In a recent post we discussed the relative safety of living in gun-toting America vs. dwelling in the ancient cities of Europe. The consensus was that while crime in the U.S. was lower, murder rates were higher. All those guns, you know.
Well, just to liven things up a bit, Paul Belien sent an email to disabuse us of that notion: the EU is beginning to pass the US in the murder and mayhem department. From Living Dangerously in Brussels, the following statistics:
Murder and manslaughter in the U.S.: 16,137 cases in 2004 (5.5 per 100,000 inhabitants).
Percent change compared to 2003: -2.4
Murder and manslaughter (moord en doodslag) in Belgium: 959 cases in 2004 (9.1 per 100,000 inhabitants).
Percent change compared to 2003: +11.12
Do yourself a favor and read his essay, Europe Must Find its Roots in America:
…History never repeats itself, and yet similarities are often so striking that in a way there is nothing new under the sun. In the 17th and 18th centuries North America was colonised by freedom loving people who brought the political institutions and traditions from Europe to a new continent across the sea. Many of them had left Europe because they wanted the freedom to live according to their own conscience instead of the conscience of the centralist absolutist rulers of the new age that was sweeping across Europe from the 16th century onwards. Their traditions were rooted in the decentralised traditions of the late Middle Ages and the Aristotelian philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas. Europe’s Middle Ages had been characterised by an absence of central power, while man was bound to multiple legal systems: the legal order of his city, that of the land, that of his guild, that of the church. There was not one monopolistic ruler, as in China or in the Muslim world, but many, which guaranteed greater freedom for the individual. The philosophy of Aquinas, moreover, was centered on the individual. God had called man to be free from sin, but in order to be free from sin he had to be virtuous, and in order for virtue to have any value it had to be voluntary, implying that the virtuous man had to be free in every aspect of his life including, as Aquinas’ followers later pointed out, his economic activities.
Hence the paradox came about that the civil society developing in the new continent was in a sense older than the new Modern Age of the absolutist monarchs governing Europe. When the Americans rebelled in 1776 they rebelled against absolutism in order to keep their old freedoms. Theirs was a conservative revolution. Europe had its own series of revolutions from 1789 onwards, but these were revolutions of a different sort. They toppled the ruling absolutists to replace them by absolutists of an even extremer form: totalitarians. These were not satisfied with controlling their subjects’ political and economic lives but also wished to control their minds and souls, i.e. to become their god.
[…]
American society is a society whose culture and view of mankind resembles that of the old mediaeval Europe from which it organically evolved. It puts man before the state because it accepts that man should come to God as a free being. Europe, having lived through the perversions of the Modern Age, has absorbed much of the absolutist and totalitarian spirit….
Read the whole thing, especially the beginning, where Mr. Belien points out how Ireland saved civilization during the Dark Ages. Ahem. His points about Americans’ understanding of economic functions read as though they were from one of Starling David Hunter‘s classroom lectures.
So far, the convictions are locally based. In October al-Turki faces yet another trial — this one in federal court — on charges of forced labor, document servitude (he kept her passport from her, and it eventually expired), and harboring an illegal immigrant. The last charge is especially ironic, since it was al-Turki himself who created her status as an illegal alien by not permitting her to renew her visa.
Yesterday morning I posted about the 
The Danish left wing had put the telescope to the blind eye and seriously failed the progressive and moderate Muslims, because they in the Mohammed case let themselves be used by the Islamist cause.
I’ve learned a lot about Islam since September 11th, 2001.
And I’d heard of Osama bin Laden before — he figured prominently in the reporting on the US embassy bombings in 1998, after all — so when his name came up, it made sense.
I learned that Osama bin Laden was a Sunni, a member of a particular branch of Islam, and that there were other branches, each with its own terrorist leaders. Sufism is often considered a peaceful and enlightened form of Islam, but Sheikh Syed Mubarik Ali Shah Gilani is a Sufi, and also the head of a brutal terrorist organization with an extensive network right here in the United States of America.
The main rival to the Sunni branch is that of the Shi’a, who recognize the Prophet’s cousin and son-in-law Ali as his successor rather than the Four Caliphs. Iran is the most prominent Shi’ite country in the world, and with the accession to power in 1979 of the Ayatollah Khomeini, Iran became the world’s first Islamic terrorist regime. Khomeini and his successors have fed an assortment of terrorist groups across the world, the most notorious being Hizbullah in Lebanon.
In fact, dangerous Islamic terrorists already operate outside of Al Qaeda’s structure. Consider the latest incident in the United States, the arrest of the Sears Tower conspirators. By all accounts these are strange and marginal Al Qaeda wannabes, and were captured in a sting when trying to make contact with Osama’s people. The recently arrested Canadian terrorists seem to be similarly home-grown, as were the members of the California terrorist cell that was accidentally exposed by sloppy practices during the robbery of a convenience store.
Then we have John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, inspired by Osama bin Laden and possibly relying on Sheikh Gilani’s people for help, but acting alone while terrorizing an entire metropolitan area for weeks. Sunni or Sufi? And taking orders from whom? Either question is hard to answer.
The notorious Richard Reid, a.k.a. the “Shoe Bomber”, was loosely affiliated with Al Qaeda through various mosques and radical Islamic organizations in Britain. But a definitive chain of command, with a hierarchical terrorist structure passing orders to its operative, has never been fully established. Richard Reid converted to Islam, became devoted to the cause, got on a plane, and tried to blow it and himself up. That’s all we really know.
Osama bin Laden and many Sunni terrorists have looked to Sayyid Qutb and the Muslim Brotherhood for inspiration and guidance. The Brotherhood originated in Egypt in 1928, but has opened chapters in other countries in the years since. In its structure and modus operandi it resembles Al Qaeda. Once again, however, there is no central authority giving orders or asserting control.
Not all the violent Shi’ite groups take orders from the Iranian mullahs, and not all the Sufi terrorists pay homage to Sheikh Gilani in Pakistan. Ultimately the only things all these people have in common are the Prophet and the Koran. Islam’s holy book demands violent jihad on behalf of the faith; it sanctions any means whatsoever to achieve the spread of Islam. Violent thugs blowing up children and beheading captives all over the world are simply carrying out the basic catechism of their religion.
To start with, there’s the explosion of Salafist funding. Thanks to the price of oil and the nefariously corrupt regime in Saudi Arabia, the Great Islamic Jihad devours a surfeit of resources the likes of which have not been seen for five hundred years or more. It’s no longer necessary to breach the walls of Constantinople and loot the cathedral, or send pirates out on a razzia to plunder wealthy merchant vessels: all the Saudis have to do is hire infidels to drill for the black goo and then sell it to other infidels. The proceeds from this lucrative racket have been plowed back into Sunni jihad activities across the globe, always disguised as “charity”.
When an Islamic terror group moves into a lawless area, we can expect it to absorb existing criminal structures — as has recently occurred in Somalia. This doesn’t mean that Al Capone would necessarily convert to Islam and submit to a more powerful emir as his new capo; the head of a traditional criminal enterprise might well choose to go down with all guns blazing. But much of his organization could be converted to jihad operations; there’s no reason a low-level gunsel wouldn’t find life under the new sheikh congenial to his taste.
But what about the non-cynical converts, the ones who really are willing to die for the cause? What about the true zealots like John Walker Lindh, the “American Taliban”? Where do they come from?
A century and a half ago the same person would have embraced Anarchism. Instead of Mohammed, my friend would have gravitated towards Mikhail Bakunin. The same behaviors and motivations are there: absolute lawlessness coupled with absolute ideology. Push nihilism far enough in that direction, and you get a zeal that exceeds all others in its ferocity.
That’s where Abu Musab al-Zarqawi comes in. Simple criminal impulses cannot explain his behavior — the ordinary criminal would never have endured the life he had to live. Only dedication to an all-encompassing ideology of destruction could have produced such monstrous behavior.
This is what we’re up against: the Big Tent of ideological nihilism. The closer any given society gets to the behavioral sink, the more Islamic it tends to become. Just look at the death-cult that is “Palestine”, voluntarily living under the yoke of the sadistic murderers of Hamas. Or the chaos of Somalia, now turning from the rule of the warlords to the rule of Shari’ah.
Or consider the banlieux of Paris, with their burning cars and rampaging “youths”. Those destructive and lawless kids are only marginally ideological, but they do know their identity, and it is most assuredly Islamic.
When a glimmer of realization finally begins to show through, as formulated by the artists whose drawings ignited the Danish Mohammed cartoon crisis, it is quickly squelched by the keepers of the conventional wisdom. The violence engineered to create the crisis must be our own fault; after all, the grievances of any disaffected and marginal people are always our own fault.
The protesting Muslims reinforce the West’s suicidal tendencies, threatening violence in ways that an average law-abiding citizen would never be allowed to express. The shakedown always works; the protection racket has the desired effect. “Give us X — censorship of your publications, more social programs, government-funded mosques, the wearing of headscarves for our schoolgirls, separate swimming pools for men and women, an endless list — and we won’t bomb your transportation facilities or poison your water supply.” The craven, democratically-elected authorities (with the notable exception of the Danes) always cave in to the demands, and thus the ratchet gets turned up another notch, to rest there until the next crisis.
The final element of the Demonic Convergence, the coup de grace for Western Civilization, is provided by our own news media. Absolutely determined to end the administration of a particular American president and a particular political party, there is no limit to what they will do, no tactic to which they will not stoop, no secret they will not divulge, and no principle they will not betray in order to accomplish their purpose. The Saudis are better funded, but the Mainstream Media are more powerful, and together they provide a synergy that is capable of destroying us all.
Pirates are back in the news.
On Sunday night, pirates successfully boarded two UN chartered ships carrying construction material for the reconstruction of the tsunami-hit Aceh province.
I’m taking a page from the book of 
On August 29, 1966, the famous author and polemicist Sayyid Qutb was hanged for treason, along with five co-conspirators, in his native Egypt.
It all began in 1928, when Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood. The Ikhwan was based on the idea that the Egyptian government — and all the Muslim governments suffering under the infidel colonial yoke — had abandoned Islam and was, in fact, mired in apostasy. Kemal Attaturk was particularly worthy of opprobrium for abolishing the Caliphate and secularizing Turkey.
Even as a young student, Sayyid Qutb had been interested in following the time-honored principles of Islam, but he did not become a radical — what is now known as an “Islamist” — until the late 1940s.
Most of the world is ignoring the lessons of America’s remarkable cultural renaissance, of which dramatic falls in crime are only a part.
Here are Interpol 2001 crime statistics (rate per 100,000):
Stacy and Nathalie were abducted in Liège, the largest city of Wallonia, the Socialist-dominated French-speaking part of Belgium. Melissa and Julie were from the same city, often referred to as “Palermo on the Meuse.” According to Urban Audit Liège has the highest crime rate of all European cities (EU27), with 256.13 recorded crimes per 1,000 population in 2001.