Posted on 12/18/2014 5:01:21 AM PST by SJackson
Has the West Lost the Will to Live?
Posted By Mark Tapson On December 18, 2014 @ 12:38 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 6 Comments
When it became too obvious to deny that the hostage crisis in Sydney, Australia was an act of Islamic terrorism, Prime Minister Tony Abbott asked Aussie citizens for calm, saying, “The whole point of politically motivated violence is to scare people out of being themselves. Australia is a peaceful, open and generous society – nothing should ever change that. And that’s why I would urge all Australians today to go about their business as usual.” That’s what a politician is expected to say. But what he should have said is that the time for business-as-usual is over.
Recently my friend Doris Wise Montrose – founder of Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and its related site for self-defense instruction, Jews Can Shoot – brought to my attention something she found disconcerting. It was a Facebook post by a very popular Israeli news blogger, a brief update on the knife attack perpetrated by a young Arab on shoppers in a Jerusalem supermarket. This update was accompanied by mention of the blogger’s own mundane shopping trip to a different supermarket, and a photo of the contents of his cart.
Doris commented to him that connecting the two experiences in the same breath, in the same tone, seemed oddly cavalier. The blogger replied that it was simply an acknowledgement that this is the way of life in Israel – her citizens refuse to be cowed; they proudly carry on even with terrorism in their midst. Business as usual.
Last month novelist Jack Engelhard, who writes a weekly column for Israel’s Arutz Sheva, wrote an op-ed questioning precisely this attitude of proudly taking terrorism in stride. He noted that in the wake of four rabbis being hacked to death in a Jerusalem synagogue, for example, Israeli life went on as before. Engelhard wrote: “Hurray for Jewish bravado,” but
are Israelis getting too used to this? Is this a case of Israelis proving that nothing can stop them, or is this a case of Israelis accepting their fate as sheep doomed to be slaughtered? When will it end… how can it end… when no matter what happens ‘everything is back to normal’?
You often hear the cliché that if we let the terrorists change our way of life, change who we are, then they win. But they have changed our way of life and who we are as a culture. Look at what has become of air travel in the wake of 9/11 and the bungling Shoe Bomber: passengers shuffling along like cattle in long security lines, removing our shoes and laptops, submitting to invasive scans by the useless TSA, etc. This is but one example of our “new normal,” and as incidents like the Boston Marathon bombing and the Jerusalem synagogue butchering and the Sydney hostage-taking become more and more common, they too will become our new normal.
The jihadists need not carry out another 9/11 or a nuclear strike in order to ultimately prevail. Terrorism is a war of attrition, a strategy of death by a thousand cuts. That means we live with the subtle but ever-present expectation that a so-called “lone wolf” like the Sydney gunman, or a suicide bomber, or a well-trained team of merciless slaughterers like the Mumbai or Nairobi terrorists could strike anywhere at any time: a mall, a café, a market, a school, a synagogue, a subway, anywhere.
For the victims of terrorism life doesn’t go on at all, and it is forever altered for the surviving family members and friends. The rest of us live with the knowledge that next time, it could be us or our loved ones. The psychic attrition is incalculable, and it sits in our consciousness like a cancer no matter how much we tell each other that we must not live in fear.
In an address to the Los Angeles Museum of the Holocaust earlier this year, J.J. Goldberg of the Jewish Daily Forward praised those Jews during the Holocaust who “fought back by surviving another day in the face of the inhuman killing machine, and then another day and another. They fought back by maintaining their humanity and dignity in the face of utter depravity.”
But that is not fighting back; it certainly is not victory. It’s simply a dignified surrender. To accept living under the cloud of terrorism while declaring stubbornly that it won’t change us is a terrible self-delusion. It is a fatal misconception to believe that simply denying terrorists the satisfaction of terrorizing us is any kind of a victory at all. Our humanity and dignity mean nothing if depravity wins, if our civilization succumbs to a hungrier, more ruthless one, if the world enters a Dark Age under a totalitarian theocracy. The only victory worth having will come when we bring the terrorism to an end.
The West is in decline for a number of reasons, one of which is its cultural capitulation in the face of an ascendant Islamic fundamentalism. It is as if we, or at least our leaders and elites, have lost the cultural will to live. We need to get in touch with a sort of cultural rage, a fierce determination to crush threats to our culture, our values, and our liberty. We need to demonstrate that our tolerance has reached an end, that there will be no more coexistence with an ideology openly dedicated to our destruction. “Never mind normal,” as Jack Engelhard put it. To paraphrase his wish for Israel, for once let our blood “be exceptional and cause for nausea and trembling” among our enemies. Show the jihadists that there will be no more business-as-usual capitulation, and that they can expect us to unleash hell in retaliation for a single drop of Western blood.
We have a President who actually announced to the world that “the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.” At the rate we’re going, it won’t. One thing is certain: the future will belong to the culture that is not hamstrung by cultural self-doubt, that is not mired in apologetic self-abasement, that is not burdened by historical guilt induced through decades of politically correct indoctrination, and that burns with a will to win, no matter how long it takes or what it costs. The future will belong to the lions, not the lambs.
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Don’t miss Shillman Journalism Fellow Mark Tapson on the Glazov Gang discussing Fighting the Culture War:
You put the cart before the horse. The west has a SIN problem...it has decided in the aggregate that it would rather love darkness rather than the light....because of the SIN PROBLEM....the following issues with sexual perversions, birth control, abortions, materialism. homosexuality, murder, theft,licentiousness, greed, and everything evil that men do are produced as a symptom of the SIN PROBLEM.(That only Jesus can fix.) Revivals and “awakenings” of mass amounts of people are the only way wayward societies can shift course, but you can bet those who love darkness will always attempt to stamp such awakenings out!
Yes. English-speaking countries have welcomed subhuman bearded savages with open arms and have given them a free pass to say and do anything they want. The citizens who are paying for the savages are thrown in jail if they SAY something about the savages.
So yes. The answer is yes.
bfl
I’ve been saying it for years: The USA will be destroyed by political correctness.
No external enemy can destroy us, but the cultiral rot of PC will.
The signs are everywhere.
Cultural.
I don’t think cultiral is a word :)
“I don’t think cultiral is a word :)”
Cultviral isn’t a word as well...but it should be!
What caused that?
Was it spontaneous?
It started in the 60s with “Hey Hey Ho Ho Western Civ Has Got to Go.”
The “West” is actively commiting suicide. Importing millions of third world immigrants and catering to their every whim is nonsense.
Start with Genesis ....you might get a clue. Christ said the Father can make sons of Abraham out of the very stones of the Earth, so contraception isn’t the cause of our sorrows though it certainly has contributed to them. It is the SIN in our collective hearts that is causing the dissolution of our societies. We have allowed the so called “wise” of this world to present science as some sort of replacement God instead of insisting that science remain only a tool for reason and understanding.
God has power to heal and forgive should men turn to him. There is power in the blood of Christ! Yet knowledge of him isn’t always transferred between generations which is why each generation must discover God anew. This generation has listened to the “false Gods” of science and has been caught up in the glitz of materialism. Even many who have an inclination towards Christian worship are confused by the wink wink nod nod of civil notions of religion that have no power to save!
You think evil contraception is the whole issue that has cause God to turn his back. I say we have turned our back on God and contraception is just one of many evils that has come from that. The churches, Catholics and Protestant have been, for about 150 years, held hostage by philosophers and antichristian theologians( ravening wolves in sheep’s clothing) teaching philosophies that deny Faith in the transcendent God and instead teach that men must place their trust in enlightened men ‘who know what is best’. They teach that “men must save themselves” for there is no God that will rescue us save by scientific reasoning and the God like potentials of the human brain. The ultimate irony they do not comprehend is that while they teach that we “are products of nature” they complain that humans are out of step with nature and are in danger of destroying nature.
They created contraceptives that further interfere with what “nature” has created in us, that is the ability to reproduce. If we are mere products of nature, then something has gone wrong with nature that we should have stepped out of line with nature to the point that we should threaten to supersede nature....unless something has interfered with man himself!
Genesis explains what has happened with nature and why the actions of our earliest forbears have cause all of creation to be placed under a curse! Yes...all of it...stars and universe, too!
So true, but then we have the American people who cannot fathom basic understanding of issues that will destroy them.
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