western world all the time. See those great Western scholars of Islam -- Schacht, Jeffery, Snouck Hurgronje, Lammens and so many others -- who studied and wrote about Islam before the Great Inhibition set it. That is, they studied and wrote before Muslims, and their non-Muslim sympathizers, managed to insinuate themselves into academic positions where they have been quite good at keeping out any other viewpoints, and have steadily managed to hire and promote each other, aided of course by grants from Arab governments and institutions and individuals, until they have managed, all over the Western world, to control so much of what is taught about Islam and "Islamic studies" and "Middle Eastern studies."
But a few holdouts never were booted out, and nowadays, many in the West, alert to the danger, have simply chosen to go around, to do without, to ignore, the sly apologists of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA Nostra), and that has had a salutary effect.
The American government should simply set up institutes to teach Americans about Islam and the Middle East, going carefully around the universities -- or perhaps carefully vetting every department that would wish to get in on the money. It may not be possible to re-create an atmosphere in American universities, or in other universities of the Western world, in which disinterested study, rather than transparent apologetics, is offered to innocent students. Certainly the number of schools where such study is possible has diminished over the past 30 years. Georgetown's lean, mean, jogging John Esposito is the rule, not the exception. But one should at least try. University administrators now have a duty to inform themselves fully, and not permit the fellow-travellers of MESA Nostra already ensconced in their institutions to manage to smuggle in one more of their number.
Eventually even to belong to MESA Nostra will be seen as somewhat comical and suspect. It must terrify the members of MESA Nostra that, out of nowhere, so many well-informed people -- because a doctorate nowadays in Middle Eastern studies guarantees absolutely nothing, nor does a tenured post -- are simply bypassing them and informing themselves about Islam on their own. But what can you do when all the canonical texts of Islam, all the Muslim commentators, and all the evidence from history as carefully accumulated by hundreds of careful scholars, are against you? How the hell is someone like Rashid Khalidi or Laurie Brand or Joel Beinin going to impugn Joseph Schacht, or David Margoliouth, or Snouck Hurgronje, or Vajda, or Abel, or Charles-Emmanuel Dufourcq, when they refuse to stay buried, but are being triumphantly revived, read, studied, and found not wanting, but thoroughly relevant to explaining the evidence of the Jihad and dhimmitude that are everywhere around us?
MESA Nostra and its European equivalents, and all the attempts to thuggishly silence truthful discussion about Islam, from Said's Orientalism to the latest lawsuit by CAIR or latest phony "Dialogue of Civilisations" or conference on "The Need for the 'Other' in Western Civilization: The Case of Islam" and so on and so obviously forth, are now coming to naught.
The evidence from 1350 years, and from today's newspaper, is just too great. And you cannot hide the Qur'an, the hadith, and the sira forever from the Infidels. Some of them actually know how to read.