Radical Islam By Any Other Name

“That which we call a rose by any other name would smell just as sweet,” William Shakespeare once wrote, but he’s just another dead white male that nobody bothers to read these days. Modern liberals believe that words do indeed have magical powers that can alter whatever reality they are intended to describe. Thus a man can become a woman with a simple change of pronouns, a university can erase its long-ago racism with a few more up-to-date names on some buildings, the problem of illegal immigrants can be made to disappear simply by calling the millions of people who have immigrated here illegally by some more polite name, such as “undocumented Americans” or “dreamers,” and the latest euphemisms can imbue all manner of malodorous things with that sweet fragrance of moral superiority that keeps the modern liberals’ noses constantly upturned.

The latest problem to get this mystical linguistic treatment is radical Islam, which we are now assured does not exist. Although the semantic shamans won’t go so far as to pretend that terrorist attacks haven’t been occurring all over the world with increasing frequency and savagery in the past decades, and that there’s usually someone with a Muslim name shouting “Allahu Akbar” at the scene and a group calling itself something Islamic claiming credit,  they will go so far as to pretend that anyone who draws the intuitive conclusion that the Religion of Peace has anything to do with it is just a nasty old bigot. Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking to the staff of the American embassy in France just days after somebody or another shot up six sites in Paris for some reason or another, insists that “It has nothing to do with Islam. It has everything to do with criminality, with terror, with abuse, with psychopathism — I mean, you name it.” So long as you don’t name it Islam, of course, Kerry is content to deal with the problem on whatever convoluted language and new coinages you might prefer. His predecessor at the State Department, the supposedly presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, speaking just hours before some terror group or another for some reason or another killed all the hostages at a Mali hotel who could not recite verses from the Koran, went further to insist that “Muslims are peace and tolerant people who have nothing whatsoever to do with terrorism.” Clinton was so proud of the statement that she “tweeted” it out to her followers, a surprising number of whom responded with scathing criticism, and the Democratic Party has already released an internet advertisement criticizing the Republican’s repeated use of “radical Islam” that features the formerly vilified George W. Bush saying that Islam is a Religion of Peace and we’re not at war with a religion and all the obligatory boilerplate that he never got any credit for back in the day.

So long as the shootings and bombings and stabbings and beheadings and crucifixions continue one will have to call it something, though, and Clinton has chosen to call it “jihadism.” It’s better than “psychopathism,” we suppose, but we can’t see how it’s a more politically correct term than “radical Islam.” Our big old Random House dictionary doesn’t have an entry for jihadism, but it does define jihad as “a holy war undertaken as a sacred duty by Muslims,” and our 13 volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary are so old they offer the alternative spellings of jehad and jahad and define it as “A religious war of Mohammedans against unbelievers in Islam, inculcated as a duty by Koran and traditions,” and pretty much every etymologist will tell you that it’s a term having something to do with Islam. The more respectful but less precise lexicographers like to define jihad as a peaceful struggle to better one’s self, and for some reason they usually cite quitting smoking as an example, but even Clinton seems to have given up on that. The terror group calling itself Islamic Jihad, and the proudly self-proclaimed jihadists doing all the shooting and bombing and stabbings and beheadings and crucifixions, and such widely respected-within-the-Islamic-world scholars as the late Ayatollah Khomeini saying “I spit upon those foolish souls who make such a claim” that jihad does not mean a more literal war against the unbelievers has given the word a certain connotation that cannot be easily shaken, no matter how many well-intentioned Turks start laying off the hookah.

There are subtle and nuanced arguments to avoid the words “radical Islam,” as are required for such difficult sophistry. The gist of it is that by acknowledging the Islamic beliefs of the people we are obliged to fight and kill we signal to the entire Islamic world that we are at war with the entire religion, forcing all those more peaceful and tolerant Muslims who otherwise would be disinclined to shoot and bomb and behead and all that to join with their more belligerent co-religionists. This seems at least slightly plausible, given that all those peaceful warriors are probably already suffering the crankiness of nicotine withdrawal, but even the Democratic Party’s internet advertisements explicitly acknowledge that America’s leadership has always stressed how the country and its allies are only at war with those particular sorts of Muslims who are avowedly and actively and often effectively at war against us, and even such right-wing crazies as the Republican presidential candidates and ourselves are always careful to affix that “radical” qualifier to make the same point, so by now all those peaceful Muslims should be reassured. The term “radical Islam” does include the “I-word,” but we’re all adults here and might as well acknowledge the obvious fact the terrorists are acting in strict accordance with a very ancient and still widely-held understanding of Islam’s holy book, and surely those peaceful Muslims will frankly acknowledge the current struggle does indeed involve the more radical elements of their religion. One can argue that no true Muslim wants war, because Islam is a Religion of Peace, just as one can argue that no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge, because any one that did is no true Scotsman, but it’s still a fallacy and you’re still left with a large number of people who want to kill you in the name of Islam and don’t care how painstakingly polite you’ve been to the religion that you insist they don’t practice, and we suspect that by this point even some of the most peaceable sorts of Muslims are probably starting to contemplate which side is more likely to prevail.

Our reading of history suggests that the side with the high-tech weaponry and most modern scientific know-how is usually a good bet, but the side that knows what it’s fighting for and who it’s fighting against is often a formidable underdog. In the current conflict our side is fighting with itself over proper protocol for transgendered persons and that building named after a guy who built it but who owned slaves long ago and what to call all those immigrants who are here illegally, and we refuse to acknowledge that we’re fighting at against the same radical ideology that has been intermittently at war with the west for the past 1,400 years, long before there was western imperialism and Israel and George W. Bush and all the other usual exculpatory grievances, and which has always claimed to be Islamic. When a former Secretary of State and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee is reduced that to claiming that it is merely “jihad” and therefore has nothing to do with Islam, it’s a good time for hedging bets.

If this all sounds too war-mongering and xenophobic and Islamophobic to your ears, we’ll happily recite all the rote assurances about the vast majority of the world’s Muslims being peaceful and tolerant and disinclined to chop off your head and take your daughter as a sex slave. We wish them well, and assume they wish us well in our efforts to defeat those who are committing atrocities in their name. People being people, though, we assume that there are some among the presently peaceable Muslims who are waiting to see how it plays out. Every strain of Islam has always found itself in conflict with some aspects of western civilization, and although most Muslims in the western world have found a peaceable and tolerant accommodation there are many who wouldn’t mind if the west were a little more accommodating itself. In some cases they might be making reasonable requests, in other cases intolerable demands, but Kerry and Clinton and all the political correctness in the world won’t keep them from contemplating a Muslim world. President Barack Obama contends that the Republican rhetoric about radical Islam is a recruiting tool for the terrorists, but the better recruiting tool for a potential pool of new jihadists is the string of victories they’ve lately racked up.

Clinton and her two rivals have both sworn off the term “radical Islam,” and of course the party itself is rallying to the cause with that internet advertisement, but it’s going to be a tough sale. The polls show the public unimpressed, even the vulgar late night comedian and usually reliable Democratic pitchman Bill Maher is scoffing at it, and thus far the biggest political beneficiary is the one candidate who doesn’t seem to care how war-mongering and xenophobic and Islamophobic he sounds. The magic words about men being women and Woodrow Wilson never having been president of Princeton University and illegal immigrants being dreamers aren’t polling well, and we don’t expect they’re going to win a war.

— Bud Norman

Seismic Shifts in Paris, Wichita, and Elsewhere

Last night’s earthquake was the longest and strongest we’ve felt so far. There were no reports of injuries or property damage or anything that would impress a longtime Los Angeleno, but it rattled our old house with an unprecedented violence for an eternal 30 seconds or so, and as we are still relatively new to this sort of thing it rattled our nerves something awful. Although our prairie town has responded mostly with nervous humor, one can’t help noticing a widespread worry that the next one might prove worse. Alas, earthquakes aren’t the only thing in this unstable world giving us such an unsettling feeling.

The head-chopping, crucifying, gang-raping nut cases calling themselves the Islamic State continue to rule an Indiana-sized caliphate in the heart of the Middle East and have recently downed a Russian airliner over Egypt, launched deadly bomb attacks against formidable Muslim rivals in Beirut and Ankara, killed more than 130 infidels in six coordinated attacks on Paris, and threatened to do worse yet somewhere in America. Our leaders assure us they’re on the job of protecting the homeland, but they also assure us that the Islamic State is in no way Islamic and that they’re a “jayvee team” that has been “contained” and will “eventually” be eliminated, and that there’s no need to worry that a small but deadly number of its operatives might be among the many thousands of refugees seeking asylum from a Middle East and a North Africa that are on fire and being rapidly abandoned by millions of refugees despite our unquestionably successful foreign policy, and that the majority of Americans who harbor doubts about it are racist and xenophobic and religiously bigoted and downright un-American. Such arguments are somehow not reassuring, however, no matter how much petulant and un-presidential sarcasm they come with.

We’ve been reading up on basic seismology lately, just as we started reading up on basic Islam during the Iranian hostage crisis and then delved even further into the subject after the 2001 terror attacks on America, and both studies have reminded us how very unstable the world has always been. So far as we can tell from the seismology stuff, the world is riddled with fault lines where two great tectonic forces are in constant tension against one another, and although a stasis usually prevails there are occasional eruptions that shift the world into new shapes and sometimes do great damage to what had been built on the old shape. Along some of the fault lines one side has such a significant advantage in strength that it can push the other one in ways that do devastating things to the people who happen to be living there, but Tokyo and San Francisco and Los Angeles and some other modern metropolises located in such inconvenient places have largely coped with it through modern science and engineering, while such unfortunate locales as Iran and Haiti have not, and despite our post-earthquake nerves we still hold out hope that the Sears & Roebuck Company’s famously well-built Craftsman homes of the 1920s will survive the relatively mild rumblings we’ve been having here on the south-central plains.

This recent spate of terrorism by the Islamic State and other “on the run” terror organizations, on the other hand, seems indicative of a more significant seismic shift. Even the most peace-loving and clock-building Muslims of the politically correct imagination will acknowledge that the Koran specifically describes a world divided between Dar al-Islam, the “House of Submission” where Muslims are the ruling majority, and Dar al-Harb, the “House of War” where people go about their days according to their own more westernized and individual notions, and even the most politically correction imagination is forced to concede that over the past 1,400 years or so this fault line has occasionally shifted in ways that did great damage to the people who happened to be living there. Our leaders assure us that it’s all a misunderstanding about that awful George W. bush and the still-pesky-after-5,000-years presence of Jews in the Middle East, but Islam had conquered a large of chunk of Christiandom by the time the first crusades were launched, Europe’s white folks were entirely unaware of the North American continent until shortly after the Reconquista of the Iberian peninsula from Muslim occupiers, the west’s survival wasn’t assured until hard-won victory at the Gates of Vienna in 1683, America was newly born and blameless when it launched its first war against an Islamic country that had been enslaving its sailors for the plainly stated reason that its religion demanded it, there was that British disaster in Khartoum when the natives went wildly religious, the Ottoman Empire’s role on the wrong side of the First World War, the Arab world’s similarly problematic involvement in a Second World War, all before there was an Israel or a cartoon drawing of The Prophet Muhammad — peace be upon him! — or even a George W. Bush. France’s difficulties with Algiers and everybody’s problem with Pan-National Arabism during the Cold War, or the slaughter at the ’72 Olympics and the bombings at so many long-forgotten nightclubs and cafes and South American Jewish centers, or the countless internecine wars with countless millions of fatalities, that long-forgotten hostage crisis and fare more recently but just as easily forgotten Boston Marathon massacre, none of which seem to have anything to do with Israel or George W. Bush or even the Koch brothers, all suggest that it’s a fault line that persists no matter how genuinely outreaching our foreign policy might be. One side has Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and busy-body bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving cars and showing full facial nudity, while the other has very different ideas about such things, and it’s hard to how see they’ll ever comfortably settle up against one another no matter how soothingly blind to the facts of the matter our the leadership of our fissiparous side of the fault line might be.

So far as we can tell from all this seismology stuff the the seismologists still don’t have any reliably predictive understanding of when these fault lines wind up doing significant damage to the people living on them, and we expect it will take another couple of generations of historians to explain why things went so very wrong between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb, so for now we’re left with that unsettling feeling. All our liberal Facebook friends are insisting the the local earthquakes have been been man-made by the lubricating waste-water disposal of the hydraulic fracturing method of petroleum extraction going on down in Oklahoma, which might even be true, although gasoline is currently selling for $1.88 cents at the nearest convenience store and we’d hate to be paying $4 for Iranian supplies and still suffering the occasional house-rattling earthquake, but at least there’s no denying the human agency in the Dar al-Islm versus Dar al-Harb fault line. To explain the sudden rift, we figure it’s a weakness on one side. The west still has the decided advantage in economic and scientific and military terms, but the strength of its belief in Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving cars and showing full facial nudity is invitingly weak to a more culturally confident enemy.

As nerve-rattling at the latest earthquake was, and in a state that’s also been tormented by the usual number of autumn tornadoes, we expect the next big event will be along that Dar al-Isam and Dar al-Harb fault line. The chances of mankind screwing that up seem far greater than it’s influence on nature. There’s also the fault line that’s looming on the public debt, too, and the looming realization that the $20 trillion of debt and zero interest rates that have kept America’s economy can’t continue forever, and that the rest of the west’s finances are similarly beset, and how that might affect all those poor refugees, and our nerves are rattled something awful. We hold out hope that our old Craftsman bungalow will preserve, and that the western world of Baptist churches and gay bars and capitalism and bureaucracies and man-made constitutions and women driving around showing full facial nudity will as well, but it’s hard to shake that nagging doubt. We don’t mean to go all Book of Revelation on you, but we can’t shake that unsettling feeling about this unstable world.

— Bud Norman

Beyond Winning and American Leadership

We have witnessed some pretty awful presidential press conferences in our time, but President Barack Obama’s performance in Turkey on Monday surpasses them all. There was nothing so memorably pithy as “I am not a crook” or “I did not have sexual relations with that woman,” but it was packed with more pure nonsense and un-presidential prickliness than anything we can recall.

The Cable News Network reached into its thesaurus to describe the president as “unyielding” in the headline, but by the second paragraph was forced to settle for “testy,” and even such polite press as Politico.com described him responding to reporters questions with “mild irritation.” We’d have gone with “annoyed,” “arrogant,” “dismissive,” “snarky,” “snarling,” and “downright un-presidential,” but that would only be a warm-up for all for the pure nonsense that he spouted. Little wonder that the president was “defensive,” as other press outlets put it, as the recent victories of the Islamic State in Paris and Beirut and over the skies of Egypt and across an expanding caliphate in the Middle East, as well as his venue in recently-bombed and refugee-swarmed Turkey, forced him to defend his foreign policy in general and his dealings with the Islamic State in particular. Pure nonsense is necessary to defend such a record, and some un-presidential prickliness is inevitable.

Obama had once scoffed at the Islamic State as a “jayvee team” of terrorism, and even after it seizure of an area larger than most European countries and its downing of a Russian jetliner over of Egypt and successful bombings against its Shiite enemies in Lebanon and another deadly attack in Turkey, and just hours before it launched a coordinate attack on six sites in Paris he boasted they were “contained,” so even the most cooperative press had to ask if he might have underestimated the enemy. The president explained that the expansion their Middle Eastern caliphate had not lately increased, a claim that even one of the most reliably supportive Democratic senators disputes, and which ignores its recent incursions into Lebanon and Turkey and the very heart of France, and we think even the most sympathetic observer would note some mild irritation on the president’s part.

Obama was more upbeat as he announced that “What is different this time” is that all the major parties involved in the Syrian civil war now “agree on a process that is needed to end this war, and so while we are very clear-eyed that this will be a very, very difficult road still ahead, the United States, in partnership with our coalition, is going to remain relentless on all fronts — military, humanitarian, and diplomatic. We have the right strategy, and we’re going to see it through.” This is hardly Churchillian in its rhetorical spelndor, even without the accompanying prickliness, and only reminds how very, very difficult that road to surrender to Iran over its nuclear ambitions proved to be, and it was immediately undercut by his comments on how relentless the United States will be on the military front. “And let’s assume that we were to send 50,000 troops into Syria. What happens when there’s a terroristic attack from Yemen? Do we then send more troops into there? Or Libya, perhaps? Or if there’s a terrorist attack that’s operating anywhere else — in North Africa, or in Southeast Asia?”

This is a devastating rebuttal of whatever straw men Obama imagines are advocating 50,000 troops in Syria, but it raises unsettling and unasked questions about what Obama would do in the case of a terrorist attack from Yemen or the former Libya that he bombed into chaos or North Africa or Southeast Asia or some other likely place of origin, and it has little to with the debate that’s actually occurring. Not only in the Republican nomination race but even in the most respectable foreign policy think tanks there is a growing consensus that some change of course is necessary, and the president responded to such contrary opinions by saying that “if people want to pop off and have opinions about what they think would do, have a specific plan. If they think somehow that their advisors are better than my joint chiefs of staff or my generals on the ground, I would like to meet them. I would like to have that debate.” Reports indicate that those generals on the ground are being ignored, and the joints chiefs of staff at this point are more considered concerned with gender equity and a welcoming atmosphere for non-traditional recruits, and the advice Obama has been following has turned out as it has, so the president is left with prickliness.

“What I’m not interested in doing is posing or pursuing some notion of American leadership or America winning or whatever other slogans they come up with that has no relationship to what is actually going to work to protect the American people and protect the people in the region who are getting killed to protect our allies and people like France. I’m too busy for that,” the president, sounding rather testy. The statement implies than “winning” and “American leaders” are scare quote-worthy slogans that have no relationship to what will protect America and the people in the regions we’re doing some of the killing and for allies as well as “people like France,” and if it were only pithier it would live in presidential press conference infamy with “I am not a crook” and “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” The historical consequences of such thinking, though, are likely to be far worse.

There was the familiar talk about not being at war with Islam, which Obama noted that even George W. Bush had said, and some worries that you can’t deal with suicide bombers, which isn’t even Rooseveltian, given that FDR had the Navy stand up against kamikaze pilots, and similar prickliness, but he topped it all with his insistence that America grant asylum to at least 100,000 “refugees” from the Syrian civil war, and his support for Europe taking in millions more. Those “refugees” include a suspiciously high number of fighting-age males, many have proved not be from Syria at all, at least one was involved in the horrific attacks on France, and despite his administration’s earnest assurances that they’ll all be carefully checked out there’s really no way of knowing, given the lack of Syrian record-keeping and current poor relations with the Syrian government, who might be a bad guy among the newfound wards of the state. This is all part of that humanitarian front, apparently, and the president insists it would be racist and xenophobic and downright un-American to question the wisdom of relocating the Middle East’s apparently unmanageable pathologies into America and the rest of the west, and that his more enlightened attitudes will eventually win the heart of the Muslim world.

We expect that most of the western world, even the bluest portions of the formerly stiff-spined America, will expect a less prickly and more robust response to the latest outrages. The Islamic State seems poised on further outrages yet, and far more robust responses will be required.

— Bud Norman

Until the Next Paris

Every time Islamic terrorism strikes against the west, as it does all too often, we somehow expect that at long last the reaction will be different. Instead of the obligatory worries about the anti-Muslim backlash that never occurs, or the rote assurances that Islam is a Religion of Peace, or the reflexive moral relativism that seeks to excuse cold-blooded murder as no worse than western civilization, we hold out faint hope that this time there will only be righteous outrage and a collective resolve that such barbarity will not be tolerated. The past weekend’s meticulously planned attacks on at least six locations in Paris, which killed more than 120 innocents and wounded hundreds more, sadly seems to have brought us only one more outrage closer to that surely inevitable day.

All of the usual hand-wringing about potential rather than actual victims of terrorism and pretzel-logic apologetics and ahistorical litanies of the west’s alleged past sins have predictably followed the carnage, and much of the west’s political leadership immediately demonstrated it usual cowardice. There were the same old statements of sympathy and support from the west’s capitals, of course, but most were couched in the same old language that seeks to avoid mentioning the ideology that has motivated the latest carnage. Almost nowhere in the halls of western government, except in the currently socialist and instinctively pacifist but momentarily enraged capital of Paris, is there any frank acknowledgment that a sufficient portion of the Islamic world has declared war against the west and that the west has every right and a moral obligation to protect its citizens, their freedoms, and their objectively superior culture.

President Barack Obama’s official statement was sympathetic and supportive and quite sure that “Paris itself represents the timeless values of human progress,” but he was careful to not make any mention of who might have committed such a crime against the city or what might have motivated them. In a televised debate among the Democrats hoping to succeed, which was hastily changed to deal with the breaking news rather than the income inequality and Republican “war on women” and other topics they would have rather dealt with, none of the candidates were willing to accept the notion of Islamic terrorism even with the modifier of “radical” attached. Both the current occupant of the White House and each of his would-be successors maintained their welcoming stances regarding the tens of thousands of Middle Eastern of male and fighting-age “refugees” seeking asylum in America, none were willing to question the wisdom of the past seven years of empathetic outreach and brazen appeasement to the Islamists, and all maintained their calls for cuts in defense spending and increases in immigration from the Muslim world.

Even the journalists posing the questions during that dull debate seemed eager to change the subject, and we don’t wonder why. Just hours before the Islamic State launched its deadly attack on Paris Obama had gloated to the American Broadcast Company the terror gang was “contained,” echoing his earlier characterization of the growing caliphate as a “jayvee team” of terrorism, even though the same group of killers had recently downed a Russian airliner and bombed its Hezbollah rivals in Beirut and still controlled a large and expanding chunk of what was formerly Iraq and Syria, and the related messes in Libya and Turkey and Jordan and the tidal wave of refugees spilling into Europe and America made the breaking news all the more inconvenient for the administration. The unsurprising revelation that the perpetrators of the Paris attacks included some newly-welcomed “refugees” raised questions that even such reliably far-left outlets as the United Kingdom’s Guardian had to ask, and no one on the welcoming committees anywhere has any plausible answer. Some reliably far-left pundits even in the United States are noticing that the refugees are flowing out of areas once pacified by more confident western governments, but long since abandoned for ostensibly progressive reasons, and a Democratic field that includes the Secretary of State who bombed Libya and pulled out of Iraq and “reset” relations with a Russia that is suddenly in the middle of everything, a self-described socialist who immediately attempts to change the subject back to income inequality and Wall Street’s wickedness, and a former governor who has nothing to say except to chime that he also wants a very multi-national and nuanced response was few good answers.

There are other parties with other views to be found almost everywhere, that being one of the reasons that western civilization is objectively superior to others, so there’s still that faint hope that the proper outrage and resolute response can still be mustered. Already there’s much hand-wringing in the respectable press about the possibility of right-wing parties gaining a political advantage from the attack. In America “right-wing” means the Republicans, whose supine response to the last seven years of retreat should placate even the most paranoid left-winger, even if all the party’s candidates have been at least somewhat tougher in response to the Paris events than their Democratic counterparts, but in Europe that sometimes means the more unsavory nationalist and racialist and authoritarian notion of “right-wing.” So far as we can tell the United Kingdom Independence Party and Geert Wilders’ party in Holland and many of the other party’s resistant to unrestrained immigration are reasonable advocates of national sovereignty and the perpetuation of their cultures, but in some cases such as France’s National Front and several of Germany’s most forthright opponents to their country’s insane immigration the likely beneficiaries do have worrisome roots in the continent’s Fascist and Nazi past. When widely-held common sense opinions are ruled by the elites as beyond the bounds of respectable opinion, the most disreputable sorts of parties are bound to benefit, and if the elites here had the same power to define such boundaries as they do in Europe we’d surely be in the same position. Even here the candidate most likely to benefit from the public’s outrage is Donald Trump, so America might not be so well-positioned as we had once thought.

Here and throughout the rest of the west the anti-immigration forces are gaining strength, at least, along with any voices that dare to challenge the elite opinion that the occasional downed airline or shot-up concert hall or bombed marathon or act of “workplace violence” that claims 13 lives on an American military base are just the price to be paid for maintaining the western elite’s sense of moral superiority. We hope that this yields leaders willing to defend the western values of tolerance, free speech, and religious pluralism, and even the Judeo-Christian traditions that once led us to the modern world, and that we won’t have to choose between those who would sacrifice that for security and those who would throw it all away for the sake of some self-loathing suicide impulse. That significant portion of the Muslim world intent on waging war against the west is clearly determined, and sooner or later they’ll backlash they’re begging for.

— Bud Norman

Immigration, Extremism, and Existentialism

Life in the tiny town of Sumte, Germany, is about to become very different. The 105 residents of the remote and little-noticed Lower Saxony village will soon be joined by 500 of the millions of migrants who are heading to Europe from the Middle East, with another 250 scheduled to arrive soon after, so it is reasonable to expect that some significant changes are inevitable. The rest of the western world won’t be out-numbered seven-to-one within its own borders quite as soon, but it would still do well to consider the fate of Sumte.

It’s tough enough for a town of 105 people to suddenly accommodate another 750 or so in the best of circumstances, especially when it has no shops or schools or police stations and a limited amount of sewers and roads and other infrastructure, and such an influx of newcomers who do not speak German and practice a consequentially different religion and derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility toward western values is by no means the best of circumstances. The German government, which one might well have thought had been created to protect the German way of life for its citizens, has reportedly told the people of Sumte that the only responses to the resettlement plans are “yes and yes,” and the rest of the western world suddenly seems faced with the same grim options. The people don’t much like it, in Sumte or pretty much anywhere else in the western world, but their supposedly democratic governments don’t seem to care. Throughout most of Europe’s officialdom, and among at least half of America’s political parties, and even among the American press that brought us the sad story of Sumte, the bigger worry seems to be that extremist nationalist parties might benefit from the inevitable discontent.

We’re at least somewhat sympathetic to the concern regarding Germany, where extremist nationalist parties have proved so very bellicose over the past century, although even there we’re inclined to feel sorry for the Sumteans, but we wonder why Sweden and Great Britain and Denmark and other countries that have less troublesome histories should be similarly guilt-ridden. The sudden surge of migrants asking for the generous welfare benefits of Scandinavia, long the envy of America’s liberals and the role model for the surging insurgent Democratic presidential campaign of self-described and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, suddenly has those far-right crazies popping up even there. Even in the United States those Republicans have gone so extremist as to oppose mass immigration, with the same appalled reaction from the respectable press and the more respectable members of both major parties, and there is the same glaring gap between the opinion of the populace and that of its elected officials. Almost nowhere in the western world are the governments acting to defend the western civilization that its people have grown accustomed to, whether the populace prefers it because of racism and xenophobia and chauvinism or the same objectively valid reasons that have caused millions of people from the Middle East to migrate to the west, which also seems worrisome.

If the respectable press and the respectable parties are able to declare that any opposition to a preemptive surrender to a Third World invasion is outside the realm of respectability, we expect that the disreputable parties will indeed benefit. The New York Times’ account of Sumte’s travails includes some clearly reviled quotes from one neo-Nazi town councilman, as well as some regretful comments by an unreformed East German communist town councilman that are quoted with great respect, and although we’d like to think that at least a few of the other 103 people in town are somewhere in the more sensible middle we expect they’ll be tarred as right-wing extremists if they’d prefer to not be suddenly outnumbered more than seven-to-one by people who don’t speak German and practice a consequentially different religion and derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility toward western values. Here in America we can still hope the Republicans will  insist on immigration policies that perpetuate the existing culture, and will retain whatever respectability comes with its status as one of the two major parties, but in much of it Europe we can see how only the worst sorts of elements will address the concerns of otherwise respectable people.

For the moment America’s immigration problems are less threatening, as most of the country’s unprecedented number of new arrivals don’t speak English but at least practice a religion that is less consequentially different than the American norm, or they don’t practice any religion at all, which is becoming the American norm, and they’re not so hostile to most western values, even if they derive from countries with a culturally enforced hostility to capitalism, but the issue is still thorny even here, and the Middle Eastern influx is becoming even thornier. Already the issue has provided a platform for the likes of Donald Trump, and anyone hoping to shame him out of the race should hope that a more respectable candidate will emerge to represent the overwhelming public opinion in favor of retaining something more or less like the cultural status quo.

The same respectable secular opinion that believes the culture of any cannibalistic Amazonian jungle tribe with bones in noses must be preserved in amber seem to also think that Sumte, Germany, or the entire country of Sweden or all of western civilization should be sacrificed on an altar of multi-culturalism to the most supremacist strain of Islam.  They’re worried that extremist parties might benefit from the extremism of the small town yokels in Sumte, Germany, and Wichita, Kansas, and we share their concern, but we’d also prefer to not only avoid the Nazis or the admittedly less dangerous charms of Donald Trump but also leave Sumte and the rest of western civilization intact.

— Bud Norman

The Cultural Contradictions of Liberalism

There was another mass shooting in another “gun free zone” last week, so of course there is the usual clamoring for more restrictions on the right to keep and bear arms. This time around the President of the United States has gone so far as to praise the gun laws of Australia and Great Britain, where the right to keep and bear arms has essentially been revoked altogether, and we were once again reminded of the strangely contradictory logic of modern liberalism.

The smart fellows over at Powerlineblog.com smartly observed that the same president who sneers it would be absurd to even contemplate rounding up and deporting an estimated 11 million or so illegal immigrants is now suggesting the country emulate laws that would involve rounding up and confiscating an estimated 350 million presently legal firearms. We are told by open borders advocates that rounding up and deporting so many illegal aliens would require not only a police state but a society of snitches and would foment open rebellion, and we take their argument seriously even as we insist on some level of enforcement of the immigration laws, yet they offer only a condescending chuckle in rebuttal to the argument that rounding up a far greater number of weapons from law-abiding citizens long accustomed to exercising their constitutional and God-given rights to self-defense might raise similar concerns. We’ve known enough gun-owners during our long life on the plains to understand that all that talk about prying guns out of cold, dead hands isn’t just bumper sticker braggadocio, and in the circles we run in we’ve also met enough anti-gun zealots to know they’d happily cooperate with whatever police state was required to satisfy their bien pensant souls, and on the whole we think it would be a far messier project than enforcing a border, but somehow the more liberal eye sees it otherwise.

Similar contradictions occur elsewhere in the immigration debate. We’re always struck that the same people who decry the incurable racism and xenophobia of American society are the ones assuring us that the introduction of tens of millions of foreigners into a rotten-to-the-core country, at an unprecedented rate that currently exceeds the number of jobs being created by a debt-laden economy, will prove no problem at all. Although we don’t share the same low regard for our fellow countrymen, most of whom seem to be enjoying all the excellent authentic Mexican and Asian restaurants that are suddenly flourishing in our town, and otherwise getting along with everyone reasonably well, we do understand human nature well enough to worry about how two separate cultures might co-exist within the same space. In our extensive reading of history we haven’t encountered any previous occasions when this occurred, but we’re aware that modern liberals tend to get their history from other books.

The immigration debate has lately been enlivened about what to do with the mass of reggaes fleeing the outbreaks of war in the Middle East, where the president is boasting about the peace he has wrought, and the same people who decry the incurable sexism and homophobia of American society are insisting that our allegedly Judeo-Christian culture can bring in tens of thousands of people from cultures that don’t allow women to feel sunlight on their faces and toss and homosexuals off tall buildings without any ensuing cultural conflicts. This is also with precedent, of course, and will strike anyone other than a doctrinaire liberal as unlikely.

All the rest of that blather about about the racist and sexist and homophobic nature and the moral equivalence of societies that condone slavery and forced genital mutilation of women and toss homosexuals off tall buildings seems rather contradictory, too. We can think of other examples of the mutually exclusive arguments offered by modern liberalism, but the hour is growing is late and at this point we’ll be satisfied if the latest gun-grabbing proposals are easily repelled as the more modest proposals that were put forth after the last mass shooting. The latest mass-shooting was by a mixed-race nutcase with an apparent animus toward Christians, so there’s little chance we’ll be having one of those “national conversations” about anything else.

— Bud Norman

Meanwhile, Back at the Asylum

Sometimes we get the unsettling feeling that our government doesn’t take the threat of Islamic terrorism quite seriously enough. The most recent time was when we read about the 1,519 foreigners who have been granted asylum in the United States despite their known ties to terrorist groups.

The report was in the internet publication The Daily Caller, which can easily be dismissed as one of those crazy right-wing sites, and its source was the activist group Judicial Watch, which suffers a similarly conservative notoriety, but they were simply publishing a copy of a report to Congress prepared by the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, whose reputation is quite unsullied by any taint of conservatism. We’re therefore inclined to believe that are indeed 1,519 people with known ties to anti-American terror organizations enjoying refuge in the United States, especially because the government seems so very proud about it.

Although the USCIS concedes that the 1,519 asylum seekers all provided some sort of support to terrorist groups, with 627 providing the more ominous-sounding “material support” to undesignated terrorist groups and another 198 providing “material support” to the more ominous-sounding designated terrorist groups, they insist these asylum-seekers did so only “under duress.” This is plausible, we suppose, given how much duress there is in the Middle Eastern countries from whence these 1,519 individuals came, but given that there are 1,519 of them we can’t help wondering how sure the government is that they all were unwitting accomplices. We also wonder if they won’t come under similar duress here, given that homegrown terror networks tend to be even more duress-ing than that federal government wants to be.

These concerns are not addressed in the USCIS report to Congress, but even the bureaucratese of document they are clearly proud of their willingness to give the benefit of the doubt to anyone who has has provided “material support” to even designated terror groups but has a story about under duress. At least it’s only 1,519 of them, and not the hundreds of thousands of suspiciously young and male and abled bodied and non-Syrian “refugees” who are flooding into Europe, while our own government is hoping to give at least 10,000 of the same benefit of the doubt, but it’s still another one of those frequent times when we worry that the threat of Islamic terrorism isn’t be taken quietly seriously enough.

— Bud Norman

Another Nervous Sept. 11

Today is September 11, and it seems as good a time as any to assess how America and the rest of Western Civilization are faring in the 1,400-year-old onslaught by the more bellicose adherents of Islam. We note with great relief and considerable nervousness that the west has suffered no attacks as deadly as the one that occurred in New York City and Washington, D.C., and over the skies of western Pennsylvania 14 years ago today, and hope and pray this will remain true throughout the day, but otherwise it doesn’t seem to be going very well for our side.

Smaller-scale but still horrific attacks on America and its allies have since become so commonplace they are largely forgotten after a 24-hour news cycle, and the ones in faraway places of which we know little, such as Mumbai and Moscow and Paris and London and Moore, Oklahoma, barely make an impression through the day. Each story comes carefully packaged with caveats about how it would be wrong to draw any conclusions about anybody but the particular individuals responsible for the carnage, who probably had legitimate grievances, not at all like the more infrequent stories about crazed white guys with guns who might have been listening to talk radio, and the cumulative death count is never mentioned. Although the death count is troublesome enough, the West’s instinct to ignore it is all the more so.

Meanwhile, the more bellicose adherents of Islam are rapidly gaining power in ever larger swaths of the religion’s Middle Eastern birthplace. A self-proclaimed Islamic State is imposing the most brutal and barbaric version of Sunni Islam in a growing portion of what was once Iraq and Syria, and the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism on behalf of Shiite Islam’s most murderous manifestation is about to get a $150 billion signing bonus from the West for a treaty that won’t prevent from them from acquiring nuclear weapons and the missiles to deliver them to Western targets and implicitly acknowledges their rightful role to regional hegemony. Such assertiveness by the most bellicose adherents of both branches of Islam is troubling enough, but the West’s passivity is all the more so.

The head-chopping, crucifying, burning-at-the-stake depravity of the Islamic State has occasionally forced its way onto the otherwise pristine pages of America’s newspapers, but even the most stomach-turning stories always end with assurances from the administration that the Islamic State remains a “jayvee team” of terror and that the coalition of unaccountably moderate amateurs that has been assembled is somehow is not only holding its own against them but also the Syrian Assad regime’s professional Iranian-supported troops and the crack Russian soldiers that have lately been showing up in the middle of this convoluted conflict. This happy talk has lately been undermined by an Inspector General’s report, prompted by the complaints of more than 50 intelligence analysts working for the military’s Central Command, alleging that frank talk about the Islamic State’s worrisome gains have been censored. This seems all the more plausible given the administration’s determination to describe the Fort Hood, Texas, massacre as “Workplace violence” rather than Islamic terrorism, despite the culprit’s self-status status as as “Soldier of Allah” and his chants of “Alahu Akbar” as he gunned his victims down, or use any other explanation that will subtract from that troublesome death count of small-scale yet horrific terror attacks on American soil.

The same administration assures us that the deal delivering $150 billion and free reign to pursue intercontinental ballistic missiles and all sorts of ways to get nuclear warhead is the only alternative to what would surely be an unwindable war against the same Iran that president in his first successful campaign called a “tiny country” that “doesn’t pose a serious threat to us the way the Soviet Union did.” There are still plausible options available to the Republicans and their more level-headed Democratic allies to scuttle the deal, but it remains to be seen if they’ll be willing to hold that crucial line. At this point, the best hope is that the deal will go down as an executive treaty that can be undone more a rock-ribbed president early in 2017.

Most of the rest of Western Civilization and its media seem to be on board, and only France, of all people, seem to have put much of a fight about it, and that this is not at all surprising is the most disturbing news of all. Europe’s government, if not its people, seem intent on welcoming what will eventually be millions of new arrivals from the lands where the most bellicose adherents of Islam predominate. A long-shot candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination thinks it plays well with his party to advocate that America take in at least a few hundred thousand, the same front-runner for the Republican nomination who’s grabbed the lead by talking tough about Mexican Catholics takes the same position as that Democrat regarding Islamic Syrians, and nobody seems to be insisting on the democratic and republican and unabashedly Judeo-Christian yet rigorously secular values that have Western Civilization during its 1,400-year onslaught by the more bellicose adherents of Islam. So far the West has ceded to demands that there be no criticism of Islam, that even the most belligerent emigres to the west be afford their right to undermine the hosting civilization, and that western culpability always be presumed.

That Republican front-runner has admitted that he can’t think of any favorite passages from the Bible, and we’re sure that all the Democratic contenders will think of something about greed and covetousness in the unlikely event they’re ever asked the same question, but on this day we’re reminded of of the book of Jeremiah, chapter six and verse 14: “They dress the wound of my people as though it were not serious. ‘Peace, peace,’ they say, when there is no peace.”

— Bud Norman

Move Along, Nothing to See Here

A Kuwaiti-born immigrant named Muhammad Youssef Abdulazeez shot and killed four servicemen on Thursday at a recruiting center and another military site in Chattanooga, Tennessee, but don’t jump to any conclusions that it might have anything to with Islam. There’s always a chance it was caused by some Confederate battle flag emblazoned on a passing pick-up, or something that some Republican presidential candidate might have said about immigration, and in any case it couldn’t have had anything to do with what everyone knows is a religion of peace.

By now the ritual is all too familiar. Someone named Muhammad commits mass murder at a military installation or some other obviously symbolic target, has announced to his friends and the internet and anyone who will listen that everything he does is motivated by his understanding of Islam, millions of Muslims with a similar understanding of the faith “tweet” their congratulations or celebrate in the streets or otherwise express their approval of the slaughter, and polite opinion and the official pronouncements insist that it has nothing to do with Islam. By now the far more impolite average American’s instinctive opinion is that it must have something to with Islam, somehow or another, but the official record and the most massive of the mass-media will somehow veer around this increasingly inescapable conclusion.

This particular Muhammad died during his mass-murder spree, which will absolve the authorities of the unpleasant necessity of charging him with terrorism rather than the mere mass-murder charges that might be more conveniently brought against someone motivated by a Confederate battle flag or a Sarah Palin graphic or some other domestic provocation that doesn’t require apologetics, and although the investigation will likely be forced to concede that Islam did have something to do with it  somehow or another the carefully-worded report won’t require widespread news coverage. In the meantime the four Americans who were gunned down while serving their country in Chattanooga, Tennessee, will be easily forgotten as the four Americans who were gunned down while serving their country in Benghazi, Libya, and there will be stories about how America hasn’t suffered 9/11-style attack during the current administration, just the occasional pesky cases of “work place violence” at Fort Hood and shootings at a recruiting center in Arkansas and this one in Tennessee and cars being driven into pedestrians in a couple of towns and a beheading in Oklahoma and unspeakable carnage all across areas of Iraq that had once been pacified and almost civilized by American military might, and much celebration that the Iranian theocracy and its very bellicose understanding of Islam has promised the Great Satan that it won’t get a nuclear weapon for at the least the ten years or so that it will take them to acquire the ballistic missile systems that America’s politely indulgent understanding of Islam has now allowed to buy from their newly-acquired Russian and Chinese friends.

There are no doubt many Muslims who do subscribe to that Religion of Peace of version of Islam that we keep hearing about, every time some some self-proclaimed Muslim commits mass murder, and we wish them well. The best possible outcome would be that they somehow convince their co-religionists to reach a similarly placid understanding of Islam, and persuade them to live in peace with a western world that is anathema to their generations-old understanding of right and wrong, and are able to point to America’s capitulation to a Shiite Iranian nuclear bomb and the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood’s legitimacy in Egypt and elsewhere as proof of its good intention, but barring that unlikely possibility some frankness will be required among the both the officials and their mass-media accomplices. A widely-held understanding of Islam is utterly incompatible with the values that both the left and the right of western civilization, is causing the all-too-frequent deaths of Americans and far more massive bloodshed throughout the rest of the world, and cannot be peacefully be resolved without capitulations to a medieval theology that goes way beyond repealing same-sex marriage and women’s suffrage and is offended even by the more old-fashioned morality of the Christian right, and some resistance must be offered.

We can’t say where to begin the bombings, as the threat is by now far too diffuse and well-armed in the deserts and well-hidden in the suburbs and too politely ignored by official pronouncements and mass-media commentary, but at a frank acknowledgement that this has something to do with Islam, somehow or another, would be a good start.

— Bud Norman

On Indifference and Outrage

Those high-brow fellows over at Commentary magazine recently published a fine essay on the art world’s self-inflected irrelevance, and we recommend it to all our culture vulture readers who still take an interest in such things. We’ve already fulminated a few times on these pages about pretty much the same unhappy point, though, and what most struck us was an opening anecdote that nicely illustrates an even bigger problem with what people are now indifferent to and what still offends them.

The author, who seems such a reasonable thinker that we are pleasantly surprised to note he is somehow the Faison-Pierson-Stoddard Professor of Art at Williams College, recalls showing one of his classes the grainy black-and-white film documentation of a 1971 performance art piece by the late Chris Burden, which involved having a friend shoot him in the arm with .22-calibre rifle at close range. We can still recall how the alleged artwork provoked a wide range of reactions even at such a late date in modernity as 1971, but the 21st Century students who watched were mostly interested in the legal ramifications and tried hard to it put into the context that savvy art students now understand their professors expect, but were otherwise indifferent. The professor seems somewhat surprised at such a dispassionate reaction to the spectacle of a man being shot in the arm at close range by .22-calibre rifle, but we are not. As the professor notes in the rest of his essay, even by the time Burns got around to it this sort of shock-the-squares stuff had already been going in the art world since approximately the end of World War I, and that Burns had to top it by having himself famously crucified atop a Volkswagen Beetle, and that subsequent attempts at giving offense have required ever more over-the-top outrages, so by now indifference to such efforts is both the sophisticated and sensible reaction.

What strikes us as odd, and went unmentioned by the professor, is that these same 21st Century students are the ones who require “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” and protection from “micro-aggressions” and outright censorship of Ovid or Mark Twain or The Bible or that vaguely Republican commencement speaker or any other vestige of pre-World War I Western Civilization that might call into question the comforting consensus of academic opinion. Such strangely differing standards of what should be met with indifference and what should be met with offense are by no means confined to the academy, or to those corners of the world only culture vultures still take an interest in, but also define the broader public’s approach to politics.

Thus The New York Times is outraged by the four traffic tickets that Republican presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio has received over the past 20 years, but seemingly indifferent to the four brave Americans who were killed in an American consulate in Libya that failed to receive requested security from Democratic presidential contender and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton following her ill-fated war against Libya. Thus the civil rights establishment is aroused to hash-tagging “black lives matter” and rioting in the streets when a black man is killed by police in even the most justifiable circumstances, yet indifferent to the vastly greater number of black men killed by other black men, and further indifferent when that horrible number inevitably increases after the hash-tagging and rioting inevitably hamper law enforcement efforts in poor black neighborhoods. Thus it is that polite opinion holds the insane profligacy of the Greek government is not only to be tolerated but forever to be subsidized, while a corporation that prefers not to pay its minimum wage employees any more than they produce is considered outrageously greedy. Thus it is that the mass executions of homosexuals in the Islamic world is met with sincere attempts to understand context and generally with indifference, while some Baptist confectioner’s reluctance to bake a gay wedding cake is met with widespread outrage.

A couple of years after Burden’s performance art piece provoked widespread outrage the public was so shocked by executive lawlessness that President Richard Nixon was forced to resign, with the second article of impeachment being that he had dared raise the possibility of using the Internal Revenue Service to harass his political opponents, but these days the president flouts immigration law with powers that even he had previously stated he does not constitutionally possess, and the stories about how the IRS actually did harass his political enemies and then engage in a Nixonian but up-to-date cover-up continue to trickle out, yet it is met with indifference. Perhaps it’s the same process of the public becoming inured to indifference by endless repetition, but that can’t explain why there’s still plenty of outrage left for far less inconsequential matters.

We continue to read about those high-brow culture vulture issues even in this age of art’s irrelevance, and to follow all those silly academic quarrels going on within the “safe spaces” from “micro-aggressions,” even as we recognize that by now they are of far less importance than the first four dead Americans from a failed foreign policy and the overlooked black lives that are taken while the police are under indictment and the eventual global consequences of the profligacy of the Greeks and just about everyone and the horrible fate of homosexuals in the Islamic world and the injustice being done to traditionalist confectioners in the name of homosexual rights, because we think they also matter. A society that can no longer recognize the difference between art and some nihilistic nutcase inviting a friend to shoot him in the arm, or prefers the comforting consensus of contemporary academic opinion to the challenging truths of of Ovid and Mark Twain and The Bible and that vaguely Republican commencement speaker or any of the rest of pre-World War I western civilization, is unlikely to choose wisely about what should be met with indifference and what should be met with outrage.

— Bud Norman