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2016: The West’s Last Chance — Last Gasp?

Will it defend itself or not? Crossposted at The American Spectator

Behold recent developments: the moral inversion elevating Hamas over Israel, skewered by Dennis Prager (4:12); the fascism of militant Islaminsanely strict rules of engagement that tie our hands in battle; Miss Puerto Rico suspended from the Miss Universe pageant for an anti-Muslim online rant; rampant political correctness describing as “peaceful or moderate” Muslims who take offense at those who link Islam to terrorism; the government questioning the loyalty of an American dentist, two of whose siblings had emigrated to Israel, seeking to provide dental services to veterans per a federal program; the feds funding a radical mosque linked to Islamist terror groups; the Muslim Michigan ACLU official who refuses to condemn acts of Islamist terror “just because I’m Muslim.”

Worse still, a triumph of PC over homeland security: In settling an ACLU lawsuit the NYPD agreed to scrub its website of its landmark 2007 study of how American Muslims self-radicalize; it further agreed not to use the report to “open or extend investigations.” In the same vein is the abject Islamophilia exhibited by Philadelphia’s PC-addled mayor, who tweeted of the self-declared Islamist thug who shot a Philly cop without provocation, “Last night’s shooting had nothing to do with any faith. It was a violent assault by a criminal. I urge all Philadelphians to stand together.”

Germany shows most starkly what the future may augur for the U.S. In default of strong moderate opposition to Muslim migrants — an estimated 1.1 million asylum-seeking migrants arrived in 2015 alone. Refugees assaulted locals en masse in German cities — most notably, in Cologne, where the (female) mayor advised local women to stay at “arm’s length” from potential marauders. The far right took to the streets in protest. The New Year’s Eve attack tally in Cologne topped 500, with 40 percent of complaints alleging sexual offenses; of 31 suspects taken into custody, 18 were Muslim migrants. Elsewhere, multiple complaints of sexual harassment led one German town to bar migrants from the public pool.

It gets worse. NOT MAKING THIS UP: A German official has called anti-immigrant rhetoric equally as bad as mass sexual assault by Muslim migrants: “What happens on the right-wing platforms and in chatrooms [sic] is at least as awful as the acts of those assaulting the women. This is poisoning the climate of our society.”

In France Jews were set upon by Muslims in Marseille, in contravention of the city’s self-proclaimed multi-confessional arrangement giving substantial governance autonomy to religious communities. In Sweden, home to 700,000 Muslims (seven percent of Sweden’s population, versus under one percent in the U.S.), the leftist government does diplomatic cartwheels to avoid offending easily offended Islamists. Ardently pro-Islamist foreign minister Margot Wallström, who spends much of her time appeasing Islamist countries whilst denigrating Israel, once ventured criticism of Saudi Arabia’s Sharia-inspired sentencing of a regime critic to 1,000 lashes for “insulting Islam.” The instant result: harsh blowback from the UN’s 57-member Organization of Islamic Countries (OIC), via a webpage posting that stated: “In her remarks, Ms. Wallström degraded Saudi Arabia and its social norms, judicial system and political institutions.”

Dutch member of Parliament Geert Wilders, scourge of Islamists, co-authored a piece examining the cultural phenomenon of mass rape by militant Islamists, stating therein:

“Cultural enrichment” has brought us a new word: Taharrush. Remember it well, because we are going to have to deal with it a lot. Taharrush is the Arabic word for the phenomenon whereby women are encircled by groups of men and sexually harassed, assaulted, groped, raped. After the Cologne taharrush on New Year’s Eve, many German women bought pepper spray. Who can blame them?

A culture that has a specific word for sexual assaults of women by groups of men is a danger to all women. The existence of the word indicates that the phenomenon is widespread. Frau Merkel, Prime Minister Rutte and all the other open-door politicians could and should have known this….

Taharrush is quite common in Islamic countries. Women are frequently surrounded by men and subsequently abused. The Egyptian website Jadaliyya points out that it also happens to veiled women. Women are victims simply because they are women and not because they have provoked the men by their conduct or “provocative” clothing. It can happen in the streets, public transport, supermarkets, or during protest demonstrations.

Wilders adds that European governments now warn their females to curb their behavior so as to avoid molestation; of this Wilders said:

When one imports Islam in the Netherlands, one also imports the misogynistic culture of Cairo, Damascus, Riyadh into our cities. Next to headscarves, burkas [sic], mosques, honor killings, and terrorism, we now have taharrush.

The solution is not that our women keep an arm’s length from the male barbarians, but that the government keeps these men thousands of kilometers away from us.

Muslim rapes of local non-Muslim females are rife. Other Western European leaders are emulating Germany’s shameful example of playing down or ignoring Muslim mob rampages while blaming their victims; anti-Jewish violence is rarely condemned. Showing sterner stuff in Eastern Europe, Czech President Milos Zeman has called Muslim integration into Europe “practically impossible,” for want of necessary cultural similarity.

As to America, ace prosecutor Andy McCarthy had settled, so he thought, the “peaceful”/”moderate” Muslim argument when he successfully prosecuted the World Trade Center I conspirators:

About 20 years ago, I prosecuted a dozen jihadists, led by the “Blind Sheikh,” Omar Abdel Rahman, for waging a terrorist war against the United States — including the World Trade Center bombing and a plot to attack the Lincoln and Holland Tunnels, as well as other New York City landmarks. The defendants were caught on tape building bombs, scheming to strike at American military sites, and planning attacks timed to achieve maximum infidel carnage. At trial, the jihadists tried to tell the jury they were just moderate, peace-loving Muslims who had been provoked by American foreign policy, a perception of anti-Muslim bias, and videos of Muslims being persecuted in Bosnia. The Blind Sheikh insisted his incitements to jihad were simply a case of faithfully applying sharia principles, which, according to his lawyers, the First Amendment gave him the right to do….

McCarthy asked the jurors:

Is there any obnoxious, insulting, infuriating thing I could say to you, or show to you, that would convince you to join up with mass-murdering terrorists? To become a terrorist yourself?

The jurors, he writes, “laughed the defense out of the courtroom.” Now, he ruefully concludes that what was a courtroom joke 20 years ago is now bipartisan government policy. None of these jurors run Twitter, which knuckled under to Islamist protests over what they deem “offensive” tweets.

Our government, mired in PC, though entrusted with the solemn duty to “preserve, protect and defend” the federal Constitution against enemies foreign and domestic, genuflects to Islamist sensibilities, as do leaders in both political parties. Democrats in Congress have introduced House Resolution 569; it condemns “violence, bigotry, and hateful rhetoric towards Muslims in the United States.” Such language would effectively criminalize criticism that offends Muslims. The Obama administration has expunged from federal training materials anything that might be seen to link Islam with terrorism, and enforced the new party line against recalcitrant instructors.

Recall Hillary announcing after Benghazi: “We’re going to have that filmmaker arrested” — a warning she issued whilst knowing that the video in question was not responsible for the attack of September 11, 2012 in Benghazi. Meanwhile, President Obama’s favorite leader, Turkish president Recip Tayyip Erdogan, recently — NOT a misprint — praised Hitler’s Germany as a — YES — salutary example of executive presidency. One presumes the president, if he knows of the statement, is reconsidering.

WSJ’s Bret Stephens captures the utter perversity of multicultural PC:

… Multiculturalism is a liberal fetish that is also the antithesis of liberalism, classical or modern — a simultaneous belief in individual autonomy and cultural equality, irrespective of whether different cultures believe in individual rights or not.

Typically liberals have elided this incoherence by pretending, as President Obama often does, that Western cultures are no better than non-Western cultures in respecting human rights, or by demanding radical liberalism inside the West while supinely accepting violent anti-liberalism outside it.

But the events in Cologne make nonsense of this. What was outside the West is now inside. In the spirit of Christian charity, Angela Merkel and other European leaders have imported a culture of Muslim misogyny. In the name of humanity, the benefactors are asked to close their eyes to the brutishness of so many of their beneficiaries.

Stephens suggests that we allow elderly, female and young Muslims to emigrate to America, but not misogynistic Muslim men. He explains:

Put bluntly, there is a pronounced tendency among Middle Eastern men to view women either as chattel or as whores. This is not a pleasant reality to acknowledge, but it’s an even more dangerous thing to ignore.

Even Hollywood is waking up — at least, some members of the entertainment community. Comedian Tina Fey spoke up against the “apology culture” and declared that she will ignore it from now on. Unless we follow Tina on this one, expect that the U.S. will follow Norway’s path, and eventually order Christian houses offering shelter to Muslim refugees to remove all Christian symbols, lest they offend their guests. We should follow Australia’s third-largest Christian congregation, the Uniting Church in Australia, in rejecting baseless claims that Jesus was a Palestinian.

Much of Trump’s appeal seems to lie in his blunt rejection of PC norms, what WSJ’s Dan Henninger calls the “revolt of the politically incorrect”:

Forget the controversy over Donald Trump’s Muslim ban. This unique political campaign is about more than that. Donald Trump and indeed Ben Carson popped the valves on pressure that’s been building in the U.S., piece by politically correct piece, for 25 years. Since at least the early 1990s, a lot of the public has been intimidated into keeping its mouth shut and head down about subjects in the political and social life of the country that the elites stipulated as beyond discussion or dispute. Eventually, the most important social skill in America became adeptness at euphemism. It isn’t an abortion; it’s a “terminated pregnancy.”

One sobering prediction is that by 2040 Muslims — whose votaries have accounted for 99 percent of terrorism deaths since 9/11/2001 — will be America’s second-largest religious community. Which suggests we’d best get started now in formulating new policies to deal with new realities.

Such cannot come to pass until as a society we can properly name the enemy and the challenges posed, whilst restoring our own truncated freedoms of speech and artistic expression in the process.

To do this, we should abandon the “violent radicals/peaceful moderates” dichotomy to describe the varied Islamic communities. Replace this with a triad: (1) violent radical: (2) peaceful yet radical; (3) true moderates.

Everyone understands the violent radical: the folks who gave us the 9/11 attacks, and sundry attacks since — and who lust after WMD so as to inflict vastly greater harm upon us.

But too many conflate the adjectives “peaceful” and “moderate.” And this is how we are led astray. Consider the Norway vignette recounted above: The migrant supplicants acted peaceably, petitioning the government for redress of their grievances. And they won. But there is nothing “moderate” about such action. The newcomers imposed their religious preferences upon that of their hosts. This was a hostile act — one of religious and cultural imperialism. SC Governor Nikki Haley’s response to President Obama’s SOTU address impliedly recognized this cultural threat: “No one who is willing to work hard, abide by our laws, and love our traditions should ever feel unwelcome in this country.” (Italics mine.)

Again, such acts are not violent — no planes taking down buildings, no bombs hurled into cafes, no AK-47s firing at innocent passerby. But they are radical acts that express extreme, aggressive hostility to values cherished by the host. It is this intermediate category — not violent but profoundly hostile, and hence not truly moderate — that many of our elites seem to miss. The public, intuitively, understands this far better.

Unless the voters elect someone who sees the threat posed by non-violent Muslim migrants, the post-2016 years may become the West’s last gasp.

John Wohlstetter

Senior Fellow, Discovery Institute
John C. Wohlstetter is a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute (beg. 2001) and the Gold Institute for International Strategy (beg. 2021). His primary areas of expertise are national security and foreign policy, and the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He is author of Sleepwalking With The Bomb (2nd ed. 2014), and The Long War Ahead and The Short War Upon Us (2008). He was founder and editor of the issues blog Letter From The Capitol (2005-2015). His articles have been published by The American Spectator, National Review Online, Wall Street Journal, Human Events, Daily Caller, PJ Media, Washington Times and others. He is an amateur concert pianist, residing in Charleston, South Carolina.