Needless to say, yesterday's terrorist attacks in Norway—a bombing directed at the Norwegian government's headquarters which killed seven, and a shooting at a Labor Party youth gathering which took at least ten more lives—were horrific, and came as a great shock to the nation. But for me and the rest of the Norwegian non-aligned Right (all three of us), the attacks also spell bad news for another reason: they were, it seems, not the work of Islamic terrorists, but of tall and blonde Anders Behring Breivik--according to the media, a "conservative Christian" and "self-declared nationalist" with links to "anti-Islamic groups." (I find it a little suspicious that Breivik's Twitter feed and Facebook page, which seem to be main sources of these characterizations, were both created recently, but let that go; I'm not usually one for conspiracy theories, and I don't intend to start now.) I take it for granted that Norwegian authorities, media, and activists will use this as an excuse to come down hard on "right-wing extremists," and I won't be surprised if the establishment in the rest of Europe follows suit.

If I'm very lucky, I may even get a knock on my own door soon.

Anders Breivik

I was on Russia Today this afternoon to discuss the death of the National Security's State favorite Bogeyman.    

Our president’s assertion that he was born in Hawaii strikes me as far more credible than this evening’s reports that the Central Intelligence Agency has just killed Osama bin Laden. 

The theory that bin Ladin was a CIA asset all along perhaps goes a bit too far down the rabbit hole... however, there was reason to believe that the recent videos and recordings of the 9/11 “mastermind” were phony and that the man has likely been dead for years.

My hunch is that those who put on the media-political circus decided that their bogeyman of the decade had outlived his usefulness and it was time he got vanquished by “the good guys” before the public completely forgot who he was. (And with the birth certificate, Trump, and being outshone by the martially dressed Princes William and Harry, perhaps Obama’s handlers felt that he needed to do something big.) 

The January 24^th terrorist bombing at Domodedovo Airport in Moscow serves as a reminder of why Russia throughout its history has dwelt in a state of mobilization. The vast spaces of the Eurasian heartland have concealed a wide array of adversaries, from Poland’s Winged Hussars and the Grande Armée to Turkic nomads and rebellious Caucasian mountaineers. War is a reality that manifests itself here with depressing regularity, and it has been firmly impressed in the Russian historical memory. From fields of battle to the dark recesses of the soul, Russia more than other cultures is defined by struggle.

And so the carnage persists into our brave new twenty-first century; this time a suicide bomber killed 35 innocents during the hours of Monday-morning travel. The attack was most likely carried out by a cell of the Caucasus Emirate, a jihadist umbrella organization. It was calculated to further destabilize the republics of the North Caucasus and possibly drive inter-ethnic tensions in Russia’s major cities to a breaking point. Retribution, as Prime Minister Vladimir Putin remarked, will be inevitable. But in calibrating a response, the Kremlin is placed in an extraordinarily difficult position, as it must attend to a situation that could quickly spin out of control.

Imagine a dystopian England under the rule of a brutal fascistic regime. Political opposition is outlawed. Free speech is non-existent. Government spies go undercover in pubs and restaurants searching for prohibited expressions. Security cameras tape everything you do and even occasionally yell at you. The state controlled media promotes a specific political agenda and knowingly lies about facts that jeopardize its worldview. Violent thugs, funded by the state, openly attack political opponents while the regular police do nothing or arrest the victims. Those who do not believe in the official ideology of the state are either banned from decent jobs or hounded out of their profession.

Such is the world of V for Vendetta, a nightmarish fantasy designed to show how even terrorism may be justified to fight tyranny and secure freedom. The film dares to ask if violence is ever a legitimate tactic if the government crosses a certain line. It is a favorite of libertarians, including many YWC members, and tomorrow, tens of thousands will “Remember, Remember, the Fifth of November” and ponder whether they’d be willing to act if the government ever crosses that fateful Rubicon.

The problem, of course, is that this is also the United Kingdom in the world we live in right now. You don’t have free speech in England. Cameras are everywhere, and like the telescreens in 1984, they can yell at you. Police monitor what you say and do in pubs and restaurants. Saying the wrong thing can cost you your money, your job, or your freedom. The political order is safeguarded by violent thugs, supported by every major party from both the Left and the phony Right.

A correspondent recently complained about the tendency of generic conservatives to adopt "Islam oppresses women" as a major reason for opposing Muslim assertiveness and expansion. Doesn't that approach (he asked) play into a feminist analysis of society, and end by supporting feminist solutions generally? And as a factual matter, can it really be true that Muslim society is fundamentally a system whereby men oppress women? Doesn't it have other more basic problems, and wouldn't there be more give and take on that particular point?

I'm sympathetic with such concerns. The "Muslims oppress women" theme tends to merge opposition to violent jihad and the spread of Islam in the West into a general crusade for global liberation understood in a left/liberal sense. It easily turns into "religion oppresses women" and "tradition oppresses women" unless there's a focus on the specific nature of Islam, which there never is.

More basically, though, the Muslim treatment of women is their problem. Why should we get involved in their problems, when we've got our own and can't do much about theirs anyway? I'd prefer "Muslims engage in terrorism" and "Muslims are anti-Western" as themes, where "Western" refers to something more specific and complex than universal principles of freedom, equality, and scientific rationalism. I suppose "we don't want to be Muslim" should be part of the mix, and the position of women is part of that, but it's not as if relations between the sexes are in great shape in the West, so it's odd to put it first and foremost.

We do need to know what we're dealing with, so we should discuss the merits. On that point I'd say women are unquestionably at a disadvantage in Islam. Men can have several wives, and they can divorce at will. So the bond between man and woman is weaker and less balanced, and there is less mutual trust and more use of force than in traditional Western society.

Principles like that have some effect on day-to-day life, and a big effect on the likelihood of the kind of extreme situation that makes the news. So there are a lot more honor killings and stonings for adultery in Muslim societies, just as there are more babies who get their skulls punctured and brains sucked out in liberal societies.

General principles don't determine everything though, and in any event there are also general Islamic principles requiring fair treatment and whatnot. On the whole, people are people, life is mostly particular events, domestic ill-feeling is no fun, and women know how to get their way even if men are supposedly in charge. So I don't think the "generalized system of sexist abuse" theory holds water. How could such a system be maintained in household after household century after century over whole continents? Why would so many people go to such an effort?

I know something about life among at least some Muslims, since I spent a couple of years before all the unpleasantness began as a Peace Corps math teacher at a government boarding school in a small village in Afghanistan.

(The school where I taught, in Helmand Province, has since become Forward Operations Base Delhi. You can see a row of classrooms I taught in at around 1:40 in this video.)

There weren't many polygamous marriages where I was, and a lot of them had to do with special situations (your brother dies so you've got a second wife all of a sudden). And there were few or no divorces. There really can't be: at the crudest level, bride price might be 5 years salary for a schoolteacher, and the woman's family isn't going to be pleased if you toss her aside, so basically you make a go of what you've got.

It was hard for a single foreign man to observe family relations directly, but you could pick up this and that. Girls went around freely in public until they were 12 or so, and fathers seemed no less attached to them than to boys. There was one teacher--a very intelligent man who had studied in America and spoke excellent English--who notoriously beat his wife, and people looked down on that. There was another who was reputedly a great lover, and the women would giggle and tell stories behind the scenes.

Mostly the bits and pieces I heard about sounded like normal domestic life--A's wife had worry B about the children, C's wife wanted some sort of fancy cloth so he picked it up for her, etc. The most respected of the teachers, who everyone called "Father," had a much younger wife people called "Mother" who went around without a veil and did what she wanted. She was a very spirited woman, and nobody messed with her.

So far as I could tell, a lot of the differences had to do with the nature of the society rather than Islam as such. The two are connected, but it's complicated. Maybe it's something of a chicken-and-egg problem--Islam catches on in societies to which it's adapted. Or maybe the nature of the pre-Islamic society makes a big difference in how Islam turns out. Others will have to say.

The women didn't have much public presence where I was, but that didn't mean what people here would expect. There's less public life in Muslim countries. The classic Middle Eastern city was a bazaar and some palaces, mosques, and barracks in the public sphere, and also walled quarters where people lived among their own and ran their own affairs.

The family was generally a unit of production as well as consumption, so the idea of "career" was mostly irrelevant. That's still largely true, by the way. Career depends on large formal organizations, and such things don't work well in the radically divided societies you find in the Middle East and Central Asia. People are mostly farmers, artisans, or shopkeepers, and the ideal is having enough to live on so you can sit at home drinking tea.

I remember a guy in Kashmir (another Muslim region) asking me--very tentatively, he didn't want to seem like a fool who takes everything he hears seriously--whether it was true that in the West people didn't think it was enough to have money to live on and hang with their friends but also wanted to work as a positive good thing.

So the basic idea has always been that everything's behind walls, with extended families living together in compounds, and outsiders only admitted to the relatively small public areas. Behind the scenes, which is where everything took place, the women were much freer and certainly part of what was going on. There was also lots of to and fro through back doors into other compounds. The images of imprisonment you get in the West aren't at all accurate.

I suppose another influence leading to the absence of women from public life was the possibility of abduction. It's expensive to get a wife, so why not steal one? That can be a real possibility in a radically divided society without much public order in which everything takes place in walled quarters and compounds and there's more emphasis on arbitrary fortune than free choice anyway. That's not the sort of thing that's a big current issue, but I think it had a role in how the system developed and the possibility still has an influence somewhere in the background.

A problem with the whole picture is that the way of life doesn't transplant to all settings. It doesn't work at all in a bureaucratic and industrial society in which people live in small apartments in large buildings and make their livings as operatives and functionaries in big organizations. So traditional Muslims in the West have problems and modernization runs into problems in Muslim countries. I have no doubt that one result is increased conflict and violence.

Whether the Muslims will be able to pick and choose among aspects of modernity and come up with something that works for them I don't know. If they want to convert to Catholicism I'd be glad to send them a catechism or even explain why it's a good idea, but if they want to do their Islamic thing I can't help them.

Converting them to liberalism--by force or any other way--doesn't seem to be the answer. We in the West have our own problems, and we're in no position to straighten other people out. Let the Muslims have a go at it where they run things and let's leave each other alone. Each should mind his own business, barring extraordinary circumstances, and maintain boundaries for the sake of peace.

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.

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.