Its Their Nature

The parable of the Frog and the Scorpion is familiar to most of us.  A scorpion begs a frog to carry it across a river:

Halfway across the river, the frog suddenly felt a sharp sting in his back and, out of the corner of his eye, saw the scorpion remove his stinger from the frog's back. A deadening numbness began to creep into his limbs.

"You fool!" croaked the frog, "Now we shall both die! Why on earth did you do that?"

The scorpion shrugged, and did a little jig on the drownings frog's back.

"I could not help myself. It is my nature."

Then they both sank into the muddy waters of the swiftly flowing river.

In the Jerusalem Post this morning:

Erasing Ezekiel's Jewish identity

For centuries Jews, Christians and Muslims came to Al-Kifl, a small town south of Baghdad, to visit the tomb of the Prophet Ezekiel and pray. 

The distinctive Jewish Character of the Al-Kifl shrine, namely the Hebrew inscriptions and the Torah Ark, never bothered the gentile worshipers. In the 14th century a minaret was built next to the shrine, but the interior design remained Jewish. The vast majority of Iraq's Jewish community left some 60 years ago, but Shi'ites took good care of the holy site.

Until now.

Recently "Ur," a local Iraqi news agency, reported that a huge mosque will be built on top of the grave by Iraq's Antiquities and Heritage Authority, while Hebrew inscriptions and ornaments are being removed from the site, all as part of renovations.

Iraq is the newly minted "democracy" for which so many Americans sacrificed so much.  now they are behaving just as Muslims have behaved for a thousand years: Once a majority, they force non-believers into dhimmi status and erase all signs of the hated infidel.  This is a story as old as the Temple Mount and the Hagia Sofia and as recent as the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron. 

In May 2005 I wrote a post in which I made an analogy between "Good Muslims" and "Good Germans":

I liken the Islamic world to the state of the German nation in the 1930's. The Nazis were a minority party with a small following at first, in the early years of the decade. The percentage of people willing and eager to join in the party's thuggery was quite small.  A far larger number sympathized with the Nazi program of externalizing all blame for Germany's straits with special emphasis on anti-Semitism, an even larger number were quietly alarmed or indifferent but the number willing to stand against the Nazis was minuscule, and hampered by the fact that they were typically not thugs themselves. By the late thirties, Hitler had been legally elected by a minority of voters and once in power he unleashed a growing band of bullies and thugs who were the spiritual ancestors to Zarqawi and his ilk. By the time the danger of Nazism was noticed by the population, opposition became deadly dangerous. It is one thing to risk your life to protect yourself and your family, it is something else altogether to risk your life to defend an outsider, like the Jew. As it was by the late 1930's and increasingly into the 1940's, to be an anti-Nazi German was to risk a horrible, lonely death; today, in "1930's Islam", to be a moderate Muslim is to risk death.

We cannot expect any help from Moderate Muslims in saving their own hides. Their governments cynically use the radical Islamists to keep pressure on their enemies and to keep their own populations under control. There will be minimal help from that direction. Further, every poll taken of an Islamic country shows a sizable population supporting the most rigorous and most intolerant, often Wahhabi or Wahhabi influenced (thanks to Saudi oil money), brands of Islam. These populations are still minorities in many places, but they are sizable, passionate, and ruthless. In general, the more provincial and unsophisticated a society, the more conservative they tend to be. While we can't expect much help from Saudi Arabia, still playing their double game, protected by their oil for the time being, it should surprise no one that Egypt, Pakistan, the Sudan, parts of Indonesia, and other areas, are extremely fundamentalist, extremely anti-American, and extremely unlikely to ever utter a word of complaint about the desecration and persecution of Christians, Jews and others unfortunate enough to live within their midst.

It is also worth wondering if there even exists a sizable population of moderate Muslims. The MSM, our government, most civilized people seem to believe that if they insist there exists a moderate Islam, then it must be so. While I have no doubt there are moderate Muslims, their lack of visibility is troubling. When even in this country, where dissenters are safer than most anywhere else, a rally for Muslims against terror draws minimal numbers, it is troubling.  Whenever there is an article written, or a public stance taken, opposing the Islamic fascists, the brave individual Muslim puts their life at risk, receives condemnation from official organs of Islam, and often receives death threat fatwas. They receive nothing but calumny from the governments which are supposed to be our allies in this war. The official Egyptian press and the state sponsored Imams in state supported mosques, regularly spew out the worst hatred of infidels (that is Americans and Israelis, especially, but with special vitriol for those Europeans who have the temerity to object to their increasing dhimmitude) and apostates. Most Islamic states have death penalties for apostasy, for desecration of the Koran, and for any of a number of offenses against Islam; at the same time, Shariah law openly, arrogantly, discriminates against those who are not sufficiently Islamic, and grants almost no rights to non Muslims.

I continue to believe we need to behave as if the majority of Muslims are moderate.  We do not want to prematurely precipitate a state of war in which the entire Muslim world is convinced they are under attack.  If we continue to kill the terrorists when possible and insist upon minimal standards of civilized behavior where possible, we will win this War with minimal casualties.  Fundamentalist Islam cannot long survive a collision with the modern world.  Unfortunately, our own feckless responses to the Islamists (including treating terrorists as if they deserve full Constitutional protections as criminal defendants, allowing agents of the Islamists to speak for American Muslims while dictating the "proper" approach to Muslims in this country, and demurring when a steadfast defense of our Rights would be appropriate) embolden the Islamists, convinces the majority of Muslims that the West is weak and rotten to the core, and makes a greater eventual conflagration much more likely.

When Muslims behave as traditional Muslims, the Christian and Jewish populations under their rule tend to disappear over time.  The Arab world is essentially Judenrien  and the Christan population in Muslim countries is under great duress.  Apparently, such genocidal colonialism and religious supremacism is simply their nature.