According to an article in the Independent, the English Defense League is taking a, shall we say, interesting approach to resisting Islamic colonization of the United Kingdom and the perceived encroachment of Sharia law. Some excerpts:

A white extremist organisation is forging links with Jewish, Sikh and gay communities to fuel prejudice and fear and hatred of the Muslim community, it was claimed today.

New branches of the League, such as the Jewish Division, could exploit the existing religious hostilities caused by territorial disputes in the Middle East, says Professor Copsey whose report was commissioned by the organisation Faith Matters.

It claims that these inter-faith tensions were brought into sharp focus last month when the senior US Jewish leader and Tea Party activist Rabbi Nachum Shifren denounced Islam at a EDL rally outside the Israeli Embassy in London. Israeli flags have also been spotted at several EDL demonstrations across the UK.

As well as aggravating religious tensions, the EDL has established a Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Division to "defend" gay people from Sharia law. There are also specialist divisions for women, soldiers and disabled people. The report warns these communities to be vigilant against "selective racism" and the EDL’s attempts at manipulation.

Contributors to the EDL Facebook site confirm that the group wants to work with other minority organisations including those which promote women’s rights. One member writes: "After all, leftists have portrayed themselves for decades as the only ones really interested in promoting a progressive and inclusive agenda: homosexual rights, women’s equality, minority rights, reproductive rights, immigration, world peace, among others."

One member added: "Remember there is a difference between being anti-Muslim and anti-Islam. We are against the ideology not the people. Let’s not forget that many Muslim women and children are victims of their own religion."

On the surface at least, the EDL appears to be less concerned with developing a serious and reasonable defense of Western cultural heritage than in crude, philistine Islamophobia resembling that of American neocons, combined with the hoary leftist habit of denouncing everything to the right of Leon Trotsky as racist, fascist, sexist, and homophobic. Indeed, the Islamophobia of the neocons sometimes comes close to resembling the anti-Catholic tirades originating from American know-nothings of the mid-nineteenth century. It is possible to recognize Islam as one of the world’s great civilizations and religious traditions, and even find much that is admirable about Islamic culture and history, while also recognizing that uncontrolled mass immigration by Muslims into the West amounts to cultural and demographic suicide. It is even possible to at once favor the preservation of Western civilization and agree with thinkers like Michael Scheuer and Robert Pape that much of the problem with Islamic terrorism is indeed “blowback” generated by unnecessary Western, mostly American, interventions and interference in the Islamic nations, and that some kind of apocalyptic showdown between the West and Islam is neither necessary nor inevitable. As Pat Buchanan says, “They are over here because we are over there,” and there is no clear reason why we Westerners should not seek peaceful co-existence with Islam as much as possible. While we don’t want to surrender Western nations to Islamic colonization via mass immigration, there is no reason why Muslims cannot exercise sovereignty in their traditional homelands.

The English Defense League is an organization I admittedly know little about. Perhaps English readers can enlighten me. If the depiction conveyed in this article is accurate, it would appear that the EDL is less interested in defending the Western civilization of Aristotle, Seneca, Augustine, and Michelangelo than in defending the Western civilization of Theodor Herzl, Betty Friedan, Harvey Milk, and RuPaul. AlternativeRight.Com contributor Richard Hoste has in the past made the plausible argument that a Europeanized Islam might even be an improvement over much of what goes on in Europe at present: “I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey. “

I’m inclined on one hand to regard these activities on the part of the EDL as one of those “So this is how it ends?” moments. If the principal objection to conquest of the West by means of demographic aggression by hostile immigrant populations is that some of the immigrants aren’t PC enough, then why bother? Surely a civilization that has sunk to such levels would deserve to die. Still, political pragmatism and eclecticism have their place. The approach of the EDL resembles in some ways the Dutch left-nationalist movement of the late Pim Fortuyn, and even my own approach to certain questions (for instance, my blurring of the left/right distinction when attacking the managerial state) bears a casual resemblance on occasion. A commenter on my blog suggests that the EDL’s efforts are largely motivated by a desire to steer anti-Islamic or anti-immigration sentiment away from support for the British National Party. That would seem to be as good an explanation for this spectacle as any. However, the EDL may have the positive unintended consequence of providing an entry level gateway for participants in its activities, particularly young people inclined towards either the Left or neocon sympathies, to eventually develop a more serious critique of the threat posed by uncontrolled immigration and a more solid intellectual and political defense of their cultural heritage and civilization.

When I first read Pat Buchanan's latest column, I thought he was using sarcasm to make a point.  When I read it again, I feared that he was actually being serious. Here are the relevant passages; you decide:   

Bonfire of the Quarans

Creators Syndicate

By Patrick J. Buchanan

Sept. 10, 2010

 

[...]

Everybody frets and wrings their hands. No one acts.

Yet if, as President Obama and his commanding general both say, the torching of hundreds of Qurans could so enrage the Islamic world as to incite terror-bombings against U.S. troops and imperial our war effort, why does not the commander in chief send U.S. marshals to arrest this provocateur and abort his provocation?

For Jones, who sells t-shirts saying "Islam is of the Devil," may be an Islamophobe, but he is also a serious man, willing to live with the consequences of his deeds, even if he causes U.S. war casualties.

The questions raised by his deliberate provocation are not so much about him, then, as they are about us.

Are we a serious nation? Is Obama up to being a war president?

Constantly, we hear praise of Lincoln, Wilson and FDR as war leaders.

Yet President Lincoln arrested thousands of citizens and locked them up as security risks, while denying them habeas corpus. He shut newspapers and sent troops to block Maryland's elections, fearing Confederate sympathizers would win and take Maryland out of the Union.

President Wilson shut down antiwar newspapers, prosecuted editors, and put Socialist presidential candidate and war opponent Eugene Debs in prison, leaving him to rot until Warren Harding released him and invited the dangerous man over to the White House for dinner.

California Gov. Earl Warren and FDR collaborated to put 110,000 Japanese, 75,000 of them U.S. citizens, into detention camps for the duration of the war and ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute antiwar conservatives.

During Korea, Harry Truman seized the steel mills when a threatened strike potentially imperiled production of war munitions. Richard Nixon went to court to block publication of the Pentagon papers until the Supreme Court decided publication could go forward.

This is not written to defend those war measures or those wars. It is to say that if a president takes a nation to war, and commits men to their deaths, as Obama did in doubling the number of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, he should be prepared to do what is within his power to protect those troops.

And if Petraeus says letting Jones set this bonfire could imperil U.S. troops, Obama should act to stop it. And if he is so paralyzed by uncertainty as to whether he can do anything -- and, as a result, soldiers die -- what would that tell us about their commander in chief?

Would stopping Jones and confiscating the Qurans violate Jones' First Amendment rights?

Perhaps. And perhaps not. But if Eric Holder cannot find a charge against Davis, or an inherent power of a war president to prevent actions imminently damaging to the war effort, Obama should find some Justice Department attorneys who can.

Let the ACLU make the case that interfering with Davis' bonfire violates his First Amendment rights. Let a U.S. court decide whether Obama has the power to take a decision previous wartime presidents would have taken without hesitation.

And if Obama does not have the power to stop actions like this, imperiling our troops, then we should get out of this war.

This episode reveals the gulf between us and the Islamic world. Despite all our talk of universal values, tens of millions of Muslims, in countries not only hostile but friendly, believe that a sacrilege against their faith, like the burning of the Quran by a single American oddball, justifies the killing of Americans. What kind of compatibility can there be between us?

What do we have in common with people who believe that evangelism by other faiths in their societies merits the death penalty, as do conversions to Christianity, while promiscuity and adultery justify stonings, lashings and beheadings.

And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a "long war" in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?

Action creates consensus, Mr. President. People follow when a leader leads.

There are a couple of sentences that still make me think that Pat was being sarcastic; these include, "And what does it say about our ability to fight and win a 'long war' in the Islamic world if our war effort can be crippled by a solitary pastor with 50 families in his church who decides to have a book burning?" Pat has been forthright about America's inability to ever win the war for global democracy that Bush, Obama, and the neocons have defined.  

Publicly burning Korans is an extremely unwise, unnecessary, and vulgar act. The fact that a loon who thinks doing so marks a profound religious and political statement has become a subject of serious discussion has much to do with our hysterical news media, which love to pull out of the woodwork various nutjobs who discredit the possibility of a traditionalist Right. (The loon in question, Pastor Terry Jones of the “Dove World Outreach Center,” has apparently called off the stunt.)

Throughout this fabricated public controversy, the question I have been asking myself is whether the instinctive and passionate support for Pastor Jones and opposition to the “Ground Zero Mosque” on the part of many White Christians represents a healthy, defensive nationalism -- something dangerous to the current Establishment and that might lead to a Western awakening -- or whether it’s a false Western consciousness, the kind of blind, flag-waving “Americanism” that only leads to neoconservative wars and the expansion of the Department of Homeland Security.

I’m still not sure… But make no mistake, Pastor Jones is all “Freedom Fries.” Indeed, his manifesto, “Ten Reasons to Burn a Koran” (which I’ve read via Larry Auster), reads like a missive from David Horowitz’s Front Page Magazine. And it’s worth going through these “Ten Reasons” one by one as they reveal the hollowness of the worldview of the modern "defenders of Judeo-Christian civilization” -- a worldview that has defined official conservatism at least since 9/11.

Here’s an interview with Geert Wilders on Australian TV.

Near the end, the broadcaster asks if Wilders would ask every immigrant whether he’s a Muslim or not.  The Dutch politician responds that he only says that there should be no immigration from Muslim countries.  The Australian asks specifically if that means a Jew from Egypt or Christian from Lebanon can’t come to the Netherlands.  Wilders says they would be banned.  This doesn’t make sense and indicates the PVV leader isn’t just worried about Muslim immigration, but non-Westerners in general.  He just can’t say that and uses Muslims as his boogeymen, which practically makes a lot of sense.

There are 47 majority-Muslim countries in the world, which means that a Wilders program would effectively ban half of the third world, including just about all poor non-Westerners in closest proximity to Europe (the entire Middle East, the top half of Africa, and the Stans). Those worried about third world immigration but somewhat turned off by his constant harping on Islam and over-the-top support of Israel should thus support Wilders, as ending Muslim immigration basically means doing away with the vast majority of total immigration.

It’s interesting that Wilders is himself partly of Indonesian descent, since his program would not allow anybody from that country into the Netherlands.  From Wikipedia,

In a biography, Wilders himself seems to play down his Indo heritage. Anthropologist Lizzy van Leeuwen analyses Wilders' Eastern heritage with the concept of displacedness, and classifies his standpoints as "post-colonial revanchism". This analysis is met with agreement in Indo communities. However, in an interview, Wilders denied van Leeuwens' speculations.

Ignoring the post-colonial gibberish, could trying to cover up his Indo heritage be the motivation for Wilders’s absurd dye job? Wilders's hair has always made me suspicious of him, as there's just something not right about an originally dark-haired (I think) but now graying 50 year-old man wanting to be a blond.  Now I think I understand.

I'm not going to respond directly to Srdja Trifkovic,  since he said that our correspondence was over (for the record: in a responspe to a comment where I told him the same thing first), but there is an argument used by him and other professional Muslim haters that I can't stand.  It's called the "True Islam theory."  It goes like this. 

Oh so you think we can exist on the same planet as Muslims?  Do you know that in 1453 the Grand Turk said that the Holy Roman Emperor looked like a homo?  That in 1652 there were Muslim tourists who spit on the Sistine Chapel?  That the Koran says a woman is worth three toenails of a man?  That the great Muslim theologian Kareem Abdul-Jabar wrote in 1068 that moving to Europe to live off the welfare state and rape blondes is part of jihad? Read up on the real Islam, and what the religion is really about.  Then you'll be ready to debate.

The problem is that it doesn't take any historical or theological knowledge to know that "True Islam" is a chimera.

I knew this from the first time I picked up the Bible as a child.  I saw a passage commanding that disobedient children be stoned to death.  Nobody I knew did this, so nobody I knew was a real Christian.  Jesus tells us that "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple," (Luke 14:26) while one of the commandments is to honor one's parents.  Other blatant contradictions can be found.  Not only would people who practiced some of the more bizarre edicts in the Old Testament be locked in mental institutions, but for there to be a true version of an ideology that contradicts itself is a logical impossibility.

Of course practicing Christians believe that there is a "True Christianity," usually the one they just happen to be born into.  For the rest of us, the faith where it is practiced is simply one of the many historical and sociological factors that blend in with a group's innate characteristics to produce what we call a "culture."

Both sides in the Civil War thought Christ was on their side, as did the most fanatical slaveholders and abolitionists.  John Calvin, Martin Luther King,  Jr., Jim Wallis, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, Phillip Berryman, David Koresh, Jim Jones, Herbert Armstrong, St. Augustine.  All and a thousand others claimed to be men of God and shared the same Savior and same Bible.  Arguing over which of these are the "True Christians" is a project fit for morons.

It is the same with Islam.  Followers of Muhammad are told both to slay the infidels and that there is no compulsion in religion.  Here's a website that lists Koranic contradictions. A simple Google search will find you several sites that similarly take apart the Bible.  Do Malaysians, Saudis or Bosnians practice the "True Islam"?  Each of these groups has filtered Islam and the Koran through their respective biological makeups and pre-Islamic cultures.  The most populous Muslim country in the world is Indonesia, with a population of 238 million.  The fact that its culture is not that of Pakistan is due to a large extent to genetic differences. (Someone should ask Trifkovic if he believes in evolution or racial differences.)

Looking across the world, it seems that Muslim ethnies tend to have more in common with biologically related groups than they do genetically distant coreligionists.  Is Indonesia more like Thailand or Afghanistan?  Are Albanians more like Serbs or Saudis?  I by no means underestimate the importance of culture.  Indonesia and Buddhist Thailand are very different but in the former case Islam has not made a pacific race into a nation of holy warriors. 

As for Christians who go on about Islam's bloody history, “why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but do not consider the plank in your own eye?"  The religion that gave us the rack, the Inquisitions, burning at the stake, witch hunts and the Crusades has little room to talk.  A body count comparing the two faiths wouldn't even be close.

But Christians and Jewish and Serbian activists would agree with none of this.  They take the worst practices from the worst cultures of a community that makes up a sixth of the world's population and tell us that this is the "True Islam."  I think the motivations of the Zionists have been rehashed plenty of times already, but as for those of the Christian Muslim haters, I think one commentator to Trifkovic's last thread put it well and is worth quoting at length.

Those conservatives itching to start another Crusades (this time, against a feckless, inbred, infighting foe) are either evangelicals or Jews. Both have strong psychological need for an absurd Dar al-Islam bogeyman that has little to do with love of Western civilization.

Starting with Christians: let's face it... it's very hard for someone well-educated to believe in Bronze-Age Abrahamic gibberish. But many people still do (people who for similar reasons tend to be political conservatives; they 're simply overwhelmed to unreason by the prospect of a metaphysically unknowable, cruelly material world). Seeing how much more devoted Muslims are to their God (how many Christians would leave their EZ-loungers and die for their God?) embarrasses them; it also braces them by suggesting relativism (all religions can't be right, but all can certainly be wrong), setting into stark relief the superstition of religious belief in general. Thus, they need to believe Allah is the very incarnate of Evil, a false diabolical temptation. (It also doesn't hurt to have a common enemy to build morale among those Christians embarrassed at the effeminacy of the modern church.)

Then, more importantly, don't be fooled: Christians cannot care first and foremost about the eugenic advancement of the European races. Christianity is, after all, universalist (the mother of universalism, really). Because they must believe their eternal salvation is more important than any worldly consideration, devout Christians like Trifkovic have an "Apres Christianity, le deluge!" mentality. For them, the answer to all our problems has to be a rebirth of Christianity. Hoste is free to consider the fascinating question of what a European Islam would be like (Nietzsche: "If Islam despises Christianity, it has a thousandfold right to do so: Islam at least assumes that it is dealing with men"); Hoste is free to consider the possibility that, perhaps, Europe owes its greatness to the superiority of the European people, to eugenic breeding arrangements, and to classical values, not Christian values (which are obviously Jewish in origin, though certainly refined by Europeans over millennia); Hoste is free to wonder whether, in fact, these very Christian values that Trifovic wants to rehabilitate (especially when co-opted by Jewish Leftists) sunk the West into the pitiful state it's in today. Trifkovic, on the other hand, has no such freedom. He is forced to consider the spread of Islam the moral equivalent of European genocide.

I stand by my statement about Turks having a superior culture to that of the Swedes.  Men having to sit down to pee, toddlers finding examples of gender stereotyping in animal stories, large scale projects to get men to take maternity leave, men trying to breastfeed their babies, little boys being forced to wear dresses, a state Church that approves of "homosexual marriage," etc.  If you don't prefer Albania to this (and we can agree that a Swedish Islam would be no more misogynist than that of of Albania), one is not of the Alternative Right, but of the Neo-con or Christian Zionist variety.  The main problem with a mass conversion would be possibly seeing even more non-white immigration-exacerbating Europe's racial problems.  These, however, can only be solved by spatial separation, not through a Holy War of our own which brings out the aspects of the historical West we don't want to revive.

With all due respect to Mr. Trifkovic, if his latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent 90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles.

I'm no fan of Muslim immigration. In fact, I think that best case scenario most European countries will have a significant Muslim minority hostile to their societies forever.

But here in this country -- and Trifkovic doesn’t seem to differentiate between the U.S. and Europe -- of a Muslim population of six million or so, there have been at most 50 arrests for terrorism in the last decade (most of which are probably fake). Considering U.S. support for Israel, the sanctions on Iraq and Iran and the bombings of Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan and Yemen, American Muslims have behaved with incredible restraint. For comparison’s sake, and to see what a real problem population looks like, know that one in three black males can expect to spend time behind bars over his lifetime as can six percent of whites.

As I’ve written elsewhere,

And those ringing the warning bells of a “creeping Sharia” are even more moronic. Of 535 members of the US Congress, there is one Muslim and he supports homosexual marriage.  There are no Muslim governors, no Senators, no major media personalities, not even (probably) any Muslim police chiefs or mayors!

So there is no Muslim threat in America, from the position of either terrorism or a building up of institutional power. This couldn’t have been predicted beforehand, of course, so Muslim immigration was a bad idea from the start.  But the West’s problem is non-whites and enforced diversity, not Islam qua Islam, as the case of North American Muslims shows.

Trifkovic actually goes as far as calling for a “ban” on Islam if it doesn’t reform itself to his standards.  In this, he should know that he’s more fanatical than Osama bin Laden, who would let Christians live and practice their religion in Muslim lands.  Would he like to ban the Islam of Muslims indigenous to Europe like that practiced by Albanians and Bosnians, too? Or perhaps have the EU or NATO supervise each mosque to see if it’s sufficiently progressive, as they determined at what point the Serbs were badly enough behaved to be bombed?

We get the ominous warning,

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

I’m sure a man as intelligent and as educated on religious and cultural matters as the distinguished author knows that Allah is the Arabic word for God, a name which Middle Eastern Christians have been ascribing to their deity before the faith became that of Europe.  Literally, what the above statement says is “where God retreats, God advances.” If he’s speaking metaphorically, then we can interpret this as a linguistic point: Trifkovic worries that Arabic will replace the native European languages. But then again not all Europeans speak English. It would’ve made more sense to say “when God/Dieu/Gott retreats, Allah advances.”  Whatever the case may be, language differences with the new migrants is the least of Europe’s troubles.

The author states

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.

This could only have been written by somebody who either knows nothing about North Korea or thinks sexual promiscuity is the only true freedom, in which case the author would have much in common with Geert Wilders, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the tyrants from Brave New World, and Larry Auster (when it’s convenient for his ethnic interests.)  In Saudi Arabia, there’s no death penalty for using cell phones, the economy is freer than most other places in the world (it is in 65 on the Index of Economic Freedom, just behind France, compared to 179th, or last for the Hermit Kingdom), foreign TV shows and the Internet aren’t banned (though censored), citizens can leave the country and come back and there are no concentration camps filled with families of government enemies. Even Christians are better off in Saudi Arabia. Once again, aside from the issue of sex it’s hard to see in what way the Saudi Kingdom is within the same universe of totalitarianism as North Korea.

In Trifkovic’s conclusion, that more Europeans may convert to Islam as time goes by and the religion gains power, I actually think he may be right.  But most of them would be converting from Secular Humanism, not anything that can be called Christianity.  It would be a mistake to believe that whites would be Muslims in the same way Pakistanis or Saudis are; the faith would be molded to conform with the biological characteristics of its adopters, or “Europeanized” as Christianity was in the first place.  I don’t know what a Swedish Islam would look like, but it probably wouldn’t be half as ugly as the feminist-communist dystopia that the country is today.  The culture of that Nordic state repulses me a lot more than that of, say, Turkey.  Not that I advocate a European mass conversion -- such an event would have unforeseen consequences beyond what any mortal could predict -- though I could imagine a situation where a Muslim Europe was the least of all evils.

One thing we may consider: from the perspective of white survival, Islam may be the best bet. What would be lost to miscegenation would be more than made up for in higher birthrates. Whether a European Islam would have higher or lower rates of immigration is harder to say. Whites may sympathize with their new Arab and North African cousins, or they may become like other Muslim countries, i.e. restrictionists. Once again, too many variables to make solid predictions. We must have a realistic picture of the Muslim people though and not turn the abstraction "Islam" into some sort of Satanic prototype we expect people to conform to. 

If we are going to reject this scenario, and stick it out with Christianity no matter how much it's failed or try for a revival of Paganism, we have to understand that the hostile minority in the heart of Europe is there to stay. The BNP used to favor repartition. Imagine how much money it would take to convince your average Pakistani or African immigrant (or one who was born in the West and doesn't even speak the language of his ancestors) to go back to his country of origin, multiply it by the number of non-whites and you would easily see that such schemes are impractical for all countries but those maintaining the largest white majorities (you think entitlement programs are expensive!). Genocide should be off the table; the same with regards to crazy ideas like banning Islam or the Koran which would lead to civil war and be incompatible with civilized society.  What options are left? I have no good answers, and neither does anyone else.

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.

Many of the Muslims who come to live in the West must daily shake their heads in amazement, unable to believe how stupid Westerners are to not only give away their wealth and paradise, but actually persecute the few who dare object. Said Muslims come here as conquerors, and our political leaders, instead of defending the interests of the people they were elected to represent, provide them with every conceivable aid to expedite the conquest. True, even the traitorous Labour government of Tony Blair found it within itself to jail or deport some of the most notorious cases; but such action, when it has been taken at all, always came late, was limited in scope, and struck one as cosmetic and expedient in character: the deeper problem – government sponsorship of foolish immigration policies, political correctness, and multiculturalism, which began and encouraged the progressive Islamisation of our society – remained untreated, and is still in fact consciously and willfully compounded through its promotion, financing, legalisation, and court enforcement, year after year after year. It is no wonder these would-be Muslim conquerors hold us in contempt.

Europeans have their own version of George W. Bush.

José Maria Aznar, former prime minister of Spain, published an opinion article with the London Times Thursday saying the world must support Israel because "if it goes down, we all go down".

Aznar, who has joined the 'Friends of Israel' campaign to which David Trimble, a foreign observer taking part in Israel's flotilla raid probe, also belongs, calls on Europe to refuse to put up with cries to eliminate Israel as part of global Christian-Jewish cooperation.

"Anger over Gaza is a distraction. We cannot forget that Israel is the West’s best ally in a turbulent region," Aznar writes of the IDF's calamitous raid on a flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31. 

Actually, Egypt, Turkey and Jordan are by far better allies than Israel.  None of these countries has ever launched an attack killing dozens of Americans, planned to get the US involved in a foreign war by bombing Western interests or had agents caught in a major spy ring.  As a matter of fact, not even Iran or Syria has done those things.

Aznar says the real threat to the region is extreme Islamism, "which sees Israel’s destruction as the fulfillment of its religious destiny and, simultaneously in the case of Iran, as an expression of its ambitions for regional hegemony".

"Both phenomena are threats that affect not only Israel, but also the wider West and the world at large," he adds.

Aznar concludes by saying that Israel is the West's first line of defense against the chaos set to erupt in the Middle East, and therefore must be protected.

How does one say “We fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here” in Spanish?

Is there any stupider argument than the first line of defense one?  This is an immigration issue, not a 19th century land war.  Muslims settlers are legally flying into Western airports and the politicians who facilitate this act as if the only way to Europe is to march through the Levant!  Hold the line Judea!

Perhaps they mean this metaphorically.  Something like “Muslims will be emboldened if they destroy Israel.” But even this is nonsensical.  What act of “appeasement” with regards to Israel lost parts of the Netherlands, Sweden and France to Islam?  

If Aznar was really concerned about Islamization, he could’ve spoken up against Muslim immigration when he was Prime Minister.  In fact, he didn’t and went ahead with European integration.  The only time he bucked the globalist consensus was when he joined Bush’s war on Iraq.  If men this stupid are the defenders of the European peoples and their cultures, we are truly in trouble. 

Please, spare me the talk about the “West” and what we must do to defend it coming from those who are destroying it by mistaking bad metaphors for reality.  We need to ask ourselves why today a “conservative” is one who invokes the “West” when he means Israel and Europe and an "extremist" is one who invokes the “West” when he means Europe only.

As Srdja Trifkovic has already recorded on this site, Geert Wilders has continued his remarkable political progress with better-than-expected results in the Dutch general election of 9th June. His Partij Voor Vrijheid (PVV) increased its number of seats in the Dutch parliament from 9 to 24. An election fought ostensibly on the economy and Afghanistan clearly had an important if sotto voce immigration angle.

Dutch politics are complex, and getting more complex as the comfortable postwar consensus breaks down irretrievably. As the Guardian’s Ian Traynor noted on 10 June, “The election… revealed a political spectrum fragmented as seldom before and thoroughly polarized.”

In an echo of the bitter 16th century struggles against the Duke of Alva’s tercios (see Motley’s 1856 classic The Rise of the Dutch Republic or Edward Grierson’s excellent 1969 The Fatal Inheritance), Holland has always had important divisions between the largely Protestant north and the largely Catholic south, with a more secular, mercantile urban middle class acting as counterbalance. In recent decades, this urban and now post-Christian majority has dominated, with couldn’t-care-less views on everything from sexual morality and drugs to immigration, first from former imperial possessions and then from anywhere, into one of the world’s most densely-populated countries. This set the scene for the rise and sanguinary fall of Pim Fortuyn and now the rise of Wilders (who lives under permanent police protection to avoid sharing the fate of his political predecessor).