Many times here at Jihad Watch [1] I have stressed the need for those who are resisting the global jihad and Islamic supremacism to stick together -- or at least not to let jihadists, their agents, and/or their useful idiots (or even their own narrow self-interest or what they perceive as such) set them against other people who should be allies in our common fight for survival. At the risk of redundancy or belaboring the obvious, I will repeat here what I pointed out then about such “friendly fire attacks” [2]:
There is a dispiriting number of self-described counter-jihad activists who spend more time sniping at other counter-jihadists instead of actually doing something constructive to fight the jihad. There are those who know all about how it can all be done better and more effectively, but never quite manage to get off their couch and prove it. There are those who sling around reckless and false charges against others, and those who style themselves as junior Machiavellis, maneuvering publicly and privately, in ways more or less transparent, to muscle out those they apparently regard as competition.
I find all this distasteful and wrongheaded, and do not participate, but am for whatever reason often the recipient of it.
This has particular reference to a dispute that opened up several weeks ago regarding the scholar Srdja Trifkovic, author of The Sword of the Prophet [3] and many other fine books. Trifkovic was barred from Canada on false accusations of being a genocide denier and of having been a senior official in the Bosnian Serb government during the Balkan wars of the 1990s. These false accusations were initiated by a circle of Bosnian Muslims who are purveying [4] militant anti-Israel, pro-Palestinian jihad, and pro-Mahmoud “I am proud to be a Holocaust denier” Ahmadinejad propaganda.
When I posted an item on Jihad Watch pointing out how “the ‘hate speech’ weapon is increasingly used by the thuggish Leftist/Islamic supremacist axis to silence its opponents,” Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, a young man who has since then exposed himself as a full-bore agent provocateur [5], writing in the Leftist dhimmi blog Harry's Place to denounce me and other "right-wing bloggers" for all sorts of transgressions (distorted and fabricated, of course) against the sainted Obama and obsessively elsewhere in what has become an ongoing campaign, saw an opportunity to launch an offensive against both me and Trifkovic.
That initiative had two immediate goals: first, to preserve in pristine form the lurid narrative of one-sided Muslim victimization in the Balkans. (Where are Muslims not the victims of the kuffar, rather than the perpetrators?) That issue has been dealt with masterfully by Andy Wilcoxson [6]. The second – facilitated by the provocateur’s presenting to me a passage of Trifkovic’s writing taken out of context (genuinely, not the way Islamic supremacists are forever claiming is being done to the Qur'an by non-Muslims) and accordingly subject to misinterpretation as antisemitic – has been analyzed in depth by the relentless, indefatigable Julia Gorin [7]:
Trifkovic concerns himself with Jewish and Israeli survival. That's more than can be said of other paleocons, too many of whom – not unlike too many liberals – have convinced themselves that Jews are the problem with jihad, and let the Muslims off the hook, often defending them. Unhindered by such biased mental blocks, Trifkovic does not have it in for Israel, as his maligned symposium contribution and a lifetime of work make clear.
Make no mistake. These two seemingly unrelated issues are closely linked: false Muslim claims of victimization (whether in the Balkans or in Gaza) and false accusations of “hate speech” (whether anti-Semitism or “Islamophobia”). They both spring from the same font, and have the same goal.
The key word is survival – survival in the face of efforts to blame the victims of jihad, not the jihadists. This means the physical survival of those fighting against jihad in their homelands: Jews in Israel; Christians in the Balkans, the Philippines, Egypt, Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere; Hindus in Kashmir; Bahais in Iran; Buddhists in southern Thailand; and so on. It means survival of our freedoms against efforts to muzzle and defame those who are telling the truth about Islam, jihad, Sharia, dhimmitude, the Qur'an, the Sunnah, and Muhammad. It means survival of persecuted non-Muslims in places too numerous to name, and whose only recourse in many cases is emigration.
As my colleague Roland Shirk [8] recently observed regarding the much-maligned Terry Jones:
Another argument out there asserts that the actions of Pastor Jones – and by definition, of all Islamo-realists – provoke Islamic violence against real innocent civilians, including unarmed men, women and children: namely, the millions of non-Muslims who live as hostages inside Islamic countries. The numbers of these people are shrinking, to be sure, as resurgent Islamic governments from Kosovo to Iraq find ways to ethnically cleanse their territories, repeating against the Christians the purges Arab states conducted of Jews in 1948. Tragic and criminal as that mass-expulsion was, it did have one advantage: there aren't millions of Jews living at the mercy of Muslim mobs, whom hostile governments can use as pawns or hold for ransom. Likewise, the flight of ancient Christian communities from Muslim-occupied countries is a painful assault on heritage and history. But in the long run it may save their lives, and give the rest of us more freedom of action in confronting global Islam while we still can.
So regarding Trifkovic, I value him as an ally in a common struggle. Like me, he is dedicated to the survival of those fighting against the jihad, both for our freedoms here at home (not to mention Canadastan) and globally, including Israel. We don’t have to agree on everything -- pace the Leftists who try to convince the gullible that any counter-jihadist who ever stood in the same room with another counter-jihadist must necessarily and wholeheartedly agree with everything his momentary companion has ever said and approve of everything he has done. We still don't completely agree regarding his statements to which I initially objected, but we do agree on the primary goal of resisting jihad and Islamization. And I don’t think he is an antisemite or a “genocide denier." I respect his work on Islam and his stand for freedom -- and against the jihad in the Balkans and Israel. I regard the efforts by Aymenn Jawad al-Tamimi, whose pro-jihad (at least in the Balkans and probably elsewhere as well) sentiments are now clear, and others to frame him as such indistinguishable from the kind of smears and threats to which I am subjected constantly.