Islamism – Page 6 – Maverick Philosopher

Islam: The Religion of Submission

What follows are excerpts from a powerful and penetrating essay by William Kilpatrick who deserves an award for his insight and courage. Please read the entire piece. Emphases added.

Submission. That’s what the word “Islam” means. Muslims must submit to Allah, and the rest of the world must eventually submit to Islam. Submission does not necessarily require conversion, but it does require that one acknowledge the superiority of Islam, pay the jizya tax, and, in general, keep one’s head down.

Europe is currently in the process of submitting to Islam, and America also seems destined to eventually submit. If you have young children or grandchildren, it’s likely that they will have to adapt at some point to living in a Muslim-dominated society. It won’t necessarily be a Muslim-majority society because, as history testifies, Muslims don’t need a majority in order to successfully take control of non-Muslim societies.

[. . .]

A culture war can only be fought by cultural institutions—schools, churches, political and civic organizations, and so on. As things stand, however, none of our cultural institutions have shown much evidence that they are equipped to fight a culture war with cultural jihadists. The chief reason this is so is that most of these institutions are still fighting the last culture war—the civil rights struggle and the concomitant war against intolerance, racism, and bigotry. This “old-war” mentality makes it nearly impossible for our cultural and civic leaders to resist Islamization. Because so many Americans still live mentally in a time when intolerance was considered the greatest evil, they have difficulty understanding that an indiscriminate tolerance can father just as many sins.

One way of grasping the vulnerability of our society to Islamization is to ask “Who’s going to stop it?” Where, exactly, are the forces of resistance?

The university? American universities are bastions of political correctness and mandatory tolerance. Most of them are already quite sympathetic to the Islamic point of view. A combination of intimidation (from both Muslim and leftist groups), Saudi money, and multicultural ideology has ensured that when push comes to shove, the universities will line up with the Islamist camp. If present trends continue, American universities will fold to Islam just as German universities once folded to the Nazis.

The media? The media is still trying to find a motive for the 9-11 attack. That’s because it still won’t make the connection between Islamic terror and Islamic belief. In general, media people see it as their duty to put the best possible face on all things Islamic. Scratch the media as a source of resistance.

The Church? As with college administrators, many Church leaders are deeply mired in multicultural ideology. They are constantly on the lookout for offenses against the “other.” Accordingly, American bishops seem to think that “Islamophobia” poses a grave threat to society. Many of them seem more concerned about anti-Muslim bigotry than about the victims of Islamic terror. To prove that they themselves are not “Islamophobes,” the USCCB operates one of the largest programs for resettling refugees from Muslim countries into the U.S. Besides facilitating Muslim migration, American, as well as European bishops, have facilitated the migration of Islamic beliefs. On numerous occasions, prominent clergy have pronounced these beliefs to be benign and peaceful, and thus deserving of a warm welcome. In general, Church leaders see themselves as friends and protectors of Islam. Given their current mindset, the bishops are unlikely to recognize an Islamic cultural putsch, let alone resist it.

Big Business? Corporations also qualify as cultural institutions. Much of our understanding of what is culturally acceptable and unacceptable is picked up in the workplace. This can be a good thing and often was in the past. Unfortunately, many corporations now reflect and magnify some of the worst cultural trends: arbitrary speech codes, draconian diversity policies, transgenderism, and the like. Currently, several large corporations are using their leverage to suppress speech that is critical of Islam. Giant companies such as PayPal, Google, Facebook, and Twitter are actively trying to shut down websites and individuals that provide accurate information about Islamic cultural jihad. The media monopolies are playing the role that the Ministry of Truth played in Orwell’s 1984. All the really useful information about Islam that has been painfully accumulated in recent years is being quietly dropped down the memory hole.

Why are the counter-jihad sites being shut down? Because they supposedly are “intolerant” and “racist.” Here we come back to the “old-war” mentality. The corporations, the schools, the churches, and the media are ready to do battle with racists, sexists, homophobes, Islamophobes, and transgenderphobes, but they lack the mindset that would allow them to resist the long march through the institutions being conducted by determined and skillful cultural jihadists. In short, their energies are focused on evils that have long been in retreat or on non-existent evils (transgenderphobia, etc.). Meanwhile, the much larger threat posed by Islam draws ever closer.

The people who might be expected to fight this new culture war are scarcely aware of its existence. They are too busy championing the cause of newly invented “civil rights.” Fifty years ago they would have been on the cutting edge, now they are on the edge of irrelevancy.

Nowadays, the cutting edge is elsewhere. And when the “cutting-edge” cultural and business elites meet the cutting-edge of Islamization, they will almost inevitably submit to it. That is what they have already begun to do. And as the culture war with Islam heats up, the submission process will only accelerate.

"Cutting edge" is right. It's a good bet that the leftist enablers of Islam will be the first of the infidels to have their throats cut. They will learn the hard way, too late.

The Most Radical Form of Islam: Neo-Bolshevik Post-Marxist Islamo-Leftism

Pascal Bruckner:

And here is where the strangest factor in the whole Islamophobia controversy emerges: the enlistment of a part of the American and European Left in the defense of the most radical form of Islam—what one might call the neo-Bolshevik bigotry of the lost believers of Marxism. Having lost everything—the working class, the Third World—the Left clings to this illusion: Islam, rebaptized as the religion of the poor, becomes the last utopia, replacing those of Communism and decolonization for disenchanted militants. The Muslim takes the place of the proletarian.

The baton seems to have been passed at about the time of the fall of the Shah of Iran in 1979, with the resulting rise to power of Islamist revolutionaries, which was the occasion for enthusiastic commentary by Michel Foucault, among others on the left. God’s return on history’s stage had finally rendered Marxist and anticolonialist programs obsolete. The faith moved the masses better than the socialist hope. Now, it was the believer in the Koran who embodied the global hope for justice, who refused to conform to the order of things, who transcended borders and created a new international order, under the aegis of the Prophet: a green Comintern. Too bad for feminism, women’s equality, salvific doubt, the critical spirit; in short, too bad for everything traditionally associated with a progressive position.

This political attitude is manifest in progressives’ scrupulous idolatry of Muslim practices and rites, especially the Islamic veil: “modest fashion” is praised to the skies, so much so that, for certain leftist commentators, an unveiled Muslim woman who claims this right can only be a traitor, a turncoat, a woman for sale. The irony of this neocolonial solicitude for bearded men and veiled women—and for everything that suggests an oriental bazaar—is that Morocco itself, whose king is the “Commander of the Faithful,” recently forbade the wearing, sale, and manufacture of the burka in his country. Shall we call the Cherifian monarchy “Islamophobic”? Shall we be more royalist than the king?

It’s worth considering this Islamo-leftism more closely, this hope nourished by a revolutionary fringe that Islam might spearhead a new uprising, a “holy war” against global capitalism, exactly as in Baku in 1920, when Bolshevik leaders, including Zinoviev, published a joint appeal with the pan-Islamists to unleash jihad against Western imperialism. It was an English Trotskyite, Chris Harman, leader of the Socialist Workers Party, who, in 1994, provided a theory for this alliance between militant revolutionaries and radical Muslim associations, arguing for their unity, in certain circumstances, against the common enemy of capitalism and the bourgeoisie. Generations of leftists saw the working class as the messianic leaven of a radiant humanity; now, willing to flirt with the most obscurantist bigotry and to betray their own principles, they transferred their hopes to the Islamists. (Emphasis added.)

Is Islam a Religion of Peace?

A video by Aayan Hirsi Ali. 5:09. Can you spare five minutes to improve your thinking on this topic?

Is Islam a religion of peace? Is it compatible with Western liberalism? Or does Islam need a reformation, just as Christianity had the Protestant Reformation? Somali-born author and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali explains.

Iconoclasm: Another Similarity Between Muslims and Leftists

Muslims are well-known for their iconoclasm, hostility to the arts, and destruction of cultural artifacts. Leftists are like unto Muslims in this regard too. There is also the iconoclasm of the Left. For now, a couple of links to introduce the topic.

Leftist Iconoclasm Must Stop

Stomping on Jesus: The Iconoclasm of the Left

The trouble with iconoclasm is that all parties can play the game.

Mass-murdering communist regimes are responsible for some 94 million deaths in the 20th century. Why not then destroy all the statues and monuments that honor the likes of Karl Marx, V. I. Lenin, Fidel Castro and all others who either laid the foundations for or carried out mass murder?

You understand, of course, that I am not advocating this. For one thing, the erasure of history would make it rather more difficult to learn from it. For another thing, there would be no end to it. Why not destroy the Colosseum in Rome? You know what went on there.

Or how about St. Robert Bellarmine, S. J. ? Should paintings and statues of him be destroyed? He had a hand in the burning at the stake of the philosopher Giordano Bruno! According to Wikipedia:

Bellarmine was made rector of the Roman College in 1592, examiner of bishops in 1598, and cardinal in 1599. Immediately after his appointment as Cardinal, Pope Clement made him a Cardinal Inquisitor, in which capacity he served as one of the judges at the trial of Giordano Bruno, and concurred in the decision which condemned Bruno to be burned at the stake as a heretic.^[5]

Better known is the fact that Bellarmine is the man who hauled the great Galileo before the Inquisition.

Calling all philosophers and scientists! To your sledge hammers and blow torches!

And then there are the paintings, statues, etc. of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., plagiarist and adulterer.

There is no need to multiply examples. You should be getting the point along about now.

The Statue of Lenin is a 16-foot (4.9 m) bronze sculpture of Communist revolutionary Vladimir Lenin located in the Fremont neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Initially installed in Czechoslovakia in 1988, the sculpture was removed after the Velvet Revolution and brought to the United States in the 1990s.

Islam and the (Destruction of the) Arts

Here:

Which brings us back to the arts. Among the things that Islam finds offensive are paintings, statues, mosaics, music, and song. The destruction of the Bamiyan Buddhas, and the razing of the Roman temples and arches in Palmyra are just the most recent in a long line of vandalism that stretches back to Muhammad. According to culture critic Hugh Fitzgerald, “the greatest destruction of art in the history of the world is that wrought by Muslims on the art (architecture, artifacts), sacred and profane, of non-Muslim civilizations.”

Thanks to resurgence of militant Islam we seem to have entered a new era of iconoclasm. And it’s not just the arts that are being attacked, but also the people who patronize them. There have been a number of terror attacks against tourists at the ancient Egyptian Karnak Temple near Luxor. In 2015, gunmen killed 19 people at the Bardo Museum in Tunis. In 2002, 40 to 50 armed Chechen Islamists took 850 hostages during a musical theatre production at Moscow’s Dubrovka Theater. The three-day siege ended with the death of 130 hostages including 17 members of the cast and one-third of the orchestra. More recently, we’ve seen the jihad attack on the Bataclan theatre in Paris which resulted in the death of 130 people, many of whom were also mutilated, and the jihad attack on an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester, England which left 22 dead.

For all their antipathy to the arts, jihadists have an almost Hitchcockian sense of dramatic locations: the Temple of Karnak, the Bardo Museum, the Dubrovka Theatre, the Bataclan Theatre, the World Trade Center. They haven’t gotten around yet to Mt. Rushmore and the Albert Hall, but it’s quite likely that both are already on some jihadis to-do list. Fortunately, the authorities have discerned the pattern, and have begun to beef up security around museums and monuments. Nowadays, if you want to visit the Louvre or the Rijksmuseuem, you have to tiptoe around police and soldiers carrying automatic weapons. Many artists like to advertise their work as transgressive and even dangerous. That’s becoming literally true, though presumably not in the ways that the artists intended. When you go to a concert or a museum these days, there is indeed a heightened element of danger.

It would be a mistake, however, to think that armed jihadists are the only danger to the arts and music. The other danger comes from Islamic culture itself and from the non-violent spread of that culture into Western societies. The trend has been referred to as “Islamization” and also as “stealth jihad.” For my own part, I prefer the term “cultural jihad” because at this point the advance is far from stealthy. The reason that citizens of the West don’t see the cultural takeover in progress is that they don’t want to see it. And they don’t want to see it because they don’t know what to do about it. Some of those who do see what’s happening think the trend toward Islamic dominance is unstoppable. Here’s economist Peter Smith in Quadrant:

Tolerant societies in these politically correct times have no feasible way of countering intolerance when it is practiced and preached by a minority religion ready to claim victimhood at the drop of a hat. I entertained the thought that it could, but it can’t be done.

Whether or not the trend is irreversible remains to be seen, but the trend has not been toward assimilation (as so many had hoped), but toward cultural conquest. And as Islamization continues, it will have a profound effect on the arts. Because where Islamic beliefs and laws advance, the arts retreat.

It’s not just a matter of hostility to the arts, but indifference to them. Although some Muslim immigrants to Europe will acquire a taste for Chopin and Renoir, most will ignore the symphony halls and the art museums altogether. As the population continues to shift in the favor of Islam, those museums that manage to stay open will have to emphasize non-representational Islamic art and put the Renoirs in cold storage. As for the concert halls, many will die a slow death. Mark Steyn puts it this way:

When the demography changes, there will be no concert halls. Artists who take a multicultural view should be aware of this. Count the number of covered women in London’s West End. In Birmingham, where I went to high school, you have a provincial symphony orchestra in a Muslim city—I’m not sure it will survive. All art, all popular culture is endangered by Islam, because there’s no room for it.

Although Birmingham won’t be a Muslim majority city for another twenty years or so, Steyn is right about the general trend. And he’s right about the unawareness of “artists who take a multicultural view.” Those in the arts community who blindly celebrate diversity constitute, in effect, a fifth column that facilitates the invasion of Western society by an anti-arts culture.

One has to wonder if they really love the arts or if they are more in love with the idea of being thought exceedingly tolerant and open-minded. People who love something are usually willing to fight to defend it. But there’s scant evidence that the arts community will fight to preserve the culture they have inherited.

There are exceptions, of course. The aforementioned Mark Steyn is one of them. By profession, Steyn is a music critic who specializes in writing about composers of popular music such as Cole Porter, Jule Styne, and Dorothy Fields. Yet shortly after 9/11 Steyn branched out to political and cultural criticism with a particular emphasis on criticism of Islam and the lackluster Western response to its inroads. Why the foray into politics? As Steyn puts it, “The point of politics is to free up time for what really matters”—which in his case is music.

Another counter–jihadist who would rather be doing something else is Ned May. He is the director of Gates of Vienna, a website devoted to discussing the dangers of Islamization, both in America and Europe. Writing under the pen name Baron Bodissey, May produces a daily supply of knowledgeable and well-crafted columns. Yet his real passions are landscape painting and music. In a piece about Bach’s choral prelude, “O Lamn Gottes unschuldig,” he writes “[Bach’s music] is one of the principal motives behind my choice to continue the struggle against the Great Jihad. The music of J.S. Bach represents the apotheosis of the human spirit, and will remain such even as the civilization that created it turns to dust.”

He continues: “There is no ideology in this [the music]… But ideology may well destroy it. Just as there are no longer any Buddhas at Bamiyan … there may come a day when all the pipes lay strewn across the paving stones of a shattered building, with no more fingers to race across the keyboards nor feet to tap the pedals. That is one of the main reasons why I do what I do: so that this shall not pass from the face of the earth.”

As they are willing to fight to preserve the music they love, Steyn and May deserve to be thought of as genuine music lovers. I’m not so sure that the same can be said for those artists who rush to defend every diversity under the sun, but have little regard for the culture that produced Bach, Beethoven, and Cole Porter. Are they in love with art or are they more in love with a currently fashionable but ultimately destructive ideology about cultural diversity—one that will spell the death of art and music?

Robert Spencer Poisoned in Iceland

Robert Spencer explains on YouTube.

Mark Steyn, The Poisoning of Robert Spencer

Robert Spencer’s Ban from the U.K.

The following from a London correspondent:

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.

Nazis Hid Their Crimes; Islamists Exult in Theirs

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.

………………………………..

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.

Continue reading “Nazis Hid Their Crimes; Islamists Exult in Theirs”

There are Moderate Muslims but No Moderate Islam

This is an important distinction explained with great clarity by Robert Spencer. London Ed summarizes:

He [Spencer] believes that there are moderate Muslims but there is no moderate Islam, giving the example (3:25) of the Catholic Church's official teaching on contraception: "Contraception is wrong, contraception is immoral, don’t contracept." Yet

"Surveys show that 70-80-90 percent of Catholics use contraception. Now, we would be absolutely wrong, incorrect, to say ‘oh that means the Church doesn’t really teach that contraception is wrong’ . . . it’s just that most Catholics don’t pay attention. Islam really teaches warfare against unbelievers. A lot of Muslims don’t pay attention. That’s just great. The problem is that they have no theological leg to stand on in Islam, and therefore when they are challenged by the jihadis, and even when their children are recruited by the jihadis, they don’t have any answer."

This seems to me to be correct. It follows that I was mistaken when I wrote, on many occasions, of radical Islam. For that phrase suggests that there is a difference between Islam and radical Islam and that 'true' Islam the 'religion of peace' has been radicalized by radicals and militants. The truth is that Islam just is radical Islam. It is a radical and extreme view right out of the box.

There can be moderate Muslims, but there is no such thing as moderate Islam. Spencer mentions Zuhdi Jasser as one of the few moderate Muslims in the world. Dr. Jasser is a moderate Muslim in that he diverges from Islam by, among other things, advocating separation of mosque and state.

Quotation of the Day

From Malcolm Pollack's Cower of London entry:

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?

Dalrymple on Creative Appeasement, Candles, and Teddy Bears

Here:

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.

Theresa May: Still Pussyfooting Around

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.

………………

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.

Addendum (6/5)

Two related YouTube videos (HT: Bill Keezer)

Paul Joseph Watson

Stephan Molyneux

Time for a Moratorium on Immigration from Muslim Lands?

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.

………….

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?

Isn’t the Rope Too Long?

"Isn't the rope too long?" I wrote to the man who sent me the graphic a sinistra.

He replied, " The idea is the tree will grow and eventually be tall enough to hang him."

"I got that," said I. "But trees grow slowly and there's a lot of rope that has to hoisted before the man is hanged. Although Islam's threat to the culture of Europe is not imminent, it is not far in the future either.

So I say the rope is too long!"

In battling our ideological and existential enemies, all methods must be employed, including cartoons, jokes, mockery, derision, and tweets. You have to make them look ridiculous and 'uncool.' The young and immature are inordinately impressed by what is 'cool' and what is not. So we need comics like Dennis Miller and polemicists like Kurt Schlichter whose name for Hillary is 'Felonia von Pant-Suit.' That is perhaps more effective than the more accurate but brutal 'Crooked Hillary.'

Learned disquisitions and carefully crafted arguments are necessary but insufficient. You have to get the attention of the masses besotted and benumbed by the ever-present wash of media dreck.

Memo to George F. Will, et al.: it's about saving the West from its main internal threat, leftism, and its main external threat, radical Islam. It's not about gentlemanly conversations about Edmund Burke over good brandy and fine cigars in well-appointed drawing rooms while Rome burns.

Immigration Policy Comes First

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.

Language matters!

Heather Mac's article is here.