To my knowledge, no one has yet commented on the mordant and obvious irony that the attack on the Paris Bataclan concert hall by ISIS-inspired terrorists coincided with a performance by the facetiously named American rock band Eagles of Death Metal. It seems as if a kind of macabre serendipity were at work — birds of prey swooping in, a lot of metal spewing death. More to the point, how many eagles of death metal, armed with grenades and Kalashnikovs rather than guitars and drums, will smuggle themselves into the homeland under cover of the streaming hordes of refugees and migrants from the Middle East and North Africa, aka “Syrians”?
It is salient to observe, in the wake of the official push in Europe, the U.S. and Canada to import large numbers of “Syrian” refugees, that a discarded Syrian passport was found at the site of the attack at the Stade de France. As the Washington Post reports, “Greece’s civil protection agency confirmed the passport holder had arrived on the island of Leros, most likely from Turkey.” In fact, Syrian passports and driving licences are readily purchased by those falsely claiming to be Syrian nationals; as MailOnline reports, “ISIS fighters and economic migrants are able to buy Syrian identity documents that allow them to hide among refugees travelling to Europe with frightening ease.”
Moreover, refugees without such documents but passing themselves off as Syrians are often permitted to pass through border controls. The Wall Street Journal quotes Matteo Salvini, leader of the Italian conservative party Northern League: “Three-quarters of the people coming to Europe are not fleeing any war…It’s one thing to host refugees and another to fill up the country with illegal migrants.” The prospects for Paris-like attacks and worse swell by the day. But when it comes to public policy and media sympathy, it would appear that compassion trumps survival.
Daniel Pipes is surely right, for a change, when he argues that “the people and the professionals are moving in opposite directions, the former to the right, the latter to the left.” What he calls the “4-P” establishment — politicians, police, press, professors — are living in “a bubble of public denial.” I have long contended that only a truly cataclysmic terrorist attack that takes out a city or costs hundreds of thousands of lives will force these sleepers to awaken. I recall the consternation among my fellow panelists at a symposium held at Library and Archives Canada in Ottawa on a 9/11 commemoration weekend in 2011 when I advanced this argument. Pipes has come to a similar conclusion. “Only a truly massive loss of life, perhaps in the hundreds of thousands, will force the professionals to back off their deeply ingrained pattern of denying an Islamic component in the spate of attacks.”
Observe, by the way, Pipe’s use of the word “Islamic,” this from a pundit who has for many years strenuously insisted on the (entirely meretricious) distinction between “Islamist” and “Islamic.” It is moderately encouraging to see that some prominent figures, like presidential hopeful Ben Carson, also recognize that the problem is Islam, not a comforting figment like “Islamism.” Unlike Barack Obama who “[didn’t] want to speculate” about who was responsible for the November 13 Paris attacks, Carson has no illusion about their source, and others like them — as well as their partial remedy. Immigration from Muslim-majority countries must cease or be rigorously monitored. Bringing in thousands upon thousands of Middle Eastern refugees is a recipe for disaster. Note his choice of words: “We have to recognize that the global Islamic movement is an existential threat.” Islamic, not Islamist.
But the professionals are mired in their folly. German Chancellor Angela Merkel proposes to lead the fight against terrorism by “living our values confidently” and extending tolerance to the other, in other words, to the migrants currently displacing natives from their homes. President Obama declares that the Paris bloodbath was an attack “on all humanity and the universal values that we share.” No, it wasn’t. As Mark Steyn remarks, “What it is is an attack on the west, on the civilization that built the modern world — an attack on one portion of ‘humanity’ by those who claim to speak for another portion of ‘humanity.’ And these are not ‘universal values’ but values that spring from a relatively narrow segment of humanity.” For his part, French president François Hollande ordered the borders of France sealed to prevent the terrorists from escaping — when it is clear, as former al-Qaeda informant Morten Storm points out, that the jihadists have no intention of leaving the country. The rich fields for further harvests are inside the country, where the reaping will continue to take place.
The complete fatuousness of the official response to the atrocity shows no sign of tapering off. The Spectator posits that the “appalling attack” represented an act of war against Islam itself. Indeed, The Spectator is convinced that the “scenes in Paris will shock Muslims world over…when Muslims hear of gunmen shouting ‘Allahu akbar’ before committing the very acts of murder explicitly prohibited by the Koran.” Of course, nothing could be further from the truth, as even a cursory reading of the Koran would reveal. Quoting the Muslim apologist Bassam Tibi as if he were the fount of scholarly rectitude and panoptical wisdom, Tibi falsely argues that the Sharia espoused by the jihadists is not the Sharia found in the Koran — the certifiable idiots at the paper conclude that what we are witnessing “is a new ideology, a form of totalitarianism — and one that has its ideological source not in medieval Islam but 20th century fascism.” Incidentally, the article in question was written by one Qanta Ahmed.
The truth, as historian of Islamic theology Andrew Bostom clarifies for us, is that the carnage in Paris flows directly from medieval Islam and not 20th century fascism. It derives explicitly from Koran 59:2, which reads in part:
And they thought that their fortresses would defend them from God! But the (Wrath of) God came to them from quarters from which they little expected (it), and cast terror into their hearts so that they destroyed their houses by their own hands and the hands of the believers.
This ayah or passage is cited verbatim in a statement released by ISIS following the attack, which concludes, “This is just the beginning,” and quotes the last sentence of the Koranic ayah, “It is also a warning for any who wish to take heed.”
Clearly few of our “experts” — political leaders, editors, intellectuals — have read the Koran or the Hadith or the Sunnah and operate on about the same level of plummetless ignorance as, say, Mizzou students or Brandeis administrators. Or, just as likely in those cases where we can presume familiarity with canonical scripture, they are shilling for the enemy, or are actually members of the forces arrayed against us. In either event, the houses of the West are being destroyed, both by our own hands and the hands of the believers.
The real eagles of death metal are everywhere around us and the band they have formed plays on.
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