Bringing the fires with them.
Fouad Ajami’s understanding of the jihad’s “nowhere men“:
The immigrants who turned up in Western lands were few, and they were keen to put the old lands, and their feuds and attachments, behind them. Islam was then a religion of Afro-Asia; it had not yet put down roots in Western Europe and the New World. Air travel was costly and infrequent.
The new lands, too, made their own claims, and the dominant ideology was one of assimilation. The national borders were real, and reflected deep civilizational differences. It was easy to tell where “the East” ended and Western lands began. Postmodernist ideas had not made their appearance. Western guilt had not become an article of faith in the West itself.
Nowadays the Islamic faith is portable. It is carried by itinerant preachers and imams who transmit its teachings to all corners of the world, and from the safety and plenty of the West they often agitate against the very economic and moral order that sustains them. Satellite television plays its part in this new agitation, and the Islam of the tele-preachers is invariably one of damnation and fire. From tranquil, banal places (Dubai and Qatar), satellite television offers an incendiary version of the faith to younger immigrants unsettled by a modern civilization they can neither master nor reject.
His summary: We’ll be at daggers drawn with these young men for quite some time.
Yep. Clearly, time for them to go back home. They can hate and fulminate and behead and stone and mutilate their daughters to their hearts’ content. There.
Fouad is one of my favorite authors/commentators, but “Wired” mag. had an article making essentially the same points circa 2006/7 IIRC–written my some security analyst whose name I don’t recall. I’ve previously said ad nauseum here there and everywhere that this current incarnation of fundamentalist Islamic ideology, when combined with modern technology–internet, satillite/smart-cell phones/laptops; dissemination of knowledge of bomb-making and access to the makings etc.–and cheap international airfares and an essentially border-less European Union and a porous American one, all combine to achieve the present-day functional equivalent pf the “Andromeda Strain.” And so far we haven’t found the antidote…
And unless we destroy every single copy of the Koran world-wide, it will continue to represent a ticking time-bomb waiting to trigger young impressionable minds decades–generations–hence. The Koran is like those long dormant seeds buried beneath the desert sands–patiently awaiting the day long in the future needing only a single drop of water to germinate and spring into full flower.
Problem is, they don’t *want* to go home — they want *us* to share the misery that is Wahabbi, even if they have to kill us, first.
Which is why our daggers need to stay drawn, and occasionally sheathed in one of them…
BillT … I agree with you. But I also feel that this country is too soft and politically correct to do what should be done with naturalized citizens like Shahzad, and Major Hasan, and any other jihadist Muslim naturalized American citizen who commits a crime against our country and its citizens… withdraw their citizenship and exile them permanently from our country. They broke faith with us. We will cleanse ourselves of them.
If they are not American citizens, then as soon as they have served their sentences for whatever crimes they have committed against our country, then they should be permanently exiled and never readmitted on any kind of visa. We don’t need them. We need not to have them in our society, committing honor killings, stoning their womenfolk and carrying out other 8th century outrages against our more civilized citizens. And if you need proof of the lethal srupidity that occurs when civilized nations admit folks like these, just look at Britain today.
Marianne
Britain was already lethally stupid, Marianne — that’s what allowed them to shove their way in back in the ’90s and maintain their status as “protected” religionists.
We disagree on one point — I believe that, rather than exile, a native-born or naturalized citizen who commits a terror crime should become a permanent guest of Sheriff Joe.
I would disagree with you just slightly, Bill. If they commit a terror crime, they go to a gallows. Why should we give them 3 hots and a cot after something like that?
Hanging them will make them martyrs to their brethren. Living under Sheriff Joe will make them curse the day they were born, with every breath they take, for the rest of their natural lives and will make them serve as a horrible *example* to their brethren.
I’m for making a multitude of martyrs. They will get the idea eventually. AND if the are quietly (i.e. secretly) martyred, so much the better.
If we catch them before we do something, then give them to the good Sheriff.
So, hijack the satellite TV feed and replace Jihad with Disney. It works for Joe Arpaio.
Like the Koran, Virgil, the Bible has a similar tendency to germinate when watered, and is, perhaps, the single largest reason we witness such an effort to descry Christianity throughout America. One is predicated upon love and doing good to others, while the other is largely predicated upon tyranny and subjugation to achieve its end…or else. The two cannot peacefully coexist in the same space. A matter of historical fact, not speculation. I give you Budapest as an example, once taken over by the Turks for a time and ‘converted’ to Islam. One of their Catholic cathedrals (the name escapes recollection), which predates the Turkish invasion, still bears the Muslim architectural influence of the attempt to convert all to Islam.
Sending Muslims ‘back where they came from’ is not the answer. Standing firm on our principles and speaking out loudly for those principles is, IMO.
Why isn’t sending them back where they came from the answer? Why wouldn’t it work?
Simply saying we can’t do it is certainly not an answer. The left tried that with illegal immigration, but already know they were and are wrong.
Mongo … Joe Arpaio is one of my folk heroes, a true proponent of ‘thinking outside the box.’ Making his macho male prisoners wear pink underwear, and housing them in tents was a very effective way of reminding them of their sins, and emphasizing that incarceration was not summer camp. It was supposed to be punishment for crimes. The way we run prisons now, everyone has TV, libraries, regular meals, exercise machines [God forbid they should get soft and flabby while being 'punished'] and seminars on various subjects. Gosh, it’s almost like college. Except for the pink jockey shorts.
Marianne
Fouad is wrong.
This isn’t about America or the West. It appeals to us to think that way but really we aren’t central.
This isn’t anything new, these violent terrorist action aren’t unlike the violent terrorist actions carried out in the past. Only difference is scale made viable by greater financial resource and focus made by the politics of the sponsors.
He is not wrong about how they cling to the “Old Country” views. That’s the problem. The strange thing is people come here to partake in the opportunity, then they demand the system run like the country they left.
Let them stay home, or let them assimilate, up to them, but you can’t have it both ways. Reminds me of Shanon Faulkner’s lawyers telling The Citadel how they would handle her, since she was a women, when she was admitted to get the same thing the guys got to get in the “Good Old Boys Club” (as it was perceived)…Weird: They asked to the experience, and demanded it be handed to them their way. So, how do you get what you ask for, when you ensure it’s changed to your preference when you come in the door?
We are at a similar crossroads with our own population: Citizens demand other “rich” citizens fund the way of life to which they have been accustomed, all the while, forcing more Government jobs (think “overhead”) while destroying the ability of the private sector (think “direct funding”) to generate the money to pay those citizens monthly “dues.” Can’t have it both ways, but hey…no politician seems to know that, nor do they care.
I’m curious, who will be at daggers with them? Not the people I’ve seen on TV, who find it a complete mystery as to Faisal Shahzad’s motive.
A mystery that seems to be shared, for that matter, with the people writing the Fort Hood report about some unnamed Major as well as the National Security Strategy.
WESTPAC … I’ve been wondering for a long time at the deliberate “la-la-la I’m not listening” attitude of our civilian population in regard to the Muslim population. It’s particularly baffling to me that the aggressive, modern feminists so numerous in our society deliberately ignore the fact that Muslims feel free to treat their women [probably half the Muslim population] as inferior chattels, not beloved equals. When a Muslim cab-driver in Dallas murders his two teen-aged daughters for being too popular in school, the feminists are silent. When a Muslim husband here in the States flogs his wife for disobeying him, or kills her in an honor killing, the feminists are still strangely silent. How can they, who are so protective of their own rights, not extend their protection, or at least their indignation, to their Muslim sisters?
Instead, they put their fingers in their ears, cover their eyes, and say “la-la-la I’m not listening.”
Marianne
Many of these people who assimilate are good, loyal Americans. But they are not true followers of their faith. Kind of like Jews in Hollywood. Not Jews of the Torah, that’s for sure. The Koran is an evil, evil book written by a man who, if he was in America in our age, would be on “To Catch a Predator.” I’ve read an English translation of the Koran and it is not a religion of peace. Think about what the word Islam means: submission. Also think about dhiminitude. That’s what we are fast on the track to becoming.
Coastie, you misread. It’s a religion of pieces. Just a small misspelling. But, it makes all the difference in the world.