DINING OUT WITH TERRORISTS
by
DAVID SOLWAY
______________________________
David
Solway is a Canadian poet and essayist (Random Walks)
and author of The Big Lie: On Terror, Antisemitism, and
Identity and Hear,
O Israel! (Mantua Books). His editorials appear
regularly in frontpagemag.com and
PJ Media. His monograph, Global Warning: The Trials
of an Unsettled Science (Freedom Press Canada) was launched
at the National Archives in Ottawa in September, 2012. His debut
album, Blood
Guitar, is now available, as is his latest
video, Loving
You, Loving Me.
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
Yeats
On
the days when my wife teaches late classes at the university,
we usually go for supper at a nearby mall, which boasts a massive
“dining hall” (once a “food court”)
and which features a wide range of exotic menus to choose from.
It is immensely popular, seating hundreds of diners at any one
time, some in company, others peering into their smart phones,
a few reading books, some attending to baby carriages, most
clearly enjoying themselves under ample lighting in a mainly
festive atmosphere.
Janice
and I were there for a 7 o’clock post-class supper on
Wednesday, December 2, tucking into our Bento Box and chatting
about university politics and related issues, when for no apparent
reason I was suddenly struck by a kind of vision, a troubling
sense of premonition. I imagined a team of terrorists emerging
from the corridor into the dining area, armed with AK-47s and
spraying the crowd—they could take as many lives as they
had bullets to take them with. What would I do? My first impulse
was to shield my wife, but by then it might already be too late.
The image does not bear describing. The security guards would
have been utterly useless since they are unarmed, and, given
our strict gun laws, no one among the diners would have carried
a weapon. It was Bataclan revisited. I shook off the visitation
and returned to a semblance of normality, but the meal had lost
its savour.
Later
that evening, after a two hour drive to our country home, I
consulted my computer to catch up on the day’s events
and read about the mass shooting in San Bernardino. And I knew
beyond the shadow of a doubt that the horror could just as easily
have happened in that spacious, well-lighted dining hall, or
in one like it, and that, thanks to our lax immigration procedures
and the welcome we have extended to the droves of “Syrian”
refugees and other poorly screened migrants, one day it surely
would. And I knew, too, that in the aftermath, we could expect
the same evasions and platitudes from our newly elected prime
minister, the feckless Justin Trudeau, that Americans were treated
to by Obama, who lied: “At this stage we do not yet know
why this terrible event occurred…we don't know why they
did it, we do not know the extent of their plans, we do not
know their motivations.”
One
wonders how the jihadists get away with their atrocities and
from where they derive their power. Of course, they enjoy material
help from the constitutive practices and ideology of the very
nations they are attacking: the scourge of multiculturalism,
which has received them into the body social and the body politic,
and the reigning pathology of political correctness that refuses
to name the enemy and suppresses or scumbles their true identity.
The terrorists also profit from the sympathy of left-wing parties
and the complicity of the liberal elites who pride themselves
on the destructive canard of “tolerance,” that is,
tolerance of both the intolerant and the intolerable. Influential
leaders of Western nations have clearly sided with the children
of Islam. One need look no further than Barack Hussein Obama,
the first pro-Muslim American president; Justin Trudeau, the
first pro-Muslim Canadian prime minister; Angela Merkel, the
first post-war pro-Muslim German chancellor; and political weaklings
like France’s president François Hollande and Britain’s
prime minister David Cameron, among many others.
But
the terrorists’ strength emanates from even more powerful
sources. What we have not appeared to understand is that their
spirit and practice differ categorically from the methods, traditions
and policies of the armies of the West, in two crucial ways.
First,
they are not bound by the Geneva conventions, they do not wear
uniforms, they do not regard civilians as non-combatants, they
do not care for the wounded, they do not respect the sanctity
of rescue and medical corps, and, what should be immediately
obvious, they do not take prisoners; they take hostages. Which
is to say, they are out-and-out barbarians with no redeeming
traits and their only connection with what we call civilization
is deceptive and parasitical. As PJ Media columnist
David Goldman writes in the Asia Times, “The
trouble is that very large numbers of Muslims are willing to
kill themselves in order to harm enemy non-combatants, and the
number appears to be increasing. To my knowledge that is something
new under the sun. Japanese kamikazes and Nizari assassins in
the Middle Ages, like the pre-1917 Bolsheviks, were willing
to die to kill public officials or soldiers. But the murder
of non-combatants through suicide attacks (or attacks likely
to prove suicidal) is something we have never before witnessed.”
Second,
they are subjectively invincible. They do not take casualties.
Their bodies are like weapons; when these are spent, they can
be discarded. In other words, they do not die, but are immediately
translated into Jannah, the Muslim heaven, where they
will revel eternally in sparkling brooks, fruited orchards,
and harems of sloe-eyed virgins. In a sense, they are the zombies
of the modern world, the armies of the living dead who, as they
are fond of saying, love death more than we love life. They
cannot be defeated, they can only be quarantined, kept at bay,
left to rave and rampage in the killing grounds of their own
countries.
I don’t
wish to join the controversy around Donald Trump’s proposal
to ban Muslim immigration or Ted Cruz’s more modest plan
to restrict it. But it’s clear that we have an enormous
problem on our hands. “[T]o deny we have a gigantic Muslim
problem in this country and in the world,” writes Roger
Simon, “is to be a troglodyte of epic proportions. Something
has to be done.” Simon advocates the outlawing of Sharia
law, which is a start. But since Sharia is a bedrock principle
of the Islamic faith, proscribing the one looks equivalent to
prohibiting the other—a thorny contradiction, to say the
least. Additionally, if a jihadist wants to kill Americans or
Canadians, a public renunciation will have no braking effect
on his intentions.
Simon
and I agree that border security has become an unmitigated farce
and that Muslim immigration should be rigorously monitored and
scrupulously vetted. Indeed, it needs to be radically curtailed.
Plainly, only a small percentage of the Muslim community living
in the West are jihadists, but the zombies enter our countries
under cover of a non-belligerent majority, whether as legal
immigrants, as students, or as refugees. As former FBI counterterrorism
agent John Guandolo points out, since 9/11, “we collectively
have received nearly zero help from the Muslim community”
and a “vast majority” of U.S. mosques and Islamic
centers are a part of a much larger “jihadi network.”
This
suggests that we need to take resolute action against the so-called
“terror mosques”—which proliferate throughout
the land—and the host of problematic Islamic organizations,
many affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, by revoking their
licenses and privileges. We must also revise our immigration
protocols drastically downward and refuse to accept the multitudes
of refugees and migrants who will deplete our budgets, displace
native citizens and furnish the camouflage the killers among
them require to carry out their purposes. Regrettably, they
are already here, with many more on the way, bound by the precepts
of an archaic religion and culture at odds with liberal values
and wholly incompatible with the constitutions and charters
of Western secular nations.
Blogger
Tim Murray is worth heeding when he reminds us that “we
don’t have a moral obligation to act as a dumping ground
for hundreds of millions of migrants from failed states…who
can’t be expected to check their third world mentality
at the door.” Nonetheless, we now find them in the free
shelters, military barracks, subsidized apartments, affordable
housing projects, and eventually residing next door, like the
Khadr family in Canada and the Farook family in the U.S., where
they are at liberty to feed their hatred and hatch their plots.
How
many innocent people will have to be butchered before we awake
to the reality that the enemy is embedded in our midst? How
many apologists for Islam will have to take a bullet or a knife
blade before they change their tune? Hundreds? Thousands? Or—if
a recent EU Parliament report is correct in claiming that ISIS
is acquiring the expertise and the raw materials to build and
employ weapons of mass destruction—millions? According
to the London Daily Mail, “Wolfgang Rudischhauser,
Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Non-Proliferation
Centre at NATO said: 'ISIS actually has already acquired the
knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would
allow it to use CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear)
materials as weapons of terror.'”
Such
devastation is a genuine future threat, as Europol has acknowledged.
But on the less cataclysmic scale of our present circumstances,
we remain under the gun. We are hectored daily by the political
elite not to turn against our (presumably) innocuous Muslim
neighbours—yet as Rudyard Kipling wrote in a poem called
“The Stranger:”
In
this connection, I think also of W.B. Yeats’ immortal
lines from “The Second Coming:” “The best
lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate
intensity.” As for the “worst,” the jihadists
who have infiltrated our societies, they are not only full of
passionate intensity, which gives them a distinct advantage,
they are also full of death, which to them is life everlasting,
and which is the greatest advantage of all.
Meanwhile,
the “best” among us are the mediocre, the fearful,
the sanctimonious, the decadent and the corrupt, those whom
C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man called “men without
chests,” men without “virtue and enterprise…traitors
in our midst.” Political divisions and allegiances are
not entirely applicable in this regard. Lewis’ apt formulation
is reminiscent of a distinction put forward by Dwight Morrow
in a letter praising his good friend, America’s thirtieth
president Calvin Coolidge: “I have about come to the conclusion
that the division of the people of the world is not really between
conservative and radical, but between people that are real people
and people that are not.” Our leaders, opinion makers
and the plurality of our intellectuals are in this respect not
“real people.”
In
such amenable circumstances, coddled by the human wraiths that
constitute our authority structures, the terrorists are free
to wreak carnage among us, and they will continue doing so until
or unless we come to our senses. Prayers, “je suis”
slogans, sidewalk bouquets and candlelight vigils are a non-deterrent
joke, a sentimental indulgence that only shames us. There is
no alternative, if we wish to live more or less normally—or
even simply to live—but to implement the stringent measures
mentioned above. Every day that passes raises the probability
of further attacks targeting ordinary citizens who will suffer
the consequences of their complacency, timorousness and self-righteous
clemency for those who wish to kill them. For the fact is, we
are engaged in a war unlike any that has been fought before.
Yet
in a significant way, the jihadists, their supporters and their
devout co-religionists have already won. They have made air
travel an ordeal and a danger. They have infested our universities
with their demands and activities. They have sponsored hate-speech
legislation that has curtailed freedom of expression and led
to damaging law suits (“lawfare”). They have exploited
the workplace with their assumptions of and claims to special
exemptions. They have stoked the fires of anti-Semitism. They
have rendered neighbourhoods inhospitable. They have established
ghettoes and no-go zones. They have made shopping a wager and
strolling a hazard. They have turned Christmas parties into
charnel houses and public events into abattoirs.
And
they have made dining out a risky proposition.
