A Jihad Watch poster recently asked incredulously, “There’s a mosque in The Hague?”

Yes, there is a mosque in The Hague. And all over Rotterdam, and Amsterdam, and in Paris and Marseilles and Lyons and Toulouse, in London and Manchester and Birmingham and Leeds, in Rome and in Milan, in Berlin and Hamburg and Frankfurt, and in thousands of other cities and even small towns all over Europe. The Saudis and other rich Arabs fund them, just as they pay for the land, and the construction, and the maintenance, of mosques all over this country, from Boston to sunny California. Most of the mosques in the Western world are not paid for by the locals, but by very rich foreign Muslims — governments, institutions, individuals.

After all, not all of that ten trillion dollars in oil revenues that Muslim states have received since 1973 alone goes for arms purchases, and palaces for the boys, and wages for those millions of non-Muslim wage-slaves who keep Saudi Arabia and the smaller sheikdoms going, and gambling in London and Monte Carlo, and call girls (the Arabs especially contemptuous of the West for allowing “their women” to be bought and used in such a way, by their sworn enemies, the Arab Muslims), and endless shopping in the funfair-cum-brothel of Europe.

Occasionally local opposition can stop the building of a mosque, but not because the mosque has been paid for by sinister foreigners, nor because mosques are far more than merely religious establishments but politico-religious outposts of the Army of Islam, and inevitably, unless subject to constant round-the-clock monitoring, will tend to have khutbas based on the almost-unavoidable subject with which the Qur’an and Hadith are full: to wit, the permanent state of war that exists between Believers and Infidels, and the need for Muslims to work to remove all obstacles to the spread, and dominance, of Islam.

Western governments simply will not stop to examine, will not dare even to discuss, the nature, the meaning, the menace of Islam and Jihad. Those whose duty it is to protect us will continue to pretend that what goes on in mosques is as “religious” in nature as what goes on in churches or synagogues. But it isn’t. Visits to mosques, or tapes of what goes on, or the testimony of those who have jettisoned Islam but can still recall what they heard (or if their faces are not recognized, enter mosques still) confirm that what goes on is dangerous to Infidels, to their legal and political institutions, to their physical security.

The national governments of the Western world have failed those whom they are supposed to protect. They have failed to exhibit any intelligent curiosity about Islam as a Total Belief-System, and the role of the mosques as a basis for Jihad — that is, the “struggle” to promote Islam and remove all obstacles to its spread, and dominance. Yet local governments, or local officials, have been forced to change or cancel permits by aroused citizens, who have made their cases against this or that mosque on the basis of size — the proposed mega-mosque in London appears to have been stopped — rather than on the basis of the bristling and aggressive nature of these huge structures, their minarets rising like missiles (as Erdogan once famously said).

If more non-Muslims came to understand the texts and tenets and attitudes of Islam, they would not be so uninterested in the mosque-building that goes on, sometimes even with the aid of local governments (e.g., Mayor Menino encouraging the building of the Boston Mosque, and even agreeing to sell land far below the market price), but would move heaven and earth to stop as many such projects as possible, and what’s more, to make sure that existing mosques and madrasas are monitored for the contents of what they preach (and what Muslims practice, when they are in a position to do so). The word “religion” keeps getting in the way, but greater knowledge would give Infidels the confidence not to be bamboozled or impressed by such a word, and determined not to be deterred in their opposition to mosques and madrasas. For the first is not simply, or mainly, a house of individual worship, but a center where a collectivist and aggressive Total Belief-System can more easily maintain or reinforce its hold over local Believers.