The Wall Street Journal's reporters Ian Johnson and John Carreyrou recently pointed out that Muslim extremists define Arab lands to include Europe. "Fatwas," they write, "are traditionally only valid in the Islamic world, so [Ayatollah] Khomeini's [1989] fatwa implied something profound: Europe was part of the Islamic world [emphasis added]. It was a revolutionary change that now is accepted by many Islamic theologians and thinkers." Europe was part of the Islamic world?
Migration to Europe, with no intention of assimilation, according to Robert S. Leiken, a nonresident fellow at the Brookings Institution, serves as a tactic for Muslim reconquest: "In Islamic mythology, migration is archetypically linked to conquest. Facing persecution in idolatrous Mecca, in AD 622 the Prophet Muhammad pronounced an anathema on the city's leaders and took his followers to Medina. From there, he built an army that conquered Mecca in AD 630, establishing Muslim rule. . . . Europe could even be viewed as a kind of Medina, where troops are recruited for the reconquest of the holy land, starting with Iraq."
How can one "solve" the problem of Islamic extremism?
The problem is this: to Islamic extremism, democracy is toxic. Al Qaeda-affiliated Abu Musab al Zarqawi, just before the January Iraqi elections, gave a speech in which he listed seven reasons to condemn democracy: Democracy requires obedience to man, not Allah; democracy allows freedom of religion, even to convert from Islam to another religion; under democracy, the people, rather than Allah, rule and pass judgment; democracy's freedom of expression would allow condemnation of Allah; separation between religion and state calls for secularism, totally inconsistent with Islam; democracy's freedom of association would allow one to join an unacceptable party; and finally, that majority rule is "totally wrong and void because truth according to Islam is that which is in accordance with the Koran and the Sunna [i.e., the tradition of the Prophet], whether its supporters are few or many."
In London, where one of the blasts went off near the Arab area -- Edgware -- The New York Times quoted a Lebanese resident, "This was a message to us. They want us to get out of here and go home." So Arabs living outside the Middle East are now legitimate targets?
What do they want?
Islamic extremists say they want America and her allies to leave "Arab lands." Islamic Sharia law says Muslims must present non-Muslims with the three choices from Sura 9:29 of the Koran: conversion, submission to Islamic rule with second-class status and a special tax called the jizya, or death.
For those of us who support freedom, minority rights, women's rights, religious freedom, rule of law, transparent government, and separation of religion and state -- they want mass suicide. Nothing less.