Rushdie’s Generic Response (The

Here he is, denouncing the craziness not  of Islam but of all religions, and furthermore claiming that there has been a “mutation” in Islam — no, there hasn’t — that explains current behavior.

What explains Islamic behavior is the fact of growing  Muslim power, and ability to act within the heart of non-Muslim lands.

Three things:

1) OPEC trilliions — nearly 30 trillion dollars since 1973 alone — the result of an accident of geology, has bought  a lot of influence, not only at the U.N. and such non-political organizations as FIFA, but also in Western chanceries, and other banana-peeled corridors of power.

2) Muslim millions who have, in a fit of criminal negligence and near-insanity, been allowed into the countries of the West, of Western Europe, North America, Australia — where those migrants bring with them, undeclared in their mental baggage, the ideology of Islam. And that ideology is incompatible with, and is a danger for, the laws and customs and security of non-Muslims everywhere.

3) Free access to technology from the West, which is exploited to spread the Message of Islam.The audiocasettes that allowed Khomeini to spread his message throughout Iran, while still in exile in France, at Neauphle-le-chateau, the videocassettes, and the satellite channels, and the Internet that allows the posting of beheadings that are apparently chosen because of their efficacy in attracting recruits to the most violent practitioners of Islam — all these products of the West, just like the arms on which the Arabs and other Muslims depend, are given when they should be withheld, and there many ways to withhold them.

None of this comes from Rushdie. Instead of forthrightly denouncing  Islam, that is Qur’an and Sunnah, and the figure of Muhammad, he retreats into this business of how crazy are all “religions.”