The Discomforts of Re-Reading
Serious readers re-read favorite books, both for pleasure, and
also for guidance. Jews in particular
are a people rooted in re-reading. There’s
a reason to re-visit ground that’s been covered before: events also re-cycle.
Much of Jewish and general history re-revolves. Just as early Islam was spread initially in
the Middle East by aggressive desert tribesmen sweeping up others along with
it, so too ISIS/ISIL/IS is expanding rapidly and getting recruits from the far
corners of the map. In its early days,
Islam conquered far and wide, until finally it was stopped at the gates of
Vienna in 1529. Today, radical Islam is already
deeply rooted in the West via immigration and is exporting fighters from Europe
back to its natal Middle East. In a reverse flow, jihad has already returned to
Europe, with fatal
results.
While the Europeans seem to have progressed little beyond hand-wringing,
these days Egypt, Jordan, and even the Saudis are on the phone with Bibi
Netanyahu, wondering what to do about ISIS.
Middle Eastern regimes rightly fear the ISIS horde of rampaging, raping
and beheading Islamist terrorists—which strikingly resembles early Islamic
expansion. A chant popular among Islamic
terrorists and activists, “Khaybar,
Khaybar, ya Yahud”, nostalgically recalls the annihilation of the Jewish
community in the Saudi peninsula in Islam’s early days.
Saudi King Abdullah said regarding Iran, we must cut
off the head of the (nuclear) snake.
Today the problem for Western civilization, including Israel, is that there
are also numerous small independent “snakes” operating off the radar. The
threat of scattered, loose cannons is too scary, and therefore many Western
regimes dismiss them as as minor actors.
Among the small snake deniers is the U.K., which was shocked
last week to find out that journalist James Foley was beheaded by an ISIS
recruit from pricey
Maida Vale. Home-grown small and
not-so-small snakes from the U.K. include such “luminaries” as the Underwear
Bomber, the Shoe Bomber, the Tel Aviv Mike’s Place Bombers, the
Kill-a-British-Soldier-in-the Streets Knife Wielders, and of course the London
Transport Big Ka-Boomers. Why were U.K.
leaders so flabbergasted by the rapper/beheader’s radicalism?
Also outside of the U.K. there are too many people perennially
obsessed with big snake management, including the myth that all Islamic states
have one head. President Obama and the
U.S. State Department are still focused on “Israel as the problem”. The logic goes that if only Israel would make
peace with the Palestinians, there would be “Peace in the Middle East”. The horrific persecution of the Yazidis, as
one example, proves that this is not the case.
This week I re-read the excellent Remains of the Day
by Kazuo Ishiguro. Spoiler alert on the
big moral of the story: it’s about “well-intentioned” aristocratic British
anti-Semites trying to appease the Nazis.
Ishiguro based his Lord Darlington character on Lord
Londonderry, who entertained Nazi ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop, and
visited Germany several times, meeting with Hitler and his top brass in the
late 1930s. The U.K.’s appeasement policy ultimately resulted in the fall of Czechoslovakia
and the invasion of Poland.
Yet prominent policymakers today in the U.K., instead of
learning from history, are pretending that all the snakes can be charmed, despite
ongoing and accelerating evidence to the contrary. In fact, the Brits are
snake-charming themselves into complacency and acceptance of a worsening of
their home front—and it is indeed a front.
Police in Rotherham failed
to prosecute the raping and
trafficking of 1,400 local, non-Muslim young girls. Officials admitted that since the
perpetrators were members of the city’s Pakistani community, prosecution could
amount to “racism”.
Let’s admit
that racism on the part of the Muslim perpetrators allowed them to abuse
non-Muslim girls. Let’s fight the idea that in the interest of “fairness” Muslims may not be deemed culpable
or responsible for their actions. Racist
liberal “superiors” rationalizing and justifying Islamist criminal actions, no
matter how reprehensible, result in more of the same brutality. With that kind of thinking, only when an Islamist
outgrows his breeches and joins up with ISIS to kill a member of the privileged
press class, is that inexcusable.
But as I hope
you have noticed, gentle reader, it’s not about snakes or how large or small
they are, it’s about radical Islam. It’s
not about the means, it’s about the ideology that drives actions. No matter how “gentlemanly” Ribbentrop was or
how badly Germany was treated after World War I, Nazism was pure evil, and so
is Islamist ideology, no matter who is doing the killing, raping, or other
inhumane acts.
At this point
in our recycled history, those at the point of the sword know that they must
act out of self-preservation. Those in
Europe, America and elsewhere, must choose soon, before complacency becomes
complicity, and dithering causes a fait accompli. For the girls of Rotherham, it’s too late,
but there is still time for the West to act against the evil ideology that
drives mass murder and terror .
