Fitzgerald: Ali Gomaa and that strange thing, the Golden Rule

And at the same time a representative Muslim shows his inability to grasp the nature of the Golden Rule. Though associated with Christianity, it is a rule so obvious and so sensible as to be of nearly universal acceptance. Indeed, it would seem to most to be the most obvious of and sensible of rules for conduct.

But so far from being obvious or sensible, the very idea is anathema to Islam. For Islam is based on the idea that all of humanity is divided between Believers and Unbelievers, Muslims and Infidels, and between the two there must be unrelenting hostility, a state of permanent war (though not always of open warfare), until - inexorably - Islam everywhere comes to dominate, and Muslims rule, everywhere. Islam is the truth, and the only truth. There are no other truths worth anything, and the only Jesus that counts is the Muslim not the Christian Jesus, and the only Moses that counts is the Muslim Moses not the Jewish Moses. And the same goes for all of the bits and pieces - the personages, the stories - appropriated from Jews and Christians, and distorted by those who first assembled the ideology of Islam.

Exhibit A is then, is this Ali Gomaa, who is no dismissable crank, but rather a respected and high-ranking Muslim cleric. He lives and works in Egypt, where the native Copts, the truest and most unswerving descendants of the ancient Egyptians, have over the centuries been reduced in number by the effects of Islam, by the persecutions and humiliations inflicted on them by the Arabs who brought with them Islam. And Islam, in turn, brought further arabization of those who, though not Arabs, were taught to take Arab names, use the Arabic language, and to forget, or treat with indifference or contempt, their own pre-Islamic pasts. Ali Gomaa exists in a country where when the buildings of any non-Islamic faith fall into disrepair, they continue to do so, and only in extraordinary circumstances are they repaired -- a desire to keep some sites presentable for Western tourists so as to pocket their money, a temporary attempt by someone or some regime to curry favor in the West. He lives in a country, a country that itself is part of a wider Arab and Muslim world, and in that world, some countries forbid altogether the existence of a church (as in Saudi Arabia), while others simply make the repairing and building of churches as difficult, as nearly impossible, as possible. And of course do not even ask about synagogues, or Hindu or Buddhist temples, or other monuments and religious artifacts associated with Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and, in some cases, Christianity as well; all these things belong to a period before Islam, a time of Ignorance, the Jahiliyya, and in truth have no right, under Islam, to continue to exist.

What Ali Gomaa illustrates is the complete obliviousness, by almost all Muslims, to the very idea of the Golden Rule: Do Unto Others As You Would Have Them Do Unto You. The apostate Ali Sina has written at length - see here -- convincingly and eloquently about the Golden Rule, a simple code for conduct that is present, Ali Sina notes, in all the major world faiths with one exception - and that one exception is Islam. For the Golden Rule makes no sense if the Highest and Only Good is to promote the expansion and domination of Islam. And the true object of worship in Islam is Islam itself. For Islam is The Truth, to its adherents. It is a Truth whose adherents by right should dominate over all others, and be permitted every sort of means, or weapon, in working toward the end that must animate all true Muslims - to participate in Jihad, that is the struggle to ensure the dominance of Islam, and rule by Muslims, everywhere.

Ali Gomaa is not being a hypocrite when he attacks the Swiss for voting against the minaret. He's not even up to the possibility of hypocrisy. It never occurs to him, for it simply has never entered his head that the same rules should apply to Islam as apply to other faiths. He has never considered that the way that Muslims treat the religious structures of others might have something to do, along with so much else, with how Muslim structures in the West are coming to be - correctly - viewed, as akin to military outposts, places where soldiers of Islam can be trained, or further brainwashed, and from which campaigns of Da'wa can be plotted. They serve as a Recruiting Office too, where potential reverts, or converts, that is Western recruits to the Army of Islam, can be inveigled into signing up, and not for a two or four-year stint, but for a lifetime, with no reprieve and no escape.

I wouldn't call Ali Gomaa, or Muslims hypocrites. They are far far beyond hypocrisy in their deep beliefs. They simply can't fathom why, in what universe, anyone would expect them, the Muslims, ever to treat the bearers of Untruth, the Ungrateful Infidels, in a way that would not make clear the many legal disabilities under Shari'a that non-Muslims must, by right, endure. Shari'a is the Holy Law of Islam, to which the manmade laws of the Muslim state or states can only aspire to copy exactly in every particular, but must at least try asymptotically to emulate. Under it, non-Muslims deserve to be humiliated, deserve to be degraded, deserve to live in conditions of physical insecurity. How could it not be? For how else can the Truth of Islam, and the superiority of the Muslims, the "best of peoples," otherwise be declared in all its unswerving rightness?

It can't. And Ali Gomaa feels this keenly. And so, in his mental universe, it is a travesty of right when non-Muslims declare, anywhere in the world, limits on what Muslims can or cannot do. And it would be a travesty of the right, contra naturam, were non-Muslims ever to demand that they be treated as full equals to Muslims in the Muslim-dominated lands. Both are offensive. Both are intolerable - to Ali Gomaa, and a billion others.