Posted on 09/09/2004 6:40:41 AM PDT by Pokey78
‘He is sedated,’ said Bill Clinton’s heart surgeon on Tuesday. ‘But he is arousable.’ I’ve never doubted it.
That seems as appropriate a thought as any with which to consider the state of the new war three years on. Like former President Clinton, much of the West is sedated. But is it arousable? On the eve of this week’s anniversary, hundreds of children were murdered in their schoolhouse by terrorists. Terrible. But even more terrible was the reaction of what passes for the civilised world, the reluctance to confront the truth of what had occurred. The perpetrators were ‘separatists’, according to the Christian Science Monitor — what, you mean like my fellow Quebeckers? They were ‘commandoes’, according to Agence France-Presse — you mean like the SAS?
‘We have been confronted with a deep human tragedy,’ said the Dutch foreign minister Ben Bot, speaking for the European Union. ‘I am appalled that a school and its pupils are being used for political ends,’ said Unesco’s director-general Koichiro Matsuura. A ‘tragedy’? ‘Political ends’?
Five days after the slaughter, the New York Times finally got around to using the I-word, and then only in paragraph 24: ‘While the extent of international support may be debated, the attacks bear some trappings of Islamic militancy. Officials here in Beslan said they had found notebooks with Arabic writing, and witnesses reported hearing Arabic exhortations, though the attackers mostly spoke Russian.’
Any Arabic exhortation in particular? Only the slogan of the age, ‘Allahu Akbar’. Nothing to worry about, folks. They may kill kids, but they’re just ‘separatists’, ‘radicals’, ‘activists’. No connection with any events you may have heard about in Madrid, Istanbul, Bali, Tel Aviv or New York. The approved tone in polite society is that of my Telegraph colleague Adam Nicolson: keep it tasteful, keep it elegant, lots of exquisitely honed overwritten allusions — each dead child was ‘a Pietà, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V...’. Lovely stuff, may even be an award in it. But not a word about the killers or a hint of their identity. Only a limpid, passive sadness. Nicolson is sedated but, unlike Clinton, not arousable.
Three years after September 11, the Islamist death cult is the love whose name no one dare speak. And, if you can’t even bring yourself to identify your enemy, are you likely to defeat him? Can you even know him? He seems to know us pretty well. He understands the pressures he can bring to bear on Spain, and the Philippines, and France, too. He’s come to appreciate the self-imposed constraints under which his enemy fights — the legalisms, the political correctness, the deference to ineffectual multilateralism. He’s revolted by the infidels’ decadence but he has to admit it’s enormously helpful: the useful idiots of the pro-gay, pro-feminist Left are far more idiotic and far more useful to him than they ever were to Stalin. He’s figured out that while pluralistic open democracy might be a debased system of government next to Sharia, it has its moments: he had no idea that quite so many Westerners so loathed their own governments and, if not their own, then certainly America’s. And he never thought that, even in America, while one party is at war, the other party is at war with the very idea that there is a war. And even the party committed to war presides over a lethargic unreformed bureaucracy, large chunks of which are determined to obstruct it.
So, despite the loss of the Afghan training camps and Saddam and the Taleban and three quarters of al-Qa’eda’s leadership, it hasn’t been a bad three years: the enemy has learnt the limits of the West’s resolve, and all he has to do is put a bit of thought into exploiting it in the years ahead. A nuclear Iran will certainly help.
By contrast, what have we learned? According to the Associated Press, last Sunday, at the Bercy stadium in Paris, Madonna dedicated her performance of ‘Imagine’ to what the AP reporter was still calling ‘the Russian hostage crisis’, even though by then the ‘crisis’ was over, as were the lives of the hostages. Madonna ‘urged fans to think about what happened in Russia and Lennon’s lyrics’. Okay:
‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try ...’
Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist. More importantly, if Madonna is advocating global secularism as the answer to terrorism, she’s backing a loser. For the fellows pulling the martyrdom routines, heaven is a brothel. In Madonna terms, it’s ‘Like A Virgin’ times 72. It’s the jackpot, it’s winning the lottery. Telling the guy it’s a fraud and your crappy life in Egypt or Saudi Arabia is all there is doesn’t seem likely to work. Doesn’t it make more sense to try to move him into buying the idea of heaven as a lot of fluffy clouds where we sit around twanging harps all day rather than attempting to shunt him all the way over into instant radical post-Christian atheism?
This isn’t a theoretical proposition. Last year a senior Dutch cabinet minister talked me through some very interesting findings apropos his own country’s Islamic population. The grandchildren of Muslims who arrived in Holland in the Seventies are often more militantly Islamist and unassimilated than their grandparents. Raised in a society as close as one can find to the sappy nihilism of Lennon’s lyric, they decided it had no appeal for them. I mocked the singing of ‘Imagine’ on some 9/11 all-star memorial gala in the fall of 2001, yet here it is again, irrelevant, dated, but indestructible as ever. Singing ‘Imagine’ is a sure sign of a failure to imagine.
That’s really the heart of it: the failure of what Osama bin Laden saw as a soft pampered West to imagine that it can ever all come to an end. Three years ago, for the cover of our September 11 issue, Heath drew us a defiant Statue of Liberty, her torch held high above the headline ‘The West Must Fight Back.’ Nice idea, but it didn’t quite work out like that. 9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed. Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, ‘the West’, for example, had lacked sufficient sense of common purpose to ‘fight back’.
It’s fashionable now to employ some false distinction between Afghanistan and Iraq — the good war and the Texas cowboy’s Halliburton land grab. But ‘the West’ was never committed even to Afghanistan. A few months ago, I had the honour of participating in the US Naval Academy’s annual foreign affairs conference in Annapolis. After I’d made a few breezy generalisations about the pitiful performance of America’s so-called allies, an indignant French naval cadet stood up to insist that, au contraire, Paris had made a significant contribution to the war in Afghanistan. Why, it had dispatched the ultimate symbol of Gallic prestige, the nuclear (and, indeed, toxic) aircraft carrier, the Charles de Gaulle.
It seemed cruel to point out that Afghanistan is a land-locked country, and that dispatching a stricken carrier with a few reconnaissance aircraft to the general vicinity of the Indian Ocean is not perhaps the most robust commitment to the war effort. It seemed crueller to point out that the Charles de Gaulle was dispatched in late December 2002, a month after the fall of Kabul. In other words, the French had waited till the war was over before making a contribution to it. That’s America’s post-modern ‘alliance’.
In the US, some observers thought it would be different once Europe got hit. On the day of the Madrid bombing, John Ellis, a Bush cousin and a shrewd commentator, declared confidently: ‘Every member state of the EU understands that Madrid is Rome is Berlin is Amsterdam is Paris is London is New York.’ All wrong. Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: ‘We apologise for catching your eye.’ Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc., it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two and a half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.
This war will go on for some decades, and by the end of it Madrid will be Rome will be Berlin will be Amsterdam will be Paris, but none of them will be as we now know them. As I’ve said here before, by 2030 Europe will be Eurabia — at least semi-Islamified, with Muslim lobby groups transformed into Muslim political parties, with their own representatives serving in coalitions with bewildered Continental multiculturalists. (The recent by-elections in the Midlands, with the Friends of al-Aqsa Committee summoning the candidates to a tribunal in order to see who could outpander the others, is only an interim phase.) In the last three decades, Europe has taken in (officially) some 20 million Muslims (officially) — or the equivalent of the populations of three EU countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark). Once you look at it like that, why should they have less say in the corridors of Euro-power than Ben Bot or Bertie Ahern? Imagine France with a 20 per cent Muslim bloc and then consider the likelihood of French forces fighting alongside the US ever again.
In her lame apologia for last week’s kiddie-killers, the Guardian’s Isabel Hilton rhapsodised about ‘asymmetrical warfare’ — how else could the poor wee insurgents/ activists/whatever fight back against overwhelmingly superior force? But these days who’s really ‘superior’? An old-fashioned European army — Belgium’s, say — is incapable of projecting itself to Saudi Arabia; but a terrorist group in Saudi Arabia, through routine innovations like email, cell phones and automated bank machines, can easily project itself to Belgium. What did 9/11 cost its perpetrators? Flight lessons would be below $5,000 depending on how impatient the hijackers were (as Zac Moussaoui told his instructors, he didn’t need to learn how to land); boxcutters cost a couple of bucks; add in a few rental cars and motels, and that’s it. For around $150,000, 19 not especially talented terrorists killed more than 3,000 people and caused immediate economic damage of $27 billion, with the final tab yet to be calculated.
That’s what I call asymmetrical. Now imagine nuclear technology, which long ago slipped the bunkers of the great powers. If you’re a quiet-lifer like the Spaniards, who do you talk to to head off catastrophe? There isn’t an ‘al-Qa’eda’ in the sense of an organisation one can enter into formal peace talks with, as Mo Mowlam advises. There are local terror groups sharing the same aims and methods from Algeria to Indonesia and, like crime families, they all know who to go to if they happen to find themselves in Chechnya, or Kosovo, or Sudan, or Colombia. And there are freelance acts of mayhem committed by chaps who wake up one morning and hear the call of the jihad — the British shoebomber and the Washington sniper both fall into this category. Not all Muslims are al-Qa’eda supporters, but they don’t have to be. If just 1 per cent is generally sympathetic, that’s enough for a vast global support network.
More to the point, keep an eye on that big picture. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30 per cent of the world’s population to just over 20 per cent, and the population of Muslim nations increased from about 15 per cent to 20 per cent. 1970 isn’t that long ago. It’s when John Lennon wrote ‘Imagine’, which our pop stars seem to think is still pretty cool. But while they’re droning the same old dirge, everything else has moved on.
Two years ago I said that the terrorists blew apart the ‘polite fictions’ of the September 10 world. A lot of people have devoted a lot of energy to trying to reconstruct them. But it can’t be done. The old world has gone, and if Madonna wants to preserve the kind of pluralist society that enables her to be photographed naked with her bottom hanging over a wall and get a bestselling book out of it, she’s going to have to choose sides and fight for it. Imagine that.
Steyn finds the words behind my unease.
No comment required.
Radical Islamist don't understand -- there's not enough humiliation and weird kinky black outfits for their women to wear, to wash the tons of filth from their evil souls.
These idiots think Allah will smile on the child rapists, the murderers, the evil ones. Will smile if only their stupid women cover their silly heads. And cover their arms and legs and look like bondage nutcases.
Here's a flash -- even if the radical islamist women look like moving piles of black dog poop, it won't wash away the sin of one child rape. Allah hates sin.
Thanks for the ping. Mark Steyn always says everything that needs to be said!
Tell them, Mark....The elite press thinks we are scare mongers...When will they face the TRUTH!!...and
The French are not our friends.
bump for later read
bookmark
Thanks for the ping. I can't get enough of Mark Steyn, so yesterday I ordered (Amazon) his anthology, From Head to Toe, for even more Steyn.
I believe that when the West will be aroused (and yes, it will happen... after a few hundred thousand are killed by the muslims)... there will be a mass massacre of muslims in Europe à la St Barthelemy...
Talk about a 75mph fastball right in the wheelhouse. Still fun to read it though....
Amen.
bnttttttttttttttttt
Clinton's sleepiness' is a perfect visual synedoche for the West's inability to come to grips with the rise of Islamofascism. Half of the West would like to pretend the latest evil doesn't exist so they can resume their decadent lives. The other half would like to fight it but finds the division in their society prevents them from really take it to the enemy. As Mark Steyn points out, we still don't get it. Perhaps it may take a thousand Beslans before we do and by then it may be too late. History is not too comforting - the British were sleepwalking through Nazi aggression right through the fall of France. And heaven knows when all of America will get the wake up call since if 9/11 has not changed the Hate America mindset of our Left, its hard to fathom what will. The enemy knows us better than we know ourselves and he is fortified with a fanatical commitment to his cause as much as we are weakened by doubts. We need more arousal and it won't be supplied by another round of Viagra pills. The day we begin to name the enemy for who he is, is the day we will begin to finally win World War IV.
Yet ANOTHER Steyn home run.
Within 72 hours of the atrocity, voters sent a tough message to the Islamists: ‘We apologise for catching your eye.’ Whether or not Madrid is Rome, Berlin, etc., it certainly isn’t New York. At least in the two and a half years between 9/11 and 3/11, there was always the possibility of Europe stiffening itself. Now America lives with the certainty that it won’t, and can’t, until it’s too late.
I think you are way too optimistic.
Europe will lay down and submit. They are all but already there.
You are probably basing your assumption that there is still active energized Christians in Europe. There are churches still, but for the most part are filled with old people.
Love your tagline!
‘Imagine there’s no heaven It’s easy if you try ...’
Not what I would want to hear if my kid had just been shot dead by a terrorist. More importantly, if Madonna is advocating global secularism as the answer to terrorism, she’s backing a loser. For the fellows pulling the martyrdom routines, heaven is a brothel. In Madonna terms, it’s ‘Like A Virgin’ times 72.
Mark Steyn Bump.
No, I base my assumption on the fact that they half a self-defense reflex...
In a way, it takes a lot to awaken democracies... World war II showed it...
For instance, do you know that the most restrictive laws against Muslim immigration were now passed in... denmark? And that Norway has found a way to deny immigrant status to Muslim spouses of its own citizens?
By the way, while travelling in France this summer, I was flabbergasted to see how full the churches were (outside Paris) on sundays...
Allah hates sin.
Obviously not or we wouldn't be in a war for our very lives.
I certainly hope you are right.
Madrid didn't pass the test. Of all the European nations, one would think Spain would be one of the strongest, since they actually are an partner in word and deed before that event.
He really nailed Europe in this one! He's exactly right, IMO.
Just brilliant, he nails it again.
bump
History repeats and repeats and repeats...
"When they came for the gypsies I did nothing..."
Why is it that we are able to bring ourselves to outlaw the Nazi party in Europe but we can't even call this Muslim effort by its true name: Islamic Fascism?
Must 20 million more people die before the blinders come off? If so, then this world wags on, lamentable in all its unteachable misery.
Re#11 I don't foresee that, yet. I do see that France is way behind the curve. The present holds many troubling facts for the future, that's for sure....
And the Democrats are desperate to elect a President who wants to sing lead in this chorus.
I must have been unarousable during WW III?
Yes, there's still hope, at least on my part, that the people of Spain will awaken, and in time. It's happened here in the US, I have faith, it can happen in Spain, too. Of course, witnessing the activities of Communist Party, Intnl.. gives me pause -- this org has a strong foothold in Spain.
Yeah...Al sure is intrigueing to me. And I like crushed glass with milk for breakfast.
It was against the Soviet Union.... They claimed they would bury us.. but they got burried by Ronald Reagan.
Steyn always gets it right.
Now I'm just awed.
Wow, goldstategop, what a perfectly elegant (and eloquent) observation! Thanks for the ping to this wonderful thread, Pokey!
...And it can't happen fast enough.
With Steyn's references to John Lennon's mindless song, "Imagine", I was reminded of the excellent critique of it by Joel Engel, published in the Weekly Standard last year. Here it is:
Imagining "Imagine"
On the anniversary of John Lennon's death, it's worth taking a look at the gibberish in his beloved anthem.
by Joel Engel
12/08/2003 12:00:00 AM
TODAY MARKS the 23rd anniversary of John Lennon's murder by a deranged fan, an act that at once revivified the ex-Beatle's career and established his 1971 song "Imagine" as the official utopian anthem. For millions of people around the world, the song's three minutes of bumper-sticker slogans describe the best of all possible worlds.
But before the faithful gather in memoriam to light candles and sing "Imagine" together, as they always do on the anniversary, a few of them might want to stop and consider that the lyrics are hardly a recipe for universal bliss. Chaos may be closer to the truth.
Put aside for a moment the inconvenient fact that John once admitted he'd written "All You Need Is Love" as irony. Or that, as a Beatle, his most spirited vocals may have been on the group's cover of "Money (That's What I Want)," which begins: The best things in life are free / But you can keep them for the birds and bees. Or that, on his solo debut album, recorded a year before "Imagine," he sang: I told you before, stay away from my door / Don't give me that brother, brother, brother, brother . . . Let's just take the words of "Imagine" at face value.
Imagine there's no heaven . . . No hell below us . . . Imagine all the people living for today. Okay, let's imagine that; let's imagine six billion people who believe that flesh and blood is all there is; that once you shuffle off this mortal coil, poof, you're history; that Hitler and Mother Teresa, for example, both met the same ultimate fate. Common sense suggests that such a world would produce a lot more Hitlers and a lot fewer Teresas, for the same reason that you get a lot more speeders / murderers / rapists / embezzlers when you eliminate laws, police, and punishment. Skeptics and atheists can say what they like about religion, but it's hard to deny that the fear of an afterlife where one will be judged has likely kept hundreds of millions from committing acts of aggression, if not outright horror. Nothing clears the conscience quite like a belief in eternal nothingness.
Imagine there's no countries . . . Nothing to kill or die for / No religion too / Imagine all the people / living life in peace. Hmmm. A single, borderless entity. No passports or customs inspectors rifling through your luggage. So far, so good. But wait a second. By what laws, rules, cultures, customs, and mores would we all be living? America's? Saudi Arabia's? Iceland's? Cuba's? Obviously, organizing billions of people from different traditions around a common mindset would require some serious coercion that progressives (many of whom will be out in force tonight with lighted candles) keep reminding us is not our prerogative--not even in countries with brutal dictators. And if there's nothing to kill or die for, then there's really nothing to live for, either--not equality, not liberty, not justice. It bears remembering that those young Englishmen who declared, in the 1930s, that they wouldn't fight for king and country did nothing for the cause of peace; quite the opposite. Lennon's own Oxford Pledge may warm the hearts of pacifists, but it's true music to a tyrant's ears.
Imagine no possessions, I wonder if you can / No need for greed or hunger, a brotherhood of man / Imagine all the people, sharing all the world. . . . Let's begin implementing the third stanza's message by splitting up the royalties to this copyrighted song. Mrs. Lennon, I imagine, will be only too happy to share with the rest of us the proceeds from the semiannual checks she receives for its licensing. In fact, why don't we all participate in every revenue stream created by John's invaluable catalogue? No, even that's not good enough. John wants us all to own everything, so we're each entitled to an equal share of not only his catalogue but also every album, tape, and CD ever made--by every artist. True, in such an egalitarian world, there soon won't be any record stores from which to take home recorded merchandise, since the owners will have nothing left to sell and are anyway no longer the owners (we all are). Nor will there be anything to play or record the music on (assuming any artist still wants to record), since there'd be no one to build the equipment. Why should anyone volunteer to work in a factory making hard goods when everyone else is living in the poshest houses and eating at the finest restaurants for free? Of course, housing and food are going to be problems, too, unless someone volunteers to mine the quarries, hammer nails, plant corn, and catch salmon for the rest of us. In John's imagined world, su casa es mi casa. So is su radicchio.
And the world will live as one. One what? Violent mess, apparently.
Imagine that.
Joel Engel is an author and journalist in Southern California.
Steyn gets it right every time.
I agree.
The only way to stop this sort of thing is to make the cost of misbehavior unbearable.
We can cling to the illusion that humans today are somehow more sensitive or moral than they were during WWII, or that the Germans were somehow a flawed people, but the fact is that all humans have the capacity for barbarity.
Civilization is a thin veil over the ugly face of self-preservation at any cost -- A fact the Islamofascists have embraced.
We are in a cultural war, and will remain so until there is a winner. Islam in its present state cannot survive in the face of economic and social progress, and civilization cannot advance with the ball and chain of fundamentalist religion or extremism gnawing away at it.
In assymetrical warfare, the distinction between militant and civilian is blurred. We fear enraging the Islamic world while ignoring the fact that they only real method they have available to fight us is terrorism. We balk at breeding more extremist recruits, or at damaging the mosques that they are indoctrinated in.
The Soviets understood one thing: Fear is a universal motivator. A young man willing to die in a blaze of nail-bomb glory may balk at the idea that his mosque, family, and city would be razed in retaliation. Radical Islamic clerics may realize that inciting their adherents to violence is shrinking the religion rather than expanding it when their cities begin disappearing one by one in retaliation for school bombings.
The empire-builders of bygone years understood that pacifying people required making the cost of insurgency and rebellion so great that those who would be inclined to participate were cowed.
We may not be building an empire, but we had better be prepared to win the war. Not just against the Islamists, but against a world who would see our sovereignty and right to self-defense diminished to subordinated to an international body.
World opinion means exactly nothing to me. Survival, safety for my children, and a proud, self-sufficient America means everything to me.
More likely people in a place like Beslan will rise up and begin ethnic cleansing of the Muslim population. The elites on the left will equate taking actions that are necessary (closing borders, proactively killing Islamofascists)with this response and we will be further hamstrung in our ability to respond as we must.
satan is a really intelligent adversary
Steyn is more of an American than the RINOs, the "undecideds," and the Party of Slavery and Treason. I have yet to see a poor article from him.
Steyn Bump!
>>>9/11 was not ‘the day that changed the world’ but instead the day that revealed how much the world had already changed.<<<
So very true!!
<><
I note your comment, "Europe will lay down and submit. They are all but already there," and think that if I were a resident of Europe, I would hope to be an old person right now. The future there looks really bleak.
Just because I didn't know you were the one responsible for naming wars doesn't mean you need to act like a liberal when someone asks for clarification.
Great read.
Steyn and others are wailing the klaxon as loud as they can. Are enough listening to make the ultimate difference?
I always hated that song
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