Imagine there's no You.

You will never be the one who dies in a terrorist attack. You'll be dead. You won't be around to discuss it. So, it'll always be someone else who dies. And until your life is made rotten by others you'll muddle through. You might not like the way things are for others but until your life is miserable you won't do anything much to change the lives of others; you won't go out of your way to do anything that would make your life less than it it now, even if it means saving yourself great misery later. Daily concerns press daily, and the big questions of government and social concerns are left to those who make it their duty to work on those problems professionally. That's why we have politicians and civil servants, because we're too busy to deal with the problems of greater society ourselves. We delegate the chores to others on our behalf. If they fail we try to find enough discontent to organize ourselves into voter blocs to rid ourselves of this lot and replace them with better delegates. Or we don't. We go along with what the politicians and professionals have to say because they're professionals, working daily at hard jobs to do what they do best: keep us safe andx secure, prosperous and content. That goes for Mulsims and everyone else on the streets and in the communities we live in. If a few lunatics kill at random, well, it's never you who dies, and it's only a small fraction of extremists who cause the problems, not the vast majority of Muslims who are law-abiding people just like you. Leave it to the police to find the small number of agitators, leave it to the politicians to smooth the ruffled chicken feathers of the irate whom we've somehow offended, do what they ask, and then everything will again be just fine. You won't die in a terrorist attack. If someone else does, well, you'll just get by.

But if the economy goes sour, if you run out of money because the world is in a slump, if you lose your comfort and security, if you face financial hardship or worse, then you'll find yourself in a different frame of mind. Consider what you might become under those circumstances. consider what others before you became under those conditions. Look at the people in the West of the 1930s, and ask if that's what might happen to you, unaffected as you might be today by Islamic terrorism and fascism.

Today we can afford to be liberal, benevolent, and indulgent. But what will you be like if you can't afford to be indulgent any longer? If your personal life goes pear-shaped due to some attack on the world economy puts you on the dole, what kind of person will you be when you see a hijabed moron protesting Islamophobia? What if the Muslims keep up the terror attacks on public transit users, keep denying responsibility, keep blaming you for the problem of mass and random murder on the streets, and what if they are half the population or more?

The essay directly below by Orianna Fallaci comes here via http//:jihadwatch.org. The three further essays are early warnings as well. But there's nothing early about this at all. We have seen the rise of the fascists since 1789, the Counter-Enlightenment reactionaries working from the start to destroy Modernity; and nothing has changed.

Most of the world's population live in a state of primitive fascism, and they have done so for the past 5,000 years. Most people were satisfied with their lots. Life was nasty, brutish, and short, as Hobbes put it, and most people were resigned to it. They invested in it, and moreso in the next life, the one that would be Golden. The majority of people in the world today do not want to live in a global Modernity but in the mud huts and squalor they know and are accustomed to. They might like some of the modern stuff of the West but they want it without paying the price of being Modernists themselves. Maybe they have some valid points. But we cannot co-exist with the primitives any longer in relative peace. The split between Modernity and the status quo is too wide, and widening daily. The primitives see it clearly, the progress of the West leaving them further and further from what they envy and hate. They can never compete as things are today, but they can compete and win if only they can bring the Modern world to the level of the primitives. Man to man, the Modernist pitted against the primitive, they think, is no match. So, they must destroy the trappings of the West, of Modernity, to get at the Modernist's throat. And how will you react if it comes to a fight man to man? What are you going to be like if you meet a man and he wants to kill you? What if you're hungry and angry? The primitives are in their element but you won't be. the primitives want to destroy your world of power to rule you, enslave you, kill you if they please. That's the nature of the fascism of Islam.

We've written briefly about the nature of fascist hatred of mediocrity, the loathing of the unheroic the fascists see in the middle-class Westerner. The fascist loves death, not life. He wants to die in a blaze of glory to go on to the next life and its rewards. The fascist hates the man he sees as a coward and a mediocrity who counts his money but has no cosmic greatness. What are you going to do when you meet that man and he want to kill you? What if you're unemployed thanks to his terrorist antics?

We are revolutionaries, a small group of people living in affluence and in the expectatio n of further progress in all areas of life. We are an island in the midst of fascism and hatred that worships violence, death, and murder. We are generally well-protected from them, the fascists of Islam. We can opine about their ocassional outrages against someone else somewhere else, and it will never be you who dies. But you might get hungry, and there's the problem. You might become a fascist too.

But we've also quoted Primo Levi from the Drowned and the Saved, and we've seen how the vast majority of concentration camp inmates simply sank into inevitable death because they foolowed the camp rules till they starved to death. We've also written that in the heat of battle, only 15 per cent of combat soldiers, even when under direct fire with clear target to shoot at, fired in return. You might not do a thing but lie down and die. Regardless of what you might think of yourself, the odds are that you won't resist being killed. And until you die it will always happen to someone else.

So far our living conditions are bearable. Not one of us was murdered in a terrorist attack. It happened to others. And maybe if Islam is a religion of peace, then Muslims, the vast majority of them, will tell the deluded hijackers of the agenda to stop and wwe can resume our Modernist lives as per usual. We can remain passive, hoping this nightmare will sort itself out in time, and that we can continue the soma daze of our lives as before. Fallaci says no, and she's on trial for saying so.
***
http://mysteryachievement.blogspot.com/
Saturday, July 23, 2005
"The Enemy we Treat Like A Friend" (Part 1)

Rather than try to keep up with the body counts from the latest love offerings by the Religion of Peace or, more painfully, to listen to the latest outrages against human decency pouring forth from the lips of their apologists--pale of skin and heart--I've decided to give the floor to one of the very few people who has been consistently making sense ever since the Muslim war against our civilization came to New York on a September morning four years ago.

From the Italian blog Eddyburg (via Romanwanderer) comes the latest column by Oriana Fallaci. Published exactly one week ago today in Corriere Della Sera, it is entitled, "Il nemico che trattiamo da amico" ("The Enemy We Treat As A Friend"). Hopefully, I'll have Part II translated and posted by tomorrow.
***

Now, I ask myself: "What do you say, what do you have to say, about what happened in London?" They ask me face-to-face, via fax and email; often scolding me because up until now I have remained silent. Almost as if my silence were a betrayal. And each time I shake my head and murmur to myself: what else should I say?!? I've been saying it for four years--that I fight against the Monster that has decided to eliminate us physically and, along with our bodies, to destroy our principles and values. Our civilization. For four years I've been talking about Islamic Nazism; about the war against the West; about the death cult; about European suicide. About a Europe that is no longer Europe, but Eurabia, and that with its feebleness, its inertia, its blindness, its servitude to the enemy is digging its own grave. For four years, like another Cassandra, I've been shouting until I'm hoarse "Troy is burning! Troy is burning!" and I despair of the Danaids for whom, like Virgil in the Aeneid I weep for a city entombed in its torpor. [A city] that, through its wide-open doors receives fresh troops and joins complicit parties [inside]. For four years I've been repeating to the wind the truth about the Monster and its accomplices; that is, the accomplices of the Monster who, in good or bad faith, open wide the doors--who, like [those] in the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist, throw themselves at his feet and allow themselves to be stamped with the mark of shame.

I began with "The Rage and the Pride." I continued with "The Force of Reason." I followed [those] with "Oriana Fallaci Interviews Oriana Fallaci," and "The Apocalypse." And in each one I preached, "Wake up, West! Wake up!" The books, the ideas, for which in France they tried me in 2002, accusing me of religious racism and xenophobia. For which Switzerland asked our Minister of Justice to extradite me in handcuffs. For which in Italy I will be tried for vilifying Islam; that is, for an offense of opinion. (An offense that carries a sentence of three years in prison; none of which will be served by the Islamist caught with explosives in his cantina). Books, ideas, for which the "Caviar" left, the "Fois Gras" right, and even the "Prosciutto" Center have denigrated and vilified me, putting me in the stocks together with all who think as I do. That is, together with the sensible and unprotected people who are defined by the radical-chic in their frivolous talk as "the riff-raff of the Right."

Yes, it's true: In newspapers that in the best of cases pharasaically opposed me with a conspiracy of silence now appear titles using my concepts and words.--"War Against the West."; "Cult of Death"; "The Suicide of Europe"; Wake up, Italy! Wake up!" Yes, it's true: Though without admitting I wasn't wrong, the ex-secretary of the Democratic Left now submits to interviews in which he declares that "these-terrorists-want-to
-destroy-our-values"; that "this-slaughter-is-facist-in-nature-and-expresses-hatred-for-our-civilization". Yes, it's true: In speaking of Londonistan, the section of London where some 700,000 Muslims live, the newspapers which at first gave comfort to the terrorists--going so far as to make excuses for their crime are now saying what I did when I wrote that in each one of our cities exists another city. A subterranean city; equal to Beirut when it was invaded by Arafat in the 70s. A foreign city that speaks its own language and observes its own customs; a Muslim city where terrorists go about their business undisturbed and, thus undisturbed, plan our deaths. The rest is now spoken of openly; even Islamic terrorism, something that was carefully avoided in order not to offend moderate Muslims. Yes it's true: Now, even the fifth columnists and the imams express their hypocritical condemnations, their mendacious loathing, their false solidarity with the relatives of the victims. Yes, it's true: Now, thorough searches are being made in the cases of the accused Muslims; suspects are arrested; perhaps it will even be decided to expel them. But in substance, nothing has changed.Does the matter of the One God really suffice to establish a concord of concepts, of principles, of values?!? This is the point, in the unchanged reality of post-attack London that perhaps troubles me the most. I am also troubled because it goes along with, and thereby reinforces that which I consider the error committed by Papa Wojtyla: not to fight as much as he should have, in my opinion, against the illiberal and anti-democratic--no, cruel--essence of Islam. During these last four years, I have done nothing but ask myself why a warrior like Wojtyla, a leader so singular who contributed more than anyone else to the downfall of the Soviet empire and, therefore, of Communism, showed himself to be so weak towards a disease worse than the Soviet empire or Communism. A disease that, above all, targets Christianity (and Judaism) for destruction. I have done nothing but ask myself why he did not inveigh openly against what was happening (and is happening), for example, in Sudan where the fundamentalist regime was practicing (and is practicing) slavery. Where Christians were eliminated (are eliminated) by the millions. Why he was silent about Saudi Arabia where anyone with a Bible in hand or a cross around his neck was (and is) treated like a scum to be put to death. Still today, there is that silence I don't understand, and…
***

Naturally, I understand that the philosophy of the Catholic Church is based on ecumenism and on the commandment "Love-your-enemy-as-yourself." That one of its fundamental principles (at least theoretically) is forgiveness, sacrifice, turning the other cheek. (A sacrifice I refuse not only for pride; that is, for my way of maintaining my dignity, but also because I believe there is a motive of Evil on the part of those who do evil.) But there also exists the principle of self-defense or, instead, legitimate defense and, if I'm not mistaken, the Catholic Church has made use of this principle more than once. Charles Martel turned back the Muslim invaders lifting up the crucifix. Isabel of Spain tossed them out of Spain while doing the same. And at Lepanto there were even Papal troops. In order to defend Vienna, the last bulwark of Christianity, in order to break the siege of Kara Mustafa, there was also, and above all, the Pole Jan Sobienski with the image of the Virgin of Chestochowa. And if those Catholics had not applied the principle of self-defense--of legitimate defense--we, too, would be wearing the burka or the calabash. We, too, would be calling the few survivors infidel dogs. We, too, We, too, would be cutting off their heads with the halal knife. And Saint Peter's Basilica would be a mosque, like the Church of Saint Sofia in Istanbul. Worse: the Vatican would be Bin Laden and Zarqawi.

Thus, three days after the latest massacre, when Pope Ratzinger renewed the theme of dialogue, I was astonished. Your Holiness, I speak to you as a person who admires you very much. Who loves you, because you are right about so many things. Who, because of this, is mocked along with those nicknamed "devout atheist," "sanctimonious layperson," "clerical liberal." A person, above all, who understands politics and its necessities. Who understands the drama of leadership and its compromises. Who admires the stubbornness of faith and respects the renouncements and generosity that it demands. But I must pose the following question all the same: do you really believe that the Muslims would accept a dialogue with Christians, or with other religions, or with atheists like me? Do you really believe that they can change, reform, quit planting bombs? You are a very erudite man, Your Holiness. Very cultured. And you know them well. Much better than I. Explain to me then: When ever, in the course of their history--a history that has lasted for 1400 years--have they changed and reformed?

posted by someguy @ 9:19 PM
***

Most Westerners don't want to rock the boat. Most Westerners do not see themselves as radical revolutionaries at odds with the majority of the world's population. Rather, we see ourselves as ordinary and normal people who just want to get along with everyone in a state of love and peace, just like in the 60s.

Well friend, the times they are a changin'. The times are changing and we, like our Muslim cousins, don't want to deal with it. Fallaci rages, and Bush and Blair obfuscate. The Muslim world goes on their ocassional killing rampages, and the Muslim spokesmen plead innocence, ignorance, and impotence. It's all the fault of the West, anyway. Let's look the other way, pay off some of the bad gys, pretend it's not really happening, and let's get on with our lives and know that we will never witness our own deaths. People have lives to live, and they don't want to be bothered with radical solutions to things that likely aren't as bad as some would claim. No. The times are not like they were even six moths ago. Some people are starting to look around. There's a man with a gun over there telling me I got to beware. What's that sound? The changing times?

In the following two essays by Mark Steyn we'll see just how much they're a changin' and just how little change it means in our lives and attitudes generally.
***

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

Mark Steyn: Mugged by reality?
25 July 2005

WITH hindsight, the defining encounter of the age was not between Mohammed Atta's jet and the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, but that between Mohammed Atta and Johnelle Bryant a year earlier.

Bryant is an official with the US Department of Agriculture in Florida, and the late Atta had gone to see her about getting a $US650,000 government loan to convert a plane into the world's largest crop-duster. A novel idea.

The meeting got off to a rocky start when Atta refused to deal with Bryant because she was but a woman. But, after this unpleasantness had been smoothed out, things went swimmingly. When it was explained to him that, alas, he wouldn't get the 650 grand in cash that day, Atta threatened to cut Bryant's throat. He then pointed to a picture behind her desk showing an aerial view of downtown Washington - the White House, the Pentagon et al - and asked: "How would America like it if another country destroyed that city and some of the monuments in it?"

Fortunately, Bryant's been on the training course and knows an opportunity for multicultural outreach when she sees one. "I felt that he was trying to make the cultural leap from the country that he came from," she recalled. "I was attempting, in every manner I could, to help him make his relocation into our country as easy for him as I could."

So a few weeks later, when fellow 9/11 terrorist Marwan al-Shehhi arrived to request another half-million dollar farm subsidy and Atta showed up cunningly disguised with a pair of glasses and claiming to be another person entirely - to whit, al-Shehhi's accountant - Bryant sportingly pretended not to recognise him and went along with the wheeze. The fake specs, like the threat to slit her throat and blow up the Pentagon, were just another example of the multicultural diversity that so enriches our society.

For four years, much of the western world behaved like Bryant. Bomb us, and we agonise over the "root causes" (that is, what we did wrong). Decapitate us, and our politicians rush to the nearest mosque to declare that "Islam is a religion of peace". Issue bloodcurdling calls at Friday prayers to kill all the Jews and infidels, and we fret that it may cause a backlash against Muslims. Behead sodomites and mutilate female genitalia, and gay groups and feminist groups can't wait to march alongside you denouncing Bush, Blair and Howard. Murder a schoolful of children, and our scholars explain that to the "vast majority" of Muslims "jihad" is a harmless concept meaning "decaf latte with skimmed milk and cinnamon sprinkles".

Until the London bombings. Something about this particular set of circumstances - British subjects, born and bred, weaned on chips, fond of cricket, but willing to slaughter dozens of their fellow citizens - seems to have momentarily shaken the multiculturalists out of their reveries. Hitherto, they've taken a relaxed view of the more, ah, robust forms of cultural diversity - Sydney gang rapes, German honour killings - but Her Britannic Majesty's suicide bombers have apparently stiffened even the most jelly-spined lefties.

At The Age, Terry Lane, last heard blaming John Howard for the "end of democracy as we know it" and calling for "the army of my country ... to be defeated" in Iraq, now says multiculturalism is a "repulsive word" whereas "assimilation is a beaut" and should be commended. In the sense that he seems to have personally assimilated with Pauline Hanson, he's at least leading by example.

Where Lane leads, Melbourne's finest have been rushing to follow, lining up to sign on to the New Butchness. "There is something wrong with multiculturalism," warns Pamela Bone. "Perhaps it is time to say, you are welcome, but this is the way it is here." Tony Parkinson - The Age's resident voice of sanity - quotes approvingly France's Jean-Francois Revel: "Clearly, a civilisation that feels guilty for everything it is and does will lack the energy and conviction to defend itself."

And yet, The Age's editor Andrew Jaspan still lives in another world. You'll recall that it was Jaspan who objected to the energy and conviction of certain freed Australian hostage, at least when it comes to disrespecting their captors: "I was, I have to say, shocked by Douglas Wood's use of the 'arsehole' word, if I can put it like that, which I just thought was coarse and very ill-thought through ... As I understand it, he was treated well there. He says he was fed every day, and as such to turn around and use that kind of language I think is just insensitive."

And heaven forbid we're insensitive about terrorists. True, a blindfolded Wood had to listen to his jailers murder two of his colleagues a few inches away, but how boorish would one have to be to hold that against one's captors? A few months after 9/11, National Review's John Derbyshire dusted off the old Cold War mantra "Better dead than red" and modified it to mock the squeamishness of politically correct warfare: "Better dead than rude". But even he would be surprised to see it taken up quite so literally by Andrew Jaspan.

Usually it's the hostage who gets Stockholm Syndrome, but the newly liberated Wood must occasionally reflect that in this instance the entire culture seems to have caught a dose. And, in a sense, we have: multiculturalism is a kind of societal Stockholm Syndrome. Atta's meetings with Bryant are emblematic: He wasn't a genius, a master of disguise in deep cover; indeed, he was barely covered at all, he was the Leslie Nielsen of terrorist masterminds - but the more he stuck out, the more Bryant was trained not to notice, or to put it all down to his vibrant cultural tradition.

That's the great thing about multiculturalism: it doesn't involve knowing anything about other cultures - like, say, the capital of Bhutan or the principal exports of Malaysia, the sort of stuff the old imperialist wallahs used to be well up on. Instead, it just involves feeling warm and fluffy, making bliss out of ignorance. And one notices a subtle evolution in multicultural pieties since the Islamists came along. It was most explicitly addressed by the eminent British lawyer Baroness Kennedy of the Shaws, QC, who thought that it was too easy to disparage "Islamic fundamentalists". "We as western liberals too often are fundamentalist ourselves. We don't look at our own fundamentalisms."

And what exactly would those western liberal fundamentalisms be? "One of the things that we are too ready to insist upon is that we are the tolerant people and that the intolerance is something that belongs to other countries like Islam. And I'm not sure that's true."

Hmm. Kennedy appears to be arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people's intolerance, which is intolerable. Thus the lop-sided valse macabre of our times: the more the Islamists step on our toes, the more we waltz them gaily round the room. I would like to think that the newly fortified Age columnists are representative of the culture's mood, but, if I had to bet, I'd put my money on Kennedy: anyone can be tolerant of the tolerant, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. Australia's old cultural cringe had a certain market rationality; the new multicultural cringe is pure nihilism.

Mark Steyn is a regular contributor to The Australian.
***

We have some sympathy for the Muslim collective identity, the ummah. They have a right to live, and live as they please. But the world is now too crowded, and the Muslims are among us, living with us, killing us because we offend them by our very existence. That, too, is highly understandable. But it cuts both ways, and it can only go one way in the final analysis.

More of Steyn below:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/

A victory for multiculti over common sense
By Mark Steyn
(Filed: 19/07/2005)

It has been sobering this past week watching some of my "woollier" colleagues (in Vicki Woods's self-designation) gradually awake to the realisation that the real suicide bomb is "multiculturalism". Its remorseless tick-tock, suddenly louder than the ethnic drumming at an anti-globalisation demo, drove poor old Boris Johnson into rampaging around this page last Thursday like some demented late-night karaoke one-man Fiddler on the Roof, stamping his feet and bellowing, "Tradition! Tradition!" Boris's plea for more Britishness was heartfelt and valiant, but I'm not sure I'd bet on it. The London bombers were, to the naked eye, assimilated - they ate fish 'n' chips, played cricket, sported appalling leisurewear. They'd adopted so many trees we couldn't see they lacked the big overarching forest - the essence of identity, of allegiance. As I've said before, you can't assimilate with a nullity - which is what multiculturalism is.




So, if Islamist extremism is the genie you're trying to put back in the bottle, it doesn't help to have smashed the bottle. As the death of the Eurofanatic Ted Heath reminds us, in modern Britain even a "conservative" prime minister thinks nothing of obliterating ancient counties and imposing on the populace fantasy jurisdictions - "Avon", "Clwyd" and (my personal favourite in its evocative neo-Stalinism) "Central Region" - and an alien regulatory regime imported from the failed polities of Europe. The 7/7 murderers are described as "Yorkshiremen", but, of course, there is no Yorkshire: Ted abolished that, too.

Sir Edward's successor, Mr Blair, said on the day of the bombing that terrorists would not be allowed to "change our country or our way of life". Of course not. That's his job - from hunting to Europeanisation. Could you reliably say what aspects of "our way of life" Britain's ruling class, whether pseudo-Labour like Mr Blair or pseudo-Conservative like Sir Ted, wish to preserve? The Notting Hill Carnival? Not enough, alas.

Consider the Bishop of Lichfield, who at Evensong, on the night of the bombings, was at pains to assure his congregants: "Just as the IRA has nothing to do with Christianity, so this kind of terror has nothing to do with any of the world faiths." It's not so much the explicit fatuousness of the assertion so much as the broader message it conveys: we're the defeatist wimps; bomb us and we'll apologise to you. That's why in Britain the Anglican Church is in a death-spiral and Islam is the fastest-growing religion. There's no market for a faith that has no faith in itself. And as the Church goes so goes the state: why introduce identity cards for a nation with no identity?

It was the Prime Minister's wife, you'll recall, who last year won a famous court victory for Shabina Begum, as a result of which schools across the land must now permit students to wear the full "jilbab" - ie, Muslim garb that covers the entire body except the eyes and hands. Ms Booth hailed this as "a victory for all Muslims who wish to preserve their identity and values despite prejudice and bigotry". It seems almost too banal to observe that such an extreme preservation of Miss Begum's Muslim identity must perforce be at the expense of any British identity. Nor, incidentally, is Miss Begum "preserving" any identity: she's of Bangladeshi origin, and her adolescent adoption of the jilbab is a symbol of the Arabisation of South Asian (and African and European) Islam that's at the root of so many problems. It's no more part of her inherited identity than my five-year- old dressing up in his head-to-toe Darth Vader costume, to which at a casual glance it's not dissimilar.

Is it "bigoted" to argue that the jilbab is a barrier to acquiring the common culture necessary to any functioning society? Is it "prejudiced" to suggest that in Britain a Muslim woman ought to reach the same sartorial compromise as, say, a female doctor in Bahrain? Apparently so, according to Cherie Booth.

One of the striking features of the post-9/11 world is the minimal degree of separation between the so-called "extremists" and the establishment: Princess Haifa, wife of the Saudi ambassador to Washington, gives $130,000 to accomplices of the 9/11 terrorists; the head of the group that certifies Muslim chaplains for the US military turns out to be a bagman for terrorists; one of the London bombers gets given a tour of the House of Commons by a Labour MP. The Guardian hires as a "trainee journalist" a member of Hizb ut Tahir, "Britain's most radical Islamic group" (as his own newspaper described them) and in his first column post-7/7 he mocks the idea that anyone could be "shocked" at a group of Yorkshiremen blowing up London: "Second- and third-generation Muslims are without the don't-rock-the-boat attitude that restricted our forefathers. We're much sassier with our opinions, not caring if the boat rocks" - or the bus blows, or the Tube vaporises. Fellow Guardian employee David Foulkes, who was killed in the Edgware Road blast, would no doubt be heartened to know he'd died for the cause of Muslim "sassiness".

But among all these many examples of the multiculti mainstream ushering the extremists from the dark fringe to the centre of western life, there is surely no more emblematic example than that of Shabina Begum, whose victory over the school dress code was achieved with the professional support of both the wife of the Prime Minister who pledges to defend "our way of life" and of Hizb ut Tahir, a group which (according to the German Interior Minister) "supports violence as a means to realise political goals" such as a worldwide caliphate and (according to the BBC) "urges Muslims to kill Jewish people". What does an "extremist" have to do to be too extreme for Cherie Booth or the Guardian?

Oh, well. Back to business as usual. In yesterday's Independent, Dave Brown had a cartoon showing Bush and Blair as terrorists boarding the Tube to Baghdad. Ha-ha. The other day in Thailand, where 800 folks have been killed by Islamists since the start of the year, two Laotian farm workers were beheaded. I suppose that's Bush and Blair's fault, too.

I'd like to think my "woolly liberal" colleague Vicki Woods and the woolly sorta-conservative Boris Johnson represent the majority. If they do, you've got a sporting chance. But in the end Cherie Booth and Dave Brown and the Bishop of Lichfield will get you killed. Best of British, old thing.
***

When you're finished wiping away the bitter tears, we'll end today's installment with an essay by Diana West, who asks where our multi-cultural pretentions are leading us. But it's not enough to know that we're on the road to perdition and the end is near. The question is what is to be done? West adds more fire to the smoke of dhimmitude. No, we are not alone in this war against fascism, but where are we going? What are we doing? Who's going to save us if we won't save ourselves from the drowning in the lager?
***

http://www.townhall.com/

Burnt offerings on the altar of multiculturalism
Diana West ( archive )
July 18, 2005

Without it -- without its fanatics who believe all civilizations are the same -- the engine that projects Islam into the unprotected heart of Western civilization would stall and fail. It's as simple as that. To live among the believers -- the multiculturalists -- is to watch the assault, the jihad, take place un-repulsed by our suicidal societies. These societies are not doomed to submit; rather, they are eager to do so in the name of a masochistic brand of tolerance that, short of drastic measures, is surely terminal.

I'm not talking about our soldiers, policemen, rescue workers and, now, even train conductors, who bravely and steadfastly risk their lives for civilization abroad and at home. Instead, I'm thinking about who we are as a society at this somewhat advanced stage of war. It is a strange, tentative civilization we have become, with leaders who strut their promises of "no surrender" even as they flinch at identifying the foe. Four years past 9/11, we continue to shadow-box "terror," even as we go on about "an ideology of hate." It's a script that smacks of sci-fi fantasy more than realpolitik. But our grim reality is no summer blockbuster, and there's no special-effects-enhanced plot twist that is going to thwart "terror" or "hate" in the London Underground anymore than it did on the roof of the World Trade Center. Or in the Bali nightclub. Or on the first day of school in Beslan. Or in any disco, city bus or shopping mall in Israel.

Body bags, burn masks and prosthetics are no better protections than make-believe. But these are our weapons, according to the powers that be. These, and an array of high-tech scopes and scanners designed to identify retinas and fingerprints, to detect explosives and metals -- ultimately, I presume, as we whisk through the automatic supermarket door. How strange, though, that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full-face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.

Notice I didn't say "Islamists." Or "Islamofascists." Or "fundamentalist extremists." I've tried out such terms in the past, but I've come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so, because in their imprecision I think they allow us all to give a wide berth to a great problem: the gross incompatibility of Islam -- the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it "moderately" enables or "extremistly" advances jihad -- with the West. Am I right? Who's to say? The very topic of Islamization -- for that is what is at hand, and very soon in Europe -- is verboten. A leaked British report prepared for Prime Minister Tony Blair last year warned even against "expressions of concern about Islamic fundamentalism" (another one of those amorphous terms) because "many perfectly moderate Muslims follow strict adherence to traditional Islamic teachings and are likely to perceive such expressions as a negative comment on their own approach to their faith." Much better to watch subterranean tunnels fill with charred body parts in silence. As the London Times' Simon Jenkins wrote, "The sane response to urban terrorism is to regard it as an avoidable accident."

In not discussing the roots of terror in Islam itself, in not learning about them, the multicultural clergy that shepherds our elites prevents us from having to do anything about them. This is key, because any serious action -- stopping immigration from jihad-sponsoring nations, shutting down mosques that preach violence and expelling their imams, just for starters -- means to renounce the multicultural creed. In the West, that's the greatest apostasy. And while the penalty is not death -- as it is for leaving Islam under Islamic law -- the existential crisis is to be avoided at all costs. Including extinction.

This is the lesson of the atrocities in London. It's unlikely that the 21st century will remember that this new Western crossroads for global jihad was once the home of Churchill, Piccadilly and Sherlock Holmes. Then again, who will notice? The BBC has retroactively purged its online bombing coverage of the word "terrorist"; the spokesman for the London police commissioner has declared that "Islam and terrorism simply don't go together"; and within sight of a forensics team sifting through rubble, an Anglican priest urged his flock, as The Guardian reported, to "rejoice in the capital's rich diversity of cultures, traditions, ethnic groups and faiths." Just don't, he said, "name them as Muslims."
Their faith renewed, Londoners soldier on.

2005 Newspaper Enterprise Assn.
***

What is to be done? Our multi-cultural principles are revolutionary, and because of the success of our revolutions we have attracted the bodies of envious and uncomprhending minds of losers from around the world. Most of them, in time, get the idea, and they assimilate and become Western Revolutionaries themselves. But not Moslems. They not only refuse, they kill. We do not wish to give up our revolutions and become like them, but by not fighting back with the full capacity we have to save ourselves from their destructive agenda, we are surely going to die. But it won't be you you read about. It'll be the other guy. You'll be the lucky one. Just keep muddling along, and things will surely improve, or at least you won't outright die. Besides, it's Bush's fault. Yeah, we should get out of Iraq and let the Israelis die. We should give more money to the bombers. We should....

You're going to die in a Muslim terrorist attack. And you won't even know it.