RUTHFULLY YOURS

Jihadis do not mysteriously emerge from a culture free zone, only ‘accidentally’ parroting their religious credentials. They promote a violent, fascistic ideology which draws its energy from a reading of the verses and concepts of Islamic texts:

Francois Hollande described Friday’s massacre in Paris as an ‘act of war’. He was right to do so. But this is not a new war declared upon us by our enemies. For these atrocities are merely the latest in a long line of mass casualty Islamist onslaughts against civilians.

The terror in Paris was preceded by the 9/11 attacks, the Bali bloodbath of 2002, the Madrid train bombings, the Beslan school killings, 7/7, the massacres of Al Shabaab and many thousands of smaller scale strikes across the world.

France alone has suffered several attacks in the last year, with satirists, atheists, Jews and revellers being targeted with venom. Israel is being attacked every day.

My friend Ezra Levant reports from Paris:

France has developed a tolerance for terrorism. They accept terrorist violence as the new normal. They’re numb to it now.

Here’s proof. In January of this year, Muslim terrorists launched a series of five attacks that killed 17 people across Paris, including 12 at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. That led to a massive solidarity march through Paris, with millions of people — including many foreign leaders — swearing it would never happen again.

But it did happen again, ten times worse…

But there’s no massive march this time, no stream of foreign leaders coming to pay their respects. And even at the actual site of the massacre, the mood was subdued. As you can see in my video reports, there were a few hundred people milling around, but there was no resolve, no conviction, no purpose. Outside Bataclan, a street performer set up to entertain the crowd — and no-one seemed to find it inappropriate.

I hope Ezra’s wrong, but as I wrote four months ago:

So the cowardly and evasive “support” the world showed after January’s bloodbath was a very clear lesson to the survivors in the limits of global solidarity – and how it will go next time: We’ll be sad when you die, too! (Although probably not quite as sad and not in as many numbers, because, like, been there, done that.)

All cultures are equal, don’t you know?

Contributor and friend of Quadrant Michael Galak writes:

I do not want my children to be Eloi.

I have not been surprised or shocked by another massacre perpetrated by the Muslim terrorists in Paris. Sickened, disgusted and angered, but not surprised. I do not share “the deep shock” professed by Frau Merkel, Mr.Cameron and Messr. Holland. This trio of Western leaders has created the right atmosphere and conditions for the European jihadis to thrive.

Butchery is what jihadis do, it is their nature. They destroy, they maim and they kill. All in the name of the creed our leaders persist against all evidence in hailing as “the Religion of Peace”. In a sanctimonious rage against their own inability to function in the 21st century, these losers adopted the two most effective weapons of mass destruction: Islam and the Kalashnikov. The new barbarians appear suddenly from their underground, like the Morlocks of H.G. Wells’ Time Machine, to kill their Eloi prey — and then they disappear until the next time.

Why should Western leaders feel genuine shock and dismay? They are intelligent people, and they have long known that the real-world translation of the nostrums they sprout amount to “acquiescence”, “prostration” and “appeasement”. They knew as much for years yet dared not deviate from the pablum of their favoured dogma. It is their silence, their craven silence, that has brought on the Paris attacks and so many other similar calamities. Simply put, they found murder and mayhem preferable to facing a thorny truth.

Malcolm Turnbull is fond of proclaiming that Australia is a multicultural society, but this is loose talk. A multicultural society is a contradiction in terms, since common cultural understandings are the glue that holds a society together. Just look at France and the way its very fabric is ripped asunder
We were about thirty hours from sending this issue of Quadrant to the printers when the news broke that terrorist attacks in Paris had killed more than a hundred people. It seemed an important enough event, throwing light on both European and Australian concerns, to justify commissioning serious commentaries on it. That in turn pushed us into re-shaping this Quadrant around the concept of France’s emerging civil war.

Chance favours the prepared mind, it is said, and that concept had been planted in our minds the previous week when we received an article from our perceptive cultural critic Michael Connor titled “Paris, at Five Minutes to Midnight”. On a visit to France, Michael was struck by the unstable jostling blend of joyful cultural entertainments, car-burnings in resentful anti-white suburbs, the smart bookshops running out of republished Occupation-era fascist novels, all within a few stops on the Metro. “Nowhere in Paris is far from possible danger,” he writes. “The theatres and museums operate under strict security. Armed soldiers punctuate the street outside the Shoah Memorial, as they do outside Sacré Cœur.” An excerpt from his column in our next edition is below:

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In French bookshops this autumn is Lucien Rebatet’s Les Décombres (The Ruins). It was hastily reprinted after the initial 5000-copy print run sold out on publication day. It was also a best-seller during the occupation and this is the first uncensored post-war edition. The fascist and anti-Semitic must-read of 1942 now comes with a modern prophylactic introduction by a left-wing historian—strange when you think that the Left is now the home of anti-Semitism. A new translation of another wartime best-seller, Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, will be in the bookstores in January 2016, after the author’s copyright expires.

Before then Paris will celebrate the tenth anniversary of the 2005 banlieue riots. A nostalgic rock-throwing, car-burning veteran has been quoted as saying that next time it won’t be a riot, it will be civil war. A civil war suggests two sides but in France there might not be another side to take to the battlefield. Just in the last few weeks there have been major incidents with gypsy bands attacking gendarmes, burning cars and closing down some of the country’s main road arteries. With Holland appearing more and more like a Louis XVI bis there were few, if any, arrests. The Parisian banlieues already seem like a foreign concession—Dogs and Frenchmen Not Admitted. France does grand defeats on a grand scale—1870, almost happened in 1914, 1940, 1962, and possibly sometime very soon. When ISIS flags flutter along the Rue de Rivoli and Marais gays flap from the top of the Arc de Triomphe survivors may talk not of civil war but the War of Conversion circa 2016 ….

Secretary of State Kerry said of Friday’s terror attack in Paris, “These are heinous, evil, vile acts. Those of us who can must do everything in our power to fight back against what can only be considered an assault on our common humanity.” President Obama used the phrase “common humanity” as well.

They are wrong.

“Heinous, evil, vile” yes; but there is no “common humanity” with ISIS and their ilk. The attack in Paris was an attack on Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite, which, in simple terms, is a modern standard of tolerance. President Obama actually called it, “liberte, egalite and the pursuit of happiness.” It was felicitous a slip of the tongue. To have liberty, equality and the pursuit of happiness as government policy — whatever our personal social, ethnic or religious differences — requires tolerance. And tolerance is the specific contribution to humanity of Western democratic liberal governance. It is the antithesis of what Prime Minister Netanyahu called “medievalism” when he was in Washington last week. It is that which is under attack in the Middle East; that which was attacked in France.