"Jihad's Fellow-Travelers"

By Serge Trifkovic at FrontPage:

.... "If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles," says Sun Tzu. We know the jihadist enemy. We know his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious society.

The main problem is with ourselves, with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who will reject and condemn our diagnosis. Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility but loath to be "judgmental," members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed "cures" that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from terrorism as snake oil is likely to cure leukemia.

Abroad, we are told, we need to address political and economic grievances of the impoverished masses, we need to spread democracy and free markets in the Muslim world, we need to invest more in public diplomacy. At home we need more tolerance, greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the minorities that feel marginalized and threatened by the war on terror.

The predictable failure of such cures leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and morbid self-doubt. This vicious circle is untenable and must be broken....

Some eighty years ago Julien Benda published his tirade against the intellectual corruption of his times, The Treason of the Intellectuals. For generations prior to the twentieth century, Benda wrote, members of the Western intellectual elite ensured that "humanity did evil, but honored good." The "Treason" of the title occurred when they gave up promoting lasting civilizational values and allowed short-term political preferences to distort their understanding of the intellectual vocation as such. Benda’s argument found wide resonance at a time when fascism, nazism and bolshevism dominated Europe’s political and intellectual scene. Today the "treason" of the elite class takes a different but essentially similar form. It upholds the allegedly universal values of multiculturalism, inclusiveness and antidiscriminationism to the detriment of the particular value of our civilization and all its fruits. The propensity of the elite class to the betrayal of culture – Benda called it "a cataclysm in the moral notions of those who educate the world" – remains the same, however.

The fact that normal people don’t realize the magnitude of the problem works to the advantage of the people like Blair, Soros, Zapatero, Prodi, or Kerry. Their ideas, which but two generations ago would have been deemed eccentric or insane, now rule the Euro-American mainstream. Only a society inured to the concept of a "open borders" can be unblinkingly told that Islam is good and tolerant, that "we" (the West) have been nasty and unkind to it over the centuries – remember the Crusades! – and that "terrorism" needs to be understood, and cured, independently of Islam’s teaching and practice.

At the root of the domestic malaise is the notion that countries do not belong to the people who have inhabited them for generations, but to whoever happens to be within their boundaries at any given moment – regardless of his culture, attitude, or intentions....

Those Americans and Europeans who love their lands more than any others, and who put their families and their neighborhoods before all others, are normal people. Those who tell them that their attachments should be global and that their lands and neighborhoods belong to the whole world are sick and evil. They are our main enemies and jihad’s indispensable allies. The elite class, rootless, arrogant, cynically manipulative, and irreversibly jihad-friendly, has every intention of continuing to "fight" the war on terrorism without naming the enemy, without revealing his beliefs, without unmasking his intentions, without offending his accomplices, without expelling his fifth columnists, and without ever daring to win.

It is up to the millions of normal Americans and their European cousins to stop the madness. The traitor class wants them to share its death wish, to self-annihilate as people with a historical memory and a cultural identity, and to make room for the post-human, monistic Utopia spearheaded by the jihadist fifth column. This crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty.

(Thanks, Francis.)

Lane Core Jr. CIW P — Sun. 05/07/06 08:19:51 AM
Categorized as More Than Readworthy.