Twenty Years Ago

Twenty years ago something of extreme importance happened – we all know what it was – but to understand it, we must go back to 1989 when Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against Salman Rushdie. I understood this to be a message to the West that said, “We Muslims intend to rule you Westerners.” At the time, I assumed everyone understood this message, but it’s now clear to me that almost no one did. I was puzzled by the lack of demonstrations supporting Rushdie, but I now know that the vast majority of leftists did not get the message (or if they did, they didn’t care).

After 9/11, I thought that the silver lining in that event was that the Muslim question would get settled. That is, most Westerners would finally understand that Muslims weren’t over there someplace with no access to us, but rather they were here and could do a lot of damage and would ultimately try to rule us. Were we in the West going to stick up for the West or not? It became clear fairly quickly that most leftists did not see 9/11 as a follow-up to the fatwa. Instead, they saw it as a justifiable reaction to grievances that Muslims had against Americans for supporting the Palestinians, having troops in Saudi Arabia, and so on. Or else they thought it had nothing to do with Muslims and was instead perpetrated by our own government.

However, I thought that at least those on the right knew what was going on. But more and more this doesn’t seem very likely, either. Just as “truthers” exist on the left, so they exist on the right, too, though with the difference that those on the right who are truthers blame the Jews rather than our own government.

Then there are those who believe that the struggle we are in is limited to the “war on terrorism.” If we can somehow stop the terrorists, then we will be fine. This is wrong. We are in a struggle with Islamic supremacists who are sometimes terrorists, but who, as a result of our misguided elites (both on the right and the left) having let in massive numbers of Muslims, don’t really need terrorism as much as they did twenty years ago. They can simply bide their time and gradually take over by chipping away at Western institutions and sources of power and also by simply outbreeding us. We cannot count on our elites to figure things out and stop this slow takeover of the West, for our elites (at least the leftist variety) are weak and conflicted about Western values. For example, they believe that a culture infused with feminism is superior to those cultures that are not infused with feminism, but at the same time they think it is wrong to think any other culture is inferior to ours. The result is that we cannot count on our elites to understand what is happening to the West, because even if they did, they might say we deserved it.

All I want is for our elites – all of them – to tell Muslims NO. I want them to make it as clear as possible to Muslims that they are not going to take us over. But I have been trying to get through to our elites about this for twenty years, and they stubbornly refuse to see the problem, much less see the necessity of saying no. (And of course, the more time that passes, the harder it will be to say no.) Now recently, the State Department whined that the Taliban’s rulers weren’t diverse. Everyone with sense thought that this was stupid, but maybe it was their way of saying no. They were sticking up with Western values (though not the ones that are the most basic to the West: why not mention freedom of religion?) If so, it was not very effective, eliciting scorn from both the Taliban and many Americans. It reminded me of the scene in some Marx brothers’ movie in which Groucho is being harassed by some thug. He eventually responds, “I’m not the kind of man to make threats, sir, but there’ll be a letter about this in the Times tomorrow morning.” Of course, what is ridiculous and pathetic about Groucho’s threat is that the thug almost certainly doesn’t read the Times, nor is he likely to be dissuaded by anything but force. Likewise, the Taliban, having just outlasted us, are hardly likely to be persuaded to have women as rulers just because we Americans tell them to.

And so we wait for the next terrorist incident, or else for a flood of Muslims coming in and acting as though they own the place. And our elites remain clueless. The strange thing is that so many of our elites will hate being dominated by Muslims. What will feminists gain by having Muslims in charge? In Iran in 1979 when Muslims took over, all female judges were fired, plus many restrictions on women were put in place. Yet, feminists act as though it is Christian conservatives who are the threat. Homosexuals, trannies, and secularists are equally clueless.

Against such stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.

Comments

[Charles N. Steele]

This is a very important post. Unfortunately hardly anyone sees it.

In February 1998 Al Qaeda declared war on the United States. They managed to pull off a remarkably successful attack 3 1/2 years later. The U.S. response *should* have been all out war and annihilation or unconditional surrender of all the Islamists (AQ, Taliban, etc) but instead was a stupid half-fought intervention and twenty year nation building boondoggle. The U.S. has now been defeated in Afghanistan, all the Islamists know they’ve won a great victory, and their declaration of war is still on. This has just started. I have a hard time explaining such points to everyone, except some of my students, who don’t have fixed opinions and are actually trying to learn something.

We now have a senile old puppet as president, and his handlers have no interest in protecting Western Civilization. We are in very dark times.