Wolfgang Bruno: Defeating Defeatism - The End of the Phony War

This is a timely and insightful column by a European author and blogger whose site I have just discovered. I urge my readers to pay regular visits as this man has much to say that bears reading and thinking about. While I think he may be a bit harsh on our beloved Mark Steyn, whose recent columns betray a certain resigned sadness over the seeming inevitability of the demographic and cultural decline of Europe at the hands of expanding Islamism, he makes many valid and excellent points. He points out that it is the people who are waking up to the real dangers of Islamofascism, while the politicians lag behind in their politically correct Ivory Towers. And he correctly points out that by not listening to the public wisdom, the politicians open the possibility of dangerous fascisms arising once again in order to deal with the problem.

Bruno encourages righteous anger as the necessary emotion rather than submitting to the defeatism of inevitability. He is right that the people as a whole are getting the message about the dangers of Islam, but the problem still remains that the leadership, not only of the EU, but ironically even in the United States, is behind the curve and continues to appease the Islamofascists. Even George Bush, who has been the only one to openly confront terrorism is going wobbly in the knees, and even, alarmingly, is on a politically correct offensive in the recent controversy in the states over the Dubai Ports World deal.

Bush's reflexive defense of this deal has been to mercilessly label 70% of the American population and an overwhelming majority of the Congress who oppose this deal for obvious reasons as "racists", "xenophobes", "nativists", "nationalists", "isolationists", "protectionist" and on and on. The vehemence and anger of the smears continues on a daily basis and is becoming an orchestrated symphony of Wagnerian proportions being waged through the media, bloggers, talk radio and other outlets.

I am an American-Ukrainian conservative, but I do not support Bush in this and am shocked at the craven methods employed to degrade and smear the natural reaction of a people awakened to the nature of the real enemy. Bush seems to be playing a double game -- pretending on the one hand to be fighting the war on terror, but he is failing to address the true nature of the enemy.

He wants us to fight the "evildoers", to "bring them to justice", to "hunt them down" as he never tires of telling us in the same speech repeated endlessly, as if repetition would make it more convincing -- but he cannot fight this nebulous war on terror unless he names the enemy. Because of political correctness, because he has elements in his own administration which favor the Islamic vote in America and do not wish to alienate their money or their votes, and because he is also a globalist in financial outlook, he has a divided loyalty to this war.

Who are we hunting down? A few insurgents or terrorists? Or are we fighting the greatest ideological and spiritual battle to face mankind in the last century? If even Bush has now labeled it a crime to recognize who your enemy truly is -- we are in trouble. But the fact that the country was roused to such a level of outrage (whatever the details of the particular case, it has to do more with the gut reaction of a people sick and tired of being victimized and then being asked to apologize for it) shows that there may be a groundswell of resistance that has been roused in the American population as a whole. And even if the Republicans howl that Democrats used the deal in order to polish their security bona-fides -- still -- the situation is salutary in that the Democrats are all finally on record as recognizing who the enemy is. Perhaps the first law of successful warfare is "know thy enemy."

Wolfgang Bruno: Defeating Defeatism - The End of the Phony War

I have stated before that we in the West need to face down our internal enemies, the twin trolls of Denial and Defeatism, before we can have any chance of dealing with Islam. Yes, the Islamic threat is very real and could lead to a cataclysmic world war unless stopped. No, it’s not too late to win this. Not yet. Writer Mark Steyn does a good job at devouring the former troll, but insists on feeding the latter. As Lawrence Auster demonstrates, Steyn continues to claim that we have in fact already lost, and must settle for "a Muslim majority world.” He talks as if he is the Churchill of our age, yet displays a resigned defeatism that would have made even Neville Chamberlain blush. Contrary to the views expressed by many, the madness of the Muhammad cartoons issue can in hindsight turn out to have been a blessing in disguise. Eurabia’s legions of spin doctors were quite successful in placing the blame for 9/11, the Madrid and the London bombings on US and Israeli foreign policies. These attacks may actually have strengthened Eurabia. Not so this time. The first cracks in this wall came with the murder of Theo van Gogh. With the Danish cartoon case, these cracks have now grown into a chasm.

The Phony War was a phase in early WW2 marked by few military operations in Continental Europe, in the months following the German invasion of Poland. What we have witnessed during these past few months is the end of the Phony War against Islamic Jihad. The election of hard-line president Ahmadinejad in Iran and of Hamas in the Palestinian Territories, the Muslim riots in France and the international unrest triggered by the Muhammad cartoons case mark a watershed in this battle. After having carefully, and one must admit skilfully, built up the mythology of Islamic tolerance for decades, Muslims now blew their own cover. This is end of taqiyya, and from the Muslim point of view, it probably came too soon. It is indeed possible for Muslims to win this, but it would have made more sense for them to lay low for another couple of decades, and quietly continue the demographic Jihad through migration conquest. Of course, being Muslims, they have to boast and brag all the time, and haven’t got the patience to wait that long. This critical character flaw, more than infidel strength, is why they will most likely lose. Just like the Japanese during WW2, who hailed the attack on Pearl Harbor as a great victory, the sheer arrogance of their creed blinds them from realizing when they make huge mistakes that could eventually cost them victory. There is now a critical mass of Europeans who see clearly that Islam and Muslim immigration constitute a mortal danger to their freedom and their civilization. They feel confused and scared, but first of all angry. If this is the true face of Islam, doesn’t that mean that our academic elites, our media and our political leaders have lied to us systematically for decades? Muslims misunderstand the mentality and potential response from the infidels because they see mainly the appeasement of the political class. What they don’t see is the simmering defiance that is growing at the grassroots level.

What we need now is not another column by Mark Steyn telling us that all I lost and we might as well surrender pre-emptively. What we need now is anger. Anger gives you energy, instead of the resigned passivity bred by defeatism. However, we should be careful not direct this anger towards that favorite Eurabian boogeyman, the USA and Israel, nor should we resort to the time-tested European tradition of targeting random “foreigners.” It wasn’t the Americans or the Israelis who brought us into this mess, and it certainly wasn’t the Indian dentist or the Chinese shopkeeper down the corner. It was in fact our very own EU elites.

Americans tend to consider the EU as a joke. It’s not, because it’s not funny. Apart from a few vague statements, the EU has largely abandoned Denmark during the cartoon incident. “European unity” only exists whenever Brussels wants to subvert the democratic process in individual member states and force more Islam down our throats, selling us out behind our backs through the intricate networks of the Euro-Arab Dialogue. The Danish embassies had hardly burnt down before Javier Solana, the “Foreign Minister” of the European Union, promised his real masters the Saudis that the EU would henceforth work to limit freedom of speech for half a billion people. And he can’t be held responsible for this by the European public, since he doesn’t answer to any democratically elected government. The EU is not a joke, the EU is evil, destroying freedom across an entire continent and spreading instability far beyond the borders of Europe. The Cold War was won when Ronal Reagan publicly labelled the Soviet Union “the Evil Empire.” A generation later, we are witnessing the rise of another Evil Empire. Not the Soviet Union, but the European Union. It’s time to bring this one down, too. The European Union, not the USA and definitely not Israel, is the greatest threat to world peace today. It is appeasement by the EU that has emboldened the Islamic Jihad, and not just in the West. The EU is an increasingly totalitarian entity that is post-democratic and neo-feudalist. The buildings of the European Commission should be turned into a museum of the history of dhimmitude and Jihad across the world. Parts of it could be torn down and displayed next to pieces of the Berlin Wall, symbols of past tyranny and oppression and the ultimate triumph of freedom. Javier Solana, Chris Patten and their ilk should be tried for treason in public trials to reveal the full scale of the Eurabian project.

There is a growing estrangement between the peoples of Europe and their elites. People sense that they are not being told the truth, and feel betrayed. Somebody needs to show them just how deep the rabbit hole goes. Publish Bat Ye’or’s book “Eurabia” online, both in the full version and in abridged versions of 50 and 5 pages. Pay the author whatever she wants for the copyrights, and encourage the translation of the book into multiple European languages. Store it online on websites such as Faith Freedom International and Jihad Watch, as well as major blogs based outside of Eurabian jurisdiction, and encourage visitors to download the text or display it on their own websites. This principle could be repeated with a number of books critical of Islam, creating a flood of information bypassing politically correct media and official censorship. Such an operation could receive clandestine support of the Bush administration. It would cost a fraction of the war in Iraq, and achieve a lot more, both in the West and in the world in general.

Perhaps in stead of pinning our hopes on an Islamic Reformation that will probably never materialize, Westerners should rather focus on an Enlightenment and a new Renaissance. Not in the Islamic world, but in Europe and the West. Wishful thinking, you say? Well, although the situation is now very serious, it is in fact not impossible to imagine such an outcome. Moreover, it is important that somebody formulates an alternative, positive vision to rival that of Islam and Eurabia, or the only alternatives ordinary Europeans will be stuck with are extremist political movements. And then we will end up with a Clash of Fascisms and the death of European democracy. Hope is important. Without formulating a positive vision of hope we can never win this.

Muslims always claim that the West owes much to Islam, and that Islamic influences triggered the Renaissance. That’s not true. But maybe it will be this time. It is true that the West in general and Europe in particular has lost its way at the beginning of the 21st century. Perhaps this life-and-death struggle with Islam is precisely the slap in the face that we need to regroup and revitalize our civilization. Europe will now be forced to rethink her culture and the entire basis of Western civilization, if she is going to cure the weaknesses that are currently making her vulnerable to Islamic infiltration. We need to rebuild a stronger sense of Western unity, much fractured by the Eurabian Union and the anti-Western, pre-Enlightenment ideology of Multiculturalism. If so, Islam would indeed be responsible for triggering a Western Renaissance, the Second Renaissance. Ironically, Islam itself would be critically, perhaps mortally wounded by this struggle, and Bernard Lewis would be proved wrong. Europe, or at least most of Europe, will not be Islamic by the end of his century. It is more likely that Islam itself will have ceased to be a global force of any significance by that point. But it is important to realize that such a result will not come by itself. It will require Europeans, Westerners and infidels in general to grow some backbone, end appeasement and openly confront the very real Islamic threat we are now facing. If we do so, I remain confident that we will prevail. We just have to listen a bit less to the defeatist siren song of Mark Steyn.