Redstate

By Paul J Cella Posted in War — Comments (24) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

So it looks as though, having first fitfully embraced the Jihad by means of democracy, Palestine will consummate this union by simple brute force. Hamas, a forthright agent of the Jihad, is swiftly conquering Gaza, dispossessing the nationalist organization Fatah; and in a kind of microcosm of Western impotence, we see Nationalism, a thing basically understood by the West, overthrown by Religion, a thing made mysterious to by our folly of forgetfulness — overthrown first by Westerns mechanisms such as elections and other democratic forms, and then by means of Western technology. We have before us, in short, Democracy and Progress.

Read on.

Western impotence, my friends, is something that in my judgment amounts to simply a fact we have to confront. By that I mean merely this: the Jihad is older and deeper than most of us realized at first, and even today many influential people are still in a position of the most brassbound and reactionary denial about it. The Jihad will not soon be changed or defeated, much less broken and discredited, by any craft we here possess. We cannot introduce Permanent Revolution into the strange ferment of piety and radicalism in the Dar al-Islam: and expect to profit from the consequences of that toxic brew. We can hardly predict those consequences, much less exploit them toward a just peace.

What we can do, perhaps, is stand our ground in the Dar al-Harb — the house of war, our lands, where Islam is not ascendant, but into which Muslims continue to filter, most for perfectly understandable and even noble reasons, but far too many for reasons of insurrection and terror. Spain, let us say, is not yet an Islamic outpost: but many on both sides of this contest expect Spain to become one, perhaps even within the lifetime of the rising generation. This catastrophe we should set our minds and our policy against with the fullest vigor and resolve. The Republic of France, often the object of our jests and barbs, has recently taken demonstrable if insufficient steps, hard on the heels of petty insurrections in the banlieues, toward a wholesome realism; and she ought to be supported and praised. Here in our own land, the drift of prejudice, and the hardening of even reflective opinion, is in my observation decisively in the right direction: that is, toward intransigent opposition to the Jihad, toward deep suspicion of its enablers, and toward a healthy and necessary skepticism of the whole culture and religion from which it has emerged. An example of this: Last summer I had occasion to present some of the proud Liberals of my acquaintance and relation, with drafts of several of the more strident chapters in a book written against the Jihad (publication date still unknown). These old Democrats and young progressives, whom I expected to return to me with fire in their bellies, reproaches for my temerity, and distress at my intolerance, instead returned sullen and resigned, but in agreement. Digging further into this happy surprise of agreement, I discovered that for some the Cartoon Jihad had effected the hardening of opinion, for others the silence of official Islam, for still others the palpable dissimulation of some spokesmen of Islam — whatever the specific impetus, the result was the same: they had had it with the Islamic religion, and were quite through with all the platitudes that have long fettered any discussion on the subject.

So, if the reader will permit me to carry through a metaphor, not of my making: we have our own house to attend to, which is the house that the Jihad craves to bring under its dominion by whatever means available. There may be some reason, in the course of defending our house from razzias and revolts and usurpations, for calculated interference of a destabilizing character in the enemy’s house. For instance, while the Democracy in Palestine Project is clearly a failure on its own terms, for democracy has not hindered our enemy but helped him attain power, and has not advanced liberty unless liberty be confused with anarchy — yet it is not obvious to me why we should now join the chorus of diplomats and analysts pining for “stability” in that unfortunate land. Leaving the factions butcher one another, while plainly ruinous for the inhabitants of Palestine, will at least shift the focus of bloodletting to the Dar al-Islam itself. Even the smoothest PR-men for the Palestinians sounded a little ridiculous blaming their civil war on Israel and the West, which together gave the Palestinians the means to conduct real wars for real things like a State.

But I think the important thing this: Before we can advance our resistance to the Jihad from a basically defensive posture — which is all we are really capable of now — to a more robust and healthy offensive one, we must cleanse ourselves of the crippling errors, misperceptions, delusions and rationalisms, which we have taken hold of in our minds. The principle of Democracy should be set aside, or at least reduced to an emphatically instrumental place. We favor democracy — to the extent that it weakens our enemy or strengthens our friends. The principle of Pluralism should be similarly demoted, because its effect on our house, which again is where we must focus, is to weaken our unity against the Jihad. Above all we have give the public discourse of the Republic free range over the subject of the Islamic religion, without cringing in the face of the various prepackaged invectives that our enemy and his dupes make such ready use of.

Such a “free range” of inquiry will likely expose what was plain to the men of the West long ago: that the Jihad is native to the primitive tradition of Islam and not a recent innovation; that it derives from the actions and teachings of the Prophet, whose example is unimpeachable in Islamic doctrine; and that its success as an instrument of conquest and subjugation is unparalleled in the history of the world.