Muslims are necessarily fundamentalists

There is an incompatibility between Islam and the ideas which are fundamental to Western civilization.

There are logical contradictions between the principles at the basis of Islam and the West. One cannot resolve logical contradictions, they cannot be solved in the way that problems can. You simply cannot square a circle.

It’s got nothing to do with terrorists, or fundamentalists, fanatics, or Islamic radicals of various sorts.

I’m here talking about mainstream Islam and the fact that it is in serious, direct and open contradiction with principles which are at the core of Western civilization and form the very basis on which all our Western world are erected.

I am not talking about issues like the treatment of women. Not only this is not even remotely the issue that concerns me most (I am much more concerned about the way Muslims treat non-human animals: just look at their terrible ritual slaughter record), but also, and more importantly, Islam’s treatment of women is only one aspect, one application of the much more general problem of Islam’s incompatibility with Western principles which I am about to discuss.


There are several elements in Islam which conflict with and contradict Western core principles. Here I'm outlining one of them.

All Muslims believe (and they must believe, I mean it’s not open to interpretation or dispute) that the Koran is the actual word of God. They think God himself dictated it word by word to Mohammed.
Christians think that the Bible was written by human beings: that leaves a lot open to different interpretations and variations in opinion, and it leaves a lot of room for mistakes.
But for Muslims, none of this tolerance and flexibility is possible. Every true Muslim must believe in the complete, literal truth of every word of the Koran.
So, basically, every Muslim is a fundamentalist. That old, tiresome, repeated ad nauseam distinction between Islamic fundamentalists and the “benign” majority of mainstream Muslims is much less important than it is constantly portrayed to be.
This fact in itself, that all Muslims believe in the literal truth of the Koran (no word of the book can actually be disputed) “invites trouble”, opens the gate to all the flood of problems that we have continuously witnessed in the history of Islam. It is a veritable Pandora’s box.
The funny thing is that Muslims themselves have used this argument in order to justify their own intransigence and intolerance, for instance when they try to justify the fatwa against Salman Rushdie. And for people with short memory, I want to remind that, when in Muslim communities living in Britain there were episodes of public burnings of Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses in the streets, it wasn’t a minority of fundamentalists who were doing and justifying the burnings. On the contrary, it was the Muslims’ majority.
Whenever I watch a TV debate or interview involving Muslims, hardly ever I see the interviewer or participant in the debate ask a Muslim person (supposedly a member of the tolerant Muslim majority who has no problems with Western values) what s/he thinks of the fatwa against Rushdie. That question, and especially its answer, obviously would immediately show an unbridgeable gulf between the supposed “tolerant Muslim” and the rest of us, and would expose this construct of the “tolerant Muslim” for what it is: a myth.
To clarify a possible misunderstanding, I am not here talking about personality traits: I don’t mean “tolerant” in the sense of nice, decent, pleasant, likeable person. I’m sure that there will be many Muslim individuals who fit the latter description. But their “tolerance”, or rather lack of it, is nothing to do with their personal characteristics: it’s not a matter of personal choice. They have no choice. If they are Muslim, they must think that the Koran was indeed written by God through Mohammed’s hand, and therefore it necessarily follows that they cannot tolerate a work like The Satanic Verses: to them it will be tantamount to blasphemy, an insult to God himself.

Violence has a different definition for Muslims

To state that Muslims, by reacting with anger, attempts at intimidation and with both threats and acts of violence to the claim that Islam is violent (regardless of the question whether this was what the Holy Father simply quoted), are saying with their own actions what has been claimed just with words is even too obvious.

What I think is showing here is a semantic gulf between the West and Islam.

I cannot believe that all Muslims are so stupid (it’s possible, but statistically improbable) not to realize that for someone to say: “I’m not violent, and I’ll kill you if you say that” is a situation worth of a comedy sketch.

What I think is that when we Westerners say “violence” or “violent” we mean something entirely different from what Muslims intend by the same words.

The Western definition of those words, for reasons of culture, history and mentality, is not the Muslim definition of them. They have a negative connotation in both worlds, but they are applied to different behaviours and actions.

For example, for us in the West the act of killing someone who has offended Mohammed, Islam, the Koran or anything sacred to Muslims is an act of unqualified violence. For Muslims, it simply is not: it is indeed an act even laudable and in some circumstances legal and required (e.g. the fatwa proclaiming the death sentence for Salman Rushdie).

I personally am convinced that the Pope believes in the words he quoted from the erudite 14th-century Christian Byzantine emperor, Manuel II Paleologus. He did not retract them. The reason for his expressing regret at the way they had been taken was mainly, in my opinion, to protect the unfortunate people who are already persecuted on a routine basis and prevent them from being persecuted even more: I refer, of course, to the Christians living in Muslim countries, particularly in the Middle East, where the burning of churches is a normal occurrence, only made worse by the jihad against the Holy Father.

And, to mix the sacred with the profane, does anybody remember what the Muslim Zidane did when he headbutted the Italian Materazzi in the football World Cup final last July? He blamed Materazzi for having provoked him, stubbornly refused to apologize to him and, in the politically correct environment of the FIFA and the liberal media, he almost got away with that lame excuse. It looks like blaming others for one’s own violence and irrational behaviour is definitely a Muslim thing.

What is natural and is it better?

The word “natural” is treated in a way peculiar in the extreme. This perhaps reflects our confused ideas about nature, or perhaps darker, more sinister misconceptions are at work.

There is a strange dichotomy between the positive connotation of “natural” in one realm (that encompassing health, food, medicine, environmental management, and the like) and the negative connotation of “natural” in another realm (social and political organization).

If you use the adjective “natural” in conjunction with objects of the first group, eg natural remedies, natural substances, natural environment, it is almost invariably taken as a virtue, a good qualitative appreciation.

If, on the other hand, you use “natural” in discussions of the second group of subjects, for example regarding differences between sexes, sexual orientation or a thorny question such as war, its use is at best controversial, and at worst considered a threat against the march of progress.

In expressions like "natural foods" or "natural medicines", "natural" is taken to mean, among other things, "good" and "not harmful". In the case of remedies or drugs of natural source, the idea is that they shouldn't have the nasty side effects of other drugs.
In fact, there have been cases of harmful side effects of so-called natural and herbal remedies, much the same as the risk exists with all medicines.
And, if you think about it, there's no reason why it should be otherwise.
Poisonous mushrooms are natural, and so is snakes' venom.
The idea that substances occcurring naturally should necessarily be good is a fantasy, but a widespread one. “Nature knows best” is the dogmatic slogan in this field of thought.

But, when we discuss sexual roles, the natural, biologically determined forces moulding the behaviours of men and women are treated as demonic entities to be fought tooth and nail. Something similar applies to many explanations of social facts, events and behaviour in terms of nature, including class differences, race differences, sexual orientation, violence, war.
In all these areas “we know better” than nature, we can improve on it, or this is the received wisdom.

We don’t know whether our view of social organization is indeed better than a more natural one. Of course, the dispute is often about what is natural, but frequently that simply shifts the question, because the sort of people who have utopias and are certain about what the best society would be are also people who defy the most compelling scientific data and reject the most overwhelming empirical evidence when these don’t conform with their own pet theories.

I think that both attitudes are wrong, or rather that this dichotomic attitude, which expresses itself in the two faces of the same coin, is wrong. There should not be an a priori value judgement about nature and what is natural, in either direction.

Each situation where we compare something “natural” with something artificial, or created by human individuals and societies, should be considered according to the particular circumstances of the case and judged accordingly.

UK Muslims back 7/7: so what's new?

A 7 August 2006 survey reveals that almost a quarter of British Muslims believe the July 7 terror attacks in London, the worst the city has ever seen in its long history, were justified because of Britain's support for the war on terror.

And nearly half of the UK Muslims questioned said that the 9/11 attacks on New York were a conspiracy between the US and Israel.

The survey found Muslims under the age of 24 were twice as likely to justify the 7/7 attacks as those aged over 45.

A third of those polled said that they would prefer to live under Sharia law in the UK rather than British law.

Now the question is: what is the news value of these results?

Only if you are a liberal, a leftie or a person brainwashed by politically correct propaganda, this may seem shocking to you.

Let’s face it: the Muslims living or trying to live in the West are extremely lucky that the Western people do not know almost anything about Islam.
Ignorance is the greatest ally of the Islamic world or, to paraphrase a famous song, Western ignorance is a Muslim’s best friend.

The majority of people of Western countries, understandably, do not want to read the Koran and do not want to know about the Muslim doctrine. Who can blame them? It’s one of the most uninteresting theories ever developed, philosophically it’s a non-entity.

Unfortunately, its importance does not derive from its non-existent intellectual worth: it stems from the terrible power it holds on people who culturally and morally belong to a different age from ours, from its political significance.

Who else in the West should know anything about Islam? The media people, like all those on the left of the political spectrum, are completely naïve in their misunderstanding of the Muslim world. They erroneously believe that everybody is the same, that all humans of all races, cultures and latitudes want the same things and share the same values, which is obvioulsy not true. So they attribute to Muslims the same desires, intentions and attitudes of mind that they have, so losing any possibility of grasping the first thing about them.

One detail particularly revealing of this huge incomprehension, a funny one too, occurred when Channel 4’s Jon Snow, during the TV broadcast yesterday of his survey of UK Muslims, talked in sheer puzzlement to the camera about a Muslim bloke who had just tried to convert him to his own religion: “He tried to convert to Islam even me!” he cried, in true disbelief, as if the young chap had attempted something amazing and not simply done what was the most natural thing to him, what the Koran demands him to do with any means.

The Arabic word for the part of the world which is non Muslim, translated literally into English, means “not Islam yet”. This clearly means that, for the Koran, the whole world must become Muslim one day.

The advertisng blurb for this recent survey was “You’d better know him better” next to the picture of a Muslim lad.

But the point is: we know who Muslims are already, or at least the Western authors, political thinkers and philosophers who have not been blinded by the current media propaganda and political orthodoxy know.

Whenever some Muslim commits an atrocity, you watch the news coverage and what do you get? TV crews interviewing Muslim leaders, “scholars” and common people about whether that is the “real Islam” or “what the Koran says” or not.

But you never see or read anything in the mainstream media that shows the other side of the coin, a different opinion.

This biased, one-sided reporting is the equivalent of a situation in which some staff of a large corporation, like a multi-national for example, committed something illegal or damaging to the public health or the environment, and the only people that journalists bothered to interview, the only ones asked to voice their opinion on the matter, were the spokespersons of the company involved itself.