By: Srdja Trifkovic | December 04, 2015:
With mathematically predictable precision, President Barack Hussein Obama declared that last Wednesday’s slaughter of 17 American attendees of a Christmas party by two Muslims in a community center in California, and the wounding of two-dozen others, was a mystery (“We don’t know the motives)—and that the U.S. needed stricter gun laws. It was a jihadist attack by devout Muslims against Americans, as it happens. It was an eminently jihadist act of murderous aggression by self-starting, home-grown Muslim terrorists.
Enough already of Obama and his ilk. The war against sudden jihad self-generated by Muslim immigrants and their offspring, threatening literally every American, is by now both real and present. It can and must be won, in spite of Obama and his ilk. From now on every Muslim is a legitimate suspect and every non-Muslim is a potential victim, with self-defense strategies understood
The first task is to start talking frankly about the identity and character of the enemy, Obama’s devious plaitudes notwithstanding. It is essential to discard the taboos and to discuss Islam, Middle Eastern immigration, and the Muslims in general without fear or guilt, or the shackles of mandated thinking. What I am about to state here is not different from what I have said at countless public platforms in the U.S. over the years, or advocates in these pages of Chronicles. This is a summary of many years of study.
The imperative is dictated by rational integrity no less than by the need for self-preservation. We have a moral and intellectual obligation “not to shirk the difficult issues and subjects that some people would place under a sort of taboo,” Bernard Lewis (age 99)—who knows Islam better than any prominent Westerner alive—warned three decades ago, “not to submit to voluntary censorship, but to deal with these matters fairly, honestly, without apologetics, without polemic, and, of course, competently . . . Because, make no mistake, those who are unwilling to confront the past will be unable to understand the present and unfit to face the future.”
Or, to be more precise, unfit to survive very far into the future. Since Lewis wrote those words it has become blatantly obvious that the main threat to Western security comes from the purveyors of “voluntary censorship,” with those among us who have the power to make policy and shape opinions, and who reject his diagnosis and demonize everyone else who agrees with him. Having absorbed postmodernist assumptions, certain only of uncertainty, devoid of any serious faith except that in their own infallibility but loath to be “judgmental,” members of our own elite class treat the jihadist mindset as a pathology that can and should be treated by treating causes external to Islam itself. The result is a plethora of proposed “strategies” that are as likely to succeed in making us safe from jihadism as pretending that Turkey and Saudi Arabia are America’s “allies” in the fight against ISIS will help defeat the Islamic State.
Abroad, we are told, we need to trust Ankara and Riyadh, we need to spread our “values” in the Muslim world, we need to invest more in public diplomacy. At home we need more tolerance, more draconian legal measures against “Islamophobia,” greater inclusiveness, less profiling, and a more determined outreach to the Muslim communities that feel marginalized and stigmatized. The predictable failure of such cures leads to ever more pathological self-scrutiny and morbid self-doubt. This vicious circle is untenable and must be broken. Evidently it costs too many American (and French, English, Spanish . . . ) lives, and the problem will get worse. The magnitude of the threat demands radical responses that fall outside the cognitive parameters of the elite class.
1. Spying on Muslims is necessary, legal and justified—Let us start with the complex and emotionally charged issue of constitutional rights versus national security. In December 2005 it was disclosed that soon after the September 11 attacks, President Bush secretly authorized the National Security Agency “to eavesdrop on Americans and others inside the U.S. to search for evidence of terrorist activity without the court-approved warrants ordinarily required for domestic spying.” The unwillingness of the mainstream media to disclose the exact identity of the NSA eavesdropping subjects was reminiscent of its refusal to disclose the religious identity of tens of thousands of rioters who wreaked havoc in dozens of French suburbs a decade ago. Glossing over the surveillance targets’ identity has implied that that a Muslim who has become a naturalized American citizen is so thoroughly and irrevocably “American,” that no hyphenated designation or qualifier is called for. This fits in with the liberal world view that rejects the notion that faith can be a prime motivating factor in human affairs, or that importing Muslim immigrants may be in any way disadvantageous for the host country’s security. Having reduced religion, politics and art to “narratives” and “metaphors” which merely reflect prejudices based on the distribution of power, the elite class did its usual thing, calling—most recently—the attackers in Paris last month “French” or “Belgian.”
Our awareness of the many failures of the Bush II presidency should not make us instinctively disinclined to see the legal justification for its conduct. The threat posed by jihad today is different in degree to that faced during the Cold War, but not in kind: it is an existential threat. 24/7 surveillance—at home and abroad—is the right and proper part of that response. The legal and constitutional dilemma, such as whether the U.S. should spy on jihadist-minded “Americans” at home is both false and unnecessary under the circumstances. Radical solutions are needed for radical challenges, and they do exist.
If and when all persons engaged in Islamic activism are excluded from America, there will be no need for such intrusive domestic surveillance. We don’t need any legislation to protect CAIR’s clients’ privacy, we need the law that will treat any naturalized citizen’s or resident alien’s known or suspected adherence to an Islamic world outlook as excludable – on political, rather than “religious” grounds.
2. Refuse/Rescind Citizenship to Islamic Activists—All Americans—real Americans, that is, and not those who falsely take the oath of citizenship but continue to preach jihad and Sharia—will be spared the worry of state intrusion if Islamic activism is treated as grounds for the loss of acquired U.S. citizenship and deportation. The citizenship of any naturalized American who preaches jihad, inequality of “infidels” and women, the establishment of the Shari’a law etc., should be revoked, and that person promptly deported to the country of origin.
* I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of the big influx of Slavic-looking people into the San Fernando Valley from Eastern Europe in this century are say, cousins of cousins of people who qualified as Soviet Jews under the favorably admission laws in the 1970-1990s. A half Jewish person moves from Russia to Valley Village and writes a letter to his not Jewish cousin about how great the weather is in SoCal, who follows who sends the same type of letter to his completely not Jewish cousin. Since Jews in the later years of the Soviet Union tended to be discriminated against for being too successful, there was plenty of intermarriage, so immigration programs for Soviet Jews wind up drawing in eventually lots of totally non-Jewish blond flatheads who maybe get work as bodyguards for their cousin’s cousin.
* Job discrimination against Jews in the Soviet Union got started around 1947 when Golda Meir came to visit and Stalin noticed how excited a lot of his Jewish underlings were about the formation of Israel.
Before that the Soviet Union had been aggressively anti-anti-Semitic from 1917 to the late 1930s. Then the Jewish foreign minister Litvinov got fired in 1939 so Molotov could make a deal with von Ribbentrop to launch WWII. But that stands out. For the next decade, the Soviets were less aggressive about rooting out anti-Semitism as in the first couple of decades, but did not have anti-Semitic policies. During the war, the Soviet government, which had largely been a Coalition of the Fringes (e.g., Stalin and Beria from Georgia, the Armenian Mikoyan, the Jewish Kaganovitch, etc., and before them Lenin and Trotsky) became more pro-Russian, so it attempted to push regular Russians into better jobs, which had negative consequences for Jews and other talented minorities.
Then policies to keep down the Jewish percentage in various jobs started to be erratically imposed after the formation of Israel, although they weren’t universal. But discrimination against Jews in the later Soviet Union was a real thing.
