British journalist and author of Londonistan Melanie Phillips gauges the depths of Britain’s evolving collective derangement (hat tip Ayaan Hirsi Ali):

Everyone knows that Europe is a continent stuffed with craven, terror-appeasing fromages who loathe America. Britain, by contrast, led by the lion-hearted Tony Blair, is full of stalwarts who stand shoulder to shoulder with the United States in the defense of the West. Right?

Wrong. Fury at Prime Minister Blair for being President Bush’s “poodle” has reached such a pitch that the most successful Labor prime minister in memory is being forced out of office because of his support for U.S. policy in Iraq and Israel. Labor’s members of Parliament say his refusal to break with America by calling for an earlier cease-fire in Lebanon was the last straw. The disturbing fact is that Britain is consumed by a rampant anti-Americanism and an allied hostility toward Israel, which are driving public debate into irrationality, prejudice and appeasement.

In a Populus poll last month in The Times of London, 62% said the government should change its policy by distancing itself from the United States, being more critical of Israel and declaring a timetable for withdrawing from Iraq. An August YouGov poll in The Spectator magazine revealed that while 53% wanted a tougher anti-terrorism policy, 45% wanted to be allied more closely with the European Union than with America. Only 14% supported closer U.S. ties.

[..]But British animosity toward the U.K.’s most important and historic ally is wider and deeper. Partly it derives from simple snobbery, the long-standing British belief that Americans are vulgar upstarts who lack the gravitas that Britain has accrued from a thousand years of history.

Probe further, however, and you discover anguish at the progressive junking of that history. Schools, for example, no longer teach the history or values of the British nation on the grounds that national identity based on a majority culture is viewed as “racist.” Instead, they promote multiculturalism, the doctrine that minority value must have equal status to those of the majority. Loss of confidence in Britain’s role in the world has demoralized its governing class so badly that it has come to believe that the nation state is the principal source of all ills from prejudice to war, and that legitimacy resides instead in supranational institutions.

[..]The dismaying truth is that, even after the suicide bombings in London, America’s defense of the free world against Islamic terror is widely viewed in Britain as the cause of that terror. The paranoid bigotry that drives the jihad — that the United States and its Jewish puppet masters make up a giant conspiracy of evil — is being increasingly echoed within Britain’s non-Muslim population.

The very idea that weakening the alliance with the United States would be in Britain’s interests is madness. But in a country that has lost its way, rationality is a commodity in short supply.

The following article is from the LA Times, 26 May 1968

Israel’s Peculiar Position
ISRAEL – Held to Different Standards

By Eric Hoffer

The Jews are a peculiar people: things permitted to other nations are forbidden to the Jews. Other nations drive out thousands, even millions of people and there is no refugee problem. Russia did it, Poland and Czechoslovakia did it, Turkey threw out a million Greeks, and Algeria a million Frenchman. Indonesia threw out heaven knows how many Chinese-and no one says a word about refugees.

But in the case of Israel the displaced Arabs have become eternal refugees. Everyone insists that Israel must take back every single Arab.

Arnold Toynbee calls the displacement of the Arabs an atrocity greater than any committed by the Nazis. Other nations when victorious on the battlefield dictate peace terms. But when Israel is victorious it must sue for peace.

Everyone expects the Jews to be the only real Christians in this world. Other nations when they are defeated survive and recover but should Israel be defeated it would be destroyed. Had Nasser triumphed last June he would have wiped Israel off the map, and no one would have lifted a finger to save the Jews. No commitment to the Jews by any government, including our own, is worth the paper it is written on.

There is a cry of outrage all over the world when people die in Vietnam or when two Negroes are executed in Rhodesia. But when Hitler slaughtered Jews no one remonstrated with him. The Swedes, who are ready to break off diplomatic relations with America because of what we do in Vietnam, did not let out a peep when Hitler was slaughtering Jews.

They sent Hitler choice iron ore, and ball bearings, and serviced his troop trains to Norway.

The Jews are alone in the world. If Israel survives, it will be solely because of Jewish efforts. And Jewish resources.

Yet at this moment Israel is our only reliable and unconditional ally. We can rely more on Israel than Israel can rely on us. And one has only to imagine what would have happened last summer had the Arabs and their Russian backers won the war to realize how vital the survival of Israel is to America and the West in general.

I have a premonition that will not leave me; as it goes with Israel so will it go with all of us. Should Israel perish the holocaust will be upon us.

Eric Hoffer was a Non-Jewish American longshoreman turned into a social philosopher. He was born in 1902 and died in 1983, after writing columns for newspapers, nine books and winning the Presidential Medal of Freedom. His first book, The True Believer, published in 1951, was widely recognized as a classic.

The more things change…

Have a read of these great quotes from this remarkable man. Further quotes from some of his books here.

Here’s a few of my selections:

“Both the revolutionary and the creative individual are perpetual juveniles. The revolutionary does not grow up because he cannot grow, while the creative individual cannot grow up because he keeps growing.”

“How much easier is self-sacrifice than self-realization.” [TOD: One for the budding martyrs in the audience]

“Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, “to be free from freedom.”“

“Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.“

“Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.”

“It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power—power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.”

“There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless. When hopes and dreams are loose on the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows, and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. Though ours is a Godless age, it is the very opposite of irreligious. The true believer is everywhere on the march, and both by converting and antagonizing he is shaping the world in his own image. Whether we line up with him or against him, it is well we should know all we can concerning his nature and potentialities.”

“It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from the sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression. St. Vincent De Paul cautioned his disciples to deport themselves so that the poor “will forgive them the bread you give them.”"

“He would rather “work, fight, talk, for liberty than have it.” * The fact is that up to now the free society has not been good for the intellectual. It has neither accorded him a superior status to sustain his confidence nor made it easy for him to acquire an unquestioned sense of social usefulness. For he derives his sense of usefulness mainly from directing, instructing, and planning-from minding other people’s business-and is bound to feel superfluous and neglected where people believe themselves competent to manage individual and communal affairs, and are impatient of supervision and regulation. A free society is as much a threat to the intellectual’s sense of worth as an automated economy is to the workingman’s sense of worth. Any social order that can function with a minimum of leadership will be anathema to the intellectual.”

“The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world”.

” All the ‘true believers’ of our time-whether Communist, Nazi, Fascist, Japanese or Catholic-declaimed volubly[..] on the decadence of the Western democracies. The burden of their talk is that in the democracies people are too soft, too pleasure-loving and too selfish to die for a nation, a God or a holy cause.This lack of a readiness to die, we are told, is indicative of an inner rot – a moral and biological decay. The democracies are old, corrupt and decadent. They are no match for the virile congregations of the faithful who are about to inherit the Earth.”

“Absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep.”

On a related note John Howard said the following at the Quadrant dinner last night:

Today, free and open societies face a new tyranny: the tyranny of Islamist terrorism, one with at least a family resemblance to the great struggles against forces of totalitarianism in the past. A Czech writer once wrote with great prescience: You can’t build utopia without terror and before long terror is all that’s left.

Terrorism is but a symptom of the problem. The problem is the “mass movement”, as referred to by Eric Hoffer above, of Islamism, or Islamo-Fascism, if you will. It is the same old tyranny.

update: I meant to note that the “Czech writer” John Howard is referring to is in fact Eric Hoffer, according to at least one source, and he is of course not Czech at all. I can’t find further confirmation of this, but it certainly very much sounds like something he would say.

Go ahead, jog your memory. I insist.

Three words:

Hippies. Crack. Bollocks.

Seems that while sleeping off a hangover I missed a Crusade. Oh well, I’m sure there’ll be another one next week. In the meantime here’s what everyone said about it.

But first things first. The great Oriana Fallaci passed away on Friday. This first series of links marks her departure. And from me a humble THANK YOU.

• Mark Steyn: Farewell, La Fallaci
• Michelle Malkin “Oriana Fallaci, R.I.P., and the Religion of Perpetual Outrage”
• Amy K. Rosenthal: “Oriana Fallaci: Champion of civilization”
• Gates of Vienna: Part 1 and “Part 2: Dissidence in the pew”
• Jihad Watch” (Robert Spencer)
• Protein Wisdom (Dan Collins)
• Hot Air.

And now, as they say “Durkah, Durkah, Muhammad, Jihad!”

• Father Raymond J. de Souza in Canada’s National Post: “Rioters’ madness shames Muslim world” Reactions of some fanatics does not help open dialogue
  

  The eruption of rage in some quarters of the Islamic world against Pope Benedict XVI requires that several tough things be said.

  Painful though it may be, speaking frankly is necessary if there is to be honest and open dialogue between the Abrahamic faiths. Given the reaction to Benedict’s address, though, one wonders if that dialogue is even possible.

• Rod Liddle in The Sunday Times: “You’ve said sorry, Holy Father – now demand a price”
  

  You can bet your life that by the time you read this, some Catholic priest toiling away in a godforsaken, dusty hellhole — Sudan, perhaps, or Turkey — will have been smacked about a bit, or had his church burnt down or been arrested without charge. The Pope should have been aware that Islam always reacts to western allegations that it is not a peaceful religion by mass outbreaks of vituperation, denunciation and acts of jihadic violence.

  That this is a paradox seems not to be even remotely recognised by many Muslims. Commenting on the Pope’s speech, Tasnim Aslam, a spokeswoman for the Pakistani foreign ministry, came out with this little piece of doublethink beauty: “Anyone who describes Islam as a religion as intolerant encourages violence.”

• Claus Christian Malzahn in De Spiegel: “Rushdie, Hirsi Ali, the Pope — Who’s Next?” The pope has apologized for the outrage amongst Muslims sparked by his recent comments. But the episode proves once again that criticizing Islam is dangerous.
  

  That so many in the Muslim world joined the protests against the pope merely show just how influential Islamist extremist groups have become. The political goal of the Islamists is clear: any dispute between Christianity and Islam must obey the rules handed down by political Islamism.

  Bending to this demand would be a mistake — indeed it would be tantamount to turning one’s back on freedom of expression and opinion. What will come next?

• Christopher Orlet in The American Spectator: Come Together
  

  There will be those who wish the Pope had gone further. Count me among them. Rather than relying on some emperor of seven centuries past, I wish Benedict had said that holy war was an oxymoron like “tax return.” I wish he’d reminded Muslims that this is the 21st, not the 7th century, that the Age of Reason began three centuries ago, and that the days of vilifying Jews and seeking their extermination should be ended.
  ..

  I suspect that the Pope was hoping to make the point that unless the West comes together, heals its divisions, and faces the threat of radical Islam together, it may face a similar fate as the Roman-Byzantine Empire. Naturally Benedict couldn’t come right and make such a bald statement — just as Benedict’s predecessor Pope Pius XII had to be similarly circumspect during Nazi rule — so he couched his remark in an obscure reference by a forgotten historical figure. The pope knew that he would have to apologize later for his statement, still he believed it important enough to risk it.

  For the first time since the mid-14th century Manuel II has returned to the world’s consciousness. It’s as though he’s been waiting, nearly 700 years, for just this occasion. On his behalf I’d like to say one thing: “Apologize, hell. I mean what I said, and I said what I mean.”
  (via Tim Blair)

• William Rees-Mogg, in The Times: “Why the Pope was right” Benedict did give offence — but no great religion should be immune from difficult questions
  

  The question is not whether the quotation from the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Palaeologus is offensive: it is.

  The question is whether the emperor is justified in what he said. His main thrust was at least partly justified. There is a real problem about the teaching of the Koran on violence against the infidel. That existed in the 14th century, and was demonstrated on 9/11, 2001. There is every reason to discuss it. I am more afraid of silence than offence.

• Editorial in the Telegraph: “Islam, like Christianity, is not above criticism”
• David Warren in the the Ottawa Citizen: “Apologize for what?”
  

  The BBC appears to have been quickest off the mark, to send around the world in many languages, including Arabic, Turkish, Farsi, Urdu, and Malay, word that the Pope had insulted the Prophet of Islam, during an address in Bavaria.

  He had not, of course.

• Andrew Bostom in The American Thinker: “The Pope, Jihad, and “Dialogue”
  

  The most important address commemorating 9/11/01 was delivered on 9/12/06, a day after the fifth anniversary of this cataclysmic act of jihad terrorism. It was not delivered by President Bush, and was not even pronounced in the United States. On September 12, 2006 at the University of Regensburg, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture (“adding some allusions of the moment”) entitled, “Faith, Reason and the University”.

• Douglas Farah, “The Islamist Reponse to the Pope’s Comments”:
  

  In this war, the enemy will use denial and deception, propaganda, front groups ready to react with public outrage at even preceived minor grievances to portray everything that happens as an anti-Muslim crusade. So we don’t mention what Islam really teaches, or what many in Islam teach as Islam-we believe in free speech and freedom of religion, so we don’t want to get involved with what is generally deemed to be protected speech.

  And that has vast merit. But it does not mean we cannot point out, and very publicly, the great hypocracy of these groups. It is not all of Islam, but the premediated response by some is designed to broaden the appeal of the Islamists in the Islamic community. We cannot stand by and allow them to define the entire terms of every debate.

• Anne Applebaum on Slate.com: “A Sorry Situation” It’s time to stop apologizing and start defending freedom of speech.
  

  Already, angry Palestinian militants have assaulted at least seven West Bank and Gaza churches, destroying two of them. In Somalia, gunmen shot dead an elderly Italian nun. Radical clerics from Qatar to Qum have called, variously, for a “day of anger” or for worshippers to “hunt down” the pope and his followers. From Turkey to Malaysia, Muslim politicians have condemned the pope and his apology as “insufficient.” And all of this because Benedict XVI, speaking at the University of Regensburg, quoted a Byzantine emperor who, more than 600 years ago, called Islam a faith “spread by the sword.”

  We’ve been here before, of course.

• Melanie Phillips in the Daily Mail: “The jihad against the Pope”
  

  In fact, the Pope’s real crime surely lay in speaking a truth that is denied by the many who claim that Islam is a religion of peace. On the contrary, Islam does indeed have a long history of imposing its faith on the world by the sword. The Emperor whose remarks sparked this furore had spoken in despair when his empire was under siege from the Ottomans.

  It is that religious tradition of holy war which is precisely what is driving the global Islamic terrorism that currently threatens us all. Which is why the Pope’s observations were a contribution to a crucial worldwide debate which must be had.

• Jules Crittenden in the Boston Herald: “Pope blinks in struggle with Islam?”
  

  The pope blinked.

  He picked a fight with Islam. Then he gave Islam a victory.

• Daniel Johnson: “Understanding Benedict”:
  

  Günter Grass, in his memoirs, recalls an encounter with the young Joseph Ratzinger while both were held in an American prisoner-of-war camp in 1945. The young Grass, a Nazi who had been proud to serve in the Waffen-SS, was taken aback by this soft-spoken, gentle young Catholic. Unlike God, the future pope played dice, quoting St. Augustine in the original while he did so; he even dreamt in Latin. His only desire was to return to the seminary from which he had been drafted. “I said, there are many truths,” wrote Grass. “He said, there is only one.”

  Sixty years later, just before the conclave that elected him pope, Ratzinger proved that he had never changed. The then prefect of the Congregation of the Faith — in effect, the church’s theological backstop — preached a sermon to the assembled cardinals in which he denounced the “dictatorship of relativism.” From that moment on, there was no other serious candidate.

• Swapan Dasgupta: “Pope is right on Islam”
• And finally here’s the Pope’s full speech. And the Vatican’s version, with a slight difference.

In other Counterjihadi developments:

• Sam Harris in the LA Times: “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals”. Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
  

  TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, “The End of Faith.” In it, I argued that the world’s major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

  …my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

  On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.

• Ralph R. Reiland in the Pittsburg Tribune-Review: Children as bombs
  

  As if things weren’t crazy enough in the Middle East, here’s the officially sanctioned message in sixth-grade Palestinian textbooks for 11- and 12-year-old kids: “The noble soul has two goals ” death and the desire for it.”

  The goal isn’t to build magnificent skyscrapers or write brilliant novels or to work on cures for the world’s most lethal diseases. The noble goal for the noble soul is as simple as strapping on a dynamite belt and blowing oneself into a million pieces in an Israeli pizza shop.

• Doug Patton: “Political Correctness Now Precludes U.S. Winning a War” (via IRIS)
• Mary Laney in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Peaceful Muslims should turn their anger toward Islamofascists”
  

  We are at war. Islamofascists have declared war on the United States and stated that they intend to kill all Americans. And they’ve shown us that they mean business.

  We’ve just passed the anniversary of the worst attack on America in history, 9/11, when Muslim terrorists killed nearly 3,000 innocent men, women and children as they turned passenger planes into missiles. Yet the news is filled with stories of Muslims — not loudly condemning the Muslim murderers — but complaining of their treatment here and demanding Americans change their attitudes.

  We Americans should change our attitudes?

• Charles Krauthammer in the Washington Post: “The Tehran Calculus”
  

  In his televised Sept. 11 address, President Bush said that we must not “leave our children to face a Middle East overrun by terrorist states and radical dictators armed with nuclear weapons.” There’s only one such current candidate: Iran.

• Emmett Tyrrell in the NY Sun: “Alone at the heart of Liberalism”
  

  In a thoughtful and timely Wall Street Journal column Bret Stephens offers this, “Here’s a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains — namely liberals — are typically the most reluctant to fight?” They have also been the first to bug out of Iraq, which one would think does not put liberals in a good light.

  Mr. Stephens advances several reasons, none of which diminishes the irony of his point. He offers the liberals’ “instinct for pacifism,” their moral relativism, their weakness for appeasement and their confusion of Islamism with opposition to materialism and to the corporate world.

  But I have an additional explanation….

• Bernard Lewis: “Bring Them Freedom, Or They Destroy Us” adapted from a lecture delivered by Bernard Lewis on July 16, 2006, on board the Crystal Serenity, during a Hillsdale College cruise in the British Isles.
  

  By common consent among historians, the modern history of the Middle East begins in the year 1798, when the French Revolution arrived in Egypt in the form of a small expeditionary force led by a young general called Napoleon Bonaparte–who conquered and then ruled it for a while with appalling ease..

• Robert R. Reilly on MercatorNet.com “9/11: a chance for the West to rediscover itself”
  Winning the battle of ideas with radical Islam calls for moral coherence. Are we up to the challenge?

• Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Coverage of 9/11 anniversary was too wimpy”

And the Rest:

• Charles A. Radin in The Boston Globe: “Muslims from Israel bring fresh views to Hub”
  

  Al Qasemi College , which was founded in 1989 as the first institute of Islamic higher education in Israel, is trying to export revolutionary openness and liberalism to the wider Islamic world, leaders of the faculty told educators, Jewish leaders, and local Muslims during a four-day visit to the Boston area that ended yesterday.

• Michael Petrou: “Tyrants of the Caribbean” The virulently anti-Western Non-Aligned Movement is having its coming-out party in Havana this week
• Carolyn O’Hara at Foreign Policy (links in original): “Darfur Delusions”:
  

  What happens if you organize and arm janjaweed militias who rape, kill, and pillage for years, displacing millions from their homes and leaving at least 200,000 dead? And what happens if you recently imprisoned an American journalist, his translator, and driver, kept the U.S. president’s envoy waiting for three days – despite her offer of a one-on-one meeting with Bush – because you are “too busy” to meet, and then rejected all international calls for U.N. troops to be deployed in your country, despite demonstrations around the world over the weekend demanding just that? Well, if you’re Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir, you get a nice package of economic incentives offered to you – think debt relief, increased trade, and more aid. Is this how the international community hopes to address the worsening violence in Darfur? By so richly rewarding one of the men responsible?

• Letter to Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Richard Corwin from Bethel Park:
  

  If you liked Srebrenica, if you liked Rwanda, if you are looking forward to the African Union troops leaving Dufar [sic], you’ll love the results if the U.S. quickly leaves Iraq.

Phew. I feel another hangover coming on.

and Canada:

A couple of days later, an unnamed very senior mega-important super-duper government official (as The New York Times says when it’s leaking details of U.S. national security programs) told me that, after untold meetings during the Chrétien-Martin years, he’d concluded that Canada, like New Zealand, saw itself not as a country but as an NGO. [..] Australia, on the other hand, is an old-fashioned nation state: it has responsibilities rather than attitudes. A few days into my trip to the Antipodes, I’d heard so often the line that Canada to America is like New Zealand to Australia, that I began proposing an alternative: Canada to America is like Indonesia to Australia–crazy joint to the north where half the people are jumping up and down shouting, “Death to the Great Satan!” But, after mulling it over, I decided this was unfair to the Indonesians. The world’s largest Muslim nation is a fragile democracy, to be sure, but it seems, for the moment, to be doing quite a good job holding down the Islamists.

And while I am here, here’s Steyn on Iraq:

On the ground America has allowed its enemies to subvert Iraq with impunity. My model here would be the so-called “Confrontation” in Indonesia 40 years ago, a conflict so obscure I’ll bet most readers have never heard of it. The Indonesians were convinced that the British had set up the new Federation of Malaysia as a neo-colonial puppet regime and so sent “insurgents” across the borders to subvert it and foment coups, secessions, etc. British and Commonwealth forces decided to return the favor and sent troops on lethally effective raids into Indonesia, keeping Jakarta on the defensive and dramatically reducing the amount of mischief they were able to make. The Brits and Aussies and Malays won that one with barely a word of it making the papers. This is exactly what the Americans should be doing with Syria and Iran. Instead, we accept the same de facto one-way traffic flow as applies on the US-Mexican border. This is one reason why we wound up hunkered down in the “Green Zone”. In future, it should be the other fellow who has to have a Green Zone.

The above comment is from National Review’s symposium “Last Chance for Iraq?”, which appeared in the September 11 print edition only. The other contributors were Michael Rubin, Michael A. Ledeen, Newt Gingrich and David Frum. You can see read their contributions on the American Enterprise Institute website.

Symposiums seem to be all the rage this week and National Review have another one on their site, also from September 11, on the question “Did It Change Us?”, which also featured Mark Steyn. Others include Daniel Pipes and James Lileks.

Here’s Pipes:

9/11 changed much for conservatives, little for liberals.

Conservatives tend to see the United States, Western culture, and even civilization itself under assault from a barbaric totalitarian force in some way connected to Islam. They perceive a cosmic struggle — reminiscent of those in World War II and the Cold War — over the future destiny of mankind.

Liberals tend to have a far more relaxed view of the situation, as symbolized by John Kerry’s 2004 comment calling terrorism a “nuisance” and comparing it to gambling and prostitution. Liberals widely accuse conservatives, for self-interested reasons, of exaggerating the threat. The hard Left goes further and purveys conspiracy theories about the Bush administration having perpetrated 9/11.

As I pointed out already in 1994 (in a National Review article), the current debate divides along lines closely mirroring those concerning the Soviet Union. Conservatives, being prouder of what Americans have created, worry more about external threats and urge confrontation; liberals, being more self-critical, are more sanguine, and prefer conciliation. Put differently, 9/11 mobilized conservatives against radical Islam even as it mobilized liberals against conservatives.

Looking ahead, nothing but an atrocity of terrible proportions will wake liberals and make “united we stand” once again a meaningful slogan.

But this is a Steyn post, so curtain call, buddy:

In the end, very little changed. The so-called “9/11 Democrats” are almost as invisible a presence as the “moderate Muslim,” and, insofar as one can tell, are most likely outnumbered by members of the Scowcroftian unrealpolitik Right still wedded to stability uber alles. In theory, if you’d wanted to construct an enemy least likely to appeal to the progressive Left, wife-beating gay-bashing theocrats would surely be it. But Islamism turned out to be the ne plus ultra of multiculti diversity-celebration — for what more demonstrates the boundlessness of one’s “tolerance” than by tolerating the intolerant. The Europeans’ fetishization of the Palestinians — whereby the more depraved the suicide bombers are the more brutalized they must have been by the Israelis — has, in effect, been globalized.

Anyone who’s mooched about the Muslim world for even brief amounts of time is struck by what David Pryce-Jones calls its “intellectual poverty”: It has a remarkable lack of curiosity about anything beyond its horizons. That hobbled it for centuries in its wars against the west. But our multicultural mindset is its mirror image: For isn’t the principle characteristic of “multiculturalism” its almost total lack of curiosity about other cultures? The multicultis make bliss of ignorance: You don’t need to know anything about Islam, you just have to feel warm and fluffy about it, and slap that “CO-EXIST” bumper sticker on your Subaru. If you want to know how little changed on 9/11, look at how it’s being observed in the nation’s schools.

The latest essay from Fjordman is of the same exceptional standard we’ve come to expect from the man. Here’s a short extract, do read the whole thing.

Western feminists have cultivated a culture of victimhood in the West, where you gain political power through your status in the victim hierarchy. In many ways, this is what Political Correctness is all about. They have also demanded, and largely got, a re-writing of the history books to address an alleged historic bias; their world view has entered the school curriculum, gained a virtual hegemony in the media and managed to portray their critics as “bigots.” They have even succeeded in changing the very language we use, to make it less offensive. Radical feminists are the vanguard of PC.

When Muslims, who above all else like to present themselves as victims, enter Western nations, they find that much of their work has already been done for them. They can use a pre-established tradition of claiming to be victims, demanding state intervention and maybe quotas to address this, as well as a complete re-writing of history and public campaigns against bigotry and hate speech. Western feminists have thus paved the way for the forces that will dismantle Western feminism, and end up in bed, sometimes quite literally, with the people who want to enslave them.

UPDATE (Sept 7): More on feminism morally blinded by political correctness from Janet Albrechtsen in The Australian:

THE young Turkish mother never stood a chance. Standing at a Berlin bus stop one February night last year, 23-year-old Hatin Surucu was gunned down at point-blank range, three bullets tearing into her face. This was no random killing in the heart of progressive Europe. Three of Surucu’s Muslim brothers were arrested. This was an honour killing.

According to foreign newspaper reports, Surucu was pulled out of her German school in Year 8 and sent back to Istanbul where, at 16, she was forced to marry an older Turkish cousin. She was killed because she rebelled. She fled Turkey, taking her young son to Berlin. She discarded the Islamic headscarf. She moved into a women’s shelter, finished school and enrolled in a technical school. In the eyes of her family, that display of female independence brought dishonour on them. She was slaughtered to restore their honour. Her youngest brother, who allegedly bragged to friends about killing her, confessed to the murder. In his statement, he said: “She wanted her own circle of friends … It was too much.”

What shocked Germany even more came in the weeks after the slaying. According to German magazine Der Spiegel, during a classroom discussion of the murder at a school not far from the murder site, 14-year-old Muslim boys mocked Surucu for getting what she deserved. One boy said: “The whore lived like a German.”

So let’s not beat about the bush. John Howard was right to point to the inequality confronting some Muslim women. But it is a shame the Prime Minister did not elaborate further. This is not about the banalities bandied about by Australian feminists obsessed with glass ceilings, pay discrepancies and men not changing the right number of nappies.

[..]

Last year there were eight honour killings in Berlin. According to Papatya, a Turkish women’s group, there have been 40 such cases across Germany in the past decade. Some reports suggest the numbers are higher. It makes for horrifying reading. A girl beaten to death by her brothers with a hockey stick because she slept with her boyfriend. A young girl strangled by her father because she had a boyfriend.

Earlier this year, a court in Denmark sentenced nine members of a family for the honour killing of 18-year-old Ghazala Khan. She had married an Afghan man against her father’s wishes.

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It’s happening in Britain, too. In 2002, a Kurdish immigrant from Iraq stabbed his 16-year-old daughter and slashed her throat over a bathtub. Her crime? She had an 18-year-old boyfriend. Since then, there are reports that a police review of 22 domestic homicides last year led to 18 being reclassified as “murder in the name of so-called honour” and to Scotland Yard reopening investigations into more than 100 suspicious deaths during a 10-year period that may have involved family conspiracies to murder Muslim women. It may only be the tip of the iceberg. Other Muslim girls are sent back to Muslim countries where they are murdered away from prying Western eyes.

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Most disappointingly, this multicultural moral blindness has silenced our feminists. Instead, it’s left to a conservative Prime Minister, derided by feminist critics as Mr 1950s Picket-Fence Man, to make headlines about the inequality facing some Muslim women. Meanwhile, our feminists have been making headlines with their trivial pursuits.

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Mark Steyn in the Chicago Sun-Times: “Why abduct us? We cede our values for free”

Did you see that video of the two Fox journalists announcing they’d converted to Islam? The larger problem, it seems to me, is that much of the rest of the Western media have also converted to Islam, and there seems to be no way to get them to convert back to journalism.

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Perhaps they are thinking along similar lines to Thomas Pellow and his fellow slaves, in the book based on his memoirs, “White Gold: The Extraordinary Story of Thomas Pellow and Islam’s One Million White Slaves”. Pellow was one of this million, stolen by Islamic pirates, who regularly raided the European coastline in the 17th and 18th centuries for human booty, and held captive for 23 years until his escape. Writes one reviewer:

They were held for ransom, built the [Moroccan Sultan Moulay Ismail's] vast pleasure palaces, became part of the 4,000 European women in imperial harems or were sold in the vast slave auctions in Morocco, Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Those captured by sea by the Moroccan corsairs where likely to be middle-class, educated and skilled Europeans, but Europe was too powerless to meaningfully respond. The Sultans effectively managed to raid as far as the Irish coast although they preferred the far richer Spanish Galleons. Coupled with real fear and brutality, there was always the hope that with luck, ability or the possession of marketable skills and most of all conversion to Islam, a slave could not only gain freedom but status, wealth and power.

Status, wealth and power? Perhaps thats it. Coupled with real fear and brutality, nay, who am I kidding, make that stupidity.

More from Mark last week in the Western Standard (“Londonistan calling”) and McLeans, where he reviews a couple of books dealing with the 9/11 conspiracy theories. And if thats not enough Steyn for ya, check out this video of him on C-Span.

Ralph R. Reiland recounts several warnings about mixing religion and politics from some great Americans in “A short stroll to fanaticism”

Arguing against religious coercion and in support of diversity of opinion, Jefferson wrote: “Is uniformity attainable? Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support roguery and error all over the earth. Let us reflect that the world is inhabited by a thousand millions of people. That these profess probably a thousand different systems of religion. That ours is but one of that thousand.”

Next, a Telegraph Comment on some modern day seekers of religious “uniformity”:

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Contrary to what Peter Taylor suggests on this page, no negotiation is possible with al-Qaeda or the fanatical Islamist organisations affiliated to it. Their goal is to destroy liberal, tolerant, secular society in all its forms, and replace it with a rigid theocratic dictatorship that enforces a medieval interpretation of the most barbaric elements of Islamic law.

In the conflict between the terrorists who wish to impose their vision of a “just and righteous society” by force on the rest of us, there is nothing to talk about: they are not interested in compromise or negotiation, and there is no common ground between their vision of the future and ours. The terrorists themselves have stated their position clearly: “We are not,” one of them has insisted, “trying to exact concessions from you. We are trying to eliminate you.”
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Earlier this year, the Government brought in the Terrorism Act 2006, whose provisions are precisely directed against those who make statements that “glorify the commission or preparation” of acts of terrorism. That Act has yet to be used.

In particular, it has not been used to prosecute the Islamist preachers who have stated that the murders of July 7, 2005 “raised the banner [for] jihad in the UK, which means it is allowed for suicide bombers to attack”; who have said that all non-Muslims should be converted or killed (“capture them and besiege them and prepare for an ambush from every angle”); and who have insisted that those murdered by the 7/7 bombers were, as “kuffar”, or non-Muslims, “animals and cowards”.

The Government’s failure to act against preachers of this kind of poison merely perpetuates and encourages them. That, in turn, helps, far more effectively than any foreign policy, to recruit people with a propensity to homicidal violence to the terrorist cause.

It was the failure to act decisively against the preachers of hate that helped to incubate Islamic terrorism in Britain. The continued reluctance to prosecute those preachers can only exacerbate the mortal danger we face.

Well, perhaps something is finally being done about this scum?

Victor Davis Hanson in the National Review Online: “The Waiting Game”.

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The truth is that we are in a pause, a lull in a great storm that broke upon us five years ago on September 11. We are waiting to see when and where and how — not really if — the Iranians test their envisioned bomb. “Another 9/11” is now part of the lexicon, suggesting that most Americans accept that an amorphous enemy that tries to knock down the Sears Tower, to blow up the Holland tunnel, to explode airliners over the Atlantic, and to slaughter commuters from London to Madrid to the Rhine may finally get lucky once — and that once could be a death warrant for thousands of Westerners.

After 9/11 we were at war with a fascist creed that had trumped any damage to the homeland wrought by all earlier enemies, whether Germans, Italians, Japanese, or Russians. But now, five years later, we are in a holding pattern, waiting in a classic bellum interruptum — whether in exhaustion from this long war in Afghanistan and Iraq, or complacent due to our very success hitherto in preventing jihadists from enacting mass murder in the United States.

So we are in limbo — a sort of war, a sort of peace. Lulls of this nature are not such rare things in history. The Athenians and the Spartans between 421-415, or the Western Europeans between October 1939 and May 1940, likewise thought the squall had passed — the respite a sign that the enemy was satiated, or was occupied elsewhere, or had had a change of heart, or that times of transient calm might mean permanent peace

We all wish it were so, but in private also fear that the worst — whether from al Qaeda, Iran, or their epigones — is to come.

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The rest:

• Hugh Fitzgerald at JihadWatch:“Carter and Brzezinski, together again at last”

• Another Muslim voice of reason, American ambassador to Fiji, Osman Siddique in the Washington Post: “Muslims must come forward”

• Paul Kelly in The Australian: “Clearly crying out for control”
  One sign of a mature democracy is its ability to change its security laws in response to threats writes Editor-at-large Paul Kelly

• Caroline Glick in the Jerusalem Post: “Setting the conditions for disaster”

• Victor Davis Hanson: “Messy Democracy Still the Best Course”

• Charles Krauthammer: “Hezbollah’s ‘victory’”

Thane Rosenbaum is a visiting American law professor, who describes himself as having “impeccable” left-wing credentials.

[..] the other night, as the keynote speaker sponsored by the City of Melbourne and Liberty Victoria – the Victorian Council for Civil Liberties – in front of a crowded auditorium and with co-panellists whose liberal sensibilities far exceeded my own, I was struck by the somewhat casual attitude that most people in the audience shared when it came to the threat of terrorism worldwide and at home, in your own country.

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Perhaps what I heard the other night was simply the luxury of remoteness. Australia is an ocean away from blown-up buildings, jettisoned planes, suicide bombs and beheadings. Geographic distance isolates and insulates this nation from that tragic proximity to violence that other Western countries experience more directly and intimately.

Yet, as an American, I wonder why the ghosts of Bali have not resounded here as a wake-up call or the foreshadowing of a possible future.

It is absurd to act as if terrorism is a video game that Australians simply refuse to play rather than accept it for what it is: a reality of the post-9/11 world that may one day force Australia to reach for something more lethal than a joystick to defend its interior.

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The rest in The Australian.

Actually the absurdity goes far further than that. For many Australians on the Left the de facto response to a foiled terrorist plot is write it off as a beat up created to boost some evil Right wing party’s election chances (even if that happens to be Tony Blair’s Labour, who is obviously simply doing Dubya’s bidding) and the de facto response to a successful terrorist attack is to blame it on the CIA, Mossad, or simply “the neocons” – evidently carried out to drum up support for their phony “War on Terror” – a euphemism for US Imperialism. The moral relativism is absolute – training in terrorist camps is no big deal, after all it was the US that created those camps and the madrassas in Pakistan to fight the Soviets in the first place (that was of course just another era of US Imperialism). Likewise the cultural relativism – it is inconceivable that any Muslim dominated society is responsible for its backwardness, they are merely “same same but different”, held down by that ubiquitous bogeyman US Imperialism, and European Colonialism before that. Any savagely barbaric or cruelly mysoginist tendencies of these socities are mere quirks that we can’t possibly be in a position to judge – just look at Club Gitmo, I mean Guantanamo Bay… and Texas, where they execute minors! Proof of course that the evil West is just as bad as the Taliban. 9/11 was an inside job, Bali was done by the CIA with a “micronuke”, Blair masterminded the London train bombings, Osama bin Laden is on the neocon’s payroll, if he exists at all, Israel is after Lebanon’s land and Iran is a victim of the West, a true battler merely trying to make ends meet in the face of Western oppressors that just don’t want to see brown people succeed.

In short the West is evil, greedy, selfish and all-powerful. The rest of the world is helpless, unfathomably envious of our wealth and hopelessly yearning for freedom, which the oppressors merely use a carrot to coax its victims into giving up their resources. And terrorism? Just another ruse used to maintain this status quo, by scaring the population into compliance.

Welcome to the Australian Useful Idiot Show.

UPDATE (7/9/06): In “Don’t mention the terror” (The Australian, Sept. 6th) Merv Bendle focuses on the parallel infantile attitude of Australian academics towards the threat of terrorism, their discourse poisoned by an anti-Western guilt-ridden leftist agenda.

IT is hard to believe Australian academics take terrorism seriously. Indeed, research into terrorism in Australia faces two main challenges: academic lack of interest and indiscriminate use of the simplistic “class, sex, race” theoretical template to produce predictable research results, showing that it is invariably the West and not terrorism that is at fault.

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Gerard Baker in the Times Online:

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This victim mentality reaches its apotheosis in the minds of a few in the hideous distortion of martyrdom. The image of the suicide bomber captures the ultimate catharsis of victimhood and at the same time the ultimate escape and liberation from it — the violent immolation of the victim on the altar of a sacred ideology. Of course this is a perversion of the very idea of sacrifice. Martyrdom is a willingness to die for one’s faith, not a willingness to take hundreds of innocents with you in the process.

Pierre Rehov, an Algerian-born French filmmaker, who produced a documentary, Suicide Killers, was asked in a TV interview this year how the world could end the madness of suicide bombings and terrorism. “Stop being politically correct and stop believing that this culture is a victim of ours,” he said.

Of course, this celebration of victimhood plays to the West’s deep sense of guilt, producing a fearful complementarity that makes today’s crisis so potent — a civilisation all too willing to accept the blame for the woes of a people all too willing to blame them.

We can stop enabling the victim mentality by overcoming our guilt complex. But then it is up to Muslims themselves to defeat it. Polls repeatedly show vast majorities of Muslims in the West, and smaller majorities in the Middle East, believe that terrorism is a perversion of Islam. But those same polls also show many Muslims agreeing with the proposition that the root cause of that terrorism is “oppression”.

It takes courage for leaders to expose the weaknesses in their own society. But there are some willing to do it. Last week their ranks were augmented from an unlikely source. No less a figure than Ghazi Hamad, the spokesman for the terrorist-supporting Hamas Government in the Palestinian Authority, wrote in an Arabic newspaper about the real causes of the mayhem in Gaza since the Israeli occupation ended last year.

“We’re always afraid to talk about our mistakes,” he said. “We’re used to blaming our mistakes on others. What is the relationship between the chaos, anarchy, lawlessness, indiscriminate murders, theft of land, family rivalries, transgression on public lands and unorganised traffic and the occupation? We are still trapped by the mentality of conspiracy theories, one that has limited our capability to think.”

David Warren in the Ottawa Citizen:

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We don’t “overreact” in the West, the way we used to do — we don’t like to put out little fires, we prefer to wait until they are big ones. And we prefer blaming ourselves to blaming the enemy, when the enemy lights the fire. We assume they only do it because we must have done something to annoy them.

Jean-François Revel: “Democratic civilization is the first in history to blame itself because another power is trying to destroy it.”

At the time Revel said this, the enemy power was Soviet Communism. The intellectuals, the smart journalists, the fashionable academics, the smug urbane of all descriptions, were hardly pro-Communist. They were more ironical than that, they were “anti-anti-Communist”. Today they are anti-anti-Islamo-fascist.

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