Yet another conservative approaches the (non-liberal) truth, then pulls back

Joseph Puder writing at ChronWatch has a good, direct, unusually hard-hitting article, summing up the meaning of the Islam/West clash. The Muslims, he says, are aiming at global dominance, and, sensing the West’s amazing weakness and paralysis, they are moving in for the kill. But—oh so predictably—Puder in the end utterly fails to confront the very threat he has so cogently laid out:

Europe must wake up and face reality: it cannot buy off the Jihadists. Europe must defeat them or be subjugated by them. If Arab-Muslims wish to live in Europe they must become Europeans. If they do not, Europe may find that it has lost more than its culture.

To call this final paragraph a falling off would be an understatement. Why, given everything Puder has said about the global Islamic jihad, is there the slightest reason to expect that the Muslims will become Europeans? Even more to the point, what if they don’t become Europeans? What do we then? What, after all, does the “war” that Puder is proposing consist of? He certainly hinted at concrete steps that must be taken against our enemies when he wrote: “If Arab-Muslims wish to live in Europe they must become Europeans.” This plainly implies that if the Muslims don’t become Europeans they can’t go on living in Europe. So Puder’s next sentence should have read: “If they do not [become Europeans], the Muslims cannot remain in Europe,” meaning that the Europeans must make the Muslims leave. But that’s not what he wrote. Instead he wrote: “If they do not [become Europeans], Europe may find that it has lost more than its culture.” In other words, if the Muslims don’t become Europeans (and there is no reason to expect that they will), then Europe itself will be defeated, losing its culture, its civilization, its freedoms, its everything.

Puder’s argument could be paraphrased as follows:

“Listen, men of the West, this is really serious. We have got to stop lying to ourselves. We are in a war for our survival. We must defeat our enemy or he will destroy us. And defeating the enemy means … that the enemy must abandon his deepest beliefs and become like us…. And if he doesn’t, well, we will be destroyed. And there’s nothing we can do about that! Onward Western soldiers!”

Thus, despite his truthful, un-PC account of the Islamic menace, Puder in the end remains a liberal (and let us remember that all mainstream conservatives today are basically liberals), still hoping for the successful assimilation of our deadly enemies into our culture, and completely lacking any Plan B if such assimilation does not occur. Until we Westerners pass decisively beyond modern liberalism, beyond the belief in the achievable sameness of all peoples, and beyond the belief that it is wrong to defend ourselves as a people, we will remain helpless before the Islamic jihad

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 25, 2006 03:15 PM | Send