Saturday, October 30, 2004

Relentlessly and Thoroughly

In a prescient piece written 3 years ago, just one month after the 9/11 attacks, English historian Paul Johnson makes the case that the fight against islamism must be relentless and thorough:

One central reason why appeasement is so tempting to Western governments is that attacking terrorism at its roots necessarily involves conflict with the second-largest religious community in the world.
Dispensing with the deliberate fiction that Islam means "peace", Johnson states the unpleasant Truth:

Islam means "submission," a very different matter, and one of the functions of Islam, in its more militant aspect, is to obtain that submission from all, if necessary by force.

Islam is an imperialist religion, more so than Christianity has ever been, and in contrast to Judaism...

Islam remains a religion of the Dark Ages. The 7th-century Koran is still taught as the immutable word of God, any teaching of which is literally true. In other words, mainstream Islam is essentially akin to the most extreme form of Biblical fundamentalism...
Read that last sentence again, it's important.

Got it? Good. It gets worse:
Moreover, Koranic teaching that the faith or "submission" can be, and in suitable circumstances must be, imposed by force, has never been ignored. On the contrary, the history of Islam has essentially been a history of conquest and reconquest.
Johnson deals with another bit of modern self-hating revisionism:

The Crusades, far from being an outrageous prototype of Western imperialism, as is taught in most of our schools, were a mere episode in a struggle that has lasted 1,400 years, and were one of the few occasions when Christians took the offensive to regain the "occupied territories" of the Holy Land.
He clearly lays out the age-old cycle: civilizations, no matter how advanced, always fall under the pressures of barbarians:
This millennial struggle continues in a variety of ways...Indeed, in the West, the battle is largely demographic, though it is likely to take a more militant turn at any moment. Moslems from the Balkans and North Africa are surging over established frontiers on a huge scale, rather as the pressure of the eastern tribes brought about the collapse of the Roman Empire of the West in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D. The number of Moslems penetrating and settling in Europe is now beyond computation because most of them are illegals. They are getting into Spain and Italy in such numbers that, should present trends continue, both these traditionally Catholic countries will become majority Moslem during the 21st century.

The West is not alone in being under threat from Islamic expansion. While the Ottomans moved into South-East Europe, the Moghul invasion of India destroyed much of Hindu and Buddhist civilization there. The recent destruction by Moslems in Afghanistan of colossal Buddhist statues is a reminder of what happened to temples and shrines, on an enormous scale, when Islam took over. The writer V. S. Naipaul has recently pointed out that the destructiveness of the Moslem Conquest is at the root of India's appalling poverty today. Indeed, looked at historically, the record shows that Moslem rule has tended both to promote and to perpetuate poverty.

Meanwhile, the religion of "submission" continues to advance, as a rule by force, in Africa in part of Nigeria and Sudan, and in Asia, notably in Indonesia, where non-Moslems are given the choice of conversion or death. And in all countries where Islamic law is applied, converts, whether compulsory or not, who revert to their earlier faith, are punished by death.
That's no hyperbole. It's an accurate portrayal of what's going on today -- right now -- and is not the work of some tiny minority.

For those who complain, like Kerry, about lack of allies in Iraq, Johnson was way ahead of him:
It is vitally important that America stick to the essentials of its military response and carry it through relentlessly and thoroughly. Although only Britain can be guaranteed to back the White House in every contingency, it is better in the long run for America to act without many allies, or even alone, than to engage in a messy compromise dictated by nervousness and cowardice. That would be the worst of all solutions and would be certain to lead to more terrorism, in more places, and on an ever-increasing scale.
He concludes by noting, as Gladstone said, that "the resources of civilization are not yet exhausted", and exhorts the US, the main holder of those resources, to live up to its responsibility to relentlessly and thoroughly crush these soul-destroying lovers of Death.

And finally, we are reminded to not falter
when the weasel words of cowardice and surrender are pronounced.
Especially when pronounced by the likes of exit-strategy-seekers and quagmire-declarers such as Kerry and the media-celebrity complex that backs him.

1 Comments:

Blogger RDS said...

Spiney,

I think you've revealed a big part of the problem: it seems people have such little historical depth, and are so pampered by luxury, that they fail to conceive just how bad things could really get, and how fragile this very unnatural existence we lead truly is.

Not to mention the sapping of self-reliance and initiative that the creeping welfare state creates.

It is a staggering failure of imagination.

10:07 PM, October 31, 2004  

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