One of the great pleasures that has come to me since I joined as a writer for Jihadwatch has been discovering (or revisiting) the work of so many lucid and humane authors who address the issues that swirl around the global confrontation with expansionist Islam.

It is no small thing to me, the existence of these authors; the subject matter we deal with here is grim. The news we’re dispensing is bad. No one really wants to hear it. In fact, most of those whom we try to convince are strongly motivated to dismiss our arguments out of hand because:

• They’re beguiling themselves with multiculturalist leftism, which subjects the West (especially the United States, the Christian faith, and the State of Israel) to an outrageous double standard, while giving Islam (and usually, Marxism) an infinite supply of “Get Out of Hell, Free” cards.
• They have internalized, too deeply and in the wrong way, the post-Westphalian imperative to avoid religious conflict by treating faith as a private matter. One should no more criticize another man’s faith (or faithlessness) than one should discuss the physical attractiveness of his wife. It’s simply… uncivilized, and it can lead to a bloody fistfight.
• They are genuinely magnanimous and tolerant, and hence are reluctant to accept the “bad news” we have shown up to preach about Islam. Surely, it’s just an ugly caricature–the equivalent of those “Jack Chick” tracts that mock the Catholic sacraments (the eucharist is a “death cookie”) or Father Coughlin’s radio rants denouncing “Judaeo-Masonry.” The ugliness of Islamic orthodoxy is simply impossible for them to reconcile with the friendliness of the Egyptian guy who runs their favorite shish-kabob cafe.
• They are really, deeply scared. That is something humiliating to admit. So they lash out, deny, ignore, or wish away the facts.

So ours is a tough line of work. I’m reminded of one of my favorite TV shows, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit. It focuses on detectives who hunt down rapists and child molesters, and does a good job of showing the effects on professionals who spend their lives mucking around in the gutters of human behavior, trying to keep the sewage under control. And where else should we locate the Islamic hunger for world conquest, its adolescent lust for sex and power, its misogynistic refusal to see women as persons, and the sickening crimes against humanity that are committed every day in its name (as this site tries in a small way to chronicle)?

But just as on the show it’s a genuine pleasure to see a sharp detective crack a case and collar a perp, so it’s a real delight to encounter writers who tell the truth gracefully, who swim against the current of doublethink on these issues, often at great personal cost to themselves–or at least, with little reward. Names like Bat Ye’or, Robert Spencer, Robert Reilly and Steven Emerson come to mind. But one person whom I’d never encountered before, whom I’ve read with enormous pleasure and profit, is Ibn Warraq. Ever since Robert Spencer handed me two of his books, I have taken them with to restaurants and cafes to read for pleasure–in much the same sense I enjoy watching Law and Order: SVU.

Why I Am Not a Muslim is a lucid and cogent exploration of the inherent intellectual weaknesses of Islam, the long list of historical crimes that can be laid to its account, and the fragile, heretical offshoots of that faith which tried (vainly) to escape from the intellectual and moral straitjacket that Muhammad placed on a large portion of the human race. My favorite section is its exploration of how Islam tries to hijack the sacred scriptures of both Judaism and Christianity–which Muhammad plagiarized based on hearsay, transmogrified self-servingly into predictions of his mission, then claimed (with no evidence) had been falsified by Jews and Christians to remove all the abundant references to a future (and final) Arab prophet. Whatever Jews may think of the Christian appropriation of the Hebrew Scriptures, or Christians might think of the Book of Mormon, in neither case did the newcomers have the hubris to claim that their precursors had faked their own religious books. It took the bandit-chieftain of Medina to summon that much gall–as Ibn Warraq documents in damning detail.

The other Ibn Warraq book I’m enjoying (it’s too good to race through, and I’m still savoring it one chapter at a time) is Defending the West, a comprehensive refutation of Edward Said’s infamous Orientalism. For those of you who haven’t slogged through the latter book, it is–simply put–the intellectual charter of multiculturalism. Sloppily conceived and hastily written, it has attained almost Qur’anic status among teachers and students at such havens of anti-Zionism and anti-Americanism as the Middle East and Islamic studies programs at Columbia University, Georgetown, American University, to name a few. A deracinated Arab ex-Christian, Said employs all the tools of fashionable French literary criticism to defame the centuries of selfless work done by Western scholars of “oriental” cultures, dismissing hundreds of scholars and their thousands of books as epiphenomena of Western imperialism. In other words, the only reason all these Westerners wanted to learn about the Islamic or Hindu world was to help their governments rape them.

And Ibn Warraq calls Said on his lies. He systematically proves that Said is either ignorant of, or purposely dishonest about, the long list of English, French, and other scholars who dedicated their lives to learning dozens of Semitic or Indian languages; to digging up and preserving archaeological treasures neglected or forgotten by local residents; to collecting, editing, and publishing profound religious and literary works from the ancient world that would otherwise have been lost; to launching the 19th and 20th century renaissance of Hindu culture (a work for which even nationalistic Indians, as Warraq documents, credit these selfless foreign scholars).

This vast work of disinterested scholarship, and the intellectual disciplines it has launched, the cosseted Prof. Said of Columbia University dismissed in a slim and poorly researched book that is now clutched in the fingers of undereducated, anti-Western Ivy Leaguers across the country–and cited, Warraq shows, by Islamic supremacists and bigots in the Islamic world as a tool to intimidate and dismiss those who fight for human rights. I have seen very few works of scholarship that so utterly devastate their targets; the only work I can compare to Warraq’s obliteration of Said is Ludwig von Mises’ concise, irrefutable work on Marxism, Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth–which demonstrated logically, decades before it happened, why the Soviet Union had to collapse.

As downcast as we might become in the face of the traitors and the appeasers, the dhimmis and the timid, we should take some comfort from this comparison. Mises was dismissed in his day as a crank by an economics profession beguiled by varieties of Marxism or corrupted by Maynard Keynes. But his prophecy came true. Marxist economics do not work, so Marxist economies didn’t. Islam corrodes and suppresses the intellect, retards scientific progress, monopolizes and deadens civilizations, and stagnates every country where it becomes a dominant force. Its only advantages today lie in our our addiction to oil, and the fertility of Muslim women. The West still has the means to push back, hard, against Islamic conquest. The weapon it needs is the truth–of the sort told by Ibn Warraq. And he tells it at the highest intellectual level, in language betraying a liberal arts education of the sort few Westerners receive nowadays. Defending the West should be required reading for every undergraduate in America. If you know a young person headed for college or graduate school, it really is the perfect gift. It’s the intellectual equivalent of the polio vaccine. Don’t send anyone off to the swamps without it.