Avi Davis is a journalist based in Los Angeles. Here is his keen-eyed assessment of the situation in Europe:
In his work, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the historian Edward Gibbon describes how a vacillating Roman Senate, with the army of the Barbarian Goths at its city gate, debated fretfully about the Roman Empire’s future. Apparently unknown to them, a civil rebellion, led by slaves and domestics, had erupted within the city walls, leading to anarchy. Days after the appearance of the enemy, the gates were opened from within and the Barbarians poured in to pillage Rome. Within a week, 1100 years of empire building had come to a close.Sixteen hundred years after that epochal event, it should surprise no one that new barbarians threaten the safety and security of the continent Rome once controlled When the body of Ilan Halimi turned up last week on a railway track outside of Paris the group responsible was identified as the Barbarians. Yet these were not Goths, Huns or Vandals of ancient times, but Muslim criminals whose intent was clearly to commit a racial murder. The torture to which Halimi was subjected and the methods with which he was eventually dispatched should remind everyone in Europe of the original provenance of the term “barbarian” -- that of men intent on destruction of centers of Western culture and civilization.
The actions and justifications of the present day Barbarians are of course more than a match for their ancient predecessors. The brutal slaying of Halimi, a young French Jew of no particular importance, has opened the eyes of the European public to the dangers of the Muslim jihadist culture as no other act of terrorism or criminality has done until now. Tens of thousands protested the murder – recognized universally as an attack -- not on just a Jew, but on France itself. Not even the brutal slaying of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh or the murder of the gay Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn has quite provided the same political impact. That is because in the wake of the recent French riots and the worldwide disturbances caused by the publication of the Danish cartoons, European politicians now recognize that radical Islamic sentiment is no longer confined to a few scattered sects, focused on anti-Semitic provocations, who can be tamed through dialogue and discussion. It rather represents an ideological pandemic spreading voraciously in European cities, which vouchsafes the notion that the murder of Jews, gays, conservatives, journalists, editors -- and in fact anyone who is perceived as a barrier to Islam’s advance, entitles those with requisite religious belief to issue and execute death warrants. And further, that flimsy, ignorant response and the cognitive dissonance of denial only fans these flames higher.A word should certainly be offered to those secular humanists who still believe that amelioration of the economic plight of Islamic urban centers will substantially change the attitudes of the jihadists in their midst. This view not only ignores the historical pattern of the jihadist culture and motivation; it is a sop to the Islamists -- clerics and leaders -- who see such soft-pedaling as a weakness to be exploited. One must wonder at the blindness of European politicians who still believe that the fire bombings of synagogues, the murder and harassment of Jews or the torching of Jewish businesses are merely isolated examples of urban unrest, economic disenfranchisement or even latent anti-Semitism. They are, in fact blows, aimed against Western civilization. Imams and Islamic clerics throughout Europe have prophesied for years about the West’s imminent collapse. They do this while employing the liberal values of tolerance, openness and dialogue to protect their mosques while propagating hatred, racism and incitement to murder beneath the shield of freedom of speech.
Most Western countries have not, as yet, recognized the profundity of the threat. But for some there is a growing measure of clarity. Last week Peter Costello, the Australian treasurer, made public his government’s opinion that those who do not subscribe to Australian values or deny the supremacy of Australian law over Islamic law should be denied both citizenship and the right to enter Australia. Costello went further, in an interview on television, in declaring that even Australian citizens who fail to pass this basic litmus test should be subject to deportation. The Australian government, particularly its feisty Prime Minister John Howard, have been well ahead of the rest of the world in legislating firm controls against incitement and racism emanating from their country’s mosques. But few Western leaders have been as forthright as Costello in recommending deportation as a measure against a country’s citizens for denying the basic values upon which their own societies are founded.
Meanwhile, time is running short for Europe. Without recognizing that an unbalanced emphasis on pluralism at the expense of security, will gradually erode the moral superstructure of liberal democracy, there will be thousands more Ilan Halimis -- Jew and non-Jew alike -- tortured in third-floor apartments and dying on the streets of restive Islamic communities.
For that reason, no one should be deceived. Barbarism has returned to Europe. But this time the barbarians are not just outside the city, battering at the walls. They are inside it, with sufficient political clout and public sympathy to open the gates from within.
I appreciate the sentiment the writer is trying to express, but it seems to me there is an internal inconsistency. Early on in his essay, he says the following:
"The brutal slaying of Halimi, a young French Jew of no particular importance, has opened the eyes of the European public to the dangers of the Muslim jihadist culture as no other act of terrorism or criminality has done until now."
But at the end, he says this:
"They are inside it, with sufficient political clout and public sympathy to open the gates from within."
Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but it seems to me that his assessment of public attitude is contradictory. Personally, I think you have to be careful about attributing a great deal of significance to public demonstrations. It's not that difficult to get a few thousand people in France to protest something. The key is whether the public is willing to take the concrete steps necessary to solve the problem. In this regard, I believe the writer's second comment about public attitudes is, sadly, the more accurate.
This is just a comment on the etymology (provenance) of the word barbarian. It is drawn from:
http://laudatortemporisacti.blogspot.com/2004/09/barbarians-and-beards_08.html
"The word barbarian is indubitably (not just possibly) Greek in origin, preceding even Homer (cf. barbarophonos at Iliad 2.867). Anyone who didn't speak Greek sounded like they were saying bar-bar, and by definition any non-Greek was a barbarian.
The Romans adopted the word barbarus directly from Greek barbaros, and applied it by extension to anyone who was not a Greek or Roman, although every Greek worth his salt probably felt in his heart of hearts that the Romans were barbarians, too, just as today supposedly cultivated Europeans look down their noses at upstart, boorish Americans.
The protest by the Stranger in Plato, Statesman 262c-d (tr. Benjamin Jowett), against this classification only shows how widespread it was:
The error was just as if some one who wanted to divide the human race, were to divide them after the fashion which prevails in this part of the world; here they cut off the Hellenes as one species, and all the other species of mankind, which are innumerable, they include under the single name of 'barbarians,' and because they have one name they are supposed to be of one species also."
Like Plato's Stranger, I think the use of the term "barbarian" is painting with too broad a stroke. If the threat is political Islam, just say so.
It is only when people -- nice, kind, tolerant people, who simply haven't been following things-- begin to change their ways. This person, then that one, then that one over there. They have not permitted themselves the leisure or luxury of studying Islam, its tenets and history and the varied instruments of Jihad, and the methods of decepton of Infidels, and thoe amazing ways in which Infidels engage in self-deception using wish-fulfilmment, deliberate ignorance, and not noble nadezhda-mandelshtam hope-against-hope, but mirage-against-reality, in order to get up in the morning and not be alarmed.
And things dismissed as "unthinkable" are perfectly thinkable, if people will only start to think. The behavior of Benes, Masaryk, and the Czechs after World War II was not unthinkable. The Benes Decrees, which based on a need to remove, it was felt, a permanent internal threat to Czech security, with plenty of evidence to suggest that the feeling was both rational and justified, need to be studied, need to be examined. It is not a question of whether or not the execution was perfect, or if the the statutes were drawn overbroadly. It is a question of discussing, rather, whether the tolerance of Western societies is always and everywhere adequate to the task of protecting those societies, in the face of an untoward menace to the laws, customs, manners, wellbeing, and physical securit of those societies.
What is permissible? What is rational?
Begin with Tomas Masaryk, Eduard Benes, and the Benes Decrees.
That is what Europe needs to do. And it needs more acts of open defiance of the pensee unique, of the E.U. Bureaucracy, of the weight and power of armies of Arab hirelings from the ruling and business classes, who supplement the groups on the left, whose alienation from society often finds the perfect vehicle for its expression in Islam. And of course both groups are those most prone to those two pre-existing conditions that have been played upon, and whipped up, in Europe by a meretricioius and biased media -- anti-Americanism and antisemitism (the latter finding its outlet in the grotesque coverage of Israel and its poorly-explained attempts to fend off the Lesser Jihad).
Start by googling "Jihad Watch" and "Benes Decree." Ask yourself if, at the time or since, any Czechs or any world statesmen, or figures deemed to have special knowledge of pre-war and wartime Europe (especially of the Fascists and Nazis) have had occasion to deplore the Benes Decree? No? Not General Svoboda? Not the poet Siefert? Not Aleksandr Dubcek? Not Pavel Kohout? Not Churchill? Not De Gaulle? Not Truman or any other president? Not De Gasperi? Not Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn? Not Andrey Sakharov? Not Elena Bonner? Not Andrey Amalrik? Not Yuri Galanskov? Not Raymond Aron? Not Pierre Mendes-France? Not Rene Cassin? Not Pablo Casals? Not Albert Schweitzer? No one at all, save for German revanchists? And when you look at Czechs today, who do not apologize for, and are the beneficiares of, the removal of that threat, as they saw it, do you regard them as monsters? You do not.
And what about a similar situation in Poland? Not quite the same. Not 3 million ethnic Germans, whose ancestors had lived there for generations. But still -- a large-scale expulsion of those deemed a security threat. What do you think Zbigniew Herbert or Czeslaw Milosz would have said during their lives, or Wislawa Szymborska would say now, if asked to denounce as "abominable" the behavior of Poland in expelling Germans after World War II? What do you think they would reply?
In 1945, and 1946, Germany lay in ruins. It lay, truncated. It was not a threat. It was not even a foreseeable future threat. Nonetheless, in some far distant time, who knows -- reasoned the Czechs and the Poles-- might happen, given recent history?
What should the people of Western Europe conclude, based on 1350 years of history, and on the express doctrines contained, and obvious, in hundreds of passages in the immutable Qur'an, on many hundreds of the most famous and "authoritative" Hadith, and on the life of Muhammad, that Model of Men, uswa hasana, al-insan al-kamil?
What should they do? What do they have a right to consider doing, to preserve themselves and the most advanced and tolerant civilization every created? What should they do to preserve not only themselves and their laws, but the possibliity of art? Of science? Of all free and skeptical inquiry?
What are they entitled to do?
"Peter Costello, the Australian treasurer, made public his government’s opinion that those who do not subscribe to Australian values or deny the supremacy of Australian law over Islamic law should be denied both citizenship and the right to enter Australia. Costello went further, in an interview on television, in declaring that even Australian citizens who fail to pass this basic litmus test should be subject to deportation."
Where is the American equivalent of Peter Costello?
"Where is the American equivalent of Peter Costello?"
That's a very good question and a sign of how out-of-touch American politicians really are. I wsas very impressed (favorably) with Costello's remarks -- they struck exactly the right balance of firmness and friendliness. So I am surprised that I have heard NO American politician of any party say anything remotely similar. Our politicians really are asleep.
"Maybe I'm reading it incorrectly, but it seems to me that his assessment of public attitude is contradictory."
This contradiction stems from an attitude that seems common among jihad watchers (I use that term in the widest sense), and that attitude is one of childish braggadacio puffed up to rally the troops. It takes the form of saying silly things like "Islam is not growing!" and "If Muslims tried that on US soil, they'd be put down instantly!" and "Everyone knows that Islam is evil!" and "No one -- no one -- takes John Esposito seriously anymore!", etc.
The bleaker fact is that the West, from the top elites down to millions of free and ordinary people, are still in thrall to a massive psychosociopolitical worldview that prevents -- yea, forbids -- the simple, rational critical condemnation of Islam.
In this regard, Hugh doesn't see the mountain range of popular and institutional opinion that stands in the way of his Neo-Benes Decree.
The discussion must start somewhere -- I don't argue with the premise of the desirability or even the necessity of expulsing inimical populations from our midst, but there are some significant differences between the state of affairs in 1946 and 2006 -- namely:
"In 1945, and 1946, Germany lay in ruins... "
And the Muslim world does not (lay in ruins), nor is it "truncated", despite the mangled and chaotic appearance to Western eyes.
The proposals for expulsion are premature. Not only are our citizens unprepared to contemplate this eventuality, but the Muslims are prepared, unlike their 1946 and after German counterparts to exploit such calls to their full advantage...
Islam is slouching along much as it ever has -- and is now unbowed -- In fact, far from being diminished, Islam is flush with staggeringly high and unprecedented births and birthrates, gushers of cash, inflows into Muslim domains of goods and technologies -- and, most ominously, exponentially greater numbers of enclaves and footholds in foreign lands... These things make the Muslims lust for more, imagining, as they do, that Islam is ascendant... that Islam will triumph. The Benes Decree, had it been proposed in 1937, prior to the invasion of the Sudetenland, would have been a calamity. Discussion of such a proposal also would have helped create the pretext for 1938 -- and the Muslims are poised in the exact same manner today.
Certainly, if the aftermath of 9/11 is any guide, Muslim organizations across the globe were prepared to exploit the atrocity to their advantage, and were largely successful in depicting themselves as the ultimate victims of the attack. How much more resonant, then, their claims of victimology at our hands among 1+ billion Muslims, than those claims of victimology by Hitler which created his pretext for the annexation of sovereign Czech territories?!
But I guess it's not helpful to lay out the whole ugly picture in one pass -- assimilating the titanic threats the Muslims pose may only be possible in smaller bites, and by seeing smaller chapters and stories out of the their bloody book of Jihad...
Who am I to point such things out? I never thought cartoons would galvinize Westerners -- or that 9/11 would leave many yawning or worse, blaming the victims for the crimes of the Muslims.
Hugh, how likely is it that any European country or the US would support Benes-like decrees, basically suspecting every local muslim of collaboration? Considering some of the poll outcomes of 40% support for bin Laden, would that be enough to justify such an action in the eyes of the public?
Hasn't been so far, of course...
until we actually teach our young people to take pride in western civilastion , instead of berating it in an orgy of cultural equivalenece and absurd moral relativism, we will never be able to defend ourselves. No doubt this was a state of mind which existed at the end of the Roman Empire amongst the Roman intelligentsia.
At the best of times, even without threats from the outside, we are busy destroying ourselves from the inside.
This is a problem that is endemic in Europe but as yet not so in the US and Australia.
Peter Costello's call to respect and endorse the moral values of one's host country, would have been met by virulent calls of resignation in the UK. And horror editorials in the Gusrdian, independent and at the BBC.
But australia is not that sick and the only severe rebuttals came from the Muslim Councils.
For Europe whatever outrages occur ( Halemi, Van Gogh, the 711 bombings, madrid etc), whatever demnds are made it is ALL OUR FAULT and will always be in the psyche of the progressives who rule our minds fron the universities, the Media and from the leftists.
Almost any conclusions can be made by these groups, without regard to reality for the sake of relativism.
The Guardian tells ther readers that the victims of the bombings are morally equivalent to their killers who are hapless victims of internal imperialism and had no other choice but to make a "statement".
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,3604,1398445,00.html
And the list goes on.
The main problem with western thinking is that it has given away the MORAL highground and the Islamists have worked that to the full.