The Trojan Mosque

There are two kinds of cultures that can co-exist with a majority culture

1. Those cultures willing to integrate to a significant degree within the majority culture and as a result gain equal decision making powers, e.g. the classic immigrant melting pot.

2. Those cultures who choose to preserve their unique culture intact through isolation by refusing integration, e.g. the Amish.

There is a third kind of culture, but one that cannot co-exist with a majority culture, a culture that refuses integration but demands control over the majority culture through violence and intimidation. This is the way of the conqueror culture.

Integration and isolation are both compromises that balance cultural integrity with cultural influence. Both are reasonable and ethical compromises. They are the sort of compromises that have to be made for the larger system to function.

We can posit an analogy to the business world. If Mr. X chooses to join a company, he must to some extent adapt to the company culture, even as the company culture must make some concessions to his individuality. If Mr. X chooses to maintain his individuality uncompromisingly, he can create his own business.

In the third scenario however, Mr. X wants to join a business, but he does not want to adapt in any way to it, instead he demands that the business take on his goals, his values and his priorities. The manager demands to know why such a thing should be done. Mr. X responds simply, "Because if you don't, I'll kill you."

And that in a nutshell is the problem of Islam in the West.

Large scale Muslim immigration to Europe was not simply a physical migration of Gastarbeiters, or guest workers, but a cultural migration. This is something that European liberals and conservatives ignored for too long, before trying to view the whole thing in an American multicultural context. Europe though isn't America and Islam poses much graver challenges than even an organization like La Raza does.

It is not merely hands and feet that came to Europe, but Islamic culture as well. And Islamic culture is primarily a conqueror's culture. Islamic lacks the persecuted martyr narrative of Judaism and Christianity. Martyrs in Islam are killers not saints, dying not to keep their faith, but killing to perpetuate it. Unlike Judaism and Christianity, Islam was never a minority religion for long and has no religious narrative for functioning as one. Mohammed's response to being a religious minority was war. Since his time that remains the consistent Muslim response. "Live and let live" simply isn't in the Muslim vocabulary, except to Dhimmis.

Western Liberals insist on teaching Europeans, Americans and Muslims how to live together in peace, unaware that they're preaching to a single audience. Muslims do not take lessons on life from Western social institutions but from their own, and their key institution remains the Mosque, that outpost of Islam on foreign shores.

Islam has no template for life but that of Mohammed and no narrative for co-existing as a religious minority except war when you are strong enough and war by deceit when you aren't strong enough. When Mohammed was strong enough, he wiped out his enemies. When he wasn't, he signed phony truces with them, while raiding and harrassing them and undermining their alliances in order to isolate them and destroy them anyway. That is the template Muslims are following toward the West today, from without and from within. The only Muslims who don't, are secularized and Westernized enough not to take their guidance from Islam.

So the Mosque abroad becomes the Trojan Mosque, a source of anti-Western values for Muslims and mingled bullying and spin directed toward Westerners. Refusing both integration and isolation, Muslims continue to demand that their values rule the day, without making any compromises in turn. And when they are turned down, time and time again violence becomes their dealbreaker.

While European governments may turn to Brussels or to Rome or to London, Muslims turn to Mecca and then to their local Mosque, putting another cassette tape, CD or MP3 file on play and listening to the latest sermon. Unable to reach an accommodation, unable to co-exist on another culture's terms and unwilling to cede any ground, the tide of honor killings, murders, rapes and terrorist attacks continues as Islam acts the part of the conqueror's culture expecting from its enemies only submission or death.