Lights Out on Liberty

From Imprimis

By Mark Steyn

On August 3, 1914, on the eve of the First World War, British Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey stood at the window of his office in the summer dusk and observed, "The lamps are going out all over Europe." Today, the lights are going out on liberty all over the Western world, but in a more subtle and profound way.

Much of the West is far too comfortable with state regulation of speech and expression, which puts freedom itself at risk. Let me cite some examples: The response of the European Union Commissioner for Justice, Freedom, and Security to the crisis over the Danish cartoons that sparked Muslim violence was to propose that newspapers exercise "prudence" on certain controversial subjects involving religions beginning with the letter "I." At the end of her life, the Italian writer Oriana Fallaci—after writing of the contradiction between Islam and the Western tradition of liberty—was being sued in France, Italy, Switzerland, and most other European jurisdictions by groups who believed her opinions were not merely offensive, but criminal. In France, author Michel Houellebecq was sued by Muslim and other "anti-racist groups" who believed the opinions of a fictional character in one of his novels were likewise criminal.

In Canada, the official complaint about my own so-called "flagrant Islamophobia"—filed by the Canadian Islamic Congress—attributes to me the following "assertions":

America will be an Islamic Republic by 2040. There will be a break for Muslim prayers during the Super Bowl. There will be a religious police enforcing Islamic norms. The USS Ronald Reagan will be renamed after Osama bin Laden. Females will not be allowed to be cheerleaders. Popular American radio and TV hosts will be replaced by Imams.

In fact, I didn’t "assert" any of these things. They are plot twists I cited in my review of Robert Ferrigno’s novel, Prayers for the Assassin. It’s customary in reviewing novels to cite aspects of the plot. For example, a review of Moby Dick will usually mention the whale. These days, apparently, the Canadian Islamic Congress and the government’s human rights investigators (who have taken up the case) believe that describing the plot of a novel should be illegal.

You may recall that Margaret Atwood, some years back, wrote a novel about her own dystopian theocratic fantasy, in which America was a Christian tyranny named the Republic of Gilead. What’s to stop a Christian group from dragging a doting reviewer of Margaret Atwood’s book in front of a Canadian human rights court? As it happens, Christian groups tend not to do that, which is just as well, because otherwise there wouldn’t be a lot to write about.

These are small parts of a very big picture. After the London Tube bombings and the French riots a few years back, commentators lined up behind the idea that Western Muslims are insufficiently assimilated. But in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. Since these are the principal means of discourse in multicultural societies, they’ve mastered all they need to know. Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada. Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading "Behead the Enemies of Islam" and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen.

Thus we see that today’s multicultural societies tolerate the explicitly intolerant and avowedly unicultural, while refusing to tolerate anyone pointing out that intolerance. It’s been that way for 20 years now, ever since Valentine’s Day 1989, when the Ayatollah Khomeini issued his fatwa against the novelist Salman Rushdie, a British subject, and shortly thereafter large numbers of British Muslims marched through English cities openly calling for Rushdie to be killed. A reader in Bradford wrote to me recalling asking a West Yorkshire policeman on the street that day why the various "Muslim community leaders" weren’t being arrested for incitement to murder. The officer said they’d been told to "play it cool." The calls for blood got more raucous. My correspondent asked his question again. The policeman told him to "Push off" (he expressed the sentiment rather more Anglo-Saxonly, but let that pass) "or I’ll arrest you." Mr. Rushdie was infuriated when the then Archbishop of Canterbury lapsed into root-cause mode. "I well understand the devout Muslims’ reaction, wounded by what they hold most dear and would themselves die for," said His Grace. Rushdie replied tersely: "There is only one person around here who is in any danger of dying."

And that’s the way it’s gone ever since. For all the talk about rampant "Islamophobia," it’s usually only the other party who is "in any danger of dying."

War on the Homefront

I wrote my book America Alone because I wanted to reframe how we thought about the War on Terror—an insufficient and evasive designation that has long since outlasted whatever usefulness it may once have had. It remains true that we are good at military campaigns, such as those in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our tanks and ships are better, and our bombs and soldiers are smarter. But these are not ultimately the most important battlefronts. We do indeed face what the strategists call asymmetric warfare, but it is not in the Sunni triangle or the Hindu Kush. We face it right here in the Western world.

Norman Podhoretz, among others, has argued that we are engaged in a second Cold War. But it might be truer to call it a Cold Civil War, by which I mean a war within the West, a war waged in our major cities. We now have Muslim "honor killings," for instance, not just in tribal Pakistan and Yemen, but in Germany and the Netherlands, in Toronto and Dallas. And even if there were no battles in Iraq and Afghanistan, and if no one was flying planes into tall buildings in New York City or blowing up trains, buses, and nightclubs in Madrid, London, and Bali, we would still be in danger of losing this war without a shot being fired.

The British government recently announced that it would be issuing Sharia-compliant Islamic bonds—that is, bonds compliant with Islamic law and practice as prescribed in the Koran. This is another reason to be in favor of small government: The bigger government gets, the more it must look for funding in some pretty unusual places—in this case wealthy Saudis. As The Mail on Sunday put it, this innovation marks "one of the most significant economic advances of Sharia law in the non-Muslim world."

At about the same time, The Times of London reported that "Knorbert the piglet has been dropped as the mascot of Fortis Bank, after it decided to stop giving piggy banks to children for fear of offending Muslims." Now, I’m no Islamic scholar, but Mohammed expressed no view regarding Knorbert the piglet. There’s not a single sura about it. The Koran, an otherwise exhaustive text, is silent on the matter of anthropomorphic porcine representation.

I started keeping a file on pig controversies a couple of years ago, and you would be surprised at how routine they have become. Recently, for instance, a local government council prohibited its workers from having knickknacks on their desks representing Winnie the Pooh’s sidekick Piglet. As Pastor Martin Niemoller might have said, "First they came for Piglet and I did not speak out because I was not a Disney character, and if I was, I’d be more of an Eeyore. Then they came for the Three Little Pigs and Babe, and by the time I realized the Western world had turned into a 24/7 Looney Tunes, it was too late, because there was no Porky Pig to stammer, ‘Th-th-th-that’s all folks!’, and bring the nightmare to an end."

What all these stories have in common is excessive deference to—and in fact fear of—Islam. If the story of the Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than ten percent of Europe’s population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20 percent? In small but telling ways, non-Muslim communities are being persuaded that a kind of uber-Islamic law now applies to all. And if you don’t remember the Three Little Pigs, by the way, one builds a house of straw, another of sticks, and both get blown down by the Big Bad Wolf. Western Civilization is a mighty house of bricks, but you don’t need a Big Bad Wolf when the pig is so eager to demolish the house himself.

I would argue that these incremental concessions to Islam are ultimately a bigger threat than terrorism. What matters is not what the lads in the Afghan cave—the "extremists"—believe, but what the non-extremists believe, what people who are for the most part law-abiding taxpayers of functioning democracies believe. For example, a recent poll found that 36 percent of Muslims between the ages of 16 and 24 believe that those who convert to another religion should be punished by death. That’s not 36 percent of young Muslims in Waziristan or Yemen or Sudan, but 36 percent of young Muslims in the United Kingdom. Forty percent of British Muslims would like to live under Sharia—in Britain. Twenty percent have sympathy for the July 7 Tube bombers. And, given that Islam is the principal source of population growth in every city down the spine of England from Manchester to Sheffield to Birmingham to London, and in every major Western European city, these statistics are not without significance for the future.

Because I discussed these facts in print, my publisher is now being sued before three Canadian human rights commissions. The plaintiff in my case is Dr. Mohamed Elmasry, a man who announced on Canadian TV that he approves of the murder of all Israeli civilians over the age of 18. He is thus an objective supporter of terrorism. I don’t begrudge him the right to his opinions, but I wish he felt the same about mine. Far from that, posing as a leader of the "anti-hate" movement in Canada, he is using the squeamishness of a politically correct society to squash freedom.

As the famous saying goes, the price of liberty is eternal vigilance. What the Canadian Islamic Congress and similar groups in the West are trying to do is criminalize vigilance. They want to use the legal system to circumscribe debate on one of the great questions of the age: the relationship between Islam and the West and the increasing Islamization of much of the Western world, in what the United Nations itself calls the fastest population transformation in history.

Slippery Slope

Our democratic governments today preside over multicultural societies that have less and less glue holding them together. They’ve grown comfortable with the idea of the state as the mediator between interest groups. And confronted by growing and restive Muslim populations, they’re increasingly at ease with the idea of regulating freedom in the interests of social harmony.

It’s a different situation in America, which has the First Amendment and a social consensus that increasingly does not exist in Europe. Europe’s consensus seems to be that Danish cartoonists should be able to draw what they like, but not if it sparks Islamic violence. It is certainly odd that the requirement of self-restraint should only apply to one party.

Last month, in a characteristically clotted speech followed by a rather more careless BBC interview, the Archbishop of Canterbury said that it was dangerous to have one law for everyone and that the introduction of Sharia to the United Kingdom was "inevitable." Within days of His Grace’s remarks, the British and Ontario governments both confirmed that thousands of polygamous men in their jurisdictions are receiving welfare payments for each of their wives. Kipling wrote that East is East and West is West, and ne’er the twain shall meet. But when the twain do meet, you often wind up with the worst of both worlds. Say what you like about a polygamist in Waziristan or Somalia, but he has to do it on his own dime. To collect a welfare check for each spouse, he has to move to London or Toronto. Government-subsidized polygamy is an innovation of the Western world.

If you need another reason to be opposed to socialized health care, one reason is because it fosters the insouciant attitude to basic hygiene procedures that has led to the rise of deadly "superbugs." I see British Muslim nurses in public hospitals riddled with C. difficile are refusing to comply with hygiene procedures on the grounds that scrubbing requires them to bare their arms, which is un-Islamic. Which is a thought to ponder just before you go under the anaesthetic. I mentioned to some of Hillsdale’s students in class that gay-bashing is on the rise in the most famously "tolerant" cities in Europe. As Der Spiegel reported, "With the number of homophobic attacks rising in the Dutch metropolis, Amsterdam officials are commissioning a study to determine why Moroccan men are targeting the city’s gays."

Gee, whiz. That’s a toughie. Wonder what the reason could be. But don’t worry, the brain trust at the University of Amsterdam is on top of things: "Half of the crimes were committed by men of Moroccan origin and researchers believe they felt stigmatized by society and responded by attacking people they felt were lower on the social ladder. Another working theory is that the attackers may be struggling with their own sexual identity."

Bingo! Telling young Moroccan men they’re closeted homosexuals seems certain to lessen tensions in the city! While you’re at it, a lot of those Turks seem a bit light in their loafers, don’t you think?

Our Suicidal Urge

So don’t worry, nothing’s happening. Just a few gay Muslims frustrated at the lack of gay Muslim nightclubs. Sharia in Britain? Taxpayer-subsidized polygamy in Toronto? Yawn. Nothing to see here. True, if you’d suggested such things on September 10, 2001, most Britons and Canadians would have said you were nuts. But a few years on and it doesn’t seem such a big deal, nor will the next concession, or the one after that.

The assumption that you can hop on the Sharia Express and just ride a couple of stops is one almighty leap of faith. More to the point, who are you relying on to "hold the line"? Influential figures like the Archbishop of Canterbury? The politically correct bureaucrats at Canada’s Human Rights Commissions? The geniuses who run Harvard, and who’ve just introduced gender-segregated swimming and gym sessions at the behest of Harvard’s Islamic Society? (Would they have done that for Amish or Mennonite students?) The Western world is not run by fellows noted for their line-holding: Look at what they’re conceding now and then try to figure out what they’ll be conceding in five years’ time. The idea that the West’s multicultural establishment can hold the line would be more plausible if it was clear they had any idea where the line is, or even gave any indication of believing in one.

My book, supposedly Islamaphobic, isn’t even really about Islam. The single most important line in it is the profound observation, by historian Arnold Toynbee, that "Civilizations die from suicide, not murder." One manifestation of that suicidal urge is illiberal notions harnessed in the cause of liberalism. In calling for the introduction of Sharia, the Archbishop of Canterbury joins a long list of Western appeasers, including a Dutch cabinet minister who said if the country were to vote to introduce Islamic law that would be fine by him, and the Swedish cabinet minister who said we should be nice to Muslims now so that Muslims will be nice to us when they’re in the majority.

Ultimately, our crisis is not about Islam. It’s not about fire-breathing Imams or polygamists whooping it up on welfare. It’s not about them. It’s about us. And by us I mean the culture that shaped the modern world, and established the global networks, legal systems, and trading relationships on which the planet depends.

To reprise Sir Edward Grey, the lamps are going out all over the world, and an awful lot of the map will look an awful lot darker by the time many Americans realize the scale of this struggle.

None Dare Call It Savagery

Plato and Aristotle by Raphael

By Kyle Bristow

Russell Kirk, a former history professor at Michigan State University and the first American to earn a doctorate of letters at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, once remarked that “Michigan State University’s chief function [is to] deprive the young people who pass through its gates of whatever prejudices and moral principles they bring with them, to send them out into the world having given them nothing in return in the way of values or understanding to help them come to terms with the realities of life.” I believe that the observation he made nearly half a century ago is as true today as it was then.

In the humanities and political science classes, students are oftentimes immersed in the ideology of cultural relativism by their professors. Cultural relativism dictates that there are no good or evil, civilized or backwards cultures, but rather, that all cultures are morally equivalent.

By asserting that the West is no better than foreign cultures, the professors who preach cultural relativism are doing a great disservice to their students. Rat-like, the haters of Western civilization gnaw at the foundation of our culture.

Is it that radical to suggest that Western civilization is superior to foreign cultures?

The West has produced great authors, such as Shakespeare, Dante, and Goethe, and has produced great musicians such as Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven. Although the indigenous peoples of Africa and the Americas have produced intricate dances for pagan tribal rituals at the camp bonfire, their “art” is by any fair measure inferior to the works the West has produced.

Westerners, compared to the peoples of lesser civilizations, have an innate desire to explore and learn. Hernán Cortés, Leif Erikson, Christopher Columbus, and Marco Polo traveled vast distances in their explorations. Is it any surprise that the same civilization that produced people who explored the ends of the earth also produced the people who put mankind on the moon and sent rovers to Mars?

The brilliant minds of Westerners have invented the airplane, the automobile, and the computer; cured diseases like Polio and Smallpox; and have given the world political theories such as democracy and republicanism. Certainly an African invented peanut butter and the indigenous peoples of the Americas gave the world popcorn and chocolate, but by any fair measure, the technological innovations of the West are superior to those of lesser cultures. In fact, at the time of Christopher Columbus’ arrival to the Americas in the fifteenth century, the indigenous people there had not progressed past the Copper Age, had not even figured out how to domesticate animals, and had not even invented the wheel—they were still living in the Stone Age. Perhaps if the indigenous peoples were less interested in capturing and sacrificing people to Huitzilopochtli and cannibalizing one another, they would have made some kind of technological and societal progress.

Technology, however, is in and of itself not the defining mark of superior culture, for ordered liberty is. With the blessing of ordered liberty, the people of a civilization are able to live in peace, which allows for them to achieve prosperity.

The Greeks and Romans gave the world liberty and law, respectively. The Enlightenment gave the world the free market, liberal democracy, and the desire to come to terms with reason through a better understanding of science. Britain’s Glorious Revolution of 1688 emphasized liberty and constitutionalism. The West has a long and proud history of perfecting ordered liberty—which is something that most of the world has yet to even attempt to achieve. Totalitarianism in Africa, the Middle East, and the Far East, and socialism in South America exist because of a lack of ordered liberty.

With all the blessings that Providence has bestowed upon the Occident, Westerners have felt obliged to spread their ideals and principles to the less fortunate. Hernán Cortés, Godfrey de Bouillon, Francisco Pizarro, and countless others were dispatched by the West to introduce Christian salvation to heathen lands.

We are the heirs to a great tradition. We should be proud of who we are.


Kyle Bristow was until recently the chairman of Young Americans for Freedom chapter of Michigan State University, which had become famous due to its lively and controversial meetings under his leadership.

Guns, Foreign Courts, and the Moral Consensus of the International Community

From The Acton Institute
By Jordan Ballor

In a landmark decision that will impact the future of gun regulation in the United States, late last month the Supreme Court struck down a handgun ban in Washington, D.C. In District of Columbia etal. v. Heller (No. 07–290) a slim 5-4 majority found the D.C. ban to violate the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which reads, “A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.”

Over the last few years observers of the Supreme Court have noticed a trend among some of the justices to cite the decisions of foreign courts as part of the relevant precedent in deciding the cases before them. In 2005, justices Scalia and Breyer engaged in a rare public conversation on this very topic, “Constitutional Relevance of Foreign Court Decisions.” In the recently-decided D.C. v. Heller neither of the two dissenting opinions, written by justices Stevens and Breyer respectively, make substantial reference to foreign court decisions. But the growing phenomena of reference to foreign judgments as precedents raises the question of what the justices might have found if they had consulted such materials.

This tendency to invoke foreign jurisprudence is becoming more troubling as it becomes clearer that the moral consensus that once united Western nations has almost entirely broken down. A few years ago a pastor I know, as part of his duties as a representative of the Christian Reformed Church in North America (CRC), took part in an inter-church dialogue with a member of the Gereformeerde Kerken in Nederland (GKN), a grouping of Reformed congregations in the Netherlands. The GKN sent what they considered to be a moderate pastor to participate in this conversation about moral issues. In the course of the discussion, the GKN moderate asserted that it was more evil to own a gun than to have an abortion.

At this, the CRC representative was only able to respond that their discussion was effectively over. The CRC’s official position on abortion is that the church “condemns the wanton or arbitrary destruction of any human being at any stage of its development from the point of conception to the point of death.” As any rhetorician knows, argument can only proceed where there is some basic level of agreement, and the ethical opinion expressed by the GKN pastor was so far removed from the sensibilities of the CRC that there was effectively no point of contact for continuing dialogue. The GKN has since joined a number of other Protestant denominations in the Netherlands, including other Lutheran and Reformed denominations, to form the Protestantse Kerk in Nederland (PKN).

While this is a relatively minor anecdote, it serves well to illustrate the conflicting moral values placed on issues of life by the mainstream culture in Europe and the United States. No doubt there are those on either side of the Atlantic who would take issue with the dominant cultural judgment, but the national and international legal documents underscore the real differences. Where the U.S. Constitution’s Bill of Rights singles out the right of the people to keep and bear arms, proposed European Union constitutional documents make no such mention. And as a recent Washington Times article relates, “many in Western Europe and Japan see U.S. gun ownership rates and gun violence as a clear mark of difference with other industrial countries.”

But the difference has not always been so stark. Indeed, the preamble to the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, written in 1948, recognized the possibility of “rebellion against tyranny and oppression” as “a last resort,” an option that ideally could be avoided by protections according to the rule of law.

On the question of abortion, part of what derailed adoption of the EU Constitution in 2004 was concern by nations like Poland and Ireland that the vague constitutional provisions about “dignity” and “integrity” of the human person would require the repeal of national anti-abortion laws. The Treaty of Lisbon, successor to the failed EU Constitution, was rejected by Ireland last month, in part over similar concerns by pro-life advocates that adoption of the treaty “would threaten the Irish constitutional protection for the unborn, given the almost universal acceptance and promotion of abortion at the EU level.”

Upon reflection, then, the ethical judgment expressed by the GKN pastor seems to represent fairly well the mainstream EU attitude toward moral issues like guns and abortion. If part of what characterizes a civilization is a consensus on moral issues, then the idea of a unified Western civilization encompassing Europe and the United States is an illusion. A consensus that diverges on such fundamental questions of the right to life and responsibilities of self-defense is simply no consensus at all.

Jordan J. Ballor is associate editor at the Acton Institute for the Study of Religion & Liberty in Grand Rapids, Mich., and a contributor to the Acton Institute PowerBlog.

The New Learning That Failed

The New Criterion recently published a thoughtful article on the decline of classical learning and the core liberal arts curriculum in the university. For those who would like to understand the "dumbing down" of our elementary and secondary schools and the coarsening of our culture, this article probes the root causes.

Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian, columnist, former classics professor, and author of A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War.

The Heart of an Islamist

From FrontPageMagazine.com
By David Solway

[The following is an excerpt from David Solway's new work-in-progress, Living in the Valley of Shmoon .]

The West, whether the European Lilliput or the American Brobdingnag, has not yet realized that Middle Eastern-style autocracies are categorically different from Western-style democracies. It does not appreciate the role of culture and history in forming the folkways, attitudes and presuppositions of a people. It has not understood that the Islamic world does not play by our rules and that it lives by an entirely different code of conduct from that which we have taken for granted for centuries—a code in which reciprocities, trade-offs, standard negotiating parameters and the dialectic of mutual advantage do not signify. We refuse to see that we are dealing with a culture that is fundamentally alien to ours and that does not accept the axioms, postulates and expectations of politically pragmatic discourse or the procedures of reasonable accommodation. It is a culture whose institutional basis has almost nothing in common with the civic armature of Western civilization that has allowed the latter, albeit at great cost and in far too desultory a fashion, to resist its own homegrown tyrannies.

In the 21st century the Leviathan that would swallow us rises from another sea than our own. Western Christendom and post-Christendom are based on a completely different “symbolic order”—Jacques Lacan’s term for the way symbols are used unconsciously by a culture—from that of the Islamic world, especially with respect to the concept of individual autonomy, the modalities of personal salvation, the idea of citizenship, the rule of established law and the binding force of international accords.

We must also bear in mind that the enemy holds a clear advantage in what Norman Podhoretz has called, after the Cold War, World War IV: the terrorist camarillas, unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have few structural assets to protect and the rogue regimes which protect them rely on their control of the oil supply and their stockpiling of Western currency reserves for immunity from retaliation. When a set of cultural assumptions rooted in an alien scripture and a traditional worldview which repudiate what we have come to understand as social and political evolution is added to these factors, the task before us takes on dismaying and redoubtable proportions.

We really have little idea how foreign the Islamic mindset is to our way of thinking and feeling. For example, we regard a death in battle as a loss—the word “losses” is a common synonym for “casualties”; whereas in the Islamic view, as attested in both the Koran and the hadith, each “loss” in battle is no such thing but a translation into paradise, a picayune price to pay for the gift of immediate salvation and part of the “bargain” the believer has closed with Allah. What we see as losses, the Muslim sees as gains, the “supreme triumph” guaranteed by the Faith. “Allah has purchased of the faithful their lives and worldly goods and in return has promised them the Garden. They will fight for his cause, slay and be slain…Rejoice then in the bargain you have made” (Koran 9:111). Death is sought and celebrated. This has no point of contact with what we have hallowed as the dicta of reason. What we do everything in our power to evade, the enemy joyfully welcomes. What we suffer as a privation, the enemy cherishes as a promotion. What we regard as a curse, the enemy accepts as a benefaction. Try, as they say, to get your mind around that.

As Lee Harris argues in The Suicide of Reason, in a prolonged standoff the rule of law is no match for the rule of the jungle, the individualist “rational actor” cannot hope to triumph against the collectivist “tribal actor”—at least, not until he adapts his strategy to meet the challenge—and the “myth of reason” in which we have come to believe, if we are unable or unwilling to refocus our attitude to the world, will see to our defeat at the hands of those who do not recognize the “normal rules of engagement” and “cannot take a moral stance outside the perspective of [their] tribe.” And the crisis we are now facing does not allow for that species of adjournment we call diplomacy or the nepenthean illusion of “dialogue” with an interlocutor who does not abide by its formative assumptions. Time is running out. “The borderless challenge of emancipated warriors,” cautions French philosopher André Glucksmann, “allows us little leisure for procrastination” (City Journal, August 2007). If we are not careful, it may well be game, set, match.

What the situation cries out for today are deeply educated and farsighted statesmen of the stamp of Winston Churchill and David Ben-Gurion, or at the very least determined political leaders like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Instead, our fate is in the hands of one-dimensional, small men and women without vision, knowledge of history or the courage to act, except insofar as they are prospecting for votes. It is not only, as Joe Klein contends in Politics Lost, that the political process has been trivialized by the burgeoning tribe of “marketing professionals, consultants, and pollsters who…have robbed public life of its romance and vigor,” but that the subjects of the “pollster-consultant industrial complex” are themselves devoid of moral and intellectual substance to begin with. This fact was recognized by Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, who in a 1993 meeting in Philadelphia said: “When I speak with the American, I speak with someone who doesn’t know anything” (Steven Emerson Blog, March 25, 2008). Add to this sorry spectacle of political vapidness and acedia the editorial vaporizings of a philistine press and the parlous state of journalistic ethics, and we have, to put it mildly, a big problem. Yet it does not take a mantic expertise to discern the probable future should we continue to sit back, swallow the sedatives of standard political analysis and let events take their course. For it is not just that Jews are under threat in the new wave of antisemitism spreading throughout the world. It is the Western secular democracies as well, in which both Jews and non-Jews have, if only intermittently, enjoyed the benefits of peace, prosperity and common egalitarian values, that are in grave danger of subsidence.

This is what all too many in the West, including its power-holders and influence-peddlers, refuse to understand. We are truly in a war, different from any war we have fought in the past, waged on many different fronts from fifth column infiltration to an expanding demographic to incendiary physical assault to “Dark Web” terror attacks on basic cyber infrastructures to the introduction of Shari’a Compliant Finance on the stock market, but a real war nevertheless that will persist well into the century. Let us not dissemble or extenuate. In its militant dimension it is a war that is once again approaching our shores—9/11 was only the opening salvo—and which will have real consequences in large numbers of casualties, civil disruption, cultural prostration and economic breakdown.

And it is a war that, in the long term, we may well lose if we do not awaken to the peril which confronts us. It is not by the pricking of our thumbs that some of us fear the imminence of a generations-long tumult but by a sober reading of the historical archive, the absorption of the relevant literature and an informed and common-sense alertness to the current scene. Those of us who are sounding the alarm will naturally be accused by the droves of sleepwalkers shuffling in the public domain of exaggeration and even of war-mongering in our turn. But when these contemporary R.I.P. Van Winkles are finally jarred awake by events, they will likely find themselves living and dying in a very different world from the one in which they fell asleep.

In his introduction to The Best American Essays (2002), entitled “To Open a Millennium,” Stephen J. Gould remarked that, as the 20th century began at the end of World War I, so the 21rst century dawned the day after September 11, 2001. This was the “fateful year” and the meaning of 9/11 was the substantive issue to be addressed. I venture to say he was correct. We are now challenged as never before as the 21st century unfolds toward the seismic event of civilizational conflict between a messianic world-faith and a secular world-view. There are no atoms of compatibility between two such global systems of culture and belief. Let us listen to the music before we have to face it. For the theme song of the Islamic adversary—we have the authority of Hamas chieftain Mahmoud Zahar on this—may be regarded as a modification of the famous Leonard Cohen lyric: first we take Jerusalem, then we take New York.