A Counterjihad Survey From a British University

A few weeks ago a PhD candidate at a British university sent us the following email.

I am a PhD student at [a major British institution of higher learning]. I am researching groups set up to oppose radical Islam in Europe and North America, including anti-Jihad, anti-Sharia and anti-halal organisations.

I would like to interview activists within these organisations, to help me understand how they became involved, what their concerns are about radical Islam, and how they are going about countering them.

I would welcome the opportunity to interview someone from Gates of Vienna as part of my research, given that it is one of the most prominent counter-jihad websites.

Depending on the questions, I’m not averse to answering such surveys, even though I know the all but universal multicultural agenda of the institutions that sponsor them. I wrote him back and told him that if he wanted to use my answers to compile statistical results, that was fine. But if he quoted me, I required that he include the entire questionnaire — all his questions and my answers in full — somewhere in his published material, even if only as an appendix. In the past, various Counterjihad people (including several of my friends) have had the unfortunate experience of being quoted out of context. This method at least makes the entire context available for anyone who is interested. Plus, of course, I am posting it here — I told him that I reserved the right to publish the entire interview myself.

When the questionnaire arrived, it was prefixed with an option to choose between two waivers:

Delete as appropriate: EITHER: I agree that these answers may be attributed to me in published materials; OR: I would prefer to remain anonymous in published materials.

Please note: There is no compulsion to answer any question. If you prefer not to answer a question, just leave the box blank.

I chose the second option, but appended a proviso:

I agree that these answers may be attributed to me in published materials provided that they are made available to readers in their entirety, including the complete wording of each question.

The questions and my responses are reproduced below in their entirety:

Part A: Personal details

Name: Ned May
Organisation: Gates of Vienna
Position within organisation: Editor
Age: 60+
Gender: M
Ethnicity: Human Race

Part B: Questionnaire

1. When and how was Gates of Vienna set up?

We put up our first post on October 9, 2004. For the first eight and a half years we were hosted for free at blogspot.com, under the aegis of Blogger (i.e. Google). Then, after a series of incidents in which our blog was closed or locked by Blogger, in January 2013 we moved to our own domain gatesofvienna.net hosted by a commercial service.

For the first couple of years most of the blogging was done by my wife Dymphna. After I was laid off in 2006, I started blogging more regularly. As Dymphna’s chronic illness worsened, I took on more tasks, and now perform most of them.

2. What is your role in Gates of Vienna?

I am the principal editor. We have a number of translators and contributors, and it is my job to edit their prose where appropriate, find and prepare images to use as illustrations, and do the general formatting for each post. This is in addition to writing an occasional post myself.

I also maintain the database used to create each day’s news feed, and write the programming code that makes it possible.

3. Were you involved in political activism before Gates of Vienna? If so, please indicate which organisations.

No, I was never politically active. My wife and I made modest campaign contributions to our congressman from time to time, but that was all.

4. How would you describe the purpose or aims of Gates of Vienna?

Our principal aim is to resist the Islamization of Western societies. More specifically, we want to prevent the imposition of Islamic law (sharia), which is encroaching on our legal system piecemeal at an increasing rate, by a process that is commonly known as the “stealth jihad”.

Examples of the new sharia-based rules include the “religiously-aggravated Section 5 public order offences” in the U.K., the “hate crime” prosecutions by the various Human Rights Commissions in Canada, and the prosecutions for the “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” in Austria. Numerous other examples may be found in almost all Western countries.

Sharia-based norms violate the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as well as the constitutions of the countries in which they are implemented. In that sense they are illegal or extra-legal, and not in conformance with the law of the land.

Islamization is only making headway in the West because the existing cultural matrix has been damaged. For that reason, Gates of Vienna frequently examines other issues that pertain to our ongoing social and political breakdown.

5. What are the main challenges or obstacles you face in achieving these aims?

(a)   Lack of funding. Everything must by financed by small individual donations from readers.
(b)   The unwillingness of the legacy media to cover these issues in depth and without bias. Counterjihad people are routinely characterized as “racists” and “far-right”, while at the same time the issues we raise are virtually never examined on their merits.
(c)   The toxic smog of political correctness that shrouds all public discourse and prevents an honest discussion of Islam as a totalitarian political ideology, and not just as a religion.
 

6. What is Gates of Vienna’s relationship to the wider counterjihad movement?

As envisioned by the original participants in the 910 Group (later CVF and then ICLA), we function as a “network of networks”. That is, we help expedite contact and communication between and among individuals and groups that share the same broad Counterjihad goals.

When I say “we”, I mean the very loosely associated groups under the ICLA umbrella. Gates of Vienna serves as a clearinghouse and bulletin board for those groups and their leaders.

7. What is your assessment of the counterjihad at this point in time?

The Counterjihad is fairly fragmented and often at odds with itself. Cooperation across a broad spectrum of groups is relatively rare. Like the rest of the culture, the members of the loose constellation of groups and people who oppose Islamization are afraid of being called “racists”. That fear causes people to shy away each other if there is even a faint perception of “racism” on one side or another. For this reason broad, sustained coordination among groups is very difficult to achieve.

However, due to the rise of the Islamic State and the increasing incidence of atrocities committed by jihad groups, more and more people are becoming aware of the nature of the crisis that faces us. As a result, I can see our work becoming less difficult in the not-so-distant future — we will not be required to overcome as much initial resistance as has been true in the past.

“Racism” will eventually seem less important, given the immediacy of violent jihad and the illiberal cultural regimen imposed in areas that have accepted sharia rules.

8. If the counterjihad were to be successful, how would the world be different in twenty years’ time?

Your question doesn’t make any sense, because the Counterjihad can’t possibly achieve success within twenty years, or even forty. This is the “Long War”. I expect it to last at least two more generations. I will be long dead before there is any final resolution, so I’m reluctant to predict the shape of things to come.

Let’s just say that I expect that we will experience an undetermined number of grim and bloody decades before this is over.

9. If someone wanted to learn more about the issues discussed on Gates of Vienna, where would you direct them? For example, are there particular books, websites, or other resources that you would recommend?

As a starter, I recommend the book Among the Believers by V.S. Naipaul. After that, anything written by Robert Spencer in his books, or at JihadWatch.org, would help the reader become fully informed. To stay abreast of the violence and brutality of Islamic terrorists worldwide, people should read TheReligionOfPeace.com every day.

For comprehensive, in-depth analysis of sharia law and jihad, the book Catastrophic Failure by Maj. Stephen Coughlin is highly recommended.

10. Are there any issues not covered in your previous responses that you think should also be considered as part of this research?

I would like to emphasize the importance of studying Islamic law. Until non-Muslims in the West grasp the essentials of sharia, they will remain confused and perplexed by current events involving Islam.

Sharia is based directly on core Islamic scriptures — the Koran, the hadith, and the sunna — and has not changed in any meaningful way in more than a thousand years. When one has acquired a basic understanding of how it all works, such disparate phenomena as Boko Haram, the Islamic State, Louis Farrakhan, the Taliban, Hamas, and Anjem Choudary begin to make sense. The interconnectedness of events concerning Islam — whether “moderate” or “radical” — will start to become clear.

After reading some of the books and websites mentioned earlier, interested citizens should acquire a copy of ’Umdat al-salik wa ’uddat al-nasik, or The reliance of the traveller and tools of the worshipper. It is commonly referred to as Reliance of the Traveller when cited in English.

English-speakers should read the Revised Edition (published 1991, revised 1994), “The Classic Manual of Islamic Sacred Law ‘Umdat al-Salik by Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri (d. 769/1368) in Arabic with Facing English Text, Commentary, and Appendices”, edited and translated by Nuh Ha Mim Keller. The publisher is listed as amana publications in Beltsville, Maryland.

This is an authoritative source on Sunni Islamic law, because it is certified as such by Al-Azhar University in Cairo. There is no higher authority on Sunni Islamic doctrine than Al-Azhar; it is the closest equivalent to the Vatican that can be found in Islam.

27 thoughts on “A Counterjihad Survey From a British University

  1. Baron, is this a study by a disinterested party or is the outcome expected to be partisan? I applaud your willingness to respond but I don’t think I would have done so.

    • Do you think the person that asked you to complete a survey will receive death threats if you expose him/her and their university if you do so?
      What is your reason for keeping it confidential?
      I would like to write to this person. I would like to be included in the survey and tell this person about the massive changes I have seen in our culture over the last 15 years.
      What seems to be lost by young university students is what our countries were like before mass immigration of Islam. The society they look at today is the norm and, like viewing a bug under a microscope, they view our culture of just 20 years ago with historical interest.

      • I don’t expose him because he treated me with respect, civility, and courtesy, and I am reciprocating. I am treating him the way I would expect to be treated.

        I’ve been public for five years now. For the first six years of this work I was pseudonymous, and anyone who exposed my identity would have been commiting the most egregious of acts, in my book. Therefore I won’t do the same sort of thing to someone else.

    • Based on my correspondence with him, I don’t have any information about his own political opinions. However, given the university he attends, I don’t think his research will be allowed to draw anything but the standard multicultural conclusions — not if he wishes to be awarded his doctorate, anyway.

      But his questions were reasonable and not tendentious — no use of words like “racism”, “far-right”, “xenophobia”, etc. There was no reason not to take the time to think out my answers carefully and in full.

      By requiring him to publish the whole thing or not at all, I guarantee that my responses won’t be used against me. And, if he goes back on his word and quotes me selectively and out of context, there is always this copy posted here on the public record to demonstrate exactly what the full questions were, and what I replied to each.

      Every time I get one of these I consider it an opportunity. They always generate an intesting post, by the time I finish writing them.

  2. In addition to the books mentioned by the Baron, my book list, at least in terms of deepening my understanding of Islam vis-a-vis the West, would of necessity include Bat Ye’or’s book on our sidebar – though her “Eurabia” was a mind-bender of the first order.

    In addition, Emmet Scott’s amazing “Mohammed and Charlemagne Revisited” changed forever my view of what happened in Europe from say, the 7th through the 10th centuries. After I finished that book I felt as though Europe’s historians had deliberately and massively cheated us of the real story about the advent of the so-called “Dark Ages”.

    It wasn’t until I saw the videos Bill Warner made about the reasons for our fear and the way it affects our “forgetting” that I really understood the twisted psychodynamics of those who labor under the strictures of political correctness as a sadly misguided attempt to deal with the inevitability of human aggression.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_Qpy0mXg8Y

    For many years I’ve studied the individual and group responses to trauma and how trauma controls our memory. We still have the nursery school’s “Ring Around the Rosey” because of our culturally impressed ‘memories’ of the Black Death. Barbara Tuchman’s comparison of the Black Death and our then-preoccupation with massive death via nuclear war was a helpful template. “A Distant Mirror” remains interesting as an artifact depicting the public terrors of a global nuclear winter. Obviously, it’s an artifact since children no longer hide under their desks at school during “drills”.

    But for the most part, we forget and forget and forget. Bury that bogeyman deeper, Pa.

    Just the highlights, leaving out the various Asian and African genocides for the moment:

    –The mass death in the first “modern war”, the American Civil War numbers over 700,000 people and the wounds continue to fester;

    — the huge loss of the cream of Europe’s culture in two bloody World Wars in a bit more than a generation (so much for Westphalia) meant the rise of mediocrity since many of the best and brightest didn’t live long enough to leave behind progeny . For those who did manage to reproduce, their boys died in the second attempt at cultural suicide in Europe 25 years later;

    –the deaths of anywhere from 12 to 20 million people in the global Spanish flu epidemic while we were killing one another.

    All of this should have caused a shut down.

    But it didn’t. Instead the world responded in a frenzy of technology and frenetic hedonism – that was the 1920s,

    a massive economic collapse in the 30s,

    and several major and minor messiahs in the form of Hitler, Mussolini, FDR’s massive governmental grabs, and Stalin’s brutal repressions of Russia and its near abroad.

    When trouble comes to River City we want an Answer Man.

    But we’ve long since buried the question.

  3. What is the title of the PhD project, and who’s funding it? If known, such information may give some clues as to what the study may be used for…

    • From earlier – not outdated – experience, you hear British University, and you would think British University, British student and PhD.

      The university may even sound British, but still be something totally different, although with a very British address. So may be the student with the PhD. A university like Oxford, for instance, has long been infiltrated, and Britain isn’t Britain anymore.

      In the British climate of today, would a student at a university in Britain, even be allowed to do a study like this, unless it was pro-islam?

  4. “Let’s just say that I expect that we will experience an undetermined number of grim and bloody decades before this is over.”

    Should this be interpreted in an advocated-proscriptive or an objective-predictive manner?

    This is a clarifying question that the researcher should ask you, but my guess based on some experience working with academics is that you won’t get asked this. Instead, they will jump to the conclusion that it’s an advocated-proscriptive statement. After all, (s)he is addressing questions to an “advocate” so everything will be evaluated in that context.

    • He can “evaluate” all he wants; I don’t mind. Just so long as he publishes all the questions and responses in full, or not at all.

      If my responses are aggregated into a group of statistics, I’m sure I will be evaluated as “racist”, “xenophobic”, “far-right”, “Islamophobic”, etc. — all the usual bumf. But that will happen anyway, regardless of what I say.

      • Did he happen to say what field of study he was in? For example sociology vs cultural anthropology?

        • Yes, but I decided not to include that. It was one of the “soft” sciences that cultural Marxists are so fond of.

          • I’m so glad that someone *else* besides me still uses the phrase “soft sciences.” Thank you! (and, of course, I should’ve known….)

  5. I am curious why neither the Baron or the Dymphna referenced Andrew Bostom’s “The Legacy of Jihad”. Bostom’s use of Islamic sources brings much credible history.
    I am ordering Mohammed & Charlemagne Revisited for my next read.
    With warm Regards,

    • Doubtless that prof Bostom’s book is very useful. But if we’d be recommending each and every book, the list would become long. Very long…

      My personal favourite is not even a “Counterjihad” book, but “Europe: a history” by Norman Davies. In it, prof Davies describes how it was due to the constant invasions by followers of the Religion of Peace, Europe could only concentrate on defending itself – hence science, development, and everything else took a back seat… he also doesn’t shy away from citing comparisons of the Battle of Warsaw, 1920 to the Battle of Vienna, and mentions the Grand Mufti’s involvement in the Holocaust.

      And this is a widely-respected historian who is a bestseller in countries like Poland, and well-known in Britain – he can hardly be accused by anyone of being a “loon”.

  6. And while you are at it, “Christmas in the Koran” by Ibn Warraq. The word studies show the weakness of the Semitic languages that have only diacritical marks, if any at all, to represent vowels. The weakness of such a linguistic system can be illustrated as follows, is “h–rs-” hoarse or hearse?
    Several Sura that made no sense whatsoever were studied and then retranslated by Christoph Luxemburg and others with the same result, the Koran will say what you want it to say. Just ask Jay Smith who is still searching for credible manuscript evidence and has only found palimpsets.
    Your doctoral student would be better served studying behavioral insistence in the face of the loss of credibility. People only scream louder or become violently emotional when they realize that their position is incapable of standing on its own and requires propping up constantly and continually.
    I have the sure word of prophecy and unlike Islam, have not followed any cleverly devised fables.

  7. Hi,

    Another excellent book is It’s all about Mohammad, by FW Burleigh.

    • *sigh* My county library system doesn’t have this book, and neither does the extended system of libraries it’s attached to via Interlibrary Loan (called Link+ in this system). Any hints about the Burleigh book? thx

      • @Cynthia

        Looks very good, and well worth reading, judging from this letter from the author, stating

        “Islam contains the seed of its own destruction, and this seed is the truth about Muhammad.”

        A statement, that in itself, obviously, explains better than anything, why we see all the panic everywhere, claiming “nothing to do with islam”.

        “Muhammad in fact committed almost every crime listed by the International Criminal Court as constituting a crime against humanity — all indictable offenses based on the evidence that can be found in Islam’s literature.”

        The author says in the afore mentioned letter, that he only woke up on 9/11. Nevertheless, here he comes with tons of ammunition, he says.

      • @Cynthia
        Heaven knows, it’s nice to be able to borrow books, lots of books, at the library, but once in a while it is important to own the book. In my opinion this is such a book that you will want to be able to go to, and look up, again and again.

        Amazon

        • Having been unemployed since my layoff in March 2014, I’m very cautious about books (and other discretionary expenses) for the duration. I *first* check a book out from the library–if possible–and, if the book “threatens” to become a frequently read book, go ahead and purchase it. Used, if possible, with low shipping rates.

          Books I can’t get from the library for a pre-read I look for as used items *but* I also search out as many detailed reviews (pro and con) as I can find before closing the sale.

          Thank you for the additional information! 🙂

        • OK. My time since the prior posting (approx. 1 hour) has been spent reading the links from your link *and* reading only SOME of the liberal excerpts available online from this book. Will definitely pursue purchase! Thank you so much for the lead. 🙂

  8. Another excellent book is the Legacy of Jihad by Andrew Bostom. He writes insightful articles and well-researched books. He’s an MD by profession but has chosen the life of an academic to expose Islam. Patricia Crone of Princeton U is another good researcher/writer. A must-have.

    Alfred Guillame’s Mohammad is an authentic translation of Ibn Ishaque’s biography of Mo.

    William Muir’s translation of the same is good too.

  9. FW Burleigh s bio is the best. It has, I don’t know, like 80 pages worth of citations from Muslim sources, which even Muslims can’t refute. They can behead him, but not refute !

  10. I don’t dismiss any and all of us reading more on this, but the truth is that far too many apathetic people won’t and they provide unwitting cover to politicians and is lam. The tipping point into that bloody and neo-dark ages will be a combination of events, one of which hits the apathetic hard. Not advocating, just saying.

Comments are closed.