The United States remains on its previous stance, that of a person wearing blinders that does not see the coming threat on his flank is incredible
enough. What is beyond belief is that the State Department persists in its stubborn refusal to correctly label the problem and now is going hat in hand to the Spanish, whom everyone knows as appeasers, to supplicate, hoping that they can assist in find a "peaceful" solution to jihad.

They still don't get it. This asymmetrical "war on terror" is not a military adventure to wipe out a few thousand ignorant desert or mountain
tribesmen. If this were so, we could drop a few Daisy Cutters and be done with them. Any military man understands this premise.

If this were only a diplomatic problem, we have sufficient numbers of capable individuals in the diplomatic corpse that could hammer out a treaty
with this or that entity that would bring a halt to the armed incursions.

But we are faced with something more than generals and diplomats can solve.

For some reason the State Department refuses to acknowledge publicly that we are facing an ideology which more than a billion call a religion. An abstract idea can not be confronted by generals and diplomats that don't acknowledge its existence.

The Spanish may or may not understand why they caved in. They may believe that not provoking terrorists is the proper course. The influence of Moors on Spanish culture, their proximity to Gibraltar, Morocco and North African culture as well as socialism softened them up for the kill.

Their regrettable capitulation is understandable in the light of this influence, but the stubborn intransigence of the United States State
Department can not be explained away in these terms unless there now exists an Islamic element within the State Department that has infected the upper leadership with the meme of Islamism. Can there be another explanation for such gross stupidity?

OTOH, the US knows that this latest negotiation dance with Arafat will fail, so why not let the Spaniards take the blame? It will prove the fallacy of their strategy.

In the United States, and especially in Wasington, it is not understood that for three decades -- since OPEC's "money weapon" began to be brandished -- there has been a steady, persistent, increasing islamization of European foreign policy, beginning, but not ending, with the so-called Euro-Arab Dialogue. It is not a dialogue but a diktat, and the one calling the tune is the Arab League, and the dancers, who must forever pick up their step, faster and faster, are the hapless members of the EU. The entire EU bureacracy, like that of the UN, has simply been seized by agents of, or apologists for, Islam. Chris Patten, Javier Solana, Romano Prodi are among the anointed quislings -- who of course cannot dare to look directly at the demographic conquest of Infidel Europe by its overbreeding, and o'erbearing, and expensive (to monitor) and dangerous Muslim population.

How much easier it is to allow onself to believe that as long as Arab demands in "Palestine" are satisfied (which is to say, not that justice is done, but that Israel is thrown to the wolves), there will be no problem, and all manner of things shall be well. It is nonsense. It would mean a great betrayal of the right of the most persecuted tribe in human history. But more than that, it would be to surrender a sliver of land that is equally important to Western civilization, to those who do not, and never have, wished anything for that non-Muslim civilization except for its subjugation and ultimate disappearance.

Zapatero and company are not part of the solution. They are the problem.

The United States must look on Europe as Occupied Europe. It must exercise all of its art and cunning, to articulate, for the mute and helpless and increasingly inglorious Europeans, who live their lives in a world where a campaign of vilification against Israel and America is the daily fare, and where no one is allowed to criticize Islam, or even to tell a few oblique truths about it, without being hounded or otherwise censored.

In the late 1940s, despite the fact that American troops had liberated western Europe, and the Red Army had seized all of eastern Europe, the two largest political parties where the Communist parties of Italy and France. The so-called "intellectuals" (an idiotic word, really) were almost entirely supporters of the Soviet Union. But with the spending of large sums of money, subventions to non-Communist parties, such as the Christian Democrats in Italy (who later became intolerably corrupt, but served a purpose then) to support non-Communist newspapers such as Der Monat, to found the Congress for Cultural Freedom, which in turn gave birth to Encounter, the best English-language magazine in the world, to support for conferences and seminars to and fro across the Atlantic, often conducted by ex-Communists such as Koestler, Moravia, Crossman, and others. It took money, planning, and guile. It worked.

Instead of wasting money and time in Iraq, the main focus of anti-Jihad efforts should be in western Europe. Those in eastern Europe, including such countries as Bulgaria that have historic memories of the devshirme (the Ottoman levy of Christian children for the armed forces) and Rumania, an appeal can be made to enlist their service in helping to convince the decadent and foolish states of western Europe that they must cease to be handmaidens of the Jihad, but instead recognnize, not the pseudo-link that geography provides ("the North" and "the South" -- les deux rives -- of the Mediterranean), but the real linke of culture and ideas. Spinoza and Hume, Leonardo and Pushkin, La Fontaine and Melville, Jefferson and Lincoln and Mill and Raymond Aron -- these are the links that count, not the fact that Muslims live in North Africa and the Middle East, and have forced their way, under the benevolent eyes of very foolish elites (who have betrayed their own peoples and countries and cultures, and cannot for one minute allow themselves, much less those peoples, to realize it -- it would be simply too horrifying). When the Solanas and the Pattens and the Prodis and the Mary Robinsons are all seen for the sinister quislings (and some outright antisemites among them) and fixated anti-Americans they are, American policy will be vindicated, as it was, in Italy, when De Gasperi led that country.

to e.p.g.: very clear and concise post. i was going to answer your ending rhetorical question with "stockholm syndrome," but alas, hugh has come along and eloquently filled in all the gaps it would seem.

to hugh: you're beginning to win me over on the idea that the europeans may be too far gone to hope they can save themselves.

Great post, Hugh. But I would like to point out one thing: the French are attempting some minor challenges to the Muslims by, for one thing, forbidding the wearing of headscarves by female students. That action may portend more resistance on their part in the future. I totally agree with the concept of an occupied Europe. I remember reading where an Arab bragged that they wouldn't have to invade France, they would simply out reproduce them. Thank you for your insights.

"We have to energetically oppose terrorism, but we mustn't change the way we live," Solana has told the German weekly Bild am Sonntag in an interview to appear on Sunday, adding "Europe is not at war." (Javier Solana)

What an idiot! Europe is not at war... Blah, blah, blah... Does it even strike the minds of these Chamberlin-style appeasers that while they might not be at war, Islam is??? What a bunch of idiots! Just because you aren't at war, doesn't mean that war is not upon you.

To get the u.s. influence out of the negotiations in the middle east is probably the reason this is being done; agree it will not work. We are not at war with some sill ass arabs; as said earlier we are at with with an idiological religion that wants to dominate the world. This is in plain truth the war we are fighting. The other major religions of our world, don't seem to get it yet. If thay do then as in rome it is in silence that the wounds fester with hate. The leaders of nations is not needed here, the leaders of the worlds religions voices is what is needed, and thay lay silent.