“What we feared has happened.” — Charles Michel, Prime Minister of Belgium
I’ve been expecting Islam’s defenders and apologists to accuse Belgium’s Prime Minister Charles Michel of Islamophobia. So far, weeks after the attack, no journalist has dared brand this leader an Islamophobe, even though he has openly admitted to being afraid of and anticipating this terrorist onslaught that has been happening long before the tragic events in Brussels on March 22, 2016. Apparently, only those who have not suffered in their flesh the bite and barbarism of Islamic terrorism are prohibited from feeling uneasy about the presence of Muslims in their midst. Apparently, if you’ve already been the victim of terrorism, it’s permissible to admit to being afraid of such horrible misadventures. But by then, as we say, it’s already too late. Prudence is a virtue scorned by the Left.
It truly astonishes me how journalists will use the term “Islamophobia” as though “Islamophobia” were actually more than a sophism used to exculpate the religion of Islam from the terrorism and Jew-hatred it has bequeathed to the world at large. Whoever doesn’t fear Islam and the malefic potential of his Muslim neighbor, whoever doesn’t anticipate the coming of age of radical elements that are surely being incubated in every Western Muslim community, is naively superstitious and hopelessly imprudent. Whoever doesn’t fear this danger has failed to notice the particular behaviour of those certain few within Islam whom Pakistan’s Khaled Ahmed pointed out only “serve to confirm the primordial simplicity of the Muslim mind.”
Robert Spencer once referred to “this unreality forced upon us.” This “unreality” is the modern-day version of Tertullian’s rule of faith: we are being compelled to believe that we have nothing to fear from the Muslim umma and their Islam. Credo quia absurdum. If only we believe what all Western journalists are suggesting, that Islam is not connected to terrorism, that we have nothing to fear from the Muslim community (when all evidence points to the contrary), then it will be so. If only we believe, as Aristotle proposed, “for it is not by its true or possible character that it so appears.” The problem is, even after believing the impossible about Islam and the Muslim umma, we are not rewarded with the desired result: sectarian violence and militancy are everywhere evident whenever the religion of Islam achieves preponderance. As Neil Kressel wrote in his book The Sons of Apes and Pigs, “we are left with the bigger question, whether hatred traveling under the veil of extremist Islam will succeed in overpowering the more tolerant humanistic forces within the religion. Recent events leave us with few reasons for optimism.” As Milton Viorst wrote in the Los Angeles Times way back in 2003, “It is not so much that Muslims are more pious than Westerners. It is that the imperatives of the culture impose limits on diversity of outlook, whether religious or social. These imperatives suppress the demand for personal identity, leaving believers with little tolerance for the free and open debate necessarily at democracy’s core.”
“Nothing is so firmly believed as what we least know,” wrote Montaigne. We are being told by the Liberal Party of Canada that Canadians have nothing to worry about as regards the thousands of Syrian refugees being admitted into this country. However, those giving us these reassurances (our shiny new Prime Minister included) know nothing of what the future holds for Canada and what may become in the same future a Muslim-majority country (for this is the course on which we’re headed). How could they know? Yet this Liberal government has announced that they plan on receiving and settling 25,000 Syrian refugees by the end of 2016. Perhaps this influx of Syrian Muslim refugees, which could possibly usher in a Muslim-majority Canada, is part of the Liberal Party strategy. Every Canadian with half a brain knows that a Muslim majority will surely mean a Liberal majority constituency.
The Archdiocese of Vancouver has confirmed on its website that “in a Dec. 15 open letter, the Canadian Conference of Catholic Bishops (CCB) president Hamilton Bishop Douglas Crosby and Canadian Rabbinic Caucus co-chair Rabbi Baruch Frydman-Kohl had urged Foreign Affairs Minister Stephane Dion to make persecuted Christians a priority.” However, the same article on the website also reports that “despite calls from religious leaders to respond to a genocide of Christians in the Middle East, Canada is not making any extra provisions for Christian refugees from Syria.” Where are the journalists, who years ago jumped at the opportunity to report on the “refugee crisis in Syria,” commenting today on the subject of this genocide being perpetrated upon Syrian Christians? In response to this uncomfortable question, Robyn Urback writes in the National Post that “the Canadian government would never do that, of course, since it would set itself up for accusations of institutional Islamophobia.” This country has descended so far down into the dark and immoral abyss of political correctness that we fear more the accusation of “institutional Islamophobia” than we do the shameful legacy of having turned our faces away from the horrific genocide of Syrian Christians at the hands of Islamic terrorists. Albert Camus was so right: “Nothing is more despicable than respect based on fear.”
The greatest hindrance today to the perpetuity of Western democracy, in my view, are the journalists and apologists and politicians who have created an oppressive atmosphere much like the precarious conditions suffered by dissidents (Jew and non-Jew alike) during the long and dark night of Nazi rule in Germany. Many of us, unfortunately, have become like the fictional Hergesell couple in Hans Fallada’s Every Man Dies Alone, who, because of their naivete, “failed to understand that there was no such thing as private life in wartime Germany. No amount of reticence could change the fact that every individual German belonged to the generality of Germans and must share in the general destiny of Germany, even as more and more bombs were falling on the just and unjust alike.” However, there are a few of us who are not afraid to confess to our fear of Islam and the presence of radicalization in the Muslim community. It is not a fear that engenders respect of any kind for a religion that refers to Jews as “the sons of apes and pigs.” Nor is it the fear that tinctures the timid among us with immoral complacency. Rather, it is a fear that, like the fictional couple Otto and Anna Quangel in Fallada’s book (based on the true story of the heroic German husband and wife Otto and Elise Hampel) who determined between each other that “the main thing is that we remain different from them, that we never allow ourselves to be made into them, or start thinking as they do.”