You Can’t Talk Sense to a Shotgun
by Michael Devolin
“The fight would continue, as it had in the Crusades, until the injustice was completely removed. By imposing partition, the United Nations would virtually precipitate Palestine into a bloodbath.” –Jamal Husseini, 1947
The above statement was addressed to the UN General Assembly regarding the establishment of a Jewish sovereign state in the Middle East. I’m not even going to approach the debate between Arab and Jews and the indigenous right of Jews to their place in the Middle East. If the Jewish people, with all their brains and brawn, cannot convince the Arab Muslim to stop hating Jews simply because they’re Jewish and find enough common ground to live together in peace, then my sciolistic and miniscule contribution to that eternal debate will accomplish nothing. But I use the Arab Muslim example of intransigence, as inspired by a religious fidelity, as a means of pointing out that the conflict in North America (Europe is lost, in my opinion) between the opponents of Islamic jihad and those who either support Islamic jihad or whose political vilification of Western values and traditions serve no other purpose than to empower Islamic jihad, will never come to an end. Our only hope is to prevent the Islamic imperial dream from reaching fruition here. After all the apologia and political sophism employed to portray Islam proper as being somehow benign—regardless its entire history, from its violent beginnings to its violence present day—the one and only course of action left to those of us who have never been convinced of this benignity is to speak with the enemy at the gate, intimate to him that we are truly aware of his willful nature, that we are not naive, and prevent him from entering our city.
Raphael Israeli has written, “…one cannot help but notice that some of the international conflicts in which Muslim groups or countries are involved, such as in the Middle East, Kashmir, the Philippines or Xinjiang, have also been tinged by Islamic ideology. The implications are vast: if, thus far, conflicts have been mediated and settled by negotiation and compromise, namely by quantitative means, once they are pushed to the religious domain they become qualitative and not given to negotiation and compromise and become that much more difficult to resolve.” They are foolish, therefore, who believe this conflict between the West and the religion of Islam will soon be settled and a final denouement reached.
And it is, essentially, a conflict between the religion of Islam and the West, not merely between the fundamentalists of Islam and the West. For without Islam the religion, there would be no Islamist fundamentalism—there would be no jihad. If Islam is an absolute good, there can be no 9/11, or Beslan, or 7/7, and now ISIS. Or as Raphael Israeli also asks, “Why is it that Islam has given rise to so many groups of ‘suicide bombers’, and to so many ‘spiritual’ leaders who openly condone this practice and lend legitimacy to it…?” These are questions our media and political leaders and apologists not only refuse to answer but, far worse and far more imprudent, refuse even to ask.
Efraim Karsh gives examples of Islamic recalcitrance in Palestine Betrayed: “For all their drastically different personalities and political styles, Arafat and Abbas are warp and woof of the same fabric: dogmatic PLO veterans who have never eschewed their commitment to Israel’s destruction and who have viewed the ‘peace process’ as the continuation by other means of their lifelong war.” He recounts elsewhere that Saeb Erekat, who served for 12 years as editor of the Palestinian newspaper Al-Quds (a paper which purported in 1997 that the virulently antisemitic book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is indeed factual), who in 2002 alleged that the IDF killed more than 500 civilians during their assault on the town of Jenin (when in fact there were no more than between 53 and 56 recorded casualties), said of Netanyahu’s request that the PA recognize Israel’s “Jewish nature”, that “he [Netanyahu] will have to wait 1,000 years before he finds one Palestinian who will go along with him…” In other words, the Palestinians, or to be more precise, the Palestinian leadership, would much rather the land of Israel remain a desert and barren to Muslims and their terrorist affiliates exclusively—forbidden to Jews—than become a land cultivated, fruitful, and made beneficent for all, both Muslim and Jew.
It should be obvious to all by now that the goals and visions of Islamic jihad, as it exists in the West Bank and Gaza, takes precedence over the lives and well-being of ordinary Palestinians: death to the Jews and the elimination of the State of Israel, in the minds of Hamas and PA leadership, is far more important than providing a means of livelihood and enduring infrastructure for ordinary Palestinians. Better to build concrete tunnels with the purpose of attacking Israeli Jews than to build homes and schools and hospitals for Palestinian families. Moreover, that the majority of ordinary Palestinians actually concur (after all, they elected Hamas) with these nefarious adventures, as defined by Arafat and Abbas, speaks volumes about this overwhelmingly anti-Jewish mindset an assortment of Israeli governments since 1948 have vainly attempted to conciliate. “World history is the history of large cultures” wrote Oswald Spengler in Decline of the West. Who can deny that Islamist culture, as it exists within the Islamic world, is on the rise? We witnessed this dangerous proliferation playing out in the so-called “Arab Spring” and today in the subsequent and populist ISIS movement. Religiously prescribed intransigence is the pivotal ingredient to this brutal ideology’s continuity.
Instead of becoming an open pasture for political pundits the world over, good and bad, the “peace process” between the State of Israel and the Arab Muslim world (not simply the Palestinians) should be by now a joke shared amongst those who can see clearly that the debate is going nowhere, has always gone nowhere, and was going nowhere as far back as 1933. Lt. Col. (ret) Jonathan D. Halevi, senior researcher of the Middle East and radical Islam at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, recounts: “Arafat reached the decision that the negotiations at the Camp David summit in July 2000 were going nowhere. He sent a security representative to Sheikh Salah Shehade, head of the Hamas military wing at the time, with the message: ‘I have no objection to Hamas taking action.’”—Even while feigning the role of a “peace partner” in the eyes of the Western world, Arafat was secretly preparing for the Second Intifada, coordinating with Hamas immediate terror attacks inside the State of Israel.
You can’t talk sense to a shotgun. And you can’t negotiate on a level plane with a religious prejudice that presupposes Muslims as superior to, and above, all others. How can the State of Israel ever hope to accommodate, or exist contiguously with, a people whose religion is innately and traditionally anti-Jewish and whose tenets boast that Islam and the Muslim have obsolesced Judaism and the Jew? Neil J. Kressel posits that, according to studies, “…in non-democratic countries, high self-esteem may actually increase support for authoritarian institutions.” He points out further that psychologist Roy F. Baumeister’s research in this area of human behaviour suggests that “…empirical evidence supports the counterintuitive proposition that bullies, domestic abusers, and other perpetrators of violence frequently have high self-esteem…many evil-doers throughout history have possessed inflated self-images. When these images become tarnished or damaged, the result may be a powerful drive for revenge.” Islamist jihadists, those who commit “honour killings”, and those of Yasser Arafat’s ilk fit the above criterion perfectly. And the common denominator of them all is their religiously taught, hateful intransigency.
The same anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment that has for many decades permeated the Muslim Middle East is the same anti-Western and anti-Jewish sentiment now permeating North American universities, media, and political discourse. The portentous and existential imbroglio the tiny State of Israel shares with its Arab Muslim neighbors is the prime symbolic example of the much larger and precisely similar portentous existential imbroglio Western democracies now share with our Muslim citizens and/or immigrants. To insist that this imbroglio does not exist, to rely on the vain strategy of placating those whose religious tenets demand implacability is also intransigence.
Michael Devolin has been a member of JDL Canada since the 1980s, and has served as the personal bodyguard to Meir Weinstein, National Director of JDL Canada, at several high-profile trials, including the Jim Keegstra hate crimes trial and the Imra Finta war crimes trial.
Jay Boo says
Is she using the correct hand to hold the Koran?
I forget:
What hand is it that Muslims use to wipe their butts.
BC says
Yet the right hand is needed to shoot the gun which for most jihadists is the most important, killing ‘opponents’ of Allah!
JOSEPH says
They eat with their right and wipe-ass with left. That is why thieves have their right hand cut off. WAIT…..they really do wipe/wash their arse? Could have fooled me.
Mattt-ن says
They don’t wipe they wash lol
Don McKellar says
How can Israel peacefully coexist beside Islam? Well, NOBODY can peacefully coexist beside Islam unless Islam is beaten into the ground and subdued and moslems realize that they cannot bully people as their religion instructs them to do.
Bamaguje says
You don’t coexist with an evil ideology… you destroy it. Even it pretends to be religion
We didn’t coexist with Nazism, we destroyed it.
Bamaguje says
You don’t coexist with evil… you destroy it. Even if it pretends to be a religion.
We did not coexist with Nazism… we destroyed it.
BC says
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, long since dismissed as a fake created by the Tsarist secret police
in Russia to support pogroms against the Jews, is freely available on bookstalls in the Middle East.
Need one say more?
Long live Israel.
As for your frequent prognostications of doom. The population of the EU is over half a billion. Third largest population in the world. Even Britain stood alone against the might of Nazi Germany who were a far more formidable opponent than IS and its affiliates, for two years. Then we beat them with help from the USA and Russia of course. The jihadists are building their own coffins, with ever atrocity more people become aware of the danger and more disgusted with Islamic political extremism.
Even little Israel with a population of just over 8 million has beaten off several attacks usually on several fronts from Arab nations trying to overthrow it and still it stands proud and free. A lighthouse in a stormy sea of corruption and racist bigotry.
Angemon says
By “injustice” he means “non-islamic rule”.
voegelinian says
“Europe is lost, in my opinion”
Unless this is hyperbole, it tends to mar the whole essay and makes it exceedingly difficult to take the writer seriously as a credible analyst. I agree the ongoing train wreck of the Mohammedan jihad against Europe (with all its seemingly straggling diversity combining practically every form of jihad except the kitchen sink of frank military invasion) is dire; but dire can devolve into worse and worse, even frightfully so, without Doom being spelled; and it is the height of rhetorical (and strategic) recklessness — particularly in such an exquisitely dreadful context — to pronounce it speculatively and prematurely.
Jay Boo says
Classic voegy
Just when it seems like you are being an honest broker you nitpick on one thing in order to extrapolate it for the purpose of discrediting the whole essay with your added twist of an ad hominem attack on the writer:
“makes it exceedingly difficult to take the writer seriously as a credible analyst”
P. J. has clearly shown here that he knows your whole bag of tricks.
Time to throw in the towel voeg and give it a rest.
voegelinian says
What could the obtuse Phillip Jihadski possibly object to in my comment? I haven’t even read his knee-jerk retort (since with very rare exceptions I haven’t read him in months), but I cannot imagine he would have any objection to my elementary points I made which perhaps he needs a pre-school primer to elucidate for better pablum-like comprehension:
1. The writer of the featured essay wrote that “Europe is lost” (lost to Islam, that is).
2. Such a statement is, to all non-Europeans who love freedom, ostensibly giving up the ghost on a priceless ally, and expresses surrender to hopelessness.
3. If, however, the statement is meant in the spirit of rhetorical hyperbole, it is salvageable.
4. If the statement is not so salvageable — i.e. (young Master Jihadski, sit up straight and stop fidgeting with your colored chalk and eating your boogers) if Michael Devolin meant it literally (which from the context seems to most sensible reading) then the remainder of my argument pertains. One can of course at that juncture attempt to disagree that, with utterly bleak and black pessimism, to pronounce Europe dead before we can actually verify it is so (and during a time when millions of Europeans are waking up and a minority among them are valiantly rousing themselves to fight the good fight) — not even factoring in the fact of the devastating meaning of such a loss, for which an appreciation of the incalculable, inconceivable, priceless beauty and goodness of Europe with such cavalier resignation fared an unceremonious bon voyage to the unfolding vortex of an Islamic Hell-to-come — is a good message to send out to the Counter-Jihad and to the wider West of which it is a part. But one damn well better have a damn good reason for doing so.
P.S.:
In a similar context & vein, the now deceased analyst Lawrence Auster nearly ten years ago took another Gloomy Gus to task — namely, Mark Steyn — and nicely skewered his glib pessimism about Europe. Here’s an excerpt:
…Steyn, the recent winner of the Claremont Institute’s Winston Churchill award, does not declare in Churchillian fashion that losing many or most European countries to Islam is totally unacceptable and that we must do whatever we can to prevent such an unimaginable calamity. No, more in the mode of Lord Halifax than of Churchill, he tells people it’s too late to stop it. The best he hopes for is to save some parts of the West, by which, based on his previous writings, he presumably means America. He has written off Western Europe.
Yet having written off the cradle of our civilization, Steyn then adds: “That’s what the war’s about: our lack of civilizational confidence.” So, in prophetic tones he tells the West that is doomed, then he scolds it for its lack of civilizational confidence! It doesn’t occur to Steyn that if the West started taking serious measures about the Muslims in its midst—stopping their immigration cold, deporting all Muslims who adhere to the Islamic political agenda, restricting their mosques, all of which would result in the beginning of the decline of the Muslim power and numbers in the West instead of their continuing increase—that such policies and results would bring back Western confidence and perhaps increase Western birthrates as well. Does he really expect people whose imminent doom he is continually and gleefully announcing to want to have lots of children?
While I had some disagreements with Auster on the mechanics of his solution, I appreciate his diagnostic analysis — more often than not usefully perspicacious — of the failure on the part of many in the Counter-Jihad to adequately assess the problem that would be solved (for one can’t optimally solve a problem if one doesn’t grasp the actual problem but rather has some flawed perception of its nature & dimensions). The great detail into which I went in this regard may be garnered here:
http://hesperado.blogspot.com/2014/07/transcripts-from-2009-extended.html
Angemon says
voegelinian posted:
“What could the obtuse Phillip Jihadski possibly object to in my comment? I haven’t even read his knee-jerk retort”
Huh, if you haven’t read his post how come you know he’s objecting to anything you wrote?
“but I cannot imagine he would have any objection to my elementary points I made”
Right, because you’re God’s gift to JW and therefore whatever you post is meant to be treasured and cherished for all eternity…
“1. The writer of the featured essay wrote that “Europe is lost”
It seems it’s not just mine or PJ’s posts you’re allegedly not reading (and I already caught you lying about it). Devolin wrote “Europe is lost, in my opinion”. You leave out a crucial bit so you can go in on of your stereotypical masturbatory self-aggrandizing diatribes that you’re so fond of. Anything you derive from the absence of what you saw fit to conceal belongs in the rubbish bin, even if you’re not honest enough to admit it.
Arthur says
Without additional squabbling, maybe it makes sense to hold the view that current European culture (its complacency toward liberties and its eagerness to appease minority populations) is not immune to the Islamic infection. The culture might *change* and decisively reject and eliminate this newest supremacist ideology, while retaining fundamental liberties and diversity. So perhaps the future is, quite simply, uncertain?
mortimer says
Muslims hate Israel because it has become a non-Islamic territory. This proves that Islam is false if it is allowed to continue. Israel proves that Allah is impotent.