RUTHFULLY YOURS

As my text for today, I take the words “inappropriate”, “disproportionate”, “challenging” and “extraordinary”. I intend to examine them in their current context, starting with the last.

Increasingly, the word “extraordinary” is splattered about the papers like a Rorschach test. “What an extraordinary performance she gives . . . it’s really extraordinarily moving . . . that extraordinary moment when she’s carried aloft in that most extraordinary of arias . . . It’s simply extraordinary.”

Except it isn’t. Not any more. Overuse has rendered it the most mundane, least expressive adjective in the language and it has come to mean its exact opposite, ordinary.

Similarly, the word “challenging” has sprung from political correctness and has come to suggest not resistance or defiance but something insoluble. It is applied liberally and equally to disability, the NHS, resolving the problems in the Middle East, and opening a West End show in a hot summer.

Which brings me to the inappropriate use of the word inappropriate. Explained in the dictionary as “unsuitable or not relevant to the topic”, it has come to define any bad or unethical behaviour, mostly relating to insults and sexual mores. I’m ashamed to report that I used it myself once when asked by the press why a relationship had broken up. I blamed his “inappropriate behaviour”. The word was so much in the zeitgeist, it seemed more on-trend than saying, “Actually, he was just weird.”

I’m not averse to language moving on. I understand why a “frightfully decent chap” became “a nice guy”; every generation needs their own vernacular. In my day, “nice” itself was deemed lazy and unimaginative — and indeed, originally meant “stupid”. It has long since been replaced by “cool”, “wicked” and, I’m told, “sick”. What’s sauce for the goose is coulis for the cognoscenti. Hearing myself on radio, I’m always depressed by the number of times I say, “you know.” But my real tooth-grinding kicks in when words evolve in dangerous directions.

“Disproportionate” is such a word. And these days, it seems to be used almost exclusively to describe any action — defensive or responsive — by the state of Israel.

The 20th century saw the rise and fall of two murderous ideologies: Hitler’s Nazism and the ‘Communism’ practiced by the likes of Stalin and Mao. The former was (hopefully) eradicated by mass re-education, after a world war that cost the lives of 70 million human beings; the latter eventually collapsed from within, under the burden of its own profound immorality – but not before claiming the lives of around 100 million people.
These days, we see the rise of yet another vicious ideology – Islamism. Why do I place it in the same category? Quite simply: because it fits there.
True, despite being already guilty of horrendous crimes, Islamism has not – yet – caused tens of millions of victims; but neither had Nazism or Communism by the 1930s.
On the other hand, all three extreme ideologies share the same fundamental characteristics.
Firstly, all three are predicated on supremacist propositions – namely that a group of people is inherently superior to all the others. What exactly that Master Group is depends on the specific differentiator that the particular ideology is centred upon. Since Nazism saw the world through a ‘racial’ perspective, its fundamental proposition was the superiority of the ‘Aryan race’ (the Master Race or Herrenvolk); centred on ‘social’ differences, the Communists decreed that the ‘proletariat’ was inherently loftier than every other class; for the Islamists, whose particular angle is ‘religious’, it is the adherents of Islam that are ‘entitled’ to unquestioned, divinely-ordained supremacy.
Take for instance the following statement:
It is the duty of members of other races to stop disputing the sovereignty of the Aryan Race in this region, because the day these other races should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror. Such statement sounds is surely reminiscent of early Nazi ideology, or of that espoused currently by neo-Nazi movements. Yet it originates from neither; it simply paraphrases (by merely replacing ‘religious’ with ‘racial’ terminology) a paragraph from The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas). The exact quote is:
It is the duty of the followers of other religions to stop disputing the sovereignty of Islam in this region, because the day these followers should take over there will be nothing but carnage, displacement and terror.Initially, the Nazi ideology did not advocate the physical extermination of ‘other races’ – that came later. For early Nazi ideologues, these races could be allowed to live, provided they accepted Aryan supremacy and did not attempt to ‘pollute’ the Master Race. The Racial Tenet (Rassegrundsatz) printed on every Nazi-issued ‘Aryan Certificate’ declared:
In line with national socialist thinking which does full justice to all other peoples, there is never the expression of superior or inferior, but alien racial admixtures.Hamas’s version is somewhat wordier, but fundamentally similar:
The Islamic Resistance Movement is a humanistic movement. It takes care of human rights and is guided by Islamic tolerance when dealing with the followers of other religions. It does not antagonize anyone of them except if it is antagonized by it or stands in its way to hamper its moves and waste its efforts. Under the wing of Islam, it is possible for the followers of the three religions – Islam, Christianity and Judaism – to coexist in peace and quiet with each other. Peace and quiet would not be possible except under the wing of Islam.When groups like ISIS issue ultimata to Christians to ‘convert to Islam, accept its supremacy or die’, they express, in a more practical way, the same ideological tenet.
The Communist variety of supremacism is obvious, for instance, in the words of Trotsky:
When we speak of a labour government we mean that the hegemony belongs to the working class. […] Political supremacy of the proletariat is incompatible with its [current] economic slavery. […] A Socialist revolution in the West would allow us to turn the temporary supremacy of the working class directly into a Socialist dictatorship.

An order to launch an immediate attack to the world in which we live has been issued. Since yesterday, ISIS militants received an exciting command through two videos, and a tweet: kill, and kill yourselves. The Islamic State –as the video says in response, two days ago, to the Obama’s preparation of an international action against ISIS – “is resisting, in spite of your conspiracies, weapons, and stockpiled ammunitions”. Now we are going to react, says Al Baghdadi’s organization, and calls upon the fighters: “Identify your targets, prepare car bombs, explosives, and suicide belts, so as to hit hard and break some heads”. The first video shows a wide range of enemies in the background, from Obama to Abdullah, to Cameron. The tweet warns Egypt to expect a surprise, while asking the Muslim Brotherhood to form an alliance with ISIS. The second one shows a black flag as it wraps and swallows up the American, Israeli, German, and British flags.

The theoretical background is clear: ISIS decided long ago not to be content with the Middle Eastern perimeter. Actually, it discovered that both the raising number of its recruits and its success are tied to the broadening of its horizons. The more that fierce adventure sinks its teeth into the Western reality, which they deem sinful, uncomfortable, and even grim, the more the younger generation feels the urge for it. ISIS’ goal, as clearly stated by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, the caliph of beheadings and children killings, is not only to establish a state in Iraq and the Levant, as he used to say until some months ago: since last June, Al Baghdadi has a much wider Islamic State in mind, and on the tip of his gun. And he wants to pay us a visit. At the time, his speech was translated in English, French, German, Turkish, Russian, and Albanian. The underlying slogan was: “Rush O Muslims to your state” or, in other words, “leave your roots behind, and expand your power over the world we are entitled to”. He has in mind, as also Bin Laden did, the Umayyad Empire, from 661 to 750, and then the Abbasid one, and he does remember very well the 623 years of the Ottoman Empire too, which extended from the outskirts of Vienna and Poland through Azerbaijan, the Balkans and, obviously, the whole Middle East until 1922. Madrid first, but also Rome, Paris and London are now in the perspective of any follower of the re-conqueror Islam, while also India and the Far East are a target.

As the capital of Christianity, Rome is a primary land to be conquered. This has been announced not only by Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi, but, for instance, also by Al Qaradawi, historical leader of Al Qaeda, and by Yunis Al Astal, a well-known Hamas preacher. All of them promised the certain conquest of the “capital of Christianity and of Crusaders”. How realistic is that order to attack? Judging by the past, we are vulnerable, and the forces of the Islamic terrorism have a very wide distribution.

A challenge facing America is deciding the right balance between safety from those who would harm us and security provided by government agencies like the NSA, which under the Patriot Act have the right to scrutinize personal e-mails and phone messages. Everyone wants to be safe from another 9/11, yet no one wants some government bureaucrat reading his or her personal e-mails or listening in on calls. The freedoms we cherish will be lost if it means always living under the omnipresent eye of “big brother.” But if one is killed in a terrorist attack because of an absence of vigilance, then all that freedom would have come to naught. A life lived freely but subject to an attack, may be good for the mind, but not the body; while a fully secured life may save the body, but entrap the mind.

The debate is as old as democracy, but remains crucial. Cicero wrote, “In time of war, the laws are silent.” Benjamin Franklin admonished: “If we give up freedom to gain security, we lose both.” While there is Cicero’s statement, Franklin’s is too absolute. It ignores the likelihood that such laws do, at times, catch enemies before inflicting damage. Additionally, his statement overlooks the fact that in the past when rights have been suspended during time of war, they have been reinstated upon the arrival of peace. In a democracy, life is lived along a spectrum between anarchy and totalitarianism. That exact spot changes, depending on circumstances. While I would prefer erring on the side of freedom, I don’t want to live foolishly.

However, before attempting to determine the proper balance, the first questions that must be answered are: Are we at war? Is our homeland threatened? If the answers are ‘no’ then acts such as the Patriot Act have no place. According to David Stockman, writing on his blog on Friday, individuals from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) testified on Capitol Hill just hours before the President spoke on Wednesday evening. They stated that the closest they could come to a credible threat of ISIS planning an attack on the U.S. was chatter on Twitter. If that is true, the Patriot Act should be repealed.

But the DHS’s response begs a larger question: Is Islamic fundamentalism at war with the West, and particularly with the United States? Keep in mind, as a free people we culturally and morally represent everything Islamists hate – from our legal system, to or politics of inclusion, to our support for women’s and minority rights.

The International Criminal Court earlier this month suffered its biggest setback since its establishment at the turn of the century amid hopes that soft power and legalism could deter atrocities. The court’s chief prosecutor announced that she was shelving the prosecution of Uhuru Kenyatta, accused of abetting thousands of murders and rapes in Kenya’s 2007 interethnic election violence.

The prosecutor said the three-year-old case could not go on because Kenya’s government would not cooperate with requests for evidence. As it happens, Kenyatta is the country’s president (and son of post-colonial founder Jomo Kenayatta); his co-defendant, William Ruto, is the deputy president. They were democratically elected last year, having run for office while under the ICC indictment, cracking jokes about The Hague on the stump.

So the court decided to prosecute a sitting head of state in its most high-profile case to date and then packed it in when — surprise — Kenyatta’s regime decided to make its job difficult. It is an embarrassment of the highest order because the case is the first in which the court has sought to execute what many see as its core mission: prosecuting world leaders for mass atrocities.

The creation of a permanent international criminal tribunal with authority over public officials was a dream of cosmopolitan thinkers for much of the 20th century. The end of the Cold War created a unique moment when the dream seemed to have been achieved: The Rome Statute creating the court was ratified in 1998, with the court itself coming into existence a few years later. The court has jurisdiction over the territory and nationals of states that accept its jurisdiction, and it deals with war crimes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Kenya is a member of the court; the U.S., Israel, Russia, and much of the Arab world and the major Asian powers are not.

‘Free’ Speech at Yale
A letter to the Muslim students protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture.

To the Yale Muslim Students Association and its many sister organizations that have co-signed a letter protesting Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s lecture on Monday:

I love your new free-speech concept! Obviously this woman should have been banned from campus and had her face stomped in; why couldn’t they have just quietly murdered her in Holland along with her fellow discomfort-creators? These people are worse than tweed underwear! They practically live to make undergraduates uncomfortable. But let’s deal with the harsh realities. Your inspired suggestion, having Official Correctors speak right after Ali to remind students of the authorized view of Muslim society, is the most exciting new development in Free Speech since the Inquisition — everyone will be talking about it! You have written, with great restraint, about “how uncomfortable it will be” for your friends if this woman is allowed to speak. Uncomfortable nothing. The genital mutilation of young girls is downright revolting! Who ever authorized this topic in a speech to innocent Yale undergraduates? Next thing you know, people will be saying that some orthodox Muslim societies are the most cruel and benighted on earth and that Western societies are better than they are (better!) merely because they don’t sexually mutilate young girls! Or force them into polygamous marriages, countenance honor killings, treat women as the property of their male relations, and all that. Can’t they give it a rest? You’d think someone was genitally mutilating them.

We all know that Free Speech doesn’t mean that just anyone can stand up and start spouting. Would you let your dog talk for an hour to a Yale student audience? What’s next, inviting Dick Cheney? Careful study of contemporary documents makes it perfectly clear that when the Bill of Rights mentions Free Speech, it is alluding to Freedom of Speech for the Muslim Students Association at Yale. We all know that true free speech means freedom to shut up, especially if you disagree with your betters. And true free thought means freedom to stop thinking as soon as the official truth is announced by the proper Authorities — and freedom to wait patiently until then.

Youth, as everyone knows who has passed through it some time ago, is the age not of idealism but of self-importance, uncertainty masked by certitude and moral grandiosity untouched by experience of life — or, of course, the age of total insouciance. It is not surprising that ideology makes young men dangerous, for it is in the nature of ideology to answer all the difficult questions of human existence while giving believers the illusion of special understanding and destiny not available to others.

With the downfall of the Soviet Union, Marxism lost almost all of its appeal for hormonally disaffected young men of the West, leaving them bereft of significance and purpose. Except for one group among them, they now had only a potpourri of causes (sexism, racism, the environment, etc.), none of which quite met the need or filled the gap.

The group excepted, of course, was the Muslims. Islam was waiting in the wings with a ready-made ideology. Nature hates a vacuum, especially in young men’s heads, which are all too easily filled with quarter-baked ideas. Islamism is so stupid, so preposterous and intellectually nugatory, and so appallingly catastrophic in its actual effects, that it makes one almost nostalgic for the days of Marxism. At least Marxism had a patina of rationality, and most of its adherents (in the West at any rate), while not averse to violence in the abstract, were willing to postpone the final, extremely violent apocalypse to some future date and did not believe that by blowing themselves up or cutting people’s throats they would ascend directly to the classless society or meet Marx in his pantheon. You could be a martyr in the Marxist cause, but only on the understanding that death was final. The best you could hope for was that, after the final victory of the proletarian revolution, you would have a postage stamp issued in your memory. This does not have quite the same attraction as an everlasting orgy in a cool desert oasis while everyone else is roasting eternally in Gehenna (no bliss is quite complete without someone else’s agony).

The Islamic State is not only Islamic, it is the very paradigm of Islam.

There’s a lot of competition for Barack Obama’s biggest lie. The man who could assure the American public with a straight face over thirty times that they could keep their doctor under his health plan, when he knew that to be completely false, is one hellluva fibber.

But execrable as that serial prevarication may have been, it doesn’t hold a proverbial candle to his most recent whopper — that the Islamic State is not Islamic — not to mention its corollary, or perhaps subsidiary lie, that real religions do not indulge in murder. Islam has been doing that pretty much straight through for fourteen centuries, both outwardly toward Christians and Jews, and inwardly in its unresolved pathological conflict between its Sunni and Shiite strains that continues, as the world well knows, to this day and undoubtedly into the foreseeable future, spewing an uncountable number of corpses as it goes.

The Islamic State is not only Islamic, it is the very paradigm of Islam, Islam distilled to its essence as practiced by Mohammed, massacring local tribes, raping and enslaving their women, and making war against everyone in his way until he had subdued as much of Arabia as possible. Who knows how many beheadings were involved, but can we assume the total significantly outstrips the Islamic State’s, at least for now ? Islam is far from the only violent religion — almost all have had their moments — but it is unquestionably the most unremittingly so. If Islam is said to have been hijacked, it is not by the thugs of the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS, al Qaeda, al Nusra, Ansar al Islam, Ansar al Sharia, al Shabaab, Boko Haram, Jemaah Islamiyah, Hamas, Hezbollah and on and on. They are the true practitioners of the faith, following in the footsteps of Mohammed and obeying the prescriptions of the Koran and the Hadith to make the whole world Islamic or else. They don’t need to communicate with each other. They just do their thing, because the playbook has been written for them and they have studied it well. It is they who have been temporarily hijacked by a few whirling pacifistic Sufis or other moderate outliers before getting down to the unfinished business of finally crashing through the Gates of Vienna or defeating Charles Martel at Toulouse and returning Al Andaluz to its rightful owners. As one will recall, that was the stated intention of the al Qaeda maniacs who blew up the train at Madrid’s Atocha station just a few years ago.

As the Islamic State beheads a third hostage and the world recoils in horror and reassures itself that all this has nothing to do with Islam, it is useful to remember that jihad activity continues in the United States – although hardly anyone notices amid the rush to dissociate Islam from the mounting violence committed in its name and in accord with its literal teachings.

Take, for example, a Muslim from Seattle, Ali Muhammad Brown. KING 5 News reported that Brown is “currently in jail on $5 million bail for the alleged murder of a college student in late June.” He has “already been charged with gunning down two men at 29th and King Street in Seattle’s Leschi neighborhood on June 1.” And he is “now the prime suspect in a fourth homicide.”

The report noted laconically in its fifth paragraph, without elaboration, that “multiple sources with knowledge of the investigation say Brown told police he carried out the murders because he was on a jihad to kill Americans.” NJ.com added, also deep in its story on Brown’s murders: “Prosecutors say Brown is a devout Muslim who had become angered by U.S. military intervention in the Islamic world, which he referred to as ‘evil.”

That report also noted: “Ali Muhammad Brown said he considered it his mission to murder 19-year-old Brendan Tevlin as an act of ‘vengeance’ for innocent lives lost in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria and Iran. ‘All these lives are taken every single day by America, by this government. So a life for a life.’” This is a reference to the Qur’an: “We ordained therein for them: ‘Life for life, eye for eye, nose or nose, ear for ear, tooth for tooth, and wounds equal for equal’” (5:45).

New York radio host Todd Pettengill, host of WPLJ’s “The Todd Show,” said that Brown’s murder of Tevlin was evidence that “domestic terrorism is already here.” Pettengill declared: “It was in fact an act of jihad, perpetrated by a fellow American who sympathized more with those who want to annihilate us than with his own country and its people.”

Pettengill is right. Domestic terrorism is indeed already here. And it was here before Ali Muhammad Brown went on his killing spree. Another Muslim from Seattle, Musab Mohamed Masmari, was sentenced on July 31 to ten years in prison for pouring gasoline onto a stairway in a famous gay nightclub, Neighbours, and setting the stairway on fire last New Year’s Eve, when the club was crowded. If the fire had not been put out – the carnage would have been great.

The Middle East as it exists now has no future. Its borders were drawn by European colonial powers for their own purposes. The political agendas behind those borders are long dead. The kings and coalitions they were meant to protect have vanished.

ISIS is determined to tear apart the borders of the region and it’s not alone. Iraq and Syria are caught in cycles of violence because their national borders are prisons trapping incompatible religious and ethnic populations in multicultural tyrannies. The world has spent a lot of time trying to redraw Israel’s borders when it should have been redrawing the borders of the entire region.

There are only two solutions for ending the violence in Iraq and Syria; tyranny or denationalization.

As long as Sunni and Shiite Arabs and the Kurds are trapped together in a single country they will never be at peace.

All of this is really bad news for Arab Christians because they are a fragile religious minority in a region swiftly redefining itself by religion. The Arab Nationalism that shielded them is dead. That leaves them with few options except to form temporary coalitions with the representatives of older systems, the Baath Party and the Egyptian military, or the minority Shiite Islamists.

There is no future in such coalitions. The Egyptian military was nearly toppled by the Muslim Brotherhood. Next time the Brotherhood might finish the job.

The Baath Party in Syria has become a Shiite Alawite front and an arm of Iran. Hezbollah is even more so. Christians are persecuted in Iran. When Shiite Islamists gain the absolute power to impose their clerical will, that will lead to Christians becoming an even more persecuted minority.

It’s inevitable that the lines will be redrawn, whether by international agreement or by ethnic cleansing. ISIS is pursuing the latter course. Even if we destroy ISIS, the best way to preempt it is by redrawing the lines to create countries based on stable ethnic and religious majorities.