I read this book because I heard that Weisman was in favor of open borders, and I wanted to know why any sensible person would want such a thing. I’m little the wiser after having read it. He pushes for open borders on p. 33, but doesn’t make much of a case for it, for his interests lie elsewhere (in the rise of the alt-right). He justifies open borders with a small number of historical examples, and that is all. His basic point is that it’s good for Jews. A couple questions that alt-right types ask is, “What about the rest of us?” And, “Does he think the same for Israel?” Probably not, though he doesn’t address this specifically. Many similar questions emerge. Would he have wanted lots of Nazis to be allowed easy access into our country during the 1930s and 1940s? Again, probably not. His belief that open borders are a good thing was not critically examined, and I’ve yet to be convinced. Moreover, given the recent amazing turn in France – see here – in which over 300 French intellectuals sent an open letter to Le Monde demanding that Muslims “obsolete” some passages in the Qur’an, I have to wonder if we are at a turning point in all of this. After all, their letter was sent because of a number of atrocities by Muslims against Jews, which has led lots of Jews simply to leave, either for America or Israel.
Anyway, let me talk about his beliefs on Muslims. To begin with, he appears to believe that the vast majority of Muslims are harmless, which is true enough if one is only worried about out-and-out terrorism. But it’s not just terrorism that’s the problem; it’s the fact that their values clash with ours and that they are willing to use violence to impose theirs on us that is the problem. He ignores all of this, of course, just like all the other elites. He fervently supports the Southern Poverty Law Center, which hates liberal Muslims and ex-Muslims, and CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, even though they are ultra-conservative. I despise both those organizations. He whines that the Gates of Vienna blog is Islamophobic (though in fact it along with JihadWatch is a valuable resource for those of us in the Counter-Jihad). He talks about Syrian children, apparently unaware that most Syrian refugees were definitely not children, although some pretended to be. He mentions the rise of the far right in Europe, but never stops to analyze why it is happening; ditto for the rise of white supremacists here in America. He mentions the Orlando massacre at a gay nightclub, but merely says it was done by someone from ISIS. He never acknowledges that letting in a lot of Muslims might be a big problem for gays in America. He is unaware that younger Muslims in Britain are more likely to favor shari’a than older ones are.
In short, he’s the typical elite with the typical opinions of an elite in this day and age with the typical blind spots.
A snarky response to him, given that he is so worried about likely violence from white supremacists, is to point out that his chances of being murdered by white supremacists are less than that of dying by slipping in his bathtub. After all, that’s what all our elites keep telling us about Islamic terrorism. What’s sauce for the goose, etc.
But let me make four points:
1. On page 219, he observes that Eugene Ionesco “had watched helplessly in the 1930s as, one by one, the university professors, students, and intellectuals around him abandoned logic and took up first the language, then the beliefs of Nazism....” In 1959 he wrote a play, Rhinoceros, that depicted the process. (See here.) Weisman thinks this is a great play to stage these days, but he’s clueless. Are “the university professors, students, and intellectuals” in our society taking up Nazism? Of course not. What they’re taking up instead is something else entirely, namely Islamophilia or what I’ve been calling pre-Islamism. Ionesco’s play describes perfectly what I’ve been seeing among the educated elites in recent years. What Ionesco experienced is exactly what I experienced in the days after 9/11, except that the intellectuals I saw were supporting Islamo-fascists rather than ordinary fascists.
Perhaps this play should be performed at some of our more conservative colleges and universities.
2. Weisman describes the idea that we have let in a lot of people who want to impose shari’a on us as “fantastical.” This is the typical response of our elites. Instead of responding to actual arguments with considered criticisms or counter-arguments, they simply rely on ridicule. I myself have been better at criticizing my own beliefs than our elites have. (I can’t find the post, but I have suggested in the past that maybe the Islamists will terrorize lower-class neighborhoods only and that is all, or that Coolidge was right in thinking that most problems will self-destruct before action is needed). Anyway, my argument that shari’a is in our future is simple. I believe it was Mark Steyn who said that in a short war, bet on those who have the better arms, but in a long war, bet on those with the stronger will. And in our struggle with the shari’aphiles, they have the stronger will. Our elites, by contrast, have no will at all to oppose the imposition of shari’a. In fact, they get terribly upset when the rest of us try to resist. Accordingly, we are on the road to shari’a, and based on current trends should have it imposed on us by the end of this century, if not by 2050.
That, of course, is a projection and not a prediction. Anything might happen to change things. Our elites might finally connect the dots and realize how dangerous it is to let these people in and that we need some drastic counter-measures. But so far, there is very little to suggest that they are close to connecting the dots.
3. A big problem with letting a lot of people in is that it is very hard to expel them once they are here. We’ve expelled the occasional Nazi who somehow managed to slip in after World War II, but those have been rare. (Plus, they were entitled to a trial.) It is very easy for people to get here and just disappear. We’re a big country, and despite the fact that our government seems to have no problem with spying on its citizens, it manages to lose track of lots of people who have come here illegally or have stayed illegally.
Of course, we don’t have to literally expel people. We could make them feel so unwelcome that they would leave on their own. I myself have been surprised at the number of illegals who have headed to Canada, given the very mild disapproval expressed against them in our society. I guess we can thank the left for that! They have so demonized Trump that the illegals think they’d better leave while they can rather than wait for ICE to come and expel them. But to really deal with the problem, we’d need disapproval from nearly all segments of society, and that is not happening soon.
4. Here is an interesting question: what if the horrors of Nazism had been delayed a decade or two? It would have been much harder for dissidents to take a stand against it because without the horrors, one is dealing with abstractions. The result would have been that even more people would have been swept up in the beliefs of Nazism, and it would have been even more difficult to defeat. Assuming it was still defeated even under these conditions, there would have been even fewer people around who even remembered what the pre-Nazi past was like and how one should live a normal life.
A delay in the expected problems is what many of us are dealing with concerning the Islamists. We can see that they are a big problem, but they are not yet such a problem that our elites can see this. It might be another twenty years before the problems are big enough so that even the most die-hard supporter of open borders will be convinced. And so we wait for our elites to connect the dots and hope that they do so before things are well nigh irreversible.
