Update 2 – Darcey is hosting Fitna on his own server, and Flea is providing torrent links.
“If you quote the Koran. If you do so in the name of freedom of speech. You will be threatened with death. The press will collude with the enemy.”
When I can figure out how to set it up, I’ll host another here.
Statement from Liveleak on the removal of Fitna
Because “multiculturalism” means “more pavilions at Folkfest”…
In anticipation of this, a number of sources have already saved and rehosted the film, so it won’t be hard to find.
Background info.
Because they just can’t help themselves. – Addressing the European parliament, the Grand Mufti of Syria told his audience that “If there is unrest, bloodshed and violence after the broadcast of the Koran film, Wilders will be responsible.”
A million views at Liveleak already (and nearly two million of the Dutch version) and they’ve issued a statement. Via Hotair – “They’re obviously willing to go to the mat to keep this online.”
Michael van der Galien chronicles the astonishing efforts to stop the film from being seen in the Netherlands. “I disagree with your opinion that Islam is violent, but I will fight to the death to prevent you from inciting them”. Or something like that.
In a nutshell:
The Islamofascists have a “religious memory,” right up to a second ago.
The West has lost its “religious memory,” which puts us in great jeopardy.
To ignore this reality is to ignore a central reason why the West is in the predicament it’s in and why our young people and our so-called “intelligentsia” seem completely incapapble of recognizing the devastation at their doorstep.
How was it that the Islamist Jihadis have been able to advance to not just our gates but are now within them? By an acquiescent and pliant citizenry in Europe–and now in the U.S. (less so) and Canada–without the spiritual weapons with which to resist and, when necessary, fight for our freedoms.
Certainly, it will take wake-up calls like Fitna to shock us awake, and I’m grateful for Geert Wilder for putting the clips together to show us, simply, what’s happening. But Fitna serves only to diagnose and expose the disease.
The cure is something else altogether.
John West, I agree with you. But so many in the West live in Never Never Land: some are my friends. Reality and facts have nothing to do with their perceptions. Discussions threaten friendships and, furthermore, don’t make a dint in their fantasies. On this issue, we seem to be seeing two solitudes: two very different perceptions about the threat of Islam, including the collusion of our liberal elites, and those of us who see a clear and present danger that should be met much more boldly.
There are microcosms of this lefty “flight from reality” all around us. John West writes, “They (the Left including the CBC, CTV, women’s groups, gay groups, the NDP., University students and many others) do this by either speaking out against our side in the terror war or by not speaking out in support of even the Muslim women who are subjugated by Islam and treated as sub humans. This is wrong.”
Yes this is wrong, but Canadian society seems to be embracing the unjust and dangerous model of excusing the bully and abandoning the victim, who is left to fend for themselves. In 2008, this seems to be a systemic problem in this country.
E.g., The subjugation of Muslim women and their treatment as sub humans with no help from those who should know better, reminds me, quite honestly, of the treatment of teachers in Canadian public schools. The abuse, of course, is not as extreme as that of Muslim women, but teacher abuse by certain students and their parents—allowed by the system—is dangerous, demoralizing, and subverts the legitimate authority of both the teacher and the system. Then the cycle of abuse and degradation of both the victims and the perpetrators continues, with many public school classrooms being hell to be in and manage: forget the teaching.
The principle of the bullies getting away with being bullies, with the collusion of the powers that be is the same as the abandonment of Muslim females to their fate: the insubordinate, barbaric behaviour of horrendously socialized students of inadequate, belligerent parents is glossed over all the time. Excuses are made for the student: Behaviour Codes are ignored. Teachers are pretty well in agreement that consequences for unacceptable behaviour simply are not being carried out by those whose job it is to do so. Many teachers have decided to deal with the worst behaviour themselves, as best they can, as a trip to the office usually ends up with administration “making nice to” and excuses for the miscreant. No matter how egregious the behaviour, there is a tacit understanding that the teacher has somehow failed if he/she can’t handle the situation.
Sometimes the teacher needs to get tough—I’ve found that that’s the only way to deal with bully students seriously acting out: they understand and even respect someone who takes them on and doesn’t insult them with the “soft bigotry of low expectations”. On occasion, a complaint about a teacher’s discipline will be made to the office, usually by a belligerent, inadequate parent. It used to be that the focus was on the student’s poor behaviour and administration would back the teacher. The Charter has changed all that: a complaint usually turns administration’s focus on the teacher’s behaviour and, no matter how justified (I’m not talking physical abuse, though just touching a student’s arm is now construed as abuse), teachers find themselves hauled into the office to justify THEIR behaviour.
Being bullied, seeing the bully getting support and treated with kid gloves, while the victim is left to muddle through really wears one down. Given my own experience in a system that actually rewards bully behaviour—the anti-bullying programs are an insult: all perception over substance—I can understand a little bit what the subjugated Muslim girls and women are dealing with. The situation of being abused, with those in control turning a blind eye is humiliating, scary, and, yes, dangerous for the victim. Actually, it’s dangerous for all of us because, as a society, we’re breeding a generation of thugs.
From a post by DJ over at the Shotgun Blog:
Of course totally unaddressed by Wilders is the issue of responsibility for the existence of 50 odd million Muslims in Europe. Why (and who encouraged) the mass migration in the first place?
Kevin MacDonald:
“Political correctness in the West cannot be maintained without constantly ratcheting up the social controls on individual thought and behavior. Western societies will experience increased ethnic conflict. Their governments will increasingly be obliged to enact draconian penalties for deviations from political correctness. And probably also to “correct” ethnic imbalances in social status and political power—much as the Hapsburg and Ottoman empires of old were forced in their declining years to constantly bargain with rising ethnic pressure groups. Democracy, representative government, and freedom will be likely casualties.[…]
The response of the Left has been to entrench a culture of “political correctness” in which expressions of ethnocentrism by Europeans are proscribed. Organizations such as the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Anti-Defamation League seek draconian penalties against such expressions by Europeans—and only Europeans. Many European countries and Canada have savage legal penalties that enforce intellectual conformity on these issues.”
http://www.vdare.com/macdonald/080327_muller.htm
DJ’s “post” is actually a response to the thread “Liveleak pulls Fitna”
Regarding the issue of ‘mass migration’ of Muslims to the West, it is unreasonable to expect and unethical to insist that ‘defined groups’ stay in one spatial zone of the earth. That ignores that we are all a common humanity, a singular species of homo sapiens.
It also ignores that the world doesn’t operate within those far-off ‘closed spatial zones’ anymore. The advent of a global economy, and global electronic information networks has effectively reduced space to….nothing.
With the increase of global population, groups can no longer be socially and economically isolate. The establishment of industrialism, an economic mode that specifically rests on vast spatially distant networked interactions, which sees resources extracted from one site, manufactured in another, consumed in many others – means that isolation of peoples to confined spatial zones is unworkable.
Again, our informational network ignores space. Space simply isn’t a viable variable in the modern world anymore.
Peoples are moving around. The old notion of living in one town all your life..is gone. The modern mode is to even work in multiple cities at one time, to have ‘pads’ in various countries. Or, to do it serially, to move from job site to site, even for the same company.
The situation is, I suggest, as I’ve outlined before. The Islamic world, operating in the 7th century, was brought into the industrial economic world with the two world wars. Its ideology, a social, economic and political tribalism, was entrenched as a religion and therefore, its axioms were closed. This Islamic mode is entirely unsuited to an industrial mode of life – and the Islamic world is struggling with dealing with this problem.
Its first attempts have been to refuse to examine its mode of life. Indeed, Al Qaeda fascism is an attempt to return to the 7th century, to reject both the source and actions of industrialism. This won’t work. The Islamic population is now too large to live ‘the old way’. The US pushed this fight against industrialism back into the ME. That’s where it must be fought – between the tribes – until they realize that the historic era of tribalism is over.
The other tactic is to change the West, to insist that it’s the Western beliefs and behaviour that must change, and the West must adopt Sharia law etc. The fact that the Islamic beliefs and laws are unsuited to an industrial economy hasn’t been examined by these people.
The post WWII West attempted to deal with the immigration influx by multiculturalism, by accepting their ‘different’ beliefs and behaviour. But, this isn’t working. No society can function with a hodge podge of random, non-coherent behaviour. The very notion of ‘society’ is an acceptance of common beliefs/behaviour.
Then, there is the actual ideology itself. Islam is less a religion and primarily a sociopolitical economic mode. A tribal mode. It rejects the individual, rejects reason, rejects freedom. These are all values that the West fought for and won – and cannot abandon. Furthermore, they are a requirement for an industrial economy.
Islam must move into a phase of self-examination. It has set itself up as unable to do so, with its rejection of individualism and reason. However, the West did the same to itself in the medieval period – and fought its way out of that morass.
Therefore, the West has to constantly confront Islamism, insist on criticizing its axioms, insist on examining, debating, reasoning those axioms. Islam cannot continue to prevent examination of its economic and political axioms by calling them a ‘religion’. It has to question, examine and debate its ideology. These actions by the West are exactly what is needed to Break The Wall behind which Islamists are hiding.
Again, confining anyone to a spatial zone, insisting that ‘they’ can’t immigrate is actually similar to the Islamist attempt to live back in the 7th century. We can’t do that. What we must do is to reject a 7th c. mode of life and insist on the primacy of reason, equality, free speech and individualism. That means – examining their axioms as well.
“What the Mohammed cartoons have done is force political correctness to overreach.”
And so it begins
An ex-Muslim cartoonist is authoring the first R-rated cartoon film showing Mohammed and his 9 year old bride according to the Gateway Pundit. The Sugiero blog writes: “Ehsan Jami decided to reject Islam after the 9/11 terror attacks. Since then he has defended the right of religious freedom, with the usual consequences … ”
Jami is in hiding in the Netherlands. Sugiero remarks that Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, who “has written a letter to Indonesia’s largest Muslim organisation, Nahdlatul Ulama (NU) in which he says that the views presented in the anti-Qur’an film of populist leader Geert Wilders do not represent those of the Dutch government” will be writing a lot more letters. Yesterday for Wilders, tomorrow for Jami, and the day after for who knows who?
In an earlier post I predicted that European leaders, “Human Rights” committees and all the assorted enforcers of politically correct speech would eventually be trapped in a whack-a-mole mode. They’ll be busy fighting a cultural counter-insurgency.
If al-Qaeda is smart it will do the unexpected and refrain from issuing any more fatwas; to quit presuming a veto power over Western cultural and political institutions. If Islamic radicals back off, most people will lose interest in these Mohammed parody cartoons, which frankly have a limited market on their own merits and whose attraction is principally that of symbols of resistance. But if groups like al-Qaeda continue with a campaign of intimidation and terror, they will be met with a campaign of blasphemy the likes of which they never imagined possible. And who knows where it goes from there?
But al-Qaeda, though clever, is fundamentally stupid. They are like those brainless thugs who yell their way through a crowd and, finding someone who refuses to give way, believe that by yelling louder they’ll gain passage. A smart thug would know that he’s come upon the Black Swan; that he’s run into trouble and should move around. But fanatics, armed with a presumed divine foreordination, don’t believe in the existence of surprises; they think they know the future from their doctrine and bull on. But they don’t know the real mind of God; they only think they do. Nothing surprises the fanatic more than the belated discovery that he doesn’t know everything.
And so, the Islamic radicals will likely go on assuming that the asymmetrical warfare rules which paralyze governments necessarily paralyze whole populations. They might commit their tame media outlets, hired academics, cowed liberal intellectuals and all their instruments of information control to a campaign aimed at suppressing dissent inside the West. And my guess is that the instruments of political correctness will shatter under the effort of waging a sustained cultural counter-insurgency. They will use up their own jihadi cultural fifth column in futile attacks against never ending targets. Political correctness works when applied in small, gradual steps. What the Mohammed cartoons have done is force political correctness to overreach.
One of the enduring lessons of history is that the worm, tormented long enough, always turns. …-
Read more about the 8 tremor earthquake and the Ace Factor.
http://tinyurl.com/2ekf93 (belmont club)
…-
Sugiero blog:
Thursday, March 27, 2008
Netherlands: Another Islam Critic Movie – Aisha & The Sexually Aroused Muhammad
http://tinyurl.com/2rdubc
ET: “Islam must move into a phase of self-examination.”
That’s certainly the hope, but isn’t it ironic that our Western “intelligentsia” and chattering classes are the ones who seem to be requiring that the West do the self-examination (“if we hadn’t done thus and so, they would never have felt the need to attack us”) and that it’s the West, not Islam, that is examining Islamofascism and finding it particularly wanting?
What will compel Muslims to do the self-examination necessary to adapt to the industrial age in which the world is living today? The Christian West–the majority of Europe until very recently–“constantly confront[ed] Islamism, insist[ed] on criticizing its axioms, insist[ed] on examining, debating, reasoning those axioms,” and, yet, their efforts didn’t seem able to convince Islam that they shouldn’t “continue to prevent examination of its economic and political axioms” or their self-identifying as a religion.
I’m curious as to what you think is self-evident about Islam’s having “to question, examine and debate its ideology.” Islam seems to think that it neither has to do this nor does it have to come out from behind the wall beind which it is hiding.
It seems, rather, to want to defeat the West and stash our reality, our history, our corpses behind their self-protective wall.
Lookout,
Nice post and I agree with you. I happen to know many teachers through my work, and I know what you are talking about. I am no fan of the ed system or the teacher’s union, but I agree that when a real teacher wants to teach and need to get some discipline in the class room and even the hallways which are sometimes horror zones, they are the mercy of the offended student, parents and the principals suck up to the alleged aggrieved.
When I went to school we got slapped across the back of the head and sometimes worse for misbehaving. If we got out of hand we were kicked out and then had to splain to our parents who then would punish us for shaming them.
What an upside down world the Liberals have given us.
I tried to hang on to a few of Lefties whom I was friends with, but as time went on I lost so much respect for them that I could no long be in their company. I know that sounds bad, but these differences are no long small matters. I am much happier socializing with folk who I agree with on most things. There is more mutual respect understanding and freedom to just have fun.
I should mention that whenever I found myself in complete political disagreement with anyone, old friends or acquaintances, I feel disrespect for them, but I feel visceral hatred coming from them toward me. For them it’s more personal because they don’t have arguments for their positions, just great belief and emotional investment … sort of like Islamists.
Late in on the discussion,and this situation has been well discussed here.While the media and some blogs are caught up in Earth Day,and the silly Martin woman,yet another ‘media’ has received death threats, buckles to terrorists, and it goes unnoticed.Almost surreal. I have always sensed the enviro whackiness is a distraction from important issues. This proves my point.
I would only add that the common thread of NDP and Avi Lewis types,CBC and university students as well as so-called progressive-liberals is their hatred for the USA, and that plays so well with the terrorists.
ace commented:
‘The only hopeful part of the video is when a page is being metaphorically “torn” out of the Koran’
I understood that was a page ripped from a telephone directory in England.
Inasmuch as the Christian West–the majority of Europe until very recently–constantly, as ET asserts we must, confront[ed] Islamism, insist[ed] on criticizing its axioms, insist[ed] on examining, debating, reasoning those axioms (from ET’s and my posts above) the Christian West was successful in stemming the tide of Islamist influence in the West.
When, in the last century, the Christian West–which, BTW, was more than able to adapt to industrialism–forsook their spiritual heritage to become the surrender-monkey, Secular, Humanist, Socialist West, we became sitting ducks for the rush of Islamist thought and immigration to the West.
Our red flags did not go up, our instinct for self-preservation did not kick in, because we’d already given up our individual freedoms to the false-security of the “freedoms” (sic) of the collective.
batb- the West hasn’t critiqued Islam. It has instead accepted it without thought within the mantra of multiculturalism. It has only begun to critique it with 9/11, and the bombings in London, Madrid, Bali and elsewhere.
The al Qaeda bombings were a ‘wake’up’ to the West, which realized that a particular ideology was attacking their mode of life: industrialism.
As I said, there are two tactics Islam has developed to deal with its problem – the problem that Islam is not a religion but rather a specific economic, social and political mode of life – and one that is trapped within the 7th c. How do you deal with a lifestyle that is then defined as a sacred religion and thus immune to change? You dig your heels in…and refuse to change. So, Al Qaeda’s agenda has been to return the ME to the 7th c. Pre-industrial. And attack the industrial West.
The non-violent tactic has been to insist that the West transform itself to Islamism. That’s been made easy by the sophistry and ignorance of the leftists of the West, who fall easily into liking Islamism because it fits into their socialist collectivism.
Remember, the socialist left rejects the right of the population to reason, to think; we are all ‘beer and popcorn’ types who must rely on the elite (the academics, the govt bureaucrats) to make all decisions for us. So, the socialist left actually likes the political style of Islamism, because it operates the same way. The individual is denied reason, denied freedom of thought and speech, and must rely on His Betters. That’s pure leftism.
What is happening now, is ..two things. First, in the ME, where the US pushed the violent Al Qaeda strategy back into the ME. And the people there don’t like that violence. Furthermore, they don’t want to live in the medieval 7th c. They want the modern lifestyle. So, they are themselves starting to reject that old mode.
In the West, finally, multicultural relativism is being challenged. It is no longer seen, as kate outlines it, just as ‘more pavilions in a multicultural festival’. It is actually being seen as an active campaign by the Islamists to, not accept our way (ie, to themselves be multicultural) but to deny our rights and way of life and privilege theirs.
Multiculturalism is being challenged in a way that has never occurred before. John Tory, in Ontario, lost an election over it. It’s not something that we are talking about; but we are acting against multiculturalism. Europe, in particular Denmark, the Netherlands and even France, are acting against the Islamist ‘soft take-over’.
And in the Muslim world, more and more Muslims are speaking up, writing articles about the need for reform, speaking up about the need for reform.
You ask – what is ‘self-evident’ that Islam has to reform? The fact that industrialism exists; industrialism requires reason, individualism, dissent, critique. Therefore, not only the Islamic countries but the West have to operate that way.
The fact that the Islamic world has accepted industrialism.
The fact that their population is now too large for a tribal way of life.
These are facts. So, whether the Islamic world likes it or not, it has no choice but to enable a lifestyle that permits its membership to operate in an industrial mode. No choice. They are now part of the global industrial economy. They can’t live in the 7th century.
Of course, it is fighting it; you don’t give up an ideology in the blink of an eye. But, it’s inevitable. Remember, all of this is in the last 50 years or so. It takes time. The changes since 9/11 have been enormous – and we’ll see an escalating proportion of changes in the next few years.
This is precisely the problem. Fitna is being defined as ‘hate’ for openly exhibiting the hate of Islamist imams, fanatical murderous Muslims and Islamic hate literature, disguised as holy texts.
That is irrational and unacceptable:
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon comes out strongly against free expression.
“I condemn, in the strongest terms, the airing of Geert Wilders’ offensively anti-Islamic film. There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence. The right of free expression is not at stake here. I acknowledge the efforts of the Government of the Netherlands to stop the broadcast of this film, and appeal for calm to those understandably offended by it. Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.”
“There is no justification for hate speech or incitement to violence.”
Agreed. So, why are the world courts and the blue helmeted troops not locating these Islamic preachers of hate and locking them up? Why is Islamic hate literature not being examined and declared precisely that?
“and appeal for calm to those understandably offended by it”
Offended by witnessing offensive Islamist behaviour? Offended by Islamists quoting hate straight out of their sacred literature? Offended by murderous Islamist actions? Offended by an aggravated and well managed assault on western freedom, including freedom of speech?
“Freedom must always be accompanied by social responsibility.”
Agreed. As long as we understand that our social responsiblity is to protect our freedom, rather than destroy it.
Ban ki moon’s twisted statement was completely unexamined prior to releasing it. Illogical responses like this are beyond surreal, they are harmful to western freedom and should be condemned.
ET said: “You dig your heels in…and refuse to change.”
Hell yes.
Regarding the issue of ‘mass migration’ of Muslims to the West, it is unreasonable to expect and unethical to insist that ‘defined groups’ stay in one spatial zone of the earth. That ignores that we are all a common humanity, a singular species of homo sapiens.
As a libertarian I could agree with this — but only if the the unethical-immoral welfare state were disassembled. Until that time, this is a bogus argument in the REAL world AS IT IS.
Moreoever, as the West simply does not KNOW how to distinguish between islamists intent on destroying our civilization and immigrants who genuinely want to assimilate into western civilization, and until such time as it learns to do this, this is a bogus argument in the REAL world AS IT IS.
ET: I sometimes use the phrase “street smarts” in my criticism of some of your posts. Here’s an example. Radical suicidal idealism.
So, ET: maybe just get rid of he CA-Mexican border?
No human is illegal?
That’s a hard-left notion designed to destroy western liberal democracy.
Thanks, John, for your comments. Yes, having liberal friends can be very stressful. In fact, I self-censor. As I said, facts, of which I have far more than they seem to–“Ignorance is bliss” seems to work for them–don’t put a dint in their PC armour and also often lead to unpleasantness. So I sustain a number of what I guess must be considered half friendships. I should really assess if that’s worth my while. However, where I live and work–PC CENTRAL–people like me are very few and far between!
Re the Muslims: even if we should be successful at stemming immigration and that culture’s bellicosity, we, in the West, still have our own, untamed barbarians, who are growing, like weeds, right in our midst. Out of the frying pan into the fire? And the lefties, who control virtually all of the institutions in the West, fiddle.
Depressing, I’d say.
I’m simply don’t understand why certain individuals want to throw our doors wide open to mass immigration, particularly from the third world? What’s so inevitable about globalization that the third world has to live on our doorsteps?
“Regarding the issue of ‘mass migration’ of Muslims to the West, it is unreasonable to expect and unethical to insist that ‘defined groups’ stay in one spatial zone of the earth.”
Africa for example can easily feed itself, as can the Middle East and South East Asia. I watched a CBC documentary the other night (starving planet?) where the reporter was being told by Afghanis that Canada needs to send more food aid, then they tossed their free grain sacks over their shoulders and trotted off through their poppy fields.
We do not have to allow the third world to populate our countries, what on earth can they possibly benefit us, cultural enlightenment? Watch National Geographic or get on a plane.
Watch this video to see the stress of mass immigration on American infrastructure, the seminar is older but time has proved its accuracy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n7WJeqxuOfQ
We have done great as western societies and cultures without the third world or Islam, what is wrong with certain individuals who think that is a bad thing, something to be ashamed of? Why would you care to commit yourselves, children and the rest of us to your cultural suicide…because it feels like the right thing to do?
Moreover, ET: There’s a grave inconsistency in your view. On the one hand, you point out — and I agree fully — that we have no obligation to “money launder” the fruits of our successful economic system to the 3rd world thru phony Kyotoism — no moral obligation so “share” our wealth with this 3rd world; but on the other hand, in your post above, you defend your defence of unlimited mass-muslim-migration on ethics grounds.
Makes no sense at all.
Note: Ending mass muslim immigration can be achieved without specifically targeting muslims by getting back to a saner basis for immigration, namely, choosing immigrants on the basis of needed skills — for OUR benefit — and abandoning the rotten notion of “family re-unification”.
A report in France recently has shown that with this kind of immigratiion the costs greatly exceed the revenue, and that the argument that we need this immigration to pay for our elaborate “social safety net” [pensions etc] is bogus for that reason. I believe that our own Fraser Institute has concluded the same about Canada.
We need to get back to the highly moral profit motive — our profit, not theirs.
Just another brick in the wall between the UN and the Western Democracies.
Hate speech is only hate speech when said by White Christians, preferably male and preferably straight.
Strange Deadly Brew
me no dhimmi – Where did I say ‘unlimited mass immigration’? I said immigration.
I’m opposed to some people who insist that ethnic or religious groups should stay isolated from each other, in ‘their own country’. So, we get posters here who say that NO Muslims should be allowed into the West…That is, they reject any immigration.
I certainly don’t want our current ‘Everyone Come and Call Yourself a Refugee and We’ll support you’ type of immigration. I don’t want people coming here and going on welfare – as so many do, and as so many more do in Europe.
I’m all for skilled immigrants, who will learn English, who will work rather than go on welfare, and who acknowledge that they are coming to a country with a particular legal, social and political system, and that they can’t demand any special treatment from our way of life.
ET, you say that “the West hasn’t critiqued Islam.”
I’m no historian, but surely they critiqued it, found it wanting, and actively repelled it from their societies at the time of the Crusades and when Spain sent the Muslim Moores packing.
As far as my limited historical understanding goes, Western Christendom/Europe was constantly vigilant concerning the threat of Muslim infiltration/takeovers of their territories. As I’ve said so many times before, it is essentially BECAUSE of Western Christendom’s shared/common beliefs and values that it was able to discern the danger of Islam to its counties’ mutually beneficial communal way of life.
Since the rise of socialism in, until recently, Christian Europe, common beliefs and values no longer exist. Socialism has divided us into automotons, with competing beliefs and values. That’s the way the socialist overlords want us: weak and vulnerable so they can divide and conquer.
So, this is what the once-strong Christian West has become: an apostate, flabby, fragmented, comfortable, complacent, let-someone-else-do-it assortment of odds and sods as replacements for once commmonly held spiritual beliefs and values, which protected women and children and our mutually beneficial communal way of life. Until recently, until the leftie brigades of political correctness invaded us, there was a consensus about what was worth fighting for. No longer.
Here we have Islamofascists in our midst, desiring our harm, perpetrating violence, death, and destruction and we can’t agree that we need to act decisively to repel this threat.
This is not progress. ‘Seems to me that the Europeans who mounted the Crusades and the Spanish forces that ousted the Muslim Moores from their country were way ahead of us. Who says that “evolution,” “modernity,” and “advancement” are inevitable?
Correction to above post: Muslim Moors
batb – I don’t think the West critiqued the ideology. It didn’t know very much or care about the Islamic ideology. It just, militarily, defended itself against military attacks and economic control by the Islamic countries.
I don’t think that the Crusades were strictly and only against Islam; they were also, I think, due to internal strife in the Church’s control of the population. But that’s another topic.
What is happening now, is that the isolation of Islam from the rest of the world has been broken. It has moved into industrialism, and the size of its population means that it can’t return to a non-industrial mode.
An industrial mode requires a middle class. That means that the Islamic mode of life, which is tribal and doesn’t have a middle class, can’t continue on.
As well, the fact that industrialism as an economic mode is necessarily global (resources from A,D,E, manufacture in B,C, consumption in everywhere)…means that isolationism won’t function anymore. The Islamists have to come to terms with the modern world.
Yes, the leftist strategy of dealing with the migration of people around the world has been wrong. Multiculturalism or relativism is disastrous.
No, ‘ousting the Muslims’ from our or any country won’t solve the problem. The economic mode of our time is a networked globe. We can’t return to an era of several centuries ago where peoples could be, in part, isolated. Furthermore, the informational era that we live in is also global. We can’t undo the internet.
So, we can’t do what the Islamists also want. They want to return to the 7th century. Do you want to return to the 13th? Can’t be done.
The economic mode of industrialism is global. The information mode is global. And.. The world population of 6 billion is too large for isolate nation-states. ‘Progress’ is inevitable; depends in large part on the population size.
So, Islam is going to have to deal with its ideological inability to enable its followers to live and work in the modern world. It’s going to have to transform and reform that ideology.
And we in the West have to insist that we don’t give up our own hard won values.
ET, the problem is–visit any public school, or university, or government office, or . . . and check out the one-size-fits-all, multicultural, socialist mindset–we’ve already, internally “give[n] up our own hard won values”.
bluetech,
I understood the tearing of the phonebook to mean the Koran because the next scene follows up with the phrase: “It is not up to me, but up to Muslims to tear out the hateful verses from the Koran.”
It could have a double-meaning – stopping Islamic immigration.
Thank you for your responses, ET. Although I don’t think we’ll ever totally agree on one another’s take on things, I appreciate your serious grappling with this huge predicament we in the West find ourselves in vis a vis Islamofascism/immigration policies and how to move forward.
I’m not advocating a return to the 13th century or that we oust our North American Muslim immigrants, but I’m with Me No Dhimmi on how we deal with future Muslim immigrants: We need to get “back to a saner basis for immigration, namely, choosing immigrants on the basis of needed skills — for OUR benefit — and abandoning the rotten notion of ‘family re-unification’.”
We need to live, in other words, as though we have enemies and stop saying “peace, peace, where there is no peace.” I’m not saying that you’ve said that, but that that is the tack being taken by the the socialist, multi-culti/diversity/politically correct brigade. The destination of their lay-down mentality is a no-Exit cul-de-sac, which will be very bad for us.
I also agree with lookout’s assessment of our situation vis a vis your notion of our not giving up our own hard-won values: We already have.
Has anyone else been disappointed with the reaction of European leaders? I don’t expect them to get up and applaud, but do they have to be so abject when they try to distance themselves from the message in this film? I know they have a lot of pressure on them to keep peace but could they not manage this with some sort of dignity? I don’t suppose they remember just how successful the policy of appeasement was when they dealt with Nazi madmen. This bothers me a lot.
lookout, batb, ET too (teachers all): Off topic, but dying thread, so presume it’s OK:
Sign on fish tank at my local grocery store, just encountered:
Please do not feed the fish except Eric in Produce.
Damn good chuckle I tell ya; too bad there wasn’t a Wanda in produce, eh?
lookout: Yes, that’s the thing: we’ve already surrendered; you’re in reality, ET’s in her head on this. However, it looks like the CPC is quietly re-engineering immigration with a certain objective which of course must remain unnamed.
rita: My reading is that the European leaders actively want massive muslim immigration and therefore want to suppress any view which might question this. See Bat Ye’or’s Eurabia. She nailed it.
A few months back, Brussels refused to grant a license (!) or a peaceful assembly commemorating 9/11 and violently manhandled protestors, including politicians, who assembled anyway.
Object: A Euro-Med empire to rival the great Satan US. More power. They’re tired of their little provincial backwaters.
MND, not off topic: a parallel. The appeasement of the most barbaric behaviour of our entitled kids and the dhimmi status of those who should be in charge is a microcosm of the situation the West is in with the jihadis. Really.
If we’re willing to allow the barbarians to rule in our schools, why should we be surprised when it happens beyond? I see the problem in both places as synonymous with the gutting of our culture. If we want to be successful in big things, we need to be successful in smaller things. The West is failing on both counts.
Me No Dhimmi, I must really be out of the loop then. Looks like I’d better start doing some more reading. Thanks.
rita: You’re most welcome. Yeah, I read 5 of Bat Ye’or’s books including Eurabia (warning: pretty dry stuff). I found her thesis compelling, but always wondered if there might have been a bit of conspiracy theory in there! Not so, as it turns out. The website Brussels Journal is a good place for monitoring Euro-appeasement of radical Islam. Also dhimmiwatch, and jihadwatch. Also try Melanie Phillips Londonistan and Bruce Bawer’s While Europe Slept.
lookout: Just keep fighting your good fight and try not to let the bastards get you down! (referring to spot of despair I thought I sensed in one of your posts on another thread). This lunacy will pass, maybe during a massive economic downturn when people stop being silly and start worrying about real problems.
Thanks for the encouragement, MND. Hope is a Christian virtue, but sometimes it’s hard!
I hope you’re right.
me no dhimmi and lookout – well, I don’t think that Europe wants massive Muslim immigration. They’ve allowed it to happen over the past few decades and are now stunned by the results of both the immigration and their isolationist multicultural policy.
They are now starting to retrench and reject multiculturalism. Slowly. But it will happen. You can’t have a society operating as a hodge podge of non-compatible beliefs and behaviours. In the beginning, when there was a strong substratum of ‘old Europe’ beliefs/behaviour, the new immigrants could be viewed as ‘more flavour at the folk festival’.
But now that those same immigrants are isolated, unassimilated and insisting that they should live within their old former country’s beliefs – Europe is stunned. They’ll reject the hodge podge. As I said, no society can function as a random collection of non-compatible beliefs.
Lookout’s problems in the classroom and the spineless administration are horrifying. They are direct reflections of the appeasement policies of postmodern child-rearing, where somehow, some inner ‘essence’ of the child was deemed to exist, and this inner essence had to be expressed. The focus wasn’t on learning but on individual and personal expression…without constraints. The pendulum is swinging to the other side, as more and more parents send their children to private schools to get out of the ‘I’ll do whatever I want to do’ freedom of the public schools. Eventually, the public schools will have to change, as they lose students and control.
ET: Well, I certainly agree that they are stunned and that the immigration project did not start out as a willful destruction (guest workers, and all that) of western civilization. And certainly Bat Ye’or doesn’t make that argument either. More like, “Omigod, look what we’ve done … it’s irreversible, so let’s keep a lid on it” + Yankee-envy – neo de Gaullist desire for a competing empire etc. BUT, unless I’m misreading things, I see no signs that Europe is restricting the wrong kinds of immigration. I see no signs that the Imams are being taken off welfare (Anjem Choudary – sp? — is receiving 25K pounds a year in Britain while openly preaching jihad and openly recruiting).
I admire your optimism, which I do share in glimpses from time to time. I’m certainly feeling a tiny bit more optimisitic with the incipient signs of push-back. And I also completely agree with your observation about the pendulum. In fact, in conversations with a very good friend, I sometimes opine that under the surface there often percolates a unseen resistance to elitest lunancy which builds and builds and builds and then explodes, when least expected. As you point out, vis-a-vis outloook’s travails, parents DO gradually get the picture and gradually take rational defensive measures. BTW, a customer of mine — a school principal — once expressed this contemptuous opinion of parents: “They once went to school so they think they’re experts on education”. Needlless to say, I remained mum out of self interest, but I was thinking “well they’re experts on their own kids!”.
ET: One more thing. I wish to take back and apologize for my criticism of your views on Israel/Zionism as “anti-Semitic”. If you’re curious, I came to that sudden conclusion while reading a recent George Jonas piece on the subject in the NP. Frankly, I get extremely emotional on this subject and sometimes go overboard (a couple of very distubring e-mail correspondences with old friends who are true anti-Semites didn’t help).