Another incident in the suicide of the West. And in England of all places. The battle appears to be lost in the mother country and in the rest of the Anglosphere with the exception of the United States of America. Here is where the West will make its last stand, or else begin to turn the tide.
Is the meaning of 'last stand' such that the defenders, fighting against overwhelming odds, always lose? That is what 'last' implies. Custer's last stand was the end of Custer. He stood no more. Or does the meaning of the phrase allow for the defenders to sometimes prevail? Onkel Ludwig taught us that meaning is use. I take it to be an empirically verifiable lexical point that the phrase is used in both ways. Sometimes linguistic prescriptivists such as your humble correspondent have to acquiesce in the ways of a wayward world. Kicking against the pricks is somethimges pointless. I am tempted to dilate upon 'kicking against the pricks,' but I will resist temptation.
If one of the primary purposes of a university is to protect and hand on intellectual heritage, commitment to archive preservation is fundamental to that purpose. Perhaps the reason why the University of Leicester did not protect the IST archive was because it is now committed to erasing the past. An indication of this is in reports that the administration wants to “decolonize” the teaching of English literature by eliminating medieval studies (so Chaucer, inter alia, is to be removed from the curriculum), and “focus on ethnicity, sexuality and diversity,”
Ceasing to teach something does not necessarily entail the destruction of materials used for teaching it. Is it likely that a university entrusted with documents of national and international importance would deliberately discard them because they are no longer useful to its teaching? Would it choose to waste the fruits of long, hard, even dangerous effort exerted against a malign force threatening the Western world? Sadly, I suspect it would if it came to believe that the Western world was systemically at fault and needed to be transformed. But if therefore it would no longer protect documents of public importance, should it still be funded with public money?
The loss of an archive, whether by negligence or decision, is a calamity. To lose it by negligence is barbarously callous. To discard it deliberately is an act of intellectual vandalism, the equivalent of book-burning. If, in either case, a university is responsible, the disgrace must leave a permanent stain on its reputation.
Almost all of my political commentary and linkage these days is at my Facebook page, but some of you so despise that platform that you will not join me there. I fully understand. But this article is important enough to be worth citing here.
Perhaps the magnitude of Hillary's 2016 loss is only now becoming apparent. Clinton didn't just lose the White House, she also lost the Democratic center to the radical ornaments. The diminution of Brooks, Stevens, Kristof, and even Biden are the consequence of that defeat. The radicals who once served the useful purpose of putting fear into the other side are taking center stage. It's not surprising that the French Terror began with the purge of the moderates and the urgency of virtue. As Robespierre put it, virtuous men have no choice but to employ any means necessary:
If the basis of popular government in peacetime is virtue, the basis of popular government during a revolution is both virtue and terror; virtue, without which terror is baneful; terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the patrie.
The Thing is older than one would think. And more voracious. The intellectual Old Bolsheviks thought their illustrious records would protect them from the ruffian Stalin. Bukharin, who was eventually executed by Stalin, once said: "Koba, you used to be grateful for the support of your Bolshevik comrades." "Gratitude is a dog's disease," Stalin shot back.
It won't stop at Andy Ngo. There is no safety from It.
John Searle famously remarked that Derrida gives bullshit a bad name. Striking indeed is the French penchant for pseudo-literary vaporosity.
"Something" took place, we have the feeling of not having seen it coming, and certain consequences undeniably follow upon the "thing." But this very thing, the place and meaning of this "event," remains ineffable, like an intuition without concept, like a unicity with no generality on the horizon or with no horizon at all, out of range for a language that admits its powerlessness and so is reduced to pronouncing mechanically a date, repeating it endlessly, as a kind of ritual incantation, a conjuring poem, a journalistic litany or rhetorical refrain that admits to not knowing what it's talking about. We do not in fact know what we are saying or naming in this way: September 11, le 11 septembre, September 11. The brevity of the appellation (September 11, 9/11) stems not only from an economic or rhetorical necessity. The telegram of this metonymy—a name, a number—points out the unqualifiable by recognizing that we do not recognize or even cognize that we do not yet know how to qualify, that we do not know what we are talking about.
For the entire piece, go here. You are forgiven if you have had enough.
The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, dry Arizona morning. Back from a hard run, I flipped on the TV while doing some cool-down exercises only to see one of the planes crash into one of the towers. I knew right away what was going on.
I said to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about our porous southern border."
I was right about the first, but not about the second.
Do you remember Gary Condit, the California congressman? Succumbing as so many do to the fire down below Condit initiated an extramarital affair with the federal intern, Chandra Levy. When Levy was found murdered, Condit's link to Levy proved his undoing. The cable shows were awash with the Condit-Levy affair that summer of 2001. 9/11 put an end to the soap opera.
But it didn't do much for the security of the southern border.
We got lucky in November, 2016. Now do your bit to vote down the obstructionsts and defeatists, whether living or dead, legal or not, this coming November.
Quite incredibly, Spencer is still banned from visiting the UK because of what he says in this short (2:07) YouTube video. The letter from the Home Office, then under the auspices of Theresa May, said:
You are reported to have stated the following:
>>It [Islam] is a religion and a belief system that mandates warfare against unbelievers for the purpose for establishing a societal model that is absolutely incompatible with Western society … because [of] political correctness and because of media and general government unwillingness to face the sources of Islamic terrorism these things remain largely unknown.<<
The Home Secretary considers that should you be allowed to enter the UK you would continue to espouse such views. In doing so. you would be committing listed behaviours and would therefore be behaving in a way that is not conducive to the public good.
You are therefore instructed not to travel to the UK as you will be refused admission on arrival. Although there is no statutory right of appeal against the Home Secretary’s decision, this decision is reviewed every 3 to 5 years.
Astonishing. So it is "not conducive to the public good" to speak the truth because some people (Muslims) will be offended by it and others (ordinary Brits) will be inspired to commit acts of violence against members of a minority? Is that the Home Office reasoning?
Lord have mercy!
The Islamists have learned how to use our values against us. We value toleration and they exploit our tolerance. That ploy is structurally similar to what Communists did and their leftist successors do. Islam is the Communism of the 21st century. Theresa May plays the role of 'useful idiot.'
And then comes the Orwellian twist: when Spencer points out that Islam is incompatible with Western values such as toleration, and speaks up in defence of toleration, he is denounced as intolerant! So you are intolerant if you won't tolerate your own destruction?
There are many deep issues here, and it is very difficult to set them forth clearly in a few sentences. One issue is whether there is truth at all, or only politically correct opinions. Note the obvious: what is politically correct need not be correct in the sense of true.
For the Left truth doesn't matter since it is all about power in the end and those narratives that are conducive to the gaining and maintaining of power. As I have said more than once, a story does not have to be true to be a story.
One of the subterranean links between leftism and Islam concerns the denial of absolute truth. On Islamic voluntarism, truth is subject to Allah's will, which of course implies that truth is not absolute. That's just a hint. More later.
By Kevin Myers. The Sunday Times, 11 June 2017. Via Karl White who provided me with the text and who tells me that "Kevin Myers is one of Ireland's most controversial writers." The 'purple passages' are by your humble correspondent.
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A suicide bomber attacking a concert for little girls is a little earlier in the curve of depravity than I’d expected. But a nurse being cut to pieces as she minded the injured on London Bridge — at this point in the descent into the abyss, perfectly predictable. The Nazis hid their crimes. These people exult in theirs, knowing that the path to a moral nadir is paved with the public glorification of the most revolting violence. It is also paved with passivity, excuses and equivalence from the host communities.
When you won’t build a wall around your country, you must build walls around everything inside your country.
Along the same lines, is it not insane for Western countries to expend blood and treasure battling ISIS and other Islamist terror groups in their lands while allowing Muslims to enter our lands largely unvetted?
They perceive ours as a candle-and-teddy-bear society . . . We kill, you light candles.
And so acts of terrorism are not expressions of nihilism or desperation, but reasonable, methodical steps to topple a society that has become too weak and decadent to have the will to defend itself even though it has the means to defend itself.
Next stop: dhimmitude.
Am I wrong? I hope so!
And I hope we Amis learn something from the feckless Brits.
Had enough yet? If not, here is Heather Mac's latest.
The Brits may want to rethink their gun laws in the light of recent events.
Katie Hopkins lays into Sadiq Khan, mayor of London.
Keep calm and carry on? Keep calm, and carry one!
By the way, are there any cities or towns in Muslim countries that have Christian or non-Muslim mayors or other government officials? Just asking!
Should we tolerate the intolerant? Should we, in the words of Leszek Kolakowski,
. . . tolerate political or religious movements which are hostile to tolerance and seek to destroy all the mechanisms which protect it, totalitarian movements which aim to impose their own despotic regime? Such movements may not be dangerous as long as they are small; then they can be tolerated. But when they expand and increase in strength, they must be tolerated, for by then they are invincible, and in the end an entire society can fall victim to the worst sort of tyranny. Thus it is that unlimited tolerance turns against itself and destroys the conditions of its own existence. (Freedom, Fame, Lying, and Betrayal, p. 39.)
Read that final sentence again, and again. And apply it to current events.
Kolakowski concludes that "movements which aim to destroy freedom should not be tolerated or granted the protection of law . . . " (Ibid.) and surely he is right about this. Toleration has limits. It does not enjoin suicide.
The prime minister is right that ". . . our values - pluralistic British values - are superior to anything offered by the preachers and supporters of hate."
But her Enough is Enough statement shows that she and her countrymen lack the will to take the steps necessary to deal adequately with the Islamist scourge and defend their values.
She did not mention the necessity of a moratorium on Muslim immigration.
Nor did she mention the necessity of reinstating the death penalty.
So I predict that the 'new normal' will continue. After enough blood is shed and disruption caused, you will see the moratorium and the reinstatement.
Let's just hope that it doesn't take a nuclear event to rouse the Brits from their suicidal tolerance.
Here are some of my arguments in defense of capital punishment.
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London Ed responds,
I think significant progress has been made in that May specifically refers to ‘Islamist’ extremism, which she never has before. She also mentions some specific measures that will be taken. Only two days before that, Paul Nuttall (UKIP leader) in the BBC General Election debate said ‘Politicians need to have the courage to name [the problem]: it’s Islamist extremism’ and was jeered at by the other panelists. This article discusses.
BV: Progress, yes; but significant progress? The good lady shed a tiny bit of her political correctness and finally admitted publicly what everyone knew all along. Big deal! She now grants that 2 + 2 = 4.
Of course that is not as strong as saying that Islam (rather than a ‘perversion of Islam’ or suchlike) is the problem, but it is progress. She is a politician, and politicians speak in code, and are mindful of relationships with Islamic countries, of the reaction of sillier members of the public, and so on.
BV: Good point. Politicians, with the exception of Trump the the anti-politician, have to be politic, diplomatic, mindful of the foibles and fatuities of members of their audience. The trouble with this civility is that it typically goes too far and ends up in the precincts of the effete and the epicene. Western liberal politicians then become easy marks for thugs whether Nazi, Commie, Islamist, you name it. I might cite your own Neville Chamberlain as an example. Herr Hitler played him like a fiddle. The restoration of manly virtue among the tribe of politicians must then come in the form of boorish individuals like Donald J. Trump. Think of him as an unpleasant but necessary corrective.
I don’t see how the death penalty would deter suicide bombers.
BV: My dear Ed, you are making a nit-picking defeatist lefty move of which I cannot approve. There are people over here who say things like, "A wall along the Southern border won't stop illegals coming from the north." What a penetrating insight! As a logician, you like fallacies, or rather the avoidance thereof. The present fallacy is to think that if a policy won't solve every problem, then it won't solve any problem. The Great Wall of Trump won't solve every problem re: illegal aliens, but it will solve some of them.
Similarly, the swift and sure execution of jihadis won't deter suicide bombers, but it would deter those of the London Bridge stabber ilk, and many others besides.
But of course the restoration of the death penalty and its serious implementation won't happen until much more blood is shed if it happens at all. If PM May is only now coming to call the threat by a properly descriptive name, then there is little hope that she and others in power will come to their senses.
Here we go again. The third terrorist attack in the U. K. since March of this year. And so time to re-run the following entry from 5 December 2015. Please think it through for your own good and that of your descendants.
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And now San Bernardino. It is surely 'interesting' that in supposedly conservative media venues such as Fox News there has been no discussion, in the wake of this latest instance of Islamic terrorism, of the obvious question whether immigration from Muslim lands should be put on hold. Instead, time is wasted refuting silly liberal calls for more gun control. 'Interesting' but not surprising. Political correctness is so pervasive that even conservatives are infected with it. It is very hard for most of us, including conservatives, to believe that it is Islam itself and not the zealots of some hijacked version thereof that is the problem. But slowly, and very painfully, people are waking up. But I am not sanguine that only a few more such bloody events will jolt us into alertness. It will take many more.
So is it not eminently reasonable to call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands? Here are some relevant points. I would say that they add up to a strong cumulative case argument for a moratorium.
1. There is no right to immigrate. See here for some arguments contra the supposed right by Steven A. Camarota. Here is my refutation of an argument pro. My astute commenters add further considerations. Since there is no right to immigrate, immigrants are to be allowed in only if they meet certain criteria. Surely we are under no obligation to allow in those who would destroy our way of life.
2. We philosophers will debate until doomsday about rights and duties and everything else. But in the meantime, shouldn't we in our capacity as citizens exercise prudence and advocate that our government exercise prudence? So even if in the end there is a right to immigrate, the prudent course would be to suspend this supposed right for the time being until we get a better fix on what is going on. Let's see if ISIS is contained or spreads. Let's observe events in Europe and in Britain. Let's see if Muslim leaders condemn terrorism. Let's measure the extent of Muslim assimilation.
3. "Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Here. Now immigrants bring their culture and their values with them. Most Muslims will bring a commitment to sharia with them. But sharia is incompatible with our American values and the U. S. Constitution. Right here we have a very powerful reason to disallow immigration from Muslim lands.
4. You will tell me that not all Muslims subscribe to sharia, and you will be right. But how separate the sheep from the goats? Do you trust government officials to do the vetting? Are you not aware that people lie and that the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya justifies lying?
5. You will insist that not all Muslims are terrorists, and again you will be right. But almost all the terrorism in the world at the present time comes from Muslims acting upon Muslim beliefs.
Pay attention to the italicized phrase.
There are two important related distinctions we need to make.
There is first of all a distinction between committing murder because one's ideology, whether religious or non-religious, enjoins or justifies murder, and committing murder for non-ideological reasons or from non-ideological motives. For example, in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the murders were committed to avenge the blasphemy against Muhammad, the man Muslims call 'The Prophet' and consider Allah's messenger. And that is according to the terrorists themselves. Clearly, the terrorist acts were rooted in Muslim religious ideology in the same way that Communist and Nazi atrocities were rooted in Communist and Nazi political ideology, respectively. Compare that to a mafioso killing an innocent person who happens to have witnessed a crime the mafioso has committed. The latter's a mere criminal whose motives are crass and non-ideological: he just wanted to score some swag and wasn't about to be inconvenienced by a witness to his crime. "Dead men tell no tales."
The other distinction is between sociological and doctrinal uses of terms such as 'Mormon,' 'Catholic,' Buddhist,' and 'Muslim.' I know a man who is a Mormon in the sense that he was born and raised in a practicing Mormon family, was himself a practicing Mormon in his early youth, hails from a Mormon state, but then 'got philosophy,' went atheist, and now rejects all of the metaphysics of Mormonism. Is he now a Mormon or not? I say he is a Mormon sociologically but not doctrinally. He is a Mormon by upbringing but not by current belief and practice. This is a distinction that absolutely must be made, though I won't hold it against you if you think my terminology less than felicitous. Perhaps you can do better. Couch the distinction in any terms you like, but couch it.
Examples abound. An acquaintance of mine rejoices under the surname 'Anastasio.' He is Roman Catholic by upbringing, but currently a committed Buddhist by belief and practice. Or consider the notorious gangster 'Whitey' Bulger who is fortunately not an acquaintance of mine. Biographies of this criminal refer to him as Irish-Catholic, which is not wrong. But surely none of his unspeakably evil deeds sprang from Catholic moral teaching. Nor did they spring from Bulger's 'hijacking' of Catholicism. You could call him, with some justification, a Catholic criminal. But a Catholic who firebombs an abortion clinic to protest the evil of abortion is a Catholic criminal in an entirely different sense. The difference is between the sociological and the doctrinal.
6. Perhaps you will say to me that the percentage of Muslims who are terrorists is tiny. True. But all it takes is a handful, properly positioned, with the right devices, to bring the country to a screeching halt. And those who radicalize and inspire the terrorists need not be terrorists themselves. They could be imams in mosques operating in quiet and in secret.
7. You will tell me that a moratorium would keep out many good, decent Muslims who are willing to assimilate, who will not try to impose sharia, who will not work to undermine our system of government, and who do not condone terrorism. And you will be right. But again, there is no right to immigrate. So no wrong is done to good Muslims by preventing them from immigrating.
8. Think of it in terms of cost and benefit. Is there any net benefit from Muslim immigration? No. The cost outweighs the benefit. This is consistent with the frank admission that there are many fine Muslims who would add value to our society.
9. Perhaps you will call me a racist. I will return the compliment by calling you stupid for thinking that Islam is a race. Islam is a religious-political ideology.
It is Saturday night and I'm 'Islamed out.' I could say more but I've had enough for now. So I hand off to Patrick J. Buchanan, Time for a Moratorium on Immigration?
I have been discussing Islamist terrorism with a couple of Brits who are open to the sorts of things I say. One of them I know is a conservative; the other I think is. What struck me is that both make a curious lefty move. The move is well-described by Heather Mac Donald:
Defenders of the open-borders status quo inevitably claim that if a terrorist is a second-generation immigrant, like Abedi [the Manchester suicide bomber], immigration policy has nothing to do with his attack. (Abedi’s parents emigrated to Britain from Libya; his immediate family in Manchester lived in the world’s largest Libyan enclave outside Africa itself.) Media Matters ridiculed a comment about the Manchester bombing by Fox News host Ainsley Earhardt with the following headline: FOX NEWS HOST SUGGESTS ‘OPEN BORDERS’ ARE TO BLAME FOR MANCHESTER ATTACK CARRIED OUT BY BRITISH NATIVE.
My correspondents are not open-borders advocates, but they seem to want to decouple questions about immigration policy from questions about 'homegrown' terrorists. That strikes me as foolish. I answer them in the words of Heather Mac:
Pace Media Matters, a second-generation Muslim immigrant with a zeal for suicide bombing is as much of an immigration issue as a first-generation immigrant with a terrorist bent. The fact that second-generation immigrants are not assimilating into Western culture makes immigration policy more, not less, of a pressing matter. It is absurd to suggest that Abedi picked up his terrorist leanings from reading William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, rather than from the ideology of radical Islam that has been imported into Britain by mass immigration.
Of course! Isn't that blindingly obvious?
And another thing.
'Homegrown terrorist' is an obfuscatory leftist phrase. That is why I enclosed it in sneer quotes above. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.
It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.
McCarthy knows this subject from the inside and sees things with blinding clarity:
. . . the challenge of Islam must be confronted head-on and without apology. That is unavoidable. You can’t flinch. It is a certainty that the Democrat-media complex — of which Islamist organizations are members in good standing — is going to smear you as a racist “Islamophobe.” (Yes, this is another race-obsessed “progressive” narrative, so Islam gets to be the “race,” so that defenders of the Constitution and Western culture can be cast as “the oppressor.”) You have to be content with knowing that you are not a racist, with knowing that you are defending religious liberty, including the religious liberty of pro-Western Muslims.
There is a single battle that must be won. American culture must be convinced that Islam, while it has plenty of diversity, has a mainstream strain — sharia supremacism — that is not a religion but a totalitarian political ideology hiding under a religious veneer.
Permit me a respectful quibble. (I say 'respectful' because McCarthy's qualifications in this area far exceed mine.) A more measured way of putting the point would be by saying that sharia supremacism is at once both a totalitarian political ideology and a religion. It is a hybrid ideology that blends the religious with the political. The religiosity of sharia supremacism is not a mere veneer. But this is a mere quibble since, either way, the practical problem remains and the goal of the "single battle" is the same: to keep sharia-based Islam out of the U. S. A.
Intellectually, this should not be a difficult thing to do. Sharia supremacism does not accept the separation of religion from political life (which is why it is lethally hostile to reform Muslims). It requires the imposition of classical, ancient sharia law, which crushes individual liberty (particularly freedom — of conscience, of speech, and in economic affairs). It systematically discriminates against women and non-Muslims. It is cruel in its enforcement. It endorses violent jihad to settle political disputes (since such disputes boil down to whether sharia is being undermined — a capital offense).
What I have just outlined is not a “theory.” Quite apart from the fact that sharia supremacism is the subject of numerous books, studies, public-opinion polls, and courtroom prosecutions, one need only look at life in Saudi Arabia and Iran, societies in which the regime imposes sharia. As I mentioned a few days ago, one need only look at the State Department’s warnings to Americans who travel to Saudi Arabia.
Nevertheless, what should be easy to establish intellectually is difficult as a practical matter. Sharia supremacists and their progressive allies maintain that Islam may not be parsed into different strains. For legal purposes, they insist it is a monolith that is protected by religious-liberty principles — notwithstanding that a) progressives are generally hostile to religious liberty and b) sharia supremacists themselves would destroy religious liberty. Perversely, then, they argue that the First Amendment is offended by national-security measures against anti-American radicals who would, given the chance, deep-six the First Amendment in favor of sharia.
This may well be the heart of the issue. If Islam is a religion like any other, then it is protected by religious-liberty principles. If so, any attempt to keep sharia-supporting Muslims out of the country would run counter to the values enshrined in the First Amendment, specifically, the first clause thereof. It would constitute discrimination on the basis of religion.
The issue, then, is whether Islam is a religion like any other. Clearly, it is not. If McCarthy is right, then it is a political ideology masquerading as a religion; if I am right, it is a hybrid ideology. Either way, it is a political threat to our political system which is premised on the separation of church/mosque/synagogue and state.
It is essential to win this debate over the political nature of sharia supremacism. Our law has a long constitutional tradition, rooted in the natural and international law of self-defense, of excluding aliens on the basis of radical, anti-American political ideology. Thus, if sharia supremacism is deemed a political ideology, we can keep out alien adherents of a cause that both inspires the terrorists of today and, wherever it is allowed to take root, produces the terrorists of tomorrow.
Yet, we also have a strong commitment to religious freedom. If at the end of the debate — assuming we ever have the debate — our culture’s conclusion is that sharia supremacism equals Islam, equals religion, equals immunity from governmental protective measures, then the Constitution really will have become a suicide pact. We will have decided that anti-constitutional sharia radicals are just as welcome as any other Muslim.
Sharia supremacists are like communists: they use our values against us. They hypocritically invoke them to subvert them. If we allow them to do this we are fools and we deserve to perish. Our magnificent Constitution must not be allowed to become a suicide pact.
I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration. There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements. We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.
This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test: do you share our values or not? Chief among these values is toleration.
I agree with you -- it mainly comes down to value systems (I wrote a blog post on just this a couple of years ago). But a couple of points:
1. In my experience there are two types of Muslim immigrants to the West: educated graduates who have no interest whatever in Islam, and who sometimes actively hate it. I have worked with and have close friends fitting this description. The second are uneducated, and are far more likely to embody the kinds of values we mostly find repellent in the West; some of these people commit crimes against women and children thinking them to be normal privileges, and create cultural ghettos (however some have been victims of religious persecution). So I think curtailing Muslim immigration is too coarse a tool; I'd rather deprive totalitarian theocratic regimes of their better people, both for the sake of those individuals, and in the hope of keeping such regimes from gaining greater power (or perhaps their more courageous citizens overthrowing said dictatorships).
BV: The reader's idea is very interesting: take the best and brightest from Muslim countries, thereby causing a 'brain drain'; this will weaken totalitarian theocracies and possibly lead to their overthrow. And of course the reader is absolutely right that not every Muslim is a Sharia supremacist.
The difficulty, of course, is to separate the sheep from the goats (to employ a New Testament image for the sake of maximal political incorrectness). It's a problem of vetting. This is made difficult by the doctrine of taqiyya which justifies a Muslim's lying to non-Muslims. Practically, it will be very difficult to separate the assimilable Muslims from the non-assimilable ones.
Given this fact, it would be wise to curtail Muslim immigration, at least for the time being. 'Curtail' does not mean stop. It means reduce in extent or quantity. Or one could have a temporary total stoppage which is what a moratorium is. One of the questions that has to be asked, and that people are afraid to ask is this: what is the net benefit to a Western country of Muslim immigration? I am assuming, as any rational person must, that immigration can only be justified if it works to the benefit of the host country.
A second problem with the reader's suggestion is that it will have the effect of weakening the Muslim countries that suffer the 'brain drain.' But we want them to flourish, don't we? If they flourish, then they are less likely to practice and export terrorism. Happy people don't cause trouble. And happy people don't leave their homelands. Lefties such as Obama and Hillary are not entirely wrong: the more economically prosperous the Muslim lands, the lower the appeal of radical Islam.
2. I think one way to go about dealing with traditional Islam (which is the problem, not so-called 'political Islam' - Islam is inherently 'political') in the West is to find a way to legislate against the promotion of ideologies containing certain features - primarily those the conflict with our basic notions of human rights, i.e. freedom of thought and expression, non-discrimination on the basis of innate qualities (sex, race etc), and so on; ideologies that tend toward fascism. We need to think more on how we would deal with a serious movement of National Socialism or Italian Fascism today. No names of any religion or ideology need be mentioned, just the unacceptable features. Here 'legislate' probably doesn't mean in law, but by other means; it might even mean immigrants renouncing Sharia as you say. But unfortunately, the majority of Jihadist terrorism in Europe comes from citizens born into the cultural ghettos with their alternate value systems and deep resentments. No immigration policy can touch them.
It is interesting to note that we still have the absurd crime of blasphemy on the statute books in the UK, but there is nothing to protect our system of common law or values.
BV: I agree that Islam is inherently political: it is as much a political ideology as a religion. I call it a 'hybrid' ideology. People who speak of 'political Islam,' however, have in mind the project of a reform of Islam which would render it consistent with Western political principles and values. I am thinking of Zuhdi Jasser, for example. Part of his proposed reform is a separation of mosque and state. I fear that his proposal is utopian; if it could be achieved, however, Islam would cease to be the world-wide problem it is.
As for 'legislation' that is not achieved by passing laws, I just don't understand what that could be.
My reader suggests that no change in immigration policy will affect the jihadis that are born in cultural ghettos in our countries. But that is just false. Suppose that Muslim immigration into the U. K. were stopped. Then no jihadis could be born in the U. K. to the potential Muslim immigrants who would have been stopped. The young troublemakers already in the U. K. will grow old and become less troublesome.
Meanwhile, you just have to get ruthless with terrorists. That includes the swift and sure application of the death penalty. Do you love your country or not? Do you value your way of life? Are English values and ways worth defending? Or are you a bunch of decadents who don't care whether you live or die?
As an American who feels a certain piety toward the Mother Country, I hope you grow a collective pair before it is too late.
I wrote this last year. Its reposting, slightly redacted, is appropriate in the wake of Manchester. I explain the main thing that must be done if the West is to survive as the West.
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Things are coming to a head. We cannot tolerate as a 'new normal' another Islamist slaughter of innocents every six months or so. So what is to be done? What prophylactic measures do we need to take to protect the USA and the rest of the West from the Islamist virus?
London Ed writes,
What kind of public policy, if any, would you advocate to improve the currently dire relations between the Islamic communities in the West, and their neighbours? All Muslims I know (not many, however) are horrified by extremism, and do not see it as Islamic. ‘They are just thugs’, said one of them. Most immigrant communities have ended up assimilating in some way. My first encounter with Islam was in Turkey, where a nice ex-policeman showed us round some mosques and explained Islam. He told me a moving story about a Turkish earthquake where a badly injured man, crushed under some concrete, begged him to shoot him. The policeman refused, saying it was for God to make those kind of decisions about life and death. The man died an hour later. Here we are talking about ‘ordinary Muslims’. It is a fact that all religions have extremists, and that such extremists tend to hold disproportionate power. Is there any way of redressing the balance? I.e. if you were home secretary or the US equivalent, what measures would you be taking?
Let me first take issue, not with the truth, but with the import, of the claim that all religions have extremists. The claim is true, but it is misleading unless various other truths are brought into proximity with it. It is not enough to tell the truth; you must tell the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. There is a mode of mendacity whereby one tells truths with the intention of deceiving one's audience. See How to Tell the Truth without being Truthful .
Here is a second truth: the raw number of Islamic extremists (terrorists and those who foment terrorism) is vastly greater than the number of Buddhist extremists. So one cannot use the truth that all religions have extremists to downplay the threat of Islam, or to suggest that there is a moral equivalence between Buddhism and Islam.
So when a leftist says, "There are Buddhist terrorists too!" force him to name one that that was involved in a terror attack in London or Madrid or Paris or New York or Orlando or San Bernardino or . . . . Not only are there very few Buddhist terrorists, they are not a threat to us, meaning chiefly: the USA, the UK, and Europe.
There is another important point that Ed the philosopher will appreciate, namely, the distinction between being accidentally and essentially a terrorist. Suppose there is a Buddhist monk who is a terrorist. Qua Buddhist monk, he cannot be a terrorist because there is nothing in Buddhism that supports or enjoins terrorism. What makes him a Buddhist does not make him a terrorist or predispose him toward terrorism. Our Buddhist monk is therefore accidentally a terrorist. His committing terrorist acts is accidental to his being a Buddhist. He is a Buddhist monk and a terrorist; but he is not a terrorist because he is a Buddhist. Muslim terrorists, however, commit terrorist acts because their religion supports or enjoins terrorism. Their terrorism flows from their doctrine. This is not the case for Buddhism or Christianity. No Christian qua Christian is a terrorist.
Of course, not every Muslim is a terrorist; but every Muslim has at the ready a religious doctrine that enjoins and justifies terrorism should our Muslim decide to go that route. There are many more potential Muslim terrorists than actual Muslim terrorists.
Note also that a Muslim does not have to commit terrorist acts himself to aid and abet terrorists. He can support them monetarily and in other ways including by refusing to condemn terrorist acts. Their silence is deafening.
While not every Muslim is a terrorist, almost every terrorist at the present time is a Muslim. We ought to demand that leftists admit the truth of both halves of the foregoing statement. But they won't, which fact demonstrates (a) their lack of intellectual honesty, (b) their destructive, anti-Western agenda, and (c) their ignorance of their own long-term best interest. As for (c), liberals and leftists have a pronounced 'libertine wobble' as I like to call it. They are into 'alternative sexual lifestyles' and the defense of pornography as 'free speech,' and such. They would be the first to be slaughtered under Shari'a. Or have they forgotten Orlando already?
London Ed tells us that in Turkey he met "ordinary Muslims" who were fine people. Well, I lived in Turkey for a solid year, 1995-1996, and met many Muslims, almost all of them very decent people. These "ordinary Muslims," some of them secularists, and others of them innocuously religious, are not the problem. The jihadis are the problem, and there are a lot of them, not percentage-wise, but in terms of raw numbers. It is irrelevant to point out that there are good Muslims. Of course there are. We all know that. But they are not the problem.
So what measures should we in the West take?
I will mention just the most obvious and most important one: severely curtail Muslim immigration. There is no right to immigrate, and correspondingly, we are under no obligation to let in subversive elements. We have a culture and a way of life to protect, and their culture and way of life are inimical to ours. Muslims who enter the USA should be forced to sign a statement in which they renounce Shari'a, and then they must be monitored for compliance.
This is not a religious test but a cultural-political test: do you share our values or not? Chief among these values is toleration. If not, stay home, in the lands whose inanition and misery demonstrate the inferiority of Islamic culture and Islamic values. The main reason for carefully vetting Muslims who aim to immigrate into the USA is political rather than religious, as I explain in the following companion post:
Defeatist Londoners and other appeasers are settling down to the 'new normal': slaughter, including beheadings, on the streets of great and not-so-great cities.
But what's the big deal? In yesterday's London incident only four were killed and only a few more injured. Compare terror deaths with bath tub deaths and you will see that the likelihood of getting whacked by a jihadi is vanishingly small as compared to bath tub deaths or traffic fatalities or gun deaths.
In 2006, Melanie Phillips wrote a book called Londonistan: How Britain Is Creating a Terror State Within. She argued that Britain was a sitting duck for Islamic terrorists, owing to its idiotic embrace of political correctness, multiculturalism, and religious relativism.
And ends:
Keep calm and propagandize on — that’s the attitude in Sadiq Khan’s London, where terrorism, as he put it last year, some months after his election as mayor, is “part and parcel of living in a big city.”
Khan's attitude is defeatist. Was terrorism "part and parcel of living in a big city" twenty years ago? There are plenty of stateside defeatists too, and some call themselves 'conservative.' But we got lucky last November and the deplorable Hillary went down in defeat, and with her the then-regnant mentality of Barack Hussein Obama.
It may be too late for the UK and Europe. But it is not too late for us.
Some European newspapers have reported lately – very quietly – that, according to police in Germany’s North Rhineland/ Westphalia region, from 2011 to 2016 there were 3500 cases of vandalism/desecration of Christian churches. About two per day in only one region of Germany, every day for the past five years.
That's the bad news. The good news is that Trump defeated Hillary who would have continued Obama's ostrichism.
Change and hope for 2017!
Royal again:
We, of course, can coexist with Muslims who want to coexist with us. But the presence of jihadists – essentially an amorphous armed force within our society – is going to drive us quite close to religious tests for entry into the country and perhaps more.
Royal is assuming that Islam is a religion like any other. Not so. It is a hybid religious-political ideology that promotes values inimical to the West and its flourishing. Sharia and the West do not mix. Muslim immigration ought to be curtailed because of Muslims' destructive Sharia-based political values. They have no right to come here, and we have no obligation to let them in. There is no net benefit to their immigration when you factor in the destruction, which is not merely physical, wrought by jihadis. The Europeans are learning this the hard way. May they learn their lesson well.
No one should be allowed to immigrate who is not prepared to assimilate.
No comity without commonality.
While diversity is good, it is good only up to a point. A diversity worth wanting presupposes a unity of shared principles.
A good part of the problem here is the silly liberal conceit that 'deep down' we are all the same and want the same things. False! There really are crazies ought there who want to disembarrass you of your head because you differ with them on some abstruse point of theology. Leftists, who cannot take religion seriously, think that no one else really takes it seriously either so that what motivates terrorists are things like "lack of jobs" as the foolish Obama once said. A very stupid form of projection!
But we will soon be rid of the feckless fool.
That being said and rejoiced in, Happy New Year! By OUR calendar.
That the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and cannot be justified under any circumstances is one of the entailments of Catholic just war doctrine. I am sensitive to its moral force. I am strongly inclined to say that certain actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong by their very nature as the types of actions they are, wrong regardless of consequences and circumstances. But what would have been the likely upshot had the Allies not used unspeakably brutal methods against the Germans and the Japanese in World War II? Leery as one ought to be of counterfactual history, I think the Axis Powers would have acquired nukes first and used them against us. But we don't have to speculate about might-have-beens.
If I understand the Catholic doctrine, it implies that if Harry Truman had a crystal ball and knew the future with certainty and saw that the Allies would have lost had they not used the methods they used, and that the whole world would have been been plunged into a Dark Age for two centuries -- he still would not have been justified in ordering the annihilation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Indeed, if the deliberate targeting of noncombatants is intrinsically evil and unjustifiable under any circumstances and regardless of any consequences, then it is better that the earth be blown to pieces than that evil be done. This, I suppose, is one reading of fiat iustitia pereat mundus, "Let justice be done though the world perish." Although I invoked an historical example, nothing hinges on it since a matter of principle is at stake.
This extreme anti-consequentialism troubles me if it is thought to be relevant to how states ought to conduct themselves. Suppose that there is no God and no soul and no post-mortem existence, and thus that this life is all there is. Suppose the political authorities let the entire world be destroyed out of a refusal to target and kill innocent civilians of a rogue state. This would amount to the sacrificing of humanity to an abstract absolutist moral principle. This would be moral insanity.
On the other hand, extreme anti-consequentialism would make sense if the metaphysics of the Catholic Church or even the metaphysics of Kant were true. If God is real then this world is relatively unreal and relatively unimportant. If the soul is real, then its salvation is our paramount concern, and every worldly concern is relatively insignificant. For the soul to be saved, it must be kept free from, or absolved of, every moral stain in which case it can never be right to do evil in pursuit of good. Now the deliberate killing of innocent human beings is evil and so must never be done -- regardless of consequences. On a Christian moral scheme, morality is not in the service of our animal life here below; we stand under an absolute moral demand that calls us from beyond this earthly life and speaks to our immortal souls, not to our mortal bodies. Christianity is here consonant with the great Socratic thought that it is better to suffer evil, wrong, injustice than to to do them. (Plato, Gorgias, 469a)
But then a moral doctrine that is supposed to govern our behavior in this world rests on an other-worldly metaphysics. No problem with that -- if the metaphysics is true. For then one's flourishing in this world cannot amount to much as compared to one's flourishing in the next. But how do we know that the metaphysics is true? Classical theistic metaphysics is reasonably believed, but then so are certain versions of naturalism.
I am not claiming that classical theism false. I myself believe it to be true. My point is that we know that this world is no illusion and is at least relatively real, together with its goods, but we merely believe that God and the soul are real.
If the buck stops with you and the fate of civilization itself depends on your decision, will you act according to a moral doctrine that rests on a questionable metaphysics or will you act in accordance with worldly wisdom, a wisdom that dictates that in certain circumstances the deliberate targeting of the innocent is justified?
An isolated individual, responsible for no one but himself, is free to allow himself to be slaughtered. But a leader of a nation is in a much different position. Even if the leader qua private citizen holds to an absolutist position according to which some actions are intrinsically wrong, wrong regardless of consequences, he would not be justified in acting in his official capacity as head of state from this absolutist position. The reason is that he cannot reasonably claim that the metaphysics on which his moral absolutism rests is correct. God may or may not exist -- we don't know. But that this world exists we do know. And in this world no action is such that consequences are irrelevant to its moral evaluation. By 'in this world' I mean: according to the prudential wisdom of this world. Is adultery, for example, intrinsically wrong such that no conceivable circumstances or consequences could justify it? A worldly wise person who is in general opposed to adultery will say that there are conceivable situations in which a married woman seduces a man to discover military secrets that could save thousands of lives, and is justified in so doing.
Anscombe's case against Truman does not convince me. Let the philosophy professor change places with the head of state and then see if her moral rigorism remains tenable.
We confront a moral dilemma. On the one hand, a head of state may sometimes justifiably act in the interests of the citizens of the state of which he is the head by commanding actions which are intrinsically wrong. On the other hand, no one may ever justifiably do or command anything that is intrinsically wrong.
Of course the dilemma or aporetic dyad can be 'solved' by denying one of the limbs; but there is no solution which is a good solution. Or so say I. On my metaphilosophy, the problems of philosophy are almost all of them genuine, some of them humanly important, but none of them soluble. The above dilemma is an example of a problem that is genuine, important, and insoluble.
Torture
Patrick Toner holds that waterboarding is torture. I incline to say that it isn't. But let's assume I am wrong. Presumably, most who hold that waterboarding is torture will also hold that torture is intrinsically wrong. But how could it be wrong for the political authorities to torture a jihadi who knows the locations and detonation times of suitcase nukes planted in Manhattan? Here again is our moral dilemma. I suspect Toner would not 'solve' it by adopting consequentialism. I suspect he holds that torture is wrong always and everywhere and under any conceivable circumstances. But then he is prepared to sacrifice thousands of human lives to an abstract moral principle, or else is invoking a theological metaphysics that is far less grounded than the prudence of worldly wisdom. I would like to hear Toner's response to this.
Some have tried to solve the dilemma by invoking the Doctrine of Double Effect. But I am pretty sure Patrick will not go that route.
Here is the opinion of a man who has both done it and had it done to him. "I volunteered to be waterboarded myself and can assure you that it is not a pleasant experience. But no one volunteers to be tortured."
Words mean things. They ought to be used responsibly. No good purpose is served by exaggeration in a context such as this. If waterboarding is torture, what would you call having a red-hot poker rammed 12 inches up your anal cavity? Would anyone volunteer for that?
Come Thursday it will be the fifth anniversary of the death of Christopher Hitchens. He, along with other journalists, allowed himself to be waterboarded.
I grant, however, that being waterboarded by friends is considerably different from being so treated by enemies.
I am put in mind of something similar Obama said a couple of years ago. He said, "ISIL is not Islamic."
What's the reasoning behind Obama's statement? Perhaps this:
1. All religions are good. 2. Islam is a religion Ergo 3. Islam is good 4. ISIL is not good. Ergo 5. ISIL is not Islamic.
This little argument illustrates how one can reason correctly from false/dubious premises.
Are all religions good? Suppose we agree that a religion is good if its contribution to human flourishing outweighs its contribution to the opposite. Then it is not at all clear that Islam is good. For while it has improved the lives of some in some respects, on balance it has not contributed to human flourishing. It is partly responsible for the long-standing inanition of the lands it dominates and it is the major source of terrorism in the world today. It is an inferior religion, the worst of the great religions (Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam). Schopenhauer is surely right that it is the "saddest and poorest form of theism." Its conception of the afterlife is the crudest imaginable. Its God is pure will . See Benedict's Regensburg Speech. It is a violent religion scarcely distinguishable from a violent political ideology. Its prophet was a warrior. It is impervious to any correction or enlightening or chastening from the side of philosophy. There is no real philosophy in the Muslim world to speak of. Tiny Israel in the 66 years of its existence has produced vastly more real philosophy than the whole of the Muslim world in the last 400 years.
So it is not the case that all religions are good. Some are, some are not. This is a balanced view that rejects the extremes of 'All religions are good' and 'No religions are good.'
But why would so many want to maintain that all religions are good? William Kilpatrick:
. . . if Islam is intrinsically flawed, then the assumption that religion is basically a good thing would have to be revisited. That, in turn, might lead to a more aggressive questioning of Christianity. Accordingly, some Church leaders seem to have adopted a circle-the-wagons mentality—with Islam included as part of the wagon train. In other words, an attack on one religion is considered an attack on all: if they come for the imams, then, before you know it, they’ll be coming for the bishops. Unfortunately, the narrative doesn’t provide for the possibility that the imams will be the ones coming for the bishops.
Note that the following argument is invalid:
6. Islam is intrinsically flawed 2. Islam is a religion Ergo 7. All religions are intrinsically flawed.
So if you hold that Islam is intrinsically flawed you are not logically committed to holding that all religions are. Still, Kilpatrick's reasoning may be a correct explanation of why some want to maintain that all religions are good. Kilpatrick continues (emphasis added):
In addition to fears about the secular world declaring open season on all religions, bishops have other reasons to paint a friendly face on Islam. It’s not just the religion-is-a-good-thing narrative that’s at stake. Other, interconnected narratives could also be called into question.
One of these narratives is that immigration is a good thing that ought to be welcomed by all good Christians. Typically, opposition to immigration is presented as nothing short of sinful. [. . .]
But liberal immigration policies have had unforeseen consequences that now put (or ought to put) its proponents on the defensive. In Europe, the unintended consequences (some critics contend that they were fully intended) of mass immigration are quite sobering. It looks very much like Islam will become, in the not-so-distant future, the dominant force in many European states and in the UK as well. If this seems unlikely, keep in mind that, historically, Muslims have never needed the advantage of being a majority in order to impose their will on non-Muslim societies. And once Islamization becomes a fact, it is entirely possible that the barbarities being visited on Christians in Iraq could be visited on Christians in Europe. Or, as the archbishop of Mosul puts it, “If you do not understand this soon enough, you will become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home.”
If that ever happens, the bishops (not all of them, of course) will bear some of the responsibility for having encouraged the immigration inflow that is making Islamization a growing threat. Thus, when a Western bishop feels compelled to tell us that Islamic violence has “nothing to do with real Islam,” it’s possible that he is hoping to reassure us that the massive immigration he has endorsed is nothing to worry about and will never result in the imposition of sharia law and/or a caliphate. He’s not just defending Islam, he’s defending a policy stance with possibly ruinous consequences for the West.
Of course, presidents and prime ministers say the same sorts of things about Islam. President Obama recently assured the world that “ISIL speaks for no religion,” Prime Minister David Cameron said that the extremists “pervert the Islamic faith,” and UK Foreign Secretary Philip Hammond asserted that the Islamic State “goes against the most basic beliefs of Islam.” They say these things for reasons of strategy and because they also have a narrative or two to protect. In fact, the narratives are essentially the same as those held by the bishops—religion is good, diversity is our strength, and immigration is enriching.
Since they are actually involved in setting policy, the presidents, prime ministers, and party leaders bear a greater responsibility than do the bishops for the consequences when their naïve narratives are enacted into law. Still, one has to wonder why, in so many cases, the bishop’s narratives are little more than an echo of the secular-political ones. It’s more than slightly worrisome when the policy prescriptions of the bishops so often align with the policies of Obama, Cameron, and company.
Many theologians believe that the Church should have a “preferential option for the poor,” but it’s not a good sign when the bishops seem to have a preferential option for whatever narrative stance the elites are currently taking on contested issues (issues of sexual ethics excepted). It’s particularly unnerving when the narratives about Islam and immigration subscribed to by so many bishops match up with those of secular leaders whose main allegiance is to the church of political expediency.
When the formulas you fall back on are indistinguishable from those of leaders who are presiding over the decline and fall of Western civilization, it’s time for a reality check.
Consider three types of case. (a) A Muslim terrorist who was born in the USA and whose terrorism derives from his Islamic faith. (b) A Muslim terrorist who was not born in the USA but is a citizen of the USA or legally resides in the USA and whose terrorism derives from his Islamic faith. (c) A terrorist such as Timothy McVeigh who was born in the USA but whose terrorism does not derive from Islamic doctrine.
As a foe of obfuscatory terminology, I object to booking the (a) and (b) cases under the 'homegrown terrorist' rubric. In the (a)-case, the terrorist doctrine, which inspires the terrorist deeds, is of foreign origin. There is nothing 'homegrown' about it. Compare the foreign terrorist doctrine to a terrorist doctrine that takes its inspiration, rightly or wrongly, from American sources such as certain quotations from Thomas Jefferson or from the life and views of the abolitionist John Brown.
The same holds a fortiori for the (b)-cases. Here neither the doctrine nor the perpetrator are 'homegrown.'
There is no justification for referring to an act of Islamic terrorism that occurs in the homeland as an act of 'homegrown' terrorism.
The (c)-type cases are the only ones that legitimately fall under the 'homegrown terrorist' rubric.
So please don't refer to Ahmad Khan Rahami as a 'homegrown terrorist.' He is a (b)-type terrorist. There is nothing 'homegrown' about the Islamic doctrine that drove his evil deeds, nor is there anything 'homegrown' about the 'gentleman' himself. Call him what he is: a Muslim terrorist whose terrorism is fueled by Islamic doctrine.
The obfuscatory appellation is in use, of course, because it is politically correct.
Language matters. And political correctness be damned.
The morning of 9/11 was a beautiful, dry Arizona morning. Back from a hard run, I flipped on the TV while doing some cool-down exercises only to see one of the planes crash into one of the towers. I knew right away what was going on.
I said to my wife, "Well, two good things will come of this: Gary Condit will be out of the news forever, and finally something will be done about our porous southern border."
I was right about the first, but not about the second.
Do you remember Gary Condit, the California congressmann? Succumbing as so many do to the fire down below, Condit initiated an extramarital affair with the federal intern, Chandra Levy. When Levy was found murdered, Condit's link to Levy proved his undoing. The cable shows were awash with the Condit-Levy affair that summer of 2001. 9/11 put an end to the soap opera.
But it didn't do much for the security of the southern border.
We have one last chance,and his name is Donald Trump.
According to Roger Scuton, because of political correctness:
A story of rampant child abuse—ignored and abetted by the police—is emerging out of the British town of Rotherham. Until now, its scale and scope would have been inconceivable in a civilized country. Its origins, however, lie in something quite ordinary: what one Labour MP called "not wanting to rock the multicultural community boat."
The fact that Brits object to their daughters being abused by foreigners shows that they are benighted nativists, racists, white supremacists with an irrational fear, a phobia, of foreigners. Right? And that is what Brexit was all about: an irrational fear of foreigners. Right?
I subscribe to the now tiny but, I believe, some-day-to-be prevalent Separationist School of Western-Islamic Relations. We separationists affirm the following:
Islam is a mortal threat to our civilization.
But we cannot destroy Islam.
Nor can we democratize Islam.
Nor can we assimilate Islam.
Therefore the only way to make ourselves safe from Islam is to separate ourselves from Islam.
(An earlier version of the above statement, along with a key excerpt from my article “The Search for Moderate Islam,” is posted here.)
Auster wrote this ten years ago. Mildly prophetic.
An obfuscatory leftist phrase. And therefore used by Obama the Mendacious. Why obfuscatory? Because it elides an important distinction between those terrorists who are truly homegrown such as Timothy McVeigh and those who, while born in the USA, such as Omar Mateen, derive their 'inspiration' from foreign sources. Mateen's terrorism comes from his understanding of what Islam requires, namely, the liquidation of homosexuals. There is nothing homegrown about Islam. This in stark contrast to the American sources of McVeigh's terrorism.
It is perfectly obvious why liberals and leftists use 'homegrown terrorist' in application to the likes of Mateen: they want to deflect attention from the real problem, which is radical Islam.
From the 1980s to the present. Some lists are 'static,' some 'dynamic.' The Ten Commandments is static whereas the list of Islamist outrages is unfortunately dynamic, highly dynamic.
Exercise for the reader. Compile a list of Christian terror attacks from the 1980s to the present and compare its length to that of the Islamist list. Make sure that you put on this list only those acts whose justification lies in orthodox Christian doctrine, and not acts by people who just happen to be residents of 'Christian' lands.
It's about time these establishment types began wising up:
[. . .] Immigration to the U.S., and citizenship itself, should be seen, again, as a privilege, not a right—and assimilation and integration, not multicultural separatism and ethnic and religious chauvinism, should be the goal of the host. We need not single out Muslims in terms of restricting immigration, but we should take a six-month timeout on all would-be immigrants from countries in the Middle East deemed war zones—Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Lebanon, Libya, Palestine, Pakistan, Syria, and Yemen—not only for our own immediate security but also to send a general message that entrance into the U.S. is a rare and prized opportunity, not simply a cheap and pro forma entitlement.
The inability of Barack Obama and the latest incarnation of Hillary Clinton to utter “radical Islam” or “Islamic terrorism” in connection with Muslims’ murderous killing sprees again is exposed as an utterly bankrupt, deadly, and callous politically correct platitude. Mateen did not learn to hate homosexuals from the American government, popular American culture, or our schools, but rather from radical and likely ISIS-driven Islamic indoctrination. From Iran to Saudi Arabia, the treatment of gays is reprehensible—but largely exempt from Western censure, on the tired theory that in the confused pantheon of -isms and -ologies, multiculturalism trumps human rights.
Finally, the Left will blame guns, not ideology, for the mass murder, forgetting that disarmed soldiers who could not shoot back were slaughtered by Major Hasan, that the Tsarnaev brothers preferred home-cooked explosives to blow up innocents in Boston, that the Oklahoma and UC Merced Islamists did their beheading or stabbing with a knife, and that Mateen likely followed strict gun-registration laws in obtaining his weapons.
Indeed. There is no right to immigrate, and the USA has no obligation to accept subversive elements. We do have a right, however, to demand assimilation. This has definite consequences. If you are a taxi driver you cannot refuse to accept as a fare a person coming out of a liquor store with a closed container of spirits. If you work check out in a supermarket, you cannot refuse to touch a package of bacon. If you refuse, you ought to be fired on the spot. If you want to dress up like a nun of the 1950s, go right ahead, but we had better be able to see your face.
We are tolerant, but not to the point of tolerating the intolerance of Sharia. You must renounce it and accept our values if you wish to live among us.
We are peace-loving, but we are prepared to defend our superior culture against barbarians.
Well, it has come to a nightclub, a homosexual establishment, though it might not be near you. But do you think that this is the last incident of its kind? Bruce Bawer at the excellent City Journal:
On CNN and Fox News, one politician after another professed to be “shocked” by the massacre in Orlando. “Who would have expected such a thing?” people kept asking. Actually, I’ve been expecting just such a thing for years. The only shock was that it took this long for some jihadist to go after a gay establishment.
Islamic law, after all, is crystal clear on homosexuality, though the various schools of sharia prescribe a range of penalties: one calls for death by stoning; another demands that the transgressor be thrown from a high place; a third says to drop a building on him. In Iran, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Sudan, Yemen, Mauritania, Pakistan, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, as well as in parts of Nigeria, Somalia, Syria and Iraq, homosexuality is indeed punishable by death.
Nor do Muslims magically change their views on the subject when they move to the West. [. . .]
Donald Trump has many sound ideas, many more than Hillary does. This is why you should vote for him. One of the sound ideas is that it it would make sense to have a moratorium on Muslim immigration. The trouble with The Donald, however, is that he cannot express his sound ideas properly in a non-incendiary and nuanced way, adding such qualifications as are necessary. So he comes across as a nativist yahoo. But he is still basically right, just as Lindsey Graham is still basically an idiot for denouncing Trump's proposal as "xenophobic." Is Graham a closet leftist? That is the way leftists talk. Anyone with sense knows that there is nothing 'xenophobic' or 'Islamophobic' about carefully vetting Muslim immigrants.
Vote for Hillary and you can expect more Islamist outrages on our soil. In this respect, she is nothing but Obama in drag. Vote for Trump and the chances are good that there will be fewer such outrages.
Don't forget that politics is not about choosing between the good and the bad, but between the better and the worse. You should also realize that not to decide is to decide; in particular, to abstain from our lousy presidential choice is to aid and abet the destructive Hillary.
I am trying to understand the structure of the problem of dirty hands.
A clear example of a dirty hands situation is one in which a political leader authorizes the intentional slaughter of innocent non-combatants to demoralize the enemy and bring about the end of a war which, if it continues, could be reasonably expected to lead to the destruction of the leader's state. The leader must act, but he cannot authorize the actions necessary for the state's survival without authorizing immoral actions. He must act, but he cannot act without dirtying his hands with the blood of innocents. In its sharpest form, the problem arises if we assume that certain actions are absolutely morally wrong, wrong in and of themselves, always and everywhere and regardless of circumstances or (good) consequences. The problem stands out in sharp relief when cast into the mold of an aporetic triad:
A. Moral reasons for action are dominant: they trump every other reason for action such as 'reasons of state.'
B. Some actions are absolutely morally wrong, morally impermissible always and everywhere, regardless of situation, context, circumstances.
C. Among absolutely morally wrong actions, there are some that are (non-morally) permissible, and indeed (non-morally) necessary: they must be done in a situation in which refusing to act would lead to worse consequences such as the destruction of one's nation or culture.
It is easy to see that this triad is inconsistent. The limbs cannot all be true. (B) and (C) could both be true if one allowed moral reasons to be trumped by non-moral reasons. But that is precisely what (A), quite plausibly, rules out.
The threesome, then, is logically inconsistent. And yet each limb makes a strong claim on our acceptance. To solve the problem one of the limbs must be rejected. Which one?
(A)-Rejection. One might take the line that in some extreme circumstances non-moral considerations take precedence over moral ones. Imagine a ticking-bomb scenario in which the bomb-planter must be tortured in order to find the location of the bomb or bombs. (Suppose a number of dirty nukes have been planted in Manhattan, all scheduled to go off at the same time.) Imagine a perfectly gruesome form of torture in which the wife and children of Ali the jihadi have their fingers and limbs sawn off in the presence of the jihadi, and then the same is done to him until he talks. Would the torture not be justified? Not morally justified of course, but justified non-morally to save Manhattan and its millions of residents and to avert the ensuing disaster for the rest of the country? One type of hard liner will say, yes, of course, even while insisting that torture of the sort envisaged is morally wrong, and indeed absolutely morally wrong. I am in some moods such a hard liner.
But am I not then falling into contradiction? No. I am not maintaining that in every case it is morally wrong to torture, but in this case it is not. That would be a contradiction. I am maintaining that it is always morally impermissible to torture but that in some circumstances moral considerations are trumped by -- what shall I call them? -- survival considerations. These are external to the moral point of view. So while morality is absolute in its own domain, its domain does not coincide with the domain of human action in general. The torture of the jihadi and his wife and children are justified, not morally, but by non-moral reasons.
(B)-Rejection. A second solution to the triad involves rejecting deontology and embracing consequentialism. Consider the following act-type: torturing a person to extract information from him. A deontologist such as Kant would maintain that the tokening of such an act-type is morally wrong just in virtue of the act-type's being the act-type it is. It would then follow for Kant that every such tokening is morally wrong. A consequentialist would say that it all depends on the outcome. Torturing our jihadi above leads or can be reasonably expected to lead to the greatest good of the greatest number in the specific circumstances in question, and those on-balance good consequences morally justify the act of torture. So, contra Kant, one and the same act-type can be morally acceptable/unacceptable depending on circumstances and consequences. Torturing Ali the jihadi is morally justified, but torturing Sammy the jeweler to get him to open his safe is not.
On this second solution to the triad, we accept (A), we accept that moral considerations reign supreme over the entire sphere of human action and cannot be trumped by any non-moral considerations. But we adopt a consequentialist moral doctrine that allows the moral justification of torture and the targeting of non-combatants in certain circumstances.
Now we must ask: Do the consequentialist torturers of the jihadi and their consequentialist superiors who order the torture have dirty hands? Suppose the hands of the torturers are literally bloody. Are they dirty? I am tempted to say No. They haven't done anything wrong; they have the done the right thing, and let us assume, at great psychological and emotional cost to themselves. Imagine snapping off the digits of a fellow human being with bolt cutters or high-torque pruning shears. Could you do that to a child in the presence of his father and do it efficiently and with equanimity? Could you do your job, your duty, despite your contrary inclination? (I am turning Kant's phraseology against him here.) But you must do it because the orders you have been given are morally correct by the consequentialist theory.
Do the torturers have dirty hands? It depends on what exactly it is to have dirty hands whch, of course, is part of the problem of dirty hands. On a narrow understanding, a dirty hands situation is one in which the agent acts, and must act, while both accepting all three limbs of our inconsistent triad and appreciating that they are inconsistent. A dirty hands situation in the narrow and strict sense is an aporetic bind. You must act and you must act immorally in violation of absolute moral prohibitions, and you cannot justify your actions by any non-moral considerations that trump moral ones. That's one hell of a bind to be in! Some will be tempted to say that there cannot ever occur such a bind. But if so, then there cannot ever occur a dirty hands situation. So maybe talk of 'dirty hands' is incoherent.
If this is what it is to be in a dirty hands situation, then a consequnetialisdt cannot be in a dirty hands situation. He is not in an aporetic bind since he rejects (B). And the same goes for those who reject (A) or (C).
(C)-Rejection. A third solution to the problem involves holding that there is no necessity to act: one can abstain from acting. A political leader faaced with a terrible choice can simply abdicate, or simply refuse to choose. He does not order the torture of the jihadi and and hence does not act to save Manhattan; but by not acting he willy-nilly aids and abets the terrorist.
Interim Conclusion
I have the strong sense that I will be writing a number of posts on this fascinating topic. For now I will conclude that if we leave God and the soul out of it, if we think in purely immanent or secular terms, then we are in a genuine aporetic bind, and the problem of dirty hands, narrowly construed, is a genuine one, but also an insoluble one. For rejecting any of the limbs will get us into grave trouble. That needs to be argued, of course. One entry leads to another, and another . . . .
If white moderates deserve blame for their inaction against Jim Crow, then perhaps moderate Muslims today can be faulted for failing to combat a culture of jihad.
I would add, however, that while Jim Crow has been eliminated, the same cannot be said for the culture of jihad. I should think that this is an important difference. And I would delete the weak-kneed 'perhaps' from the apodosis of the above conditional.
What Case does in his article is expose the double standard involved when one seeks to explain the now-ended racial terror against blacks in the U. S. in terms of a racist culture but fails to explain the ongoing and increasing religious terror wreaked upon the West by Muslim terrorists in terms of a jihadi culture.
As I have said many a time, little would be left of the Left were its members made bereft of their double standards. There are so many of them I was forced to begin a separate category named, appropriately enough, Double Standards.
I have had the pleasure of hearing Dr. Jasser speak twice, a few days ago right in my own neighborhood. He is an outstanding American and a Muslim, one who demonstrates that it is possible to be a moderate Muslim who accepts American values including the separation of church/mosque and state. I have reproduced, below the fold, a recent statement of his so that you may read it without the distraction of advertisements and 'eye candy.'
Jasser tells us that monitoring Muslims is not "Islamophobic." I agree heartily with what he is saying but not with how he says it. It is absolutely essential not to acquiesce in the Left's linguistic obfuscation. 'Islamophobic' and cognates are coinages designed by liberals and leftists to discredit conservatives and their views. By definition, a phobia is an irrational fear. But fear of radical Muslims and the carnage they spread is not irrational: it it is entirely reasonable and prudent. To label a person an 'Islamophobe' is therefore to imply that the person is mentally deranged or otherwise beneath consideration. It is to display a profound disrespect for one's interlocutor and his right to be addressed as a rational being. Here you have the explanation of why radical Muslims and their liberal-left enablers engage in this linguistic distortion. They aim to win at all costs and by all means, including the fabrication of question-begging and self-serving epithets.
A conservative must never talk like a liberal. To do so is thoughtless and foolish. For he who controls the terms of the debate controls the debate. When a conservative uses words like 'Islamophobic' and 'homophobic' he willy-nilly legitimizes verbal constructions meant to denigrate conservatives. Now how stupid is that?
Language matters.
What should Jasser have said? He could have said something like, "The monitoring of Muslims is reasonable and prudent in current circumstances and in no way wrongly discriminatory." Why is this preferrable? Because such monitoring obviouslydoes not express a phobia, an irrational fear of Muslims.
To understand liberals you must understand that theirs is a mind-set according to which a conservative is a bigot, one who reflexively and irrationally hates anyone different than he is. This is why conservatives who insist on securing the borders are routinely labelled 'xenophobes' by liberals and by some stupid 'conservatives' as well, an example being that foolish RINO Lindsey Graham who applied the epithet to Donald Trump when the latter quite reasonably proposed a moratorium on Muslim immigration into the U.S. Whatever you think of the proposal, and there are some reasonable arguments against it, it is not xenophobic.
There is also nothing xenophobic about border control since there are excellent reasons for it having to do with drug trafficking, public health, to mention just two. This is not to say that there aren't some xenophobes. It is true: there are a lot of bigots in the world and some of the worst call themselves 'liberals.'
Dr. Jasser is a man of great civil courage and an inspiration to me and plenty of others. If everyone were like him there would be no Muslim problem at all. One hopes and prays that no harm comes to him. Unfortunately, he is a member of a tiny minority, the minority of peaceful Muslims who respect Western values and denounce sharia, but also have the civil courage to stand up against the radicals.
To inform yourself further, see Dr. M. Zuhdi Jasser, A Battle for the Soul of Islam, Simon & Shuster, 2012.
In the 22 March 2016 attack in Brussels 34 people (31 victims and 3 perpetrators) were killed and 300 injured. Why should anyone care about this? In 2013 in Belgium alone there were 746 traffic-related fatalities. And in 2010 there were in Belgium 197 gun-related deaths. Surely it can't be rational to get excited over 34 dead as compared to the 746 dead or the 197 dead. People kill people. Things happen: things like nail bombings, highway crashes, and gun deaths.
My astute readers will of course detect something severely 'twisted' in the 'reasoning' I presented above. Horribile dictu, this is the way many leftists and some libertarians think! I shit you not. Shit happens.
Fourteen people were murdered in San Bernardino, and almost two dozen were injured, several critically. That is perfectly awful. Since September 11, 2001, I believe almost three score people have been killed in the United States in similar terrorist attacks, or so one television commentator asserted. The number sounds about right. During those same fourteen years, 120,000 Americans have been killed by guns (including those who killed themselves, just to be clear .) I cannot imagine any rational mode of discourse that treats the former number as somehow more important than the latter number. And yet, people who would pass most tests for sanity, if not intelligence, are eager to take dramatic steps to prevent another San Bernardino although they would not even consider equally vigorous steps to diminish, say by half, the number of deaths from firearms in the next fourteen years. [Emphasis added.]
Bryan Caplan quotes "the brilliant Nathan Smith" who advances "A familiar truism well-expressed:"
If we're still driving cars despite thousands of automobile accident deaths per year, we don't really set the value of human life so high that attacks in Paris (130 victims) and San Bernardino (22 victims) objectively warrant the massive media attention, revolutions in foreign policy, and proposals to shut the borders completely to Muslims that they evoke. Such events get such attention because of statistical illiteracy.
Here is an extreme example of the leftist's reflexive love of underdogs qua underdogs. A Muslim terrorist stabs an Israeli in the neck. The Israeli pulls the knife out of his neck and stabs the terrorist to death with it. Now anyone who is morally sane will cheer the Israeli for his effective and morally legitimate self-defense. But a left-wing group took the side of the Muslim terrorist! How typical.
Peace Now is a leftist anti-Israel group funded by the EU, George Soros and the usual international gang of creeps and cretins. Its opposition to self-defense against Islamic terrorism is so extreme that it even condemns a stabbing victim for fighting back against his killer.
If Donald Trump is a sort of neo-Calliclean who celebrates the winner qua winner, regardless of how he came to be a winner, the typical leftist is the neo-Calliclean's opposite number who celebrates the loser qua loser, regardless of how he came to be a loser.
Pope Benedict XVI touched on alleged “evil” in Islam very lightly in his famous 2006 lecture at Regensburg on the necessity of uniting reason and religion. He cited the example of a 14th century emperor’s view of Islam as irrationally violent and thus evil. This touched off a world-wide uproar and mayhem, concerning which then-Argentinean Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the future Pope Francis, commented: “These statements will serve to destroy in twenty seconds the careful construction of a relationship with Islam that Pope John Paul II built over the last twenty years.” He added that such statements “don’t reflect my own opinions.”
Yet another indication of Bergoglio's squishy, bien-pensant foolishness.
But what does he make of past and current reports of Islamic atrocities? The 2015 World Watch List found 4,344 Christians killed for faith-related reasons and 1,062 churches attacked. The 2016 list documents 7,106 killed and 2,425 churches attacked. There are literally thousands of cases of violence against Christians and destruction of churches in Egypt, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, Iran, Indonesia, Africa, and elsewhere in the Muslim world.
Pope Francis is presumably well-informed about such events, but he comments in his Apostolic Address, The Joy of the Gospel, “Faced with disconcerting episodes of violent fundamentalism, our respect for true followers of Islam should lead us to avoid hateful generalizations, for authentic Islam and the proper reading of the Koran are opposed to every form of violence.”
I wonder if Francis thinks that every generalization is 'hateful' just in virtue of being a generalization. I hope not. Generalize we must. The fact that it is sometimes done poorly is no argument for not doing it at all. Wise up, liberals.
Note the presumptuousness of Francis in supposing that he knows what "authentic Islam" is and requires. He desperately wants to believe that Islam is a religion of peace and so he substitutes his fervent wish for the reality. He ought to study the subject just as he ought to study economics.
In taking this position, Francis, a faithful “son of the Church,” is echoing Vatican II. At the Council, Pope John XXIII, as part of his goal of “opening the windows of the Church,” wished the participants to reconsider the relationship of the Church to Judaism, avoiding theological and liturgical positions which had a history of contributing to anti-Semitism. There was no agenda at the outset for pronouncements about the relationship to Islam; but, as I mentioned in a previous column, some Fathers and theologians at the council, were anxious to include Islam in official documents related to “non-Christian religions.”
A significant factor behind this movement was the work of Louis Massignon (1883-1962), a Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding. Massignon taught that we need a “Copernican revolution” in our approach to understanding Islam. We have to place ourselves in the center of the Islamic mindset, understanding Islamic spirituality, and conduct dialogues from that vantage point.
During the Council, one of Massignon’s disciples, the Egyptian Dominican theologian, Georges Anawati (1905-1994), actively “lobbied,” in conjunction with other council members, for positive statements about Islam in official documents. This group succeeded: Nostra aetate and Lumen gentium contain laudatory statements about Islam: “The plan of salvation also includes those who acknowledge the Creator, in the first place amongst whom are the Moslems,” an Abrahamic monotheistic religion, submitting “without reserve to the hidden decrees of God,” and sharing much with Christianity in basic beliefs and moral teachings.
But in view of the hateful attitude toward other religions shown throughout Islamic scriptures, as well as the massive numbers of murders and church-burnings and persecutions we’ve seen for decades now, was such praise simply wishful thinking? Condemnations of obvious features of Islam are almost non-existent in today’s Church.
Pope Pius XI published Mit brennender Sorge, an open critique of the German Reich and Divini redemptoris against Communism. Pope Pius XII chose to work persistently, but undercover, during his papacy, to defeat Nazism and save Jews. What if he, too, had published a bold condemnation of Nazism?
During Vatican II, the Soviet Union was a global scourge, and Our Lady of Fatima in extraordinary appearances at the outset of the Communist revolution had even warned the Church about Russia “spreading her errors throughout the world.” But incredibly there was not a whiff of criticism of Communism from the Council. What would have happened if Paul VI had strongly condemned the USSR, Leninism, and Marxism? Is diplomatic caution essential in papal pronouncements? Or should we follow the Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand I’s motto, Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, “let justice be done, even if the world perishes”?
And with regard to Islam now, an outright papal condemnation of the religion, such as uttered by popes from past centuries, we can be sure, would result in massive disturbances throughout the world – perhaps World War III. And such a condemnation might unfairly tar the moderate Muslims along with the extremists. But short of condemnation, continuous eulogizing is out of place. And as to “the religion of peace,” it’s time to take into account the traditional Muslim interpretation of “peace.” The world is divided into two “houses” – the House of Peace (Dar Al-Salaam) and the House of War (Dar Al-Harb). Only Muslims are within that first “house.”
Muslims have been murdering Christians for a long time now. Liberals need to face reality for a change. Here is an example of how adherents of the 'religion of peace' treated some Armenian Christian girls:
In his post on the genocide, (The Forgotten Genocide: Why It Matters Today) Raymond Ibrahim recounted the story of a woman who claimed to have witnessed the brutal crucifixion of 16 young girls.
In her memoir, Ravished Armenia, Aurora Mardiganian described being raped and thrown into a harem (which agrees with Islam’s rules of war). Unlike thousands of other Armenian girls who were discarded after being defiled, she managed to escape. In the city of Malatia, she saw 16 Christian girls crucified: “Each girl had been nailed alive upon her cross, spikes through her feet and hands, only their hair blown by the wind, covered their bodies.” Such scenes were portrayed in the 1919 documentary film Auction of Souls, some of which is based on Mardiganian’s memoirs.
Bryan Caplan quotes "the brilliant Nathan Smith" who advances "A familiar truism well-expressed:"
If we're still driving cars despite thousands of automobile accident deaths per year, we don't really set the value of human life so high that attacks in Paris (130 victims) and San Bernardino (22 victims) objectively warrant the massive media attention, revolutions in foreign policy, and proposals to shut the borders completely to Muslims that they evoke. Such events get such attention because of statistical illiteracy.
A truism is a truth that is obviously true. The above, however, is not true at all, let alone obviously true. It is obviously idiotic.
The Caplan/Smith argument is that because the number of auto-related deaths is much greater than terror-related deaths so far, a high level of concern about terrorism is not objectively warranted.
But this sort of reasoning involves vicious abstraction. It is highly unreasonable to consider merely the numbers on both sides while abstracting from the motives of the terrorists and the societal impact of terrorism. With very few exceptions, drivers do not intend to kill anyone, and when their actions bring about deaths, those deaths involve only themselves and a few others.
Suppose a drunk driver unintentionally causes the death of himself and a family of five. Total deaths = 6. Other people will be affected, of course, but not many. (The wife and children of the drunk driver will now have less income to get by on, etc.) The effects are confined to a small circle of acquaintances and the effects are not additive in the way that the effects of terror events are additive.
One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society. Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11? It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally. And even if you don't. Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption. The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days. Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc. That had all sorts of repercussions economic and psychological.
And if you care about civil liberties, then you should take the terror threat seriously and do your bit to combat it. For the more terror, the more government surveillance and the more infringement of civil liberties.
There is also the obvious point that jihadis would kill millions if they could. Would they use nukes against the West if they could? Of course they would. And that would change the raw numbers!
UPDATE 1/15. Today's Wall Street Journal, B1, reports that travel to Paris plunged in the wake of the November terror attacks. International flight bookings to Paris were down by 78% from Italy, 64% from Spain, 62% from other, 54% from the U.S., 51% from China, 48% from the U. K., 48% from Germany, and 41% from Canada. This for the period from 14 November to 15 December, 2105, as compared to a year earlier.
And yet only 130 were killed in the recent Parisian terror attacks. What this shows is that terrorists do not have to kill large numbers of people to have a huge effect on the world economy and on the quality of life everywhere. The fact that the people who stayed away vastly overestimated the danger to themselves is irrelevant.
The party line on Donald Trump is that he is an 'agent' of ISIS, a 'recruiter' for them. A typically supine liberal-left line in response to a real threat. Spouting the party line as Hillary did in the recent Democrat 'debate' is analogous to saying in the late '30s or early '40s that any opposition to Hitler would only 'recruit' more Nazis.
There are already enough ISIS members and other Muslim terrorists to destroy our way of life. There is no need to recruit more. There are 1.2 billion Muslims in the world. On a very conservative estimate, 10% of them support Islamic law (Shari'a). Other estimates are as high as 25%. 10% of 1.2 billion = 120 million, a sizeable number! But of course not all of them would participate actively in terrorist activities. Suppose only 1% of them would. That would still leave 1.2 million. And of these, only a few need to get through with a little luck and the right weaponry.
Fourteen people were murdered in San Bernardino, and almost two dozen were injured, several critically. That is perfectly awful. Since September 11, 2001, I believe almost three score people have been killed in the United States in similar terrorist attacks, or so one television commentator asserted. The number sounds about right. During those same fourteen years, 120,000 Americans have been killed by guns (including those who killed themselves, just to be clear .) I cannot imagine any rational mode of discourse that treats the former number as somehow more important than the latter number. And yet, people who would pass most tests for sanity, if not intelligence, are eager to take dramatic steps to prevent another San Bernardino although they would not even consider equally vigorous steps to diminish, say by half, the number of deaths from firearms in the next fourteen years. [Emphasis added.]
Let us first note that Wolff conveniently begins his count after 9/11. The Islamic terrorism of that day resulted in the deaths of 2,996 people and the injuries of 6,000 + others.[107] That adds up to around 9,000 casualties. As for the numbers Wolff cites, I will assume that they are correct.
Let us also note the phrase "killed by guns." But of course no gun has ever killed anyone. The plain truth is that people kill people and other animals often with guns, but also with box cutters, jumbo jets, and so on. Surely the good professor will grant the distinction between weapon and wielder. Weapons are morally neutral; wielders are typically not.
The question is whether it is rational to take dramatic steps to prevent another terrorist attack while taking no steps (beyond the many steps that already have been taken) to prevent further non-terrorist gun deaths, given that since 9/11 the number of gun-related non-terrorist deaths is much smaller than the number of gun-related terrorist deaths.
Wolff is maintaining that it is not rational. I say it is rational, and that Wolff's approach to the issue is not rational.
Wolff considers only the numbers of gun-related deaths while abstracting entirely from the motives of the gun-wielders and the effects that the deaths due to terror have on other people and the society at large. But this is a vicious abstraction. Terrorists aim to spread terror and disrupt civil society by slaughtering as many noncombatants as possible in unpredictable ways. They have a political agenda. Terrorism, unlike crime, is essentially political and essentially public. But the sorts of crimes that drive up the gun death numbers often occur in private and the disruption they cause is miniscule compared to that caused by terrorists.
For example, non-terrorist suicides, as opposed to suicide bombers, directly affect only themselves and almost never act from political considerations. And the same goes for mafiosi and other organized crime figures who 'whack' competitors and potential witnesses and 'rats.' The last thing they want is publicity. They are not motivated by political ideals or goals. The Lufthansa heist was about making a big score and nothing more. This holds too for ordinary criminals who kill each other and potential witnesses. And similarly for gang-bangers and drug dealers and gun-related crimes of passion. And there are the so-called 'accidental' shootings as when a careless gun owner leaves a loaded pistol where a child can find it or proceeds to clean a loaded gun.
So while the number of non-terrorist gun-related deaths of Americans is much higher over the time-frame Wolff arbitrarily chose than the number of terrorist gun-related deaths, that fact plays a minor role in any rational assessment of the threat of terrorism. Part of being rational is thinking synoptically, taking in the whole of a situation in its many aspects, and not seizing upon one aspect.
One cannot reasonably abstract from the political agenda of terrorists and the effects even a few terrorist events have on an entire society. Ask yourself: has your life changed at all since 9/11? It most certainly has if you travel by air whether domestically or internationally. Terrorists don't have to kill large numbers to attain their political goal and wreak large-scale disruption. The Tsarnaev attack on the Boston Marathon shut down the city for a few days. Same with Paris, San Bernardino, Madrid, London, etc.
There is also the obvious point that jihadis would kill millions if they could. Would they use nukes against the West if they could? Of course they would.
Why are leftists so insensitive to clear and present dangers? Why are they so eager to deflect attention from them by bringing up gun control and dubious dangers such as 'climate change'?
Here is a theory. Leftists favor losers and underdogs. Terrorists are losers and underdogs both as terrorists and as Muslims. (Not all Muslims are terrorists but almost all terrorists at the present time are Muslims.) So leftists downplay the terrorist threat. They downplay it because losers and underdogs are their clients. To them, the terrorist 'frontlash' is as nothing compared to the 'Islamophobic' backlash of the bigots, rubes, and racists of fly-over country. This helps account for why leftists downplay the terrorist threat.
But why do they try to steer the debate away from terrorism to gun control? Part of it has to be that guns and private gun ownership represent everything leftists hate such as self-reliance, individual responsibility, patriotism which they dismiss as 'jingoism,' limited government, rural people and small-town folk, and conservative attitudes which leftists perceive as racist, bigoted, xenophobic, nativist, nationalist, fascist, etc. Private gun ownership stands in the way of their totalitarian agenda. This is why they continually call for gun control when we have plenty of it already. They talk as if there is no gun control. This is because what they mean by 'gun control' is confiscation of all or almost all firearms including all semi-automatic pistols and long guns.
Of course there is much more to it than this. Leftists are anti-religion unless the religion is Islam, "the saddest and poorest form of theism," (Schopenhauer) the religion of losers and underdogs, the gang religion. As anti-religion, leftists are against God, the soul, and the freedom of the will. Not believing in freedom of the will, they don't believe in moral evil -- which is perhaps their deepest error. People are nothing but deterministic systems and products of their environment. Part of the environment is guns. Hence the repeated call to "get guns off the street"as if guns are just laying around on our highways and byways. Not believing in free agency, leftists displace agency onto inanimate non-agents such as guns. And so they think the solution is to get rid of them.
And of course this only scratches the surface. But the sun is setting and battling the Wolff Man and his bullshit has conjured up a powerful thirst in this philosopher. Time for a beer!
What is to be done about the threat of radical Islam? After explaining the problem, Pat Buchanan gives his answer:
How do we deal with this irreconcilable conflict between a secular West and a resurgent Islam?
First, as it is our presence in their world that enrages so many, we should end our interventions, shut down the empire and let Muslim rulers deal with Muslim radicals.
Second, we need a moratorium on immigration from the Islamic world. Inevitably, some of the young we bring in, like the Tsarnaevs, will yield to radicalization and seek to strike a blow for Islam against us.
What benefit do we derive as a people to justify the risks we take by opening up America to mass migration from a world aflame with hatred and hostility over race, ethnicity, culture, history and faith?
Why are we bringing all of the world's quarrelsome minorities, and all the world's quarrels with them, into our home?
What we saw in Boston was the dark side of diversity.
Buchanan is right. We will never be able to teach the backward denizens of these God-forsaken regions how to live. And certainly not by invasion and bombing. Besides, what moral authority do we have at this point? We are a country in dangerous fiscal, political, and moral decline. The owl of Minerva is about to spread her wings. We will have our hands full keeping ourselves afloat for a few more years. Until we wise up and shape up, a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands is only common sense.
Common sense, however, is precisely what liberals lack. So I fear things will have to get much worse before they get better.
Some lefty scribblers, effete and epicene, have their knickers in a knot worrying about the nativist and xenophobic 'backlash' post-Paris and post-San Bernardino. Even worse, however, is Attorney General Loretta Lynch's disgracing of herself along these lines:
Lynch addressed the Muslim Advocate’s tenth-anniversary dinner and declared that she is concerned about an “incredibly disturbing rise of anti-Muslim rhetoric . . . that fear is my greatest fear.” Her greatest fear is — not terrorism — but a nonexistent Islamophobic backlash? ISIS has demonstrated that it can bring down passenger jets, strike the heart of a great Western capitol with urban assault teams, and inspire horrible carnage in California. We also know that ISIS has pledged to keep attacking the U.S. and possesses chemical weapons. Yet it’s politically incorrect speech that strikes fear into the heart of our attorney general.
To put it in the form of an understatement: Lefties are not very good at threat assessment. I should think that the 'frontlash' is far worse than any backlash that is likely to occur.
And now San Bernardino. It is surely 'interesting' that in supposedly conservative media venues such as Fox News there has been no discussion, in the wake of this latest instance of Islamic terrorism, of the obvious question whether immigration from Muslim lands should be put on hold. Instead, time is wasted refuting silly liberal calls for more gun control. 'Interesting' but not surprising. Political correctness is so pervasive that even conservatives are infected with it. It is very hard for most of us, including conservatives, to believe that it is Islam itself and not the zealots of some hijacked version thereof that is the problem. But slowly, and very painfully, people are waking up. But I am not sanguine that only a few more such bloody events will jolt us into alertness. It will take many more.
So is it not eminently reasonable to call for a moratorium on immigration from Muslim lands? Here are some relevant points. I would say that they add up to a strong cumulative case argument for a moratorium.
1. There is no right to immigrate. See here for some arguments contra the supposed right by Steven A. Camarota. Here is my refutation of an argument pro. My astute commenters add further considerations. Since there is no right to immigrate, immigrants are allowed in only if they meet certain criteria. Surely we are under no obligation to allow in those who would destroy our way of life.
2. We philosophers will debate until doomsday about rights and duties and everything else. But in the meantime, shouldn't we in our capacity as citizens exercise prudence and advocate that our government exercise prudence? So even if in the end there is a right to immigrate, the prudent course would be to suspend this supposed right for the time being until we get a better fix on what is going on. Let's see if ISIS is contained or spreads. Let's observe events in Europe and in Britain. Let's see if Muslim leaders condemn terrorism. Let's measure the extent of Muslim assimilation.
3. "Overwhelming percentages of Muslims in many countries want Islamic law (sharia) to be the official law of the land, according to a worldwide survey by the Pew Research Center." Here. Now immigrants bring their culture and their values with them. Most Muslims will bring a commitment to sharia with them. But sharia is incompatible with our American values and the U. S. Constitution. Right here we have a very powerful reason to disallow immigration from Muslim lands.
4. You will tell me that not all Muslims subscribe to sharia, and you will be right. But how separate the sheep from the goats? Do you trust government officials to do the vetting? Are you not aware that people lie and that the Muslim doctrine of taqiyya justifies lying?
5. You will insist that not all Muslims are terrorists, and again you will be right. But almost all the terrorism in the world at the present time comes from Muslims acting upon Muslim beliefs.
Pay attention to the italicized phrase.
There are two important related distinctions we need to make.
There is first of all a distinction between committing murder because one's ideology, whether religious or non-religious, enjoins or justifies murder, and committing murder for non-ideological reasons or from non-ideological motives. For example, in the Charlie Hebdo attack, the murders were committed to avenge the blasphemy against Muhammad, the man Muslims call 'The Prophet' and consider Allah's messenger. And that is according to the terrorists themselves. Clearly, the terrorist acts were rooted in Muslim religious ideology in the same way that Communist and Nazi atrocities were rooted in Communist and Nazi political ideology, respectively. Compare that to a mafioso killing an innocent person who happens to have witnessed a crime the mafioso has committed. The latter's a mere criminal whose motives are crass and non-ideological: he just wanted to score some swag and wasn't about to be inconvenienced by a witness to his crime. "Dead men tell no tales."
The other distinction is between sociological and doctrinal uses of terms such as 'Mormon,' 'Catholic,' Buddhist,' and 'Muslim.' I know a man who is a Mormon in the sense that he was born and raised in a practicing Mormon family, was himself a practicing Mormon in his early youth, hails from a Mormon state, but then 'got philosophy,' went atheist, and now rejects all of the metaphysics of Mormonism. Is he now a Mormon or not? I say he is a Mormon sociologically but not doctrinally. He is a Mormon by upbringing but not by current belief and practice. This is a distinction that absolutely must be made, though I won't hold it against you if you think my terminology less than felicitous. Perhaps you can do better. Couch the distinction in any terms you like, but couch it.
Examples abound. An aquaintance of mine rejoices under the surname 'Anastasio.' He is Roman Catholic by upbringing, but currently a committed Buddhist by belief and practice. Or consider the notorious gangster, 'Whitey' Bulger who is fortunately not an acquaintance of mine. Biographies of this criminal refer to him as Irish-Catholic, which is not wrong. But surely none of his unspeakably evil deeds sprang from Catholic moral teaching. Nor did they spring from Bulger's 'hijacking' of Catholicism. You could call him, with some justification, a Catholic criminal. But a Catholic who firebombs an abortion clinic to protest the evil of abortion is a Catholic criminal in an entirely different sense. The difference is between the sociological and the doctrinal.
6. Perhaps you will say to me that the percentage of Muslims who are terrorists is tiny. True. But all it takes is a handful, properly positioned, with the right devices, to bring the country to a screeching halt. And those who radicalize and inspire the terrorists need not be terrorists themselves. They could be imams in mosques operating in quiet and in secret.
7. You will tell me that a moratorium would keep out many good, decent Muslims who are willing to assimilate, who will not try to impose sharia, who will not work to undermine our system of government, and who do not condone terrorism. And you will be right. But again, there is no right to immigrate. So no wrong is done to good Muslims by preventing them from immigrating.
8. Think of it in terms of cost and benefit. Is there any net benefit from Muslim immigration? No. The cost outweighs the benefit. This is consistent with the frank admission that there are many fine Muslims who would add value to our society.
9. Perhaps you will call me a racist. I will return the compliment by calling you stupid for thinking that Islam is a race. Islam is a religious political ideology.
It is Saturday night and I'm 'Islamed out.' I could say more but I've had enough for now. So I hand off to Patrick J. Buchanan, Time for a Moratorium on Immigration?
Meanwhile, Islamic society is whitewashed by pretending the dangers it poses to Western societies are non-Islamic (the Left with talk of "extremism"), or so outside the Islamic norm as to render Islam itself beyond debate, beyond concern (the Right with talk of "Islamism").
Take a recent essay on Paris by Andrew C. McCarthy.
“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam,mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West. It is what animates our enemies. ['Construction' here means 'construal,' 'interpretation.']
We are supposed to believe that "a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East," is what animates our enemies -- not Islam.
Is that so?
If this were ten, five, three years ago, I might ask what Koran, sunnas, and hadiths that this "construction of Islam" is based upon? I might break out the poll data that demonstrates strong Muslim affinity for sharia the world over. I might point to a 2013 study of 9,000 Muslims in six European countries which found that 65 percent say that religious rules are more important that the laws of the country in which they live.
But is there a point? Fourteen years after 9/11, Islam is spectrum-wide defended in the public square even as it destroys the public square, while the threat to the public square is usually identitied as coming from Europe's so-called "far right."
But never fear. Memorial light displays are ready anywhere, anytime.
Jillian Becker self portrait (early 1970s)
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