Give Us Liberty

To Mosque or Not to Mosque

By J.R. Nyquist

Everyone, of course, has heard of the Constitution of the United States. It is the supreme law of the land. The first ten amendments to the Constitution are known as “the Bill of Rights.” Americans today hear a great deal about “rights” and very little about the practical measures needed to ensure those rights. Many Americans have forgotten that you cannot have a constitution unless you have a country; and you cannot have a country unless you defend it against enemies, foreign and domestic. At bottom, every constitution must be construed so that the country’s natural right to self defense is not canceled by a growing tangle of individual and minority rights that choke off the necessaries of national defense. So here we are, wrestling with the question: Do Muslims have a right to erect a Mosque near “ground zero” in Manhattan? Does the right of religious freedom, supposedly guaranteed by the Constitution, protect Muslims in the United States from discrimination? Does it protect them against barriers to immigration, against the distrust and dislike of the native population? Does it allow them to build a Mosque near the very place where Islamic “warriors” made a great gash in the chief American city?

Whatever we think of the Constitution, it cannot protect Muslims from the enmity which Islam generates wherever its standard has been raised. In fact, the Constitution was not written to protect the nation of Islam, or various colonies of that nation planted in our midst. The Constitution nowhere says that Muslims have the right to come to the United States, build mosques, or establish their own culture as part of a multicultural patchwork celebrated as a new kind of nation (which effectively negates America). This is not why the Constitution was established. As stated in the Preamble, our Constitution was established “in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promotethe general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity....” It is worth repeating that last phrase – “to ourselves and our Posterity.” There is no reference to Muslims, explicit or implicit. They do not belong to our nation. They are not “ourselves and our Posterity.” Furthermore, we should pay careful attention to the objectives of the Constitution. How does the presence of millions of Muslims in the United States make a “more perfect Union” or “insure domestic Tranquility"? Clearly, the presence of an alien colony in our midst serves to promote disunion and unrest. How would the Arabs react if we built a Christian church in Mecca? Their violent reaction would be immediate and lethal.

Are Muslims the enemies of America? It is presently inconvenient to say so; but insofar as Muslims are like Unitarians, they are no enemy. Insofar as they take the Koran and its teachings seriously, their enmity is established by their own precepts. If a person truly believes the Koran, they cannot be an American without making a mockery of that which Americans are. It is important to say once more: If a Muslim is only a nominal follower of the Prophet, there is no harm in him. He might leave his faith, and become an American. On the other hand, if a Muslim is a Muslim in earnest, consistently and conscientiously following the teachings of the Prophet, then he cannot be a citizen of the United States in good faith. His allegiance is to Allah and to the Nation of Islam. He cannot serve two masters. Mohammad did not instruct his followers to “render unto Caesar the things that are Caesars....” The Muslim faith does not agree with this saying. For this and other reasons, Muslim culture cannot easily coexist with American culture. The God worshiped by Muslims is different from the God worshiped by Americans. It is an error to think that Muslims and Americans can live peacefully together in the same country. Such a project, if persisted in, will vouchsafe a religious war to our posterity. We might as well write a new Preamble for the Constitution “in Order to form a more perfect Disunion, establish Political Correctness, insure domestic Disorder, sabotage the common defense, promote general mayhem, and secure the Blessings of Military Dictatorship to ourselves and our Posterity.” Then, at least, our words would better align with our policy.

Of course, we are a pack of fools, and we hardly deserve our ancestors as we hardly consider the true situation of our posterity. Few have the courage to point out the disastrous course we are following. Americans ought to read the history of Islam. Here they will find a religion spread by the sword; a militant zealotry that swept away the Roman Empire, conquered Africa, Spain and the Balkans. Here is a war that raged for centuries in which millions of Christians were slaughtered and enslaved. When exactly did Islam declare that their war against Christendom was over? When did the Muslims return those lands taken from the Christians? Yet the doctrine of political correctness would have the West apologize to Islam for the legacy of colonialism.

Given the history of Islam, and the history of the United States, only a fool would imagine that Islam and America could be safely blended together. But today we have this formula, invented and carried forward by the political left, called “multiculturalism.” In fact, multiculturalism is merely a denial of American culture. For a culture that is represented by all cultures, is not American. It is everything but American. It would be like saying that everyone on earth is, in fact, an American; that every culture represents American culture. If this is accepted as true, then there can be no American culture and the whole of America’s real heritage is wiped away at a single stroke. If this is not the objective of those promoting multiculturalism, then they have opened themselves up to a serious misunderstanding. For it appears that their project is to destroy the United States of America using multiculturalism to disarm and disorient the American people, taking away the concept of “nation,” replacing it with concepts that will allow them to play a game of “divide and conquer.”

A nation is a group of people united during the course of generations by cultural and social ties, by language and history, by common values and folkways. It cannot be an amalgamation of every people and every culture, with tenuous connections and contrary folkways. Such is not a country or a culture, but a disparate stew. Yet we have been told to become this stew, and thereby lose our unique national identity. This doctrine would eradicate America entirely, leaving nothing but a Tower of Babel in its place. To allow Muslims into the United States, and say they are Americans, is a kind of insanity – unless they are nominal Muslims. But how can we distinguish the nominal from the real? And should this be our job?

If a Muslim wants to become an American, it is certain that he must give up his religion or else we should give up our country; for he cannot believe in Islam while faithfully swearing an oath of allegiance to the Constitution; for the Prophet Mohammad would not have approved of the U.S. Constitution. He would have called for its negation, and many of his followers today understand this. On the American side, it is clear that the Founding Fathers did not establish this country as a place for Mohammad's followers to colonize and subvert. This was not their intention, nor would they look favorable upon descendants who interpreted the Constitution as an instrument for the protection of an Islamic colony inside the United States. They would account any such interpretation as incredibly stupid, belonging to some new species of American idiot.

As may be readily apparent to the wise, it is backwards to imagine that a constitution comes first and a nation comes second, as if the nation was created for the constitution instead of the constitution for the nation. With this error comes the idea that individual rights trump national existence, so that we may push forward the concept of “rights” even if this concept leads to a general unraveling of national existence. There is no legitimate right which effectively disintegrates the nation that observes it; for it would be absurd to propose political principles which promise destruction to those who uphold them, as it would be absurd to propose laws that must lead to the negation of all law, or a constitution which destroys the nation for which it was framed. Not only does the individual have a right of self defense, but the nation also has a right of self defense. For if there were no nation, there could be no unit for organizing the effective defense of the individual.

Furthermore, we should not pretend that national suicide is somehow an enlightened ideal. It is nothing of the kind. And those who despise the nation state are not progressive, but follow a path leading back to the Dark Ages. National patriotism is not a synonym for racism or collectivism. If anyone should reproach the nation with being the cause of war, they should reflect that wars have existed from the beginning of human history, and occur between city states, tribes, clans, and empires. It is a mistake to blame war on the nation state. War is part of the human condition. Men will fight each other whether or not they are organized under nation states or under feudal barons. It is an affliction of all states at all times, not peculiar to the nation state.

Ask yourself: Why is America denied the right to defend its borders, its culture, and the very ground of its mourning (i.e., “ground zero”)? Because the left dreams of a world without nations where war itself has been eradicated; that is to say, they dream of the eradication of America. This dream is a delusion pushed by madmen and political psychopaths. It is an excuse to wage an altogether more dreadful type of war – a war against civilization itself. In truth, there will never be a world without war, just as there will never be a world without poverty or death. To wage war against war is merely a pretext to pursue power for its own sake. For those who want to hold total power, the United States represents a barrier that must be knocked down; for it stands in the way of the aspiring dictator, the communist psychotic, and all those revolutionary lunatics dreaming of a brave new world. Of all countries, it is America that stands in the way of the great socialist commonwealth of mankind, which the student of history knows to be a butcher’s block and a slaughterhouse. Here we see what kind of weapon multiculturalism is, and what it aims to achieve. In this context, Islam merely serves as the “icebreaker of the revolution.”

Does a weapon, deployed against us by the revolutionary left, have rights? No. Does an enemy have rights? Only with regard to the agreed-upon rules of war. The American reader should ask himself, at the end of the day, what would happen if Islam or Communism had its way in America. What if Islam took over? What if a Communist regime came to power? In that case, wouldn't it be fair to describe America as a country occupied by an internal enemy? How is it, then, that we tolerate the open subversion of our country? How is it, then, that we are unable to name our enemies (excepting the ones hiding in distant caves)? Don't we have the right to recognize those who are against us? Or are we already conquered?

Readers are free to write me at JRNyquist@aol.com