    Why is Islam so feared and derided today?

    by Ian Buckley

    Pound's biographer Professor Hugh Kenner - with whom I had the honour of
    corresponding shortly before his death - considered that without its
    poets the world would have already have long since succumbed to total
    exhaustion.

    More practically, perhaps, we can view religion as playing a similar
    valuable role in preserving traditional societies, and maintaining
    higher values than the almighty dollar. But not all faiths have 'what it
    takes' to resist the trend towards a world turned into a counting house
    on top of a rubbish dump.

    Indeed, both Judaism and the Protestant variant of Christianity are
    implicated, more or less, in the rise of capitalism. Additionally,
    traditionalist Catholics believe that their Church is now a shadow of
    its former state, having virtually self-destructed after Vatican II.
    While Eastern Orthodoxy and even Japanese Shinto play their honourable
    part in resisting the rush towards a porno-trash non-culture, it is
    pre-eminently Islam that is the biggest stumbling block in the way of
    the New World Order.

    In the first place Islam is a profoundly and genuinely democratic faith,
    as opposed to the ‘democracy’ of fakery and computerised trickery that
    characterised the election of Bush and Blair. Following on from this,
    Muslims also hold true to economic democracy in the form of the
    prohibition of usury. Though now abandoned, this was also once a
    doctrine of the Christian Church. Such a fundamental point is, to say
    the least, unappreciated by the false prophets of globalist capitalism,
    always on the lookout for fresh lands to reduce to a bland and hence
    profitable mass - or mess.

    When Muslims, like those ‘extremist’ Iranians, reject the societies
    (perhaps non-societies might be a better term) of Britain and the US,
    are they really wrong to do so? Or are they just being sensible in not
    wanting a taste of the growing gap between rich and poor, the drug
    addiction, the sleaze, the corruption, the social breakdown, the urban
    gun crime and trash TV that more and more characterises these two
    countries today?

    Significantly, terms such as Ummah and Dar-al-Islam are more or less
    untranslatable, indicating a degree of cohesion and comradely
    brotherhood that those outside the Arabic and Muslim world can barely
    understand.

    Though few of us realise it, we in the West are spoon-fed a bogus view
    of reality: the truth only comes out in peripheral areas. Times,
    Telegraph and Observer dribble on and on about the wonderful EU
    constitution, or how we must 'democratise' Iraq[1]. However in the travel
    sections of such papers you can still read the occasional comment on the
    wonderful hospitality to be found in Libya or Syria, in spite of
    everything that happened in recent years.

    Apparently, tourists there can find themselves being invited, after a
    passing acquaintance with a citizen of those 'evil' countries, to stay
    and eat in private homes. Just try doing that in New York or London! As
    Gavin Maxwell wrote of his stay in pre-Saddam and pre-American
    Apocalypse Iraq :

       'Throughout our journey I was struck by the boorishness of Western
       hospitality by contrast with that of the Arabs. If a stranger rings a
       doorbell in Europe, he must produce some very good reason before he can
       get into the house at all, much less eat there as a guest; yet in the
       lands where there are neither doors nor doorbells the stranger is not
       asked the reason for his presence, and to hesitate in setting food
       before him would be shameful.'

    The anti-Islam crowd often pipes up that some Muslim countries, most
    notably Saudi Arabia and Iran, have a harsh judicial code, particularly
    for errant women. While there is - of course - a kernel of truth in
    this, I would suggest that Western countries should get their own houses
    in order before interfering in the affairs of other countries. As
    comparatively recently as the 1950s it wasn't unheard of for women to
    receive capital punishment in Britain and America on highly dubious
    evidence of murder, when their real crime was 'immorality'. More
    recently, President Bush laughed about the execution of Karla Faye
    Tucker.

    Today in Blair's blight land, the single largest category of female
    prisoners consists of the 'desperadoes' who have failed to pay their TV
    licenses.[2] Additionally, the high suicide rate across the entire penal
    system means that the official view that Britain has no death penalty is
    somewhat flawed to say the least.

    As is clear from the Last Sermon of the Last Prophet, true Islam has a
    civilised attitude towards woman, unlike the misogyny that disfigures a
    significant amount of Judaic (and Christian) thought:

       'O People, it is true that you have certain rights with regard to your
       women, but they also have rights over you. Remember that you have taken
       them as your wives only under Allah's trust and with His permission. If
       they abide by your right then to them belongs the right to be fed and
       clothed in kindness. Do treat your women well and be kind to them for
       they are your partners and committed helpers. And it is your right that
       they do not make friends with any one of whom you do not approve, as
       well as never to be unchaste. '

    Muslims will have to face the fact that they are hated, not for their
    vices, but for their virtues. The normal mind to a large extent rebels
    against such a novel thought. As with the true story of what really
    happened on September 11th, the average person has a mental block when
    confronted by the perverse, amoral wickedness implied by 'hatred of
    virtues'.

    Most know or at least intuitively sense that two massive towers[3]
    couldn't really have been destroyed by a pair of Boeing passenger
    aircraft, but prefer not to contemplate the awful truth.

    As for actual as opposed to fabled 'Muslim terrorism' - not that I agree
    with the dubious practice of coupling faith allegiance to terrorism -
    has there actually been any? There was the attack on the USS Cole, of
    course, but can one really describe suicidally brave men in motor-boats
    versus a huge floating leviathan as 'terrorism'? Other incidents such as
    Achille Lauro and the Munich Olympics have more than a whiff of the
    agent provocateur about them.

    America today, in line with its stultifying decay, hardly produces any
    new contributors to the world of thought. Though scarcely comparable to
    Mencken or Brooks Adams, the present-day philosophic duo of Beavis and
    Butthead have it right: 'People are STUPID'.

    Yes, people are stupid, especially modern Britons or Americans. They are
    pleased to accept assessments of one of the world's great religions from
    various self-interested parties with an axe to grind - from tame
    professors run by the intelligence agencies, to fundamentalist
    'Christian' Zionist nutcases who want to bring on Armageddon.

    The Prophet Muhammad whom they ignorantly deride was in actuality – by
    the standards of his time and ours – an extraordinarily humane man. One
    interesting fact that is seldom brought out today is that many thousands
    of Western Europeans are direct descendants of the Last Prophet.[4]

    As for Muslims and Arabs in general, they can take some small comfort
    from the words of Beregond, the soldier of Gondor, in Tolkien's Lord of
    the Rings: 'We have this honour: ever we bear the brunt of the chief
    hatred of the Enemy.'

    1 'My job is to teach these natives the meaning of democracy, and
    they're going to learn democracy if I have to shoot every one of them.'
    - Colonel Wainwright Purdy (Paul Ford) in the 1956 film The Teahouse of
    August Moon.

    2 Average sentence around 7 days, but still (shamefully) the largest
    category.

    3 To say nothing about the destruction of WTC 7 by the impact of nothing
    at all!

    4 Anyone who can trace their ancestors back to the early medieval
    Spanish royals (much more common than it sounds) is also in all
    probability a descendant of the Prophet.