Why we surrender to Islam

In response to my question why the English have surrendered so completely to Islam, a VFR reader offered several interesting thoughts, among which was this:

The liberals are no different in America. Take a look at our Chief Liberal, Dubya. As soon as 9/11 happened, he was talking about the “religion of peace,” “no backlash,” and so on. He obviously had the same instinctive fears as the Britons. In a “tolerant” society, you cannot get angry at a whole group, no matter what they do. The obsessive desire to define “Islamism” as a tiny subset of Islam is a desperate liberal attempt to avoid “judging” the whole group. That this impulse is found among so many “conservatives” tells us how deeply liberalism has penetrated.

My reply:

You’ve said that one cannot get angry at a whole group because that is a violation of liberalism. This is true, but I think there’s something more elemental at work here than liberalism. The more fundamental answer to the question, “Why do the English recoil from criticizing a whole group?”, is that the group is in England, among them. To criticize Islam as such would be to say that 1.6 million Muslims don’t belong in England. This would not just be an attack on liberal tolerance. It would be tantamount to declaring something like war against an existing population group and thus against English society as it currently exists. Obviously, that’s inconceivable to people, so long as they accept the current society.

Therefore, in order to oppose Islam, one must—as I do—have a firm, unshakable sense that Islam does not belong here. If a person accepts that Islam belongs here, it becomes impossible for him to see the actual evil and threat of Islam because to see those things is to say that Islam doesn’t belong here. And to say that is to stand against one’s existing society. This is the crux of the issue. In order for Westerners to understand the negative truths about Islam and to protect themselves from Islam, they must see that Islam is irreconcilably alien to the West and doesn’t belong in the West. If they don’t see those two things, they must suppress any consciousness of the actual evil and the threatening nature of Islam, because such consciousness would lead them to oppose the very presence of Moslems, which would mean calling for the removal of Moslems including those who are British citizens.

There is no middle course. Either people oppose Islam and seek to suppress it or remove it; or they surrender to Islam (or try to cultivate a “moderate” Islam, which comes to the same thing), and it progressively takes over their country.

The dilemma was created not by liberalism itself, but by immigration. As I wrote in The Path to National Suicide, once non-Europeans were among us in significant numbers, as our “fellow Americans,” we felt we had no choice but to validate and embrace their presence here. This same demographic/psychological dynamic has led to deeper and deeper surrender, in all Western countries that have significant Third-World and especially Moslem populations. The only way to get out of this trap is, first, to reject the liberal ideas that led us to open our borders to the Moslems in the first place; and, second, to affirm that they do not belong here and must leave, starting, at a minimum, with all people who support or sympathize with jihad. Only a total rejection of the Openness Liberalism that led us to permit the Moslems to come here can save us from the consequences of our having let that happen. [July 16, 2005]

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 02, 2005 11:18 AM | Send