The day's reading

 "... Islamists decide whether violent jihad should be launched against non-Muslims based on a cost-benefit analysis, not on any conviction that killing non-Muslims is immoral."

Shall we have the New York police department refrain from investigating Muslim terrorism because the Obama justice department says that's insensitive? Read it all.

Of Mafiosi and Mullahs - Andrew C. McCarthy - National Review Online

I'll weigh in

"A terrible day," according to Commentary's blog. Tantamount to the arrival of the Visigoths outside Rome, circa 408 A.D., according to the always humorously snarky and depressed Mark Steyn. (They share the classical references, but Steyn is quite unlike the more intellectual, but never humorous and always depressed Victor Davis Hanson.) Both -- all -- are talking about Standard & Poor's downgrading of the United States to a less than triple A rating, for the first time ever.

I'll weigh in. I'll agree that it's not a good piece of news. But it seems to me that reading editorials for a lifetime will teach us that most pundits are wrong about most things. When I was growing up, pundits and wise men yelled and screamed about the environment, pollution, overpopulation, the rise of Brazil and Japan and yes, China, as the world's next superpower. And so on. What they never said Boo about was the rise of Islamic terror, because they didn't see it coming. And it has turned out to be the biggest problem the modern West faces.

Now they yell and scream "Downgrade," and about all the economic woe undergirding it. Agreed. But they are pundits. What is the big picture they are now missing? -- what grave threat will we all face in twenty or thirty years, that no wise man at the moment can see heading our way?

Joy

How many future historians, a hundred, two hundred years from now, will make careers out of studying President Barack Obama? I wonder if he might not turn out to be the most discussed and analyzed person in American history -- or will he, by contrast, be quickly slotted into his proper place? -- a very little man, a freak of collapsing early 21st-century American academia, pet of a whole superclass of citizens, the media, who propelled him into power by ignoring everything he was? Not that the voting public, alas, weren't dreadfully to blame.

This latest episode in his life provides us with the most delicious piece of irony and poetic justice it is possible to conceive. So he authorizes the killing of Osama bin Laden, the archfiend. Good. Congratulations. Yet the Greek-tragedy-and-hubris perfection of it seems beyond human arrangement. Of all things, what should Mr. Obama now be known for, what albatross now hangs around his neck? He who delights in his Muslim background but lacks the gravitas to really espouse any faith except the America-bashing one of his former Chicago church, he who wanted to, say, redesign NASA as a vehicle of outreach to the Muslim world and apologized for Americanness at Cairo and anyplace else that would host him, he who comes from a college world where the United States, the military and the masculine are about equally loathed, he who supported the Ground Zero mosque and wanted to try the 9/11 mastermind as a citizen with full Constitutional rights in a Manhattan courtroom -- and so on, all these noble views of course contingent upon polling data and re-election prospects -- he now has used America's most extraordinary soldiers to kill the most famous America-hating Muslim in the world. It seems he had to do it, literally. His re-election prospects could never have survived any leaked word that he had a chance to do it and passed it by. (Couldn't they?) And when it was over he had to go out and announce it to the world from the White House late on a Sunday night, just as if he were President.

I wonder if it wasn't one of the bitterest moments of his life. No, not because he "killed a fellow Muslim." I repeat, I doubt he has a real faith to speak of. But being impelled to do something because the position of the presidency is larger than himself must have been infuriating. The reason he won't get a "bump" in approval from this is not only because it's still the economy stupid, but because everyone, right or left, knows this one dramatic act is totally out of character for him. The path to it was laid down by other men in other years. Heroism, action, decision making, is the last thing he wants to be around. The order that bin Laden's body must be correctly treated according to Islamic law after being shot up -- now that is in character. And not because by it he was "burying a fellow Muslim." Rather because such a picayune, theatrical command is totally in keeping with our president's emotional background: the provincial professor accustomed to trotting out his special subject, the play-President who likes the job's little powers, the wildly inexperienced adult who wants ownership of a group project but lacks an adult sense of the grotesque. Lacks taste, simply put.

So, yes, congratulations.Good luck living it down among your friends.

Molly hides -- Robert, Hugh, Daniel, and Jonah do not

This is one of those stories of creeping sharia that one had hoped would always have a dateline of the UK or Sweden. Not that that's good, but those places are far away, and so when stories carry datelines like that, one can put aside, for a few moments, the fact of having to face what our ancestors knew.

Our ancestors collectively knew a lot about Islam. Evidence of their experience crops up in the oddest places, in books and documents of earlier times, in our own Marines' hymn of all things. They knew and remembered (and defeated) Muslim armies gathered outside the walls of Vienna. They knew Muslim slave raiders snatching men, women, and children off the coasts of Europe, as far north as Ireland, even in what seems to our astonished eyes the proto-modern world, the mid-17th century, by which time surely people were beginning to be rational. They knew, in Samuel Johnson's casual 18th-century phrase, all about "the Turkic contempt for women." They knew what our own ambassadors, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, were told by the Muslim representative of the Barbary states (today's Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria, and Libya) in London who explained why Muslims enslaved American sailors in the Mediterranean: "that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise." This last is from Adams' and Jefferson's report to the Continental Congress in 1786, and is quoted in Joshua London's Victory in Tripoli. Hence, incidentally, the young United States' fight against the Barbary pirates, and the reference to the "shores of Tripoli" in that hymn.

Our ancestors knew, in short, what we have had the luxury of forgetting for a while and would rather not be confronted with again, that Islam has a core of aggressive, triumphalist malice at its heart which brooks no compromise, but can only be admitted and defeated through the vigorous defense of Western freedom and frankly through battlefield victory where the battlefields are.

Our having to face this is a kind of double shock. Most Americans are believing people. It's a shock to imagine a religion could exist which has malice at its heart, and which is therefore so contrary to what a good God could will; and, childish as it may seem to say so, it's a shock to follow through and contemplate a loving and good God who could allow untold millions of people over centuries to be enslaved to this malice, in their national life, in their homes, in their bodies, in their minds. This is the way a large part of the world is. And its people are commanded by their holy books to export this, through intimidation and violence, to other lands. I am not speaking of the day-to-day aspects of the religion, of any religion, being malicious. What guides kind, decent conduct or enables man to offer praise, thanksgiving, and supplication to God is good. I am speaking of the core of this one religion, to which its purists may always revert:

Islamic sources make clear that engaging in violence against non-Muslims is a central and indispensable principle to Islam. Islam is less a personal faith than a political ideology that exists in a fundamental and permanent state of war with non-Islamic civilizations, cultures, and individuals. The Islamic holy texts outline a social, governmental, and economic system for all mankind. Those cultures and individuals who do not submit to Islamic governance exist in an ipso facto state of rebellion with Allah and must be forcibly brought into submission. The misbegotten term "Islamo-fascism" is wholly redundant: Islam itself is a kind of fascism that achieves its full and proper form only when it assumes the powers of the state. ("Islam 101," Part 3, Conclusion, by Gregory Davis, a web page of Jihad Watch.)

 

So Molly Norris has gone into hiding, as obediently as if her own state had commanded her to -- which apparently, via the advice of the FBI, it has. May we peasants be permitted to know the identities of the American agents who suggested an American citizen do this? -- who admitted to an American citizen living on her own soil that she cannot be protected from the potential punishments meted out for blasphemy by a foreign and anciently violent religious and political civilization?

And why Molly? I want to know why creeping sharia picks off the small fry, while big important fish swim and thrive. Molly is -- or was -- a cartoonist living and drawing in Seattle, who made a simple and funny cartoon last spring as a free-speech response to the South Park episode that apparently did not depict Mohammed in a bear suit, but was censored by Comedy Central as if it did anyway. She drew all sorts of ordinary objects, cups of tea and pasta packages and things, each cheerily saying "I am the real likeness of Mohammed." She framed it as if it were a hortatory poster from a non-existent group, "Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor (CACAH)." Molly very insouciantly hit the nail on the head, at first, when she reasoned that if enough people draw "Mohammed," Muslim jihadists won't be able to kill them all, and death threats like those offered to the creators of South Park -- by two individual ciphers with a laptop, it turned out -- will become "unrealistic."

Fair enough Then her idea went viral. (She enjoyed an audience to begin with, which goes far toward explaining why her cartoon of April 20, 2010 got noticed at all. She worked, or used to, for the "alternative" paper Seattle Weekly.) Major newspapers and well-known bloggers reported on her. Somebody else quickly launched a Facebook page called "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," setting aside this past May 20 as the day for a free-speech and divinity-lampooning extravaganza. The page racked up guests and "Likes," and drawings poured in.

When devout Muslims who know their duty saw it, they, or some few of them, set up protest pages. Molly freaked about not wanting to offend anyone, and essentially about the catastrophic loss of her privacy, which is understandable. She also freaked about having her throat cut, most understandable since we can anticipate Muslims doing so, just as we can now anticipate them blowing themselves up in pizza parlors, beheading journalists, and flying planes into office buildings. Facebook freaked and shut down the "Everybody Draw" page. One man, an American-born imam named Anwar al-Awlaki who used to run a Virginia mosque but is himself now in hiding in Yemen, announced that Molly "should be taken as a prime target of assassination." It will help to remember that, in Islam, Mohammed is the perfect man and the model for all behavior. In small matters, this is why the devoutest men may dye their beards red and marry little girls. In large matters:

The Prophet particularly seems to have disliked the many poets who ridiculed his new religion and his claim to prophethood -- a theme evident today in the violent reactions of Muslims to any perceived mockery of Islam. In taking action against his opponents, "the ideal man" set precedents for all time as to how Muslims should deal with detractors of their religion. ("Islam 101," Jihad Watch, by Gregory Davis, section 1, c., i., The Battle of Badr.)

Five months only after publishing her art, and two months after this holy man in Yemen passed his sentence on her, "Molly," her ex-employer sadly acknowledged, "is no more." Dead? No. Buried alive. She has changed her name, moved, and gone into hiding. I daresay we cannot imagine the nightmare she is now living in, for all she knows, self-created and for the rest of her life.

Still I'm confused as to why Molly should hide. Gregory Davis, who wrote the excellent "Islam 101" summary for JihadWatch which I quote above, to my knowledge is not in hiding. Neither are any of the all-star roster of Western or adoptive-Western scholars and journalists who write and educate us today about things our ancestors knew: Robert Spencer. Hugh Fitzgerald. Daniel Pipes. Andrew McCarthy. Andrew Bostom. Bruce Bawer (who lives in Europe). Mark Steyn. Pamela Geller. Melanie Phillips. Brigitte Gabriel. Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Wafa Sultan. Jonah Goldberg, who wrote as superb and simple a piece on Muslim violence as it is possible to find, just a few days ago ("A convenient excuse," National Review Online, September 17, 2010). A few heavyweights, like Europe's Ba'at Yeor and America's Ibn Warraq, do publish under pseudonyms, but even that nod to danger seems rare. We are blessed with some brave people out there -- though it's still shocking to live (again) in the world where we have to say that.  

So then why would Molly hide, when far more serious and, to jihadists, surely more offensive and targetable people do not? My guess is that it's not so much that Muslim jihadists go after the small fry, or the women. My guess is that it happens to be a jackpot if any one of them operating independently can cow, at a great distance, someone -- anyone -- who was a private citizen but achieved prominence by offending Islam in a free Western country. When people like Molly "go ghost" and "essentially wipe away their identity," it helps create a mental climate in which ordinary citizens hear of this and think that jihadist power anywhere is actually stronger, more startlingly pervasive, and yet more hidden, somehow therefore more routine, than it is.

Not that Muslim jihadist power and aggression in our world isn't already appalling enough. Daniel Pipes writes that although he's "elated" at the public's waking up to the classical triumphalist Muslim insult of the Ground Zero mosque, he had hoped that the public might have woken up a long time ago to jihadist penetration of our security services. (This is why I want to know who in the FBI advised Molly to disappear.) And, just incidentally, have you heard about the Christians arrested for distributing Christian literature outside a Muslim festival in Dearborn, and about the $10,000 reward offered by Detective Sherief Fadly for information on whoever burned a Koran in East Lansing, Michigan? Memo to the Dearborn police and to Detective Fadly: distributing Christian themed pamphlets and burning a copy of the Koran are not against American law, though of course both activities violate sharia.

It happens that the writers above, particularly Andrew McCarthy and Daniel Pipes, pursue a theme among many in their articles which may be apropos to Molly. The theme is that our victory in the war between Islam and the world -- and yes, Islam itself divides the world into the House of Islam (where all is correctly Muslim) and the House of War (polluted by sinners not yet converted, subjugated, or dead) -- depends very much on Westerners being confident and joyous in their inheritance, and aware of and determined to hold to its manifest strengths.

For many educated Westerners, this is emotionally dangerous. It means having to judge other civilizations, judge Islam, and find it very wanting. We don't like doing this, especially the younger of us who have been well trained in Western guilt and a kind of pretty-pretty-princess moral relativism for decades. Creeping sharia succeeds quickest, these men say, where just we well-meaning, gently reared, abashed Westerners have already absorbed instruction in our collective crimes, hypocrisies, vulgarities, and shortcomings, and therefore are ripe for the typical how-dare-you-judge-anyone-else scolding -- from a people whose civilization is far worse and who regard criticism of its religious core as blasphemy. Needless to say, freedom is not their friend, nor do they like its being ours.

Molly, I fear, good soul of the courageous "alternative" paper, is one of those guilt-ridden, sensitive types with no confidence or joy in her civilization. At first she showed an absolutely correct, simple gut understanding of her society's basic virtues, but then inadvertently tested them against an intractable alien claim otherwise. Never having dreamed there could be other worldviews -- though I daresay she could have spouted the correct things about "diversity" at a moment's notice -- she certainly could not react to absolute judgment with a gut level be-damned-to-you judgment of her own. It almost seems that, in her own conscience, she agreed she had to go.

What a mewling little tragedy that she should be the first American to go into hiding out of obedience to sharia. I know it's very easy to say someone else isn't brave enough in a situation that we ourselves are not living through. But did she, this comparative small fry, really get worse or more actionable threats or angrier pronouncements than those heard by Robert Spencer just for a start? His publishers restate them as negative selling point blurbs on the jackets of his books -- "Allah should pull his spine out and beat him with it every day for all eternity," and other official clerical gems. Robert, Daniel, Hugh, and all the others have been working to recapture and publicize our ancestors' knowledge of Islam for years, and are far better known than Molly. Yet in a matter of weeks, she dissociated herself from one drawing, and in a matter of months submitted to sharia in her own land, ostensibly forever. And her liberal, tolerant, speak-truth-to-power friends and colleagues did nothing in her defense. Mark Steyn puts it bluntly: "no one should lose his name, his home, his life, his liberty because ideological thugs are too insecure to take a joke. But Molly Norris is merely the latest squishy liberal to learn that, when the chips are down, your fellow lefties won't be there for you" ("Mollifying Muslims and Muslifying Mollies," Steyn Online, 20 September 2010).

Foolishly or not, I hold out hope for a nice, saccharine American ending to this saga. In three months -- not more, don't forget our collective attention span is not what it should be -- I want to see Molly on the cover of People, pensively and serenely photographed, telling her story of survival and bravery and uplift. Or maybe it would go better in Vogue. They can fit her in amid the fawning interviews with Eric Holder and Timothy Geithner, and perhaps dress her in couture, too. If they dare.

Image from Wikipedia article, "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"

Who are the 29?

Once again, a tiny minority submit to sharia, Islamic law and its inherent triumphalism, on our behalf. Who are the 29 members of New York's "community board 1" who voted to approve plans for a 15- storey mosque practically at the site of the World Trade Center? In an interview with Rush Limbaugh yesterday, Andrew McCarthy says the mosque builders intend to have it built by the tenth anniversary of the attacks.



Image from Standbesideher.com

Do you think this man, rather nattily dressed for a nice late summer day, would approve?

Where is "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day"?

I only learned about yesterday's being "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" on Facebook, just in time for Facebook to shut down the page. Once again, as with South Park, as with Yale University, as with the Metropolitan Museum of Art canceling an exhibit, as with all the newspapers in America that refused to publish "the Danish cartoons" -- once again, our elites capitulate to sharia on our behalf.

Facebook's "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day" page was put up in a burst of enthusiasm by an artist named Molly Norris on April 20 of this year, partly in reaction to Comedy Central's censoring of the South Park episode in which, no, it seems Mohammed was not depicted in a bear suit. A character in a bear suit was referred to as Mohammed. Norris suggested May 20 -- yesterday -- should be the day that everybody draw something similarly idiotically random, like a teacup or a spool of thread, and call it "Mohammed." It was all about the fight for free speech. Her own cartoon, below, is excellent.



Image from wikipedia.

Her idea took off, the Facebook page grew, prominent bloggers and news sources approved of it, anti-"Draw Mohammed" Facebook pages started up and of course gained followers, and she got scared and backed off. Understandable, but very regrettable. Her original thought, a mere month ago, was that if millions of free people do this, Muslim terrorists won't be able to kill every one. Noble and rational -- until you get famous and it occurs to you that they may nevertheless be able to kill you. Also, her intention, which on second thoughts all good Westerners repeat endlessly, was "NEVER" to disrespect religion. The extensive Wikipedia article about her quotes her own website in late April:

"This was always a drawing about rights, never MEANT to disrespect religion. Alas -- if we don't have rights, we will not be able to practice the religion of our choice. [...] None of these little characters ARE the likeness of Mohammed, they are just CLAIMING to be!

"I, the cartoonist, NEVER launched a draw Mohammed day. It is, in this FICTIONAL poster sponsored by this FICTIONAL GROUP," [referring to the 'Citizens Against Citizens Against Humor' wording in the cartoon]. "SATIRE about a CURRENT EVENT, people!!!"

Well, maybe. If she never launched "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," if it was only a one-time phrase in a single cartoon's fantasy world, then why go to Facebook with it?

If the breath of Muslim supremacist terror, the breath of thirteen hundred years of sharia -- which lays down among other things that no, we can't choose our religion, and it is forbidden to criticize Islam -- can reach a lone Seattle cartoonist who was trying to do the right thing by free speech given the fate of people like Theo van Gogh, then we can begin to understand what courage it takes for artists, writers, and politicians to do the right thing who are far more in harm's way. Who are living in Muslim-dominated Europe, for example, and need security guards around them in order to give a classroom lecture on free speech. A Muslim killed Theo van Gogh. Nobody to my knowledge so much as threatened Molly Norris. It was just the idea -- and a very vivid one it is.

Not being a cartoonist, I have no drawing to offer as representing Mohammed. Although, given the point of the joke, any one would do. I'm more interested in literary images. Consider this, from Dante's Inferno, Canto XXVIII, on the Sowers of Discord in the eighth circle of hell:

A wine tun when a stave or cant bar starts
does not split open as wide as one I saw
split from his chin to the mouth with which man farts.

Between his legs all of his red guts hung
with the heart, the lungs, the liver, the gall bladder,
and the shriveled sac that passes shit to the bung.

I stood and stared at him from the stone shelf;
he noticed me and opening his own breast
with both hands cried, "See how I rip myself!

See how Mahomet's mangled and split open!
Ahead of me walks Ali in his tears,
his head cleft from the top-knot to the chin.

And all the other souls that bleed and mourn
along this ditch were sowers of scandal and schism;
as they tore others apart, so are they torn ...."

Translation by John Ciardi, 1954. The poem itself was written in the early 1300s. Seven hundred years before the Danish cartoons, why on earth would Dante have done this? Just a bigot? Or did he know something?

Are you ready to write your congressman about this?

Mark Steyn writes, on National Review online:

Last week, the American Association of Pediatricians noted that certain, ahem, “immigrant communities” were shipping their daughters overseas to undergo “female genital mutilation.” So, in a spirit of multicultural compromise, they decided to amend their previous opposition to the practice: They’re not (for the moment) advocating full-scale clitoridectomies, but they are suggesting federal and state laws be changed to permit them to give a “ritual nick” to young girls.

Allahu akbar.

Longing for death

Let me understand this: as far as Mohammed was concerned, the unbelievers' (specifically, the Jews') love of life is proof that they know their religion is wrong, because if they really believed their faith was correct -- in short, if they were Muslims -- they would want to die and go to paradise. From the Koran, chapter 2:94 and following.

"Say, 'if Allah's Everlasting Mansions are for you alone' " -- and when have Jews ever claimed that? -- " 'then you must long for death, if your claim be true!'

"But they will never long for death, because of what they did; for Allah knows the evil-doers. Indeed, you will find that they love this life more than other men; more than the pagans do. Each one of them would willingly live a thousand years."

On trying terrorist masterminds in New York

Even though I understand it is intuitively grotesque to put "KSM" -- Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, master planner of September 11 -- on trial as a mere criminal in New York, and even though I understand the insult to all of us in granting alien warriors our constitutional rights, and the damage to our intelligence efforts the "bonanza" of required sensitive information from military and intelligence services would prove to do, all of it spilling out as a result of the accused having the right to face his accusers -- granted, a lot of "even thoughs" -- still I think there may be one silver lining in this cloud. (The darkest part of the cloud is that the people who want to bring KSM to trial want to do so for absolutely malicious reasons, I am sure. They, from President Obama on down, want to grotesquely insult the nation and endanger its future, but I daresay we are almost getting used to that. And their guaranteeing that KSM will be convicted and will get the death penalty also, of course, renders the whole thing a show trial, another blow to the very appearance of justice that they pretend to tout. In addition to that, I feel sure they'd be delighted if he were acquitted. We have some utterly brutish little children at the helm of this ship. Are we getting used to it?)

Anyway the silver lining is that in trying Muslim terrorists in a civilian court, we may deny them their ability to define jihad. The smart commentators are saying just the opposite, that it's grotesque for KSM to be given this forum by which to preach and recruit. I wonder.

I think back to the movie Braveheart, in which Mel Gibson plays the medieval Scottish warlord William Wallace. When Wallace, battling back against England's conquest of Scotland, is captured by his English foes, he is brought to London for his execution. The crime he is charged with is treason against the English king. The punishment is hanging, drawing, and quartering.

By no stretch of the imagination could Wallace, morally (at least in the movie) be considered a traitor to his nation's conqueror. To be charged so is a cruel and of course deliberate slur to him and to the truth and the reality of his warfare. If his side had won, things would have turned out very differently and no king would have had the power to tell him he was a rebel. But Wallace dies the death of a convicted traitor: the English crowds watch and move off, and Scotland is still conquered, or at least seems well on its way to being. He has lost. His knowing, and his people's knowing, that he is in the right in some lofty sphere, with God perhaps, does no one any service in the end.

And, outrageous as it is to bring the terrorists of September 11th to Manhattan to be "tried" as if for some extremely serious legal faux pas of which they are still yet presumed innocent, nevertheless it does also treat them as the king of England treated William Wallace. It denies them their ability to define themselves, their ability to say what their actions were about. Considering that their motive was jihad, one of the cornerstones of Islam for 1400 years and something laid down by Mohammed himself (the "perfect man"), our chloroforming that motive in a Western courtroom, our saying instead -- no, this was a crime in our Western sense, may prove to be unintentionally wise.

Revised May 16, 2010

The messianic Left

Now that the health tax bill, Pelosi-care, has passed the House in a Saturday night vote, the commentators, most of them I think genuinely distressed, are falling all over themselves to try to understand what it really means, and to predict what will happen next. They have been doing this since early summer when the fiasco emerged from under its rock -- from Harry Reid's desk drawer, or from the "liberal wet dream" where socialized medicine has always suppurated, Rush Limbaugh says. They are saying: it's a Democrat triumph, or no it isn't. If Queen Pelosi couldn't keep 39 of her minions from bolting and voting against it, then she's got nothing to be proud of. The party is still unraveling. One wise man at National Review Online even opines that now the bill is definitely dead; it will never pass the Senate because they will fear the wrath of the voter, even if the House can safely pretend not to. Wise people who are not that optimistic nonetheless agree the bill still might not pass the Senate, or if it does, then these Democrats will join all the others risking hell for it at the polls next November, and the rollback will begin. The commentators are saying, as they have said and wondered since early summer, do Democrats value being retained in their seats more than they do this bill, or don't they? Are they are so committed to it ideologically that they will vote for a ghastly abstraction they think is noble -- one that will be very hard to undo -- and accept being booted from office, so long as they can feel they have imposed a glorious legacy on us all? Is the left's will to power that intense?

The longer I watch politics, the more convinced I am that all of it boils down to something a professor of mine said many years ago. He said, you can have either freedom or equality, but you can't have both. He was not talking about equality before the law, but rather about the left's version of equality: everything will be somehow "fair" (and, depending on who defines this kind of equality, some pigs will be very much more equal than others). Individual commentators, distressed or not, can keep track of fast-moving events and important people better and faster than I can, which is why Jennifer Rubin and Michelle Malkin have careers doing it and I don't. (It's okay. As Clint Eastwood's Dirty Harry character growls, "A man's got to know his limitations.") But at a time like this, when all our lives and futures have been essentially mortgaged by a few hundred indoctrinated fools in Washington, the professional commentators are no better off than I am. They are essentially saying, please God, there has to be a way in which this is not atrocious news. And there has to be a way for me to figure it out.

You can have either equality or freedom, Professor King said, but not both. It seems to me that all politics in the modern world boils down to two parties, two mindsets, perhaps to those two definitions of human nature which are also not my own discovery nor the Professor's, far from it: that either human nature is perfectible and can be schooled to know "fairness" by expanding knowledge, by expanding thought itself (whose?), or that human nature is everlastingly the same and needs, always, the hard-won guidance and merciful warnings of mankind's collected experience. The left stands on the side of equality, of perfectible human nature, and of schooling the ignorant to move forward bravely into a better future. Conservatives stand on the side of freedom, and of an infinite but healthily embittered respect for human nature, for what it is and what it is not. Hidden somewhere in here is the reason why the left increasingly loves group "rights," like homosexual "marriage," rather than individual rights. Creating new group rights helps create the conditions whereby humanity itself can be redefined, since, no matter what groups he has ever joined, no man has ever himself been a group -- and therefore no accumulated human wisdom can guide that. The door is open to the left, there. For them, there can be no end of fruitful new groups, as fruitful new sources of social experimentation, victimhood, and command. Where the individual resides, as of old, there resides human nature, much less tractable. Full of prejudice. Contrary. Unschooled.

It's hard to know what to call the left now. Perhaps "the left" has stuck because it is the purest term for them, probing directly back to their roots in the French Revolution and of course to their actual place in the debating chamber in Paris. It probes back to their determination to upend and recreate all human living, through violence if need be, to their rushing in to fill themselves the void in orthodox thinking and religious leadership that they created. It's no wonder that they, too, like the priestly hierarchy they displaced, still govern the arts, publishing, and the universities. (I'm indebted to Paul Johnson's Intellectuals for the idea that the modern leftist intellectual has replaced the cleric as self-appointed governor of all.) Jonah Goldberg calls them Liberal Fascists, and it's not a term he made up. It has a history. Some observers, I think, want to call them, more consistently than they have been, "progressives," to indicate their passion for progressing far beyond anything classic liberalism used to advocate. Indeed it's important to remember -- and one of the reasons we need a new word for them is -- that liberals used to espouse good things, things that mankind's collective experience has taught him were indeed very much worth striving for. The end of slavery is the great example.

But now they don't do good things anymore. They have outlived their usefulness. There are no more personal freedoms to get for anybody, unless they want to start doing things like extending the vote to children. As Calvin Coolidge said, “If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions.” At this point, thinking of the absurd health care vote in the House last night, and the narcissistic, malicious, besoured little man in the White House now who is the exemplar of the creed, I would refer to the whole political phenomenon as simply the Messianic Left. These are people who will never tire of surging forward to a new world of glorious abstractions, mostly involving group rights and the state, that they will never have to pay for and that, they seem to trust, will all somehow prove to ennoble, to anoint their memories in the long distant end. They meant well. (That's the complaint Rush Limbaugh often and often voices about them, and about why they are never held to account for failure.) If they've literally got a charismatic messiah to lead them on their way, so much the better. He can even serve as a useful straw-man individual, to ward off criticisms about the creation of an endless new world of endless groups into which the individual man is ordered to fit as best he can.

And I think there is a reason why the messianic left finds it difficult to face and criticize radical Islam. (I turn to thinking of Islam because, brutal though it is to say, I suspect that the jihad at Ft. Hood this week was a godsend for the Democrats. If they were thinking of postponing the vote on the health care bill to Sunday or beyond, I believe it may well have changed their minds. It distracted enough attention from the party's losses in the elections also, and from the very fact of the health care vote coming up at all, to embolden them to carry on and do it.) If ever there were a religious creed that loves Equality, that wants all men to be the same -- all part of a group, as it happens -- it would be Islam. Of course there are many other reasons why the left shies away from this frightening thing. Open minded, perfectible people "don't make value judgments," as another professor of mine once said. Apparently it doesn't matter how much blood flows. But pound for pound and measure for measure, I think the left must at some deep level see in the faith very much the same human monolith that they are. Always surging toward a perfect future, preferably under messianic leadership, in which everyone is alike and everything is fair. And dissent is unthinkable. Dissent brings death.

And finally there's a reason why the messianic left's great enemy will also always be the United States. The founding fathers had the audacity, shall we say? -- to grant to future generations of individuals the right to govern themselves and to make their own decisions in almost all particulars. The soul of the born cleric, aching to plan, to control, to rise above his fellows and help them see the great sunny fields of common justice and joy lying just ahead, revolts in frustration at the idea of his fellows' not obeying him. And suppose behind their refusal lies the right to keep refusing, they and their children forever? The right enshrined in America's founding documents, in the actual Constitution, well thought out by extremely intelligent and educated men? It's a terrible prospect for group-messiahs, who care so much and mean so well, who used to have good and even heroic ideas about individual freedom, and who are accustomed to the fact that for a good couple of centuries now, they have shown they win in the end.



Duane Hanson, Couple with shopping bags (1976). Image from Surrealism & the body

What should you do?

Iran has a president who wants to rain nuclear bombs on Israel because it's filled with Jews, and he's got -- or is very close to getting -- the weaponry needed to do it. We've got a president filling an office which might stand athwart the murderer's ambition, -- but who is himself an academic popinjay and a moral cripple.

I wonder what will happen next?

Can he become heroic, truly -- ironically -- change, truly grow up? Oh, not so as to wade into foreign affairs brandishing a big stick, but simply enough to say, this at least shall not happen on my watch?

And what should you do?

*************

Read more: Dog feces ice cream, by Mark Steyn

Iran's not so secret secret, National Review online

**********

And finally, reprinted from the New York Post:

Excerpts from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi" Netanyahu's address yester day to the United Nations General Assembly:

NEARLY 62 years ago, the United Nations recognized the right of the Jews, an ancient people 3,500 years old, to a state of their own in their ancestral homeland. I stand here today as the prime minister of Israel, the Jewish state, and I speak to you on behalf of my country and my people.

The United Nations was founded after the carnage of World War II and the horrors of the Holocaust. It was charged with preventing the recurrence of such horrendous events. Nothing has undermined that central mission more than the systematic assault on the truth.

Yesterday, the president of Iran stood at this very podium, spewing his latest anti-Semitic rants. Just a few days earlier, he again claimed that the Holocaust is a lie.

LAST month, I went to a villa in a sub urb of Berlin called Wannsee. There, on Jan. 20, 1942, after a hearty meal, senior Nazi officials met and decided how to exterminate the Jewish people. The detailed minutes of that meeting have been preserved by successive German governments.

Here is a copy of those minutes, in which the Nazis issued precise instructions on how to carry out the extermination of the Jews. Is this a lie?

A day before I was in Wannsee, I was given in Berlin the original construction plans for the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp. Those plans are signed by Hitler's deputy, Heinrich Himmler, himself. Here is a copy of the plans for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where one million Jews were murdered. Is this too a lie?

This June, President Obama visited the Buchenwald concentration camp. Did President Obama pay tribute to a lie?

And what of the Auschwitz survivors whose arms still bear the tattooed numbers branded on them by the Nazis? Are those tattoos a lie?

One-third of all Jews perished in the conflagration. Nearly every Jewish family was affected, including my own. My wife's grandparents, her father's two sisters and three brothers, and all the aunts, uncles and cousins were all murdered by the Nazis. Is that also a lie?

YESTERDAY, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this po dium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity, and you brought honor to your countries.

But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?

A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of 6 million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!

Perhaps some of you think that this man and his odious regime threaten only the Jews. You're wrong. History has shown us time and again that what starts with attacks on the Jews eventually ends up engulfing many others.

THIS Iranian regime is fueled by an ex treme fundamentalism that burst onto the world scene three decades ago after lying dormant for centuries. In the past 30 years, this fanaticism has swept the globe with a murderous violence and cold-blooded impartiality in its choice of victims. It has callously slaughtered Moslems and Christians, Jews and Hindus and many others.

Though it is comprised of different offshoots, the adherents of this unforgiving creed seek to return humanity to medieval times. Wherever they can, they impose a backward, regimented society where women, minorities, gays or anyone not deemed to be a true believer is brutally subjugated.

The struggle against this fanaticism does not pit faith against faith nor civilization against civilization. It pits civilization against barbarism, the 21st century against the 9th century, those who sanctify life against those who glorify death.

The primitivism of the 9th century ought to be no match for the progress of the 21st century. The allure of freedom, the power of technology, the reach of communications should surely win the day. Ultimately, the past cannot triumph over the future. And the future offers all nations magnificent bounties of hope.

BUT if the most primitive fanaticism can acquire the most deadly weapons, the march of history could be reversed for a time. And, like the belated victory over the Nazis, the forces of progress and freedom will prevail only after a horrific toll of blood and fortune has been exacted from mankind.

That is why the greatest threat facing the world today is the marriage between religious fanaticism and the weapons of mass destruction.

The most urgent challenge facing this body is to prevent the tyrants of Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons. Are the member states of the United Nations up to that challenge? Will the international community confront a despotism that terrorizes its own people as they bravely stand up for freedom?

Will it take action against the dictators who stole an election in broad daylight and gunned down Iranian protesters who died in the streets choking in their own blood? Will the international community thwart the world's most pernicious sponsors and practitioners of terrorism?

Above all, will the international community stop the terrorist regime of Iran from developing atomic weapons, thereby endangering the peace of the entire world?

The people of Iran are courageously standing up to this regime. People of goodwill around the world stand with them, as do the thousands who have been protesting outside this hall. Will the United Nations stand by their side?

Ladies and Gentlemen, the jury is still out on the United Nations.

WE want peace. I believe such a peace can be achieved. But only if we roll back the forces of terror, led by Iran, that seek to destroy peace, eliminate Israel and overthrow the world order. The question facing the international community is whether it is prepared to confront those forces or accommodate them.

Over 70 years ago, Winston Churchill lamented what he called the "confirmed unteachability of mankind," the unfortunate habit of civilized societies to sleep until danger nearly overtakes them. He bemoaned what he called the "want of foresight, the unwillingness to act when action will be simple and effective, the lack of clear thinking, the confusion of counsel until emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong."

I speak here today in the hope that Churchill's assessment of the "unteachability of mankind" is for once proven wrong. I speak here today in the hope that we can learn from history -- that we can prevent danger in time.

In the spirit of the timeless words spoken to Joshua over 3,000 years ago, let us be strong and of good courage. Let us confront this peril, secure our future and, God willing, forge an enduring peace for generations to come.

NEW YORK POST is a registered trademark of NYP Holdings, Inc.

***************

Winston Churchill ... the man whose statue Barack Obama removed from the Oval Office and gave back to the British ambassador in his first week in office. Not a hopeful sign, but perhaps, perhaps he can still grow up.

Watching Dhimmiwatch

I have been keeping track of the website "DhimmiWatch" for so long that I forget when or how I first found it. Now I have it bookmarked, just as if I were some sort of computer whiz. Consulting it for the latest news on the incremental spread of supremacist Islam has become a part of my morning routine, along with coffee, toast, and getting the kids off to school.

DhimmiWatch is run by Hugh Fitzgerald, vice president of the board of JihadWatch, which sponsors a site of that name, too. These sites are the offspring of several parents, among them the newspaper Human Events ("Reagan’s favorite newspaper" and "home of ‘HillaryWatch’ " as well) and David Horowitz’s Freedom Center. DhimmiWatch and "Jihadwatch" were both founded on the same day, October 28th 2003, and both are under the governance – which is not meant to sound sinister – of Robert Spencer, author of The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, The Truth About Mohammed, Religion of Peace? Why Christianity is and Islam is Not, and many other books. Both sites link not only to Fitzgerald’s and Spencer’s writings but to Gregory
M. Davis’ "Islam 101" and Spencer’s own "Quran blog." Confusingly, Gregory Davis has also written a book titled Religion of Peace? (subtitled Islam’s War Against The World). All three of these men have appeared, I take it, as if out of a trap to do their work.

They do a Herculean job making topics that no one ever used to have to bother about, making news stories that never used to happen, available and at least somewhat digestible. It is all on one theme: Islam, always unique in its insistence on the physical subjugation of all inferior faiths and indeed everything non-Muslim (who knew?), is muscling in on every continent but especially on a bewildered West, especially a bewildered Western Europe. Through massive population increase, through violence and the shrill insistence that failure to accommodate Islam is "intolerance," the fogbanks of imperial Islam are slowly surging in, not only into faraway cultures but into every Western nook and cranny, and beginning to smother all. They are transforming the practice of Western freedom itself, in ways Westerners literally can’t believe is happening. DhimmiWatch accumulates evidence.

It comes from European newspapers and Malaysian church spokesmen and Israeli broadcasters. The news is sometimes of national scope and sometimes concerns personal tragedies, but it is always grim. Parisian "youths" riot, and this time they have big guns. A British bishop complains of "no go" areas in Britain where non-Muslims dare not show their faces, and he receives death threats for saying so. Christians in Gaza, Egypt, and Malaysia are afraid to worship. Muslim teen girls in Canada, Texas , and Britain have been murdered by their fathers for having a boyfriend or not wearing hijab. The archaeological treasure of Persepolis in Iran is to be flooded by a dam built by the mullahs, apparently not so much because Iran needs the dam as because Persepolis is pre-Islamic and therefore worthless. A jihadist will vet delegates to the Democratic National Convention (February 2, 2008). The Archbishop of Canterbury thinks sharia in Britain is unavoidable. Muslims demand separate Muslim-only days at public swimming pools in the United States, so that Muslim women can swim in modesty. Muslim students turn state college "meditation rooms" into mosques where unbelieving students dare not go. A minaret is almost finished building in St. Louis – closer than Canada, closer than Texas – presumably for a muezzin to sound the call to prayer to the large community of Bosnian Muslim immigrants there. The minaret happens to be ten miles from the mosque, Islamic law allows that, so perhaps the call to prayer will have to be amplified through loudspeakers, for all of St. Louis to hear.

This last is not technically wrong. Church bells ring, too. Water towers are tall, which is apparently the argument that won the mayor of St. Louis over when he was applied to for final permission to build the minaret. But it does help create a new world one piece at a time, everywhere and anywhere. A very different world, which is what DhimmiWatch is warning us about.

You can easily get lost in this site for the length of a morning, if not an entire day. The archives alone are huge. And this is not to speak of the scores of links to the side of the page, especially the JihadWatch page. My goodness, but people are worried, and they are blogging away. They collect comments from the same handfuls of readers again and again. Some are real haters, and do not trouble to use capital letters or punctuation marks. Some are obviously decent and aware souls, intelligent and able to phrase things so shrewdly that I wish they held public office, or at least were not completely anonymous. Some, Fitzgerald thinks, are provocateurs seeding the comment board with vulgarity to discredit the whole enterprise. A few of the blogroll links go to
recognizable names like "Little Green Footballs" and "Andrew Bostom," many do not. I had never heard of "Infidels are Cool," "Gates of Vienna," "God Help Britain," or "Northern Virginiastan."

Thanks to all who sent this in is the acknowledgment after many and many a DhimmiWatch alert. Those thanks leave me with the impression that lots of people know what is happening, and are philosophically arming themselves against an onslaught that is of course not launched by every Muslim, but that could be launched by any of them, because the reasons for it are enshrined in a holy creed. Who knew? But no one that I know talks about DhimmiWatch. When I emerge from a morning spent with it, I find to my surprise that the sky is not falling, and that there are new books on the bestseller lists, and new plays in the theaters.

It seems that thoughtful, calm, open-minded liberals, busy with progressive things, are also not too concerned with DhimmiWatch. Searching the word on The Nation’s webpage turns up nothing. Its editors did recently touch, as if with a carefully clean fingertip, a story about David Horowitz’s organizing of the first "Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week" on college campuses last fall. But they disposed of it nicely. Harvard and Princeton would not allow it to take place, of course. Elsewhere, "some student groups felt that subtle, non-confrontational responses would best take the wind from the sails of Islamo Fascism Awareness week." There were interfaith prayers and the handing out of "satirical flyers" (remember, in Manhattan, Woody Allen’s distrust of satire’s effect on guys in shiny boots?). Some young thing, offended by intolerant connections drawn between Islam and violence, questioned Robert Spencer, after a speech, about the violent parts of the Bible.

And as to sources beyond The Nation, neither National Public Radio nor USAToday nor Newsweek nor the New York Times has ever, in the four years of DhimmiWatch’s existence,
apparently had any reason to mention it. The curious thing is that posts to DhimmiWatch often come from reputable (I assume) foreign newspapers, like Britain’s Telegraph and Daily Mail. The editors of the American "msm" – mainstream media, in blogger talk – must have heard of the Telegraph, and must ignore it for a reason.

To avoid mucking about with hate, perhaps. I don’t want to hate, or be taught by sources run on hate. Each blogger only opens one window on his world, his own, and you cannot be sure when was the last time he cleaned it. "God Help Britain" at one time planned to take down her blog, because "Lionheart" had been arrested and she feared for herself. For all I know, "Lionheart" may have been arrested because he robbed a grocery store to support a crystal meth habit. Not being on the spot with them, I lose trust in them when they become desperate, sarcastic, and snide. Even Hugh Fitzgerald, who rides herd on comments that are "off-topic, offensive, slanderous, and annoying," tends to interrupt his posts with editorial comment of the "gee, ya think?" tone, a technique I find ham-fisted and unprofessional. What makes him do it? Rational outrage spurred by witness, or the panic of the blinkered and the obsessed?

Over and over again, these bloggers insist that they are warning all of us and that something must be done. But it is awfully hard to judge what to do, when one’s few Muslim neighbors - and one’s many Muslim doctors, for that matter – have done nothing wrong, nor has one’s own ox been gored. September 11th qualifies as a national goring. But it exemplifies a paradox also, if I may speak so daintily of mass murder. An attack not launched from a nation-state, but from warriors of a religion which has no official spokesmen, still leaves me as yet unassaulted personally by duplicitous demands for tolerance from others in the fold. And, from a distance, it still looks like their demands, when they come, are hard to face down because they are never technically wrong. A commentator who calls himself Alarmed Pig Farmer put it well: "Incrementalism works. Always [operate] a hair’s breadth beneath the Infidels’ threshold for action ..." (May 1, 2007).

Besides, people blogging on other things, food and wine for instance, open different windows. The sky is not necessarily falling on other people’s oxen – so to speak – either. It looks like the vineyards of Europe are still being worked and harvested, even though alcohol would be a problem in a swiftly changing "Eurabia." It looks like the restaurants are still running, and still serving pork cassoulet. To flip through Harper’s Bazaar is to see that Dior and everybody are still putting on fashion shows in Paris and Milan, complete with racily, spectacularly clad young women. If Paris had truly changed, then I would not expect to see that. I would not expect even to see women on the streets for too much longer in bewildered western Europe, except in flowing robes and with a man.

(An aside: to take the specter of Eurabia seriously is to foresee the day when, among other things, that glorious creature, the Frenchwoman, disappears from Western vision. The Frenchwoman, the heroine who loves fashion and wine and millefeuilles, who takes the trouble, with her perfume and her scarves, to make herself deliberately scrumptious as an act of will, must vanish from a new continent where only men, poverty, and Allah matter. What a pity. I wonder if I could prove the fancy that American women buy all those books about French style in an attempt to encode her into ourselves, before it’s too late.)

Not being able to double-check, personally, what the blogs report, I go on reading. I’ve read Bruce Bawer, Ibn Warraq, Andrew Bostom, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Brigitte Gabriel, whose book Because They Hate did bring back memories of, and new information on, the evening news stories from Lebanon of my teen years. Then I look at the authors’ photographs and biographies and I get cynical. Some of these newly minted celebrity authors, descanting on radical Islam, are either distractingly unique types – gay American expatriate translates from all the Scandinavian languages – or glamorous-looking women. I smell marketing. I’m a complacent dhimmi ....

Dhimmi is one of those words I’ve learned from DhimmiWatch. It means the subdued and chastened infidel living on sufferance under Islamic law after Islamic conquest. I’ve also learned the words jahiliyya (pre-Islamic ignorance), shaheed (martyr), and jeziya (the tax paid by dhimmis for being allowed to live under Islam). Many readers probably incorporated jihab, sharia, and burqa into their vocabulary about as long ago as I found the site, and about as unwittingly. I remember when the term chador, for Iranian women’s black robes, was new. When I was in seventh grade, a girl brought a political cartoon into class, showing a floating black chador clothing only an empty skull. I wonder if it would be published now.

From further exploring the books of the marketable expatriates and the glamorous-looking women, I’ve also learned about taqiyya (deceit for the sake of Islam), naksh (the principle of abrogation, that later, often violent verses in the Koran supersede early, pacific ones), and kufur or kaffir (unbelief). Yesterday I came across a new word, shahada, which I will have to look up, and today fitna (the dreadful tumult of pre-Islamic religious pluralism, which must end when Islam conquers). I know, further, that it’s the ninth chapter of the Koran which really wails on unbelievers, and it came after chapter 2 with its oft-quoted "no compulsion in religion" verse, so naksh may apply to that one. Even if naksh didn’t apply, omitting to enforce conversions still allows the imposing of dhimmi status on kaffir until they or their descendants convert "freely," through da’wa (persuasion). So it goes, and see how fluent even a complacent Westerner can become.

I find I am getting tired of DhimmiWatch, or rather, I’d like to be tired of it. It fascinates the way a car wreck does – a commentator from Britain said the same thing about Britain itself recently – but I resent having to be concerned with it. Maybe I want to study the frescoes of Andrea Mantegna instead; maybe I want to blog on food and wine. It occurs to me that, for all the warnings from the bloggers that we must know this and we must do something, having to keep up with DhimmiWatch and all its background information amounts in itself to a kind of dhimmitude. One chapter of the Koran was enough. I’ve got better things to do with my time. "This book is not to be questioned, know believers, the unbeliever shall go to hell," and so on, and hadith and sira should not my problem either. I am a Westerner. I am free.

Read over these previous pages, if you please, and note what they are. What a whine. Note that I am actually breathing a small sigh of relief and reassurance when I find proof that the vineyards of Europe are still being harvested, and fashion shows full of strutting women still being staged in the capitals. Thirty years ago even an essay like this, just something private from me who am nobody, would have been incredible. Has the world changed so completely, or is DhimmiWatch, and the absurd connections to anonymous strangers inherent in the internet, impelling me to see mountains where there are molehills? "They can’t really take over, can they?" my daughter asked at the dinner table one night. "Of course not," I said.

It would be reassuring to think that They cannot take over because Western civilization is too complex and gives too much good to too many people for it to unravel at anyone’s behest. Modern finance, medicine, the internet, are only parts of a whole structure which is at once too vibrant, too fast-moving, and yet too ossified with prosperity, the individual prosperity of millions, for it simply to be crumbled by people who think their way is purer. But, perhaps the ancient Romans thought the same thing when faced with Goths and Vandals – not necessarily Goths and Vandals hammering at the gates, but Goths and Vandals who just wanted tolerance, who just wanted separate and kindly accommodations for their houses of worship, their way of treating women, their worldview DhimmiWatch, the panicky blogs, Ali, Bawer, Gabriel, all say yes they can and they have before. It is commanded them and they enjoy it. Do something.

I am not sure what there is to do, but I do think that the present situation – let’s just call it one in which I who am nobody know more Arabic than I ever would have foreseen necessary thirty years ago – is speedily teaching Westerners what to think. Thirty years ago, the late novelist Walker Percy was much respected as an artist and a seer of contemporary America’s problems. He was concerned with religious emptiness, especially in young people’s lives, and with a smarmy and violent popular culture. In one of his novels he wrote of the disappearance of the concept of sin from American life. People cannot be decent if they do not tolerate the idea that sin can exist, that sin can be done. I suppose in those days we were all fresh from the "I’m OK – you’re OK" decade.

Anyway, I suspect that Percy was on to something. There is a concept missing from American and maybe Western life, but it’s not sin, it’s malice. The possibility of sheer malice existing in another worldview, worse, another religion, is what the rise of radical Islam is teaching Westerners, and this is what we nonplused readers of DhimmiWatch will have to take away from all the anxious posts, until our own ox is gored and we are forced into more than just thinking and wondering what to do.

We can recognize malice peering from an individual ne’er-do-well’s mug shot, of course, or maybe in the idea of invaders from outer space. Of course, we are all schooled to recognize malice in the West, in colonialism and war and so on. Malice in a foreign religion, stemming from the religion’s sacred scripture and its founding personality, is something different. It requires some effort to absorb the idea of a holy man telling his flock that proof of the kaffirs’ contumacy lies in their not loving death – if they truly believed their own idiotic faiths, they would want to die and go to heaven. Wanting to live proves the fear of hell and the guilty acknowledgment that the Muslims are right (chapter 2:94). This book is not to be questioned.

That core of malice also makes old stories and former wisdoms seem strangely current. Charles Martel stopping the Moslems at Tours, 732 A.D., is a sunny but lifeless medieval tableau, until we imagine Martel fighting screaming, green-flagged hordes willing, if they were anything like their descendants now, to cut off women’s genitals to keep them "pure." Did he know? Dante put Mohammed in the eighth circle of the Inferno, Canto XXVIII, among the sowers of religious discord. What did he know? At the turn of the 17th century Shakespeare wrote Othello, and made his hero a Moor whose murder of his innocent wife now looks simply like an honor killing. People say he knew everything. Turkish armies were only beaten back from their assault on Vienna in 1683; Harvard University had already been founded fifty-seven years before. When Gibbon wrote The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire in 1776, he recorded pronouncements that, thanks to DhimmiWatch, are no longer remote: " ‘We require of you,’" said Abu Obeidah to the people of Aelia (Jerusalem), " ‘to testify that there is but one God, and that Mohammed is his apostle. If you refuse this, consent to pay tribute, and be under us forthwith. Otherwise I shall bring men against you who love death better than you do the drinking of wine ...’ " (Modern Library, Volume 3, chapter LI, p. 161). Samuel Johnson mentioned in passing "the Turkic contempt for women." How did he know? Muslim beys were still enslaving Christian sailors, including Americans, because they were infidels and Islam permits slavery, in the early 1800s.
Then, it seems, came a short period of quiescence and colonialism; then oil money and rage; now, jihad. Along with an appreciation for the capacity for malice of another civilization, the current age is also teaching Westerners, or at least it should, that indeed there are objective truths, and in fact some civilizations are better than others, warts and all. Ours is.

And so, what to do? DhimmiWatch and the blogs and the glamorous successful authors all say "do," they all say "know." I want to know how to balance the need to learn DhimmiWatch’s lessons – naksh, taqiyya, jahiliyya, malice – with the need to distinguish eyewitness reality from panic, and the need not to have all my time enslaved to a study habit which chips away at one’s Western-ness anyway. Keeping in mind that most people are not aware of DhimmiWatch at all and that the progressive types wouldn’t dream of touching it with a clean finger, I think the balance is struck when we put on, as a kind of simple interior armor, a few simple attitudes. These are attitudes that have not required to be explained or even though through for a long time now. They should help the individual recognize and act when his ox is finally gored.

One is that free people are not obliged to help create a Muslim environment from a public space. Even that is a negative freedom, notice; Westerners should also know that they have the positive freedom to say and write anything they like about any religion or ideology whatsoever. But our memories are poor, and it has been a long time since we dealt with a malice that treats its own supremacy as a kind of etiquette challenge for the low-born. And that is before it pulls out a gun. But the simple understanding that Muslim practice needs are not the public’s problem should take care of any bleatings for Muslim-women-only days at public swimming pools, or at the gym at Harvard. That is already a done deal, by the way (February 25, 2008). Anyone who quarrels with this simple assessment, even if he mentions the sacred word tolerance, is saying yes they are obliged.....

Another simple attitude, good I think for politicians to adopt and to announce, is that Islam has no right to subjugate non-Muslim populations. Anyone who quarrels with this is saying, oh yes it does.

Beyond remembering and voicing if need be these two simple attitudes, which harm no practicing Muslim except in the realm of his ego, I think the Westerner who cares about civilization’s future is best off returning to the frescoes of Andrea Mantegna, and such like. Hugh Fitzgerald and Robert Spencer agree: "Start with Shakespeare," one of them advised in a recent post. Know the shoulders on which you stand. Know the whole body, even the – well, even the smarmy hedonism that Walker Percy hated, which has its place. I wish we all enjoyed minds too lofty to care what Britney Spears is doing, but a universe of freedom, technology, leisure, and art stand behind her. So does the entire concept of the free and accomplished Western woman. Let’s think before we diss poor Britney.

Predictions for our future run all over the road, from Theodore Dalrymple’s quiet belief that a faith more than one billion strong is actually too weak at its core to endure more than a few generations, to Bernard Lewis’ and Ba’at Yeor’s agreement that Europe will be an utter Eurabia in less than that same time frame, to the desperate bloggers signing off their posts, "Goodbye, Britain" now. I don’t look forward, as if out of sheer spite, to a day when Islam does not exist. I don’t relish the idea of people of another religion being in constant, suicidal pain because the world is not as their holy writings say it should be. Any devout Muslim could point to Western troops in Baghdad and ask whose civilization is slowly being smothered. But I will keep on consulting DhimmiWatch with my morning coffee, because to be a Westerner now is to come back around to an old concern, after a sort of long historic holiday from it. Malice, truth, freedom and slavery are not abstractions. Neither is diversity. As our ancestors knew, some people and some cultures really are as diverse as hell. Depressing – makes one a bit whiny at times – but there it is. It makes for a strange little thrill in driving to my job at a wine shop. I think, wow ... this wouldn’t be allowed, would it. A strange perspective to have, suddenly. Thanks to all who keep sending stuff in.

The End