Srdja Trifkovic

It is hard to take seriously “Richard Hoste”’s latest article. It is tempting to indulge in sarcasm and disparagement. I’ll refrain, not for the sake of the author, whose diatribe is undeserving of such consideration, but because the topic is too grave to be treated frivolously.

If my latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent, Hoste claims, “90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles.”

The view of Islam as the existential foe of Europe and its civilization -- its outré-mer offspring included -- is based on Islam’s own teaching and 13 centuries of blood-soaked practice. It is based on Europe’s long and appalling experience of Islam in action. Mr. Hoste is advised to acquaint himself with the Old Continent’s history and culture, perhaps focusing on Spain and the Balkans, before judging my views “hyperbolic.”

He would have to apply the same verdict to a host of other, better known authorities, including Tocqueville, Renan, Gladstone, Churchill, Belloc, and Chesterton -- to mention but a few of those who would pass Mr. “Hoste’s” ethno-racial screening test. Bat Ye’or would not, however, which is a pity, because her splendid work on Eurabia and Dhimmitude would help Mr. Hoste understand the roots of his peculiar mindset, and perhaps help him overcome them.

Like Communism, Islam relies on a domestic fifth column -- the Allah-worshiping Rosenbergs, Philbys, Blunts, and Hisses -- to subvert the civilized world. It also relies on an army of fellow-travelers, the latter-day Sartres and Shaws in the ivory towers, on “liberal academics and opinion-makers" -- as the late Sam Francis once put it -- who "sympathize with Islam partly because it is a leading historical rival of the Western civilization they hate” and partly because they long for a romanticized and sanitized Muslim past that substitutes for the authentic Western and Christian roots they have rejected.

Those roots must be defended, in the full knowledge that those who subscribe to Islam and its civilization are aliens, regardless of their clothes, their professions or their places of residence. They sense Western weakness and expect that if Islam supplies the only old religious tradition left standing 50 years hence, it may attract mass conversion. That would indeed be the end of the West, its final surrender to the spirit masterfully depicted by Jean Raspail in the preface to the 1985 French edition of his Camp of Saints:

The West is empty, even if it has not yet become really aware of it. An extraordinarily inventive civilization, surely the only one capable of meeting the challenges of the third millennium, the West has no soul left. At every level -- nations, race, cultures as well as individuals -- it is always the soul that wins the decisive battles.

The story that Raspail tells is rooted in a “onstrous cancer implanted in the Western conscience.” One word, "Srebrenica," embodies it perfectly. Its roots are in the loss of Faith, and in the arrogant doctrine -- rampant in “the West” for three past centuries now -- that man can solve the dilemma of his existence by his unaided intellect alone.

If that loss is not reversed, the game is over anyway -- proving yet again that where God retreats, Allah advances.

Before 1914, both the West and the Muslim world could define themselves against each other in a cultural sense. What secularism has done, since replacing Christianity as the guiding light of “the West,” is to cast aside any idea of a Christian social, geographic, and cultural space that should be protected. Islam, “extreme” or “moderate,” has not softened, however. The consequences will be very serious unless Muslims are either “westernized” -- that is to say, made as willing as Christians to see their religion first relativized, then mocked, and its commandments misrepresented or ignored -- or else Christianized, which of course cannot happen unless there is a belated, massive, and unexpected recovery of Western spiritual and moral strength.

As things stand now, the West faces two clear alternatives: defense, or submission and acceptance of sacred Arab places as its own. The latter is the visceral preference of the Western elite class, and "Srebrenica" is its totem.

Islam should not be blamed for being what it is, nor should its adherents be condemned for maintaining their traditions. We should not "hate" it, nor ban it, if it reforms itself to the standards of a civilized, that is, non-Muslim society. If it does not happen -- and miracles are always possible -- it should be banned, of course. The Kuran’s exhortations to the believers to annihilate the non-believers, to confiscate their land and property, to take their women and enslave their children are clear and unambiguous, and the fruits have been ghastly. In the present state of Western weakness, such Muslim firmness may appear attractive to the legions of cynical nihilists and lead further millions to the conclusion that we should all become Muslims, since our goose is cooked anyway, spiritually and demographically.

Those of us who do not cherish that prospect should at least demand that our rulers present that option fairly and squarely. To pretend, as the ruling elite does, that Islam is “a religion of peace,” rather like Episcopalianism, is stupid or deeply dishonest.

Islam might have been made much less threatening if the West had not conciliated or sponsored its most threatening exponents. Islam was exposed to a devastating collapse in credibility within the Arab world itself in the middle of the twentieth century. The forces of secularity were very strong indeed. But America opposed them at every turn because they were socialist or communist or simply not “in the national interest.” America gave whole-hearted support to the worst nation on earth: Saudi Arabia, a veritable hotbed of raw barbarity that makes Kim Jong Il look eminently clubable. As the economies of real states falter and haltr, the Saudi petrodollars are poured into establishing violent fanaticism as the big alternative.

“As a man thinketh, so is he.” The real problem of the Muslim world is not that of natural resources or political systems. Ernest Renan, who started his study of Islam by praising its ability to manifest “what was divine in human nature,” ended it -- a quarter of a century and three long tours of the Muslim world later -- by concluding that “Muslims are the first victims of Islam” and that, therefore, “to liberate the Muslim from his religion is the best service that one can render him.”

Islam is a collective psychosis seeking to become global, and any attempt to abet such madness is to become part of the madness oneself. The purveyors of "Srbrenica" are worse than criminal: they are mistaken.

That is exactly how the sponsors of the “Srebrenica Remembrance Day” -- currently before the Canadian House of Commons -- want it to be:

Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre, also known as the Srebrenica Genocide, was the killing in July of 1995 of an estimated 8,000 Bosniak men and boys in the region of Srebrenica in Bosnia and Herzegovina by Bosnian Serb forces;

Whereas the Srebrenica Massacre is the largest mass murder in Europe since World War II and the largest massacre carried out by Serb forces during the Bosnian war;

Whereas the Appeals Chamber of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia, located in The Hague, unanimously decided in the case of Prosecutor v. Krstić that the Srebrenica Massacre was genocide…

The trouble is that the event known to the bill’s sponsors as the “Srebernica genocide” was no such thing. The contention that as many as 8,000 Muslims were killed has no basis in available evidence; it is not an “estimate” but a political construct. The magnitude of casualties at Srebrenica and the context of events have been routinely misrepresented in official reports by the pro-Muslim governments, quasi-non-governmental institutions, and the media. 

As for The Hague Tribunal, an Orwellian institution with which I am well acquainted, its “unanimous decisions” are as drearily predictable as those in Moscow in 1936. It is not known to the public, however, that those “decisions” are now disputed by a host of senior Western military and civilian officials, NATO intelligence officers and independent intelligence analysts who dispute the official portrayal of the capture of Srebrenica as a unique atrocity in the Bosnian conflict. 

The recent unpleasantness in eastern Mediterranean has unleashed a torrent of self-serving nonsense on both sides of the issue. In reality, it was a sordid affair. A bunch of nasty Jihadist types and their enablers who have taken over the government in Ankara devise a brilliant scenario for drawing Israel into a lose-lose situation. The Israelis play on cue, with their customary subtlety and sensitivity. Most of the rest of the world recoils in shock and horror. The elite class of the Western world is enjoying itself with a fresh focus for externalized self-hate, now that the Serbs are down and most Afrikaners out. (And needless to say, amidst the general brouhaha nobody takes notice of the jihadist murder of Roman Catholic bishop Luigi Padovese in Turkey…)

What is a man of the Right with no horse in this race to do? He needs to ask himself, “How does this business affect the survival prospects of my demographically, culturally and morally decrepit civilization?”

For all their differences of emphasis and substance in foreign-policy making, Western Europe and North America share objective interests in the Middle East that require broadly similar policy responses. Since the notion of interests and the policies that they engender are defined by the ideological framework in which they are embedded, let me open my ideological cards before proceeding.

The impressive electoral breakthrough of the anti-Jihadist Party for Freedom (PVV) in the Netherlands is sending predictable shock waves through Europe. Its leader, Geert Wilders, wants a stake in government after his party came third with 24 seats, more than doubling its share in the 150 member national assembly. “Nobody in The Hague can bypass the PVV anymore,” he said. “The impossible has happened,” he went on, “the Netherlands chose more security, less crime, less immigration and less Islam.”

“Less Islam” is the key. Forget the currency crisis, social policy, welfare payments, and other nitty-gritty elements of most European elections. The biggest loser is Holland’s soon-to-be former Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, and his demise is long overdue. Six years ago, in a display of idiocy be expected from a supine Euro-Socialist, he rushed to declare -- in the immediate aftermath of the Jihadist murder of Theo van Gogh in an Amsterdam street -- that  “nothing is known about the motive” of the killer, and called on the nation “not to jump to far-reaching conclusions.” Balkenende also referred to van Gogh’s “outspoken opinions” -- hinting that he had it coming -- and added that it was “unacceptable if a difference of opinion led to this brutal murder.” Mijnheer Balkenende seemed to be implying that “this brutal murder” would have been deemed less “unacceptable” had it been caused not by “a difference of opinion” but by some more profound reason -- by the sense of pain and grievance in the Muslim community, perhaps, caused by the late filmmaker’s insensitive and inappropriate actions.

Balkenende’s defeat was also due to a host of other issues, but his undissenting dhimmitude is the key. His Islamophile inanities are no longer acceptable to a growing segment of Holland's electorate. The Old Continent is waking up, slowly, to the possibility that by 2050, Muslims will account for over a quarter of its young residents west of the Trieste-Stettin line. Millions of them already live in a parallel universe that has very little to do with the host country, toward which they have a disdainful and hostile attitude.

Today’s “United Europe,” epitomized by Balkenende and his fellow-bien-pensants in Brussels and most national chancelleries, does not create social and civilizational commonalities except on the basis of wholesale denial of old mores and disdain for inherited values. It creates the dreary sameness of multicultural “tolerance.” Their decrepitude breeds contempt and haughty arrogance on the other side: Tariq Ramadan thus calmly insists that Muslims in the West should conduct themselves as though they were already living in a Muslim-majority society and were exempt on that account from having to make concessions to the faith of the host-society. Muslims in Europe should feel entitled to live on their own terms, Ramadan says, while, “under the terms of Western liberal tolerance,” society as a whole should be “obliged to respect that choice.”

If such “respect” continues to be enforced by the elite class, by the end of this century there will be no “Europeans” as members of ethnic groups that share the same language, culture, history, and ancestors, and inhabit lands associated with their names. The shrinking native populations will be indoctrinated into believing -- or else simply forced into accepting -- that the demographic shift in favor of unassimilable and hostile aliens is a blessing that enriches their culturally deprived and morally unsustainable societies. The “liberal tolerance” and the accompanying “societal obligation” that Tariq Ramadan invokes are the tools of Western suicide. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” Jean Raspail wrote a generation ago, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

The Dutch voters -- traditionally among the most liberal in Europe -- are waking up to the fact that those weapons need to be discarded, and the upholders of those deadly “principles” removed from all positions of power and influence, if their nation is to survive.

In 1938 Hilaire Belloc wondered, “Will not perhaps the temporal power of Islam return and with it the menace of an armed Muhammadan world which will shake the dominion of Europeans -- still nominally Christian -- and reappear again as the prime enemy of our civilization?” Seven decades later, the same traits of decrepitude are present in Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Scandinavia, Canada, and the United States, including both the primary cause, which is the loss of religious faith, and several secondary ones. Topping the list is elite hostility to all forms of solidarity of the majority population based on shared historical memories, ancestors, and common culture. The end result is the Westerners’ loss of the sense of propriety over their lands.

Widers is shaking an elite consensus that de facto open immigration, multiculturalism, and the existence of a large Muslim diaspora within the Western world are to be treated as a fixed and immutable fact. That consensus is flawed in logic, dogmatic in application, and disastrous in its results. The grand Gleichschaltung of nations, races, and cultures, which will mark the end of history, is not preordained. In Holland the fruits are all too visible. Gibbon could have had today’s Rotterdam in mind, when he wrote of Rome in decline, its masses morphing “into a vile and wretched populace.”

Wilders has shown that this crime can and must be stopped. The founders of the United States overthrew the colonial government for offenses far lighter than those of which the traitor class is guilty, on both sides of the Atlantic.

Ukraine's announcement that it will pass a law that will bar the country from joining NATO has been greeted with barely concealed relief in Moscow, Paris, Berlin and Rome. It is also good news for the security interests of the United States. The time has come not only to give up on NATO expansion, but also to abolish the Alliance altogether.

Encouraging an impoverished, practically defenseless nation such as Ukraine to join a military alliance directed against the superpower next door, thereby stretching a nuclear tripwire between them, had never been a sound strategy. Article V of the NATO Charter states that an attack on one is an attack on all, and offers automatic guarantee of aid to an ally in distress. The U.S. would supposedly provide its protective cover to a new client, right in Russia's geopolitical backyard, in an area that had never been deemed vital to America's security interests.

From the realist perspective, accepting Ukraine into NATO would mean one of two things: either the United States is serious that it would risk a thermonuclear war for the sake of, say, the status of Sebastopol, which is insane; or the United States is not serious, which would be frivolous and dangerous.

Inside the Beltway, the fact that Turkey is no longer an "ally" of the United States in any meaningful sense is still strenuously denied. We were reminded of the true score on March 9, however, when Saudi King Abdullah presented Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan with the Wahhabist kingdom's most prestigious prize for his "services to Islam." Erdogan earned the King Faisal Prize for having "rendered outstanding service to Islam by defending the causes of the Islamic nation, particularly the Palestinian cause," said Abd Allah al-Uthaimin of the prize-awarding group.

Services to the Ummah

Turkey under Erdogan's neo-Islamist AKP has rendered a host of other services to "the Islamic nation." In August 2008 Ankara welcomed Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for a formal state visit, and last year it announced that it would not join any sanctions aimed at preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons. In the same spirit the AKP government repeatedly played host to Sudan's President Omer Hassan al-Bashir -- a nasty piece of jihadist work if there ever was one -- who stands accused of genocide against non-Muslims. Erdogan has barred Israel from annual military exercises on Turkey's soil, but his government signed a military pact with Syria last October and is conducting joint military exercise with the regime of Bashir al-Assad. Turkey's strident apologia of Hamas is more vehement than anything coming out of Cairo or Amman. (Talking of terrorists, Erdogan has stated, repeatedly, "I do not want to see the word 'Islam' or 'Islamist' in connection with the word 'terrorism'!")

"AnteBragd" was upset by my article on the illustrious M. Van Rompuy. His/her arguments are incorrect, illogical or just plain silly. They are worthy of a response, however, because millions of Europeans are being force-fed such platitudes every day - as relentlessly, in fact, as we are being force-fed les victimes du jour by The Morning Edition...

• "Just because a lot of the paleos repeatedly claims that the EU is some kind "prison of nations" and rally or mock it by calling it EUSSR does not make it so. It is not so, by the simple reason, that all member states has [sic!] chosen to become members."

"Chosen"? Just ask the Danes or the Irish. When the people of a state say "no" to membership, or to an ever-tighter Union once their country is inside the Lager, they will be subjected to relentless pressure by the ruling elite to change their mind and say "yes"; but if and when they do succumb - as the Irish did to Lisbon last year, having been subjected to a massive barrage of Brussels-endowed Agitprop - now, that decision is treated as irreversible. The Euro-elite treats "democracy" as the process of manufacturing ideologically desirable outcomes determined in advance of the ostensible decision. The failure to produce one equals the failure of democracy; ergo the process will be fine-tuned and reactivated until it performs as expected.

Nigel Farage, a British member of the European Parliament, was fined an equivalent of $4,000 on Tuesday for "insulting" the new European Union President Herman van Rompuy (r.) and refusing to apologize. In a memorable performance in Strasbourg ten days eaerlier, the Euroskeptic MEP told the former Beligian prime minister that he had "all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk":

"We were told that when we had a president, we'd see a giant global political figure, a man who would be the political leader for 500 million people, the man that would represent all of us all of us on the world stage, the man whose job was so important that of course you're paid more than President Obama. Well, I'm afraid what we got was you... The question I want to ask is: 'Who are you?' I'd never heard of you, nobody in Europe had ever heard of you."