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.

I am conflicted on the subject of Tony Blair. There are good reasons to dislike him intensely. He has, for instance, presided over the abolition of Britain’s liberty. There has been no more reliable advocate of Liberalism, or more feckless and even perverse skeptic of multiculturalism, than Tony Blair.

On the other hand, his loyalty and eloquence as an ally has been unfailing; and shone most brightly when America was in her hour of need. This is no small thing. Nor should it be forgotten that he disarmed Socialism in Great Britain, and allowed the British people to prosper — at least materially.

Whether Britain can be said to have prospered, in the more general sense, under his Governments, is an open question. Business enterprise has been unfettered to some degree — but rushing in behind the levelers of Liberalism, Blair’s men, has been a wave of social ruin and debasement, of nihilism and passivity, almost unparalleled in the Western world. It is like American cities in the 1970s. And perhaps the Liberals can take credit for this at least: they have demonstrated that their philosophy, when implemented with sufficient vigor, can deprive men of any race, creed or color of their culture and manners, and reduce them to barbarism.

Into these ruins filtered the agents and provocateurs of the Jihad; and they will not be easily dislodged. This may well be Blair’s most lasting legacy: as from ruins of the decaying Byzantine Empire the Turkish Jihad acquired its resources and even manpower, so too may today’s incarnation of the Jihad soon gain control of substantial resources in Europe, including in Great Britain. Tony Blair presided over the first steps of this ominous process.

Snopes, call your office; it's time for an update.

Annie Jacobsen has been speaking out for years about what she saw on Northwest Airlines Flight 327 on June 29, 2004.

But the hoax-detector site Snopes.com labels her story as an urban legend, or at least an urban myth, blown up wildly out of proportion by Annie's all-too-vivid imagination. The group of Syrian men seated in a zig-zag pattern in the plane, making hand signals to each other throughout the flight, using the bathroom continuously in rotation, and standing up in unison when the fasten seatbelt sign went on (and there's more suspicious behavior where that came from) were a musical group, don't you see? Which means, of course, that they couldn't possibly have been carrying out a terrorist dry run. All the flight attendants and the air marshals felt all along that Ms. Jacobsen was exaggerating. She was endangering the flight by making such a fuss. Everyone thought so. They tried to calm her down, but she wouldn't listen. Poor, hysterical woman. Nothing to see here, folks. Move along.

Thanks, Snopes. We're so glad you're there to tell us when to brush these things off. We wouldn't want to be credulous, now, and get all bent out of shape for nothing.

So it looks as though, having first fitfully embraced the Jihad by means of democracy, Palestine will consummate this union by simple brute force. Hamas, a forthright agent of the Jihad, is swiftly conquering Gaza, dispossessing the nationalist organization Fatah; and in a kind of microcosm of Western impotence, we see Nationalism, a thing basically understood by the West, overthrown by Religion, a thing made mysterious to by our folly of forgetfulness — overthrown first by Westerns mechanisms such as elections and other democratic forms, and then by means of Western technology. We have before us, in short, Democracy and Progress.

Western impotence, my friends, is something that in my judgment amounts to simply a fact we have to confront. By that I mean merely this: the Jihad is older and deeper than most of us realized at first, and even today many influential people are still in a position of the most brassbound and reactionary denial about it. The Jihad will not soon be changed or defeated, much less broken and discredited, by any craft we here possess. We cannot introduce Permanent Revolution into the strange ferment of piety and radicalism in the Dar al-Islam: and expect to profit from the consequences of that toxic brew. We can hardly predict those consequences, much less exploit them toward a just peace.

My call last week for a Jihad-sedition law stirred up a hornet’s nest. While it was not a new idea, I often forget that what is old hat to me may be new and shocking to others. I also must take some blame for some misinterpretations — because the simple fact is that my writing, in one paragraph in particular, was a convoluted mess.

So here, in legal and more precise language, is what I propose:

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 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.

Via Rod Dreher:

Islamic extremists embedded in the United States — posing as Hispanic nationals — are partnering with violent Mexican drug gangs to finance terror networks in the Middle East, according to a Drug Enforcement Administration report.

"Since drug traffickers and terrorists operate in a clandestine environment, both groups utilize similar methodologies to function ... all lend themselves to facilitation and are among the essential elements that may contribute to the successful conclusion of a catastrophic event by terrorists," said the confidential report, a copy of which was obtained by The Washington Times.

The 2005 report outlines an ongoing scheme in which multiple Middle Eastern drug-trafficking and terrorist cells operating in the U.S. fund terror networks overseas, aided by established Mexican cartels with highly sophisticated trafficking routes.

These terrorist groups, or sleeper cells, include people who speak Arabic, Spanish and Hebrew and, for the most part, arouse no suspicion in their communities. (Sara Carter, Washington Times for August 8, 2007)

Now, some of us who have taken the measure of the jihad, perceiving in it the nature of an existential threat to the very substance of our civilization, albeit one which will require time to ripen, have contemplated this very possibility for some time. In fact, we might even asseverate that this possibility suggests itself upon consideration of the entities involved: it is in the nature of clandestine organizations, even those that, like some Islamic groups, observe a decentralized, "leaderless resistance" style of organization, that they not concern themselves overmuch with the objectives of partners. Provided that there is sufficient overlap at the point of meeting, and provided, further, that there exist no immediate and overt conflicts of aim, collaboration can occur. That some nationals of Islamic nations may easily pass themselves off as Latin Americans only adds to the synergy.

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 want you to consider what it would mean to you, if you learned that a Jim Crow Party were potent and fashionable, and perhaps even ready to shake the political science of our country. Consider that before us stood the menace of a political movement organized upon a principle of subjugation and humiliation of an inferior or benighted class. How would you greet this? How would it strike your sensibility? Or consider what might be your reaction to the appearance of renewed apparatus of subversion, in certain ways analogous to the Communist infiltration of the early 20th century.

I want you to consider them amalgamated: an organized apparatus of subversion ordered toward the subjugation of a class of men.

This, friends, is the Jihad; and it is we who shall be subjugated. For the great honor of Islam is to extend equality to all men; and the great disgrace of the Jihad is to remove it utterly from those who reject the faith.

It is vital to understand the gravity of the situation. Now of course I know that all my friends here understand it perfectly well — else they would not have signed onto a statement of purpose so emphatic as ours. I feel confident, moreover, that even some of our dear right-Liberals, as Zippy long ago described them, are pretty well on-broad with our purpose. I have even discovered, in personal conversation, that indeed a number of flat-out Liberals are in the end sympathetic; in short that though they might bristle at the strictures I would apply to Liberalism, they could still be made to perceive the true threat of the Jihad. In these facts I find great reassurance and even pride. My countrymen, in considerable number and even despite other differences of real depth, are with me in opposition to the Jihad.

There is, in a manner of speaking, a board constituency for a formidable Anti-Jihad Coalition.

And so my question to readers is this: what sort of rhetorical, political, philosophical, even theological principles ought to comprise our strategy against this enemy?

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.

It is said that if you know your enemies and know yourself, you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles; if you do not know your enemies but do know yourself, you will win one and lose one; if you do not know your enemies nor yourself, you will be imperiled in every single battle. - Sun Tzu, The Art of War

The popular trope on the Right is that Leftists are suicidal dhimmi when it comes to the Jihad. While there may be some truth to that, I don't think it is the whole story. In a recent thread, Lydia and I were both making dire predictions which we fervently hope will not come to pass. In the course of that thread a metaphor came up which may be helpful in understanding how modern left-liberals think about the Jihad.

The metaphor is this: the modern Left views the Jihad in much the same way that the modern Right views global warming.

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]

More than a year ago my monday-morning quarterback guess was that 9-11 was a tar baby strategy on the part of al Qaeda: that the idea was that we would either be too weak willed to respond at all, or if we responded we would overcommit and end up in a Soviets-in-Afghanistan style war of attrition that we cannot win.

A year or so later, I haven't seen any reason to change that view. It seems to me that al Qaeda's strategy - if that was the strategy - worked. The reason we haven't been attacked again is because things are going exactly according to plan. Instead of narrowly focusing on wiping out al Qaeda and getting serious about preventing the form of sedition called "Jihad" at home, we decided to change the world one predominantly Muslim country at a time, starting with one that had nothing to do with 9-11.

And if we don't want to have various parts of our anatomy handed to us over the long run, one of the first things to do is admit and understand why we've had a certain one handed to us in the short run.

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

Raymond Ibrahim, editor of The Al Qaeda Reader, writing in The Chronicle of Higher Education, discloses an interesting fact indeed. It seems that the propaganda of the Jihad takes two distinct forms, one for Western eyes and one for Islamic eyes. For Westerners, the language is one of grievance and accusation: the West has committed X, Y and Z crimes against the House of Islam; the Jihad is the just response to these outrages. Meanwhile, for Muslims an entirely different tone: the West is composed of infidels; between believer and infidel there is undying enmity; the Jihad is the just response of the House of Islam to the unbearable outrage of unbelief. In short, our enemies justify their raids and aggression to us by appeals to our weakness for victim narratives; but to Muslims they justify themselves by appeals to Islamic doctrine.

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.]

Summarizing the existential significance of Sudden Jihad Syndrome, in connection with an outbreak of the mysterious, aporia-inducing contagion in Vienna, Srdja Trifkovic observes:

The list will continue for many years to come, and the victims’ blood is on the hands of the Western elite class, in Vienna, Denver, London, and any other place that is blessed and enriched with the presence of a Muslim “community.” The ongoing refusal of the elite class to protect the people they rule from Islamic terrorism is the biggest betrayal in history. It is rooted in the mindset that breeds the claim that “force is not an answer” to terrorism, that profiling is bad and open borders are good, that Islam is peaceful and the West is wicked. The upholders of such claims belong to the culture that has lost its bond with nature, history, and the supporting community. In the meantime, thanks to them, the quiet onslaught continues unabated, across the Mediterranean and through every major airport in Western Europe and North America.

This malevolent presence is only found among us for reason of our self-loathing, of a perverse and decadent psychology by which we direct ressentiment inwardly, upon ourselves, reproaching ourselves for our very historical achievements; for these achievements belied our 'faith' that a primal equality was the natural condition of mankind. In order, therefore, to atone for this transgression of the Prime Directive, we must become the Other, and the Other must become us. But just as God is not mocked, neither is Islam mocked by such craven obsequies - albeit for different reasons - and intends to laugh last, and laugh longest.

And so these lurid little dramas will be reenacted until we have become surfeited with them, inured to them, world without end - until our world splutters and whimpers to an ignoble end. Unless.

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, th