Have car, will kill kafirs

Americans again are tasting the fruits of their failure to be sufficiently inclusive of Muslims as 14 pedestrians in San Francisco were mowed down by a Muslim man, Omeed Aziz Popal, who drove around the city hitting as many people as he could.

Reading about an incident like this, you realize that we’ve transitioned into some other reality, we’re living in another world. Yet it is the world that WE created, created through our immigration policies which said that all people in the world are equally worthy to come to America regardless of their background. And we will have to experience all the consequences of that belief until we’ve learned our lesson. But by the time we’ve learned it, our society may have been irretrievably damaged and destroyed.

So three cheers for equality! Three cheers for non-discrimination! Three cheers for our humane and generous society that still refuses to know a single damned thing about Islam!

* * *

Julian writes:

In a just world you would have been the editor of the NYT, or a senior advisor to POTUS. No, in a sane world.

LA replies:

Thank you. But what you said does not indicate some special virtue on my part, but the complete lack of sanity that rules us. How much sanity does it take to know a simple, basic fact about Islam, for example, that Islam requires death to anyone who leaves the faith, and that there is no disagreement among Muslims on this point? This Muslim doctrine has been stated with stunning clarity in a letter to the editor by a Muslim in Lansing, Michigan, and other Muslims have frequently said the same thing, and I have never heard a Muslim contradict it. If we had known just this one thing about Islam, if it had been clearly established in the public mind, would we have allowed the immigration of Muslims into this country? Would we have accepted Bush’s “religion of peace” mantra? Would we have believed that we could make Muslims liberal democrats?

The entire structure of belief that currently rules us with regard to Islam is only possible because of 100 percent total ignorance of even the most rudimentary facts about Islam.

Look at us. We are expending all this energy on the subject, trying to make all these points about Islam, simply because the people who rule us don’t know and refuse to know a single damn thing about it. None of this struggle should be necessary. This problem wasn’t necessary. That’s the irony, and the horror, that the ultimate enabling cause of this civilizational disaster is not some great, powerful, irresistible thing, like the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings, but an absolutely tiny, insignificant thing: ignorance of basic facts that anyone could know and ought to know.

But of course things are not as simple as I’m pretending. It is true that in a sane world, such ignorance would not exist, or, if it did exist, it would be quickly corrected. In a liberal world, the ignorance is mandatory, and cannot be challenged. Based on the fundamental principle of modern liberalism that the more objectionable a minority or non-Western group is, the more we must cover up for it, liberalism requires that we be 100 percent totally ignorant of the most basic facts about Islam.

Julian writes:

There has been another possibility to recognize Muslim reality. Even if one is totally ignorant of Islam, an educated person, particularly a political or military leader, has no excuse for being ignorant of the history of at least the Western civilization. It’s not in vain that Patton found his teacher in Thucydides.

By their actions, even more than by their writings, you shall know them. There is no excuse for BushCheneyRummyCondieFranks, and for our entire elite going back perhaps to the 1920s, not to have studied the savage Moslem incursions into Europe for 1,000 bloody years— from the East and from the West and ending only at the dawn of the 18th century; or the appalling Muslim destruction of the great Indian civilization and their decimation of the Indian people —some call it the most savage story in all history; or the Abbasid rule in Egypt, or the fall of Constantinople and the history of the Ottoman empire—right down to 1919; or the Arabs’ treatment of Christians and Jews in pre-WW2, 20th century Palestine, Transjordan and Egypt; or the Persian Muslims’ savage persecution of the Bahai; or the barbarian tribalism in 20th century Muslim society, so evident in Iraq when Churchill tried to impose some order there post- WWI. [LA note: I would add in particular Iraq’s failed history with a genuinely liberal Constitution—not like the sharia Constitution that we have midwived—in the 1930s.]

There is no excuse for not knowing and publicizing that Muslim slave trade equaled the white man’s evil commerce in numbers, but far exceeded it in the deaths, tortures and mutilations inflicted—well into the mid-20th century, too. There is no excuse for not knowing that the Arabic words for black man and slave are one and the same to this date: abed. And so on.

We are blind and stupid, and are led by shallow, ignorant opportunists. We will pay the price of this folly.

LA replies:

I would put it this way. The problem is not blindness and shallowness. The problem is liberalism. In a sane world, leaders would know about the things you mention. Why? Because those things are important to their civilization. In a liberal world, leaders don’t know about those things. Why? Because those things are not important to liberalism. Liberalism doesn’t care about civilization, it cares about advancing the equality and freedom and satisfaction (the equally free satisfaction) of individuals. Now, the older types of liberalism (say of the Founders, or of FDR) still cared about civilization, because it recognized that equality and freedom were made possible by civilization. But modern liberalism or culturally radical liberalism (of which the father is Rousseau, but which really took off in the Sixties Revolution) sees civilization with its necessary restraints and inequalities as the obstacle to equality and freedom, rather than as the necessary condition of equality and freedom. So modern liberals generally speaking have no interest in civilization and its history, no affection for it, it’s not part of their intellectual framework. The subject is distasteful to them. The only things they really care about are liberal things. They cannot give their interest, their heart to any non-liberal thing, such as, say, the history of Christendom defending itself from Islam.

However, on the subject of Islam, it’s more complicated than that. Look up Ibn Warraq’s Why I am not a Muslim. In the first chapter of that book, he goes through various European apologists for Islam starting in the 16th century. The history of romanticizing Islam as a tolerant, romantic civilization goes back that far. It didn’t start with Jewish apologists for Islam in the 19th century, who used the image of tolerant Islam as a foil against anti-Jewish European Christendom, and were doing so when the Muslim invasions were a couple of centuries in the past. Romanticization of Islam was started by Christian writers at a time when Islam was still threatening. Why? Part of it is, they, like the Jewish writers in the 19th century, also wanted to use a benevolent image of Islam, the other civilization, as a foil against whatever aspects of Europe displeased them.

Take Gibbon, writing in the late 18th century. He was anti-Christian, and favorably compared Islam, with its simple doctrines, to Christianity, with its very complex doctrines which Gibbon couldn’t stand.

You see the immaturity and destructiveness here? It’s one thing to have a criticism of some aspect of one’s society. It’s another thing to start favoring a completely ALIEN society in order to carry out one’s critical program against one’s own society. The first is loyal opposition, the second is intellectual treason. But this is what various European intellectuals did, going back almost 500 years.

Julian writes:

Thanks, that’s well put, and it illuminates an important aspect for me. Without spending time on calling up the many cases, the one that most comes to mind is Sir Richard Burton: the troubled genius, polymath, translator of the Kama Sutra to English, explorer of Hindu Kush and Africa, man of the British Empire, who converted to Islam, got himself circumcised, and did the hajj as possibly the first Westerner ever to visit the Kaaba in Mecca. Married into the premier family of British Catholics, too: the Arundels. If you haven’t read “Mountains of the Moon,” it’s well worth doing. Then there is Glubb Pasha, and Lawrence, and the whole Arabist tradition of the British Foreign Affairs establishment.

Ben writes:

“Look at us. We are expending all this energy on the subject, trying to make all these points about Islam, simply because the people who rule us don’t know and refuse to know a single damn thing about it. None of this struggle should be necessary. This problem wasn’t necessary. That’s the irony, and the horror, that the ultimate enabling cause of this civilizational disaster is not some great, powerful, irresistible thing, like the Balrog in The Lord of the Rings, but an absolutely tiny, insignificant thing: ignorance of basic facts that anyone could know and ought to know.”

It’s the hand wringing. I really don’t know how much more men like us are going to be able to take. When you can see exactly what needs to be done to save the West and you know to achieve it would take minimal steps such as closing the West off from further immigration yet achieving this is impossible because of this huge roadblock called liberalism. It is beyond frustrating.

Actually liberalism has become like the Balrog. It cannot be questioned any longer in the West and has almost become an indestructible power that can no longer be influenced by conservatism mostly because “conservatives” have joined their so called liberal enemies. The only bulwark that was standing against liberalism and could have turned the tide in America was the conservative movement and yet it has been killed for the most part by the liberals hiding within it.

This means we have to sit here and wait for the day of destruction, the only thing that will end liberalism. This is beyond words to explain how unbearable this is. I’m not in despair but I can understand people who are. (even though I cannot condone despair)

“You see the immaturity and destructiveness here? It’s one thing to have a criticism of some aspect of one’s society. It’s another thing to start favoring a completely ALIEN society in order to carry out one’s critical program against one’s own society. The first is loyal opposition, the second is intellectual treason. But this is what various European intellectuals did, going back almost 500 years.”

This is what is sad about what has happened to a lot of people on the right including Pat Buchanan who were once effective at fighting liberalism. Their anger of what they see in our civilization has drove them to begin to support the enemy. They are the men who have been driven to despair.

This was really a great exchange you and Julian had. I sensed passion in this which is another thing that has been lost in the West.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 29, 2006 09:36 PM | Send