Is the Muslim Threat Fading?

Until the recent terrorist attack in London (with another possible terrorist attack in The Hague), it may have seemed like the Muslim threat was fading. But now we are back where we started, with yet another obvious terrorist who was treated gently by the authorities who nevertheless went on to kill some people in an attack that was clearly preventable.

So, where do we stand with the Muslim threat? Daniel Pipes in a recent article has claimed that the Islamists are losing power and so are fading. Should we accept this? Let me consider his evidence and respond. He says the following:

Several factors account for this [that is, the fading of Islamism]: a fear of wild-eyed fanatics like Boko Haram, Shabaab, ISIS, and the Taliban; the dismal experience of Muslim peoples who have lived under Islamist rule (e.g., Egypt in 2012-13); and the fracturing of Islamists (e.g., in Syria) into competing and hostile factions. What might come after Islamism is unclear, but after a century of failure with it and other extremist ideologies (including fascism and communism), an era of anti-ideology might lie ahead.

Pipes is focused on the Middle East, but I will be talking about the West. But let me add one point to the list that Pipes gives, which is that clearly the Islamists have met their match with the Chinese. I always suspected that the Chinese just were not going to react like our pathetic elites when dealing with terrorists who want to take over the world, that they were just going to hammer them as hard as they could. And that is exactly what they have been doing. To what extent this has caused any Islamists to rethink their goals and philosophy is unclear.

Anyway, it seems to me that the Muslim threat comes from three sources, one of which (sadly) is our own elites, who persist in believing there is no problem from Muslims and who support the most extreme Muslims over the liberal Muslims. The second source is these various organizations of Islamists, who organize terrorist activities. They represent the threat of a top-down imposition of Islamic law. The third source is a bottom-up threat, that the sheer numbers of rather violent and unenlightened people that our elites have allowed into our realm will cause problems. So, even if the second source is fading, we still have the third, supplemented by the first.

And so we have been hearing these dreadful stories from Sweden of shootings and bombings and rapes, which our elites almost never wish to acknowledge. It’s true that these incidents may be restricted to certain parts of certain cities, and maybe that will always be the case, but why take a chance? Why spoil a reasonably pleasant culture by taking in people who will destroy it?

There is still every reason to fear that the West will be destroyed by Muslim immigrants.

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

Pipes is focused entirely on whether various Islamic militant groups cooperate or compete. But what does that have to do with the fact that the majority of the world’s muslims appear to reject secular Western law based on individual rights and would like to replace it with shariah? Or with the fact that Western leftists appear comfortable with this as a multicultural & anti-colonial measure?