What’s Wrong with the World

Recent arrests of (qualifiedly) indigenous jihadists, four of whom are Muslims from the former Yugoslavia, and three of whom are illegal immigrants, have failed to stimulate even a simulation of the sort of discussion America must have if it is to secure itself from the depredations of such men. Such a discussion would, of necessity, be liberal in scope, encompassing interrogations of everything from immigration policy to the squalor of a foreign policy which issues in the creation of sharia states along the underbelly of Europe, and brings to power sharia regimes further to the east.

Shocka! The ACLU has expressly stated that it will not sue the University of Michigan over its installation of Muslim foot basins in public restrooms with public dollars. I note that the present talking points seem not to include what (as I posted on Right Reason) my state representative told me: that the "foot washing stations" were not going to be installed with public dollars. Perhaps that story wouldn't fly because the money is coming out of the university's general fund. The new version of the excuse is that they aren't really religious. These guys should get their spin straight.

Last year one of my blog colleagues from Right Reason posted a piece on his own site in which he argued that Islam is the greater threat to us in the West and that we should unite to oppose it. The comparative language was meant to contrast the culture war with Islam with the culture war between social conservatives and liberals on domestic issues like abortion.

In response to that post, I put up one on the old Enchiridion Militis called "Incommensurable Conflicts" in which I argued that the two conflicts cannot be compared and that the statement that the culture war with Islam is more important than that with the Left is just false. I instanced there some of the horrors of the abortion culture.

Now I want to make the same statement about incommensurable conflicts, though in response to the opposite claim.

In the debate over a proposed Jihad-sedition law — a law at once designating the threat of sedition on principles of Jihad a threat of highest gravity, and giving legal teeth to that designation — one response commonly heard, though more whispered than shouted, is that, “it will never pass.” I have written about this proposal several times over a period of over a year, but the impermanence of the Web medium makes it as though each proposal is quite novel and shocking — so I have some sense for how this thing strikes readers. A sizeable group, even at a place like Redstate, are inclined react with predictable antagonism to the proposal; some are even thrown into unreason by their shock; but others merely react with what we might call a conjecture of impotence, a preemptive prediction of failure.

James Poulos, who blogs at Postmodern Conservative and The American Scene, has, in his own words, taken part-time employment as a critic of "our general cultural retreat into the therapeutic meta-ethics of feeling, emotion, and sense - and away from the ethics of fact, act, and responsibility". Critiquing a NYT article on US-Saudi relations which stated that the American officials had consented to interviews in advance of a diplomatic junket in order to "send a pointed signal of deep frustration", Poulos wrote:

No, ladies and gentlemen. The officials were clearly intent on actually expressing deep frustration that more private American appeals to the Saudis had failed to produce a change in course. (snip) We must cease this constant retreat into meta-narrative. We must insist upon discussing the world where actual actions take place. We must resist the half-conscious urge to make feelings and feints, interpretations and intimations, more important than the behaviors that call them into 'being.' We must stop reading entrails and issuing oracles.

In other words, the US did not send a signal of frustration; they simply expressed it, period. The metanarrative of signals and signs adds nothing but a layer of opaque, baroque ritual, obfuscating what actually transpired.

I have long believed that the goal of bringing democracy to Iraq — a goal that is often confused with bringing freedom to Iraq — may in fact be inimical to the immeasurably more important goal of vanquishing the Jihad. This for the pulverizingly simple reason that the Jihad is popular in the Islamic world, including Iraq. I doubt that it commands majority support — but it certainly commands majority acquiescence, and enormous factional sympathy. That is to say, waging war to subjugate the infidel (however defined), being an ancient and enduring feature of the Islamic religion, perforce is an enduring feature of Islamic society. Emancipate that society from autocracy and suppression — free popular passions from the yoke of Leviathan — and you may well find that the Jihad is not weakened but considerably strengthened.

Scholars and theorists thrashing about in the waters of postmodernism sooner or later encounter a bizarre and stupefying fact: Michel Foucault had a thing for the Islamic revolution, had, in fact, a rather unnatural affection for it. To what can we attribute this shattering aporia?

David Frum, in a brief blog review of a recent scholarly interrogation of this theme, Foucaut and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism, writes:

...of all the absurd infatuations ever to sweep literary Paris, none has ever matched the absolute incongruity of Michel Foucault’s enthusiasm for the Iranian Islamic revolution of 1979. Foucault, a man utterly devoid of religious feeling, a homosexual who reveled in the brutalities of San Francisco’s sado-masochistic bar scene, decided in 1978 that the Khomeini revolution offered mankind’s best hope for personal liberation.

How could Foucault – for all his absurdities, obviously no idiot – have talked himself into believing anything so manifestly absurd?

...that's wrong with the world.

The "Palestinians" are tearing up more irreplaceable archeological finds on Temple Mount, while the Israelis (in the capital of whose country this is taking place) turn a blind eye. Well, that isn't quite fair. The Israeli archeological community is appalled at the present act of destruction--a piece of wall from the Second Temple bulldozed in the course of supposed electrical work. But the Antiquities Authority is making no effort to stop the barbaric work, so it goes on. To add insult to injury, the archeologists aren't even allowed to observe, take pictures, or make any other attempt to record the finds being destroyed...at night.

I say "more irreplaceable finds," because ten years ago the "Palestinians" bulldozed material from below Temple Mount and were dumping it in loads of dirt. Eventually the archeologists managed to get their hands on the dirt (thanks so very much) and found many important artifacts, including lamps, pottery, coins, and a marble pillar.

It is surely no coincidence that the people doing all of this literally deny the existence of Jewish temples on the mount, ever, at any point in history, persisting in their delusional views in the face of massive archeological evidence. And that's part of the entire delusional Muslim, not to mention "Palestinian," approach to reality. There was no Jewish presence in Israel before the 1880's, y'know. Oh, and the Wailing Wall? That was where Mohammed hitched his horse when he came to Jerusalem from Mecca. Truly, you couldn't make this stuff up.

In 1565 the Grand Master of the Knights was a Frenchmen of Gascony, Jean Parisot de la Valette by name, who was by then (like Sultan Suleiman himself) in his seventies, but still vigorous. Piety and military acumen were his leading virtues: he was the very model of the warrior-priest, a kind of throwback to a dying medieval age. The religious fervor of the Knights had of late diminished, much as the chivalric piety of the medieval age itself was dying, and many of them had become worldly, sensuous, and arrogant. But La Valette, when he became Grand Master, aimed to check this corruption. Ernle Bradford calls him, “that rarest of human beings, a completely single-minded man.” His lieutenant was an Englishman, in exile from his homeland where Catholicism was proscribed; and it was this latter who decoded the reports from spies in Constantinople that the Turks were again massing against the Knights. The Order was the last vestige of that great Christian counterattack known as the Crusades, and the Sultan was now determined to stamp it out forever. Communiqués were sent all over Europe, calling the Knights to the defense of their last island home.

For the strategists of the Turks, including an old Algerian corsair called Dragut, Malta was more than just the remnant of an antique military order: it was the key to a proposed offensive in the western Mediterranean, an offensive that was to cow the Spanish and if possible carry the jihad to the very doors of St. Peter’s. And in any case, since Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca, and southern Spain itself had once been Islamic lands, it was a duty imposed upon the Sultan, by the iron principles of jihad, as duly constituted ruler, the successor to the caliph, to recover them from the infidel. Lands where the banners of the Crescent had once flown proudly must be returned to the Dar al-Islam (the House of Islam). The presence of the Maltese Knights barred such a project; and therefore the reduction of the island would be a prelude to a wider war. Said Dragut: “Unless you have smoked out this nest of vipers, you can do no good anywhere.” In March of 1565, a fleet of nearly 200 vessels, bearing some 40,000 soldiers (including 6,500 elite shock troops known as the Janissaries), assembled in the Golden Horn for the Sultan's inspection. Dragut made two astute recommendations: move against the isle early in the season, and detach a significant flotilla to menace the Spanish mainland, thereby preventing aid from the Emperor. Once the invasion began, the more confident among the Sultan's advisers anticipated the victory to come — in a matter of days.

The victory never came. Across Europe news of the bravery of Knights — outnumbered five to one or more — rang like a great tocsin. All throughout that brutal summer on the sun-baked isle, the Turks had been repulsed, time after time, in their attempts to take the Christian fortresses of Malta. One such fortress had been reduced to rubble by Turkish artillery, and its garrison (almost every one of them already dead) desecrated by enraged Turks; but the other had held. Casualties among the Sultan’s army had been terrible, and disease ran rampant. The stiffness of the resistance, added to the depredations of pestilence and heatstroke, had won for Western Christians their first great victory over the Turk. La Valette’s final address to his men has come down to us:

A formidable army composed of audacious barbarians is descending on this island. These persons, my brothers, are the enemies of Jesus Christ. Today it is a question of the defense of our faith — as to whether the Gospels are to be superseded by the Koran. God on this occasion demands of us our lives, already vowed to his service. Happy will be those who first consummate this sacrifice.

The date of this victory has for us a certain resonance: it was September 11, 1565.

From that day we may date the decline of Turkish power on the Mediterranean. Six years later at Lepanto, a vast Ottoman fleet was decisively beaten by a comparable fleet of the Christian Holy League in one of the largest and bloodiest naval battles ever fought. The Knights were there on that day too. On another September 11, 1683, the Polish King John Sobieski led an army to relieve Vienna from a Turkish siege, in a battle that marks the end of the Turkish advance into Europe. These dates may strike us today as very ancient indeed; the reader may wonder what significance they have to us. The answer is that they form the conclusion to a very long story, a great tale of human drama, mostly forgotten now by a forgetful people k a drama that, on yet another September 11th, was renewed here in America. It is the story of the Jihad. [read more]

Via Lawrence Auster, a luminous send-up of the feckless war policy of the Bush adminstration. Have a look.

One of the less edifying features of our current public discourse is the tendency to say "shut up!" by accusing someone of postulating moral equivalence between, say, ourselves and the terrorists who have attacked us.

Now it is doubtless true that many critics of the Administration's follow-up to 9-11 really are attempting to draw a moral equivalence, or even worse, to displace moral blame for the attacks from those who carried them out to someone else. Certainly that is a dominant theme on the political Left, and the "Truther" phenomenon is its natural manifestation. If we are morally to blame then we must be the ones who actually did it, a priori: no matter how much people try to cling to the idea that we are responsible for outcomes rather than for our own acts, nature reasserts herself. The "Truthers" are just being more consistent with the reality of how moral responsibility works than other factions of the "blame America first" mob.

[Note to the paleo Right: if you don't want to be like the Truther Left, then don't be like them. You can choose.]

In a discussion sparked by this fine essay by James Pinkerton, a correspondent asks me to expound upon my notion of “Christendom,” which concept he is deeply skeptical of. I explained myself this way:

In a forthcoming magazine I have a long essay that ends in an emphatic call for Christian unity against the Jihad. It says nothing about the activity of the American state; but it says that we who profess Christ should strain toward unity against this menace. I believe that Christ opposes wickedness; I believe that the Jihad is wicked. Therefore I feel that it should be opposed. In my essay I make this call specifically in the context of all the Christian brothers oppressed by the Jihad. We should unite against this oppression.

For the green-lighting of the Empire State Building in honor of Eid, that is.

This semi-facetious characterization comes from Schlussel herself, who explains: Ten years ago, her nine-year-old cousin Mallory (this is a female name) wrote a letter asking that the Empire State Building be lit up in honor of Hannukah. Her request was granted in a highly publicized fashion. But as Schlussel points out, this pushing of a relatively minor Jewish holiday which happens to fall at about the same time as Christmas, and doing so for purely egalitarian reasons, furthered the notion that everyone is "entitled" to public religious holiday recognition. And now, of course, we have what Schlussel aptly calls "the religion of hijackers" honored by the lighting up of New York City's tallest (surviving) building, in the same egalitarian vein.

This sort of problem was foreseen by Schlussel's own late father, at a time when everyone else in the family was thrilled by young Mallory's fame. Good for him. Sometimes father does know best.

HT LGF

While touring the blogosphere rather aimlessly this morning, it seemed as though everything I read was destined to occasion aggravation. The first three articles I happened upon left me 0-for-3 in the reader-satisfaction department. At a suitable level of abstraction, there may even exist a common thread, perhaps something like, 'obliviousness to the obvious.'

The first item, Bradford Plumer's endorsement of a Sentencing Project critique of sentencing guidelines, contained this nugget of incomprehension:

The second striking bit comes when Mauer compares U.S. sentences with those abroad. Burglars now serve an average of 16.2 months in prison in the United States, compared with 5.3 months in Canada and 6.8 months in England.

A friend and colleague at Redstate, our Managing Editor Erick Erickson, has a rousing post calling for unity within the Republican Coalition. Well worth reading in full. He concludes by asking for ideas for how this unity — one thought to hold pretty well from the early days of National Review through Reagan and even up to George W. Bush — might be reconstructed. Below is an expanded version of my comment:

(1) Shift the focus of what is called the war on terror, beginning with public rhetoric, toward the domestic front; take heed of the subversives and saboteurs in our midst; strike at them. This combined with: (2) reconciling the Party to that deep skepticism verging on hostility, which comprises the majority opinion on Iraq in this country.

I really doubt that the Democrats (were they to gain Executive power) shall conduct foreign policy as the reflexive anti-patriots of their base would like. A gradual but steady reduction of American troops in Iraq seems far more likely than immediate withdrawal.

For the fiscal boys, it’s much cheaper. We don’t need huge new expenditures of money. We need to carefully craft some laws whereby we can expose the doctrines of the enemy to vigorous prosecution. Our work will largely be a matter of legal savvy and above all public and democratic will. We may need a new prosecutor, investigator, or orator now and then. We will not need to spend even a fraction of what we are spending in Iraq right now.

For social Conservatives, it's the whole enchilada: the maintenance of the character of the Republic. Who are we? Are we a people that is going to shelter and protect the Jihad like its principles are mere Free Exercise? or are we a people confident enough to say we will stand against this wicked thing?

What was the glue that held the old Coalition together, from the early glory days of NR to Reagan?

It was a clear single thing: the Communist Enterprise; and a unified antipathy for a wicked system. Well the Jihad is no less wicked, and it has already stuck us blows no Communist ever dared.

So let us unite against it. Let opposition to the Jihad be one of our principles.

I don't lie awake at night wondering about the plans of the Iranian Mullarchy to become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds, plunging the world into a sea of nuclear flame. In fact, the thought seldom occurs to me at all, and when it does, I find it somewhat amusing, actually.

There. I've said it.

Now permit me to explain myself. I'd rather that a regime such as that of the Mullarchy not possess nuclear weapons, and on principle. Such regimes, combining several undesirable qualities - Islam, evil, general contumacy - are not the sort with which one would trust such weapons, were there an option. Nevertheless, the development is animated by a certain logic, which would obtain even in the absence of the Mullarchy, and which, moreover, militates against the use of such weapons by the Mullarchy.

The linchpin of this logic? Iran is desirous of becoming the regional hegemon, the dominant power of the Near East, a long-term geostrategic ambition antedating the Mullarchy, which would outlast that regime. Iran could be liberated from the shackles of the Islamic Republic, and Persian nationalist sentiment would keep alive the both the ambition and the nuclear program itself, which would be both symbol and surety of that status, should it be achieved. This regional ambition has two main consequences, as far as the nuclear program and the West are concerned. First, a first-use of nuclear weapons on the part of Iran, whether directly, or by means of proxies - such as Hizbollah - is highly improbable, since the logical conclusion to be drawn in such a case will be precisely that Iran has used/supplied the weapons, and Iran will cease to exist as a functioning, post-medieval state. Israel and the United States will see to that, morally licit or not.

Second, and in consequence of the first consideration, any use of nuclear weapons merely suspected to originate in the Iranian program will entail the permanent demise of Persian ambitions for regional preeminence. And I would suggest that, the apocalyptic rhetoric of a former Tehran traffic engineer aside, the Iranian powers-behind-the-presidency are more than worldly enough to value that ambition over the annihilation of the Zionist Entity. Incidentally, this is the reason for the low probability of Hizbollah being provided the eventual products of a mature Iranian nuclear program. One does not hand the keys to the kingdom to third parties one cannot completely control.

Finally, as a concluding observation, a the development of a nuclear program in Iran is more or less inevitable for another reason: Iranian oil and natural gas production is declining, and I consider it highly doubtful that Iranians will be willing to contemplate a return to premodernity, merely because the only long-term means of avoiding that fate is one of which the West disapproves. This is not to argue that Iran needn't be countered in Syria or Lebanon, nor that such countering need never involve military action of some sort. It is only to argue that a nuclear Iran can be deterred. And, as regards regime change - well, have we learned nothing?

This from the "not ready for civilization" file:

A Muslim husband in the Netherlands delayed an emergency Caesarian operation because the only anesthesiologist available was male. After two hours he was persuaded to allow it, but only if his wife's arm was covered up while the injection was administered. And after that, the anesthesiologist was forced to stand out in the hallway and shout instructions to a nurse in the operating room.

I have noted before that the supposedly "pro-life" Muslim values go to the wall when they come into conflict with the desire for hyper-control of their women and the related, perverted sense of sexual "honor." The wife's and child's lives and health were of less importance to this man than his horror at the thought that a male might see some part of his wife's body uncovered.

Nor is this the only incident of this type. Muslim husbands have physically assaulted male doctors who dared to attend their wives.

Such outrageous behavior puts the doctors into an intolerable position. What should be done about it on the spot might be open to argument. Myself, I'd consider calling the cops to restrain the crazy husband. But it is yet more evidence of the incompatibility of Muslim culture with Western culture.

HT TROP

Via Lawrence Auster, a report that Muslim militias in Basra, soon to undergo a complete transition back to local governance, are threatening Christian women who have hitherto declined to wear the veil or burqa.

Actually, the "not ready for civilization" part could apply equally well to America and Britain themselves, inasmuch they embarked upon an unjust war, which they sought to justify by appeal to multifarious fraudulent pretexts, ideological, evidentiary, and material, which war has had as its entirely foreseeable consequence the grievous and irreversible destruction of indigenous Christian communities. They do not "make a desert and call it peace"; no, they do worse: they unleash evil and laud themselves for having done good, and connive at gross injustice and wallow in the pretense of virtue.

I cannot hope to approach the aptness of Srdja Trifkovic's own title, Kosovo as a Symbol of Anti-Postmodernism, and so I have not tried. Nevertheless, the essay is a masterful summation of the significance this little piece of Balkan territory holds in the not-so-playful scheme of signifiers regnant in the West. Selected excerpts follow.

Blissfully unaware of the cultural tectonic shift that has taken place in “the West,” many Serbian political leaders, analysts and institutions in their contacts with the Western elite class keep invoking four sets of arguments in support of their position that Kosovo ought to remain part of Serbia:
1. Historical: Kosovo was the heartland of the Serbian medieval state;
2. Cultural: in Kosovo there are many priceless monuments of Serbian art and architecture that define Serbia’s contribution to the common European heritage;
3. Spiritual: Kosovo is “Serbia’s Jerusalem”;
4. Civilizational: Kosovo should not fall to the insurgent jihad.

Via Lawrence Auster and a correspondent, news that Charles Johnson of LGF has, more or less, slipped the tether of reality:

I'm sure you're bored rigid by now over the antics at LGF and its recalibration to the left but I'm concerned with the way LGF is targeting major figures in the anti-jihad movement: Fjordman, the Gates of Vienna blogsite, Bat Ye'or (whose Eurabia theory has been trashed), Diana West, and, I believe, soon to be, Robert Spencer. I've heard that Spencer and Johnson are or used to be friends.

Spencer is crucial to the anti-jihad movement and has been instrumental in making Islam's doctrines widely known on the Internet. In his precise, unemotional and scholarly fashion, he is far more of a responsible symbol than LGF could ever hope to be.

Cultural particularity is the stumbling block of this unfortunate age of human history, upon which the West itself, in thralldom to various malign ideologies and delusions, now dashes itself.

A Pentagon analyst specializing in Islamic law has been removed from his position after coming into conflict with associates involved in outreach to the Usual Suspects, according to Bill Gertz. Andrew Bostom elaborates, and discusses an historical parallel, observing that the analyst, Stephen Coughlin, has demonstrated

...that “Jihad fi Sabil Allah”—“Jihad in the cause of Allah,” is the animating principle which underlies the threat of global jihad terrorism, and how this understanding should form the basis for rational, effective threat development assessment, and war planning.

Further interpretative efforts will be eschewed, inasmuch as this contributor already believes that he has entered the Twilight Zone, or some parallel universe or strange dimension hidden within a 'fold' of space-time, within which the law of non-contradiction no longer obtains, such that it is possible for jihad to be both jihad and not-jihad simultaneously.

So weary, in fact, that I'm not going to vex both myself and any readers by dredging up the countless essays Andrew McCarthy, Glenn Greenwald, and others have written on the subject. Those interested in familiarizing themselves with the contours of the debate will know where to find them.

I am surfeited with the cloying antics of the actors in this kabuki theater because, to a certain degree, the entire debate is an exercise in missing the point. The old FISA act has become cumbersome owing to advances in communications technology, resulting, among other things, in the transcendent absurdity that the law technically requires a warrant for surveillance of a call placed by jihadist A in Pakistan to jihadist B in Lebanon, if for some reason the call happens to be routed through the United States. This, however, is a comparatively minor issue, and everyone concurs on the necessity of a legal remedy. The real action is taking place in the debates over the surveillance powers the executive branch and its apologists assert are necessary to the safety and security of the American people, and the integrity of intelligence gathering itself. The surveillance, it is said, must be warrantless, at least until it is expedient to secure ex post facto legitimation, and companies complicit in the violation of the existing law must be immunized for those actions. Yawn.

If one were to distill this controversy down to its essentials, the respective positions would hold that, on the one hand, telecommunications technology is now wireless, mobile, and disposable, and that legions of jihadists are even now among us, conspiring to bring about our demise, and, on the other, that the threat has been exaggerated, and that the powers asserted by the executive threaten constitutional protections and immunities. It would seem that, in response to this issue of great import, the establishment is inclined to cede such powers to the executive, although the obstreperous remain opposed.

I've been meaning to put this up since the earlier version appeared on Dhimmi Watch: In England, female Muslim medical students are now objecting to the requirement that they scrub their arms up to the elbow. This would require them to "expose" their arms to the elbow in public. To get them clean.

The authorities have already provided them with special changing areas, but that isn't enough. They want a note saying they don't have to scrub. Some say they'd rather quit the medical course than give up on this matter of high principle--unscrubbed forearms for medical work. As one commentator on Dhimmi Watch said, it sounds like a plan. Letting them quit the course, that is. Better than returning to pre-Lister and Pasteur.

What's the betting the powers that be give in on this one and allow them just to cover up their unscrubbed forearms with long gloves instead, as was suggested here? By the Islamic Medical Association. Natch.

Now can we think again about Muslim immigration?

HT Dhimmi Watch

From time to time, I entertain a sort of running dialogue - with myself. No, I'm not crazy, at least not yet. What I am attempting to do in that dialogue is persuade myself that Western leaders and opinion makers could not betray the West, by incremental steps sometimes imperceptible, into the clutches of our adversaries - not by means of some nefarious conspiracy, but in consequence of their own imbecilic fantasies and delusions. Some part of me, cynical and melancholy though I am, is desirous that there occur no apocalypse of liberalism.

Alas, I believe that I'm am losing that argument with my pessimistic instincts, which suggest to me that, when the moment arrives, our leaders will sooner turn intolerant towards us, and our cultures, than acknowledge that, say, Islam is not a religion of peace.

Joseph Loconte, writing in the Weekly Standard of the film being prepared by Dutch politician Geert Wilders, you see, engages in the stereotypical hand-wringing and cleverer-than-the-messenger, who-should-be-shot posturing, which performance summons up all of those dark thoughts. His article is illustrative of everything that is wrong with the elite commentariat in the West, and why we cannot now rely upon them in this regard, and why they will likely continue to fail us.

In an earlier post,, I discussed the controversy surrounding Dutch politician Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, perceiving the animadversions of Joseph Loconte as characteristic of an establishment more interested in perpetuating its hallucinations than in either understanding Islam or protecting the societies it rules.

Well, the film was released, and subsequently suppressed at the original hosting locations, as Lawrence Auster explains. Apparently, the aggrieved parties, hewing to the example established during the Dutch cartoon jihad, sought to prove the arguments of those they opposed. "Slay all those who say Islam is violent", and all of that. In other news, the sun rose this morning, and will rise again on the morrow.

Rod Dreher has viewed the film, as have I, and is ambivalent, at best.

When Joseph Loconte slyly intimated that Dutch authorities ought to contrive some means of preventing Geert Wilders' film, Fitna, from being released, on the grounds that it constituted incitement to religious hatred and subverted the values of democratic society, it is highly dubious that he had these sorts of oppressions in mind. In brief, an Austrian opposition politician has been indicted on charges of incitement and degradation of religious symbols; the EU's Politburo Parliament has rejected Hirsi Ali's proposal for a common fund to provide protection for those targeted for assassination; a Dutch journalist wishes Wilders' police protection to be lifted; the Federation of Dutch Employers is mulling a suit against Wilders, to claim damages for any losses incurred as a result of Muslim boycotts; and Belgian authorities are urging vigilant citizens to report instances of religious incitement, connecting this with a campaign to suppress Fitna.

Lawrence Auster suggests that the European Union has jumped the shark. I'm inclined to concur in the assessment, but find myself wrestling with the conundrum of the European Union itself: the EU is a collective act of shark-jumping, a continent-wide declaration that Europe is a spent force as Europe, a distinctive civilization comprised of dozens of unique peoples and cultures. The EU is is merely the denouement of a long, sad process; the two attempted autogenocides of the Twentieth Century represented a last flurry of activity before the final exhaustion, with the EU itself the grave. Europe's accelerating cultural, economic, and demographic integration with the Islamic world is merely the bouquet upon the freshly-turned soil beneath which the real Europe lies. All these things being the case, the entire endeavour being a shark-jumping, how can one episode, however monstrous, be a discrete, distinguishable shark-jumping?

All of these cultural episodes are not merely foreshadowings of dhimmitude; they are the substance of subjugation itself. Consider: it is forbidden to express even historical truths, if these should be invidious in regards to Islam, while the foulest blasphemies are feted; it is apparently a respectable opinion in Europe to maintain that those who run afoul of Islam should confront the consequences naked and alone, pariahs to even their countrymen; European authorities actively seek to suppress public discourse concerning these matters, as assiduously as any Chinese censor; and the possibility of subjecting dissenters to financial ruination is openly contemplated. Dhimmitude is being imposed, not directly, but through intermediaries, the impositions not merely treasonous in the sense that they violate patriotic obligations, but metaphysically, as a breaking of faith with ancestors and descendants (what few of these actual Europeans may have).

What, however, should one expect?

[Note: I posted this last week at Redstate. It provoked a considerable debate, which can be perused (with some amusement, I think) in the comments.]

We must allow for the possibility that Islam as such is a threat to this country. Even more bluntly: The question of the character of Islamic doctrine — whether it can be tolerated without fatal exposure to its war-making titles — must remain an open question if we are to remain a free people.

Here is the enigma with this whole business. Most Americans, Right and Left, will profess belief in a very robust principle of Free Speech. Thus the idea of curbing discussion on an important topic will arouse their repugnance. I have argued in the past for legislation embracing certain aspects of Islamic doctrine — the dogmas, specifically, of Holy War (jihad), Holy Subjugation (dhimma) and perhaps Sharia law itself — into our current sedition law: in other words, outlawing the promulgation of these dogmas. Even among people favorably deposed toward an aggressive posture vis-à-vis Islam, this is met with suspicion and hostility.

Fair enough — but why abandon this Free Speech principle when it comes to the character of the Islamic religion? There is the perplexity and the frustration. People jealous to preserve a “marketplace of ideas,” where true ideas will “out-compete” false ones in the end, while understandably hostile toward my proposal to proscribe certain forms of Islamic speech, yet exhibit an apparent insouciance about proposals (less overt than mine, to be sure) to proscribe certain forms of speech about Islam.

In the name of giving yet more fodder to hypothetical unsympathetic readers who might think concern among W4 authors about Muslim activities is exaggerated (and also, in passing, getting out some information that seems to me rather important), I present this story.

In the UK, in Birmingham, a Muslim police officer tells two Christian preachers passing out Christian literature and trying to speak to Muslim young people that a) they cannot preach where they are, because it is a "Muslim area," b) he is going to take them to the police station for their activities (presumably, if they don't go away), c) trying to convert Muslims to Christianity is a hate crime, and d) if they return to the area and get beaten up, they "have been warned." He summons two other policemen, presumably non-Muslims, one of whom backs him up at least to the extent of ordering the two Christians to leave the area and not return. The Christians complain, and the only action taken is that the department defends the Muslim as "acting with the best of intentions." They say that they have offered him "guidance" on what constitutes a hate crime and on "communication style." What that guidance is, we aren't told, nor whether it contains the unequivocal statement that preaching the Gospel is perfectly legal in Britain and that there are no special "Muslim areas" where sharia law obtains and preaching Christianity is illegal.

As you've probably seen elsewhere on the blogosphere, two boys in a public school in the UK were punished with detention for refusing to kneel down on prayer mats and pray to Allah as part of a "religious education" lesson.

But although you've no doubt seen it elsewhere, you haven't heard my two cents, so I might as well give you those two pennies, unasked, just because you were kind enough to drop by W4.

...That the presence of Muslims in any non-Islamic society is the condition of the inevitability of their attempt to establish sharia as normative:

Manifestly, this fellow is deluded as to the intentions of Europeans; the publication of the cartoons that served as the pretext for riots and protests was not a calculated strategy on the part of Europeans, an attempt to provoke the Muslims to such wrath that there would obtain a pretext for the mass expulsion of 30 million followers of Mahomet. Nevertheless, his advice to Muslims in Europe - keep on the down low, pursue respectable careers and lives, so as to better propagate Islam - is shrewd counsel indeed.

(HT: Evan McLaren)

Via Jihad Watch's Raymond Ibrahim comes this must-see video from the Arabic-language satellite TV station Al-Haya (Life TV). Al-Haya is, as Ibrahim describes it, a Christian missionary TV station aimed at converting Muslims. Ibrahim doesn't mention where it is based, perhaps deliberately. I would guess in the U.S., but it would be entirely understandable if the location were kept secret. The two hosts of the show "Daring Question," known only by their first names, take telephone calls from Muslims around the world about Islam and Christianity.

In this Youtube clip, subtitled in English, they receive a call from a Moroccan woman named Sana, calling from the UK. Sana has come to believe that Christianity is true but is terrified lest her husband find out, because she believes he will divorce her and take her children away from her. She cannot lose her children, she feels, and she wants her children to be Christians, too. The hosts pray for her and with her over the phone.

Today happens to be the Feast of Stephen, immortalized in "Good King Wenceslas."

Stephen was the first martyr, and it seems appropriate for us to remember the persecuted church today. It's all the more appropriate as I haven't put up anything about Islam here on W4 for a while. Especially on my mind today are the members of a Christian family who are victims of Islamic persecution in Egypt. According to the story, they have been stopped from leaving the country and are all in prison, including the two little boys, ages 2 and 4, who are being starved (partially starved?) to pressure their Christian mother, Martha Samuel, to re-convert to Islam. The story states that she has also been raped and tortured to try to secure the same result. The father is in prison, too. Their crimes are simply that Martha converted to Christianity five years ago and that the family recently tried to leave the country to escape persecution. I never knew Egypt was a Soviet-style prison country. Perhaps only to people who have had the temerity to leave Islam.

We should pray for them.

Crossposted

On VFR, Lawrence Auster raises questions about Robert Spencer's earlier proposal in May that we should give asylum to a woman fleeing probable forced marriage in Mali. She had already suffered genital mutilation as a child and feared the additional suffering of forced marriage in a Muslim country. Spencer's rationale explicitly was that such asylum would help to make clear America's absolute opposition to the practice of female genital mutilation. The problem is just this: Suppose that we try to get some sort of principle out of that case for granting asylum, and suppose that the principle that comes out of it is that asylum should be granted to women fleeing genital mutilation in Muslim countries or reasonably fearing forced marriage after they have already suffered genital mutilation. If Muslim immigration is itself dangerous, and the women in question continue to be Muslims, to what extent is such asylum a problem even though they are (obviously) fleeing from certain aspects of Muslim culture?

I see this as a genuinely difficult question. On the one hand, I am on board with the statement that Muslim immigration, per se, is a major problem. I'm not just going to talk about "radical" Muslim immigration, or "Islamist" immigration, or anything of the sort. Sharia is bad. Good Muslims are supposed to seek sharia. Muslim culture is incompatible with American culture as I want it to be. I could say more and more. We need to get a grip on ourselves, as Americans, about Muslim immigration. We shouldn't keep kidding ourselves. (Not that anyone in any position of power is going to listen to me or to any conservative on this issue. It was a Republican President who insisted that Islam is the "religion of peace," and anyone who thinks an Obama administration will institute a crackdown on Muslim immigration is living in an alternate reality. But what's the conservative blogosphere for if not to say what you favor even if it isn't going to happen?)

An update on Martha Samuel, whose story I'd already mentioned here. She is out of jail for the moment, and it appears that so are her children and husband. But she is by no means out of the woods. She is charged with "forging identification documents," because she identified herself as a Christian on her identification documents when she was attempting to flee from Egypt to (believe it or not) Russia.

The "judge" has said he'd like to stab her. We should continue to pray for her. You can check out of Islam any time you like, but you just can't leave.

(The title is an allusion to this hymn.)

Truer words were never spoken. Lawrence Auster and Ruth Wisse on liberalism:

Liberals cannot admit the existence of real evil, of an enemy beyond the reach of reason, of an unappeasable Other. The result is a fatal collusion "between the aggressor, who wants to conceal his intention in order to execute it effectively, and the liberal fundamentalist, who has to deny aggression so that he can continue to believe that humans were created in his image."

And bang on cue comes the news that Britain has barred Geert Wilders from entering England. For "hate speech," of course. As Melanie Philips says,

The British government allows people to march through British streets screaming support for Hamas, it allows Hizb ut Tahrir to recruit on campus for the jihad against Britain and the west, it takes no action against a Muslim peer who threatens mass intimidation of Parliament, but it bans from the country a member of parliament of a European democracy who wishes to address the British Parliament on the threat to life and liberty in the west from religious fascism.

But the above quotation makes it all fairly clear: To the liberal mind, it is the messenger who tells us that we face an enemy who is the real Enemy. The liberal believes, in the face of the most incontrovertible evidence to the contrary, that we could all live in peace and harmony if only it weren't for those evil hate-mongers who raise even mild questions (for my impression is that Wilders is not one of Islam's harshest critics) about our ability to live together in peace and harmony. Thus, for reasons that are still partially obscure to me, liberalism is wilfully suicidal.

When Theo van Gogh was murdered and, shortly thereafter, I heard that police had sandblasted the words "Thou Shalt Not Kill" off a nearby wall because it might offend the Muslim community, I said that that was the sound of the key turning in the lock on Holland. That was it. That was the line crossed. Holland could never turn back. But perhaps I was wrong about Holland. It looks like England may be further along still on the way to self-destruction.

HT to VFR for various links.

This story came out at Jihad Watch a few weeks ago now, but it should not pass without a comment here at W4. In the United Kingdom--an ostensibly free even if not ostensibly Christian country--a teenager who converted to Christianity was ordered by social workers not to attend any church activity for six months. The social workers fired her foster mother because the girl had been baptized, at her own insistence, without previously undergoing "counseling to ensure that she understood the implications, especially as such conversions are dealt with harshly in some Muslim countries."

In other words, in the United Kingdom, social workers attempt to manipulate and discourage Christian converts and to uphold as far as they are able the Muslim prohibition against conversion to Christianity.

Worse, after the foster mother was fired (for allowing a teenager in her care to become a Christian), the young lady was returned to "members of her family," who have "not been told of her conversion." It is unclear which members of her family she has been sent to live with. She was originally placed in foster care because her father beat her repeatedly and threatened to take her to Pakistan and force her into a marriage there. Given the extreme clannishness of Muslim families, for her to have to live with any members of her family following her conversion could be quite dangerous for her. The foster mother said, of the girl's decision to be baptized, "I couldn’t have stopped her if I had wanted to. She saw the baptism as a washing away of the horrible things she had been through and a symbol of a new start."

At sixteen, teens in Britain are apparently allowed considerable latitude as to where and how they will live their lives. Contrast the control-freakish behavior of social services concerning a Muslim girl's conversion to Christianity with this story of a young girl who suddenly left home to live with her adult school teacher. The social worker showed up at her parents' house only to tell the girl's mother that she had "explained her rights" to the daughter and to take the daughter's clothes to the adult teacher's house.

In any event, the now-17-year-old Christian convert (whose name is not being released) certainly needs our prayers.

Let me start by saying that I have enormous respect for my WWWtW colleague Lydia McGrew, and I am usually in agreement with her on a variety of subjects. However, I have been thinking about her recent post on Muslim Immigration, and I have come to the conclusion that her approach is mistaken.

Although there are several issues I could raise, there is one in particular that has been gnawing at me. And that is the way that Catholic immigrants, including my maternal great grandmother, Vincenza Domino (d. 1979), were treated and thought of by Protestant America when they began arriving on these shores in the mid-19th century through the early 20th century.

( Anti-Catholic cartoon in Harper's Weekly, 30 September 1871)

Readers may remember this story from almost exactly a year ago. In Birmingham, England, police forbade Christians from passing out Christian tracts and speaking to Muslims about Christianity on the street in a "Muslim area." News from what Auster calls the Dead Island, right?

Well, yes, but now via Jihad Watch comes word of something unpleasantly similar happening in our beloved United States, in Dearborn, Michigan. Every year, a group called Arabic Christian Perspective sends its representatives to walk (on the public sidewalks) among the people attending the Arab International Festival in Dearborn and to distribute Christian literature to them. As a courtesy, ACP notifies police in advance of its intention to do this, and this year the police told them they couldn't. Instead, they would have to man a booth in a restricted area. At first, they were offered a centrally located area, but later they were arbitrarily moved to a location on the fringes of the festival. A federal judge refused to issue a restraining order against the police, so ACP has had to obey the police for this year. Be it noted that, according to the ACP's lawyer, this ban does not apply generally to any group wishing to distribute literature at the festival and, indeed, has not applied to the ACP in the past. So there is no question of this being merely business as usual. Moreover, as there is no evidence that any other group has been treated in this way (I suppose PETA would, if they wanted, be able to walk about and distribute pamphlets on the alleged cruelty of Muslim slaughter techniques, for example), there is every reason to believe that this is content-based and targeted at the Christian group because of the nature of their message and the Muslim context. It could even be that the police are afraid that the Christians could be attacked and are sincerely concerned for their safety, but protecting innocent people engaging in legal activities is, after all, what police are for. "These thugs might beat you up if they don't like what you are saying, so you have to shut up" is not, repeat not, the American way. A freedom of speech lawsuit has been filed on the group's behalf in federal court. At least we have that recourse in the U.S. We'll see how the suit comes out.

The lawyer has said that he intends to advise his clients next year not to pre-notify the police of their intentions. That should be interesting. If Dearborn police wander about the festival specifically looking for Christians to round up on the basis of the literature they are distributing, that should be a knock-down for a new lawsuit. In fact, it would be a great idea for friends and associates of the ACP to go out distributing some entirely different type of literature, something that might somehow be deemed "Muslim-friendly," to see what happens to them. But I don't know what the legal ramifications are of such "reverse sting" operations.

It can happen here. It is happening here. The consequences of mass Muslim immigration (Dearborn is 30% Muslim) continue.