More excerpts from one of my favorite columnists:
July 9: “The post-9/11 world is not primarily a war between civilizations – the west vs Islam – but a war within one civilization – ours. It’s a long existential struggle between those who believe western values – or, to be more precise, the values of the English-speaking world – are one of the great blessings of this world and those “counter-tribalists†(in John O’Sullivan’s phrase) who believe those values are the source of most of the world’s ills. The latter are a relatively small group but their numbers are bolstered by legions so immersed in the sappy therapeutic culture of the age that they’ve been persuaded that the best way to “celebrate diversity†is to abase oneself before moral relativism and non-judgmentalism. The Islamists are merely the lucky beneficiaries of this syndrome. It’s hard to fight a war in a culture that recoils from the very concept of an opposing side: There are no enemies, just friends whose grievances we haven’t yet accommodated.”
July 19: “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…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?”
July 30: “There’s a lot more of the world that lives under sharia than there was, say, 30 years ago: Pakistan adopted it in 1977, Iran in 1979, Sudan in 1984… Fifty years ago, Nigeria lived under English Common Law; now, half of it’s in the grip of Islamic law. So, as a political project, radical Islam has made some headway, and continues to do so almost every day of the week: since the beginning of the year, for example, some ten per cent of southern Thailand’s Buddhist population have abandoned their homes – a far bigger disruption than the tsunami, yet all but unreported in the western press.”
August 1: “The United States that so confidently nuked two Japanese cities is as lost to us as the old pre-mushroom cloud Nagasaki. In what circumstances would Washington nuke an enemy today? Were we to re-run World War Two, advisors to the President would counsel against the poor optics of dropping the big one, problems keeping allies on board, media storm, Congressional inquiries, UN resolutions, NGOs making a flap, etc. And chances are the Administration would opt to slug it out town for town in a conventional invasion costing a million casualties… Consider the broader lesson of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: an enemy folds when he knows he’s finished. In Iraq, despite the swift fall of the Saddamites, it’s not entirely clear the enemy did know.”
August 2: “The bombers are, so to speak, able to hide in plain sight …in a Britain where clerics freely incite violence; and where The Guardian hires a trainee reporter knowing he’s a member of a radical Islamist group banned in other European countries; and where the BBC cannot bring itself to drop its preferred euphemism of “militantsâ€, even as suicide bombers advance from the Zionist Entity to the Corporation’s own Tube station at Shepherd’s Bush. “Why do they hate us?†was never the right question. “Why do they despise us?†is a better one.”
August 9: “Responding to Islamist terrorism in Britain and elsewhere, Germany is considering introducing a Muslim public holiday. As Mathias Dopfner, chief executive of Axel Springer, put it, “A substantial fraction of Germany’s government — and, if polls are to be believed, the German people — believe that creating an official state Muslim holiday will somehow spare us from the wrath of fanatical Islamists.â€Great. At least the 1930s appeasers did it on their own time. But, in recasting appeasement as yet another paid day off, the new proposal cunningly manages to combine the worst instincts of the old Europe and the new.”
August 13: “Every day of the week you can find some bonkers story from the Muslim world. Here’s The Sunday Age in Melbourne reporting on July 31st on Werribee Islamic College: The imam told the students that the Jews were putting poison in the bananas and they should not eat them. You don’t have to be bananas to teach in an Islamic school but it helps. That’s a college, by the way, that receives funds from Australian taxpayers of around $3 million a year. For three million bucks they can’t hire a catering guy who can find them Jew-free bananas?”
September 1: “Consider Cindy Sheehan’s message: that neither Iraq nor Afghanistan nor (as she told a rally in Berkeley) America itself is worth the death of her son. Suppose that were true. Suppose the broader point is correct – that the first direct attack on the American mainland in two centuries is not worth a military campaign with an historically low rate of casualties. A superpower of 300 million that will bear any burden or pay any price as long as the death rate stays below four figures won’t be a superpower or any other kind of functioning polity for long.”
September 11: “Only a tiny minority of Muslims want to be suicide bombers and only a slightly larger minority want actively to provide support networks for suicide bombers, but big majorities of Muslims support almost all the terrorists’ strategic goals: for example, according to a recent poll, over 60% of British Muslims want to live under sharia in the United Kingdom. That’s a “moderate†westernized Muslim: he wants stoning for adultery to be introduced in Liverpool, but he’s a “moderate†because it’s not such a priority that he’s prepared to fly a plane into a skyscraper.”
September 25: ” . . . if you watch the TV news, you’d still think Cindy Sheehan was an emblematic bereaved army mom, rather than a pitiful crackpot calling for Bush to pull his troops out of “occupied New Orleansâ€. Her Million-Moan March washed up in Washington on Thursday to besiege the White House. As the Associated Press put it, “Sheehan, Supporters Descend On The Capital.†There were 29 supporters. Can two-and-a-half dozen people “descend†on any capital city bigger than the South Sandwich Islands’? Surely her media boosters were cringing with embarrassment at their own impotence. Since its star columnist Maureen Dowd got the hots for Mrs Sheehan’s “moral authorityâ€, The New York Times has run some 70 stories on Cindy – and every story they ran attracted another 0.4142857 of a supporter to her march on the capital.”
October 3: “I found myself behind a car in Vermont the other day which had a one-word bumper-sticker containing the injunction “CO-EXIST.†It’s one of those sentiments beloved of western progressives, one designed principally to flatter their sense of moral superiority. The “C†was the Islamic crescent, the “O†was the hippy peace sign, the “X†was the Star of David and the “T†was the Christian cross. Very nice, hard to argue with. But the reality is is that it’s the first of those symbols that has a problem with “co-existenceâ€. Take the crescent out of the equation and you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all. Indeed, co-existence is what the Islamists are at war with – or, if you prefer, pluralism; the idea that different groups can rub along together within the same general neighbourhood.”
October 11: “Why is George W Bush’s utterly unremarkable evangelical Christianity so self-evidently risible but complaints from British Muslims hung up over the 11th century are perfectly reasonable and something we should seek to accommodate..? No doubt the bien pensants will still be hooting at born-again Texans on the day the House of Lords gives a second reading to the Sharia bill.”
October 16: “After 9/11, I assumed the internal contradictions of the rainbow coalition would be made plain – that a cult of “tolerance†would in the end founder against a demographic so cheerfully upfront in their intolerance. Instead, Islamic “militants†have become the highest repository of multicultural pieties. So you’re nice about gays and Native Americans? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. And so [in Russia and elsewhere] Islamists who murder non-Muslims in pursuit of explicitly Islamic goals are airbrushed into vague generic “rebel forcesâ€.”
October 22: “The world’s largest country is dying and the only question is how violent its death throes are. Yesterday’s Russia was characterized by Churchill as a riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma. Today’s has come unwrapped: it’s a crisis in a disaster inside a catastrophe. Most of the big international problems operate within certain geographic constraints: Africa has Aids, the Middle East has Islamists, North Korea has nukes. But Russia’s got the lot: an African-level Aids crisis and an Islamist separatist movement sitting on top of the biggest pile of nukes on the planet.”
October 25: ” . . . the biggest globalization success story of recent years is not McDonald’s or Disney but Islamism: the Saudis took what was 80 years ago a severe but obscure and unimportant strain of Islam practiced by Bedouins in the middle of a desert miles from anywhere and successfully exported it to the heart of Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Leeds, Buffalo… It was a strictly local virus, but the bird flew the coop. And now, instead of the quaintly parochial terrorist movements of yore, we have the first globalized insurgency.”
November 6: “The notion that Texas neocon arrogance was responsible for frosting up transatlantic relations was always preposterous, even for someone as complacent and blinkered as John Kerry. If you had millions of seething unassimilated Muslim youths in lawless suburbs ringing every major city, would you be so eager to send your troops into an Arab country fighting alongside the Americans?”
November 15: “The Continent isn’t multicultural so much as bicultural. There are aging native populations, and young Muslim populations, and that’s it: “two solitudesâ€, as they say in my beloved Quebec. If there’s three, four or more cultures, you can all hold hands and sing “We Are The Worldâ€. But if there’s just two – you and the other – that’s generally more fractious. Bicultural societies are among the least stable in the world, especially once it’s no longer quite clear who’s the majority and who’s the minority – a situation that much of Europe is fast approaching, as you can see by visiting any French, Austrian, Belgian or Dutch maternity ward.”
November 20: “I know what Bush believes: He thought Saddam should go in 2002 and today he’s glad he’s gone, as am I. I know what, say, Michael Moore believes: He wanted to leave Saddam in power in 2002, and today he thinks the “insurgents†are the Iraqi version of America’s Minutemen. But what do Rockefeller and Reid and Kerry believe deep down? That voting for the war seemed the politically expedient thing to do in 2002 but that they’ve since done the math and figured that pandering to the moveon.org crowd is where the big bucks are? If Bush is the new Hitler, these small hollow men are the equivalent of those grubby little Nazis whose whining defence was, “I was only obeying orders. I didn’t really mean all that strutting tough-guy stuff.†And, before they huff, “How dare you question my patriotism?â€, well, yes, I am questioning your patriotism – because you’re failing to meet the challenge of the times. Thanks to you, Iraq is a quagmire – not in the Sunni Triangle, where US armed forces are confident and effective, but on the home front, where soft-spined national legislators have turned the war into one almighty Linguini Triangle.”
December 4: “Senator Kerry drones that we need to “set benchmarks†for the “transfer of authorityâ€. Actually, the Administration’s being doing that for two years – setting dates for the return of sovereignty, for electing a national assembly, for approving a constitution, etc, and meeting all of them. And all during those same two years Kerry and his fellow Democrats have huffed that these dates are far too premature, the Iraqis aren’t in a position to take over, hold an election, whatever. The Defeaticrats were against the benchmarks before they were for them.”
December 13: “Hollywood stars are forever complaining about the “crushing of dissent†in Bush’s America, by which they mean Tim Robbins having a photo-op at the Baseball Hall of Fame cancelled because he’s become an anti-war bore. But, thanks to the First Amendment, he can say anything he likes without the forces of the state coming round to grill him. It’s in Britain and Europe where dissent is being crushed. Following the murder of Theo van Gogh in the Netherlands, film directors and museum curators and all the other “brave†“transgressive†artists usually so eager to “challenge†society are voting for self-censorship: “I don’t want a knife in my chest,†explained Albert Ter Heerdt, announcing his decision to “postpone†a sequel to his hit multicultural comedy Shouf Shouf Habibi! But who needs to knife him when across Europe the authorities are so eager to criminalize him? No society with an eye to long-term survival should make opinion a subversive activity.”
December 18: ” . . . pick almost any recent statement by a big-time Dem cowboy and tell me how exactly it would differ from the pep talks Zarqawi gives his dwindling band of head-hackers – Dean arguing that America can’t win in Iraq, Barbara Boxer demanding the troops begin withdrawing on December 15th, John Kerry accusing American soldiers of terrorizing Iraqi women and children, Jack Murtha declaring that the US Army is utterly broken. Pepper ‘em with a handful of “Praise be to Allahs†and any one of those statements could have been uttered by Zarqawi.”
December 19: “Governor Dean’s bike-tunnel vision is not an isolated phenomenon. Everywhere you turn Democrats are linking arms and singing their new all-star fundraising anthem “We Aren’t The Worldâ€. John Kerry on the campaign trail: “We shouldn’t be opening firehouses in Baghdad and shutting them in the United States of America.†Al Sharpton at Rosa Parks’ funeral: “Where you have a nation respond looking for weapons in Iraq that are not there but can’t see a hurricane in Louisiana that is there.†I don’t even understand that last one: We should wait till the WMD are in Louisiana where we can see ‘em – or at least the crater they left? You can still glimpse the remnants of the internationalist left on their fading T-shirts – Fidel, Che, Mao, Allende, the Sandinistas. And admittedly today’s global celebrities are a tougher sell – Saddam, Mullah Omar, Kim Jong-Il, miscellaneous clitorectomy enthusiasts in West Africa, etc. But even so the left’s retreat to hicksville is impressive: the western progressive has ideologically downsized and relocated to a remodeled farmhouse outside Montpelier.”
December 19: “As you know, because the media parrot it incessantly, there were no links between al-Qa’eda and Saddam, because he’s a scrupulously secular Baathist and they’re fundamentalist Islamists. Good thing those pro-gay pro-feminist Eurolefties making common cause with honor-killing sodomite-beheaders don’t demand the same level of intellectual coherence from their own coalition as they do from the terrorists.”
December 20: “These days, whenever something goofy turns up on the news, chances are it involves some fellow called Mohammed. A plane flies into the World Trade Center? Mohammed Atta. A gunman shoots up the El Al counter at Los Angeles airport? Hesham Mohamed Hedayet. A sniper starts killing gas-station customers around Washington, DC? John Allen Muhammed. A guy fatally stabs a Dutch movie director? Mohammed Bouyeri. A terrorist slaughters dozens in Bali? Noordin Mohamed. A British subject from Hounslow, West London, self-detonates in a Tel Aviv bar? Asif Mohammed Hanif. A gang rapist preys on the women of Sydney? Mohammed Skaf. Maybe all these Mohammeds are victims of Australian white racists and American white racists and Dutch white racists and Israeli white racists and Balinese white racists and Beslan schoolgirl white racists. But the eagerness of the Aussie and British and Canadian and European media, week in, week out, to attribute each outbreak of an apparently universal phenomenon to strictly local factors is starting to look pathological.”
