Wednesday, September 11, 2019

A Sobering Thought for 9/11

Today Mark Steyn remarks on something that no one else seems to have noticed. There are two fronts in the war against Islamic terrorism. The one is in Afghanistan and the Middle East. The other is in the West.

You may or may not agree with him that we need to choose which one to fight. You may believe that we ought to fight one and not the other. And yet, we are largely overlooking the one that is taking place in Western Europe. Even in America, men like Donald Trump and Gen. James Mattis have drunk the Obama Kool-Aid and refuse to call radical Islam by its name.

Steyn opines:

In any war, you have to be able to prioritize: You can't win everything, so where would you rather win? Raqqa or Rotterdam? Kandahar or Cannes? Yet, whenever some guy goes Allahu Akbar on the streets of a western city, the telly pundits generally fall into one of two groups: The left say it's no big deal, and the right say this is why we need more boots on the ground in Syria or Afghanistan. Yesterday President Trump said he was committed to ensuring that terrorists "never again have a safe haven to launch attacks against our country".

By that he means "safe havens" in Afghanistan. But the reason the west's enemies are able to pile up a continuous corpse count in Paris, Nice, Berlin, Brussels, London, Manchester, Copenhagen, Stockholm, Orlando, San Bernadino, Ottawa, Sydney, Barcelona, [Your Town Here] is because they have "safe havens" in France, Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, North America, etc. Which "safe havens" are likely to prove more consequential for the developed world in the years ahead?

What is the state of the war against Islamist terrorism? Steyn continues:

Who's winning what turf? After 16 years of western military occupation, the Taliban control more territory in Afghanistan than at any time since the first US troops went in. On the other hand, after 16 years of accelerating Islamic immigration, Europe has more no-go zones, more sharia courts, more refugees, more covered women, more Muslim-dominated schoolhouses, more radical mosques, more female genital mutilation, more grooming and gang rape, more Muslim Brotherhood front groups, more Muslim mayors and legislators, more Muslim-funded Middle East Studies programs at universities ...and fewer churches, fewer Jews in Toulouse, fewer gays in Amsterdam, fewer unaccompanied women out after dark in German and Swedish cities, fewer historical representations of Mohammed in Continental museums, art galleries and scholarly books, fewer mixed bathing sessions at municipal swimming pools, fewer lessons on the Crusades and the Holocaust in European schools ...and less and less free speech in some of the oldest democracies on earth.

It is, he continues a new cold war. Even Mad Dog Mattis has been reduced to calling the terrorists “maniacs” in “false religious garb”:

Meanwhile, there's a cold war - the remorseless incremental Islamization of the heart of Christendom. Of course, there were simultaneous hot wars during the last big Cold War, too. But we were more clear-sighted with the Soviets: We understood that Afghanistan was peripheral, and that what mattered was preventing our enemies from hollowing out the free world. Today, the men running this new war think Afghanistan is the be-all and end-all, and that the hollowing out of the free world by the west's enemies is not merely irrelevant but in fact evidence of our moral virtue.

You can't connect what's happening in Molenbeek, Malmö and the other "safe havens" of the west with the "safe havens" of the east if you think what's going on is about random "maniacs" adopting "false religious garb". And until we do make that connection we are doomed to lose.

If Steyn is right, we are in very serious trouble. Surely, it’s a sobering thought for 9/11.

3 comments:

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

This is a perfect example of how our morally magnificent elites are ruining everything for the people they rule over. The consequences of all this virtue-signaling rubbish don't impact elites. That's the problem.

UbuMaccabee said...

Shortly after 9-11, and I mean within a month or two, I ran into Toby Young in a bar in Albuquerque. He was with the London Times back then. I didn’t know who he was at the time we were chatting. he was asking me about the US and our state of mind as a nation, and I told him that all this common cause and patriotism was merely skin deep for a large segment of the population, and that in short order, leftism would be back in business, attacking everything we claimed to stand for for because just below the surface, we didn’t believe in anything. The left was laying low because they had to, but it was a ruse. They hated us more than them. I told him we did not have the balls to stand up to Islam, and we were not capable of fighting the Islamists because we were mired in self hatred. He was flabbergasted. He thought I was crazy, and could not imagine that what I was saying was grounded in any reality he was observing at the time. I wonder if he remembers this random conversation. Oddly, I think he does.

Now the US has elected open Islamists to the US Congress, and every candidate on the platform this evening in Houston is an apologist for Islam and an enemy of Western Civilization. The Jews are getting out of a dangerous and uninhabitable Europe. Being a prophet is a bitch.

We are in a Civil War, we just haven’t started shooting at one another yet.

Ithaca delenda est. The poison has a source.

UbuMaccabee said...

As for 9/11, I have neither forgotten nor forgiven. There is a lot more killing to be done.