Henryk M. Broder, the editor Spiegel Online, argued that many European intellectuals have responded to an attack on Kurt Westergaard the author of the “Mohammed Cartoons”, by a Somali with links to al-Qaeda, by “de-escalating” their profile rather than denouncing the attack, in contrast to the somewhat vigorous defense of Salman Rushdie 20 years ago. Broder writes that “the West is choked with fear”.
The attack on illustrator Kurt Westergaard wasn’t the first attempt to carry out a deadly fatwa. When Muslims tried to murder Salman Rushdie 20 years ago, the protests among intellectuals were loud. Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.
The attack on Westergaard is a textbook application of terror. Even the weapons chosen — an axe for example — contributed to instilling fear. Although Westergaard himself escaped unharmed, every European writer knows that the next victim may not be so lucky. And that next writer may be himself. The Somali also demonstrated the second object lesson of terrorist pedagogy. They reminded the world that they never forget. Salman Rushdie is still on the run. Westergaard will have to be guarded until the day that he dies. There is no statute of limitations on al-Qaeda’s anger. Blasphemy is forever.
And it works. By slow degrees the intellectuals are being cowed into silence. John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, thinks that closing Guantanamo prison is necessary to avoid giving al-Qaeda “a propaganda victory”, when from al-Qaeda’s point of view the closure itself is probably regarded as the victory. In denying al-Qaeda one sort of victory, Obama is giving them another and more valuable one: it is subconsciously indoctrinating into the public an almost subconscious fear of “giving offense” to Islam that is more powerful for the fact that it may eventually be instinctive. Which is the point.
In order to protect itself from the possibility of the possibility of giving offense, Roger Simon observes that officialese already resorts to the “double euphemism”. Just as the “War on Terror” was a euphemism for the “War on Radical Islam”, “man-caused disasters” is double-speak for the “War on Terror”. Roger says:
Does this matter? Well, in two words… Hell, yes! Using euphemisms to describe what we are doing in this instance assures that we will continue doing it for years and decades to come. It does this by telling our troops in this war – from the soldiers in the field to the intelligence officers in Langley to our own people in the cities and towns of America, whose support is the most crucial of all – that we are fundamentally unserious, that we think this is all an unimportant issue that is better off ignored. The president’s campaign message got through this once. He ran on soft-pedaling the War on Terror. That was one part of the “hope and change” we all understood.
I know there are those who thought that this soft-pedaling of this war would calm down the Islamic world and make things go away, but by now events have shown them to be wrong. From Sana’a to Somalia, from Detroit to Ft. Hood, and most importantly on the streets of Tehran, things have by now, if anything, heated up, morphing to new, and often more complicated, locations.
Yet still we dare not speak the name of the War on Radical Islam. Still we fear to offend. Perhaps we need a new euphemism. For now I would suggest the “War on Ourselves.” It looks to be becoming dangerously successful.
But the Westergaard attack and to an even more important degree, the Northwest Airlines incident hold another important lesson. Private initiative, exercised within the law has proved as important as official action. Westergaard hardened his premises against attack. He had a sanctuary room and an alarm system and it saved him. On the Northwest Airlines flight, the passengers were their own air marshals. Today many school administrators plan to respond to a Beslan style attack by locking kids down in the classrooms which may only gather the targets in one place. Maybe the students will have the sense to scatter in all directions instead of turning off the lights, locking the door and hiding the corners. Although Gordon Brown in the UK is unwilling to raise a squeak against a group of extremsts who are going to march through the funerary route of British dead returned from Afghanistan to brand them as baby killers and rapists, the population itself is raising a howl against it. That may give politicians the pretext they need in order to appear bold. A British police spokesman said: “If a march is believed to be likely to result in serious disorder, disruption or damage, then the police can impose conditions upon the organiser. In exceptional circumstances, police may apply to the local authority for an order prohibiting such a march.” It’s OK Gordon. The polls say you can do it.
Terrorism doesn’t care a fig for the denunciations of intellectuals. Intellectuals are easy to cow and terrify. What they fear most is the thousand suspicious glances; the parted curtain looking down from every window; the telephone call made just after they leave; the revolver in the drawer in the little old lady’s house. Then the terror goes the other way because every shadow, every sound, every look acquires pervasive menace. The blade often cuts both ways.
Just as the result of political correctness isn’t tolerance but debased public speech, the consequence of official timidity taken too far may eventually be a breakdown in civil society and a return to tribalism. Ultimately attempts to impose an artificial consciousness on the public lead instead to the development of a revolutionary consciousness. Appeasement to terrorism in the west can eventually become a challenge to the legitimacy of the elites themselves. Either the king provides the king’s justice or the crown slips off. The Chinese have a proverb. “Kill a chicken to frighten the monkey.” But there is another proverb, “monkey see, monkey do”.
What terrorism ultimately threatens is the fabric of civilization. Given the chance they will rip it up. The destruction of the Golden Mosque in Samarra was an act of terror against the Shi’a which ultimately recoiled not only on al-Qaeda but upon many innocents. Extremism often overplays its hand. It serves the cause of tolerance to ensure that they cannot. It is useful to remember that if you bend over backward too far eventually you fall over.
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good one Richard
“Appeasement to terrorism in the west can eventually become a challenge to the legitimacy of the elites themselves.” Quite right!
Americans, especially, are not accustomed culturally to giving in to bullies. Obama and Holder look like the elitist kids who are afraid of the bully. People of the Tea Party variety are more accustomed to standing up to bullies, knowing that courage and defiance are the only recourse against terrorism.
I suspect that Obama and Holder identify with the terrorists, rather than with their fellow Americans.
In the Scopes “Monkey trial” two brilliant minds battled over the teaching of evolution.
Williams Jennings Bryan for the prosecution and Clarence Darrow for the defense.
Darrow was trumped at every turn in his attempts to admit scientific evidence so on the seventh day he turned to the Bible and called one of the scholars of the day on the Bible as a witness for the defense….he called Wm J. Bryan.
He got Bryan to admit that a Biblical day could have been an hour or ten thousand years. It was a coup.
I am today declaring that my years silence is a Biblical year of unknown duration, but rest assured, in my mind it has been a year. So I will do my best to continue making BC the best. Glad to be back.
“War on Ourselves” Roger? Talk about euphemisms! How about we declare “War on Cowards” instead? Lead, follow or be put out of our way.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan told a story decades ago which related to the view of some in the west to the Soviets.
He took his kids and some of their friends to a movie–might have been Swiss Family Robinson but I am not sure–for an afternoon.
At one point, a character on the screen was being stalked by a huge snake. After the tension built, one if Moynihan’s posse blurted out, “That snake likes me.”
I suppose it’s some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
Wretchard, let me offer a slight alternative to one of your points.
If they weren’t slow as to their personal safety, they’d never be published by rotten and rotting Western institutions in the first place (in the manner that skeptics and critics are shut-out from climate talks and “peer” reviewed journals).
Bonus: Given what they have to say, we would be blessed if they self-censored for fear of angering anybody so that the adults (the “fundamentally serious”) can get the job done sans the omnipresent din of their caterwauling.
I don’t offer the following as representing the height of courage, but when Residents and Medical Students come to me with the story that they are having trouble with a particular teacher or supervisor, I advise them to get right in that person’s face and make themselves as well-known to that person as possible, rather than avoiding them.
After 9-11 I decided to travel to Israel two to three times a year every year. When the recent version of the Lebanon war was going on, my friends and I choose that time to go to Israel. The Israelis whom we met were extremely grateful.
It seems that the peace of the grave and the “peace” of slavery is what our current leaders are taking us to.
Fear is natural. You can’t operate on the assumption that everybody is going to be Audie Murphy. The correct strategy is to take it into account. One constant through history is that people feel less afraid in groups. Less afraid when they see others doing things they are individually scared to do. This is built into the organism.
By dis-empowering the public and fragmenting them, the state is actually making individuals feel isolated and increasing their fear. What the state ought to do is to harness the public and provide an orderly channel for fear, to prevent it from becoming mindless or malicious vigilanteeism. What will happen anywhere the public begins to suspect that the state cannot protect it is that it gradually withdraws into silent, sullen, self-protecting groups. That is an explosive development.
This is where the unintended consequence can come from. This is where jokers enter the pack.
Petraeus knew how to do it. He recognized that grassroots groups sprang into existence but supervised them properly. He coopted and harnessed the anger and fear that al-Qaeda created and turned it into a sharp, controlled weapon. The warning signs, the telltales of unease are all there. This is probably one of the reasons why ammunition sales have been going through the roof. People are buying ammo on general principles, literally without quite knowing why … just on a hunch it may come in handy … though they don’t know exactly why.
The role of the opinion leaders should be to give a constructive and civil shape to unease. To prevent unease from being hijacked by demagogues you have to stop lying to the public about things. Tell them there’s a war on and how they can get ready for it. Don’t tell them fairy-tales. “Don’t jump to conclusions. It was only an isolated extremist. The system worked. Just want to reassure the public. There is no War on Terror.” This drivel is precisely the wrong thing to say because nobody believes it. Maybe not even the Left if they could get themselves to admit it. And if you don’t give the public something believable and useful to do, they’ll start buying tinfoil hats and dream up mischief.
It’s a triple euphemism. It is not “War on Radical Islam”, it is “War on Islam”, simply that. Roger Simon is another intellectual who is afraid of speaking the plain truth. Both “moderates” and “radicals” share the same objective, to live (and eventually make us all) live under sharia. We might not be at war with Islam, but Islam is at war with us. Now why is it so hard to say it?
A gentleman is someone who strives never to be unintentionally rude. The expectation is that when appropriate a gentleman should be very rude indeed. For example to defend women and children, the tombs of his ancestors and the temples of his gods, he should be willing to kill. That could be considered rude or at least unsociable behavior. If the elites refuse to display a willingness to act as needed to protect the community then they prove themselves to be not only poor scholars but not ladies and gentlemen. If they are not gentlemen and scholars then why should they receive the numerous subsidies and benefits that we have offered to members of their self designated elite? Once the respect of the larger community is lost then those who have been deferred to and cosseted will be seen not as elites but as parasites. Here we have members of the intelligentsia who not only will not lift a finger to protect the community that shelters them but which will not even defend one of their own.
We need a functional set of elites, including in the arts and academia. My suspicion, it is not strong enough or backed by evidence to qualify as a prediction, is that we shall return to a very old system of elite production. In recent generations we have created our elites by using the education systems as the sole gatekeepers with selection into the screening machine being determined by the wealth, as expressed in quality of preparation largely, of the aspirants. A small percentage of the credentialed members of the elites stayed to tend the temples and the bulk would produce or accumulate wealth for the next generation of aspirants. During earlier periods there were other more strenuous tests that young men faced before being admitted to the elites. The veterans who have been tested and proven they have the skills to lead and the intellectual aptitude to succeed in fields of law, industry, commerce or art will possibly form the core of our future elites. This would be a return to a prior successful model. We could use more men like Oliver Wendell Holmes in America. To make this work and give use the leadership we will need a larger supply of tested veterans should be available to replace the current feckless aspirants entering our universities. That is one reason why the enemies of our civilization despise the military and want to shrink it. They can’t stand the competition.
A “nation in arms” can fight a largely bloodless battle. From the very beginning the schools, the media and the public should have been harnessed to learn Arabic, to engage in online debate, to think up ways to fight extremism — all under legal guidance and under the proper political framework.
The persuasive power — not to mention its deterrent capability — of a mobilized nation is very great. It can often obviate the need for actual force. Hollywood, had it been onside, would have exercised a tremendous influence by itself.
The reason it failed to respond was because the leadership and culture of the West itself was divided. One unintended consequence of the rise of Islamic extremism is a crisis of legitimacy for the left and the soft-left. The British Labour party is a few short months from electoral annihilation. Interestingly, the Conservatives won’t be the biggest winners. The 2010 elections in the US are shaping up to be a potential catastrophe for the Democratic Party. Part of the reason is economic, but part of it has been a sheer failure of leadership. They put ideology over nation and will pay the price.
Roger Simon is another intellectual who is afraid of speaking the plain truth.
I nominate as Roger’s brother in arms Michael Medved, somebody who should know better, whom I overheard claiming suicide bombings have no Islamic legitimacy. He oddly retains his blinders even though as a very pro-Israel Jew the Islamic basis for anti-infidel violence should be obvious to him.
Even the weapons chosen — an axe for example — contributed to instilling fear.
The purpose of the axe wasn’t so much fear as obeying Quran 47:4: “Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks; at length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them): thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom: until the war lays down its burdens. Thus (are ye commanded): but if it had been Allah’s Will, He could certainly have exacted retribution from them (Himself); but (He lets you fight) in order to test you, some with others. But those who are slain in the way of Allah, He will never let their deeds be lost.”
The first sentence is why beheading is so popular with jihadists, and the last is one of the reasons why suicide bombing is popular.
I believe Sun Tzu said that when your enemy is locked up in his citadel, apparently invulnerable, you should attack something that he values more than his safety. Why have we not attacked the basis of Islam? Is that not in the Kaaba myth, in the Mecca obsession? Razing Mecca to the ground and preventing future Hajjes would show the Islamic terrorists they have failed. They would have to come into the light to fight. And would be destroyed.
There are “moderate” Muslims. But they are not moderate out of tender feelings. They think of themselves as cowards. They all feel guilty for not doing something to fight for Islam and almost all feel martyrdom is correct policy. But they also all dream of making the Haj and painting their houses in bright colors. Threaten that and they would have to act against the terrorists or show their true colors and attack us directly.
Richard writes: “Ultimately attempts to impose an artificial consciousness on the public leads instead to the development of a revolutionary consciousness.”
I suspect we are reaching a “tipping point” in reaction to the imposed artificial consciousness. The Tea Parties, in name and spirit, are an expression of revolution in the sense of rejecting the imposed (media–government–education) narrative.
Obama seemed to be the figure who would tip the scales towards a permanent left-majority. Then the public saw that Obama had his fingers on the scales. Now the tipping is going the other way. (When the AWG Climate Change theory loses its believers, and some of academic opinion tips the other way, the overall tipping will be all but complete.)
If you are on the left, you’ve got a tough product to sell, as Ben Nelson has found out. It’s tough to sell to sell unemployment as prosperity, government takeovers as investment, medical rationing as health planning, and capitulation to Islamists as security enhancement.
It’s interesting to revisit Gladwell and “Tipping Point” at Wikipedia. Who are the “Few,” the “Mavens,” and the “Salesmen” who are going to be influencing the new tipping? What is going to be the “Stickiness Factor” that proves memorable (“B+,” “The system worked”), and the “Power of Context” that shapes the message? The context, says Gladwell, will likely involve the “Rule of 150,” i.e., the number of real relationships a human can manage.
Gladwell’s book was published in 2000, so it’s ancient history in terms of understanding internet social networking. But the “Rule of 150” and “The Law of the Few” probably still hold. Gladwell’s words are a good description of Richard Fernandez: “The success of any kind of social epidemic is heavily dependent on the involvement of people with a particular and rare set of social gifts.”
Appeasement to terrorism in the west can eventually become a challenge to the legitimacy of the elites themselves.
Can become? Can become? When the ruling class cowers in front of barbarians, it not only ceases to be legitimate but also ceases to be elite.
The reason why I object to using the word “elite” in describing the West’s ruling class is because they act like the proverbial “dog in the manger”. They sit on positions of power to satisfy their own vanity while actively interfering with those who are trying to defend civilization from barbarians. To call such people “elite” is to debase the word.
Man-caused disaster? I vote for Wart on Error, as in our having to deal with the displaced viral-moral consequence of Jihadists’ self-pleasure (touching toads and such.)
What do pious jihadist moslems fear?
PORK….
We should promote the usage of PORK to defile any and all Jihadist bodies killed and captured…
What else do they fear?
Woman’s Rights…
We should start using youtube in arabic (and other languages) that speak of woman’s rights
What else do they fear?
They fear being humiliated and not being honored..
We need to mock them at every turn…
Ridicule them, poke fun at them and mock their faith..
instill fear that they will burn in hell if we kill them!
I believe Sun Tzu said that when your enemy is locked up in his citadel, apparently invulnerable, you should attack something that he values more than his safety. Why have we not attacked the basis of Islam?
The basis for Islamic extremism is not the Kaaba, it is the idea of fundamentalism. The attack on the enemy’s sacred totem does not consist of offing this imam or that imam, blowing up that mosque or shrine. Attacking their values means debating with them. Or more precisely by uniquivocally establishing that they are the legitimate subject of debate. The role of physical force is to protect the forums for debate. I would have considered it a high security priority to protect anyone who wanted to debate Islamic extremists.
This goes back to the role of security in counterterrorism in the previous thread. The role of 130,000 troops in Afghanistan is not, as some would imagine, to stupidly blunder about hunting al-Qaeda. It is to protect the population. Once the population knows they will be protected, you get the intelligence and the kinetic job of firing a Hellfire on al-Qaeda is relatively easy.
By the same token, the way to attack Islamic extremism is in the first instance to guarantee that nobody who criticizes al-Qaeda, especially from the Muslim community will be harmed. Counterterrorism is exactly that counter-terrorism. When you see posters of the Mohammed cartoons displayed humorously and without malice either to the Prophet or to those who doubt the Prophet then the war is over.
I claim that on the day a Western academic can denounce Islamic extremism without the fear of fearing for his job, his tenure, his reputation or his life then Islamic extremism is doomed. Once Islamism becomes just accepted as just another idea with no privileged position then they are over.
I have LONG advocated using what the jihadists fear the most as a weapon…
how about a youtube video showing the construction of advance ammo that actually contains pig fat.
think of this a psy ops…
if we could get this video clip spread thru-out the jihadists world showing that all western ammo contains the essence of pig just think the impact…
yes we all KNOW it’s silly…
but we are not dealing with a western mind or reality..
we are dealing with people that have a completely different reality or mind set…
use what scares them not what scares us..
Is Pajamas Media really less frightened?
Are we not warned here against “hate speech”?
We have immense military power, but even *discussing* its use is now considered socially unacceptable.
Talk to me some more about fear.
But Wretchard, paradoxically, if terrorism doesn’t give a fig for intellectual denunciations, why does it want to silence them? The totalitarian spirit cares enough to kill off the intellectuals, until it doesn’t have to care that it could be publicly dissed. In a free society ideas matter, which is something the left have always understood in their totalitarian striving whether this be through Stalinism, Sharia, or the dictatorship of liberal relativism.
“War on terrorism” is not a euphemism. It neatly express the fact that most terrorists don’t seriously represent any present or immediately realizable state, tribe, or even clan. It is not a movement of postcolonial “liberation” despite some of the rhetoric. Islamic terrorism is a movement to destroy the modern world and global economy knowing that the only way to realize the dream of a return to Sharia and Caliphate is to destroy present realities and imperatives sufficiently. Thus terror’s means – terrorism – are also its ends because its Utopian vision of a global Caliphate is so far from present realities and can only be implemented by creating a terrorized, broken,world where Sharia-enforcing gangs pick up the pieces.
And whether you like to admit it or not, after reading the Koran, Islam as it is presently constituted is as much about states suppressing the Muslim Brotherhood as it is about widespread Talibanization.
How can you have a war on “radical Islam”, something that cannot be reasonably delineated from orthodoxy? You can have a war on Jihadists, and their supporters, aka terrorists.
But for the anti-Roger Simon puritans, how can you have a war on all of Islam if you have any respect for the pragmatic realities by which the West is presently constituted? in other words, there is no common desire to fight a war of extermination, or to occupy the Islamic world, but there is a sense that victory in places like Afghanistan presently requires turning Muslims against Muslims until Islam no longer exports Jihad. There is no point in talking as if Roman legions and columnists are at hand, or we are willing to go down in history for wiping the earth clean of Muslims. So there is no point in trying to come up with some absolute definition of Islam. People believe all kinds of stuff, but you can only fight what they are willing to do. We can only hope to advance the rules organizing global modernity and free societies, in a long, slow, war, and let the chips fall where they may. That’s why we can’t give up on intellectuals even when they are presently hopeless. Just keep buggering on.
W # 11 Is an entire disaster.
“A “nation in arms” can fight a largely bloodless battle…….” Followed by a recital of what we should have done, what a decade ago? Please.
“The persuasive power — not to mention its deterrent capability — of a mobilized nation is very great.” If by persuasive power you are referring to moral suasion then a review of the philosophy of islam is in order ……..and Hollywood being on our side…Ah, not since WWII has Hollywood been on Americas side. Perhaps the Marx-Alinsky side of the USA but certainly not what would pass for a traditional understanding of standing up for the USA.
The reason for the failure of the West to dispatch islam is our unwillingness to kill them in sufficient numbers relentlessly, so that they will cease to be aggressors. US. Grant understood the concept that in some wars the enemy must be annihilated to be defeated.
We’ll NEVER talk islam out of its philosophy. Overall you are correct however about the high level of cowardice in the West.
Today, though, Western writers and thinkers would rather take cover than defend basic rights.
Whatever happened to the favorite bromide of these posturing twits, “speaking truth to power”?
We should always be afraid — of being sued, driving someone to suicide, falsely accusing someone, of being punched in the nose. I myself am careful around 6’7″ musclemen and take special care not to insult them without a very, very good reason.
It’s OK to feel fear and be restrained by it. The point is to know when you should disregard fear. Everyone knows to be scared of the 6’7″ 280 pound monster-man. The trick is to know when you should dare, or have no choice other than to tick him off.
Now in the case of Islamist extremism, it is simply a fact of life that they are dangerous. But in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, we should make it a point to tick them off. One of the unfortunate things about life is that sooner or later you will be in a room with someone you have to offend, the one you can’t walk away from. Of course, if you are extremely enlightened, you will reason that you can walk away from everything …
We passed into tribalism when the Negro population spent a decade or so attempting to find a new moniker for itself. Finally they hyphenated themselves by becoming African- Americans. Other ethnicities followed suit when they saw the boons to be garnered from psychic injury lawsuits if you didn’t use the latest PC identifier.
Concomitant with that we began to see rise of PC enforced by the Federal government via hiring quotas, forms with boxes marked with the hyphenation and government “encouraging ” private enterprise to be correct or else.
I can still remember some university dude losing his job for using the word niggardly.
Yeah, we’re tribal all the way now.
This is what I tell my friends, all liberal:
Radical Islam is attacking into our liberalism, striking where we are most vulnerable, our precious multiculturalism. They attack there knowing that we are incapable of defending it, that we refuse to for fear of losing it. They know implicitly that the West is schizoid, that we of the left have alienated ourselves from the right, those who have not handcuffed ourselves from self defense and self preservation. They might even know on some level that we of the left share their values in that we are self destructive, that we celebrate suicide of a sort. They must be aware that we are only dimly aware -even if only instinctually- that as we instrumentalize the corrosive aspects of life (death) to make our art, that we have come to lose sight of the artifice of artmaking, that the use of the lethal dimensions of aesthetics is how we move the dialog of culture along. In making our art so vivid, we have stumbled into an over-literalization that threatens not only to destroy our art and culture but also affords the enemy of civilization an avenue of attack. As Lee Harris wrote in his profound “Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History”, the left has relinquished the concept of the enemy, leaving it solely to the right end of the spectrum the dirty job of recognition and counter-attack.
We of the left, of the culture producing aspects of civilization, are the objects of the jihadist’s attack. We of the left are the chink in the armor. And the longer we persist in our blindness, the longer we refuse to recognize that we are responsible for the schizoidal split in our world, the longer we refuse to co-identify ourselves with our fictional other, the right, then we will all be destroyed by our true other, those “evergreen” enemies of civilization.
…after all that exposition, they usually laugh derisively.
Then they dismiss me as a fascist.
“Everyone knows to be scared of the 6′7″ 280 pound monster-man.”
Ok here’s a bit of self defense advice that will help you become unafraid of the large dude.
11 W
Yes your right to a point, and I have said President Bush did very little to garner or inflame Americans to accept the sacrifices that a call to war implies. He either didn’t think it out or was given bad advice, I think the latter. I believe that he was enraged beyond belief. I think that the “Go shopping” was forced on him. Which leaves me to say that at that time, he was an inept leader.
Excuse…well, having just a few months in office? Is that a good enough excuse?
Actually NO. He was no ringtailed debutant liberal academic,nor community organizer. He was a son of a President and the son of a hard scrapping practical thinking mother. He knew better but let others direct his anger and his thinking, much to the everlasting detriment of this Republic.
Opportunity and Necessity lost.
Learning the language? Maybe in our higher institutions, but you have to remember that back then, the average American didn’t know even the basics about Islam, Muslims or even the basic premise of terrorism. They had ignored all of the attacks of extremists Muslim or otherwise for years that had killed thousands all over the world including many, many Americans.
It just didn’t EVER occur to them that it would ever make it to our shores.
For even those in government this attack was an abberation. An accident of faith, could never happen again and it must be the fault of “someone else”. It was simpler than the truth of acknowledging that there were many real people willing to kill themselves just to kill Americans including them.
A few (a very few)in and out of government all over the world knew that this was going to happen somewhere sometime. But nobody wanted to listen to them or act upon their warnings.
But I was one of the few thousands that had been aware of what was going on in the world and even if I wasn’t afraid, I knew what was coming, I just didn’t know where or when.
I was on my computer with the TV on when the first news came across to me, a kinda hermit at the time, having been forced to early retirement and having just broke up with the second love of my life. I wrote a letter to my Children as the TV unfolded the terrible tragedy and I drank Vodka straight up as I had never done before.
Even now today as I watch very little TV, when it is on and I see a flash of “Breaking News” or such I get a momentary jolt back to September 11th of 2001.
(Just a little of my ancient PTSD jumping out)
Since then I have educated myself and my family as much as I can but NO, we still don’t speak any foreign languages except TEX-MEX which anyone who has taken spanish will tell you is not exactly even close to the same.
But even if Hollywood and the liberal left would have gone along, which I’m sure that you know they would never ever done so, the attention span of Americans and their priorities are so diverse and their survival from paycheck to paycheck so pressing that they would have not been such good wartime citizens as their grand parents were.
So…as in previous posts, all I can say is for each of us to try and spread the word and knowledge we have garnered and to prepare our families and friends for the worse to come. First from our enemy within and then, hopefully not at the same time, our enemies without. But it should be noted that there are millions of Muslims among us now.
Buy more Ammo
Papa Ray
“Everyone knows to be scared of the 6′7″ 280 pound monster-man.”
Ok here’s a bit of self defense advice that will help you become more self confident in the face of a hulk.
Women or men ….with all your power, kick with your leg, toe pointed, for the side of the knee. It will take the stongest man down and you can then kick him in the temple as hard as you can. Then run.
Of course it is best to shoot them …..dead, so they don’t have a story to tell…..get a concealed weapons license and gun (Ruger LCP is a magnificent carry weapon)…don’t leave any bullets in the magazine.
Now see how easy it is?
NO the advice wasn’t to hide in a blizzard white out but I believe the advice may have been editied. If it wasn’t then here it is.
Kick, with all your might, the hulk in the SIDE of the knee. He will fall and you can run for help.
Buy more Ammo
Papa Ray
AMEN
Now I will go work out so I can be the biggest abd baddest I can be. And on the weekend to the shooting range and prayer to our Lord for accuracy in killing the enemy.
Habu, welcome back; I feel better about the new year having your participation. And thanks for finishing #27; you left us hanging!
the attention span of Americans and their priorities are so diverse and their survival from paycheck to paycheck so pressing that they would have not been such good wartime citizens as their grand parents were
PR 28
I would respectfully submit that most of our G-parents also lived paycheck to paycheck. What they had that we seem to have less of was– not time or mere homogeneity of culture (as we were an ethnically diverse pop even then)– but a regard for things, or Idea, larger than themselves. Any combo of God, family, country, future, plus a healthy dose of humility probably did it.
Today, each of us, our esteemed opinion, and our personal present are paramount. We is atomized in the cults of the Individual and Convenience.
Pork as a weapon is more than a joke. Even the rumor of pork fat as a lube on bullets caused the British some trouble in India. Something I heard about the Moros in the Philippines and pig blood that may or not be true?? To the point why not use pig fat and bacon as a weapon. Eat bacon and don’t wash you hands before flying. Everything you touch should be “unclean” and there for out of bounds for Muslims. Promise pig blood on the graves of all terrorists killed. The possibilities are endless. Oh I forgot spill just a little wine on the floor of every cab you take from Minneapolis/ St.Paul airport. It is not unreasonable to make Europe and America an unpleasant place for all Muslims until most Muslims are willing to point out the terrorists and nut cases among them.
What university press, in the US, recently published a book about “The Cartoons”… without including the actual cartoons?
Academia lays prostrate before the islamists.
20. Josh:
Is Pajamas Media really less frightened?
Are we not warned here against “hate speech”?
Not anymore. The ‘Hate Speech’ clause was rescinded (see above) due to forum participant protest.
Sep 9, 2009 … Yale University has removed cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad from an upcoming book about how they caused outrage across the Muslim world, …
http://www.usatoday.com/…/2009-09-09-yale-muslim-cartoons_N.htm
Habu – Welcome back
Kahr PM9.
http://www.gunblast.com/images/NRA2008/DSC04264.jpg
I like a little more stopping power.
“What they fear most is … the revolver in the drawer in the little old lady’s house.”
Several years back in South Carolina, the sheriff’s department in one rural country received a phone call one evening from a little old lady who lived alone. Arriving at the home they found a dead man in the bedroom. They asked what had happened.
The little old lady replied, “I was sitting here reading my Sunday school lesson and I heard a noise. I found a man climbing in the window of my bedroom. I went and got my gun and shot him.”
The deputies asked when this had occurred. The lady replied “Around 7:30 PM.” And they pointed out that it was now almost 9PM and they had got there in less than 15 min from the call, and asked why she had delayed calling them.
The little old lady replied, “I had to finish reading my Sunday school lesson.”
It must terrify criminals and terrorists that there are people who can go from reading the Bible to shooting an intruder to back to reading the Bible, and to do so almost unperturbed. But of course it terrifies some people in government, too.
LifeOftheMind #10:
“The expectation is that when appropriate a gentleman should be very rude indeed.”
Some might even say that in those instances of which you speak true rudeness would be doing nothing.
I think many Filipino Muslims eat pork when they can get it. They certainly drink when they can get it. That being said, it is often the superstitious aspect of religion, rather than its doctrinal foundation that matters in the public mind. You will find quasi-Christian milita cults with a amulets in pig-latin inscription, scapulars, necklaces ornamented with bullets etc. operating in the boonies.
Once I was told with a straight face to beware of the “boodol-boodol” men, who could hypnotize their victims with a glance. Since I knew it was no use arguing, I countered with my own explanation. I put on a pair of Rayban Wayfarers and said, with an equally straight face, that this would reflect back the “boodol-boodol” stare. Amazingly this explanation was accepted in all seriousness, as I knew it would be.
In the field culture tends to be syncretic and there is no substitute for knowing what fits the exact situation. One of the key underground skills is the ability to learn the culture by hanging out, not in the hot-house safehouse or artificial discussion group atmosphere, but by the village pump, or going out fishing with the guys. That is, with nets in the motorized outrigger canoe. That and the gin afterward. Time spent in the billiard hall isn’t time wasted.
Once you get pitch perfect, or at least close to pitch, then you will be able to use the tribal politics, rivalries, etc to advantage. Language ability, an ability to sympathize and a cool head, plus native intelligence is 99% of the game.
There are the Yakan, the Maguindanao, Maranao, the Tausog, etc among the Filipino Muslims. Each is subtly different and there are tensions between. Then there are individuals. You have to know how to look for the loose cannon, the solid man, the dangerous psychopath, the blowhard loser, the ineffectual intellectual. I known people who got hung up on “educated” contacts who were all talk or who foolishly got done in by the petty criminal instincts of their contacts.
I never heard about the pig-fat much, but I did hear about Pershing. He had a legend, but the legend came from the man. I think the power of the pig-fat came from the circumstance, even the myth, that it was wielded by Pershing. The ju-ju went the other way. If Pershing had used axle-grease or Robin Hood pomade it would have had the same terrifying effect.
Wretchard — Your assumption error is in thinking Muslims if totally protected and confident would find anything to criticize in Islam. Let me assure you that almost none would do so — they are after all Muslims. This means polygamy, harems, female genital mutilation, Sharia, the burqua, and so on are part and parcel of their beliefs, values, and indeed persons. They could no more share space and society with Westerners than say, Ancient Aztecs practicing ritual human sacrifice.
This is reality.
What is encouraging is how a “non-Byzantine” response is occuring in Europe. The Swiss, voted to ban minarets. Across Europe, anti-immigrant (that is, anti-Muslim) sentiment is rising, and people are amenable to the argument that only their fellow natives, tied by blood, sentiment, tradition, values, beliefs, family, and more, can be part of society, trusted, and have tax money spent on them. The dream of a trans-national utopia of a world without borders are being destroyed by hard times and a reversion to a Reconquista, more individual manner.
Obama looks like Muslim-appeaser who wishes to submit America to Sharia (and he is). It is probable that we will release the Undie bomber if he tells us what we want to know. With Obama’s blessing.
Ultimately, a Byzantine style society is a failure. Only a society that mobilizes and empowers ordinary people, and churns over the elite to new groups and so on from ordinary people, has any endurance or ability to fight enemies.
Wretchard: You have written a great post and comments. Our intellectuals see their duty as telling their own society about its failings. They then project these images throughout the world to people who don’t see any other aspect of our culture. The in-your-face obsession with sex and our “prudery” is probably the worst possible face to put forward in the Islamic world, especially given the age group of men recruited for jihad. Somehow we need to project an image of strength and self respect and show that we believe in something we are willing to defend. Our enemies use our perceived weakness and degradation as a recruiting tool, and our elites sharpen their blades for them. I just can’t understand how so many supposedly smart people can be so ignorant of basic psychology.
Just as I predicted in the comments above, the UK Government has resolutely decided to be open to banning an Islamist march through the funerary route of British dead from Afghanistan. The Daily Mail reports:
The politicians found their backbone when the population told them to look for it or else. The lesson here is real simple. If the leaders won’t lead from the front, they’ll from the rear. The real heroes here are the organizers who got together 250,000 Facebook signatures to give Gordon Brown his Come to Jesus Moment.
Organize, organize, organize. With organization comes confidence. With organization comes daring and boldness. People lose their fear. Do you know who’s feeling his gizzard churning right now? Anjem Choudary of Islam4UK.
He thought he could terrify people with his bristly beard and trash talk. Well he could terrify the politicians for sure. But once the public got mobilized the tables were turned. This needs to happen all over. Then you’ll see the Muslim ladies who’ve been beaten by their husbands, the girls threatened with honor killings, the teachers who’ve been intimidated by the radicals come forward. Haltingly, blubberingly. But never mind. It’s like that scene with Walter Pigeon from “How Green Was My Valley”. Walk, child, walk.
The role of the security forces is to keep the armed opposition in check. To provide the security screen for the really killing blow: the struggle of the mind. If we can free our intelligensia of the dead tyranny of Leftist ostracism and Islamist fear, who knows what they might blurt out.
Wretchard wrote: “The British Labour party is a few short months from electoral annihilation. Interestingly, the Conservatives won’t be the biggest winners.”
I’m curious, do you believe the UKIP will be the biggest winner? Of course they could not win a majority, but do you think it possible for them to win enough seats to force the Conservatives into a coalition government with them?
The UKIP has a lot of flaws, notably it’s incredibly inept management up to this point, but I have realized that in terms of policy that’s the only UK party I could even contemplate supporting if I were a Brit.
Cameron is far too wedded to both the Brussels bureacracy and the the AGW scam to ever be anything more than labour-lite.
Wretchard, in the future please refer to the “European intellectual” community as the “pantywaist internationale”. This would quickly explain where they are coming from and going towards.
I don’t know who will benefit from the coming UK elections. But there’s an upswelling of disgust for the established political establishment. One is tempted to surmise, but on what grounds? that anti-establishmentarianism is running strong all across the West right now. My guess is that it is.
As I wrote before, President Obama represents not the wave of the future but the rearguard of the ancien regime. The trick is not to reflexively replace the ancien regime with its mechanical opposite, but to do things from common sense first principles.
Someone told me that in we often forget why things work. Somebody long ago figured out the architecture and we mindlessly continue it, like hierophants in a ceremonial temple. But every now and again we have to have the confidence to realize that all the great of history were just schlubs like ourselves, except that they happened to live in the past. We oughtn’t be afraid to think things through so long as we don’t get grandiose about it; we should keep to what works unless it’s obviously wrong. When it’s obviously wrong we should have the confidence in logic and reason to say it’s wrong and change it.
There’s nobody here but us and the Creator. The something out there that we are trying to understand and be in harmony. Reality and our attempts to survive in it. The problem is as it has always been. Lord, help me think straight. And have mercy on this poor sinner.
Longtime lurker enjoying the conversation as always.
Wretchard, I must correct you, though. Salman Rushdie is not on the run anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. He lives, travels, and publishes openly.
Furthermore, he is an outspoken critic of Islamism/political Islam, as are his British writer friends Martin Amis, Ian McEwen, and Christopher Hitchens–all of them braver than their American counterparts in the literary world.
Anjem Choudary probably represents the hopes and dreams of most of British Muslims. After all, Sharia, Polygamy, Honor Killing, the Burqua, and of course Jihad are all part and parcel of what being a Muslim is all about.
How is that compatible with being “British” in the sense of a rough equality between men and women, a Judeo-Christian heritage, monogamy, rule of law made by men, and so on?
The answer is that it isn’t.
What is going on in Britain is that the land will belong and be run by one group of people, either British or Muslim. And that Britain will be either completely dominated by Muslims and thus run according to the way Muslims run things, i.e. a land like Pakistan or Algeria or Saudi Arabia, or it will remain British.
If it is to remain British, then the “winners” will not be the mealy-mouthed UKIP but the BNP, i.e. an overtly racialist, White-Native preferring, nationalist party. Since these are the only people willing to fight for Britain remaining British and not Pakistan in Europe. Intellectually and culturally, with the media totally irrelevant, the BNP has defined the nature of the problem (the British are third-class discriminated people in their own nation) and the solution (kick everyone else who is not British out).
Yes, this is a Reconquista solution. It works. It works because organization is not enough. You need money and power besides, and that means appealing to the deepest interests of the people. Weimar fell because it had no one to fight for it, and lacking a conservative, traditionalist, nationalist movement, Germany fell easy prey to Socialism mixed with Nationalism. The BNP certainly has those elements (they are strong supporters of National Health, and argue that kicking non-British out keeps costs down and provides more money for NHS). However the choice for British natives is not good and better, it is bad and worse. They either choose and stand for those who will make them fully equal citizens in their own lands, or they are ruled by Muslims in Pakistan North. Those are their choices and their only choices.
Gordon Brown wants the votes and public intimidation of the Muslims to replace that of the ordinary British people in a program of population replacement. It is likely he will do nothing (but dither) and there will be pitched battle in the streets of Wooton Bassett. [Really, will the police enforce a ban on the march? Please, the Police in the UK could not stop Muslims from blowing up subways and buses. A march? That's a good one!] People will rediscover that they are British, and they must fight to remain British, by fighting their enemy (Muslims) in the streets. Again, this empowers the BNP as their argument (Britain can only remain British by kicking Muslims out) is likely to be proven on the streets of Wooton Bassett.
Choudary has called for all of Britain to convert to Islam, or be damned, and made some not very veiled threats of violence and terrorism. PC, Multiculturalist, and Diversity Dogma demand this be tolerated and indeed, submitted to. The Elites mostly agree with most of what Choudary says, and they share the same enemy which they hate and fear: the British people.
I assume that the street battles in Wooton Bassett will be quite bloody, and will be punctuated by Jihadist terrorism there and elsewhere. That is the whole point of Jihad and Muslims: submit or die. The elites and public intellectuals have been dying to submit since 1920. Perhaps since 1880. John Bull cannot — for him submitting is like dying.
What is quite clear moreover, is that the idea of a “notional state” i.e. a nation of an idea not nationality, ethnicity, tradition, family, religion, and values all mixed together is a fantasy as bankrupt as Marxism or National Socialism. People do not fight and die for a Constitution, or the idea that all men are created equal, or the idea of America or France or the United Kingdom. That’s a fantasy.
People in the end fight and die for their families and people who might reasonably be a distant relative. This is human nature. It is not enough on its own to create a society that functions (Wretchards points about the shared family DNA between Catholic and Muslim Filipinos is well taken) but is the absolute necessity for a starting point. Muslims for obvious reasons can never be part of the West. That’s just human nature.
Salman Rushdie is not on the run anymore, and hasn’t been for a long time. He lives, travels, and publishes openly.
Thanks for setting me straight on that.
I had just finished writing “I Just Can’t Understand…” posting on my blog in reaction to vb 42 when Wretchard 43 appeared.
Individuals, working together, can reduce the likelihood that they will be dismissed and treated as dumb herd animals by their self-assessed
shepherdselites.Lord I am grateful for this place.
When Salman Rushdie received a fatwa against him for writing The Satanic Verses, sales of his book shot up through the roof. Consumer choice can act as a force field against the censorship of terrorists.
The key to stopping al-Qaeda’s censorship campaign is to create a market for saying what they don’t want said. Even if our own governments were to outlaw certain varieties of artistic expression, that artistic expression would continue to thrive whenever and wherever a strong market for it exists. Consumers have power.
Imagine a movie with the polemic message of Fitna and the cinematic special effects of Avatar. Would you go watch such a film?
There is no common will, if there is no common good. Or evil.
When you are being led by a Protest Culture (leftism, at its core, is a protest culture), you will find that your leaders are much more comfortable apologizing for your existence, than they are at protecting it.
They are MUCH more comfortable protesting your unfettered advancement, than protecting it.
And they are MUCH, MUCH more comfortable trying to find “root causes” of enmity toward “you” (“they” are not to blame, only “you” are)…than they are trying to root out enemies.
We can’t fight against an enemy we don’t agree upon. We don’t have a national will, because we are being led by folks who are pulling on the opposite end of the rope.
Hacklehead:
sure they aren’t watching their belly bottom like you
Wretchard :
Your thought “The persuasive power — not to mention its deterrent capability — of a mobilized nation is very great,” illuminates one of the West’s great failings: we are no longer allowed to discuss by our elite masters in open society in honest terms, many protected controversial subjects, not only Islam, but racism, the effects of the welfare state, climategate, presidential places of birth, etc. The list goes on and on.
Westergaard to many on intellectual left was indulging in “hate speech” regarding Mohammed and Islam, and that is why he is not defended. We need to defend that kind of hate speech. Loudly and often.
The very idea of criminalizing hate speech is an attack on our liberties, but also one that encumbers greatly our defensive response to an attack on our liberties, and our very republic. .
We need more honest to God “hate speech” that tells the truth about Islam and the many other elite protected creeds and precepts. From a realistic point of view, Islam is not really a religion as viewed historically from our American-Judeo/Christian point of view as it mercilessly promotes evil and death and is a direct threat to our everyday citizen’s life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Islam is a false creed that tries to legitimatize murder, thievery, rape, plunder, thought control and subjugation, and we should be allowed to say so openly any time we want. Some of Islam’s core beliefs such as the doctrine of abrogation are just plain laughable. To believe that doctrine is to believe that God, or the all wise and powerful “Allah” if you please, can’t make up his mind and needs to reverse his decisions every once in a while. What a joke!
Wretchard is somewhat right in that if everyday America could openly, rudely and crudely criticize the joke that is Islam and loudly broadcast those criticisms to the Islamic world, we might be well on our way to defeating Islam for good. However, because of our self imposed politically correct Nanny State, we haven’t really been able to take off the gloves and attack with the full force of our political, intellectual, military and economic might.
While our host suggests characteristically thoughtful strategy and tactics in fighting the ideological war–the war for controlling the fora of debate–I believe he tragically misdiagnoses why we are not even really fighting this ideological war. The real reason is the same reason why so many occidentals are converting to Islam, especially in Europe, but in appreciable numbers, also here in the US: we can provide no effective rejoinder to the charges of the Islamists that we are culturally decadent and corrupt. Yes, we can point out the many perversions that attend life in the Dar al Islam, but how do we claim cultural superiority when we are killing one-fourth (or more) of our children in utero? What do we offer the wavering post-Christian occidental adolescent seeking something better than getting stoned and shagging one of millions of Britney Spears look-alikes? I have some notions of my own as to what we ought to offer, but none of them are plausible in the occident that has been contrived for us. Churchill said he feared most of all that the enemy would say to us “You are weak and we are strong.” This has been said explicitly to us and to Europe many times over. Does our culture give the lie to it? Do our lives as individuals give the lie to it? Our lives must in every instance seek precisely to do so, meanwhile we can see the signs of Islam’s own severe decadence and offer them something truly worth having, something rejected by most in Europe, the Gospel of Love against theirs of submission. Everywhere, sound our own call against that of the muezzin ¡VIVA CRISTO REY!
To the Congress of the United States:
Yesterday, Dec. 7, 1941 – a date which a court of law may very well determine will live in infamy – the United States of America was allegedly attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan.
The United States was at peace with that nation and, at the solicitation of Japan, was still in conversation with the government and its emperor looking toward the maintenance of peace in the Pacific.
Indeed, one hour after Japanese air squadrons allegedly had commenced bombing in Oahu, the Japanese ambassador to the United States and his colleagues delivered to the Secretary of State a formal reply to a recent American message. While this reply stated that it seemed useless to continue the existing diplomatic negotiations, it contained no threat or hint of war or armed attack.
It will be recorded that owing to the distance of Hawaii from Japan it will be alleged in a court of law that the attack was deliberately planned many days or even weeks ago. During the intervening time, the Japanese government allegedly sought to deceive the United States by false statements and expressions of hope for continued peace.
The attack yesterday on the Hawaiian islands has caused severe damage to American naval and military forces. Four of the eight battleships in Pearl Harbor were sunk at the pier, allegedly by Japanese torpedo-bombers. But our three fleet carriers in the Pacific escaped harm. The system worked.
Although I believe this alleged attack was an isolated incident, yesterday, the Japanese government also allegedly launched an attack against Malaya.
Last night, Japanese forces allegedly attacked Hong Kong.
Last night, Japanese forces allegedly attacked Guam.
Last night, Japanese forces allegedly attacked the Philippine Islands.
Last night, the Japanese allegedly attacked Wake Island.
This morning, the Japanese allegedly attacked Midway Island.
Japan has, therefore, allegedly undertaken a surprise offensive extending throughout the Pacific area. But America is not blameless in this matter. Our oil embargo against the Japanese, undertaken to punish them for violating a treaty governing the number of ships in the Pacific, may have caused Japanese militants to allegedly engage in this allegedly violent activism.
We must remember that Shinto is a peaceful religion. Americans have no quarrel with the Japanese people, nor with their military, nor with the government allegedly under their control. Blame for this alleged attack rests solely with His Imperial Majesty the Emperor of Japan. Therefore, as commander in chief of the Army and Navy, I have appointed a special prosecutor who will try Emperor Hirohito in absentia.
Always will we remember the character of the onslaught against us. For the alleged attack would have been prevented if our signals intelligence personnel had been able to glean information about the alleged movement of the Japanese fleet. But the Imperial fleet, under direction from the Emperor, allegedly resorted to the shameful expedient of obscuring their attack in code.
No matter how long it may take us to overcome this allegedly premeditated invasion , the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory over wartime codes.
Hostilities exist. Mistakes were made on our side, and allegedly on the Japanese side too. There is no blinking at the fact that our people, our territory and our interests are in grave danger. With confidence in our armed forces – with the unbounding determination of our people – we will gain the inevitable triumph over enemy cryptology – so help us God.
I ask that the Congress declare that since the unprovoked and dastardly alleged attack by Japan on Sunday, Dec. 7, a state of war has existed between the United States and the tactic of encrypting information about ship’s movements.
Somebody is calling the Nigerian cat on the plane the “Eunuch Bomber” Apparently his dopey imam is an illiterate goat herder and thought the Koran and hadiths actually called for male genital mutilation.( The goat is feeling relieved)
The deal the Obama gang offered the bomber is a gig doing the Eddie Kendricks falsetto part in the Temptations traveling oldies show.
Today the 14 Muslim nations which Obama ‘ordered’ to beef up their security are refusing to comply. To top it off, Nigeria, home of and point of origin for the pantybomber is claing “Islamophobia” and “discrimination”. Compare that response to any of the thousands of responses of Muslims after Jihad atrocities and a picture emerges. Muslims haven’t yet begun to internalize this issue of Jihad. In fact, something about the software of Islam appears to instill in Muslims an unparalelled capacity to externalize conflict and project their demons onto innocents.
Perhaps (probably) this is a logical extension of a religion founded by a murderous rapist and terrorist, but that isn’t what matters for our purposes. What should matter to us is finding the proper method(s) to make or force Muslims to confront terrorism. What would that look like?
Obviously increasing the direct cost to Muslims of Jihad sounds like a good idea, and it no doubt would have some positive effect. But their capacity to project or blame victims, and their infinite capacity to see themselves as victims gets in the way again. Some of the most shocking things that persuaded me to take a much closer look at Islam (aside from 9/11 itself) was the steady supply of Muslims in those stunning days who claimed that:
1. they were the ultimate victims of 9/11,
2. that it couldn’t have been Muslims, often followed by
3. WE had caused 9/11 by our ‘policies in the ME.
This was truly perplexing to be confronted with such a degree of self delusion, delusional denial of facts, malignant projection, blaming the victim, and contorting themselves into being the victim while the buildings still smouldered and we hadn’t yet tallied the dead.
What we didn’t hear then, in fact what we’ve never heard is how Muslims and Islam is 100% implicated in terrorism. They will blame Jews, infidels, apostates, bad Muslims, Satan, Allah, America, or any externality but never themselves.
Compare the universal tendency of Muslims to distort, conflate, deny and externalize to the reactions of Koreans in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech massacre. Koreans around the globe expressed horror, apologized, offered to help the victims, even expressed shame. We didn’t hear them claim to be the ultimate victims. They didn’t blame Jews, or America, or past grievance, or the victims. We didn’t hear the endless Muslim “but” clause: “It’s wrong to kill innocents, but…” , “He couldn’t possibly be a Muslim, but we sure have enough to be pissed about to do something like that…” etc.
Until this somehow changes, I don’t think Wretchard’s assertions about defeating Islamic terror by making them feel safe, or anything else we do which doesn’t destroy the Muslim mindset will halt Islamic terror much at all.
Finally, we also shouldn’t underestimate the power of their embrace of fatalism, or “inshallah fatalism”. Any benefit which accrues to Muslims redounds to Allah, not the infidel. $2 billion in aid to Indonesian tsunami victims? Allahs will. Tsunami? That too. More than 4000 American deaths bringing democracy to Iraq, billions building sewers schools mosques? Allah.
Perhaps Muslims congenitally are unable to internalize because Allah, Muhammad, and Islam so fill that place in them, and but for that, they are empty. If this is so, if as I believe, Muslims have truly surrendered that inner human mindscape, then all we will ever get back from them is more Islam and more Islam and the attendant nightmares we now are living.
Still have a comment stuck in moderation on the closed “New Years with a bang” thread.
Get off the net, Habu, and resume listening silence while you prepare to organize and lead adventurous activities for the annoyance of enemies foreign and domestic. Especially domestic.
wretchard (#46):
You wrote:
There’s nobody here but us and the Creator. The something out there that we are trying to understand and be in harmony. Reality and our attempts to survive in it. The problem is as it has always been. Lord, help me think straight. And have mercy on this poor sinner.
Maybe it’s my state of mind today, but this short profession of belief moves me as much as anything you’ve ever written here.
And somehow it helps me. Makes me feel braver.
Jamie Irons
Today the 14 Muslim nations which Obama ‘ordered’ to beef up their security are refusing to comply.
Thought it also applied to anyone coming through any airport with dar al-Islam (plus Cuba and Nigeria) stamps on their passports. Except for maybe the Magic Kingdom? Nope, they were included. Omitted were Egypt, Turkey, Indonesia. India. UAE. Andalusia.
Hey, how about that? I mean, under Bush, somehow I’d expect to see Saudi Arabia excluded. So much for bowing, hmm?
The passport alert list is nothing new. Pretty much the same list was in the Management SOP that was improperly released.
So, now it’s properly released? Heh.
Someone told me that in we often forget why things work. Somebody long ago figured out the architecture and we mindlessly continue it, like hierophants in a ceremonial temple.
This is the thesis of Tom Wolfe’s 1987 essay, “The Great Relearning.” Relearning the whys and wherefors of Western civilization, he says, “seems to me to be the leitmotif of the twenty-first century in America.”
The answers that should be so obvious, or that once upon a time were obvious, having been arrived at through centuries of bloody agony, appear to have been lost somewhere between, say, 1910-1970. As a country and as a culture, we don’t know, or at least we certainly don’t seem to be capable of articulating, the answers to basic questions anymore.
What is the purpose of marriage?
Why is a marriage between one man and one woman to be desired and encouraged over and above all other arrangements?
Why have children?
What are the dangers inherent in according a foreign terrorist the Constitutional rights and due process of an American citizen?
Why does the Constitution give the powers of prosecuting a war to the executive and legislative branches of the American government and not to the judicial?
Why is it inadvisable to use public tax dollars to support a woman who has three, four, five, and six children out of wedlock?
Why was there once a stigma against having children out of wedlock to begin with?
In what way are taxes a liberty issue?
What is the purpose of government?
Why not have open borders?
Aren’t all religions just different paths to the same God?
Is private property really a better system than communal property?
Is an epidemic of public cursing just an etiquette issue or does it signify something deeper?
And on and on the cultural amnesia goes ….
(More from Tom Wolfe)
“In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the hippie movement. At the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? It had to do with the fact that thousands of young men and women had migrated to San Francisco to live communally in what I think history will record as one of the most extraordinary religious fevers of all time.
“The hippies sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start from zero. At one point the novelist Ken Kesey, leader of a commune called the Merry Pranksters, organized a pilgrimage to Stonehenge with the idea of returning to Anglo-Saxon civilization’s point zero, which he figured was Stonehenge, and heading out all over again to do it better. Among the codes and restraints that people in communes swept aside — quite purposely — were those that said that you shouldn’t use other people’s toothbrushes or sleep on other people’s matresses without changing the sheets or, as was more likely, without using any sheets at all, or that you and five other people shouldn’t drink from the same bottle of Shasta or take tokes from the same cigarette. And now, in 1968, they were relearning … the laws of hygiene … by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.”
HEY WHISKEY!
Dubai just celebrated the opening of its world’s tallest building. Just wondering what the symbolism of it all means with regard to your theory on male Muslim libido frustrations?
Habu, welcome back from your sabatical year. The British did have some trouble with “alleged” pork fat. The story was that they used it to grease paper cartriges and it was required to bite the tip off them for priming or something. I don’t know if the pork fat story was true, but the result of the rumour was the Sepoy Mutiny of 1857.
Ned
whiskey, #48: What is quite clear moreover, is that the idea of a “notional state” i.e. a nation of an idea not nationality, ethnicity, tradition, family, religion, and values all mixed together is a fantasy as bankrupt as Marxism or National Socialism. People do not fight and die for a Constitution, or the idea that all men are created equal, or the idea of America or France or the United Kingdom. That’s a fantasy.
People in the end fight and die for their families and people who might reasonably be a distant relative. This is human nature.
It has occurred to me that if Wretchard’s Three Conjectures, and/or your own oft-mentioned scenario of the aftermath of a nuclear terrorist attack on U.S. soil ever did come to pass, it would effectively sound the death knell for the ideals of the Founding Fathers – there’s just no way such lofty principles could survive for two minutes in such a climate dominated by fear, rage, protecting one’s own, and the sheer survival instinct. (As I’ve mentioned before, I suspect the same would be true in the event of an outright revolution and/or “hot” civil war in this country, with or without nukes involved.) Maybe those principles and values could make a comeback in a highly
bastardizedupdated-to-reflect-post-apocalyptic-sentiments-and-mores form after things have settled down for a generation or two, but there’ll be no going back to the way things once were, any more than you or I can go back to being a newborn baby.For some time I’ve had half a mind to ask if you concurred with my grim assessment, but your comment I’ve quoted above has pretty much answered my question already.
This thread was inevitable. Sooner or later, the time was going to come when the more adventurous and thoughtful blogs would begin to muster their intellectual powers to confront the possibility of real physical warfare against Islam. All that was needed to cross the boundary to this sort of discussion was the occasion where some event or other–as in the present case, something to do with the Danish cartoons which have already been discussed au nauseam for some time now–would leave a critical body of people aware that they had already crossed a boundary line and and it was already behind them. The election of Obama and his willingness to oblige us all with an open display of just how mentally and morally bankrupt a liberal regime in America could be, this I believe was the beginning of the end of more-or-less complacent discussions.
Now we have here a series of comments, exhortations, warnings, present plans for future plans, all aimed at meeting rapaciousness with the violence it has been asking for.
Belmont Club has an impact on the blogosphere way out of proportion to the number of its contributors: just walk around the web in the next 7 days and notice other people starting to talk the way the present thread talks.
BTW I like the pork gambit: it has just the kind of boisterously stupid appropriateness that a stupid bunch of jihadis would respond to. Rounds sporting a bit of pork rind–just the ticket.
I have spent the last hour or so reading the comments on this thread. All of you are really cooking tonight.
Much has been cussed and discussed and as always I and others who come here benefit and have our thought processes enticed and rejuvenated and in some instances…just plain blown away.
If I could bottle all of this and sneak it into peoples coffee and coke we wouldn’t have a worry nor a concern about our future.
But alas, that can not be done just as I can’t conger up a Genie to give him my three wishes.
But if I could…
I would wish first for America or actually all Americans to return to taking personal responsibility not only for their lives and their families but also their Republic. Call it Nationalism or whatever you want. It just needs to happen.
Without it we will not survive as the great Republic for which our ancestors have stood and died for.
Then I would want them to take responsibility for the burden and demanding efforts that our Founding Fathers charged us with: To protect and preserve our Republic. To honor and follow the Constitution and other documents that they fought and died for and sacrificed all of their treasure for.
Then I would wish for Americans to stop their headlong plunge into consumerism and the eternal damnation of ignorance.
Yea, I know…there is no Genie and I don’t get my wishes. So I will just have to do what I can for mine. Revert back to tribalism because my government and my Republics citizens will not do what they are charged with.
Which is to protect not only our Republic but us, the common folk of America and let us pursue what happiness we can work and produce for our families and ourselves.
The government for the last fifty years has only protected and benefited themselves, other politicians and their friends- be that special interest groups, Unions or Corporations.
This must cease. It is our responsibility to see that it does.
On to Islam…what else can be said that has not been said here in this thread or the many other threads?
Not much. Except of course to reiterate that Islam will never be compatible with the rest of the world and that the chances of it being reformed are zero. Who do we tell and reinforce this to? The politicians? No, they are cowards and if not cowards can’t convince their cohorts or even it appears tell the truth to the populace for fear of being branded and losing their precious jobs.
No we must start and end with the everyday man and woman in your home town or city. We can not depend upon the government to do it, nor protect us from anything any more. The government has become if not just a dead weight around our necks, but an active and malicious force that has no regard for the ones it is charged to protect and serve.
If we are to change others we must change ourselves. We must champion right and morality, not for just the sake of morality but for the sake of our children and our Republic.
It is time for everyone to make a decision on what they are willing to do in the next few years. Are you willing to stand for what is good and right, work for what you know is needed? Are you willing to give yourself and all your treasure as our Forefathers did?
If you must, call upon your conscience and loyalty to your family and Republic, if that is not enough you can call upon your Lord for direction and discipline as he has asked you to.
HE will show you the way.
If you have no God, then you must find whatever you need within yourself.
If not then you must stand aside and let those of us who will take up the fight to stand in your stead. The Dark Times that are fast coming toward us will give us no mercy nor respite.
I for myself will not ask for respite, nor mercy because I plan on giving none.
Papa Ray
I think I just lost a longish rant to moderation (perhaps because it was immoderate).
In any case, it is just as well. Sometimes the moderator makes us look better than we are by pruning our verbiage. Hmmm, Wretchard, are you a gardener by any chance?
programmer, Your comment could have not have been any more immoderate than what I have said here tonight or on other nights.
Sleep well, contemplate and remember that this Republic was birthed by men such as are on this board, no better, no worse and certainly no more concerned and angry than we are.
Papa Ray
We are never going to win this fight until we are willing to name the enemy and the enemy is not terrorism or Al Qaeda or man caused disasters, or even radical Islam. The enemy is Islam. Imagning there is a benign Islam out there is as foolish as imagining there is benign fascism out there or a benign communism or a benign KKK. Islamic orthodoxy calls for a worldwide caliphate and divides the world into Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, literally the House of Peace and the House of War. A Muslim must practice jihad until there is only dar al-Islam and all unbelievers are either converted, dead, or reduced to dhimitude.
Until the West accepts that this IS what Islam is about or until Islam produces its own Martin Luther we are going to be losing this war and no moderate Islam will emerge. While this war will be fought with bombs and bullets it is primarily a war of ideas and we are going to need truly courageous intellectuals if we are going to win it. In the end no matter who has the biggest bombs and the most soldiers and the best generals the only way to truly beat a bad idea is with a better idea.
The sooner we can overcome our own squeamishness and fear and admit we are literally at war with Islam the better off we will be. There is no radical Islam there is only Islam and if there is ever to be a moderate Islam it has to be put on the intellectual defensive to prove its own existence.
I am categorically opposed to physical warfare against Islam for two reasons. First, physical weapons are mostly useless against an idea or a religion. Second, the West already has overwhelming physical warfare superority. That’s not the problem.
The problem is in our heads. And unless we are careful we are going to wind up visiting destruction on the Islamic world, feckless as it is, and on ourselves simply because we can’t ditch our own neurosis. The problem is our own messed up self-hatred.
If that could be fixed — just the self-hatred part — then the worst problems would go away. Islamic radicals would back off, for the most part in search of easier pickings. Now this isn’t as easy as it seems because to solve the self-hatred means some kind of negotiated truce with the Left.
To some extent the Muslims are right. The problem is in the West. They’re just being who they are. What we have to do is top being what we have become. Once you get past the doublespeak, Muslims know perfectly well how to regard each other. The Middle East is an armed camp. Maybe the worst thing you could do in the “cause of peace” is get rid of Israel. If once you got rid of Israel, all hell might break loose. Al-Qaeda kills 8x more Muslims than non-Muslims. They know well enough to be on their guard against each other, because to some extent they’ve retained a degree of common sense that the Left has completely lost. The problem with the West is we actually believe the nonsense we talk instead of knowing what is said for show and what is for real.
#70 Papa Ray:
Well said. Short of all-out apocalyptic or police-state measures, all other forms of ideological combat with the enemies depend on what you (and I above) recommend: our lives and that of our Republic as a whole must make what we say against Islam at least plausible as an alternative. Still greater force is acquired when our society makes our claims to moral superiority not only plausible but probable. No republic will stand for long if the slide you describe continues for long.
Voltimand, #69: BTW I like the pork gambit: it has just the kind of boisterously stupid appropriateness that a stupid bunch of jihadis would respond to. Rounds sporting a bit of pork rind–just the ticket.
Not to be a spoilsport or anything, but it seems to me the actual deterrence value of this sort of thing is a bit overrated. My understanding is that under Islam, those who die while performing jihad bypass Allah’s judgment altogether and go directly to paradise no matter what. If that’s the case (or rather, if that’s what jihadis are indoctrinated to believe), then we could pump round after pork-fat-laden round into jihadis, and then bury them naked in a six-foot hole filled with pig manure and it wouldn’t matter. (See also the 9/11 hijackers, many of whom frequented bars, strip joints and such – all verboten under Islam as well – prior to the attacks, apparently unconcerned about harming their good standing with Allah by doing so.)
“This thread was inevitable. Sooner or later, the time was going to come when the more adventurous and thoughtful blogs would begin to muster their intellectual powers to confront the possibility of real physical warfare against Islam.”
As a matter of fact, this has been discussed off and on ever since 9/11, if not before.
Wretchard @ 74:
If we remain “categorically opposed” to physical war against Islam we will lose. It’s that simple.
Muslims are willing to fight and die to subjugate you and me and every other infidel. If we aren’t willing to fight and die for a non-Muslim existence we will simply die without fighting.
Wretchard:
Yes, but it’s not the Islamo extremists fault. They’re just benighted sociopaths stinking their way through their own sorry lot in life. “They’re just being who they are” is right. If it wasn’t Islamic extremism, it would be something else. The Left and the cadre of Western Elites they’ve replaced with pod-people have been empty shells for a generation or so, incapable of formulating a coherent, effective response to any sort of real crisis. Indeed, incapable of even comprehending a real crisis exists. To them, any crisis is just an excuse to feather their nests a little more.
I expect they will be looking for a way to make a little graft all the way to the gallows. Sometimes I wonder if most of the Democrats voting for Health Reform view it not as a piece of legislation but as a Golden Parachute retirement plan. “We’re sunk sooner or later anyway, let’s pocket what we can and get the hell out of Dodge before the tar and feather brigades show up.” They might just be smart enough to know their own limitation and realize they don’t have the wherewithal to stabilize the government and are setting up an exit strategy.
Who will take their places? what sort of leaders will inherit the shambles?
Trupeers:
The Islamo-nazis don’t care about intellectual denunciations., they care about dissent. Any challenge to their self-proclaimed authority must be silenced, or they will lose all their power. It doesn’t matter if the challenge is a tweedy professor writing academic papers, a rival cleric denouncing their heresy, or a military force shooting at them. They have to respond or lose their own legitimacy. It’s something they understand that Western Elites do not.
Whiskey:
Of Primitive people this is true. But there is an ongoing human evolution that favors the notional state, the “tribe of ideas.” It certainly has not passed all the way through the human genome, but it is there. It may not yet be strong enough to displace tribalism, but if not yet then someday. In fact, I would say it is already strong enough to displace tribalism and has been for over two
centuriesmillenia. Rome was proof of that, and if your sentiments lean towards the spiritual, the coming of Christ and the transformation of Judaism (a tribal religion) into Christianity (a religion of ideas) was the confirmation of the change.What the Tribe of Ideas is not yet strong enough to vanquish, and what did in Rome, is the corruption of it’s own members. The problem with our leaders today is not that they are insufficiently loyal to their race, it’s that they are simply corrupt.
74. wretchard
I don’t know whether I’ve said it here before or not, but I have said elsewhere that we will never get a handle on defeating Islam until we first defeat the Left. That’s even more glaringly obvious in Europe than it is in the U.S.
And I think that defeating and marginalizing the Left is necessary, not a “negotiated truce”. They must be driven out of power and influence. It must be done either peaceably or not. Right now it looks to me like it’s going to be “not”.
Leftism is a more clear and present danger to my liberty than Islam. It sounds like you said that leftism is the source of Western self-hatred, in which case I agree. Once we can get past that, Islam will no longer be a serious threat to us. It wasn’t during the time when the West was self-confident, through the 20th Century up till the 60s or 70s.
Rickl: I don’t know whether I’ve said it here before or not, but I have said elsewhere that we will never get a handle on defeating Islam until we first defeat the Left. That’s even more glaringly obvious in Europe than it is in the U.S.
By analogy, think of the Left as the feminine, and the Right as the masculine (not a stretch). What happens in a prison when you “defeat the feminine” by making it a 100% masculine environment? Some of the men divide down male-female principles. Femininity asserts itself as an interior principle and you get couples who pair up, sexually, on that basis. Same thing happens in the women’s can.
Most Democrats in the US would be considered right-wingers in places like Norway or Sweden. So go ahead, defeat the left, elect nothing but 100% Republicans to the House in 2010 and half of the Republicans will divide themselves up along left-right principles and and you’ll be right back here again. We already see this happening in a mirror image, with the Democrats controlling the House, Senate, and the White House, but still no socialized medicine, and even the bill that is most likely to pass forgoes the “public option” despite the wet dreams of the Left.
Teresita, for govt to grow as fast and voraciously as it is, it might be helpful to view the effect you’re perceiving as the grasping left and right hands of men with unbridled ego.
@ 8. Wretchard, I am of the opinion that the left is unable to deliver truth to the public and in the end themselves. The left has projection as it’s only tool when it comes to determining “truth”. They voted for Obama precisely because he was a blank screen onto which they projected their beliefs and desires. And he faithfully reflected their projections back at them. Like the the Colonel said, “You don’t want the truth! Hell! You couldn’t handle the truth!”
So we careen onward toward our collective WTF! moment. Some of us are ready and will rebuild. Those of us who are busy projecting will be dumbstruck and probably lost.
Zeno, Conditioning and the PC envrionment.
How fitting that the symbol of the left is a mule. Sterile and unable to procreate. A dead end.
Trying to be fundamentally serious (the life you save may be your own), one of the things I have been trying to convey here is that our Left has been handicapping for the terrorists.
I’m pretty sure most of you are getting the same impression. What Rickl might call “the thinking of the Left” — that’s what needs to be defeated NOW. That is needed whether or not the Left will (surely?) reappear later in another form as Teresita asserts.
What I’d like to find is the precise turn of phrase that can be shouted from afar at Western officials so that they cannot mistake that
1. we know what they have been doing and
2. we want them to STOP.
This is not golf where we there is a need to make the game more even so that it is more enjoyable for all who play.
You Western governments have not been given power to handicap our anti-terrorist forces so that the terrorists chances IMPROVE.
You have been given power to protect us, not to “entertain” us.
Stop wasting our resources and endangering our lives and start profiling. Janet Napolitano was prepared to profile returning vets, but not Muslims. One might get the impression that Muslims are her agents while our vets are not.
Michael Yon, the veteran embed of Iraq and Afghanistan, one of journalism’s few true heroes these days, has finally gotten himself arrested by border agents. But guess where: Seattle. Apparently he refused to tell them how much money he made each year, on the claim that such data was irrelevant to national security and subject to a citizen’s protections on privacy.
Truly we have gone mad. I figured that if Michael ever got in trouble with border guards it would be out on some frontier bristling with hardened, armed men and dicey operators. No, I bet you he’d actually be okay in that environment and know how to manage. It would take a confused and self-loathing security sceme like in Seattle to defy common sense and eye-to-eye human interaction. The plains of Waziristan often make more sense, I wager.
Such disrespect for our esteemed federal workers is beneath contempt, and cannot be tolerated!
What we need is a volunteer force that would convert to Islam and then fight inside the religion for the will of their people.
Maybe Soros would fund it.
- Yon Detained, Handcuffed
In January of 2009, Yon’s article “Border Bullies” detailed a Homeland Security officer coercing a friend to give up her e-mail password so that he could read private email correspondences between her and Yon.
Regarding the incident in Seattle, Yon was adamant the TSA agents had overstepped their bounds: “If I am the guy on that passport and I don’t have any contraband in my luggage, it is a matter for the FBI, not the TSA.”
“TSA people are out of control,” he said. “They are not doing their jobs, they are harassing people, creating animosity. They ask you ‘what time is your connective flight?’ and they bully you until you miss the flight.”
The TSA story, along with the CSPAN concerning the transparency question with the healthcare proposal is forming quite an interesting dynamic right now.
It is not computing for me why TSA would be asking Michael Yon these questions. Are we sure it wasn’t CBP? The fact that he said the Port Authority police intervened argues for TSA, who are not LEOs and depend on the local authorities for support. TSA inspect you going out and CBP inspects you coming in. Unless Yon had to be rescreened when changing planes why would an arriving passenger need to go through TSA? So who actually handcuffed Yon? CBP of course are Federal LEOs and turn people over to ICE. It is possible for me to think of a scenario in which CBP is doing a smuggling investigation and ask about your income.
Lifeof,
Please read the “Border Bullies” link above and see what they did to his Thai friend.
…intimidation not visited upon her by dozens of other countries, including Communist China!
Michael Yon has since stated that it was CBP and not TSA.
Doug,
I already knew about his Thai friend. There are two issues here.
1. What should they be allowed to ask or inspect at the border.
2. How they do it.
I believe in the widest possible latitude for inspection at the border. Non-citizens have no right to enter the country and citizens should expect that anything that crosses the border can be inspected. Given that it is still very important to have professional skilled officers who do not needlessly create conflict. Honest communication about what you are doing and why does not compromise security. While Michael Yon may disagree about the necessity of a question the question may still have a legitimate purpose. Tact and courtesy and honesty are crucial. An abrasive or confrontational approach is both ineffective and inflammatory. There are very good reasons to inspect some electronic records at the border but it does need to be done carefully to protect purely personal communications and some legal records.
In fact, citizens and non-citizens that are no threat are put through the ringer, while illegals overrun the country, and young male muslims are given a pass.
Reality turned on it’s head.
Anybody here have personal experience with Israeli border security methods? Not equating what happened to Yon here, and while I deplore the invasion of our dignity because of Muslim terrorism, I’ve read that the Israelis ask some pretty bizarre questions in order to elicit a response. Because we’re unwilling to declare Islam an insurrectionist creed which breeds terrorism, (and thereby take the necessary steps to profile Muslims), we’re going to experience more and more of this type of intrusion. Having said all that, I’m not completely liking Yon’s chest-thumping approach on this. His journalism is informative and he is very brave, but he also has been taken in fully by the duplicitous smiley faced Muslim-infidel shakeown. He and Totten unwittingly retail the ‘winning hearts and minds’ meme which yields Noah Feldman Sharia-enshrined terror-haven nations like Iraq and Afghanistan. In my opinion, both of those writers refuse to educate themselves properly about Islam, as if Islam is somehow peripheral to the global Jihad the West should be fighting.
Reality turned on its head Doug? Incredulity has limited shelf life.
The reality IS that it is happening. The handicapping you’re witnessing does not benefit Americans.
Denial is not a river that ends in Egypt.
Spain has no monopoly on fifth columns.
‘By slow degrees the intellectuals are being cowed into silence.’
I would argue it is not slow at all, it is immediate.
“Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence–
Thomas Szasz
“John Brennan, the President’s counterterrorism adviser, thinks that closing Guantanamo prison is necessary to avoid giving al-Qaeda “a propaganda victory”, when from al-Qaeda’s point of view the closure itself is probably regarded as the victory.”
Our fathers and grandfathers weren’t so stupid as to think closing military prisons was necessary to avoid giving Nazi Germany a “propaganda victory” during World War II; they knew from basic common sense and a sense of self-defense that such an action would be regarded as an actual victory by the Nazis. Evil people and evil governments will always employ lying propaganda when they meet effective opposition, i.e.: when evil men are defeated they are forced to seek “propaganda victory.”
So, this is the maxim to remember:
A defeated enemy is forced into displays of victorious propaganda. The enemy’s “propaganda victory” is a measure of our actual victory. Three cheers for our enemy’s “propaganda victory.”
Cowboy 85: “It would take a confused and self-loathing security sceme like in Seattle to defy common sense and eye-to-eye human interaction.”
The death of common sense and the rise of intelligent insanity is a pre-requisite for totalitarian government.
“Those who have the best knowledge of what is happening are also those who are furthest from seeing the world as it is; in general the greater the understanding the greater the delusion; the more intelligent the less sane… The heresy of heresies was common sense.” George Orwell – 1984
Another essential ingredient for totalitarian government is widespread public ignorance and stupidity.
“Crimestop…includes the power of not grasping analogies; of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc (Socialist Principles of Oceania), and of being bored or rebelled by any train of thought which is capable of leading in a heretical direction. Crimestop in short means protective stupidity… The world view of the Party imposed its self most successfully on people incapable of understanding it. They could be made to accept the most flagrant violations of reality because they never fully grasped the enormity of what was demanded of them, and were not sufficiently interested in public events to notice what was happening. By lack of understanding they remained sane. They simply swallowed everything, and what they swallowed did them no harm because it left no residue behind; just as a grain of corn will pass undigested through the body of a bird.” George Orwell – 1984
Over a decade ago, a Japanese university professor was found dead, sliced up by sword, left to bleed to death in the stairwell of the university building where his office was. It was not a mystery why, he had been working on translating Salmon Rushdie’s book into Japanese. No one talked / talks about it, the message was sent. The chicken was killed.
There’s a lot to be learned in billiard halls, and the Philippines produce world-class players in abundance. The balls don’t suffer any delusions, they can only be brutally honest.
One commenter at Yon’s blog offered some very valid reasons for his foreign friend to be intimidated so. For example, she fit the classic profile of someone being brought in for the sex trade. Holding a victim for an extended period might allow certain drugs or influence to become exposed. After reading that poster’s comments, I realized the intimidating treatment she had been subjected to might very well been her only chance for her protection (if she had actually been entrapped by the slave trade). It made me think twice about appearances. The Customs agent might be fighting for the one he seems to be abusing.
Wretchard, I also was moved by your testimony of humble faith:
‘There’s nobody here but us and the Creator. The something out there that we are trying to understand and be in harmony. Reality and our attempts to survive in it. The problem is as it has always been. Lord, help me think straight. And have mercy on this poor sinner.’
Lord, help me think straight. Amen. Do I step into a hostile community and speak what I see as the Truth (and burn bridges) or do I shake them off as unworthy of my attention, and move on my own path? Lord, help me think straight.
Best regards, Peter Warner.
Zeno said “It’s a triple euphemism. It is not “War on Radical Islam”, it is “War on Islam”, simply that…We might not be at war with Islam, but Islam is at war with us. Now why is it so hard to say it?”
Talk about playing into our opponents hands. Imagine the field day they’d have with that statement on al Jazeera.
Message matters.
As Walid Phares says, we are at war with Jihadist Islam. Hardly all Muslims buy into this. Many if not most don’t.
So we are in a war against the jihad. The modern jihadists have restored the ages-old conflict between Islam and everyone else. It is a “Clash of Civlilzations,” as Samuel Huntington put it, but that doesn’t mean every single Muslim is engaged in the clash.
Now, the ones who don’t are cowed into silence by the jihadists. One of our goals should be to empower the Muslim opponents of Jihad. We are in a War of Ideas as much as a war of bullets and bombs, and we must be smart in our message. We must also support Muslim dissidents (yes there are lots of them) just as we supported dissidents in the Soviet Union.
Besides, how do you win a “War on Islam?” Kill tens or hundreds of millions? Force them into servitude? Wall off Islamic countries?
When I was a child, I was bullied in school. My parents wanted to help, so they offered the same advice their own parents had offered against bullies: “Just ignore them and they’ll go away.”
Of course, as everyone knows who has ever tried this strategy against a bully, it didn’t work. It merely stepped up the bullying from cruel words to strategic pinches, trips, stepping on feet, punching in the gut, etc. Bullies usually read being ignored as an invitation to ratchet up the level of pain another notch, and then another, and another.
In fact, the only long-term solution to bullying is to stand up to the bully–not with words, but with punches. If a bullied child gives that bully a definitive beatdown, the bullying is over, usually for good.
First Clinton in his day, and now Obama, seem to think terrorism is something they can safely ignore. Perhaps they believe that if they ignore the problem it will evaporate all by itself. My experience leads me to believe rather the opposite–that as we ignore or downplay terrorist activity, we should be prepared to see more and more brutal and horrifying acts against this nation and its citizens. We never should have ignored terrorists in the first place, but we did; now it’s time to administer a beatdown.