It's fitting that the bold, brash, and indiscriminately bawdy French publication that was the conspicuous and literal target of high-caliber Islamic Fundamentalist disapprobation fifteen months ago should be the one to commit the unpardonably politically incorrect faux pas of publishing the truth about what is happening to what used to be Christian Europe:
The [Paris and Brussels] attacks are merely the visible part of a very large iceberg indeed. They are the last phase of a process of cowing and silencing long in motion and on the widest possible scale. Our noses are endlessly rubbed in the rubble of Brussels airport and in the flickering candles amongst the bouquets of flowers on the pavements. All the while, no one notices what’s going on in Saint-German-en-Laye. Last week, Sciences-Po* welcomed Tariq Ramadan. He’s a teacher, so it’s not inappropriate. He came to speak of his specialist subject, Islam, which is also his religion. Rather like lecture by a Professor of Pies who is also a pie-maker. Thus judge and contestant both.
No matter, Tariq Ramadan has done nothing wrong. He will never do anything wrong. He lectures about Islam, he writes about Islam, he broadcasts about Islam. He puts himself forward as a man of dialogue, someone open to a debate. A debate about secularism which, according to him, needs to adapt itself to the new place taken by religion in Western democracy. A secularism and a democracy which must also accept those traditions imported by minority communities. Nothing bad in that. Tariq Ramadan is never going to grab a Kalashnikov with which to shoot journalists at an editorial meeting. Nor will he ever cook up a bomb to be used in an airport concourse. Others will be doing all that kind of stuff. It will not be his role. His task, under cover of debate, is to dissuade people from criticising his religion in any way. The political science students who listened to him last week will, once they have become journalists or local officials, not even dare to write nor say anything negative about Islam. The little dent in their secularism made that day will bear fruit in a fear of criticising lest they appear Islamophobic. That is Tariq Ramadan’s task....
None of what is about to happen in the airport or metro of Brussels can really happen without everyone’s contribution. Because the incidence of all of it is informed by some version of the same dread or fear. The fear of contradiction or objection. The aversion to causing controversy. The dread of being treated as an Islamophobe or being called racist. Really, a kind of terror. And that thing which is just about to happen when the taxi-ride ends is but a last step in a journey of rising anxiety. It’s not easy to get some proper terrorism going without a preceding atmosphere of mute and general apprehension....
From the bakery that forbids you to eat what you like, to the woman who forbids you to admit that you are troubled by her veil, we are submerged in guilt for permitting ourselves such thoughts. And that is where and when fear has started its sapping, undermining work. And the way is marked for all that will follow. [emphases added]
Magnificently and courageously said. I couldn't have put it any better myself.
This less subtle aspect of jihad may have been unwittingly summarized in this dialogue from Gul Dukat in a sixth-season episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (6:10 to 6:23):
A true victory is to make your enemy see they were wrong to oppose you in the first place; to force them to acknowledge your greatness.
The Muslims are doing better than that: They're forcing us to acknowledge their "greatness" without our ever opposing them in the first place. We are constructing our own gallows, braiding our own nooses, rubbing our own necks against the mono filament edges of their scimitars, begging them to shoot us and blow us up, and ironically reveling in our own moral supremacism for doing so.
Sun Tzu's first rule of war:
We are deliberately denying ourselves that most bedrock of knowledge. Is it, therefore, any wonder why we are losing this clash of civilizations that our "leaders" refuse to acknowledge?
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