Will the mosque become a cultural Verdun?

In the light of the latest à l’outrance battle cry in favor of the Ground Zero mosque by the secular-liberal Jewish fanatic who is mayor of New York City, Rick Darby at Reflecting Light has a grim premonition about the battle still to come:

Verdun, 1916. The battle that lasted 10 months, the longest of any engagement in recorded history. It took place in a few square miles of poxy mudscape in northeastern France. The French and German armies took, lost, re-took, re-lost, again and again a few hills around a French outpost called Fort Douaumont.

Neither side could win. Neither side could back down. Today, the ground contains more than 100,000 unknown soldiers, not to mention those whose remains have been identified. For decades after, shell casings, bayonets, helmets … bones turned up when farmers plowed the poor soil. Possibly they still do today.

Why do I bring this ghastly episode up?

As I fear, the conflict over the Ground Zero mosque is shaping up as the modern equivalent of Verdun. No, there will not be soldiers on the field, although in a metaphorical sense this may be where the armies of the Western world and Islam face one another.

It looks now like both sides are going to take a stand over territory, and neither will back off. As I said previously, territory is the wrong thing to contest. We should be arguing over Muslim immigration, not where they want to build Fort Cordova. But for now territory is the issue.

[end of Rick Darby post]

Now, what does Mayor Bloomberg have to do with this looming catastrophe?

Bloomberg applauded by Muslims at Gracie Mansion
Ramadan dinner after saying there could be “no
compromise” over the Ground Zero mosque

For Jewish liberals like Bloomberg,—and this includes Jewish neoconservatives like Norman Podhoretz—all discrimination is the same. Meaning, if my father was not welcome at a gentile golf club, that is the same as Auschwitz, and Auschwitz is the same as not wanting a symbol of Muslim conquest being erected next to the site of the greatest Islamic terrorist attack in history. Given the liberal Jewish belief that all discrimination is equally evil, no compromise over the mosque is possible. Which is why, if we want to avoid a cultural Verdun over this issue, the liberal Jewish position must be exposed and refuted as such.

To understand that Jewish position, see my 2004 article at FrontPage Magazine, “Why Jews Welcome Muslims” (published two years before David Horowitz’s still-unexplained discovery that my views are too racist and objectionable for me to be published at his website).

* * *

When Mr. Darby says that we should be debating over Muslim immigration into the West, not the location of a single Islamic center, he means that for conservatives to invest so much energy into stopping the construction of that one building, rather than into stopping and reversing the total growth of Islam in the West, is counterproductive, perhaps to the point of madness. The Cordoba Initiative mosque could be stopped, at enormous cost, while Islam continues to expand its tentacles over us. At the same time, I am in sympathy with the view that the mosque issue is a positive development, as it may be waking up many Americans to the real nature of a supposed Muslim moderate like Feisal Rauf, and thus waking them up to the fact that Islam itself is the problem, not the address of one mosque.

In any case, the Ground Zero mosque must be stopped. It is like the move to legalize all illegal aliens. Amnesty would be an irrecoverable disaster for our country, and so it must be stopped, but at the same time, as Churchill said of the escape of the British army from capture at Dunkirk, preventing a catastrophe is not victory.

- end of initial entry -

Richard H. writes from North Carolina:

I find it interesting that your articles seem to be back in the FrontPage archive. I searched the site for your stuff 3 weeks ago and nothing came up.

Your point about so called secular Jews seeing all discrimination as the same is quite on the point.

LA replies:

Apparently they went through yet another hideous redesign of their hideously designed website, and for the interim, the urls were not working.

You write:

“Your point about so called secular Jews seeing all discrimination as the same is quite on the point.”

Excluding Jews from your golf club is discrimination. Dispossessing, dehumanizing, and mass murdering Jews is discrimination. Stopping Muslims from establishing Muslim rule over your country is discrimination. And Podhoretz and other Jewish establishment figures have solemnly declared, as if a wedding vow, all discrimination is one. Therefore all these acts are part of the same evil and must be banned.

And what will a world be like where all discrimination has been eliminated? It could only be a one-world borderless tyranny along the lines of the EU—except that this tyranny won’t stop all discrimination, will it? In the name of stopping all discrimination, it will allow Islam to take over and oppress everyone.

It will be a monstrous, shared rule by the Left and Islam, like that of Sin and Death in Book III of Paradise Lost.

Paul Mulshine writes:

Excellent piece. It explains a lot.

August 27

Ken Hechtman writes:

“A cultural Verdun?”

I doubt it. This whole thing over a building that isn’t actually a mosque being built on a site that isn’t actually Ground Zero strikes me as a typical ginned-up ephemeral silly-season story. I expect the straight press to move on to something else soon after Labor Day. I expect that in three years’ time even you will vaguely remember there was a controversy but you’ll need to look up whether at the end of it all the damn thing got built or not.

LA replies:

Yes, but one could say the same about World War I itself. How many people living today know or care anything about the War? Yet the War formed, or rather de-formed, the world in which we live.

Examples abound of civilizational loss made all the greater by the fact that the loss has been forgotten. By the year 1650, how many Englishmen cared about the fact that England was no longer Catholic? How many cared about the fact that the entire nation had, until a hundred or so years earlier, lived a profoundly Catholic way of life, as described in rich detail in Eamon Duffy’s The Stripping of the Altars, a way of life that had been systematically eliminated by the Protestant Reformation? The answer is, very few, because everyone living in 1650 had been born after the Elizabethan Settlement, so the England they grew up in was no longer Catholic, and they didn’t know what they were missing. Catholic England hadn’t just been eliminated, it had been eliminated from men’s minds. Yet the fact that men no longer remembered what had been lost, didn’t change the fact that it had been lost. To the contrary, it made the loss all the more thorough.

The same could be said of most of the losses and disasters of history. (I say “most,” because there are some historical disasters that are kept alive in the memories of future generations, e.g., the Serbs’ loss of Kosovo in 1389, the Jews’ loss of Jerusalem, the Irish people’s sufferings under the English.) So your argument that the mosque issue will not be a disaster, because people will have forgotten about it, is not persuasive.

I made a similar point in the The Path to National Suicide: An Essay on Immigration and Multiculturalism, at the end of Chapter II:

In the years and decades to come, as the present American people and their descendants begin to understand what is happening to their country; as they see their civilization disappearing piece by piece, city by city, state by state, from before their eyes, and that nothing can be done to stop it, they will suffer the same collapse of spirit that occurs to any people when its way of life, its historical identity, is taken away from it. Beneath all the hopeful names they will try to find for these changes—diversity, world-nation, global oneness—there will be the repressed knowledge that America is becoming an utterly different country from what it has been, and that this means the end of their world. But the pain will not last for long. As the clerics of diversity indoctrinate new generations into the Orwellian official history, even the memory of what America once was will be lost.

S.L. Stoddard writes:

In “WILL THE MOSQUE BECOME A CULTURAL VERDUN?” you write of the “liberal Jewish belief that all discrimination is equally evil.” I am not sure that this is accurate, as anti-Western, anti-White discrimination is rarely (if ever) presented as any sort of evil, much less as evil to the degree that Auschwitz was, but is instead presented as a positive good. In that mindset Westerners are singularly evil and deserving of special, discriminatory treatment.

I apologize if that seems nit-picky.

LA replies:

It is both true and nit-picky! Because of course when liberals speak of discrimination we know that they don’t mean discrimination against whites. That is built into the liberal view. So when I speak of how liberals view discrimination, it is simply assumed that this discrimination—that is, discrimination as liberals think about it—does not include discrimination against whites.

Richard N. writes:

The desolate wasteland depicted in the photo you have used in this article is not of the battlefield at Verdun. Rather it is that of Ypres (3rd battle, 1917). It is a famous image used in many books.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at August 26, 2010 02:00 PM | Send