Those who have studied Islam know that Muslims are taught to offer their loyalty, their sole loyalty, only to Islam, as a faith (in Islam, what is worshipped is Islam itself), and to fellow members of the Umma, the Community of Believers. Not all do so, but quite a few do, especially the most primitive. Islam is centered on an inculcated division of the world between Believer and Unbeliever, Muslim and Infidel, and on the notion that between the two a state of permanent war, if not always of open warfare, must exist. It makes no sense to expect Muslims to ignore this, to somehow push it to one side. Too many people, easygoing or fearful, choose to rely on examples of outward affability in circumstances that require it – living in an Infidel nation-state where one does not yet have sufficient numbers to show one’s true feelings – instead of on study, not endless but at least detailed enough, and prolonged enough, of Islam – enough, that is, to give the student a grasp of Islam’s texts and tenets and the effect of Islamic teachings, reinforced in a thousand ways outside of madrassa and mosque, on the minds of its adherents.

These Muslim migrants demonstrate, in the constant flow of aggressive demands for changes in the Infidel lands in which they have settled, changes in the social arrangements and understandings, as well as in the legal and political institutions, a singular indifference, or more accurately deep hostility to, Infidels and their nation-states, seeing them, in geographic terms, solely as land areas to be conquered, not by military but by other means. Among those means, discussed in Muslim circles quite openly, and even mentioned by Muslim rulers such as Boumediene of Algeria at the U.N. in 1974 and Qaddafi of Libya in 2006, is that of demographic conquest. This is an overwhelming through both breeding – Muslim birth-rates far exceeding those of the indigenous non-Muslims or indeed of the other, but non-Muslim, immigrants in Western Europe — and through campaigns of Da’wa, particularly in prisons, to win over the economically and psychically marginal.

Have you noticed how many Muslims who have gone from Europe to join the Islamic State have been converts, who first became Muslims either in the projects, or while in prison? These are the Muslims whose knowledge of Islam is completely textual, and not the result of long experience of “living with Islam.” Textual Islam means Islam in its purest and most dangerous form. Over centuries, Muslims learned to adapt, mainly by ignoring or choosing not to find out about everything that Islam taught. It was a lot easier to do this in a time of mass illiteracy. Now, with the most militant Muslims spreading their message through the Internet, it is harder to ignore what is being said.

I don’t know how those who are “moderate Muslims” deal with the disconnect: that is, they know perfectly well to what extent the members of the Islamic State are merely putting into practice the teachings and texts of Islam without any moderating force, and yet they have to deny this, have to keep saying, not only to Infidels but to themselves, that this is “not the real Islam.” They can never offer up examples of when the Islamic State has behaved “un-Islamically,” even though they are firm in repeating this. Perhaps what they want to say, but cannot, is this: yes, the Islamic State is doing its best to follow what the Qur’an and the example of Muhammad, tell them to do. They even post on their websites the exact textual support for whatever action they have undertaken. Yet that, these other Muslims say, “is not the real Islam. The real Islam is what we do.” But what they cannot say, but only think, is this: “And what we do is based on our ignoring a lot of the Qur’an and the Hadith.”

Yet everyone knows that Islam in its purest form, without the softening of nuance that real life can produce, is intolerable for many Muslims. Over the centuries they have not, generally, lived by observing all the rules as the Islamic State does, but have by unstated consent agreed to live in a more relaxed fashion, and that is why, over time, the message of Islam, and the practice of Islam, deviated.

And just as it’s amazing how few non-Muslims have been looking into the texts of Islam, set out for them online, it’s amazing that so many of those non-Muslims have been so incurious, or so disbelieving, or perhaps better, so unwilling to believe the evidence of their senses, and to fail to recognize what should be obvious: adherents of Islam, those who are not “extremists” but simply adherents of mainstream Islam, represent both a civilisational and a physical threat to the well-being of non-Muslims, and this is not a secret. The Shari’a, the Holy Law of Islam, flatly contradicts in letter and spirit Western notions of political legitimacy (based on a social contract theory), and Western solicitude for the rights of individuals, including those recognized in the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the American Bill of Rights.