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The Western populace is now consciously hostile to Islam My impression (gained from the internet, where everybody in the developed world gets their impressions of popular feeling nowadays) is that hostility to Islam has taken root in the West. This did not happen overnight. It certainly did not happen over the night of September 11th / 12th 2001. On that first night of the new world, while there were calls for the nuking of Mecca and so on, most people wanted very much to separate “Islam” from “Whoever Did This”. Back then I was probably more hostile to Islam than most people. I stayed where I was and most people overtook me.
I was going to rabbit on about Whither Islam and Whither Western Civilization and whether both, either or neither are withering. But I think I’ll leave it at this one assertion: the West has come to despair of Islam in the last fourteen years and that change is not banal.
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Yes. I think events (and the “arguments” adduced by the powers-that-be) over recent weeks have made a lot of people realise that Gerd Wilders and co. are not a bunch of racist nutjobs.
The West got better acquainted with Islam. If the attitude was less negative before it was due to ignorance. Islam did a great job of remedying that ignorance.
I don’t think there ever was any love affair between The West and Islam (or vice-versa).
The worrying aspect of this is that as the population at large has been moved (by experience) to realise that the Arabic form of Islam is not compatible with civilisation, our leaders and intellectuals have been heading in exactly the opposite direction; becoming more and more apologetic for it and bending over backwards to accommodate it’s psychopathy.
We now have a dangerous schism in our society: The people saying one thing, and their leaders telling them to SHUT UP!
Well yes, and yet Frau Merkel has taken it upon herself not just accept but ENCOURAGE what can only described as an invasion of Europe by Muslims such as these charmers en route to Germany:
Not that I really give a fuck about Germany, but these people will be a problem for all of us soon enough.
Well said, Natalie.
These aren’t migrants, they are successful invaders and already have the Colonial Master outlook.
They may overplay their hand, though. The “deal” in the past has always been that the underclass gets free everything in exchange for voting left reliably and staying within its own bad neighbourhoods.
These men can’t do the first. And they appear to be unwilling to do the second.
I wonder how the police will handle the Altstadt, Mayfair, and Avenue Foch riots?
What gets me is not the big stuff per se – 9/11 7/7 etc. as you could argue this is just the actions of a lunatic fringe. Its the endemic social corruption.
Everyone knows about Rotherham. 1400 girls abused, 9 scumbags sent to prison. Well the police did a follow up investigation and have identified potentially 300 more Pakistani Muslim men that could be prosecuted for similar activities. 300 in one town! [Not that the police will arrest or charge them… ]
Simply put, this kind of action combined with the surveys where huge swathes of the local Muslim population say they passively support ISIS, shariah law means that we have huge problems as the demographics change… and more fundamentally a civil war is inevitable as that population continues to ignore the social contact, assisted by the lunatics on the cultural Marxist left.
Peggy Noonan’s piece today in the WSJ makes the point that the elites can be as humanitarian as they want because they don’t suffer the costs of their feelgood policies.
Also I have a strong suspicion that the first place in Europe to truly resist the ‘invasion’ will be Italy, and the resistance will be lead by Italian women. Oriana Fallaci was not alone. when provoked, Italian women can be ferocious and I have a feeling that they are being provoked to the breaking point.
Weakly. And then excuses and allowances will be made.
I doubt it. All that will happen is that the population of the West will be rapidly replaced by a faster breeding immigrant population, then when we are in a minority we will be persecuted more, until those of us who remain are raped and slaughtered en masse as Europe finally switches to Islam. All the way through this process elites and governments will support the immigrants and populations will fail to resist, because doing so is racist. Our mental pathology and political degeneracy are too great for us to be able to resist this.
We should never have stopped being hostile towards Islam. The Arab invasions(convert or die) of the Old Roman world of North Africa, the burning of the Library of Alexandria, the destruction of the irrigation systems of Mesopotamia; the turning points: Charles Martel, The sieges of Vienna and Constantinople, Lepanto; the slave trade from Africa to the Middle East; the death of rational thought per Al Ghazali that to find the universe predictable and comprehensible is to limit the power of Allah; the bloody deceitful lecherous life of its founder: all these have slipped from the history syllabus and general knowledge to be replaced by multicultural mush. They have not forgotten that we are the enemy who live in the Place of War which they will not hesitate to bring to us.
Tomsmith, Our mental pathology and political degeneracy are too great for us to be able to resist this..
Genuine question: if you are so sure of that, why do you bother writing comments in this vein?
I was not lying when I said that in terms of hostility to Islam I stayed where I was while the general opinion moved around me. Like most people I am sick and tired of the elite’s habitual obfuscation of the crimes committed by Islamists worldwide. (I strongly suspect that a major driver of the hardening of Western public opinion I have observed, which everyone here seems to agree has taken place, is revulsion at these lies.) Nonetheless, I have not completely given up on the hopes of 2003 that Islam could evolve in a better direction. I lurk on Muslim forums sometimes and read bulletins from MEMRI and there are some Muslims who want this. Remember Al-Sisi’s speech on New Year’s Day? Not that the beliefs of even the most reformist Muslims are particularly close to mine, but they are beliefs that can live in peace with mine. Another point: we should not forget the example of the Kurds fighting ISIS, knowing full well the barbaric treatment they can expect if captured. Many of these people seem a type of Muslim far from fundamentalist. A surprising number of them are women.
Historically this happened when the last parts of the Eastern Romans (AKA Byzantines) was conquered by the Ottomans. The Greek aristocrats in the city and remaining countryside converted to Islam to preserve something of their powers, much to the disgust of the clerical classes and much of the rest of the Greeks.
I expect the elites in Europe to join with their class. After all, Europe has a long history of religion taking a back seat to power. Did not Henry IV of France, a life-long Protestant, convert to Catholicism in just such a more. “Paris is worth the Mass” indeed.
Hi Simon,
I totally agree. The insolence and entitlement displayed is insulting, and quite familiar. However, the second video seems to have been shot in a French train in 2011. Is that so?
Over at libertylawsite.org is a piece by Mihail Neamtu on this subject; together with commentary that might be of interest to some who read here.
‘the point that the elites can be as humanitarian as they want because they don’t suffer the costs of their feelgood policies.’
Thank You Taylor
This also applies to many if not most federal level politicians, at least in the United States. Also believed by much of the ‘Hollywood’ crowd of bleeders who insist that we MUST help everyone on the planet ( with ‘our money’ NOT the entertainers !) up to and including the point of our own destruction because they ( the elites ) will not be ‘affected’ !!
it will get much worse especially when those same refugees had already started to have the mindset of victorious conquerors towards the European populace with the full knowledge that the American and European media will cover up their deeds while blaming those who opposed them as being xenophobic Islamophobe racists. Worst, the lot of American and European politicians and bureaucrats are more than willing to support them with the intent to gain their votes and maintain their political power at the expense of the country, their citizens and culture.
Just a note to remind people that today is the 42nd anniversary of the coup against the Allemde régime in Chile, which may have saved perhaps 200,000 Chilean lives, had Castro’s terror been replicated in Chile, and represented the first serious reverse for the Soviets and their spawn since the Korean War.
Perhaps my personal development on this issue is of interest. Certainly i did not change my mind in 2001: that a few lunatics are willing to die, as long as they can take other people to Hell with them, proved nothing about over a billion other people, as far as i could see. I had superficial friendships with Arab Muslims before then, and they seemed likeable enough. They made fun of the power that women wield in their extended families, so i did not think they were misogynous. At least one of them seemed to be an antisemite, but i thought it did not really matter, as long as he was not going to do anything about it.
What changed my mind was the Cartoon Jihad of 2006; but not in the way you might think. The Muslim riots did not seem important to me: the vast majority of Muslims worldwide did not riot, after all. What changed the way i see the world, was The Economist blaming all the fuss on the Danish PM. That convinced me that everything i ever read in The Economist about immigration and Islam, is pernicious ruling-class propaganda. It was only at this point that i started wondering about Islam.
Even now, i am still questioning. I tend to believe that — just as Christianity had to temper its own utopian altruism to survive — Islam had to temper its own fanaticism in order to survive.
As the Golda Meir character says in the movie Munich: “Every civilization finds it necessary to negotiate compromises with its own values”. Not us Vikings, for sure, but both Christians and Muslims found they had to.
Taylor:
On a lighter note: having just watched two Italian women beat the two top female tennis players in the world, i’d have to agree.
The adjective that best applies to Italian women, though, is not ‘ferocious’ but ‘Machiavellian’. As i remember, there was something in the Xenophobe’s Guide to the Italians about how Italian men are just a front: Italy is really ruled by women.
As I have said in previous comments, the fanatical Islamist leadership, in all their variations from Saudi Arabia to Iran, are leading their followers to a catastrophe beyond even their blood-soaked imaginations.
Atrocity after atrocity, barbarism after barbarism, the radicals are doing exactly what the Japanese did, and with exactly the same delusional mentality, when they launched the attacks that ended in their utter defeat and demilitarization in WW2.
After decades of relentless internal criticism of any military action, the west appears weak and demoralized. It is not surprising, then, that the Islamic fanatics have come to believe that the talking heads they see in the media, and the endlessly whining politicians mewling at the endless conferences they use to avoid any real decisions, represent the true feelings and beliefs of the people.
These delusions are dangerously, catastrophically in error.
Go to any bar, or small town diner, or big family party held away from academia or the chattering classes, and you will hear such fire breathing attitudes that your hair will curl. The feelings of the ordinary people whose kids are in the military right now, who served themselves, and whose parents did in their day, won’t show up on the evening news shows, won’t be quoted approvingly by some politician showing how correct he is, but are very deeply held, and burst out in various ways.
I am truly afraid that the Iranians will succeed in a nuclear attack over the next decade against one or more targets. Israel certainly, somewhere in Europe and/or the U.S very possibly. When this happens, the last restraints holding back the ferocity of western culture’s killing machine will fall away, and the most ruthlessly efficient machine for death and destruction the world has ever seen will surge into high gear.
I’m sure some here will claim that no such ferocity exists any longer in western culture. All I can respond is that you have not lived with the people I have spent my life working and socializing among. In that culture, “more rubble, less trouble” is the moderate opinion.
Islam is at the edge of a precipice, overlooking a chasm without a bottom. If it’s delusional leaders succeed in launching the final battle, and it will be final, indeed, for their regimes and their people, Islam will cease to exist as anything but a hunted, underground splinter of dwindling followers, fearing at every moment they will be found and exterminated, like rabid dogs.
This is the future of the illusionary “caliphate” that the fanatics in the Mideast and elsewhere are so busy constructing.
Just as Stalingrad was the grave of the Wehrmacht, so the caliphate will be the grave of Islam.
Snorri
Thanks for your kind words.
However I believe that the universe, and not just the Italian part of it is ruled by women.
Italian women may be Machiavellian in normal times, but their ferocity emerges when under stress.
It wouldn’t hurt to roll out a bit of Mrs. Niall Ferguson (Ayaan Hirsi Magan Ali) to frame this discussion.
@ Vr:
What you are hitting on about the “Caliphate” (who shall be the “deputy” of the Prophet) brings into focus the efforts, through violence, to establish the base for a new “elite” on what is left of the last attempt that began to fragment 300 years ago. Those seeking that elite status have to achieve or create a cohesive social order; but the sufficient control of violence to do so is not being attained; to the contrary, it is dispersed. The struggles of the various groups to become that new elite (based on the cohesion of the “Islam” banner) and their conflicts plus the rising western concern will probably keep the movement fragmented, if it does not self-destruct.
Life in a western society has become so easy and so removed from the normal brutal aspects of nature that we as a culture have forgotten how to make hard decisions. Many imagine that the time of Hard Decisions is past, and that a comfortable middle class lifestyle awaits us all.
But hard decisions are coming. Decisions like, sending the army in to round up foreigners and shoot those that resist. Decisions like demolishing all mosques and making islam illegal, on penalty of deportation (putting them in prison does nothing to rid us of islam). Those who continue to refuse hard decisions will in due course be overtaken by events and most likely killed by the people they are “protecting”. We ARE being invaded and the solution will never include keeping the invaders in our midst, so they must be expelled or killed. If we refuse the first course of action out of false compassion, the second course of action will be chosen for us, through civil war.
Islam is the most successful organized crime syndicate extant. Mohammed was a blend of Al Capone, Murder Incorporated and the NSDAP. Once you get that it is far more like La Cosa Nostra and less like Evangelical Christianity the quicker you will understand who they are.
To expose them you need more James O’Keefe’s. He came to Montana last night to speak. I listened intently. Mr O’Keefe has exposed ACORN, Planned Parenthood, Voter Fraud, Labor Unions and so forth and made it clear that Islam is on Project Veritas’ radar.
More here:
http://www.projectveritas.com/
Natalie, thanks for the whole posting, and good for you in vis-á-vis your reaction to 9/11.
But: Special applause for the penultimate sentence. Well played! 😉 😉
Oh well, perfection is only for God. 🙁 Please ignore the “in.”
Islam is a destructive belief system replete with odious social pathologies totally incompatible with modern and free societies.
Just as we require immigrants to have skills, education and language ability I have no problem requiring that they prove their indifference to Allah.
The data is overwhelming that immigration from the Muslim world carries a massive net cost for the treasury, culture and public order.
“Islam is the most successful organized crime syndicate extant.”
Well said.
Snorri,
My wife and I just got back from (among other things) a stay in Florence with the lovely Donatella and her family. “Velvet glove, Iron fist” does not seem quite right. Let me think a bit…
I keep having visions of rapiers, and hearing Alec Guiness’s voice:”an elegant weapon, for a more civilized time.”
I’ve said this here before, but I believe that the best long-term strategy is to question and hopefully discredit Islam itself. As long as Muslims believe the Koran is the perfect word of Allah, there’s no fundamental way to challenge the violent and totalitarian parts. At least Christians can say the New Testament overrules parts of the Old, and that it was written by many people. Plus, since few read the Bible in the original languages, there’s the added flexibility of translate. Jesus was a more peaceful guy, in any case. But imagine if Jesus had been a caravan robber turned warlord, took dictation from Heaven to write the Bible single-handedly, and every Christian had to read the Bible in the original language (God’s language). Not much room for interpretation there!
But there are many indications that the Koran was assembled from various sources, and contains human editing and errors. The scholarly questions are well-presented in Did Muhammad Exist? by Robert Spencer. If the information there could be used to discredit the essentially fundamentalist orthodoxy of Islam, and turn it into something more like the non-violent attitude of contemporary Christianity, then perhaps a worldwide religious war can be averted. Perhaps….
The best way to discredit Islam is the way we used to discredit Nazism. If you think giving them books is going to convince them that their god isn’t real, then I don’t know what to say to you.
We should remember why 9/11 was chosen by the jihadists. It marks the commencement of the battle that lifted the siege of Vienna and the turning point in the Muslim occupation of Europe. We have forgotten our most significant victory, without which the Enlightenment, Industrialization and liberal democracy would not have emerged. The jihadists have not forgotten their humiliation.
There will, at some time in the distant future, be words (books, probably, or if Iran and ISIS gets their way, stories recited over campfires) of how the west facilitated a successful invasion of their lands, culture and freedoms by hundreds of thousands of young men who had next to no interest in the places and ways they moved into and in many cases, sought to replace with something they could easily find in countries wholly committed to their beliefs.
These future words may well grasp why we of these times did this in act of what amounts to cultural suicide, but here and now we can’t really understand why so many in our midst — supposedly educated people who depend on the west’s established ways and opportunities — are so determined to see it come to an end by helping the west to crumble.
The fact that I think Europe is finished doesn’t mean I want it to happen or that I don’t hope it survives.
The problem with the idea that ordinary people are losing their tolerance towards Islam (which I agree is the case) is that there is no way for this feeling to translate into action. Political correctness and European guilt act to shame and silence people on a personal and social level. Then there is the belief system of the European political elite which is so far removed from that of the ordinary people. And finally there are the political institutions we have put in place which act to limit change and to reinforce the status quo. If European took to the streets violently we would be brutally crushed by our state apparatus. It will take a lot to remove all of the impeduiments to realistic action, if it is even possible.
Greytop and Tomsmith: as John Derbyshire once said, “better dead than rude.” I think it has to do with the liberal (in the old sense) belief that all religions are equal before the law. That’s a great principle for civil peace in the West among Christians and Jews, but unfortunately, it leads people to believe that all religions are equal in behavior. And so when one has a strong political component and a desire to conquer the world, it’s difficult for the rest of the world to defend itself.
Could be that at least one do-gooder has had his eyes opened: he tries to donate food to some “refugees”, and gets his bag stolen.
The international elite continue to push the “Islamic tolerance” and “religion of peace” myths.
However, most people know the line pushed by the “liberal” elite is nonsense.
What was common knowledge in the time of Winston Churchill and Gladstone (the hostile actions of Islam against the West from invasions starting in the early 7th century to without-a-break the Ottoman slaughter of Christians in the 19th and early 20thc centuries) is starting to become common knowledge again – in spite of all the “education system” and the “mainstream media” do to stop the spread of the truth.
People see what is happening in the world and ask the obvious question “was Islam fundamentally different in the past” – and the answer they find is, all too often, no-it-was-not-fundamentally-different.
Gladstone and Winston Churchill were correct.
I simply find it hard to believe that western populations in Europe will find it within themselves to institute military action (because thet is what will be required) against their muslim populations before they are thoroughly overtaken by demographics, given current beliefs and the actions of European politicians.
We would have to act like the Serbs (who have not forgotten what Islam is) did pretty soon, and that simply isn’t going to happen in a modern western country. We will just go from a modern western country to a country where savagery rules pretty quickly I think as the population balance changes. Then it will be too late. The one saving grace is that it will probably happen in other European countries first, which might give us time to act, if we are capable. I feel very negative about the prospect of victory here, despite the feelings of regular people.
re ljh
See this post.
http://www.onepeterfive.com/the-final-hijra-a-warning-on-the-refugee-crisis/
Paranoid or prophetic?
Let me share my journey from internationalist libertarian to anti-islamic hardass. Following 9/11 I wanted to do something, something concrete. I didn’t think of Islam as the enemy, I thought they probably needed help. But there were certain ones needed handling, so I joined the Infantry. And on my several deployments, I learned to hate everything about those cultures. It wasn’t that they disliked me and my comrades, I fully understood that. I wouldn’t have liked foreign soldiers on my soil. I can easily forgive the fingers and earlobe I left over there. Fortunes of war and all. I can forgive the lads we lost. I grieve for them, but they were soldiers and knew the risks. What I could not forgive, forget or tolerate was the way they treated each other. It is a sector of the world without law, honor, work ethic or any positive glimmer of civilization whatsoever. I saw first hand how they treated women, lower status men and children. It’s a fucking abomination. I had the chance to see, with night vision and thermals, what went on in the dark every night. If I told you what things were truly like over there, no one would believe me. But believe me when I say this: There is nothing there we want. It is a hole where civilization goes to die.
And part of the trouble, Tarrou, is that as people flee those Islamic hellholes, they bring with them the religion and culture that made those hellholes. Libertarians often have a hard time seeing this, because they tend to see humans as bundles of rights and as economic units, but culture matters.
To expand on what Tarrou wrote above: it’s not that there are not many good and decent people in the Arab world (and the wider areas of Arab/Islamic cultural and political influence), but it’s that that culture gives them no viable place in society, it marginalizes them to the point of enslaving them and killing them off. Unfortunately, the few good and lucky ones who manage to escape those hellholes are being betrayed by the elites in the West, who choose to make plenty of room in the Western societies for the same poisonous culture these people are trying to escape (I am not going to discuss yet again those who arrive in the West with their minds already poisoned by whatever it was they were escaping in the first place). They then find themselves between the rock and the hard place, and even if they manage to withstand the constant pressure for submission, their kids often don’t.
@Papaya, there’s room for maneuver there. Some countries (like the US, which didn’t even half try) seem to do quite well with integrating certain middle east immigrants. I myself am part Lebanese, from the mass that immigrated to Michigan in the early 20th century. I have distant relatives that came over as recently as the mid-80s. Some are muslim, some are Druze. They work, they go to school, and on the whole, Michigan has very few issues with political Islam, outside the campus of UM. Of course, we have very big issues with the decay of our cities, Detroit, massive crime, the highest murder rates in the nation, etc. But none of that is on the muslims that are here.
Then you look to France and Sweden, and see how badly it can be done. Even Minneapolis, which took in a mass of Somali refugees, is having a lot of issues. Culture does matter. And unless you understand the phenomenon well enough to explain why one instance works and the other doesn’t, you can’t really form a proper opinion on how to handle any current issue.
I do agree that there is a strain of libertarianism that seems to ignore culture and genes. It shouldn’t but a lot of people are captive to a fantasy political ideology that seems fantastic in their heads, but doesn’t account for those pesky humans.
I wonder if the Saudis will find some way to blame the recent accident in Mekka on Westerners? This was due to unusual rainfall, and, as we all know, the West is the cause of global warming, which causes unusual weather….
Shrewd observation by Natalie.
Three comments
1) This is partly because Islam was perceived as basically another religion in the 20th century. It’s religious or theological characteristics were seen as being its defining marks. This started changing after the Iranian revolution, but the change was very slow until 9/11. With 9/11, things changed rapidly – there was increasing press coverage of militant Islamic groups, there were the London bombings, and so on – so that over the past 15 years Islam has come to be seen by many in the west as primarily a political movement, rather than as a religion which can be compared and contrasted with Christianity, Judaism, etc.
2) Another reason for this is the disappearance of other “people-out-there who are coming-to-get-us” Between 1935 and 1945, it was Hitler and the Nazis. From 1945 to 1990 it was the communists and the threat of nuclear war. In the UK, Irish terrorism was a serious domestic concern from 1970 to 2000. With the cease fire in Northern Ireland, we soon forgot about Irish terrorism. There was a vacancy for a bogey-man. Militant Islam stepped forward to fill the gap.
3) Anecdotal evidence suggests that it is not just the western populace that is increasingly hostile to Islam. I have heard it said that in the Middle East, those growing up in nominally Muslim homes are increasingly appalled by what they see of Islam, and are increasingly open to both secularism and looking at other religions.
I wonder whether the Saudis would be so keen to finance terrorism if it was made clear to them that any attack by Islamists on the US, the UK or Europe, would be met, instantly, by the obliteration of the Kaaba stone. One cruise missile would do it.
The want to play at destroying civilizations? Why should their own be sacrosanct?