RUTHFULLY YOURS

Earlier this year, following the Charlie Hebdo massacre and related terrorist attacks in and around Paris, I wrote Islam and Free Speech, a “Broadside” that is part of the series published by Encounter Books. The following is an excerpt.

How did we get to this historical anomaly in France where, as the estimable scholar Daniel Pipes observes, “a majority population accepts the customs and even the criminality of a poorer and weaker community”? It is the result of a conquest ideology taking the measure of a civilization that no longer values its heritage, no longer regards itself as worthy of defense.

France’s population of 66 million is now approximately 10 percent Islamic. Estimates are sketchy because, in a vestige of its vanishing secularist tradition, France does not collect census data about religious affiliation. Still, between 6 and 7 million Muslims are reasonably believed to be resident in the country (Pew put the total at 4.7 million back in 2010 – other analysts peg it higher today). To many in France, the number seems higher, due to both the outsize influence of Islamist activists on the political class and the dense Muslim communities in and around Paris – approximating 15 percent of the local population. An online poll conducted by Ipsos Mosi in 2014 found that the average French citizen believes Muslims make up about a third of the country’s population.

The West has an ambiguous approach to the jihad, as we see over Israel, and a broad denial about what it is we are at war with.
For the second time this year, the global jihad has come to Paris. Dozens have been slaughtered, and it may not be over yet. First thoughts, of course, go to the families.

As night turns into morning, there will be people in the French capital who still do not know if their loved ones are alive or dead.

But we must also turn our attention to the perpetrators. During and after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in January, France and much of the wider West descended into denial. Incredibly, political leaders and many journalists in the mainstream media described the events as “an attack on Islam”.

The BBC was reluctant to even mention the Islamic motivations of the attackers.

We are at war. And if we frightened to name our enemies, it is a war we are going to lose.

A few hours before the catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now “contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and “Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen, Tea-party zealots?

Middle Eastern websites may be crowing over the jihadist rampage and promising more to come, but this past week in the United States we were obsessed over a yuppie son of a multi-millionaire showboating his pseudo-grievances by means of a psychodramatic hunger strike at the University of Missouri and a crowd of cry-baby would-be fascists at Yale bullying a wimpy teacher over supposedly hurtful Halloween costumes. I guess that is the contemporary American version of Verdun and the Battle of the Bulge.

This sickness in the West manifests itself in a variety of creepy ways — to hide bothersome reality by inventing euphemisms and idiocies likely “workplace violence” and “largely secular,” jailing a “right-wing” video maker rather than focusing on jihadist killers in Benghazi, deifying a grade-school poseur inventor who repackaged a Radio Shack clock and wound up winning an invitation to the White House, straining credibility in Cairo to fabricate unappreciated Islamic genius. Are these the symptoms of a post-Christian therapeutic society whose affluence and leisure fool it into thinking that it has such a huge margin of security that it can boast of its ‘tolerance’ and empathy — at the small cost of a few anonymous and unfortunate civilians sacrificed from time to time? Is deterrence a waning asset that has now been exhausted after seven years of Obama administration apologetics and contextualizations?

There is always the chance that the next attack will knock the scales from our eyes. Always the chance that we will realize the enemy is at war with us, even as we foolishly believe we can end the war by not fighting it, by surrendering.

As this is written, the death count in Paris is 158. That number will grow higher, and very many more will be counted among the wounded and terrorized.

“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West.

It is what animates our enemies.

Barack Obama tells us — harangues us — that he is the president who came to end wars. Is that noble? Reflective of an America that honors “our values”? No, it is juvenile.

I am not going to blame Barack Obama entirely for what happened in Paris Friday — but mostly. And that’s not just because he famously called ISIS the jayvee team, when they are now unequivocally the New York Yankees or the Manchester United of terror, repellent as that analogy may be (he started it).

But what is clear from the carnage at The Bataclan theatre and elsewhere in Paris that we will be studying for weeks or months to come is that the West has no leader in our evident civilizational war — no Churchill, no Roosevelt, no de Gaulle, not even a George W. Bush. It’s certainly not Barack Obama, a ludicrous man who thinks the world’s greatest problem is climate change in the face of Islamic terror. This is the same man who oversaw, indeed instigated, a large-scale American démarche for the first time since World War II.

And look what happened. Well, we all know. We are living at a time when the Islamic world is having a nervous breakdown, actually more like a violent psychotic break, in its encounter with modernity and is determined to bring us all down with it.

Beirut came to the 10th arrondissement today. It will come to other Western cities soon.

f there was any doubt that the world is now in crisis, the mass casualty attack on Paris a few hours ago should lay the question to rest. In response to the assault, France closed its borders, declared a state of emergency and declared a curfew, a trifecta of measures unseen since World War 2 [1]. The wave of attacks is temporarily over. The period of damage assessment, which includes totaling up the doleful toll of casualties, and political posturing now begins.

This is the first time France has declared a state of emergency since the Algerian war, which took place between 1954 and 1962. It is also the first time a curfew has been imposed since the dark days of world war two in 1944.

It’s significant that the attacks occurred during a period of heightened alert associated with big soccer matches. French president Hollande himself was watching a game when he had to be unceremoniously shuttled to the safety of a government building. That suggests that French security forces and intelligence were genuinely surprised by the attack and therefore there exist terror networks they don’t know about capable of large-scale operations. Scotland Yard and MI5 must realize this and will inevitably be burning the midnight oil tonight.

Gatestone ran a comprehensive report on the state of Sweden under the press of tens of thousands of immigrants, most of whom who have neither an affinity for Sweden nor a fondness for Swedes, except as prey for rape, robbery, and mayhem. The article, “Sweden descending into anarchy,” of November 13th, by Ingrid Carlqvist, recounts the alarm Swedes are now feeling as the consequence of their government inviting countless barbarians into the country are becoming manifest. The reality of multiculturalism is hitting home, and hard.

But while reading Carlqvist’s article, I couldn’t help but remember that the Somali immigrant who raped a dying woman in a hotel garage, and then proceeded to rape her corpse, won’t be deported after he has served his sentence. Once he’s released, he is sure rape again, and commit other crimes. Why won’t he be deported? Janna Brock wrote in 2013:

It was early in the morning of 27 September. Police received an alarm that the two men were having intercourse with a woman who was completely unconscious on the floor of a parking garage under the Sheraton Hotel in Vasagatan in Stockholm.

When police arrived at the scene they found a 34 year old man from Somalia, who was in the midst of an anal intercourse with the woman. Police checked the woman’s pulse and found that she was dead. The police caught the 34-year-old Somali Islamist in the act of brutally violating a corpse. What was he arrested for? It doesn’t get more disgusting than this, but in Sweden one must not assume the man was guilty of murder.

To say that the Japanese ruled Taiwan well is a misstatement…efficiently and brutally are better words. Furthermore, there is a lesson from Taiwan. Nixon/Kissinger betrayed Taiwan by accepting Communist China’s goal of absorbing Taiwan into “one China.”Jimmy Carter removed the US Embassy to Peking, ducking principles and loyalty to Taiwan a productive, capitalist nation building real democracy. The United Nations effectively barred Taiwan from independent membership. Taiwan persevered with its building of democracy, and stuck to its guns on independence…good for them.Israel should pay heed….rsk
When the leaders of China and Taiwan met last weekend for the first time since 1949, the unseen presences in the room were the ghosts of Mao Zedong, the Communist Party’s Great Helmsman, and his bitter rival, the gaunt Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. They had been adversaries in the Chinese civil war for more than two decades, before Mao’s victorious peasant revolutionaries took power in Beijing that year.

Chiang was driven into exile on Taiwan, taking with him his Chinese Nationalist Party, or Kuomintang. The enmity of Mao and Chiang endured across a Cold War frontier—for a time, their troops hurled shells and propaganda messages at each other across the narrow strait separating Taiwan from the mainland—but they always shared a dream, born of their long struggle: “One China.”

The unification of China and Taiwan has been the sacred mission of every Communist leader since Mao, including the current president, Xi Jinping. And though the idea of “One China” today commands virtually no popular support on Taiwan, which prizes its fledgling democracy, it nevertheless clings to life as a legacy within the Kuomintang, the party of the country’s current president, Ma Ying-jeou.

The sophistication, resources and scale of Friday’s attacks in the heart of Paris underscored to officials across the globe that the challenges of containing extremist violence have reached a new level, and that the calculus of the Western effort against terrorism had fundamentally changed.

European governments in the past few months have sought various means to guard against national security threats, with some erecting barbed-wire fences to stem the flow of migrants, while others, including France, devoted hundreds of millions of euros to strengthening electronic surveillance systems.

Friday’s attacks highlight the weakness of those strategies in a world where global extremism flows across nations. It also raises questions about transnational agreements on open-border travel that have been a bedrock of modern Europe. In his first comments to the nation after the attack, French President François Hollande announced the closing of his country’s borders.

French authorities didn’t immediately name a culprit, but the nature of the attacks left little doubt they were the work of a well-organized terrorist group. A French official said Friday the attacks were “unfortunately well-prepared and coordinated.” The apparent use of explosives and the likelihood that a significant number of people were involved were particularly alarming to U.S. counterterrorism officials.