Revolution Within the Form

Oswald Spengler wrote in the Decline of the West about the “revolution within the form.”  In such circumstances, things appear to be what they always were.  They have the same names–nations, parliaments, cultures–but their essence is fundamentally changed, like the farce that was the Roman Senate under the Emperors.   Rick Darby of Reflecting Light describes this sad phenomenon brilliantly with regard to the now decadent entity that is Europe:

Old Europe died in 1945. A lot of it was physically destroyed, but buildings can be rebuilt, and in fact some have been re-created exactly as they were before the bombs struck. But Europe’s sense of itself, its individual nationhoods, its links with a past going back to the Roman empire, are gone.

What passes for Europe now is generic and technology-minded, its so-called leaders agreed on only one thing: that its indigenous citizens are cursed with a terrible past best left behind as quickly as possible. The quickest way is population replacement. And the Third World, especially Islamic, is happy to abandon their wretched homelands for Europe’s pleasure garden. But not to abandon the tribalism and belief systems that messed up their states of origin.

The New Europe is to be, officially, anything and nothing. Unofficially, in reality, its future is Islam unless the tide is turned soon.

This indeed is the great swindle of liberalism.  An entire continent exchanges its faith and its ethnic integrity for what? Microwave ovens and the ever-receding goal of forgiveness from the gods of political correctness?  It’s a depressing situation, a crime really, and one where the chief perpetrators will escape punishment.

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Which Way Ireland?

Ireland is about to discover that its life as the archetypal ethostate is incompatible with multiculturalism.  Ireland recently enacted a controversial anti-blasphemy law, which defines blasphemy as “publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defences permitted.”

OR

Ireland always had a blasphemy provision in its Constitution.  Until very recently, this was only presumed to protect Christian beliefs, but the provision was never defined by statute and fell into desuetude.  For murky reasons–perhaps fear of a Dutch cartoon scandal–Ireland recently defined blasphemy broadly in a revision of its defamation laws.  The neutrality of that law is not entirely surprising.  Since 1916, Ireland damaged its ethnic unity through a recent wave of immigration.  Ireland’s new residents, especially Muslims, are infamously touchy on matters religious.  Furthermore, the Irish, as a religious people who long labored under official persecution, are naturally inclined to respect the religious beliefs of others.  Finally, Ireland is under pressure from E.U. overseers to remain neutral and multiculturalist in all things.  This nihilistic crap about “everyone being right” is apparently the new defining ethos of Europe.

This new law will be impossible to apply in practice.  Here is the problem:  what Islam teaches–for example that Jesus is only a prophet–is blasphemy.  Jews teach that Jesus is not the Son of God, nor was He the Messiah; this too is blasphemy.  Muslims and Jews think that my Roman Catholic beliefs are blasphemy as measured against their own beliefs.  In other words, religion itself involves many competing, overlapping, and mutually exclusive claims to the truth, where the core tents of any one religion may reasonably be called blasphemy by another.

When different confessions must exist side by side one another, and one is not clearly the national majority religion, two things must happen.  These religions will cease to be vital defining aspects to those communities and their collective life, or those religions will be in endless conflict with one another.  The relegation of religion to a private matter is one of the hallmarks of the modern age, and it did bring about a certain peace (at the very least from religious wars) in those lands where it was embraced.  But in the process religion has become weak and irrelevant.  The Irish nation, formerly defined in many ways by its militant Catholicism, has apparently lost its way in the fog of liberalism in a way that it never did under Protestant persecution.

While some privileging of Catholicism would be wholly appropriate in Ireland, the liberal treatment of religion with legal silence would be preferable to the multiculturalist’s enforced respect of all religions under the rubric of “blasphemy.” In Ireland, I predict absurdities, such as prosecutions against the “blasphemies” inherent in the core doctrines of the Catholic religion.  Such a gesture will prove the sincerity and fairness of the Irish regime to the Eurocrats in Brussels, the nascent Muslim community, and other good multiculturalists.  A show trial against Catholics will ensure that the real religion of Europe today, that of liberal Indifferentism, will not be offended.

We can only hope such an absurdity, if it comes to past, will rouse the Irish from their slumber so that, once again, they can undertake the work of re-evangelizing Europe starting with their homeland.

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Great Heresies

I received this book by Hilaire Belloc for Christmas and can’t recommend it enough.  Literally every page is packed full of a concise narrative history, insight into the development of Church doctrine and its dicontents, and Belloc imbues the whole story with unusually elegant writing and a real sense of drama.  I believe one of the best ways to understand Catholicism–or anything–is to understand precisely what it is not.  The Church developed most of its doctrines in detail as a response to different heresies.  For example, nearly every line of the Nicene Creed (promulgated at the Council of Nicea) is a response to some heresy or other, i.e., “God from God, Light from Light . . . begotten not made, one in being with the Father” is directed at Arianism, “one holy catholic and apostolic church” is aimed at Gnostics and other schismatics.

Belloc is one of the great turn-of-the-century Catholic writers, along with Ronald Knox and G.K. Chesterton.  Their times were much like our own, because the bacillus of modernism was already present, even if personal decency carried on through some inertia.  Much of what they had to say remains relevant and is, indeed, even more relevant than when it was written.

One of Belloc’s more important insights–especially for a book written in 1938–was that Islam was something of a sleeping giant, because it had clarity of ideas, sincerity, numbers, and only a temporary technological inferiority to the West.  Belloc suggested–quite fantastically given its present circumstances–that the Muslim world presented the most coherent and likely competitor to Western dominance, whether or not the home-grown heresy of Modernism and its arch-manifestation in Communism reduced Catholicism to a small minority sect.

He writes:

These things being so, the recrudescence of Islam, the possibility of that terror under which we lived for centuries reappearing, and of our civilization again fighting for its life against what was its chief enemy for a thousand years, seems fantastic. Who in the Mohammedan world today can manufacture and maintain the complicated instruments of modern war? Where is the political machinery whereby the religion of Islam can play an equal part in the modern world?

I say the suggestion that Islam may re-arise sounds fantastic but this is only because men are always powerfully affected by the immediate past: one might say that they are blinded by it.

Cultures spring from religions; ultimately the vital force which maintains any culture is its philosophy, its attitude toward the universe; the decay of a religion involves the decay of the culture corresponding to it we see that most clearly in the breakdown of Christendom today. The bad work begun at the Reformation is bearing its final fruit in the dissolution of our ancestral doctrines the very structure of our society is dissolving.

In the place of the old Christian enthusiasms of Europe there came, for a time, the enthusiasm for nationality, the religion of patriotism. But self-worship is not enough, and the forces which are making for the destruction of our culture, notably the Jewish Communist propaganda from Moscow, have a likelier future before them than our old-fashioned patriotism.

In Islam there has been no such dissolution of ancestral doctrine or, at any rate, nothing corresponding to the universal break-up of religion in Europe. The whole spiritual strength of Islam is still present in the masses of Syria and Anatolia, of the East Asian mountains, of Arabia, Egypt and North Africa.

While liberals were horrified by 9/11, I don’t believe inherently doubtful liberals have the guts or the certitude needed to counter radical Islam.  Liberals will always buckle when tough choices–such as mass expulsion of corrosive foreign elements–must be made.  Without a Christian revival, Europe is likely lost to Islam, which is conquering Europe through mass immigration, while America has half a chance because the Christian religion is not completely destroyed here.

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Christmas Terrorism

I don’t have much to say about the Nigerian terrorist, other than this is what happens when you let Muslims into Western countries they hate.  It’s like night follows day:  some of them will be terrorists, some will get in touch with al Qaeda, some will be lone wolves, but once in a while, either way, they’ll be effective.  We were lucky here.  But this is not surprising.  It seems to happen every few months.

Now, in response, TSA has freaked out in its usual fashion, not by looking at who is on its planes, but instead promulgating various across-the-board and draconian restrictions on having any items on your lap and taking a crap in the last hour of a flight.  This is a prime example of how the false freedoms of multiculturalism and open borders undermine our traditional freedoms, including the freedom to use a laptop on a flight and not to be practically strip-searched every time you board a plane.

I am surprised the suspect was not a psychiatrist with the transferred post-traumatic stress of his patients!  I’m also surprised that Obama didn’t go out of his way to protect the reputation of the “Religion of Peace,” the way he did with Major Nidal Hasan.  Remember when Obama said we should not “jump to conclusions” in interpreting his “Allah Akbar” initiated shooting spree.  And remember in Cairo, when Obama said, “I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.”  Oh well, even an instinctual leftist like Obama realizes when he’s gone too far and it’s time to beat a hasty retreat.  But when will the country realize we’ve gone too far in indulging the leftist and sentimental fantasy that we can let in Third Worlders, particularly Islamic Third Worlders, and remain a free country?

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Fort Hood Shooting

We’re soon going to have the shooting in Fort Hood reduced to a question of individual psychology.  We’re supposed to conclude that it was the meaningless act of a madman.  Thus understood, it’s random, a senseless tragedy, and a story of a good soldier gone bad.  In fact, this treacherous assault on our servicemen by a traitor in their midst is anything but senseless.  It is perfectly understandable.  It’s non-random.  It’s an act of “meaningful” violence.  And the key to deciphering that meaning is in the name of the shooter:  Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan.

I’ve written about this deficit of analogical reasoning by the media and our politicians regarding Muslim-on-American violence before.  When the patterns involved are permitted to be observed and recognized, this act of treachery should not be the least bit surprising.   It’s natural and regularly occurring and logical considering the utter incompatibility of the soldier’s religious faith and the necessary loyalty of a soldier to a country that will not implement that faith’s aggressive political program.

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An Afghanistan Strategy or an Experiment in Social Engineering?

Andrew McCarthy does a very good job of teasing out the willfully blind assumptions about Islam that permeate General McChrystal’s Afghanistan strategy. While Obama’s push-back on this strategy is likely rooted in crude politial calculation and general weakness, conservatives should not assume the converse: that McChrystal’s nation-building and troop build-up counsel is an effective one. McChrystal’s biggest source of confusion is the same as Bush’s, a confusion about nationalism, Islam, and our capacity for addressing root causes.

McCarthy writes:

When McChrystal is not getting Islam hopelessly wrong, he makes the fatal error of ignoring it — a mistake that has characterized U.S. strategic thinking for at least two decades. Thus he asserts, for example, that “the insurgents have two primary objectives: controlling the Afghan people and breaking the coalition’s will” — as if there were no rationale (besides the unremarkable tyrannical impulse) for “the insurgents” to behave this way. But the Taliban and its allies want to control the Afghan people in order to reinstitute what they see as the purified Islam of Mohammed’s Companions. They are not just “insurgents,” they are jihadists who see themselves as pursuing a divine commandment to impose Allah’s law. In a great many cases, they are doing so in their own country, and with the support and respect of many of their countrymen.

So while McChrystal is correct that a majority of Afghans (especially those who practice more moderate strains of Sufi Islam) rejects the Taliban, a sizable minority sympathizes.

I agree completely, and I would add that the McChrystal/Bush/Surge approach is similar to the liberal, 1960s approach to crime. We were told, “We can’t just arrest criminals and throw them in jail, we have to end poverty first.” How’s that working out?

The mistake in the case of Aghanistan and the War on Poverty is to think that we can’t deal with a problem other than by addressing a root cause, or that it’s always more efficient to address root causes rather than treat symptoms. Sometimes it’s most efficient to treat symptoms and mollify effects, and this is the meaning of such earth-shatteringly simple ideas like locking up criminals to stop crime or wearing a seatbelt to avoid injury in a car wreck.

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Terrorist Arrests

It’s extremely worrisome that only eight years after 9/11, a Jordanian illegal immigrant and a relatively recent Afghan immigrant that looks like this are even in the country.  Equally worrisome is the problem posed by Caucasian, native-born converts to Islam such as the angry ex-prisoner arrested in Illinois.

There is no doubt these are bad people.  In a more self-confident society, they’d be interrogated, tried, and hanged within a month.  But I do wonder if the two arrests involving FBI informants that also functioned as co-conspirators is the best use of FBI resources, as was the case of the Illinois and Dallas arrests.  There are no doubt many hateful, anti-American Muslims within our borders.  But many are lifelong seethers and trash-talkers who lack the resources, brainpower, and discipline to actually harm anyone.  They’re as dangerous as “attempted murderers” who cast spells and poke voodoo dolls.

When the FBI builds and provides a bomb to someone like this, it may be propelling a person that is in practical terms a low threat into a resource-draining inmate.  I may be wrong; the wherewithal and ability of the accused may be higher.  It’s hard to tell from this vantage point.  But one notable facts suggests they were just angry losers:  in both Dallas and Illinois, the conspiracy and the provision of disarmed bombs involved the work of FBI agents and informants.  We also know the FBI and all government agencies are fairly risk adverse.  It’s not clear they would triage potential suspects based on likelihood of success.  Let me be clear that I am only concerned about this as a matter of resource allocation; there is certainly no injustice or standing to complain on the part of the would-be Muslim terrorists themselves.

On the other hand, the New York arrests of Zazi shows a much more worrisome situation, where the accused terrorist was buying bomb-making supplies independently. I am glad that he and his confederates have been found out, before they could maim and kill.  One wonders if we would have drawn lessons from their success.  The El Al Airlines massacre in Los Angeles, the DC Sniper (involving a convert and immigrant), and the shoe bomber plot have all gone down the memory hole, as has the Lackawama Six.   Foiled or failed efforts make little impression.  Even the 9/11 attacks have been converted into a saccharine tragedy and time for national service as opposed to a wake up call that certain bad people believing a certain religion hate out guts.

Have we all been so brainwashed to forget that America was able to have limos driven and food served and other menial jobs perforemd before Muslim immigration began in the last two or three decades.  It’s not like these are essential or particularly valuable residents.  Their continued presence is a sign of national weakness and paralysis brought on by multiculturalist liberalism.  No one thought, for example, that commitment to American values required large scale Japanese and German immigration during World War II.  We knew then that saboteurs and double agents would exist in any such groups and that the risk of disloyalty and danger to national security was simply too high, even if some–perhaps a majority–of those coming would be peace-loving and loyal folks who did not like and did not fit in with the authoritarian regimes they were fleeing.

These arrests all reveal something missing from our strategic approach to terrorism.  We continue to ignore the “formal cause” of Islamic Terrorism which is a belief in Islam.  And recognizing this would make it plain that we need to (a) close our borders to Muslims, (b) remove all Muslims we can legally remove now, such as non-citizens, and (c) limit proselytizing activities of Muslims in American prisons, the military, and anywhere else where these groups can be limited  But it’s simply anathema to the liberalism and the ersatz spirituality of guys like Bush and Obama to consider that the very content of someone else’s religion might be the problem and that the Muslim terrorists might be those who understand and act upon that religion in the most sincere way.

Concerned and looking for answers, I read a lot about Islam after 9/11. Like modern Christianity, it is a varied thing with various viewpoints. But some of those viewpoints are more persuasive, rooted in the text, and made with logical and historical rigor.  I concluded the terrorists and extremists were acting on the basis of an understanding of Islam that rang the most true, that seemed to manifest its historical and textual spirit most sincerely.  All of this is another way of saying that the best Muslims are the worst people, and our only hope for decency among them is the extent to which they disregard or modify their religion’s teachings.

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More Skepticism on Iran’s “Green Revolution”

When I heard the events in Iran were the “Green Revolution,” I was very skeptical. Green is the color of political Islam. It’s the dominant color on the flag of Saudi Arabia and the headbands of Hezzbollah. It’s bad enough these color revolutions are supposed to capture our imagination without occasioning much in the way of inquiry. But a green one in Iran?!?

I’m glad I’m not alone. Abbas Barzegar notes that Ajad probably won the election, and mass demonstrations have been had by both sides. In other words, don’t believe the hype.

Diana West shares my view that Mousavi’s tenure as Iran’ prime minister in the 1980s were not exactly the country’s salad days, particularly from the perspective of the US. I know, I know. It’s democracy! It’s people power! What’s 241 Marines killed in Lebanon when we’re talking about people with faux hawks using Twitter!!! West reports to great effect that in the recent presidential debate in Iran–a first–the supposedly great guy Mousavi faulted Ajad for not executing the British sailors that supposedly drifted into Iranian waters. Be careful what you wish for.

Richard Spencer over at Takimag.com notes that the neoconservatives’ romantic passion for democratic revolution is totally immune to facts and recent events in Iraq among others. It’s a very adolescent and distinctly unconservative impulse that gets carried away by street demonstrations and does not consider what in fact is being sought. Burke’s central and important insight was that change can make things even worse in what is presently a bad regime. Consider the demonic French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, the pointless street violence in France every generation or so. This situation is particularly galling because no matter who wins, this is a stolen election because the Islamic authorities must preapprove parties and candidates to even run in Iran.

The whole event, particularly the credulous western response, is surreal. It’s a sign of the way Bush has corrupted conservatism that so many self-described conservatives now think that democracy in the Third World is the be all end all without regard to the content of the leadership or the nature of their claims to legitimacy. It’s as if we’re getting excited by some election in the Soviet Union as a watersheld, where minor issues of emphasis and personality were the only real objects of debate, and such elections (even if hotly disputed) were effectively meaningless.

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A Tale of Three Murders

When a Kansas abortionist and a Washington DC security guard at the Holocaust Museum were murdered in recent weeks by right-wing wackos–an ardent anti-abortion Missouri “freeman” and a neo-nazi respectively–the cases rightly received extensive news coverage because they were dramatic, unusual, and involve salient social controversies. There is no doubt that in both cases the perpetrators’ extreme, paranoid, and self-certain worldviews had a lot to do with why they did what they did.

It’s also true that other people that hold those views do not commit murder. This proves exactly nothing. Most of the important information in life is probabalistic in nature. There is no doubt that people with strong, uncompromising views of moral and political injustice–particularly when a certain group is viewed as the absolute enemy or absolutely evil–will be more inclined to dramatic political violence. As a consequence, it’s at least not crazy to say that if the rhetoric is extreme enough the government should keep an eye on public source data and monitor committed members of the extremist group.

But another group we are all familiar with that also employs extreme rhetoric. This group has, in fact, murdered thousands in the name of its belief system. It’s fair to describe the group as akin to certain right-wing movements: anti-modern and anti-liberal, combined with a view of violence as proof of commitment.

But this movement is never considered in such terms. It’s, in fact, treated with the utmost respect by the media and various elites. Any criticism of it qua group is treated as unfair stereotyping. In the case of this group, little effort is made to examine the connections of belief to violent action, connections which are patently obvious in the case of anti-abortion extremists and neo-nazi extremists.

At some point a crime by someone who “happens to be ‘X’” becomes “yet another X-motivated crime” or a characteristic crime of “X group” And while there is no bright line when that happens, if the actions in question follows from uncompromising statements about the need for certain kinds of violence by the group’s founders and leaders, we should not engage in back flips to avoid the obvious.

Earlier this week, a US soldier was murdered in broad daylight by someone who considered himself a sincere believer in Islam, following the religious commandment to avenge insults to Muslims and engage in jihad. But you would hardly know this from the national news. They’ve been busy focusing on the much less common domestic, right-wing extremists. And they’ve been avoiding considering the roots of Muslim violence in a widely held interpretation of Islam itself.

Consider the contrast of this lengthy AP wire report about the Arkansas attacks and the much smaller and more anodyne blurb at the NY Times.

Here’s some of what the Times cut out:

Muhammad, 23, said he wanted revenge for claims that American military personnel had desecrated copies of the Quran and killed or raped Muslims. “For this reason, no Muslim, male or female, sane or insane, little, big, small, old can accept or tolerate,” he said.

He said the U.S. military would never treat Christians and their Scriptures in the same manner.

“U.S. soldiers are killing innocent Muslim men and women. We believe that we have to strike back. We believe in eye for an eye. We don’t believe in turning the other cheek,” he said.

Consider what’s implicit in the NY Times’ editing of this wire report. A bunch of agnostics from DC and NY believe they understand Islam better than a guy who spent time in Yemen and changed his name to Abdulhakim Muhammad. The media and various political and academic elites are doing a disservice to our understanding of Islam, and there are implications of that misunderstanding relevant to the war on Islamic terrorism, our immigration policies, and domestic surveillance that should be undertaken of mosques and other Muslim groupings domestically.

The media and other elites buy into the view that our liberal social structure works well with everyone because “people everywhere want the same things,” thus diversity is basically good, and that the Third World and its people are basically victims of the West historically and victims today of “prejudice.” This view runs into conflicts with reality regularly, especially in the case of Islam, whether it is the text of the Koran, atrocities committed in the past and today by Muslims, the anti-modern and totalitarian viewpoint of the most extreme (sincere?) Muslims, and by the relatively strong connections between the content of Islam and the acts of Islamic terrorists.

Now that we have a President talking about Islam being “revealed” on the Arabian peninsula, I don’t see this sorry state of affairs changing any time soon. Failures of analysis and understanding beget failures of imagination about the threats we face as a people.

It’s sometimes objected that these terrorists are not following true Islam. Perhaps. But someone forgot to tell the perpetrators, their leaders, the thousands who cheered the “19 Lions,” and whoever put all that stuff about killing infidels in the Koran.

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Obama the Chameleon

Now that it’s convenient–in this case, the eve of a diplomacy tour to the Middle East–Obama talks far more candidly about his background, his Muslim dad, the Muslim country he was raised in, and his Muslim roots.

I don’t think he’s a secret Muslim, a Manchurian Candidate who will soon institute sharia law. If anything, many of his writings suggest an extremely self-absorbed agnostic. But I do think he has a great deal of sympathy and fellow feeling with Muslims because of his background and friendships (such as his many Pakistani friends from college) and also identifies as a black person with the Third World criticism of America as arrogant and oppressive. This all matters because Obama portrayed himself as American as Apple Pie during the campaign, highlighting his white relatives from Kansas, even though his whole life has been spent in strange locales (Hawaii, Indonesia, Pakistan), in the company of his mom’s strange succession of Third World men and then her eventual abandonment of Barack, and his public life has consisted of a fight for the “oppressed” against America’s traditional elites and traditional institutions.

This all matters because people that don’t obsess about politics and policy tend to vote for people that they think share their values and experiences. His “official” background–ambitious, American, sensitive to the marginalized, by the bootstraps, explicitly Christian, patriotic, even-handed and open-minded–was something many could relate to and about which they could find something to admire. But it deviated greatly from reality and concealed his very exotic past and his Muslim connections in particular.

His criticisms of Guantanamo Bay or the War on Terror take on a very different cast when one must ask if they merely appear to be from a patriotic American concerned about imperial overreach but are in fact expressions of a sense of brotherhood with the groups–seething Muslim extremists and their supporters–most Americans cannot relate to and consider to be the enemy.

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News Media Priorities

Ace puts it well:

At the time of this writing, there are nearly 7,000 references to “George Tiller” in Google News.

There are under 500 for “William Long.”

George Tiller, of course, was the Kansas abortion doctor murdered Sunday morning by a man who allegedly had political and religious motives.

William Long was the 23-year-old military recruiter murdered Monday morning by a man who allegedly had political and religious motives.

George Tiller dedicated his life to killing fetuses.

William Long dedicated his to killing terrorists.

One story still has ‘legs,’ the other is yesterday’s news. Some priorities you’ve got there, MSM.

Someone has already commented on Twitter saying Tiller was a public figure, while the soldier was not. Granted, but how often are US soldiers murdered on US soil by a terror suspect?

This is an inevitable product of the litany of anti-American, anti-Western, supremecist teachings of mainstream Islam. Not everyone reacts the same way to this, just as not every Christian takes his own religion seriously. Some will merely seethe. Some will grumble and offer moral suport. Some will rebel and reject the religion. Some will reject these aspects of the religion. But these teachings are from the religion, not in spite of it. A great number of Muslims have shown their hostility to our way of life, our constitutional government, our military, and our country, including homegrown losers like John Muhammad (the DC Sniper), John Walker Lindh, and now this anti-American “Army of One” in Arkansas.

This should not be dismissed as isolated mental problems or “gangbanger” stuff. Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad had been to college and spent time in Yemen–like John Walker Lindh–and obviously took his religions’ directives for Jihad and death to the Infidels for “polluting” the Dal al Islam very seriously.

The fact that he was being tracked by the FBI is doubly worrying. Obviously there are a finite number of agents and resources. But nothing slowed him down from his mission; nothing in our current laws and investigatie procedures allows the gathering of serious domestic intelligence in mosques and clubs. His emails, phone calls, and the like were not likely monitored.

And for every Abdulhakim Mujahid Muhammad who converts in the U.S. (and can more easily be monitored by friends, family, and authorities, not least because he speaks English), a great number more are allowed in directly as students, “diversity” visa winners, and green card permanent residents.

We are importing trouble and disunity into what was hitherto a 98% Christian country, whose only major internal source of strife and disunity on the eve of the 1965 Immigration Act was the black-white divide. Even there, the common religion of Christianity provided a way out of the woods in the very Christian idioms of the civil rights movement.

Islam is literally a different language with a different set of priorities and values; the only way for us to live in peace with Muslims is to seperate our lives, our cultures, our countries, and deal with each other commercially and at arms length, remembering that the western world’s freedoms should not be a Trojan Horse for those who embrace the “freedom” of submission and sharia. Even pleasant Muslims–and I have known many–if they take their religion seriously will surprise one with their deeply held beliefs about the need for sharia or the role of women. Their affability and basic decency should not deceive anyone about the core meaning of the religion, and the violence that comes when its true believers encounter non-Muslims. So long as we aim not to be a completely Muslim country as a matter of policy, diversity is anything but our strength.

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Kosovo Today…. Who Will Be On the “Chopping Block” Tomorrow?

I love this map.

 

Events far away in Kosovo implicate a very practical question:  Do we want countries and their borders to be up for grabs every time one of their ethnic minority groups resorts to terrorism?  Or do we want, instead, to encourage all nations, even nations that are commited like most will be to remaining an “ethnic state” with a particular majority, to behave justly to all of their people, seeking negotiated solutions where possible?  I think these questions answer themselves.  And the answers matter not just to Europe but to America too, because we are facing the separatist “reconquista” ideology of Mexican radicals coming to the United States.  If Serbia must give up Kosovo, what will Americans say if someday New Mexico or Arizona seek to break off from the United States and become new Hispanic-majority nations aligned with Mexico?

Ethnic and religious minorities are always a bit nervous about their safety and understandably so.  Often the best solution if peace cannot otherwise be found is purposeful separation.  If the recent breakup of Yugoslavia proves anything, it should prove the dangers of multiculturalism and multinational states.  In any ideal world, Yugoslavia would have been dissolved through fair negotiations, population transfers, mutually agreeable drawing up of frontiers, and some form of compensation of displaced people. 

But even if one thought every stateless people–Tamils, Palestinians, Kurds–deserved a nation state, the justification for a new state in Kosovo is nonexistent.  Albania, the nation, is right next door and offers a suitable homeland to any Albanian that wanted to leave Yugoslavia. Because of these contradictions, the U.S. has resorted to saying that its recognition of Kosovo’s independence will not serve as a precedent because it is “unique.”  Unique indeed, because Bush and the Europeans do not want to admit that we have participated in an incredibly dangerous exception to established principles of international law. 

* I can’t say enough about the excellent coverage of the Kosovo Crisis over at Svetlana Novko’s Byzantine Sacred Art Blog, where I found the map above.  A Serbian living in Canada, Svetlana has excellent sources and coverage from Kosovo and the rest of Serbia. 

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