This is a verbatim mirror from Gates of Vienna which wrote and assembled this important post. It is probably a good evening’s work to deal with all the information here. But I think most would agree it would be an evening well spent.

Eeyore for Vlad:

Most readers are already familiar with the work of Prof. Dr. Hans Jansen, a retired Professor of Modern Islamic Thought at the University of Utrecht.

Dr. Jansen was the keynote speaker at the Brussels Conference in the European Parliament two weeks ago. A video of his speech (with improved audio) is embedded at the bottom of this post, along with videos of his testimony at the trial of Geert Wilders in the fall of 2010. The text of Dr. Jansen’s speech in Brussels is here, and the transcript of his trial testimony is here.

The paper below was originally presented by Dr. Jansen to U.S. government officials at a conference in Arlington, Virginia in 2006. We are deeply grateful to the author for sending it to us.

By Prof. Dr. Johannes J.G. Jansen

The West has enemies, and these enemies have declared war on us. Our enemies have no difficulty at all in identifying us, but we, on the contrary, have great difficulty in identifying them. It is with good reason that we hesitate to identify them, because if one of the great world religions is our sworn enemy, we are in for a difficult period. However, life has been difficult before, and as you all know the free world managed to survive both Nazism and Communism.

However, Europe on its own could never have survived the Nazis, or the Communists. American involvement in these struggles has been essential for the survival of Europe, and the same is true for the present battle. If the US does not participate in the present battle with all resources that are needed, especially its intellectual resources, the battle we are in will eventually be lost. Then Europe will fall. The fall of Europe may have long term consequences for the US. It is better not to speculate about these consequences.

The US war effort, any war effort, has to be directed against an enemy who can be named and identified. It is obvious that this is a political necessity because as you all know wars have to be supported by public opinion, but there is more to it. Without an identified and named enemy all war efforts are wasted. Without a named and identified enemy the war effort is not a war effort, but it is an exercise, and probably even an exercise in futility. The hesitation by the US authorities and media to name and define our present enemy undermines the security of the US, and hence the security of the rest of the world. In Europe, the situation in this respect is of course much, much worse.

The program of today’s conference suggests that we are not at war with Islam, or the majority of the Muslims, but with the Muslim Brotherhood. This organization was founded in the late twenties in Egypt, by a primary-school teacher who was at that point in time 23 years old. His name was Hasan al-Banna. The first pamphlet al-Banna wrote has not been included in any collection of his works. It is an undated pamphlet, but internal evidence suggests it was written in May 1929, and published not much later, probably in June 1929. The pamphlet is an attack on the Egyptian educational system, which is interesting, but even more interesting is that the pamphlet contains long paragraphs full of praise for the Italian Fascist leader Benito Mussolini. If there ever was any doubt that European fascism played the role of midwife at the birth of modern Muslim radicalism, this pamphlet will take all your doubts away.

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