|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
To TTS and AUSSIE PRIDEReader comment on item: [Brandeis University President Jehuda] Reinharz, Israel and Me Submitted by Homefront (Australia), Feb 17, 2007 at 17:23 Thanks for your affirmation of my remarks. I wholeheartedly agree with your identification of the problem as being a diffusion of will and obfuscation of the matter. In the west there are a number of small political camps each with their own agendas that next to the grand political ambitions of Islam rate as little more than trivialities of regional management. On the one hand you have the open mala fides of the left. To them terrorism is an unnatural phenomenon in the Middle East sponsored and encouraged somehow by western powers or a just reaction to western aggression. If our societies were reformed along the lines they propose in neoMarxist terms then the "root causes" of terrorism would disappear in their little insulated world. This is either willful ignorance or poltical opportunism. In either event the left sees their social reforms as a more important than preserving the integrity of our societies hard won democratic and social freedoms. Some of the more frivolous and amoral amongst the left view Islam's assault with great amusement as the death blow to their great enemies in the Christian church. They do not and dare not turn their attention on their allies in the Islamic world. Perhaps as Ayana Hirisi Ali author of "Infidel" suggests they are trying to trick the Islamic world into becoming liberals. It is interesting to note that she giggles furiously at this proposition and not without cause. To find the cassus belli of Islam's war on the west one need look no further than the Islamic holy book the Qu'Ran which provides endless justification and precedent for the actions of the innumerable popular terrorists of the muslim world both in the Middle East and everywhere else where muslims share a border with nonmuslims. But the left's blood runs from red into black and they enter the realm of the demonically evil when they suggest that yesterdays terrorists are tomorrows heros. Sure they have constructed innumerable public figures of standing amongst undeserving and sometimes outright reprehensible individuals like Yassir Arafat for example. When he recieved the nobel peace prize he was still directing attacks on Palestinean Christians particularly the women being his specific directive to his anti Christian terrorists. And what of other terrorists? Is Carlos the Jackal a hero now? I think not. Those whose careers started in terrorism even self avowed born again peace lovers like Gerry Adams and Nelson Mandela are viewed rather dubiously by those of us with enough sense to look a little more deeply at them. Then we have a "new left" dedicated to philosophical views that belong in some long lost movie in the 1960s. To these people who have had a brush with the minority libertine viewpoints in university (the latter most popularly espoused by the late Milton Friedman) judging people by the characteristics of their group is dehumanising or a strategy dedicated to dehumanising them and should therefore never be done. Perhaps this is true but it is a view that exists in a vacuum gleefully unhindered by political exigencies of the real world. Neo lefties look for cues such as the words "they" or "them" before assailing us with their utopian banality. If we use these words we are unjustly characterising individuals collectively and thus depriving them of their humanity. Then running the full gambit of semantic mischief when allocating their own reactive self hatred they use terms like "we" and "us" to describe western countries specifically - and the west generally - thus violating their own principle when it comes to dealing with ourselves. In the real world political action and mobilisation has this form of dehumanisation as a necessary byproduct. We did not for example distinguish between Nazi and other Germans in the second world war or afford a seperate trial for each and every soldier we captured. Oh and we won that war. To take their views to heart (and many active politicians have out of laziness or perhaps even fear) is to paralyze ones society and render it incapable of defending itself from outside aggression of any kind let alone the present sophisticated multilateral assault of Islam. To the new left no level of knowledge can justify holding an opinion like my own or that of TTS and AUSSIE PRIDE. I have for example a friend who maintains that my ideas are the product of ignorance that I have not worked with a muslim - when he asserted this it was not true and to this day I still work with muslims. Then he said that I had not had a muslim friend when in fact I had had several. His port of last call was that I had not visited an Islamic country. I have neither the need nor the desire to do so and in this present environment would consider such an action to be highly dangerous. I take this issue seriously enough personally to be learning Arabic so I can better facilitate my own arguments and gather material from primary sources. My own views are therefore the product not of ignorance but of careful study. My own geneology on the Portugese side gives me a significant portion of Arab Berber blood making the claim that my anti Islamic views span from racism nonsensical. Hence ridiculous neologisms like "Islamophobia" come into play in order to avoid dealing with the matter at hand. I have a few new more appropriate neologisms I could add to the list like "Islamite" (a portmanteau of "Islam" and "termite") and "multiculturalislam" (to describe the new left wing totalitarianism we are subjected to where criticism of Islam leads to legal sanction and sometimes physically violent reprisals from the Islamic community). To put things in perspective despite superior moblilisation and an outsized importance that the left have obtained through chokeholding public media and the education sector they are still a minority and an unpopular one at that. Though far less maligned the neo conservative resisters like myself face an uphill battle presenting their views to their own camps. Modern western society is not one of political realism or pragmatism but a creature that seeks above all else domestic and material comfort. So much so it even refuses to breed. See Mark Steyn's "America Alone" for the long term political consequences of this demographic trend. The broad based politics of right wing have been focused on as I emphasised above managerial concerns. Money, Jobs and work are after all produced by management rather than solutions. In Australia our present water crisis is a prime example of this phenomenon - which transcends political boundaries and is very closely related to our inability to tackle Islam. In order to challenge a grand all encompassing ideological mission like Islam one needs a similar broad mission or idea. Secular democracy tempered with multiculturalism so as to not threaten the Islamites that we seek to market it to has simply not worked. It has merely given them avenues through which to strike at out society. We need a clear idea of ourselves and our enemy with clearly drawn battle lines. Then we can win. None of this "religion of peace which has been sabotaged" rhetoric will aid us in the long term. We need to mature enough to realise that we are all in the same boat. The ALP must stop seeing the Islamists as enemies of their great enemy (the conservatives) and start seeing them as they are - enemies of all civilised peoples including themselves. From above the west is a panopaly of special interest groups seemingly incapable of recognising any common interest to bridge political divides. The environmentalist camp places blame not unjustifiably on western technology for despoiling the environment without recognising that the resistence to this technology and all possible alternatives are also distinctively western in character. And so the metaphorical baby gets thrown out with the bathwater in this blanket condemnation of the western world and preference for "the other". I have not to this day been able to find a single Islamic environmentalist group of any standing or a muslim environmentalist. What effect then would the inevitable triumph of the Islamites mean for pet causes such as this? As an impediment to empire building the green left would not last long in an Islamic world. The lack of dynamism and general political apathy of the west is pervasive. This renders our political structures Byzantine in character. Huge overarching and inflexible with a dwindling power base. Nature abhors a vacuum and stronger hostile political forces move to take advantage of the dying body politics weakness. To paint a literary picture of our situation it resembles Mervyn Peake's "Gormenghast" trilogy. We are at a point where every part of the western world is like Constantinople before its fall. Constantinople was taken due to the internacine fighting of european christian powers. Now the Islamites are back for the rest. With the west falling into concentric circles of retreat and surrender soon we will realise the values that we supposedly shared with the Islamic world through international multilateral agreements with respect to slavery were in fact impositions of our culture on theirs. So too will religious, racial and sexual equality breathe their last breaths. The bulk of us westerners will be either dhimmis, slaves or forced converts. The consequences of our failure then would be grim for all of humanity and yet failure seems inevitable. We can only hope that after this self imposed collapse when the whole world goes to hell there are enough free westerners left to learn from the experience. Homefront. Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments". << Previous Comment Next Comment >> Reader comments (61) on this item
|
Latest Articles |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
All materials by Daniel Pipes on this site: © 1968-2024 Daniel Pipes. daniel.pipes@gmail.com and @DanielPipes Support Daniel Pipes' work with a tax-deductible donation to the Middle East Forum.Daniel J. Pipes (The MEF is a publicly supported, nonprofit organization under section 501(c)3 of the Internal Revenue Code. Contributions are tax deductible to the full extent allowed by law. Tax-ID 23-774-9796, approved Apr. 27, 1998. For more information, view our IRS letter of determination.) |