What’s Wrong with the World

The men signed of the cross of Christ go gaily in the dark.

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What’s Wrong with the World is dedicated to the defense of what remains of Christendom, the civilization made by the men of the Cross of Christ. Athwart two hostile Powers we stand: the Jihad and Liberalism...read more

Discriminating Against the Jihad

America lies torpidly beneath a consoling, yet leaden blanket of illusions, made all the more inviting by the mythology which has grown up around - or, rather, has been imposed by representatives of the dominant liberal elite - the history of her post-WWII period. According to this mythology, America was a nation which was conceived, not as the expression of a distinct and settled culture, albeit a restless one, but as a promise of the future; and that future, moreover, was cruelly deferred for a significant segment of the population, deferred, that is, until liberals awakened the conscience of the nation and roused her to realize that future. And we might well acknowledge that, despite the grotesque "unfurling of history" quality of the liberal narrative, that there was a terrible contradiction and injustice that begged for rectification.

Yet, America did not seem to rest content, having at least acknowledged a troubled history and moved to redress it. To the contrary, the liberal narrative laid hold of her authoritative institutions, if not the hearts of the people, and that glorious promise of the future cast ever-darkening shadows over the present, and even as Americans adjusted their habits to correct those perhaps now outmoded, showed it as little more than a collage of injustices. American history was now a litany of abuses and perfidies. Perhaps her essence was no more than this. At the heart of this emergent image of the republic, or at least near to its heart, was the notion that much injustice resulted from the drawing of distinctions, and the actions that followed upon such employments of reason.

In fine, the ideal of nondiscrimination was enshrined as the cornerstone of the new public orthodoxy; it was not sufficient that America had at last extended that honourable principle of equality before the law to those previously excluded from it on grounds of race; no, the doctrine held that discrimination was the postulation of differences where none existed - and as all men were dogmatically held to be alike, one transgressed not merely by stating that there were differences among men, but by causing them to appear different by means of unjust social structures, institutions, and conventions. Differential outcomes could no longer prove difference, only discrimination.

What this has to do with the jihad is, I trust, obvious. Our nation, to the point of stultification, imposes upon itself a risible regimen of conventions intended to harmonize the orthodoxy with the stubborn fact of the jihad. We suffer under a routine of airline security at once intrusive and feckless, born of the assumption that terrorist threats, statistically, are as likely to emanate from any one community as any other; we have all read of the horror stories. Our leaders, whether elected, appointed, or self-nominated, intone pious untruths regarding a great world religion corrupted and betrayed by a faction of innovators, who may even be under the spell of the ideologues responsible for the evils we confronted in the Good War. History is whitewashed by ideology; untruth is a condition of our way of life. Those same leaders offer representatives of an American front organization, a lobbying outfit with historic and, through the persons of some members, ongoing, ties to jihadist organizations, previews of our security procedures. Officers of this organization assert their intent to supplant our republican form of government, and this is apparently subsumed under the freedom of religion. One could continue indefinitely in this vein. We wish to assimilate something religiously, culturally, and historically sui generis to a universal pattern, a unique threat having a specific quality, and a specific intensity, to the types of threats which always lurk behind the wall of civilization.

This, perhaps above all other reasons, save the fact of jihad itself, is the reason the legal defining of jihad as sedition is imperative. Nothing is more enervating, more inhibiting, more confining and ultimately self-destructive, than the presupposition of our policies and rhetoric, namely, that the terrorist threat emanates from all groups without distinction. If a "religion of peace" has been hijacked by a few fascist-inspired ideologues, then the threat of religious terror can come from any confession; there will be fanatics in any faith, and so all are alike. If the threat is indistinct as to its origins, we must worry equally about Mohammed, Son of Jihad, and a group of left-half-of-the-bell-curve white supremacists out in the Northwest. If anyone can be a terrorist, then we must regard even grandmothers, nursing mothers, and nuns as potential security threats in our airports.

This, I submit, we all know not to be so. And it is time that our representative institutions declare the deliberate sense of the people to be that we will have no more of these untruths, and by a rational discrimination between threats, and between threats and non-threats, to direct the executive and the security apparatus to deploy resources accordingly. We must forcefully, and by specific actions, repudiate the ideology of nondiscrimination, which leaves us to joust with mental projections instead of concrete realities; this must begin by acknowledging the methods and objects of our enemies, and correctly classifying them: as sedition.

Comments (6)

The statement in my essay on the sedition law that provoked the most fury was, in fact, my argument for discrimination against the Islamic religion. This idea of embracing discrimination is horrifying to the Liberal, which means it is all the more necessary to keep pushing him on it.

There was a story just after the latest London bomb plot that policemen in London had been ordered "not to profile" and to show that they weren't profiling by stopping people at random in car stops in the capital. The cops on the ground were _extremely_ annoyed by this. One, who naturally asked not to be identified, said they were stopping elderly white couples while "cars with four Asian men" sped past.

We're totally insane.

The bit in Paul's essay about discriminating against Muslims in immigration practice also seemed to me eminently sensible. Why do people treat coming to our country as being on a par with applying for a job? It seems to me _totally_ different and _exactly_ the sort of thing where rough categories are appropriate. This always used to be the case. There were immigration quotas for various countries, based for example on our diplomatic connections to those countries, and so forth. There was never this crazy fiction that immigration is something to which everyone deserves some sort of group-blind "fair shot," or as though there were a set of meritocratic qualifications according to which we have to evaluate every single person who wants to come here for immigration purposes on an individual basis.

You guys know I have some meritocratic intuitions, though I think moderate ones, when it comes to job candidates. But immigration is an entirely different kettle of fish. People have to expect to be "discriminated against" and treated as members of groups in the nature of the case. I can't see how it can be any other way. And in the whole set of considerations, of course membership in a religion such as Islam should be relevant.

In point of fact, I am utterly and absolutely opposed to meritocratic considerations as applied to immigration, at least as this is currently understood. We hear all manner of moaning from interested parties about shortages of engineers, programmers, doctors, and so on. Except that there are no shortages, save of American CEOs with the integrity to pay an American an American wage.

If meritocracy now translates to, "Can the Americans and hire the foreigners", give me nepotism.

There's a difference between the question, "Given this applicant pool, whom should I hire?" and the question, "Should X be allowed to come to the U.S. in the first place, even if he has a job available?" Immigration issues concern the latter. If a person has no gainful employment available in the U.S., that's obviously a strike against him in the immigration arena, because of the danger that he will become a public charge (in the old phrase). But it doesn't follow that if someone wants to hire him, he automatically should be allowed to come and live on our shores. There are plenty of other considerations that must come first, including the question of whether he comes from a group that we have reason to believe constitutes a security danger.

There is indeed a difference; my suggestion is merely that originating in a group statistically underrepresented in threat assessments, and passing a background check, are not sufficient bases for admission. Why should we admit immigrants whose competitive effect will be to decrease the well-being of the native born? It is a matter of indifference to me that few Chinese, Indians, and Mexicans represent terrorist threats; the reality is that their immigration at present levels negatively impacts the living standards of the native born.

In fact, if one actually listens to CEOs - say, the Google folks - and reads between the PR lines, that is the point of bringing them in.

Meanwhile, if they'd start sensibly discriminating against Muslims in immigration, or even against most people from Muslim countries, on security grounds, we'd be that much forrader.

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