Here's one for David Warren.
Posted on 08/28/2006 9:17:21 PM PDT by ProtectOurFreedom
Contrary to generally received opinion, the West is not today under siege from Muslim fanatics because of a resurgence of Islam, but because of the West's own moral and intellectual decline. Even Osama bin Laden knows this. The West invites attack, and the enemy's strategy in attacking is paradoxically to hide his own weakness.
If you look at the enemy, even where he has concentrated his best forces in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Lebanon, you see something unimpressive. Everything that enemy has to fight with, is a by-product of Western industry and invention. The adaptations are sometimes clever, in a psychopathic way, but they are more psychopathic than clever.
As one very unofficial Persian commentator put it recently, it is amazing to see a country that cannot even manufacture good safety matches, going about constructing an atomic bomb. The thousands of Katyusha rockets that the Iranian proxy, Hezbollah, pumped into northern Israel, are worth examining. They are laughably inefficient in range and aim, and cannot carry much weight in explosive. They can kill only randomly, and then mostly because they are packed with crude shrapnel. Once in shelters, Israeli civilians were at no risk from them. Once emerged, they find their buildings pocked by all this flying gravel, but structural damage only where the rockets directly hit. What contemptible missiles these are!
But the ideology behind the terrorist weaponry is equally contemptible. If I were a Muslim, with the inheritance of Islamic tradition behind me, I'd be deeply ashamed of the babbling idiots who claimed to speak for me. I would be very loud in contradicting them. Their ideology is tied to Islam, and constructed largely with an Islamic vocabulary and rough grammar, but hardly with an Islamic syntax. By this I mean, that it is inconceivable that anything resembling the "blovulations" of the Salafists, and Shia revolutionists of Iran, could emerge from a purely Islamic course of reasoning. There are too many extraneous elements. In the use of Islamic terms, there is too much slapstick and self-parody.
As many have now observed, the "Islamists" have semi-consciously spun together diverse ideological materials. They have borrowed uncritically from such 20th century totalitarian ideologies as Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. Each of these European ideologies, itself simplistic, had previously played a part in Arab nationalism. The Hitler strain came right off a flight from Berlin, in the person of the satanic old Mufti of Jerusalem. You look at the fascist salutes in the Hezbollah warrior parades, and see that almost everything about these soi-disant "soldiers" is pathetically imitated from a melodrama on some other history channel.
The very obsession with Israel and the Jews -- exhibited in obscene repetitions of blood libels -- is instructive. While there is some choice indigenous anti-Jewish material to be found within the Islamic tradition, starting in the Koran, the flavour and pitch of contemporary Muslim "anti-Semitism" owes little to it. One must ask such questions as, why do the current rulers of Iran spend so much time denying the Holocaust? It had nothing to do with Islam.
Indeed, the term "Islamo-fascists", that President Bush was recently criticized for using, is a more accurate short description, than the default term "Islamism" we have been using, to describe this crassly politicized caricature of Islam.
I do not want to insert the standard refrain about the glories of past Islamic civilizations, that political correctness demands. For "PC" is a good enough label for our real mortal enemy. But it is certainly true that Muslim authorities, in most preceding centuries, offered a view of God and man's duties and destiny, that was a whole lot more impressive than the current lot offers. Islam has long been the West's rival. But we could never have wished our rival to be idiotized to such a degree.
We have a problem in us, not in them. It is the recovery of our own sense of what we are, what we believe, and what we are about, that would defeat Afghan cave-dwellers and shrieking ayatollahs fairly quickly.
In a column this last week, on the current threat from Iran and its proxies, I asked a naïve, simple question that I will repeat. I observed that no counter-threats have been tabled, nor lines drawn in the diplomatic sandboxes of the West. I asked, why not? Why not say plainly, "If you do this, we will do that."
It is this inability to deal forthrightly with madmen, that suggests we have lost too many of our own marbles. For why should a man with a gun fear a man with a stick?
Where not the ones beating our women bloody, walking into a crowd of innocents and beating them up or still living in the 7th century.
This author needs a good dose of STFU IMO!
Oh I don't know..........try the last 3 paragraphs again.
Here's one for David Warren.
Well, that would require actual action and no weaseling out of retaliation. There would be no room for "negotiation" and "serious discussion." The politicians couldn't say "we need to talk about it some more and reach a consensus." Something might have to be done that would offend somebody.
Couldn't have any of that.
His point is that liberal, white-man-is-always-guilty, PC attitudes, which are to be found in our universities, our TV and newspapers, etc. almost seem to welcome the finding of any weak point in Western Judeo-Christian values.
I know at least one who is, but he dares not speak up because they really will kill him. The difficulty is that the violent minority have all the guns, all the money, and all the press. And to a very great degree they have captured the very highest levels of the ulema, the "doctors" of Islam. And so it is perfectly legitimate to question who really is the voice of Islam, and I am afraid that the true answer at the moment is that the fanatics possess the voice of Islam. The rest may follow as their religion bids or disobey, or deny the pre-eminency of the ulema. The penalty for the latter two is death.
This must end in a fight, it can end no other way. The Nazis were a minority within Germany - 36% of the popular vote is the best they ever did - and still they set the world afire.
I think your own starting statement "Contrary to generally received opinion, the West is not today under siege from Muslim fanatics because of a resurgence of Islam, but because of the West's own moral and intellectual decline." says volumes about the situation that exists.We've decided as a culture that defining and pointing out evil where it exists is no longer an acceptable action and consequently has left us in turmoil in dealing with it.Unless the USA can come to terms with this politically correct foolish attitude we're probably going to experience more events like 9\11 in the future !!!
Where not the ones beating our women bloody, walking into a crowd of innocents and beating them up or still living in the 7th century. This author needs a good dose of STFU IMO!
The author equates western decline with the inability of certain western institutions (or perhaps their refusal) to take western traditions seriously. I do not think he is saying the west itself is bereft of moral strength, just certain aspects of it. His last paragraphs clarify this better. If I understand this author, he is saying "Awaken and Take Heart."
Well, a good enough article even if it soft sells the intrinsic 'theology' of war and conquest (jihad to Ummah) as propounded by Mummy himself.
Thanks for pointing that out to me folks.
I didn't read the bottom part as well as I should have.
Now I have to go home a drive 30 miles... YIKES
Just a bit tired.
btt
ping
Warren is dead right. The problem in the west is that we have many Neville Chamberlain wannabes who feel we can talk our way out of any bad situation. At least Chamberlain finally realized (too late) that he had been tricked by Hitler and declared war. Too many westerners are living in a liberal dreamland. Our leftist saps are too willing to appease those who would gladly slit their throats for amusement. We fight the appeasers just as much as we fight the I-Fs.
...Indeed, the term "Islamo-fascists", that President Bush was recently criticized for using, is a more accurate short description, than the default term "Islamism" we have been using, to describe this crassly politicized caricature of Islam.
I do not want to insert the standard refrain about the glories of past Islamic civilizations, that political correctness demands. For "PC" is a good enough label for our real mortal enemy. But it is certainly true that Muslim authorities, in most preceding centuries, offered a view of God and man's duties and destiny, that was a whole lot more impressive than the current lot offers. Islam has long been the West's rival. But we could never have wished our rival to be idiotized to such a degree.
We have a problem in us, not in them. It is the recovery of our own sense of what we are, what we believe, and what we are about, that would defeat Afghan cave-dwellers and shrieking ayatollahs fairly quickly.
In a column this last week, on the current threat from Iran and its proxies, I asked a naïve, simple question that I will repeat. I observed that no counter-threats have been tabled, nor lines drawn in the diplomatic sandboxes of the West. I asked, why not? Why not say plainly, "If you do this, we will do that."
It is this inability to deal forthrightly with madmen, that suggests we have lost too many of our own marbles. For why should a man with a gun fear a man with a stick?
Nailed It!
Moral Clarity BUMP !
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He's talking about the Left, not us. You know, France, the EU, the Democrats, etc.
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