In a the comments section on Belmont Club, a regular commenter, Buddy Larsen, responded to an anti-Zionist commenter with the following post, which is worth reproducing in its entirety:

Cedarford, I’m not gonna ignore you; you are no dummy, and you’re trying hard to present an alternate Israel narrative. So let me be blunt. I don’t give a rat’s ass if Israel has stepped on toes. Birth is not a pretty process. If Sharon and Bush are licking each other’s boots and they make a little room on the side somewhere, I’ll crawl up and lick boots, too.

I Like Israel. I like Jews. They’re smarter than anyone else except maybe Chinese Nukuler Fizzassists, and their women are gorgeous. Jews and Blacks make almost [all] the fun and wit and music in America. Us honkies just watch, and Thank Jesus we have more than Ingmar Bergman and Monty Python.

Israel is a bona fide Heroic Saga, the only modern story that harks back to our mythic heroic western cultural birth. It is a heroic archteypal little nation that has held its shit together surrounded by 500 million ravening death demons and a corrupted old whore of a U.N. so soaked in Jew-hatred that it squishes bile everytime it lifts a flabby ass-cheek to fart at America and her friends.

And yet still, still, Israel holds optimism up and and keeps the faith, so that the best part of the world has an example of the indomitable nature of the human spirit.

So, I don’t care that much about your case. You may be right, but I don’t care. I need, I personally need, for Israel to thrive. The Israel story to me is a strong validation of the triumph of good over evil. Should Israel fall, that to me would be a signal of the final fall of mankind.

Do you see what I mean, Cedarford? Israel is SPIRITUALLY correct, so it doesn’t matter a flying fig to people like me whether or not she is politically correct.

And, thank you for clarifying my feelings for me. Never would’ve drilled into it this deeply, without your comments. But, I can’t understand your position. You might as well be from Mars as far as I’m concerned. What would YOU like to see happen to Israel, Cedarford? And you still haven’t discussed the ‘Protocols’.

The Magdala Hostages

For two centuries before the advent of American hegemony, the British Empire was the greatest power in the world. At its height it encompassed more than a quarter of the world’s land surface and governed approximately the same proportion of the world’s inhabitants. The British ruled their colonial peoples with a light hand, and, though they were often cynical and brutal in maintaining their rule, their dominion was incomparably more liberal and enlightened than any alternative form of governance during the same period.

It was through the British diaspora that the concepts of the rule of law, individual rights, and democracy were spread to the extent that they are known today. The atrocities and excesses of British rule were always exposed and decried not by other nations, but by dissenting groups in Britain itself. This process of self-doubt and moral debate culminated in the dissolution of the Empire in the 20^th century.

It is natural for United States to have continued this process. After all, the American revolution sought to reclaim the “ancient liberties” which the colonists knew to be their natural rights as British subjects. The common culture of the English-speaking nations includes shared concepts of political economy and governance. This collection of nations is referred to here as the Anglic Reach, and includes non-white heirs of the British Empire, such as India and Singapore; after centuries of British rule, the latter countries have evolved and developed their own versions of the same political ideas.

Because it is the pre-eminent power of the Anglic Reach, it falls to the United States to perform the functions that the imperial center in Britain performed in earlier times. The American imperium is different from the British, since it declines to govern, seeking only to create the conditions in which commerce and ideas may flow freely among nations. Nevertheless, some of the parallels between the British Empire and the current struggle against the Great Islamic Jihad are striking.

The Magdala hostage incident has a resonance for modern America:

In 1866, the “mild Hindoo” (and his Sikh and Muslim brethren) were sent overseas to deal with a crisis. The Emperor Theodore (Tewodros) of Abyssinia had written the British government to request diplomatic recognition. The British Colonial Office didn’t even bother to reply, and Theodore, though justly angry at the snub, went off the deep end by arresting all the Europeans in his country and locking them up in his remote mountain fortress at Magdala. A diplomatic mission was sent to try to resolve the crisis peacefully, but ended up prisoners as well… In April 1867, Queen Victoria sent a request to the Emperor Theodore for the release of the prisoners. It wasn’t answered, and so the orders went out over the telegraph cables to create a plan for a rescue mission.

The commander entrusted with the rescue mission, Sir Robert Napier, went about his task in a way reminiscent of the 21^st century American military. A huge expeditionary force in India was created, and in November 1867 the immense logistical task of equipping, provisioning, and moving it to Africa was begun.

It took a few more months of getting the details together before the expedition could set out. By modern standards, such delays would be intolerable, but things moved more slowly in such times and in fact the expedition was a monster undertaking. There were 13,000 British and Native troops, backed by 26,000 support personnel, mostly coolies, with tens of thousands of animals, including 44 elephants. Napier’s kit even included a prefabricated harbor with a lighthouse, and all the parts for setting up a rail line to keep his force supplied.

It took the British three tough months to march to Magdala. In another element of the story that has a modern feel to it, the fight for the fortress turned out to be appallingly one-sided: the British force inflicted 1,900 casualties on the Abyssinians, with only 20 Britishers wounded in return. The hostages were rescued; the Emperor Theodore committed suicide rather than be hauled off in chains. The troops sang “God Save The Queen” as the fortress went up in flames, to be wracked by a enormous explosion when the fires reached its magazines. British Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli received the Emperor’s necklace.

This story strongly resembles the first Persian Gulf War or the recent war in Iraq: a technologically advanced nation projects massive power halfway across the world, engineering an enormously complex logistical feat to do so, and conducts an asymmetrical war against a militarily inferior foe, taking almost no casualties in the process. Abyssinia was a Christian empire, however, so the parallel is not exact.

In the 20^th century Britain stood resolute under the onslaught of a succession of empires far more brutal and barbaric than its own. In the process its strength was exhausted, and it relinquished its empire peacefully after the Second World War. Its heirs in the Anglic Reach have much to learn from it.

 

MEMRI reports today on a sermon given by Sheik Abd Al-Jalil Al-Karouri on November 19^th from the Al-Shahid Mosque in Khartoum. An excerpt from the transcript:

“What is America’s interest in this mess [i.e. Falluja]? Many Americans, after their president won a second term, opened a small window toward Canada: The electronic escape window [sic] to Canada has become increasingly popular because they want to escape the land of freedom and democracy. If America wants to preserve the country it has established, it must listen to [Benjamin] Franklin’s advice, who warned them against the Jews. Now the Jews are leading them into these battles and this mess.“

“Franklin’s advice” is a reference to a supposed speech made in 1787, a transcript of which somehow evaded the notice of historians until the 1930’s. Along with The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the blood libel, and innumerable other anti-Semitic hoaxes, it entered the arsenal of propaganda used by hate groups to smear the Jews, from the Nazis down to the present day.

In 1954 the Anti-Defamation League investigated and debunked the hoax:

The late Carl Van Doren, a biographer of Benjamin Franklin made this report:

“The speech against the Jews which Benjamin Franklin is alleged to have made [at] the Constitutional Convention of 1787 is a forgery, produced within the past five years [1933-38]. The forger, whoever he was, claims that the speech was taken down by Charles Pinckney of South Carolina and preserved in his Journal. The forger presumably knew that, in a letter to John Quincy Adams dated December 30, 1818, Pinckney said he had kept a Journal of the proceedings at the Convention. But this Journal, if it ever existed, has never been found. The forger claims that Pinckney ‘published’ the Journal ‘for private distribution among his friends’ with the title Chit-Chat Around the Table During Intermissions. No copy of any such printed Journal has come to light. Not content with these two claims, the forger has further asserted that the original manuscript of Franklin’s speech, apparently from Pinckney’s Journal, is in the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia. The Franklin Institute does not possess the manuscript.

The forger’s authority for his document is nearly as mythical as could be imagined. He cites a manuscript which does not exist, a printed book or pamphlet which nobody has seen, a Journal which has been lost for more than a hundred years. There is no evidence of the slightest value that Franklin ever made the alleged speech or ever said or thought anything of the kind about the Jews.”

A level of Jew-hatred found only on the outermost fringes in the West is part of the mainstream in the Muslim world. In the Middle East the Middle Ages never ended: the sneaky conniving Jews still skulk around eating children, poisoning wells, and, despite their miniscule numbers, contriving to influence events and leaders by some form of infernal mind control. If only America had heeded Franklin’s warning!

Göbbels would be proud.

 

What gives with Western feminism? Families of Muslim women rape, torture, behead, crucify, and hang them in public squares – all because they have committted the truly mortal sin of being female – yet the silence here on the behalf of these victims is deafening. Compared to the suffering of their Islamic sisters, the indignant chatter about ‘oppression’ emanating from women in the West is obscene.

Feminists in the U.S. claim that girls in school do less well than boys, and this happens because “America today is a girl-destroying place. Everywhere girls are encouraged to sacrifice their true selves…girls come of age in a misogynistic culture in which men have most of the political and economic power, and girls sense their lack of power.” Misogynistic? Girl-destroying? Is America, the destroying place for girls, a recognizable country?

For contrast, try these cautionary tales:

• in Sudan women who refuse to convert to Islam from Christianity are gang-raped, their breasts are cut off. Then they are left to die.
• in Pakistan laws are structurally biased against women, especially since the advent of the Hadood Ordinances in 1979. Now when coerced sexual assaults cannot be proved, the victim becomes an offender, one who enjoyed illicit sexual activity. She is therefore liable to punishment. Safia Bibi, a blind eighteen year old was raped, subsequently becoming pregnant. Since there was insufficient evidence to prove rape (“sufficient” evidence being eye-witness testimony of four adult Muslim men), the pregnancy itself was evidence of her immoral behavior. Thus she was sentenced to three years in jail and fifteen lashes for having sex outside marriage.
• In Yemen on learning that his daughter had eloped with a man from another clan, a father gathered sons, brothers, uncles and cousins, and headed a convoy of twenty cars to storm the bride’s new home. Upon retrieving her, she was thrown into one of the cars. As the convoy returned, and reached the edge of her village, her father hurled her to the asphalt and had every car drive over her.
• In Jordan, a man received a six-month prison term for stabbing his younger divorced sister thirty times. The murder, termed a misdemeanor by the tribunal, was minimized because the father of both brother and sister dropped charges against his son. The defendant was also sentenced to one week for intoxication and to two months for carrying a knife.
• In Palestine a sixteen year-old was raped by her younger brother. Once her pregnant condition became known in the wider community it fell to her older brother to kill her in order to avenge the family honor. “She made a mistake,” said one of her male cousins. “She had to pay for it.”

Ah, the absolute power of Muslim women, holding Islamic men by the short hairs; indeed the old Arab saying is true: “a man’s honor lies between a woman’s legs.”

 

In “Beyond Madrid”, a speech before the Council on Foreign Relations in May, the prime minister of Singapore, Goh Chok Tong, provided insight into the Great Islamic Jihad from a South Asian viewpoint.

The war against terrorism could shape the 21st century in the same way as the Cold War defined the world before the fall of the Berlin Wall. To win, we must first clearly understand what we are up against… My perspective is formed by our own experiences in Southeast Asia, which post 9/11 has emerged as a major theatre for terrorist operations. In December 2001, Singapore arrested 15 people belonging to a radical Islamic group called the Jemaah Islamiyah [JI]. They were plotting even before 9/11 to attack American and other Western interests in Singapore.

Singapore has Muslim minority of about 15%, so that its experience is probably typical of Western-oriented states on the border of the ummah. It is these governments which will bear the brunt of the attempts to build a new worldwide caliphate. Singapore has uncovered the network of jihadists who pursue this goal:

But the most crucial conclusion our investigations revealed was this: the existence of a transregional terrorist brotherhood of disparate Southeast Asian groups linked by a militant Islamic ideology to each other and to al Qaeda. Whatever their specific goals, these groups were committed to mutual help in the pursuit of their common ideology: they helped each other with funds and support services, in training, and in joint operations.

The ideology of these radical jihadis who pursue the caliphate is known as salafi.

Our experience in Southeast Asia is not without wider relevance because of what the salafis themselves believe. This is what one of them, an Algerian named Abu Ibrahim Mustafa, has said: “The war in Palestine, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in Algeria, in Chechnya, and in the Philippines is one war. This is a war between the camp of Islam and the camp of the Cross, to which the Americans, the Zionists, Jews, their apostate allies, and others belong. The goal of this war, which they falsely called a war on terror, is to prevent the Muslims from establishing an Islamic state…”

The prime minister then addresses a series of rhetorical questions to moderate Muslims:

Do you seek to change the world by prayer and faith? Do you work with an imperfect reality and strive towards its perfection? Do you not reject all that is not Islamic and seek to destroy it by force so as to re-establish the perfect caliphate? These are all questions that vibrate and resonate around a single axis of faith.

He hopes that by encouraging the moderates in the Islamic community and engaging them in dialogue, an alternative to the extreme Islamists can emerge and take part in the political sphere. But the war against the Islamofascists will still have to be fought.

Only the U.S. has the capacity to lead the geopolitical battle against the Islamic terrorists. Iraq has become the key battleground. Before he was killed in Saudi Arabia, Yousef Al Aiyyeri, author of the al Qaeda blueprint for fighting in Iraq, said, “If democracy succeeds in Iraq, that would be the death of Islam.”

The Islamists know that a democratic Iraq is a threat, and they will do all in their power to prevent it from coming into being. As the nascent political parties jostle for position in the January elections, once again we are left with the all-important question: Where does mainstream Islam stand?

 

The previous post, Demographic Jihad in Europe, dealt with the population crash in Europe and the incipient emergence of “Eurabia”. The obvious question is: Can the same thing happen in America?

The foreign-born Muslim population in the USA is certainly growing. But a glance at the statistics (PDF file) reveals that the major influx of immigrants (legal or otherwise) into this country comes from Latin America.

So if the native-born population of the USA eventually goes the way of Old Europe, the newcomers taking up the slack will not be mainly Muslims. They will be from traditional Christian backgrounds, with a large component of born-again evangelicals as well as Roman Catholics. This is a culture which is compatible with American values, even if it brings with it a different language. Look for an emphasis on family values and a strong work ethic from the new arrivals.

Dhimmitude, if it comes, will surely be delayed by this trend. We may well experience cultural conflict, but it seems unlikely to reach the dangerous level that the Great Jihad would bring. For the United States, dhimmi status is not inevitable.

The decline in the European birthrate has joined with the mass immigration of Muslims into Europe to produce a demographic time bomb. If present trends continue, the future of the EU is “Eurabia”: a collection of welfare states in which an increasingly geriatric native European population is maintained in its comparative luxury by a Muslim underclass. France could have a Muslim majority before the end of this century.

The big question is: Will Europe go gentle into that good night? If the emerging Muslim communities obey certain niceties – stick to their neighborhoods, abuse their women only behind closed doors, practice terrorism in other countries only – perhaps their encroachment can be tolerated. France and Germany have in effect paid protection money to terrorists. In some cities in Scandinavia whole districts of large cities are effectively closed to non-Muslims; it is said that Muslims rule Malmø. If the water of jihad boils gradually enough, the European frog may not notice the heat of dhimmitude until it is too late.

If the Muslim communities in Europe remain quiescent, one can envision a future in which their numbers become large enough to influence political outcomes, with Islamic parties forming and joining coalitions with the left to introduce sharia slowly, in piecemeal fashion. By the time Europe’s demographic decline reached its extremity, the component states of the EU would already be effectively Islamic.

But it seems unlikely that Islam in Europe will remain quiescent. The death of Theo Van Gogh seems a harbinger of what is to come. The reaction of the Dutch is a hopeful sign that Europe is waking up and throwing off the multicultural dream.

And in other parts of Europe, such as Italy, there are signs that the tide of extreme secularization is turning. If Europe were to recover some of the spiritual values and energy which gave birth to the glories of Western civilization, it may yet find the cultural nerve to stem the demographic jihad.

An optimistic, outward-looking, spiritually grounded culture may even produce a rise in the birthrate and stem the population crash in Old Europe. Stranger things have happened.

 

In his book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, Samuel P. Huntington confronts the primary problem facing the West today in its war against the Great Islamic Jihad: Is Islamic culture fundamentally incompatible with, and opposed to, the secular modernism of the West?

If Islam requires that there be no compromise, that the war with the infidels must go on until all are exterminated, converted, or reduced to dhimmitude, then the West will be forced eventually to take the battle to all corners of the Muslim world and fight until the believers are destroyed or completely subdued.

Today’s Belmont Club post touches on this topic. Commenter “wildiris” says:

Modern western constitutional democracies are now in a struggle to the death with the religion/culture of Islam. There can be only one winner in this struggle, since Islam, as a combined political-secular-religious worldview, can tolerate no competitors. The Protestant Reformation ushered in a century of bitter warfare. The wars of the second half of the twentieth century can be viewed as the struggle of western constitutional democracy to overcome the fascist forces of Marxism, Nazism, Communism and etc.

But is this true? Can Islam brook no competitors?

If the holy writ of the Quran is followed, no competition is allowed; it is the duty of every believer to wage jihad and expand the Dar al-Islam. However, in reaching modernity both Christianity and Judaism abandoned as literal truth portions of their sacred texts. St. Paul’s dictates on the status of women were jettisoned in order to create the modern secular state, for example. In order for modern science to develop, the descriptive cosmologies of the Book of Genesis had to be understood as allegory rather than absolute truth. The democratic state of Israel does not enforce scriptural rules concerning, among others, the cutting of side-locks or the treatment of non-Jews within Israel.

If Islam could develop in a similar way; if it could regard its texts as allegorical, as a guide to living righteously in the eyes of God, but without the requirement that every word be taken literally, then modernity for Muslims becomes conceivable.

But if the Islamic view of scripture remains that of antiquity, the West will have to win its victory on the terms of antiquity. And antiquity sets a harsh standard for victory: if we are to fight in seventh-century terms, able-bodied males must be slaughtered to a man, women and children must be enslaved, the holy cities razed, and the rubble sown with salt to make a wasteland for the rest of time.

Is the West capable of that? Not now, and not for the foreseeable future. But pray that Jihad never acquires nuclear weapons; once the radioactive crater appears in New York or Chicago, all bets are off.

In his convention speech, when George Bush said “liberty is transformative” he was proclaiming his coming victory.

For the last two generations the political spheres in America have been in the process of making their distinctions by contrast with each other. In one sphere, the good of the group is paramount. In the other sphere, the group is background and the individual moves to the foreground. The tension between them is the difference in world views: one of scarcity and entitlement and one of plenitude and responsibility.

Some have called this the war between the Gramscians and Tocquevillians: between the Marxist left and classical liberalism. However, if economic motives underlie decisions, then the split is between the now-discredited Keynesian view of large government and progressive taxation for the commonweal, and the view of Nobel Prize winners Mundell and Prescott, who posit the necessity for lowered taxes as the driving force behind prosperity and productivity. In their more conservative view, individual liberty is based on an essential trust in the nature of man, despite his inherent flaws and limitations. It is a view of society which sees its potential secured in the freedom of each to make individual decisions, the sum of which add up to the wisdom of the community.

The Keynesian view is more paternal. The children — the electorate — are not to be trusted with so much responsibility. Instead, they make a Faustian bargain with a central government, trusting the solutions of large bureaucracies to provide better outcomes than can be achieved by aggregate decisions of the community. This is not a view of man as redeemed but rather man as eternally fallen. In trade for peacefully surrendering large amounts of individual wealth which the government will re-distribute for the greater good of all, the people are kept safe. In this world view Government Knows Best.

However, if Frederic Bastiat is right then America is beginning to grasp the old-but-ever-new idea that liberty is a gift bestowed by God on each individual; it is each person’s birth right. Through this authentic freedom lies the only path toward transformative change, a true metanoia.

And if, as his opponents have said, George Bush is simplistic, naïve and dim, then perhaps the idea that “a child shall lead them” has come to pass.

Finally, if, as The Wisdom of Crowds proposes, the group makes wiser, more truly intelligent decisions than do the “experts,” then the re-election of George Bush is good, is a good.

For the Jewish people, therefore, the history of the twentieth century may be summed up thus: If there had been a Jewish state in the first half of the century, there would have been no Holocaust. And if there had not been a Jewish state after the Holocaust, there would have been no Jewish future.

— from A Durable Peace, by Benjamin Netanyahu

The mushroom cloud rising over Tel Aviv has to be the greatest dread of the Jewish State in the 21^st century. For a half a century after the birth of Israel, the existence of a haven for Jews all over the world could be assured by the armed might of the Jewish state. But, as the time approaches when Iran can deliver nuclear-tipped missiles to the heart of Israel, the existence of that haven can no longer be assumed.

Even without access to the secret deliberations of Israel’s security bodies, it is safe to say that Israel will do everything in its power to frustrate the designs of the mullahs in Tehran, and the Israeli military is undoubtedly capable of doing so. But the terrorists of the Great Islamic Jihad are intent upon acquiring nuclear weapons, and even a well-placed dirty bomb could do enormous damage to Israel and force much of its carefully-tended farm land out of cultivation. A devastating attack of this kind might cause the collapse of Israel’s economy.

This is a reminder of why Israel is perhaps the most important ally in the war against the Islamists. The very existence of America is not yet threatened by them, but Israel is very much at risk. They could become our greatest ally because the stakes are so much higher for them.

The jihadis make virtually no distinction between Americans and Zionists; the two terms are virtually interchangeable for them. Nothing better demonstrates why it is time to stand with the Jews.

Full disclosure: I am not a Jew. I am a practicing Christian, non-evangelical, from a background of tolerant Protestantism. I read eclectically, am well educated, and consider myself an intellectual. And I stand with the Jews.

Many historians date the beginning of the Holocaust to November 9th, 1938. On that date the Nazi government launched a pogrom against the Jews, killing hundreds and arresting many more. Synagogues were torched, Jewish shops and homes were looted and destroyed, and Jews were shipped off to concentration camps. That night of major violence came to be known as Kristallnacht, in reference to the shattered glass found on the sidewalks in front of Jewish businesses all over Germany. A few days later new laws were passed by the Nazi government, effectively banning all economic activity by Jews and removing what few civil rights remained to them. It was a big step down the road that led through the gates of Auschwitz and Treblinka to the Final Solution.

Does the West stand on the threshold of a new Kristallnacht? The alarming spread of anti-Semitism across the globe is ominous evidence of a new cycle of hatred.

• When Jewish students are attacked on an American university campus by protesters screaming “Hitler was right!”;
• when the prime minister of Iran says, “…the use of a single atomic bomb has the power to destroy Israel completely, while it will only cause partial damage to the Islamic world”;
• when synagogues are burned in Belgium and European Jews are afraid to wear the yarmulke openly;
• when The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is made into a television drama in Egypt and sold openly on Wal-Mart’s website;
• when Jews are fleeing anti-Semitism in France to settle in Israel;
• when the world does not rise up in outrage against these evils;

— then it is time to prepare for a new and more widespread Kristallnacht.

Anti-Semitism is virtually everywhere, even in such formerly safe havens of the Anglosphere as the USA and Australia. Around the world, but especially in the Middle East, countries which once boasted large and vibrant Jewish communities are now emptying themselves of Jews. Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Syria, and Iraq once were homes for Jews. Now there are virtually none; they have left their homes and their cultural roots to resettle in Israel or America. There had been Jews in Yemen since at least the second century, taking on many of the cultural characteristics of the Muslims around them and contributing to the civilization of Yemen while retaining their Jewish identity; now they are gone.

The “World Community”, as exemplified by the UN, regards violence against Jews to be of no importance. The UN passes dozens of resolutions condemning Israel, the most notorious being Resolution 3379 (1975), which declared that “Zionism is a form of racism and racial discrimination.” All Israeli actions towards the Palestinians are censured, including the building of a wall to protect innocent Israelis against suicide attacks. But in all the years of the UN’s existence, not one resolution has been passed against those who have promised to annihilate the “Zionist entity”.

Anti-Semitism was already established on the nationalistic Right. More alarming are the notably virulent strains now reappearing on the Left. During Hitler’s time, many of the Old Bolsheviks were Jews; Bolshevism was considered “revolutionary Jewish politics” and was reviled as such on the Right. But in the Soviet Union persecution of Jews flared sporadically and the purging of “rootless cosmopolitans” was the duty of the Party. Now, with the euphemistic equation Zionism=Racism, the very existence of Israel has been called into question. An anti-Zionist might say, “I am only against Zionism, not against the Jews,” but that is merely a new and disingenuous cover for Jew-hatred.

The mushroom cloud over Tel Aviv is the dream of the enemies of Zionism.

In their reaction to conservatives by those on the Left, a new term has developed: “Neoconservative” is a code word for “Jew”. A neocon who supports Israel is thus an agent of the Zionists. I am, in fact, one of their unwitting dupes as I write this, since I stand with the Jews.

Is the rich and fertile culture of “The West” even conceivable without the Jews? In every enterprise open to them Jews excel. They are over-represented in the highest reaches of the arts and sciences, and in the academy; despite historical obstacles and discrimination, they are to be found among the greatest mathematicians and physicists, composers and musicians, historians and novelists. Examine the masthead of a magazine, the credits for a movie, or the members of a university faculty, to see the contributions of the Jews.

Beyond those achievements, the greatest gift of the Jews to Western Civilization has been the Law. The Jews brought us the idea that a man stands accountable before his Creator, Who will sit in judgment over him; that the Law is just and eternal, and that obedience to it is a moral and righteous act. Christianity, especially as developed by Saint Paul, was responsible for the spread of this new idea of law and the individual throughout the West. Still, it is in essence a Jewish idea. Christ’s revolutionary message urged a return to the Law as originally understood by the Patriarchs. In its earliest years the gate to Christian conversion opened onto Judaism first. And today a Christian views the just society as a fulfillment of the Law, the Jewish Law of which Christianty is a New Covenant.

So while the halls of justice in Christendom may accord with the architecture of the Greeks, and may boast inscriptions in Latin, the justice handed down within them is the justice of the Hebrews. I stand with the Jews.

The Laws of the Jews form the moral and ethical core of Western Civilization. Without them we would be a hollow culture, subject to the whims of polytheism and prone to the fads of nihilism. They are the backbone of what makes us civilized; we repeal them at our own peril.

Whether or not it is 1933 (or 1936, or 1938) all over again, it is time for the West to make a stand. Before the shards of glass cover the pavement in front of Jewish businesses in the new Kristallnacht; before laws are passed restricting the rights of Jews; before whole families are shot and bulldozed into mass graves; before the mushroom cloud rises over Tel Aviv — Western Civilization must stand up and be counted. We must say, with the Jews, “Never Again.”

I stand with the Jews.

A previous post addressed the characteristics which distinguish the West from the culture which has bred militant Islamism. One of these characteristics is respect for the rights of the individual. But what is an individual?

The Western conception of the individual did not really exist in antiquity, nor does it in some cultures today. Distinct human beings are acknowledged, but they are appendages of family, tribe, or other collective structure, which have a greater claim to authority and authenticity than any single person.

As the Towering Barbarian has anticipated, one looks to the Jews and the Greeks for the origins of the individual. Jews brought the Law to the West, and with the Law came the idea of a man standing in relation to his God, with Whom he had a covenant, and Whose ordinances he was bound to obey. In that sense, the individual is the smallest unit of our human race to be judged by God on the basis of the Law.

The Greek innovation is reason, which looks to the world as an object separate from the self, an object that can be analyzed and understood by rational means. The Analyzer and Ratiocinator is the individual.

But the force which combined these two threads was Christianity, which brought the Law to Aristotle. In the teachings of Christ it becomes clear that the individual and his conscience are distinct in the eyes of God (Matthew 6:5-6 KJV):

And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret; and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly.

This individual, in unmediated communion with God, possesses those natural rights which were recognized in the Declaration of Independence. He is granted these rights by his Creator, and they cannot be taken away by men.

The individual is the cornerstone of the West, on whom the structure of its civilization depends. The great experiment in Iraq depends for its success on the emergence of something similar in Mesopotamia. It is an open question whether Islamic theology or some other philosophy can produce in a short time the same thing that Jewish, Greek, and Christian thought articulated over the course of two millennia. The West will have to wait and see…

A previous post concerned that which distinguishes Islamism from its enemies. But what distinguishes us?

The societies which flourish in the civilized parts of the world, collectively known as “the West”, rest on three pillars: Civil society, the rule of law, and respect for the rights of the individual.

Civil society depends on the plurality of institutions within a polity. Rather than subsume all under the state (which is subsumed under the autarch or an oligarchy), the state is only one amongst many aggregate entities within the culture. Families, churches, corporations, clubs, autonomous local government — if the individual is an element in a multitude of sets, he is more likely to flourish. Great power is less likely to concentrate when there are many groups to claim the allegiance of a person. Civil society arose gradually in Europe from the Greeks and the Romans in the interplay of pagan culture with the state and later the Church. None of it was intentional; its independence was surely cursed by monarchs down the centuries.

The rule of law is a shared understanding that the rules binding citizens outlive individual rulers. A just and liberal society can be conceived of without democracy; it cannot exist without the rule of law. The law was handed down to the Jews, who passed the concept on to the West.

Individual rights are premised on the existence of individuals in a society. We in the West are so accustomed to the idea that it is hard to conceive of societies which do not really recognize the individual as we know it. The tribe, the clan, the patrimony with its honor — membership in these is not voluntary, and all can take precedence over the individual. This is true of those cultures which form the core of the Great Islamic Jihad.

When and where was the individual invented? This is an interesting topic which will be covered in a later post.

The jihad against women is ancient, yet ever new. From a report from the city’s universities in the Washington Times:

“Any girl student who does not wear a veil, we will burn her face with chemicals.”

Under threat and physical attack, at least a third of the three thousand women who attend colleges in Baghdad have been given releases from class attendance for the rest of the academic year due to the increasing violence directed against them.

Among other things, the terrorists are demanding that all university classes be segregated and that contact between men and women be forbidden. Many women, intimidated and fearful, have taken to wearing veils to and from classes.

Bombs have been set off on campuses, women have been abducted and threatened, terrorists wait outside the gates to target women who wear Western dress or walk with their faces uncovered.

There is a severe cultural divide, a disconnect, between the idea of veiled women and those same mysterious creatures attempting to study differential equations through the gauze. This dissonance is so loud we are becoming deafened by its shrill, unrelenting fear.

Pray that all the noise is merely the death rattle of an anachronistic hatred.