This comment on Bat Ye’or’s article at FrontPageMag discusses President Eisenhower’s disastrous mistake that drove the Europeans toward a policy of appeasement with the Muslim world.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/GoPostal/commentdetail.asp?ID=6262&commentID=63214

Name: Ronb

Subject: American Action Leads to European-Muslim Axis

I can’t help but observe that America made a fundamental mistake in 1956. That was the time, you may recall, that Nassar, dictator of Egypt, nationalized the Suez canal, which was build by the British. In other words, Nassar stole it.

That was also the year, give or take some, that the maggots of Saudi Arabia nationalized the oil wells which had been developed by American technology, investment, and personnel. In other words, the Muslim thieves stole them. This provided the basis for their fabulous wealth, by which he fat, white-sheeted, princes of the Saudi clan are able to play the double game of U.S. ally and financiers to the subversive Wahabbi intrusions.

In 1956, Britain, France, and Israel collaborated to take back the Suez canal. They sent troops into the region, and the Egyptian army, meant primarily for internal repression, naturally collapsed totally. It was then that Eisenhower, the U.S. president, threatened military action against the invading armies unless they withdrew. This showed the Arab despots that it was safe to nationalize and steal the fruits of American and European investment. It also seemed to show the Europeans that the U.S. would oppose any military attempt to maintain European property rights.

It was after that period that De Gaul engineered the Algerian retreat, and France, Germany, and Britain constructed the European-Muslim axis.

I bring this up as a lesson for us now. I believe this incident shows the consequences of valuing an abstract principle of “self-determination” over actual enlightened self-interest. Imagine how much better we would be if we had retained control over the middle eastern oil wells. The money for funding terror and fanatic Islam would not be available. The citizens of Saudi Arabia would have to perform actual, productive work to survive, rather than counting the money that other people have earned. Most importantly, the west Europeans would not feel impelled to lick the boots of any Muslim in the vicinity.

I fully support the war on Iraq, but it is obvious to me that it will be a total failure if we stop there, and renounce any other military objectives for the area. We should reassert property rights over wells developed through U.S. investment.

Ron

While Ron makes many excellent points, what he says about the American belief in self-determination is key. The belief in national self-determination is a type of liberalism, a simplified, rationalist, universalist formula by which we consider all members of a certain class (in this case, nation-states), as though they were exactly the same and required exactly the same treatment. This view is mistaken on two levels. First, it prevents us from seeing that different nations are really very differently situated and that rights that one country may be able to exercise responsibly may result in disaster if another country claims such rights. Second, this view prevents us from seeing the larger structures that really order the world, such as distinct civilizations and cultures and power interests. So Eisenhower, instead of seeing the world in terms of (say) Western civilization and Moslem civilization, and ordering his policy to the benefit of our own civilization, saw the world in terms of “equal” individual nations claiming their “rights,” and so brought on this historic disaster for the West.

(This comment is also posted at FrontPage.)

I’ve read two of Bat Ye’Or’s books (BTW, her penname is Hebrew for “Daughter of the Nile,” so it’s incorrect to refer to her as Ms. Ye’Or as some journalists have done), and I sympathize with her drive to write very similar essays over and over. I think it’s likely that a century from now historians will look back to our time and see a pattern that we’re too close to to discern clearly, and she’s been doing her best to make us look.

That is, the late twentieth century saw the resumption of the Muslim determination to become the religion and way of life of the whole world, after a “rest” of about 500 years.

We’ve become familiar with the Islamists’ invocation of events that happened in the Middle Ages and find it odd that they take a much longer view when thinking of current events than Westerners do. We’d better get used to it. The first stage of Muslim world conquest was military, and was characterized by wholesale massacres and forced conversions, along with the treaties with defeated peoples (Bat Ye’Or’s scholarly field), who were protected and tolerated so long as they acknowledged the Muslims’ superiority and paid extra taxes, etc. One thing they find so intolerable about Israel is the Jews’ pride and their refusal to step off the curb, so to speak, when a Muslim walks by. This arrogance affronts Allah and his historic design.

Well, military conquest won’t work now, and so the new tactic is immigration. It’s working splendidly in France, Germany, and Belgium (where most babies are, I’ve read, born to Muslim parents). The goal is the same as it was a millennium ago; the tactics have changed to suit changing times.

Why has the infiltration proven far more successful in the aforementioned three countries than it has here? I can’t help thinking that the respective attitudes toward religion, in western Europe and in the United States, have a lot to do with it. We have an armor that they don’t have. Or we’ve had it so far. The multiculturalists are doing their best to erode it.