Two news stories, each from a different side of the Atlantic, talk about the same thing but in different ways. The British Daily Mail has an article headed by a picture showing ISIS gunman Seifeddine Rezgui “with his AK47 – casually passing abandoned inflatables as a group of men keep their distance behind him”. Rezgui isn’t even holding his weapon at the ready. He knew the men only 10 yards behind him wouldn’t sprint the distance to tackle him.
He is walking with the confidence of a wolf among sheep.
One commenter wondered what Someone was doing while this ‘tragedy’ occurred. “How come there was an alarm raised, carrying that machine gun, it was obvious to the onlookers in the picture. Somebody could have prevented another tragedy in the name of this perverse and ancient religion.”
On the American side of the Atlantic, Rukmini Callimachi has a long piece in the New York Times describing how a “lonely” American girl was gradually converted to Islam by an ISIS interlocutor on the Internet. “Alex, a 23-year-old Sunday school teacher and babysitter, was trembling with excitement the day she told her Twitter followers that she had converted to Islam.”
The only Muslims she knew were those she had met online, and he encouraged her to keep it that way, arguing that Muslims are persecuted in the United States. She could be labeled a terrorist, he warned, and for now it was best for her to keep her conversion secret, even from her family.
So on his guidance, Alex began leading a double life. She kept teaching at her church, but her truck’s radio was no longer tuned to the Christian hits on K-LOVE. Instead, she hummed along with the ISIS anthems blasting out of her turquoise iPhone, and began daydreaming about what life with the militants might be like.
“I felt like I was betraying God and Christianity,” said Alex, who spoke on the condition that she be identified only by a pseudonym she uses online. “But I also felt excited because I had made a lot of new friends.”
The NYT article calls the process enticing the lonely. The other phrase for it is filling the emptied. “She felt as if she finally had something to do,” Callimachi wrote.
The West is filled with millions of people like Alex, all of them waiting for Someone. They are the product of a multi-decade campaign to deliberately empty people of their culture; to actually make them ashamed of it. They were purposely drained of God, country, family like chickens so they could be stuffed with the latest narrative of the progressive meme machine. The Gramscian idea was to produce a blank slate upon which the Marxist narrative could be written.
Too bad for the Gramscians that the Islamists are beating them to the empty sheets of paper. And they are better at it too. Maybe the old Bolsheviks could have given ISIS a run for its money, but today’s liberals have declined from their sires. George Orwell observed the takeover of hardcore Bolshevism by the periphery in the 1930s.
The first thing that must strike any outside observer is that Socialism, in its developed form is a theory confined entirely to the middle classes. The typical Socialist is not, as tremulous old ladies imagine, a ferocious-looking working man with greasy overalls and a raucous voice. He is either a youthful snob-Bolshevik who in five years’ time will quite probably have made a wealthy marriage and been converted to Roman Catholicism; or, still more typically, a prim little man with a white-collar job, usually a secret teetotaller and often with vegetarian leanings, with a history of Nonconformity behind him, and, above all, with a social position which he has no intention of forfeiting.
This last type is surprisingly common in Socialist parties of every shade; it has perhaps been taken over _en bloc_ from the old Liberal Party. In addition to this there is the horrible–the really disquieting–prevalence of cranks wherever Socialists are gathered together. One sometimes gets the impression that the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker, ‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England.
The good news is there are no more Stalins left. The bad news is that the PC set have replaced them. Sheepdom in man is the product of conditioning, to remake what was once, in the words of Richard Connell, The Most Dangerous Game. Now, when the wolves stalk through the sheepfold everyone waits for the Someone though he is nowhere to be found.
Barak Barfi wrote in Foreign Policy about How the White House Abandoned American Hostages. “I was an advisor to the families of U.S. hostages held by the Islamic State. And the Obama administration failed them, repeatedly.” The reason for the administration’s inaction was simple. It did not compute. The problem would not lend itself to their bag of approved solutions.
It was left to civilians like me to gather information and debrief the released European hostages. Because of my experience in the Middle East, I became the principal advisor to Steve’s family, directly handling their communication with the Islamic State. …
The FBI was useless. Its tasks were alternately to extract information and to comfort the family. It never shared intelligence. One European hostage, who was incarcerated with the Americans and subsequently released, told me he was shocked that the FBI seemed more interested in gathering evidence to prosecute the hostage-takers than it was in locating the Americans. Our lead agent misled me on several occasions, employing convoluted legalisms that would have impressed the greatest Talmudic scholars. His tactics so frustrated the Sotloffs that they finally asked him to address all queries to me. Though Steve is dead, our nightmare with the FBI continues. The bureau still refuses to give the Sotloffs the original letters he smuggled out of prison, claiming it is studying them for clues.
The FBI could have helped most when the Islamic State initiated contact with each of the families. Instead, it relied on hostage training manuals designed for dealing with psychopaths. That was the wrong approach. …
The State Department was no better. When the mother of one of the hostages requested a senior point of contact at the White House, a State Department official rebuked her for going over her head.
So they did nothing. The lesson is don’t count on them to save your bacon. When the crunch comes you might have better luck locating the mythical Florida Man than the Someone you hope will save you. Maybe he existed once, but Gramsci has banished him from the meeting halls and town squares. Perhaps he could once be found in the station house, but he’s manacled by the lawyers. If ISIS attacks near you, hide, evade and fight back first and call Someone only when you’re out of the line of fire. Maybe you’ll get an answer.
That Someone’s busy with transfat, transgender and alternative marriage issues. He can’t bother with protecting borders. Just leave your number and the time you called, and he’ll get back to you. The state has finally achieved both universal jurisdiction and total impotence at one and the same moment.
What is to be done? The first task is to start gathering a circle of friends who live within walking distance of your home. Four people — a handyman, a nurse or doctor, an ex-cop or soldier and a strongback for preference — will do. Your second task is to support the causes you care about. Volunteer at your church or club. If you have no club, start one. Donate to your favorite website. If you don’t have a favorite, find one or go online yourself. Buy the book of an author you admire. And switch off the damned telescreen.
The last step is to stop worrying. Focus on what you must do, not on what might happen because of it. Shakespeare observed that every man dies or grows old or breaks a leg, so there was no point worrying about it. Die the one death and not the thousand ones of apprehension before it.
Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once.
Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come.
Otherwise you’ll finish up like Alex. Alone, lonely and afraid — desperately waiting for Someone to tell her what to do — even if that Someone is ISIS. Be instead the master of your fate. Go out and survive. Who knows but you may just succeed.
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