November 23, 2009
The charade is up. It’s now apparent that Nidal Hasan was acting upon the Islamic doctrine of holy war when he carried out mass murder at Fort Hood. But will this fact, like so many others, make any appreciable difference in our future course? Almost a decade has passed since the September 11th attacks, but Americans are more confused than ever on the origin, meaning and intent of Muslim militancy. We deceive ourselves with our own false vision of humanity; in doing so we race further toward destruction.
Through the evil he willed, Hasan delivered news the post-Christian West can”t bear to hear: modern universalism, the movement toward a secularized, borderless world of voters and consumers, is an unsustainable fraud. Witness the delusion that reigns at the highest levels of power. The U.S. Army Chief of Staff, General George Casey, gave us a perfect display of the elites” unswerving dedication to its ideological program:
It would be a shame—as great a tragedy as this was—it would be a shame if our diversity became a casualty as well.
Given the establishment’s response to the atrocity, its representatives prefer death (not their own, of course, but yours will do well enough) to facing not only the reality of jihad, but the bankruptcy of the liberal project.
Hasan also reminded us about the very nature of the centuries-long war waged by Islam against Dar el-Harb (the House of War, i.e. the world outside Islamic power). Actions ranging from full-blown invasions to smaller-scale operations that would today be termed “crime” or “terrorism” form the original basis of this faith’s expansion. Today’s West has actively facilitated the other key component of the growth of Islam, migration. With little regard to vital cultural and historical context, our elites have sown the ground for the current conflict by importing Muslim peoples en masse, a feat of recklessness without precedent.
This is not to imply a special animus against Muslims. But we must be cognizant of an enduring antagonism between civilizations that cannot be explained away by fashionable theories. Only an ignorant and fevered imagination would deem violence carried out in the name of Islam worldwide as some sort of contemporary anomaly.
Those who shrug about the growth of Islam in the West will obfuscate their way to an apology for multiculturalist policies at home and interventions abroad. Favorite terms used by officials and media commentators to expel all clarity from discussion include “extremist” and “Islamist.” It would be laughable to think about Mohammed and his followers as they fought to dominate the Arabian Peninsula and beyond as “Islamist extremists.” Were the Moors who overran Spain and threatened France also “extremists”? Or the Turks who captured Constantinople and ravaged their way deep into Europe? They were warriors fulfilling the imperatives of conquest laid out by their religion’s founder.
9:29. Fight against those who believe not in Allah, nor in the Last Day, nor forbid that which has been forbidden by Allah and His Messenger and those who acknowledge not the religion of truth (i.e. Islam) among the people of the Scripture (Jews and Christians), until they pay the Jizya with willing submission, and feel themselves subdued.
We are confronted with a belief system that since its inception has claimed nothing less than dominion over the entire earth. Liberal society cannot admit this, for to do so would subvert its organizing principles and its very own pretense to universality.
Liberalism celebrates our common humanity in the most superficial manner (individual desire), while denying the essences of cultures and peoples. The exaltation of “human capital” as interchangeable and “enriching,” no matter the country of origin, has led to the phenomenon of Londonistan. America attempts to lay the foundations for Main Street in places like Kandahar and Mosul, and with its blood and debt buys only disaster.
All these frenzied exertions to assert the universal validity of the liberal ideal are speeding its demise. The pseudo-religion of the philosophes, bourgeois revolutionaries, and today’s managerial class was designed to destroy Christianity by mimicking and supplanting it. Yet it has now encountered an alien faith against which it possesses few defenses.
Modern Westerners have no historical context, no notion of the centuries of Islamic campaigns against Christendom because they have forgotten their faith and cultural heritage. Only a decadent society would invite waves of immigration from a culture with a well-established record of hostility. And only a society truly unhinged would then undertake military interventions in those nations for the sake of an ideological chimera. The Fort Hood massacre is an acute symptom of our civilization’s suicidal tendencies.
How can America and the West step back from the brink?
Honesty would make for a fine start.
