Those of us who believe that Islam is a “religion of peace” that desires to live in harmony with the West and is comprised mainly of “moderates” who pose no danger to our way of life are living in a fool’s paradise. Despite its bloody sectarian divisions, Islam is strong, durable, belligerent and determined to impose its faith-based imperium upon an infidel world through one or another form of jihad. Violent jihad is the child of short-term thinking; stealth jihad is an expression of long-term planning. The only difference between the incendiary and the vanilla, the “extremist” and the “assimilated,” is patience, for both adhere to the tenets and commands of the Koran and the Sunnah. “Moderates,” whether they know it or not, keep the faith intact, maintaining its longevity and social status; their militant brethren profit from both the informal and official approval that “moderation” ensures, staking out the terrain in which the radicals are able to operate unhindered. As I’ve written before, moderation is the sea in which the sharks swim. (The British website Liberty GBfeatures a sober and persuasive article, “Ten Reasons Why Moderate Muslims Are Not the Answer,” which should be consulted by those who believe they are.)
A keynote speaker at the October 2013 Islamic Peace Conference in Oslo, addressing an audience of several hundred ordinary Muslim citizens, repeatedly made the point that “normal” Muslims hold to the same Koranic principles mandating abhorrent punishments as do the “extremists,” concluding that this cultural and scriptural contiguity somehow proves that normal Muslims are not extremists. Go figure! What he actually succeeded in showing is that Islam is Islam and not the innocuous doppelgänger we ludicrously wish or assume it to be. It is from its very origins a conquering religion that has never ceased throughout its more than 1400 year history to pursue its constitutive and self-defining aims. Like the tide, it has advanced and receded many times over, but it is now poised to complete an inundation from which we in the West may not recover. And we have only ourselves to blame.
There are, broadly speaking, five categories of individuals who refuse to take the Islamic threat seriously or who claim that no such credible threat even exists, namely: (1) overt or covert sympathizers and allies; (2) those who have been bought off with fees, perquisites or substantial gifts of money or donations to a cause or institution; (3) those who feel secure and protected, imbued with a “gated community” mindset, convinced they are exempt from any possible menace (no mosque will ever be built in their neighborhoods); (4) those who have been intimidated into keeping a low profile; and (5) the indifferent or ignorant, the low information — no information majority uninterested in or oblivious to the wider issues that impinge upon the health of the culture or the well-being of society.
Such attitudes bear an uncanny resemblance to the prognosis spelled out for Western civilization in the cataclysmic vision of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. As historian H. Stuart Hughes explained in his study of Spengler’s thought, a new “Caesarism” or tyranny will proclaim itself in our time, “while the mass of mankind will look on in bewilderment, apathy or resignation, ready to accept without question” their depressing fate. “A new primitivism will begin to pervade all human activity [and men] will be ready to believe anything,” as part of a “second religiosity” that Spengler foresees.
There is much truth in Spengler’s diagnostics. The secular religion of Communism has been superseded by the political faith of Islam, both aspects of that “second religiosity” replacing the Judeo-Christian foundation of the West. In the present time, the “new primitivism” of Islam has been embraced or accepted, consciously or passively, by a sweeping constituency of the bewildered, the resigned, the credulous — and, of course, the exploitative and the parasitical.
Owing significantly to the five categories enumerated above, it seems plausible to assume that the “clash of civilizations” in which we are now profoundly embroiled — the struggle between a far too insouciant West and the forces of supremacist Islam — will eventually be settled in favor of the latter. Barring a sudden awakening and an unlikely stiffening of resolve, the West as we have known it in recent history is probably doomed. Observing the shameful spectacle of Western politicians bending over backwards to placate their growing Muslim immigrant populations or siding with the objectives of their leaders, to the point where an American president has salted his administration with Muslim Brotherhood operatives and has materially supported its adherents abroad; considering the successful strategy of lawfare jihad, which has in effect suborned the legal community and the judiciary, as well as bullying many writers, journalists, magazines, newspapers and TV networks into an unoffending silence; and reflecting on the vast cohort of profiteers, academics, intellectuals, members of the privileged classes, and illiterates functional or otherwise who offer no opposition to or even concretely facilitate the progress of Islam — it is hard to escape the conclusion that it is only a matter of time before Islam triumphantly asserts its hegemony over the West.
Naturally, it won’t happen overnight, but it is happening gradually and inexorably, day by day, year by year, as one bastion after another falls to Islam’s insidious predation: lawfare in the courts in which citizens and citizen groups taking issue with Islamic practices are driven into bankruptcy; major cities being carved up into no-go zones or problematic neighborhoods; universities becoming hotbeds of Islamic advocacy; the mainstream media launching itself, in Doug Giles’ apt formulation, as “21st century truth reconstructors”; race-based or two-tier policing; political parties assiduously seeking Muslim votes and political administrations civic and national, as we have seen, riddled with Islamic agents. Islam has understood that it cannot win on the battlefield, but that it can bring its millennial campaign against the West to fruition on the fields of civil society, culture, the judiciary, the media, the entertainment industry, the constabulary, the political establishment and the energy sector.
And again, as we have noted, it is aided and abetted by a miscellaneous fifth column of fellow travelers whose posture toward Islam — whether through fear, ignorance, delusion, conciliation, profit, or liberal complacency and multicultural toleration of the intolerant — is one of supine compliance. The sequel seems foreordained. Conor Cruise O’Brien in On the Eve of the Millennium gives Western civilization 200 years before it collapses. He is probably being over-optimistic. A new poll, for example, based on exploding Muslim birth rates in conjunction with the so-called “deathbed demography” of Europe, has projected that Britain will be a majority Muslim nation by the year 2050. Indeed, the Malthusian geometric increase in Muslim immigrant populations spells the end of Europe as we know it and the victorious ascension of Eurabia. It has been estimated that France, Germany and Scandinavia are well on the way to Muslim majority status before mid-century. Even Russia faces the prospect of internal subversion, home to a restive Muslim population that constitutes 25% of the census.
Yet a majority is not essential for a robust minority group to dominate political and cultural life. According to what Raymond Ibrahim calls the “rule of numbers,” statistics show that a ratio of three or four to ten is sufficient for an aggressive minority to inflict havoc or acquire authoritative influence and decisively change the character of a nation. Even in regions where such numbers are lacking, as in the U.S. and Canada, targeted insinuation into the political echelon, cultural institutions, jurisprudential legislation and interfaith colloquia can affect the balance of social relations to the detriment of native populations. Speaking at the July 9, 2012 International Free Speech and Human Rights Conference in Brussels, the Catholic bishop and scholar of Islam known as le Père Samuel Boniface did not mince words: “One mosque in Europe is worse than nuclear.” The cultural and theological radiation that has infected the West, Father Samuel implies, may well be terminal if it is not stubbornly resisted by principled people — a vanishing breed, unfortunately.
We are now on the cusp of colonization by an imperial juggernaut that has found a winning strategy: not confrontation but infiltration. It need no longer frontally assault the gates of Vienna; it enters the civil nexus and the body politic surreptitiously, taking out citizenship as a way of taking out the opposition. Terror, for all the devastation it wreaks, is merely a tactic that accompanies this larger strategy. And we who are Islam’s victims are really, for the most part, its collaborators, for if we are to be defeated, then we will have defeated ourselves, succumbing to our own weakness and obsequiousness, or to an erroneous calculation of where our interests lie. Father Samuel, who lived in the Arab-Muslim Middle East for thirty five years, has studied Islam for forty, and is fluent in Arabic, Hebrew and several other languages, is not far off the mark when he warns that “there is an invasion of Europe guided from outside, carefully planned by…some of our leaders…in order for Islam to replace Judaism and Christianity here in the Western world.” When one contemplates the domestic and foreign policies of “some of our leaders” past and present — Jacques Chirac, Jens Stoltenberg, Carl Bildt, Tony Blair, Barack Obama, to name only a few — in concert with the hospitality of the West to massive Muslim immigration, one cannot readily dismiss the cleric as a conspiracy-monger. One would then be constrained to do the same for the most reputable scholars in the discipline, including Johan Bourlard, Serge Trifkovic, Andrew Bostom and Bat Ye’or, who have meticulously documented the failure of the West before the Islamic offensive.
Bruce Bawer, author of While Europe Slept and Surrender, points out that “the day is coming” when the Islamic cohort we have welcomed into our countries will be “calling the shots.” The window is rapidly closing for Scandinavia in particular, he points out — Bawer lives in Norway — where the native population has “been trained from infancy to react when they hear words like Islam, immigration, racism and xenophobia” with guilt, acceptance and collective dhimmitude, “like obedient subjects of imported masters.” But Sweden, Britain, France, and Norway are bellwethers of the future of the Western world. Civilizational exhaustion has set in like a wasting disease, and Islam is only the manner in which we have decided to commit collective suicide. As Martin Heidegger said in a 1966 Der Spiegel interview, “Only a God can save us.” The tragedy is that the God who commands the furtive army of saboteurs and cultural vandals invading our borders, with our willing and often enthusiastic complicity, is committed not to our salvation but to our destruction.
