‘I am Charlie’ —- Brown Variety By Bruce Thornton
http://www.frontpagemag.com/2015/bruce-thornton/i-am-charlie-brown-variety/print/
Nearly two months have passed since the global outpouring of support for the murdered staffers of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. Now those paeans to freedom of speech have disappeared down the same media black hole as the “bring back our girls” campaign protesting the kidnapping of nearly 300 Nigerian girls by the jihadist gang Boko Haram. This substitution of sentimental bluster and empty threats for meaningful action is consistent with decades of Europe’s intimidation by Muslim criminals, duplicitous “religious leaders,” and violent jihadists. The “Je suis Charlie” slogan should now be “Je suis Charlie, tendance Brown”––“I am Charlie, Brown variety.”
In one of Peanuts’ favorite running gags, Charlie Brown is baited into kicking a football held by the malignant Lucy, only to have her snatch away the ball at the last minute and send the hapless chump flying. This dynamic has defined the West’s relations with the Islamic world since the terrorist Palestinian Liberation Organization initiated the modern age of terrorism in the 60s. Indeed, dealing with the Palestinian Arabs has been an endless repeat of this bait-and-switch. From Yasser Arafat to Mahmoud Abbas, the “two-state solution” and “Palestinian national homeland” and “two nations living side-by-side in peace” have been the bait luring Europeans and Americans into demonizing Israel, pouring money into corrupt Palestinian Arab terrorist fronts, and making concessions to a never-ending series of escalating demands, all so the West can achieve the mythic “final peace agreement” that the Arabs have repeatedly demonstrated they have no interest in.
The result? Under relentless global pressure, Israel withdraws from Lebanon, and finds a Hezbollah statelet on its borders that lobs rockets into Israel and kidnaps its soldiers. The concession is duplicated in Gaza, where withdrawal creates a genocidal Hamas statelet that lob rockets into Israel, kidnaps its soldiers, and digs a network of tunnels into Israel in order to kidnap and murder civilians. The Oslo Accords gives the terrorist PLO, now rebranded the Palestinian Authority, control over Judea and Samaria, complete with a military force armed and trained by Americans. What follows are intifadas and terrorist bombings of buses and cafes, and more demands that Israel commit national suicide by accepting the “right to return” for “refugees,” and “retreat to the ’67 borders [sic].” The obvious truth is that the Palestinian Arabs no more want a state coexisting with Israel than Lucy wants Charlie to kick the football.
But Europe, with its much larger population of Muslim immigrants, greater dependence on Middle East oil, and civilizational exhaustion, has been much more prone to playing this pointless game. Muslim religious leaders and community spokesmen offer the promise of peaceful coexistence and mutual respect––if Europe recognizes the cultural superiority of Islam, apologizes for its imperialist and colonialist sins, abandons its support for Israel, cedes civic authority and public space to Islamic customs and laws, trumps free speech with shari’a blasphemy laws, and pays tribute, er, increases welfare payments to Muslim immigrants, and foreign aid to the Palestinian Authority.
Europeans accept these demands––all predicated on historical lies––and concedes, only to have Muslims respond with more demands and more violence. They perpetuate more terrorist attacks, and riot over speeches, products, animals, and cartoons deemed to insult Mohammed and Allah. They build more and more mosques at which radical imams preach jihad. They indulge vicious anti-Semitic slurs redolent of Der Stürmer. They trample on core Western principles such as free speech, confessional tolerance, and sex equality. Meanwhile their children travel to the ISIS caliphate––1,200 just from France–– then return home and use their training and battlefield experience to murder Europeans. European outrage ensues, but then quickly fizzles out.
This appeasing dynamic reflects a shift in European foreign policy instigated in the main by Palestinian terrorism and the 1973 oil embargo. In 2005 scholar Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia documented the transformation of Europe into Eurabia, “a post-Judeo-Christian civilization that is subservient to the ideology of jihad and the Islamic powers that propagate it.” In seeking economic opportunities (access to oil and markets for arms sales, for example), cheap immigrant labor, and protection from terrorist attacks, Europe “abandoned resistance for dhimmitude, and independence for integration with the Islamic world of North Africa and the Middle East.” Through institutions such as the Euro-Arab Dialogue and the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Cooperation, relations between Europe and the Muslim world were predicated on the cultural superiority of Islam, European hostility to Israel and the U.S., “human, economic, and political symbiosis” between Europe and the Muslim world, and imperial and colonial guilt.
As a result, Europe’s Muslim immigrants were encouraged to see entry into Europe, access to social-welfare transfers, and the rejection of assimilation as justified reparations for Europe’s long record of alleged colonial and imperial sins. Bat Ye’or summarizes the groveling nature of the various conclaves and other symposia in which such ideas were developed: “The Europeans are cautious and emphasize their respectful admiration for Islam. They pay excessive tribute to the great Islamic civilization from which the civilization of Europe has allegedly drawn inspiration . . . They formulate platitudinous, humble excuses for colonization and Europe’s anti-Arab prejudices. The Arab side’s representatives, on the other hand, adopt the tone of a school-teacher wielding the stick.” This perfectly describes as well the tone of Obama’s approach to Islam, most notoriously in the 2009 Cairo speech.
The last few decades have repeatedly demonstrated the wages of this failure of civilizational nerve and shortsighted policies, as Muslim immigrants and their children, despite all these concessions, foment much of the social disorder in many European countries. The Muslim immigrant crime rate is far out of proportion to immigrants’ share of the population. After Sweden liberalized its immigration policies in 1975, rapes increased by 1,472%. And immigrants are much more likely to be incarcerated: Muslims comprise 10% of France’s population, but 60% of its prisoners. Immigrants are much more likely to be on the dole and out of work; the four Muslims who perpetrated the 2005 London terrorist bombings that killed 52 had received half a million pounds worth of public assistance, while in England the immigrant unemployment rate is three times the national average. Anti-Semitism has also increased, due not to neo-Nazis and skinheads, but Muslims and their allies on the European radical left. And terrorist attacks have become what a Wall Street Journal editorial called “Europe’s new terrorist normal,” as evidenced by the recent attacks in Paris, Brussels, Toulouse, and Copenhagen.
These bad cultural habits, this culture-wide appeasement of disorder, violence, and hatred, are now deeply ingrained in European culture and institutions. But no amount of concessions to ever-escalating demands will placate those Muslim immigrants who see Europe as the “House of War,” the realm of godless infidels whom the faithful can deceive, whom the faithful can kill, whose mores and laws the faithful can assault, ignore, and undermine, and whom the faithful can fleece for the welfare entitlements seen as jizya, the tribute that the Koran says inferior infidels must pay to the superior darlings of Allah.
And no number of noisy demonstrations and blustering slogans and sentimental displays will restore to Europe the lost cultural confidence necessary for fighting back. What should be done is clear, and it’s certainly not more conferences like our president’s recent embarrassing display of evasion, groveling, and misdirection. It’s not more “outreach,” more “community centers,” more “jobs programs,” more “ecumenical” confabs, or any of the other tax-payer-funded palliatives that in the past have comprised Europe’s responses to terrorist violence, such as the 100 million euros the French dedicated to “community associations” after the 2005 riots in Paris that injured over 3000 police officers and firemen.
Rather than this futile appeasement, Columnist David Goldman has proposed the actions that should be taken to change the “new terrorist normal”:
“The means by which France, or any other nation, could defeat the terrorists are obvious: to compel the majority of French Muslims to turn against the terrorists, the French authorities would have to make them fear the French state more than they fear the terrorists. That is a nasty business involving large numbers of deportations, revocation of French citizenship, and other threats that inevitably would affect many individuals with no direct connection to terrorism. In the short term it would lead to more radicalization. The whole project of integration as an antidote to radicalism would go down the drain. The effort would be costly, but ultimately it would succeed: most French Muslims simply want to stay in France and earn a living.”
But don’t bet on France or anybody else, including this country, to follow this common sense advice. Rather, the cycle of terrorist murder followed by bluster, sentiment, desperate “outreach,” and anxious flattery will continue, until a critical mass of Europeans have had enough. And how they will respond is anybody’s guess.
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