On the fourth anniversary of the publication of the Muhammad cartoons by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten, we consider the question: has terrorism proved itself a successful tactic in the Islamic jihad against the rest of the world?:

In the 20th century, in the era of the Cold War, most of the world’s terrorist groups were ideologically communist, whatever else they were: revolutionary, or national-separatist, or national-liberationist. Most of them were aided and abetted by the Soviet Union. (So were small groups of young, free, prosperous West Europeans who committed acts of terrorism on the pretext of serving selfless causes but primarily to get a thrill out of it, such as the so-called Baader-Meinhof group.) There were no terrorist groups within the Communist Bloc.

In Latin America and Africa some groups gained their objectives, and their success may have been due in part to their use of terrorism; but it cannot be said that terrorism proved a reliably winning tactic wherever it was tried, and it certainly cannot be said that Communism won.

In the 21st century, however, terrorism has been highly successful. Almost all terrorist activity since the turn of the century has been perpetrated by Muslims acting in the name of Islam. It can accurately and fairly be called ‘Islamic terrorism’ without implying that every Muslim in the world is a terrorist, any more, it might be said, than ‘Basque terrorism’ taints every citizen of the Basque country. Yet the comparison would be misleading. While it is true enough that every Muslim is not an active terrorist, it is nevertheless the religious duty of every Muslim to help the advance of holy war against the non-Muslim world. Confirmation that Muslim terrorists are intent on fulfilling a religious duty may be found in these unequivocal statements by the 9/11 plotters, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and five others, submitted in writing at their trial in December 2008: ‘Our prophet was victorious because of fear… our religion is a religion of fear and terror to the enemies of God: the Jews, Christians, and pagans. With God’s willing, we are terrorists to the bone. So, many thanks to God… We ask to be near to God, we fight you and destroy you and terrorize you. The Jihad in god’s [sic] cause is a great duty in our religion.’

All collectivist ideologies – for glaring examples Nazism and Communism – are intrinsically violent, since the collective obedience of a citizenry can only be sustained by force. Islam is a collectivist ideology and this alone makes it intrinsically violent; but more explicitly, Islam demands of every one of its devotees that he (and she) be a holy warrior against all who remain outside of its collective. It teaches that to die in a violent onslaught against unbelievers is the highest service a Muslim can render to its God, so a ‘martyr’ who kills himself while perpetrating murder will be rewarded by God with instant admission into an eternity of sensual rewards in a leisurely afterlife.

Other collectivist creeds employ torturers and executioners to terrorize their collective into remaining submissive, and employ individuals to deliver their fellow citizens into the hands of the torturers and executioners; but Islam goes further and lays on every one of its votaries a God-ordered duty to kill for the cause of conquest, or at the very least to assist a fellow Muslim to kill. Since they do not fear death, nothing can stop Islam’s holy warriors. Their willingness, their positive eagerness to die for their cause, powerfully promotes success.

No wonder then that Islamic terrorism has succeeded. The ‘Muhammad cartoon’ episode alone demonstrates its triumph. When, four years ago today, a Danish newspaper published cartoons of Islam’s prophet, Muslims reacted by threatening civil disorder throughout Europe, killing Christians in the Middle East, and so intimidating the editors of almost all other newspapers in the world that very few dared to reproduce the cartoons. European governments cringed, apologized, and groveled. Even in America, a book about the cartoons omits the cartoons themselves, because the publishers, Yale University, fear Muslim reprisals.

Fear of Islam has become a fact of life in Europe. All EU governments rush to gratify the demands of their growing and incendiary Muslim minorities. Police are reluctant to enforce the law in ‘Muslim areas’. Judges hesitate or refuse to impose harsh sentences on Muslims who incite and plot violence, or to deport them. The indigenous populations are effectively ‘dhimmified’: rendered subservient to the will of the Muslim immigrants. There, by the use of terrorism, Islam has won.

In America, as this is being written, Muslims have been charged with plotting or attempting to carry out violent attacks with weapons of mass destruction in New York, Chicago, Dallas, and a Marine Corps base in New Mexico. An organizer of the Muslim march on Washington, D.C. on September 25th wrote on his Facebook site: ‘We don’t want to democratize Islam, we want to Islamize democracy.’

The dhimmification of America with its much larger population will take longer than it did in Europe, but day after day, step by step, Islam is making its gains. Governments, editors, police, judges, citizens already hesitate to use their constitutional right to speak freely if what they say might offend Muslims.

Since the mass murder of some 3,000 Americans by nineteen Muslims in 2001, there have been more than 14,000 Islamic terrorist attacks in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The al-Qaeda organization, probably now headquartered in Pakistan, inspires and trains terrorists from Europe and America to carry out acts of mass murder in Western cities. The Islamic state of Iran sponsors Hizbullah, the terrorist organization that has battened on to Lebanon and threatens Israel; sends arms and equipment through Syria to terrorists in Iraq; supplies the Hamas terrorists with materiel so it can continue to wage perpetual rocket war against Israel from Gaza; and directly threatens Israel with annihilation by nuclear attack.

Against all this the United Nations, sentimentally established after the Second World War to be a peace maker, proves itself worse than useless, having long ago become an agency of the Islamic states, continually manipulated by them to lie and propagandize, and actively enable anti-Western violence.

How can civilization fend off this enemy whose power lies in its invulnerability to physical damage? What strategy can it plan – short of annihilation, which is hardly possible even if it were to be unconscionably contemplated, there being over a billion Muslims in the world? Legislatures cannot do it. Police forces cannot do it. Armies cannot do it.

An optimistic view is that prosperity could do it. Encourage immigration into Western countries and grant massive economic aid to Islamic states. The reasoning goes that as people become more prosperous they become better educated, have fewer children, are less influenced by – or even renounce – religion; they see and desire the benefits of western civilization, take advantage of its openness to individual effort, and try to become part of it rather than destroy it. Unfortunately it is a theory that has been tested and not proved. It is out of the prosperous third generation of Muslim immigrants that Islamic terrorists have arisen in Britain, to place bombs in trains and park a car full of explosive in the streets of its capital. Even if there were strong evidence in favor of the theory, an experiment that requires the First World to pour its resources into the Islamic Third World is unrealistic and impracticable because it is not affordable.

An alternative idea is to isolate the Islamic nations: apply extreme sanctions; refuse to trade with them, even though they have the oil that the West needs; do not give them aid; do not permit Muslim immigration into Western countries, and deport back to their countries of origin as many present immigrants as law and civilized values permit; in sum, leave Islam to its own devices, and let internecine conflict, lack of modern technology, poor medical knowledge and general ignorance take their toll of the enemy to reduce it to impotence. This too is unrealistic, if for no other reason than that such measures would offend the sense of moral self-worth that determines the political choices of at least half the people in the Western world; those who hold compassion as their highest value and vote for parties that claim to be motivated by it – in other words, the political left.

There is no easy answer. The civilized world has at present the intellectual and economic, as well as military advantage over Islam. But if it cannot find a way with all its powers to preserve itself, it will be overcome. Europe has chosen not to resist. When most of Europe as well as most of Asia have become fully Islamized, as they very likely will be, how might America, if it is still free, deal with such a changed world? What will it do to ensure its survival when it is the last stronghold of civilization?

Jillian Becker September 30,  2009

We may all know it, but it needs to be repeated from time to time: The great political divide is between those who favor collectivism and those who favor individual freedom.

Collectivism on a national scale is necessarily statism. Human nature being what it is – instinctively self-preserving and self-advancing – such collectivism requires compulsion, or, to use a softer word, organization: the organization of an entire nation. (At least the nation: the ultimate collectivist dream is the global collective, the organization of the whole world.) And only a government, which is to say the state, has the power to do it.

A collectivized nation is not simply one that is under the rule of a common law. To the contrary, a society in which the citizens consent to be subject equally to the abstract authority of law (a constitution, or a body of laws made by representatives answerable to their electors), is a free society.

A collectivized nation is under the rule of human organizers who exert control of the people according to their own will. It is the opposite of a free society. Such a state is, in the true meaning of the word, a tyranny.

It may be a benign tyranny; its rulers, serially or in concert, could be (in laughable theory) persons of admirable uprightness, possessed of the utmost goodwill and kindly intentions, moved by the highest ideals, inspired by the loftiest visions of human happiness, but it is nevertheless a tyranny.

And besides, what sort of person can believe he knows what’s best for everyone else? How can he be a good sort? Wouldn’t such a man (or woman – there have been tyrannous queens) have to be an insufferably arrogant know-it-all? Or the sort who doesn’t really give a damn about the effects of his orders on others just so long as he has his own way? And is there likely to be a person who really can know enough to be the best arbiter of everyone else’s fate? Or can be trusted to set the best possible direction for millions of lives? And is it conceivable that one direction can be best for everyone?

Collectivists include Socialists, Communists, Nazis, Fascists, global government idealists, the Greens, and in sum the ideologists of any form of totalitarianism, including Islam.

There are two types of collectivist states and movements:

Non-egalitarian: such as Hitler’s Germany, Mussolini’s Italy, Salazar’s Portugal, Islam.

This type, except for Islam, has too few devotees at present to constitute an ideological threat. (Islam is an active enemy of freedom, but not only because it is collectivist, so we won’t discuss it any further here.)

Egalitarian: such as Soviet Russia, Pol Pot’s Cambodia, Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, Greens.

A collectivist state of the egalitarian type controls the distribution of material goods, of course. If goods are to be equally distributed, there has to be an agency doing the distributing, and that agency can only be the state. Having the monopoly of force, the state alone has the power to redistribute all property; to seize what is yours and bestow it on someone else. Maybe you worked long and hard for it, but nevertheless the state ordains that someone else who didn’t work for it has at least as much right to it as you have, in fact more. That’s the immorality of redistribution. It is called ‘social justice’. Equality of this sort is incompatible with liberty.

Millions pursue these egalitarian ideals, as ‘socialists’, ‘liberals’, ‘progressives’, or ‘greens’, despite their colossal failure wherever they’ve been tried in practice.

The attraction of an egalitarian collectivist system lies in its apparent guarantee of security. It offers you an alternative to a lonely struggle for survival. It will, theoretically, provide you with food, shelter, schooling, healing. And on top of all that, it will give you a sense of (communal) purpose, and a lifting of responsibility to make life-directing decisions for yourself. If you just do what you’re told, work where you are directed to work, live where you are allowed to live, eat what is made available to you, repeat the lessons you are taught, you will survive. And furthermore you‘ll have nothing to reproach yourself with; you can bear a lightness of moral being, certain that you are no higher or lower than anybody else, having neither to envy others nor to be annoyingly envied by them.

Paradise? For those who think it may be, there is bad news. The whole utopian structure is built on a fallacy. The idea that you will be more secure in the arms of the state than you are if left to your own devices is an illusion. What the state provides the state can withhold. If the state gives you a job, it can deny you a job. The same with housing, education, medicine. You are dependent on it, and if it fails you or punishes you by withdrawing its patronage, you will have no recourse. Your choice is to live as a slave obedient to the state, or perish.

The only real security lies always in your own ability to act for yourself (and your immediate dependents). It may not be easy, yet most who try succeed. The more freely you can act for yourself, the safer you are. The state’s only legitimate role is to safeguard you while you pursue your self-chosen aims, by protecting your country from external enemies with military strength, and you personally by enforcing the law.

The state is forever an incipient threat to freedom. It tends to accumulate power and encroach gradually on the freedom of the citizens. It needs to be kept from becoming too powerful. How to limit the power of government is the chief problem for representative democracies.

The state will take more power to itself in times of national crisis, such as war or severe economic recession. It can – and governments often do – invent crises as an excuse to take more power. They are doing so now. One of the most potent excuses that representative governments are seizing on to expand way beyond acceptable limits is ‘climate change’ with its ‘threats to the environment’.

It is in the name of an apparently overriding necessity – nothing less than the preservation of our planet – that governments are busy trying to organize populations into collective compliance with their will. All populations. The salvation of Earth is only possible, the environmentalists say, if their remedies are applied uniformly to the entire planet. Never has there been such a gift of an excuse for collectivists in power to organize the rest of us. We must all, they insist, henceforth live, work, play, travel, dress, eat, and house ourselves as they tell us to if we are to survive.

DO NOT BELIEVE THEM.

Post Script: Green is the new Red (as in Communist Red). The Communist Van Jones, briefly appointed as Green Jobs Adviser to President Obama, made no secret of why he liked the job. He said that the green economy would start off as ‘a small subset’ of a complete revolution, away from ‘grey capitalism’ toward redistribution of all the wealth. ‘We are going to push it and push it and push it and push it until it becomes the engine for transforming the whole society.’

Jillian Becker   September 2009

Barack Obama declared himself, in Berlin, to be a ‘citizen of the world’. It was not a mere rhetorical flourish. He has a globalist agenda under which the US will enter into a series of treaties that would subject America to foreign rule over its wealth (redistributing it world-wide), its trade, its laws, its use of energy, and even its defense.

The United Nations, that ghastly powerhouse of corruption, hypocrisy, and injustice, is envisaged as the nascent institution of world government.

Liberal left opinion tends to be against the nation state. It is the opinion of approximately half the voters in the Western world. Half the people of the free West apparently want to destroy their nations, and are literally doing so. They may explain their hatred of the nation state by reference to ‘colonialism’, as if in many cases colonies were not more prosperous, just, and free than the independent tyrannies they have become. Or they may say that the wars and massacres in the last century resulted from ‘nationalism’ so the nation must go; but their thinking would not be right, because the wars and massacres were the work of dictators, not democratic states of which the strongest opposed and defeated the aggressors.

Whatever their explanations, they have launched a movement for the suicide of Western nations.

All over the Western world men and women in national and international assemblies, ministries, academies, councils and committees devote themselves to the business of putting an end to their national identities. Patriotism to them is utterly absurd. Any manifestation of pride in their nation’s history, culture, traditions, institutions, even law, embarrasses if it doesn’t outrage them. In all the countries of Europe, and now under Obama’s leadership in the United States, they work towards their goal.

The very idea of the nation state they consider to be an anachronism; a nasty thing of the past much to be regretted. The more powerful and glorious the past, the more regretful they are. Filled with remorse for what their forefathers achieved, they will apologize to any foreigner who’ll listen to them. However hard their independence as a nation was won, their system of government developed, their individual freedom wrested from the fist of tyranny, they count it all worth nothing. Obama, whose ignorance of history should but doesn’t embarrass him, routinely apologizes for America to appalling little despotisms, and to countries that have survived as comparatively free nations only because America saved them from conquest by tyrannical powers.

National borders between European countries are already as good as gone. The EU plans to have ‘regions’ which will cross the borders of those outdated old nation states and replace them for the convenience of the central administration. American liberals – how many nobody knows – apparently look to this development across the Atlantic as a model to be emulated.

What will be lost if the nation state is lost?

For the most part, our countries have been identical with our nationalities. Our nationalities give us the inestimable gifts of an historical significance and a hopeful destiny beyond our individual lives; a meaning, a kind of immortality, a role in a drama, which, whether we are leading or bit-part players, involves us all. Just by existing as people of this or that country we may feel ourselves to be part of an endless story. Our nation is our greater self, the ‘we’ that is a greatness for every ‘I’, whether the ‘I’ be small or grand in personal achievement.  For many it is worth fighting and dying for. But now the story may end after all. For though it is possible for a nation to live on after its state is destroyed (the Jews did), the likelihood is that it will not. How many nations have disappeared from history with the loss of their settled, coherent, self-protected territory?  Top of the head guess – too many to count.

What else can endow us by birthright or adoption with that powerful plural identity which we seem to need and glory in? How will we fare as individuals without the nation state?  It places us in the scheme of things. It gives us a ‘local habitation and a name’. It defines us for ourselves and for others, clothing us in connotations derived from a certain history to intimate a special character. We inherit its language, which shapes our thoughts. It sets many of our goals, provides the chances for achieving them, holds a place for us, notes and records our existence. It protects us from foreign enemies and domestic assailants. It makes demands of us that we can fulfill with pride and delight, or chafe against. It provides the causes we may strive for or oppose. It is our home, our stage, our shelter, our fortress, our field, our base. Personified, it is our guardian, our teacher, our judge, and our avenger.

The nation state makes and enforces the rules that, at their best, allow us to live in freedom. It was one of the great steps forward of mankind when the city-states of ancient Greece embraced as citizens all those who would live in them not because they sprang from that particular soil but because they would accept a common law. The tribe was superseded by the state. (The great Spanish conservative Ortega y Gasset called it citizenship by virtue of  ius rather than rus – a commonality of law rather than of native soil.)  The citizens could have been born elsewhere, and could remain individual in their tastes and choices, but owed a common duty and allegiance to the state.  The United States of America is the greatest development of that splendid idea.

The European Union may have been intended by some of its enthusiastic founders to be a bigger nation-state itself in which people could live their individual lives as they chose provided only that they obeyed the laws that they themselves would have a hand in making through the democratic process. But it hasn’t worked out like that, and there is cause to doubt that it was ever really meant to. There were other purposes in the minds of its creators: Germany needed to dissolve its guilt for the Holocaust in the ocean of Europe; France hoped to be the hegemonic power in a union populous and rich enough to rival the United States.

In fact the EU is not a democracy. Representatives are elected to a European parliament, but that body is not a legislature and has little power to affect its laws. Tasked with homogenizing peoples who have different histories, languages, traditions, tastes and temperaments, an unelected bureaucracy rules. It is an authoritarian Kafkaesque Castle. Already a police-state-lite, the EU is on the road to totalitarianism.

True, it may not survive long enough to become as bad as the late Soviet Union because a Muslim majority will in all probability turn it in another direction. But there’s little comfort in that thought for those who have always preferred the old national independence to the new Europe with its Babel of tongues, its shameless corruption, its politically correct restrictions on freedom. If a Caliphate should be established by the emerging Muslim majority, freedom will not be merely restricted, it will be destroyed, erased from the book.

Politically correct opinion may like the prospect of the Caliphate because Islam aims to dominate the whole world and will wage jihad until it does, and then the dream of World Government will be realized.

But where, without the protection of the nation state, will the rest of us find shelter?

Jillian Becker   August 2, 2009