SILENCE OF THE SHEEP

Silence of the Sheep
by Yashiko Sagamori

Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.

What should have been the appropriate response to Pope Benedict XIV after he recklessly quoted a dead Byzantine emperor?

The appropriate response should have come from the revered Islamic leaders diligently issuing scholarly fatwahs from their quiet offices in the ornate mosques of Mecca and Qum; it should have come from the hushed classrooms of Al-Azhar Islamic University in Cairo where righteous imams teach their students to bravely navigate bottomless oceans of unsurpassed humanism abundant in every Koranic sura, every hadith, every reference to Mohammad's blessed life; from the royal and presidential palaces of budding Muslim democracies that our government lists among allies in our war on their terror.

The appropriate response should have come from the moderate Muslims all over the world, whether they live in their native lands or, for a reason that is still to be explained, became settlers in ours and can now serve as irrefutable proof that Islamic laws and dogmas are not only capable of peacefully coexisting with decadent Western liberties, but also of enhancing and enriching them in a way nothing else can.

The appropriate response should have come from those Jewish and Christian pundits of Islam who insist on drawing the line between the “real” Islam and Islamofascism. It should have come from every Wahhabi-sponsored department of Islamic studies inevitably present at every American university. It should have come from Condoleezza Rice who, on occasion of the last Ramadan, shamelessly praised the “benevolence” which is supposed to be found at the heart of Islam. It should have come from President Bush who, driven by his trademark ignorance and cowardice, once again, this time from the podium of the UN General Assembly, declared that we were not at war with Islam. (The next day, his audience happily cheered Hugo Chaves who called the President of the United States of America a devil and complained about the stench of sulfur he had left behind.)

It should have come from Tony Blair, who, in the wake of 7/7, announced how proud he was of the Islamic community of Great Britain; don't we all deserve to finally learn exactly what he was so proud of? It should have come from Jacques Chirac whose country, under the gentle, deeply enlightening influence of its ever growing populatoin of Muslim settlers, has become even more sophisticatedly cultured than it used to be when the French still owned it.

The appropriate response should have been very simple. It should have listed all those things that are unique to Islam; things that set it apart from Judaism and Christianity, but are neither evil, nor inhumane. And if Islam really is “just another religion”, then the list of those things, accumulated since the inception of that “Abrahamic faith” 14 centuries ago, must be long and widely known to both Muslims and us, the infidels.

We would all look through the list of all good things that only Islam could have brought into the world, and rejoice at the marvelous achievements of our turbaned brothers and hermetically veiled sisters. Catholics all over the world would cry in shame for their pontiff and begin mass conversions to Islam. Benedict XVI would, for the last time in the history of the Vatican, appear on his balcony in order to tearfully, a la Jimmy Swaggart, admit urbi et orbi the ridiculous errors of his ways, abdicate St. Peter's throne and live the rest of his life as a humble dervish somewhere in Turkey, formerly known as Byzantium.

That's what should've had happened had Manuel II been wrong in his assessment of Islam. Technically speaking, it would be sufficient to cite just a single example of “what Mohammad brought that was new” and, at the same time, good and humane. No such example has been brought up. Here's a small sampling of what has really happened.

Foreign minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit of Egypt didn't mention anything good or humane that came from Mohammad. Instead, he admonished: “This was a very unfortunate statement and it is a statement that shows that there is a lack of understanding of real Islam.”

The Moroccan government didn't mention anything good or humane that came from Muhammad. Instead, it recalled its ambassador to the Vatican.

Sheikh Abubukar Hassan Malin, of the recently established Somalia's Supreme Islamic Courts Council, didn't mention anything good or humane that came from Mohammad. Instead, he urged Muslims “...wherever you are to hunt down the Pope for his barbaric statements as you have pursued Salman Rushdie, the enemy of Allah who offended our religion. Whoever offends our Prophet Mohammed should be killed on the spot by the nearest Muslim. We call on all Islamic communities across the world to take revenge on the baseless critic called the Pope.”

Inspired by his appeal, Somalis have convincingly demonstrated the goodness and humaneness of their religion by fatally shooting Sister Leonella, a 65-year-old Catholic nun, in the back. The nun died forgiving her murderers, which partially explains why I would never make a good nun.

The parliament and foreign ministry of Afghanistan, a country recently liberated by Christians and Jews from the tyranny of the mullahs, didn't mention anything good or humane that came from Mohammad. Instead, they demanded an apology from the Pope.

The government spokesman of Iraq, another nascent Muslim democracy, didn't mention anything good or humane that came from Mohammad. Instead, he said that “the Pope's remarks reflect his misunderstanding of the principles of Islam and its teachings that call for forgiveness, compassion and mercy.” Judging from the growing fervor with which Muslims in Iraq continue murdering each other, Islamic forgiveness, compassion and mercy must be drastically different from what the rest of the world denotes by those terms. In the generally unforgiving, compassionless and merciless Dar al-Islam, Iraq presents the most dramatic example of those exclusively Islamic qualities. Sunnis and Shiites are killing each other with such unsurpassed blood lust that I begin to suspect they mistake their own kind for the children of apes and pigs. If so, someone should explain the difference to them. But on this joyous occasion, they took a brief respite from their daily routine and avenged the Pope's insult by stabbing several Christians to death.

The burning question must be answered: Why hasn't anyone — I mean literally any one — come up with a list of at least some good things Islamic? Why has none of the 1.4 billion Muslims and none of the uncounted millions of their learned appeasers in the West offered us at least a tiny sample of something good and humane brought into the world by Mohammad and his followers in the course of the 14 centuries of incessant genocide that have elapsed since the inception of Islam?

There can be only one answer: Because no such thing exists. During all the centuries of its existence, Islam has miserably failed to produce anything of value to humanity.

Al-Qaeda, in a joint statement with the Mujahideen Shura Council, declared: “...you and the West are doomed as you can see from the defeat in Iraq, Afghanistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere. ...We will break up the cross, spill the liquor and impose the jizya tax, then the only thing acceptable is a conversion [to Islam] or [being killed by] the sword. ...God enable us to slit their throats, and make their money and descendants the bounty of the Mujahideen.”

Kudos to Osama. To the best of my kowledge, this statement constitutes the best, most complete, most concise definition of Islam. As could be expected, this definition caused no objections from those whom it is supposed to hurt the most: the revered Islamic leaders of Mecca and Qum, the Islamic scholars of Al-Azhar University in Cairo, the residents of royal and presidential palaces in Muslim countries assisting us in our war against their terror, the American professors receiving their salaries from Riyadh, the moderate Muslims residing both in the lands that are already Muslim and those that have never been but are turning Muslim right in front of our bewildered eyes, or their Jewish and Christian enablers and appeasers.

The inexplicable, stolid silence of moderate Muslims prompts me to ask once again: What exactly makes us think that moderate Muslims exist? If they do, they must be something akin the mysterious dark matter that no astronomer has ever observed or is seriously hoping to observe, but that is sorely needed to balance the equations that, according to the current state of cosmology, rule the universe. One day, the dark matter will probably disappear from the science's vocabulary, just like phlogiston did when Lavoisier discovered the role of oxygen in the process of combustion, or like the universal æther that was rendered obsolete by the theory of relativity.

What iconoclastic breakthrough is needed for us to finally understand that the division of Muslims into moderate and extremists exists only in our imagination and only because the concept of “evil people” or “evil religion” contradicts everything we believe?

What genius will be able to explain to us that the term Islamofascism is absurd because Islam itself, in its entirety, is a form of fascism? Islam is the ideology of jihad. Take jihad out of Islam and all that's left will be an elaborate set of absolutely meaningless rituals. And when someone tells you that the word jihad means the internal strife of the faithful for spiritual perfection rather than genocide waged by evil savages against the rest of humanity, keep in mind that the title of the world famous classical work on humanism that enjoys ever increasing popularity among the Muslims, Meine Kampf, translates into Arabic as My Jihad.

Will we see a political leader of Einstein's proportions who will emerge in time to remind us that there would have been no victory over Nazism if we had classified the Nazis into a minority of bad, extremist Nazis who had hijacked the perfectly benign political philosophy from the benevolent, but totally undetectable majority of “real”, “moderate” Nazis? Why do we need a genius to explain to us that there would have been no victory over Nazism had we allowed Nazis to come to our shores by the millions, settle in our cities, and change the way our children learn history of the world?

As we know today, Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos saw things with an enviable clarity. One of his sons became the last Byzantine emperor before the empire fell, Constantinople became Istanbul, and one of the most spectacular churches ever built became Hagia Sofia, one of the most spectacular churches ever desecrated by the Muslims.