The World War Zone

We are in a world war. Labeled erroneously a "war on terror," any reasonable person understands that these hostilities are the result of resentment in the Muslim world that has lead to a seething hatred. The resentment has deep roots and the causes are many.

Muslims were progressed in comparison to the West many centuries ago. The West has prospered while they have remained stagnant. We in the West would probably chalk this up to the historical ebb and flow of cultures: some advance while others recede only to advance again. Muslims can't see progress in this manner for they view Islam and Muslims as "superior" and non-believers to be not only inferior but not worthy of having any authority or say in the affairs of man on earth. It galls them to know that for all their so-called superiority, for all the billions of dollars transferred to them through the sale of oil, they have not regained their "rightful place" as overlords to all mankind.

Many Westerners still don't understand that Muslims, all Muslims, feel this way about non-believers and their true position relative to the rest of us. They continue to make excuses and theories for why the jihadists attack us. Rebecca Bynum at JihadWatch has a solid grip on the recent London bombings and our present plight.

“The British anyway have far, far more experience of appeasement than the Spaniards. They know how to do it slowly, imperceptibly, so that nobody much notices.”
The history of Islamic conquest is filled to bursting with exactly this type of bit-by-bit appeasement; the slow but steady elevation of Islam coupled with the equally slow, almost imperceptible lowering of the values and ideals of the host civilization. The British seemed resigned and stoic in the face of terrorist attacks on Thursday. They may have come to believe that terrorism is inevitable and there is nothing they can do about it. As the Western world becomes increasingly engulfed in Muslim terrorism, many will prefer to ignore, like the passengers on the Titanic, that cold, wet feeling around the ankles. Pretend it isn’t happening because there’s nothing we can do about it anyway.
The history of the decline of Eastern Christian civilization occurred over many centuries, not all at once. Death came by slow degrees, achieved as much through civilizational suicide on the part of ever self-critical Christians and Jews as through actual physical violence on the part of the slowly engulfing Muslim population. Muslims are simply not as prone to self-doubt, you see, because Islam is the Perfect and Complete Total Explanation of the Universe. Therefore, Muslims are likely to have the stronger will in any contest of wills that extends over centuries. Samuel Huntington predicted the ultimate victory of Islam, and Bernard Lewis predicted that Europe would be completely Islamized by the end of this century. Not exactly cheerful tidings to those of us who have grown rather fond of Western civilization as it is.

The history of Islamic conquest is filled with people who were willing to sacrifice an uncertain and perilous future for a peaceful life in the present, or for monetary or political advantage, or because the relentless pressure of Islam with all its institutionalized persecution of non-Muslims disguised as “justice” finally came down to a life or death decision, or even a “this is the only way I can keep my job” decision. One could say that most, if not all, modern Muslims are the descendants of such people. Some time in the past a Christian or a Jewish ancestor decided the fight wasn’t worth it anymore, capitulated, and that was that. All his or her descendants from that time to this became Muslim. None could leave the new faith without risking death. Those are the rules of Islam. We would be wise to understand them.

The history of those formerly Christian or Jewish capitulators was then slowly distorted and destroyed by the conquered peoples themselves, who preferred not to remember. They preferred to think what they had chosen was better, and refused to acknowledge what they had lost. According to the incomparable historian Bat Ye’or, “the civilization of dhimmitude does not develop all at once. It is a long process that involves many elements and a specific mental conditioning. It happens when peoples replace history by myths, when they fight to uphold these destructive myths, more than their own values because they are confused by having transformed lies into truth. They hold to those myths as if they were the only guarantee for their survival, when, in fact, they are the path to destruction. Terrorized by the evidence and teaching of history, those peoples prefer to destroy it rather than to face it. They replace history with childish tales, thus living in amnesia, inventing moral justification for their own self-destruction.” The popular idea that Islam is a peaceful and a harmlessly beautiful religion is one of these childish tales. A childish tale nonetheless preferred, because to admit the truth of our truly dire situation would be too overwhelming and would make us feel too helpless in the face of it.

The question, according to Derbyshire, should be this: “Is the United States willing to fight this war the way it needs fighting, with grim ferocity and cold unconcern for legalistic niceties? To lay waste great territories and their peoples, innocent and guilty alike, to level cities, to burn forests and divert rivers, to smite our enemies hip and thigh, to carry out summary execution of captured leaders? Of course not — how barbaric! And yet (whispers the ancestral, tribal voice in our heads, and in British heads too) if not, then what’s the point? War is a tribal affair, one tribe exterminating another, or reducing it to utter impotence and ignominious surrender. That’s what war is, and it isn’t anything else. We know this in our bones, from a million years of tribal living and fighting. If we are not willing to fight a war like that — which apparently we are not, being much too civilized — then we should not be too surprised if our allies turn and cut deals with our enemies. At least they’ll have a quiet life, for a while.”

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