Book Recommendation: Religion Of Peace

This article originally appeared on VDare in 2007 as Book Recommendation: Religion Of Peace, By Gregory Davis. The article contains a number of salient points made by the author, and by Davis, that are particularly relevant today.

At a September 30, Washington DC meeting of about 200 immigration-sanity activists, author Janet Levy showed us several brief-but-horrific videos of doings in the Islamic world. The two I recall showed an actual stoning of several miscreants (i.e. violators of Islamic law) and an interview with a three-year-old Arab girl who was well-versed in the Islamic demonization of Jews as "apes and pigs."

Throughout her presentation, Levy referred always to "radical Islam." During the next break in the program, I remonstrated, one-on-one, with her that she'd really been talking about mainstream Islam - her subject needn't and shouldn't have the word "radical" associated with it.

Levy readily agreed with me, but explained that she'd doubted this audience was prepared to hear a truth as unvarnished as that, so she'd systematically said "radical" before "Islam," simply to keep the audience with her.

Conservative author Lawrence Auster has long insisted (at least as far back as 2000) that verbal formulations such as "radical Islam," "Islamism," "fundamentalist Islam," and "Islamofascism" are all obfuscations that prevent Westerners from recognizing the mortal threat that the basic Islam of Muhummad poses to our civilization. (My own recognition of the threat arises primarily from Auster's writings. But he now has highly visible intellectual company; see below.)

It can be frustrating being far ahead of most everyone else on a subject, because one has to keep making the same points, over and over and over. During the last couple of years, Auster has expressed his frustration with several prominent scholars of Islam - especially Melanie Phillips, Daniel Pipes, and Robert Spencer - for sounding alarms about Islam but failing to propound the obvious policy response: End significant immigration of Muslims into Western societies.

Auster has carefully unpacked some recent writings by Phillips to prove that, despite her well-expressed alarms, Phillips is - as Janet Levy feared about her own Washington audience (above) - still not ready to fully face unwelcome truths:

It's not just the scholarly elites such as Phillips et al. who have trouble conceptualizing that Islam really doesn't follow moral rules that are taken for granted in Christianity and Judaism. Some months ago, Auster posted an account from one of his correspondents about the reaction of an American audience to an unflinching lecture by an historian about the origins of Islam and the Crusades. An excerpt:

Fortunately, Auster does, increasingly, have perceptive - and visible - company. For example, Washington Times columnist Diana West (appropriate last name!) harbors no confusion about Islam and its supposedly twisted variants; her latest on the subject is here.

But for a sustained discussion of Islam's principles, history, and essential character, it would be hard to top a 2006 book by Gregory Davis, a recent Stanford PhD in political science. The book, Religion of Peace? Islam's War Against the World is a companion to a documentary, Islam: What the West Needs to Know, which Davis co-directed (and which I haven't seen).

The book is spare - only about 130 pages - and Davis's prose is muscular, so reading the book is a pleasure (given the annoying need to read about Islam in the first place). Before getting the book, you can sample Davis's writing and his takeaway ideas in an online interview he did at FrontPageMagazine.

In his book, Davis gets right down to business. On page 4, he writes:

Davis offers no mercy for those who would prefer to evade the subject. From page 19:

Davis argues, convincingly, that one doesn't have to be a Muslim or an Arabic speaker to grasp the Koran. (In fact, most Muslims worldwide don't speak Arabic and, perforce, have to deal with the Koran in translation.) He explains the Koran's organization (chapters are ordered not by themes or chronology but by length!) and the crucial rule of abrogation (when a later directive contradicts an earlier one, the later one counts).

He describes how Muhummad started out weak and mild (the Mecca period) and, as he gained supporters and strength (starting in Medina), became hell-on-wheels. He points out that the later wealth of Islamic societies was largely extracted from the peoples they conquered and slowly ground down.

Here, in its entirety, is Greg Davis's powerful closing paragraph:

If you read Davis's book and attempt to enlighten others with his insights, you may run into citizens of the West who are skeptical that someone outside Islam can truly know the score. To overcome such denial, keep in your intellectual armament an interview ("The Trouble Is the West," Reason Online, November, 2007) with the brave and ever-more-clearseeing Ayaan Hirsi Ali. (If you're unfamiliar with Hirsi Ali, read the introduction to the linked interview.)

The interview has two highlights. First:

Others, such as Auster, will probably disagree that such peaceful mutation is possible. But at present, it's enough to recognize that basic Islam is the enemy, as Hirsi Ali is now saying.

And here is the interview's closing highlight:

Read Davis's book. Read the Hirsi Ali interview. Please. And spread the word. Do it for your civilization.

Documentary: Islam: What the West Needs to Know