Australian columnist realizes moderate Islam is an illusion, but recoils from the implications

An e-mail to Andrew Bolt of the Herald Sun, followed by his reply, my reply, and then my further reflections on the Western liberal paralysis in the face of Islam and what traditionalists need to do about it.

Dear Mr. Bolt,

You have such important insights about the hostile and threatening nature of the Australian Muslim community, especially given the fact that for four years you have been championing the idea of “moderate” Islam. You seem to have undergone an awakening from your previous more accepting and optimistic attitude. You now say that Australia by allowing Muslim immigration was importing enemies. You even approvingly quote this excellent statement by a former Chief Justice of the UK, the late Sir Harry Gibbs, in 2002:

A state is entitled to prevent the immigration of persons whose culture is such that they are unlikely readily to integrate into society, or at least to ensure that persons of that kind do not enter the country in such numbers that they will be likely to form a distinct and alien section of society, with the resulting problems that we have seen in the UK.

Yet after all this, your conclusions come to so little: let’s keep out extremist imams, and have more pride in country. Is that it? What about stopping Muslim immigration generally? You exhaustively showed in your article that “moderate” Islam is a myth and that support for or accommodation to terrorism is intrinsic to the Muslim community. If that’s the case, then Australia must stop Muslim immigration and start sending jihad-supporting Muslims back to their own lands.

Please see my article, “How to Defeat Jihad in America.”

Sincerely,
Lawrence Auster

I got a quick answer from Andrew Bolt:

I think we should try the obvious and less controversial—and that which is consistent with our ideas of ourselves—before we rush to adopt the extremes, Lawrence.

To which I answered:

Dear Mr. Bolt,

The issue is not “extremes” versus “moderate.” The issue is, what is the adequate and necessary response to the problem that you yourself have identified in your column. For you to say to your readers, “I see clearly that we have imported into our country tens of thousands of enemies who intend our destruction,” and then to conclude, “We should deport twenty or thirty of the loudest of the enemy, and leave the rest in place, while we continue to import more of the enemy,” is not only incoherent, it’s profoundly demoralizing. You are telling your readers that there is an enemy present in your country, and you don’t propose doing anything serious about that enemy.

By your own admission, it took you four years plus the response of Australian Muslims to the suicide bombings in London to snap you out of your hopeful liberal view that “moderate” Islam is the answer. How many more bombings and how many more threatening statements from Muslims will it take for you to realize that kicking out a handful of imams doesn’t come remotely close to meeting the problem?

Why do we have to wait for actual disasters to occur before we awaken to the nature of the Muslims? As your column evidences, we already have enough information now to know what they believe and what they intend, to know the threat they represent, and to realize that the only way to protect ourselves from this threat is to REVERSE the catastrophic error—namely the open immigration of Muslims—that brought this threat upon us in the first place. Sooner or later you will come to that view too. I’m asking you not to wait until the problem is much worse, and the cost of solving it much worse, than it is now.

Again, please read my article. Even if you don’t agree with it, you will find in it a logical argument, not an “extremist” argument, about what needs to be done.

Lawrence Auster

The key idea in Bolt’s e-mail is that we must only do “that which is consistent with our idea of ourselves.” What he means, of course, is our liberal idea of ourselves, our self-image as tolerant people who would never exclude anybody because of his different culture or religion. Yet he approvingly quoted a statement that we must do precisely that. So he’s already started to move away from his liberalism, even as he clings to it. As I’ve said so many times, liberalism today faces a threat which it cannot survive, yet to which it cannot adequately respond. Therefore either Western society recognizes that its liberal belief system is wrong and renounces it, or Western society will go down, and its liberalism will go down with it. Either way, liberalism is finished. Our liberal belief in tolerance and inclusion as the highest value of society brought us to this pass. Only our repentance from that belief can deliver us.

Modern liberals are under the impression that the only alternative to liberalism is “fascism,” brutality, and savagery, the end of civilization. As long as they believe that, they will allow themselves to be killed rather than defend themselves; or, under the pressure of unbearable attacks, they will suddenly throw civilization to the winds and react in the brutal, primitive, and stupid manner they currently fear. Their liberalism precludes an intelligent and effective response to the Islamic threat.

Traditional Western people would not have experienced this dilemma. Only modern liberals experience it, because, perverting the spiritual framework that made our civilization possible, they have defined civilization as openness to other men, rather than as openness to God and truth.

Therefore an urgent task of traditionalists is to articulate for modern people a civilized alternative to liberalism, namely the vision of a society that believes in transcendent truth, and believes in itself, and is able to defend itself; a society that honors the liberal values of individualism and freedom, but restrains them within a traditionalist context so that they do not become the ruling values of the society and end up destroying it. If the people of the West continue to think that there is no civilized alternative to liberalism, they—meaning we—are finished.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at July 26, 2005 06:27 PM | Send