A Society Trapped In Its Own Assumptions

The following is an excerpt from a book review of Serge Trifkovic's book, Defeating Jihad. The reviewer is Brian Mitchell. You can read the entire review here. Here's the excerpt:

There are a lot of things that are very popular with the people but absolutely impossible for their elected representatives...and a crackdown on Islam is one of them. It isn’t that Muslims are already so influential in America that our pols must pay them attention. Rather, our own political principles make it virtually impossible to define Islam as an alien influence.

If the “War on Terror” must be compared with the Cold War, we should see ourselves not as the hard-core anticommunists of the pre-McCarthy era but as the desperate Soviet ideologues trapped in their own failing system. Trifkovic himself makes the connection: The problem of centrally planned economy could not be solved because the solution remained outside the ideological parameters of the decision-making community. To consider capitalism as an option was illegitimate, as it would have demanded a paradigm shift that could not stop short of altering the system as a whole.

“The debate on Islamic terrorism in the United States has the same Soviet quality,” Trifkovic continues. “It rarely touches on the fundamentals of policy or history” but merely quibbles over possible applications of our obligatory assumptions. Judging by the long lines at airport-security gates, we can only conclude that our soviets are working harder to save our assumptions than to save our selves.

The first fatal assumption is the belief that religion does not really matter, that wealth and freedom can fully satisfy the yearnings of the human heart, and that people only need religion when they do not have iPods. Reasoning in this manner, we must conclude that Islam is not to blame for our present conflict, and pointing out that our enemies are all Muslim (and not all poor or uneducated or even Arab) is therefore divisive, unhelpful, and un-American.

A second assumption is that any conflict between Christianity and Islam is Christianity’s fault. Only historical ignorance and anti-Christian animus can account for this assumption, but our ruling elites lack neither. It is telling that the first major film to capitalize on post-September 11 passions (Kingdom of Heaven) depicted the Christians as the villains.

From these assumptions come liberal Europe’s odd tolerance of illiberal Islam and sense of moral obligation to Muslim immigrants. The combination amounts to a civilizational death wish, unprecedented in history. “No other race subscribes to these moral principles,” writes Jean Raspail, “because they are weapons of self-annihilation.”

The evidence Trifkovic adduces for this death wish is appalling. Shortly after September 11, British Prime Minister Tony Blair welcomed Muslim leaders to 10 Downing Street to tell them, “What happened in America was not the work of Islamic terrorists, it was not the work of Muslim terrorists. It was the work of terrorists, pure and simple.” Imagine Winston Churchill assuring Oswald Mosley that the Blitz was not the work of German aviators or even Nazi aviators, but aviators, pure and simple.

Europe’s sympathy for Islam has deeper roots than most Americans might imagine. Enlightened libidos eager to cross the bounds of Christian morality were attracted to the legendary licentiousness of the harem and the Turkish bath. (Trifkovic reports that, in England, homosexuality became known as the “Persian” or “Turkish” vice.) At the same time, Islam itself was admired for its simplicity and austerity, in contrast to Christian weakness and decadence. Gibbon openly sympathized with the manly Muslim Turks against the effeminate Christian Byzantines caricatured in his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88), while Montesquieu assumed a Persian perspective to satirize French society in his Persian Letters (1721).

Trifkovic relates this early anti-Christian, pro-Muslim bias to the sympathy of such European leftists as Bernard-Henri Levy for Muslims in Bosnia and Kosovo. The Jewishness of Levy and many other European intellectuals only adds to the left’s chronic Christophobia. Even amid a surge in attacks on Jews by Muslims in Europe, European leftists have preferred to point the finger at the usual suspects— “young, disaffected white Europeans, often stimulated by extreme right-wing groups,” according to Beate Winkler, head of the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia.

Recently, in the wake of attacks in Europe by outright terrorists, European nations have taken modest steps to defend themselves. But simple demographics appear ready to finish what Europe’s feminist, multicultural, anti-Christian elites have started. Birthrates of Europeans throughout Europe are barely half of what is needed for replacement, while the Muslim population of Europe, now 50 million, is expect to double in 20 years. By 2025, Muslims will account for one third of all births in the European Union.

The situation in the United States is more hopeful. There are far fewer Muslims in America (less than two million), and there are many more Christians. Trifkovic writes that, in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, more people worship in mosques on Friday than in churches on Sunday, whereas over 80 percent of Americans still call themselves Christians...

Unfortunately, we Americans have our own useful idiots eager to absolve Islam of any blame. There are the editors at Houghton Mifflin who (by my own count) tell schoolchildren ten times in a two-volume set that Muslims are “tolerant,” and ten times in the same set that Christians “persecute” people. There are the producers at PBS who do not question Muslim claims in the miniseries Mohammad: Legacy of a Prophet but make skepticism toward the central tenets of Christianity the basis of the documentary From Jesus to Christ. And there are the politicians (some actually in politics) whose only hope is to con us all, Muslims included, into believing that Islam is a religion of peace and that jihad is only for heretics.