The Nature of the Jihadi Threat

[Dale00]

A Canadian takes a thoughtful and broad look at Jihad in the West. It is worth reading the whole thing but here are some excerpts.

...One wonders how the jihadists get away with their atrocities and from where they derive their power. Of course, they enjoy material help from the constitutive practices and ideology of the very nations they are attacking: the scourge of multiculturalism, which has received them into the body social and the body politic, and the reigning pathology of political correctness that refuses to name the enemy and suppresses or scumbles their true identity. The terrorists also profit from the sympathy of left-wing parties and the complicity of the liberal elites who pride themselves on the destructive canard of “tolerance,” that is, tolerance of both the intolerant and the intolerable. Influential leaders of Western nations have clearly sided with the children of Islam. One need look no further than Barack Hussein Obama, the first pro-Muslim American president; Justin Trudeau, the first pro-Muslim Canadian prime minister; Angela Merkel, the first post-war pro-Muslim German chancellor; and political weaklings like France’s president François Hollande and Britain’s prime minister David Cameron, among many others.

But the terrorists’ strength emanates from even more powerful sources. What we have not appeared to understand is that their spirit and practice differ categorically from the methods, traditions and policies of the armies of the West...they are subjectively invincible. They do not take casualties. Their bodies are like weapons; when these are spent, they can be discarded. In other words, they do not die, but are immediately translated into Jannah, the Muslim heaven, where they will revel eternally in sparkling brooks, fruited orchards, and harems of sloe-eyed virgins. In a sense, they are the zombies of the modern world, the armies of the living dead who, as they are fond of saying, love death more than we love life. They cannot be defeated, they can only be quarantined, kept at bay, left to rave and rampage in the killing grounds of their own countries.

How many innocent people will have to be butchered before we awake to the reality that the enemy is embedded in our midst? How many apologists for Islam will have to take a bullet or a knife blade before they change their tune? Hundreds? Thousands? Or—if a recent EU Parliament report is correct in claiming that ISIS is acquiring the expertise and the raw materials to build and employ weapons of mass destruction—millions? According to the London Daily Mail, “Wolfgang Rudischhauser, Director of the Weapons of Mass Destruction Non-Proliferation Centre at NATO said: 'ISIS actually has already acquired the knowledge, and in some cases the human expertise, that would allow it to use CBRN (chemical, biological, radiological, nuclear) materials as weapons of terror.'”

Such devastation is a genuine future threat, as Europol has acknowledged. But on the less cataclysmic scale of our present circumstances, we remain under the gun. We are hectored daily by the political elite not to turn against our (presumably) innocuous Muslim neighbors—yet as Rudyard Kipling wrote in a poem called “The Stranger:”

The Stranger within my gates,

He may be evil or good,

But I cannot tell what powers control--

What reasons sway his mood;

Nor when the Gods of his far-off land

Shall repossess his blood.

In this connection, I think also of W.B. Yeats’ immortal lines from “The Second Coming:” “The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity.” As for the “worst,” the jihadists who have infiltrated our societies, they are not only full of passionate intensity, which gives them a distinct advantage, they are also full of death, which to them is life everlasting, and which is the greatest advantage of all.

Meanwhile, the “best” among us are the mediocre, the fearful, the sanctimonious, the decadent and the corrupt, those whom C.S. Lewis in The Abolition of Man called “men without chests,” men without “virtue and enterprise…traitors in our midst.” Political divisions and allegiances are not entirely applicable in this regard. Lewis’ apt formulation is reminiscent of a distinction put forward by Dwight Morrow in a letter praising his good friend, America’s thirtieth president Calvin Coolidge: “I have about come to the conclusion that the division of the people of the world is not really between conservative and radical, but between people that are real people and people that are not.” Our leaders, opinion makers and the plurality of our intellectuals are in this respect not “real people.”

https://pjmedia.com/blog/dining-with-terrorists/?singlepage=true