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Thursday, December 28, 2006
The Imperative Of The Age
Your Curmudgeon was once known to say, at every opportunity, that the power of the State flows from fear: first, its ability to make its subjects fear its power; second, its talent for getting its subjects to fear other threatening entities, for defense from which they would turn to the State. Perhaps the time has come to start saying that again, as regularly as back when.
Politicians and other power-seekers are aware of the power of fear. When it occurs "naturally," they exploit it as they find it. When there isn't enough fear to support their ambitions, they contrive to create it. Sometimes this requires nothing but artful propaganda; other times, our political class must actually create a threat from which to "defend" us.
According to Ralph Waldo Emerson, fear always springs from ignorance. Well, much of the time, yes. But at other times, fear springs from the sense of one's helplessness: his inability, from his own powers and resources, to ward off the threats he senses looming about him. Politicians and power-seekers are aware of that, too. Thus, it is in their interests to nurture ignorance among the electorate, and to deprive private persons and institutions of the resources with which they might defend themselves.
The subjects and venues in which an American can observe this dynamic in action are innumerable. For today, your Curmudgeon will concentrate on a married pair: "gun control" and the Islamic menace.
The average American doesn't know much about Islam and has had little or no contact with Muslims of any kind. He hasn't read the Qur'an, the sunnah, or any of the ahadith; he's unfamiliar with the prescriptions and proscriptions of shari'a law; and he certainly hasn't attended a mosque or learned Arabic. What he "knows" comes to him from secondary sources or worse.
What flows to him from those sources? Mostly that Islam is just one more Abrahamic religion; that its dictates for the believer are largely congruent with those of Judaism and Christianity; that the average Muslim has no more desire to wreak violence on "infidels" than an average Jew or Christian does on Muslims. He's been told that there are a number of nations in which Islamic shari'a law is the official law code, and that those nations are largely stable and relatively crime-free. He's been given an overwhelming impression of the benignity of Islam and Muslims, to the effect that their religious distinction ought to be of no concern to him or anyone.
Of course, that's not all he's told. He also learns of the savageries, regular and irregular, committed by Muslims against "infidels" in every part of the world. He also learns of the ambitions of states such as Iran and Saudi Arabia to become nuclear powers. He also learns of the declared desires of such as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and past-President Hashemi-Rafsanjani to destroy Israel, even if the consequences would include the annihilation of Iran. He also learns that the cognomen of terrorist group HAMAS, which currently rules the Palestinians of the West Bank, is really an Arabic acronym for "Islamic Resistance Movement." He also learns that various other forces hostile to freedom and to the United States, such as North Korea and Hugo Chavez's Venezuela, are reaching out to jihad-minded Islamic nations and groups, to make common cause against us.
When he tries to integrate those reports with the just-one-more-benign-Abrahamic-faith propaganda, he becomes confused. Confusion irritates him; as long as the topic doesn't seem immediately important, he tends to back away.
All the same, John Q. Public can't escape the sense of threat. He knows there's something to fear out there. He can get reinforcement for those fears from any newspaper or airline security checkpoint. He doesn't know how close it is, or what's being done to hold it at bay. All that uncertainty and ambiguity fuels his fear just as Emerson described.
Though it's highly desirable, one doesn't necessarily have to read the Qur'an, the sunnah, or the ahadith to learn what one needs to know. There are other sources of trustworthy, detailed, meticulously referenced information about Islam, what it enjoins upon its adherents, and the history of its interactions with other faiths and cultures. Robert Spencer's Jihad Watch is among the most timely. Spencer and his co-contributors keep a careful record of current Islamic mischief, along with their massive archives of its preachments to its faithful and their historical record. Because this chronicle's portrait of Islam and its believers' intentions toward the rest of us is unflattering, it and Spencer are assailed by Muslims at every opportunity as a "hate site" -- even though nearly all it does is to report the actual words and deeds of Muslims.
Today, Spencer posts on the subject of Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA), who has spoken openly and uncompromisingly about the need to restrict Muslim immigration to these shores:
Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA) is being censured by almost everyone for his remarks about incoming Congressman Keith Ellison (D-MN) and Muslim immigration. “I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States,” Goode wrote in a letter to a constituent, “if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.” He also noted Ellison’s intention to be sworn in on the Qur’an, declaring that “if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.”
The article should be read in full -- it's highly revelatory of the attitudes of the Left and of Muslims toward the assertion of any American interest in maintaining its own laws and ways -- but the power shot is as follows:
All these criticisms share a common core assumption: that Goode has no reason to be concerned about Ellison, the Qur’an, or Muslims, and that any suspicion he does have is simply evidence of his bigotry and ignorance. In raising the specter of nativism, the Post was suggesting that America has been down this road before, and has nothing to show for it but shame. Suspicions about previous waves of immigrants amounted to nothing more than xenophobia, there was no Jewish conspiracy or Popish plot to subvert the United States Constitution, and concerns about Muslims and the Qur’an are just as hysterical and unfounded. Ellison, for his part, sounded a defiant note in an address in Dearborn, Michigan. To cries of “Allahu akbar” from a Muslim crowd, he declared: “On January 4, I will go swear an oath to uphold the Constitution of the United States. I’ll place my hand on the Quran.”Ellison said these words at a convention hosted by the Muslim American Society and the Islamic Circle of North America. According to a 2004 Chicago Tribune article, “A rare look at secretive Brotherhood in America,” the Muslim American Society was founded in 1993 as the United States arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, the Egyptian based terror group that has spawned both Hamas and Al-Qaeda. MAS members now maintain that the group has no ties to the Brotherhood, but there are indications that many in the group want to see the U.S. Constitution replaced by Islamic law. “We may all feel emotionally attached to the goal of an Islamic state” in America, said a speaker at a 2002 MAS conference, but “we mustn’t cross hurdles we can’t jump yet.”
The post is trailed by a long skein of comments, among which we find this dropping of all veils by "Naseem:"
Assalamau aLaikum all,Virgil probably thinks he is speaking for the good of the Amerikie...and in some ways he may be right...in others wrong.
That there will be more muslims in congress ....I have NO doubts. Infact I am waiting for the 1st burka + veil clad muslima becoming a member of congress. The president will hail this as a victory for freedom and a giant leap for "muslima-kind". He expects that she will bring about a paradigm shift...she will...but not of the type that the president expects.
Let's give this ficticious muslima a name for now...Fatima.
Fatima ofcourse will not want to employ men on her staff ...only other muslima..everyone wearing a burka and the freedom of a veil. As usual you peoples may have a laugh for a bit...but the Kafur just cannot imagine the changes...so let me enlighten you:
1) New security procedures will be required...men security officers will not be allowed to see their faces...only other kafur womens.
Wouldn't that be surprising....muslimas coming and going to congress for months...and the men security offices not even knowing what they look like.
2) Rooms for prayer.
3) All meat served in the canteen must be halal, cannot afford to make mistakes here...hell to pay otherwise.
4) New rules for female accompaniment...the husbands must be involved, they will leave their taxi jobs and chauffeur their womens around instead...ofcourse at 3 times thier old salary.
5) Most of all and far more importantly, I think it will the nature of new laws that Fatima and her supporters will try to pass that will fundamentally change America ....forever.
They will be thrown out to start with ...but as more and more Wuslims come on board...the pressure will start to tell....and smaller changes will become bigger ones.....you can see examples of this in other parts of the world.
The richer must pay more tax to fund the poorer muslim...who has 8 childrens...he cannot afford to feed, clothe and school them...so the state must help to stop them starving.
6) Another law that maybe tried is INCREASE immigration from muslim countries (rather than limit it) as a way to "makeup" for all the wrongs that the Amerike has done in the middle east.
7) Creeping Sharia will perhaps lead to allowing muslims to marry more than one woman.
8) Any shootings of innocent muslims will prompt Fatima and her congress supporters to pass new gun laws...to take away guns from the common folks....I can certainly see this happening....innocents muslims cannot be shot ....not in America, it's as simple as that.
9) Help shape foreign policy away from the Israel in order to secure peace in the ME...with all the implications that this carries.
In short Fatima will start an American revolution as no other....she will cut down the kufur at his knees where he stands with the power of the pen.
On the home front the kafur will lose further power over his wild slutty womens as more start to don the burka for fear of being branded a loser.
It is my opinion that the Mahdi will be wuslim in the Amerike congress ...and he will do his best to take the world from Kafur to Wuslim and possibly through to Muslim.
2007 will see this scenario a step closer, the old America is surely doomed.
Oh and before I forget Happy new year.
Isn't that just a bit different from the "religion of peace" image that's been promoted for Islam? It's surely not in line with the Constitution of the United States. Moreover, one cannot merely assume that this is a single intemperate hothead talking; courtesy of the esteemed Russell Wardlow comes this link to a long exchange between members of the Dallas Morning News editorial staff and a group of American Muslims and imams. Given the Muslims' adroitness at evading the questions posed them -- questions such as "would you like to see shari'a made the official law of the United States?" and "do you advocate the execution of homosexuals?" -- one must assume that their true convictions, which they strive so sedulously to conceal from us "infidels," are a match for "Naseem's:"
Rod Dreher: Do you believe that homosexuals convicted in a sharia court should be killed, or otherwise punished physically?Mohamed Elmougy: I don’t condone homosexuality. I have a lot of friends, a lot of people who work for me, just so you know. I don’t go kill them. But, you know, I don’t condone what they do outside of work, so long as it’s something not in front of me. So do I condone the sharia? We don’t apologize for our religion. If that is what our religion says, we certainly accept it open-heartedly.
Rod Dreher: But what do you think *should* be the authority. That’s what I’m asking. In an ideal situation, would you like to see sharia law be the basis for law in this country, and how would you reconcile that –Tod Robberson: Or put it another way. In this country, the law of man takes precedence over the law of God. In your opinion, is that the way it should be?
[garbled answer by heavily accented man, saying something to effect that the law is flexible from country to country, but there are some things that we don’t have the authority to change.]
[Ghassan – did not get his last name]: President George Bush feels that he is inspired by God, and based on that he makes his policies. He made that known to us. [crosstalk] President Bush told us that law made by man is not good enough law, that we should be following God’s law.
Rod Dreher: Just describe to me your view, the Islamic view, of sharia. What role should sharia play in this society?Mohamed Elmougy: [garbled] I don’t sit up all night thinking what the role of sharia needs to be. All I can tell you is that we as American Muslims, living in a non-Muslim country, are ordered to follow the rules of the country that we live in, no matter how much we agree or disagree with. So do I go after you if you’re homosexual, to try to kill you today? No. We haven’t seen that.
So I think to go focus on that and to leave all the other good things that American Muslims are part of, and that the religion is talking about, and only focus on things that to you sound or feel strange is just not the correct approach. Forget paranoid, it’s just not the correct approach. And it does nothing, as I said, but alienate our children from the society that they’re going to be living in, and die in.
Speaking of which, your Curmudgeon exhorts you to pay particular attention to item #8 in "Naseem's" list:
8) Any shootings of innocent muslims will prompt Fatima and her congress supporters to pass new gun laws...to take away guns from the common folks....I can certainly see this happening....innocents muslims cannot be shot ....not in America, it's as simple as that.
Which brings us to the "married" topic of "gun control."
This morning, the esteemed Kevin Bakerpresents us with an extended exercise in illogic from John Kelly, an assistant professor of orthopedic surgery:
With every gunshot-related death I read about or discover on TV, there always seems to be a continual lament: This violence and senseless killing must stop. With the recent death of Philadelphia Police Officer Gary Skerski, the commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the slaying of Officer Daniel Faulkner, and the recent Springfield High School tragedy, the public outcry against gun violence seems to have reached its zenith.Alas, nothing has changed. Yet one blatant truth remains: There are too many guns.
A wounded culture simply does not need more weapons to settle its conflicts. Until this truth is embraced and conquered, the carnage will continue.
It's usual for anti-gunners to display a complete lack of knowledge about both the history of armed societies and the fates of disarmed ones. (It's even more usual for them to deny that the contemporary carnage currently being suffered by Britain and Australia might have something to do with "gun control.") Dr. Kelly may possess such knowledge, but he certainly hasn't displayed it in the editorial cited here. He merely leaps to his conclusion -- whatever violence our nation suffers is due to the availability of guns -- in a fine demonstration of the logical fallacy called "affirming the consequent."
Kevin poses the good doctor a question he will never answer:
Can you demonstrate just one time, one place, throughout all of human history, where restricting the access of handheld weapons to the average person made them safer?
But in all places and times, restricting private citizens' access to weapons has made them less able to defend themselves, and thus more fearful of threats real or imagined, and thus more dependent on the State to defend them...and thus more vulnerable to the oppressions of the State.
As has been said many times before, "gun control" is not about guns but about control: control of the sovereign citizen, aimed at reducing him to a helpless subject of an unopposable State. It has nothing to do with the superiority of State power as a defensive force. In point of fact, the State cannot and will not defend you from predation; at most it will step in after you've been violated and pursue those who presumed to arrogate its privileges. Indeed, there have been state and federal court decisions to the effect that no level of government is obligated to defend anyone with its police powers -- that whatever defensive actions the State's police might undertake are out of the generosity of its masters.
Every tyranny in history has made disarming the people its first priority. Don't take your Curmudgeon's word for it; familiarize yourself with the history of the tyrannies of the Twentieth Century and decide for yourself. The most "successful" tyrants have simultaneously promoted massive fear among the disarmed: fear of Jews; fear of "counterrevolutionaries;" fear of "imperialists;" fear of external enemies they declined to name. And once the people had been shorn of their weapons, who remained but the Maximum Leader to "protect" them all?
Threats to Americans' well-being, our freedoms, and our accustomed ways are multiplying all around us. Our unease, compounded from weaponlessness and uncertainty, grows in proportion. Scant wonder that so many are so angry about federal inaction over border control, the nonexistent tracking of foreign visitors, the vacillations and switchbacks in our policies toward Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, and North Korea, and our seeming flaccidity toward Muslim propaganda against us. We are being made to fear outcomes that seem ever more likely with the passage of time.
Worst of all aspects of these fears is that we know, at some level, that the ultimate confrontations with the things we fear cannot be averted -- and that those burdens will not be borne by the forces of the State, but by us private persons whom the State has striven to render defenseless. For the threats of our time are diffuse threats, potentially omnipresent, modulated by individuals and small groups. That's the salient property of both "gradualist oppression" and "low-intensity warfare."
A diffuse threat can only be met with a diffuse defense: a people in arms.
To the extent that our governments seek to deny us the right to arm ourselves, they are lawless and criminal organizations: they deny the Second Amendment to the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the Land. Thus, we live under at least two threats: one internal, from the would-be oppressors in our political class, and one external, from those such as "Naseem" whose creed commands them to convert, subjugate, or destroy us. Both those threats are burgeoning as we speak.
Your Curmudgeon exhorts you all:
- Learn all you can about Islam. Read the Qur'an, and at least one of the authoritative hadith. Make use of the learning of Robert Spencer, Dainel Pipes, Bat Ye'or, and Steven Emerson. Familiarize yourselves with the travails of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Wafa Sultan, and other apostates from Islam. Familiarize yourselves with the lives of Muslims in Islamic states, and with the sufferings of non-Muslims in lands such as Pakistan and the Philippines where Muslims are a militant force. Don't allow the just-another-harmless-Abrahamic-faith propaganda to condition you to inertia.
- Arm yourselves as heavily as you can. If yours is a right-to-carry state, get a concealed-carry permit and buy a handgun. No matter where you live, stock at least one long arm for every adult member of your household. Instruct your children in firearms discipline, and invite them along when you go to the range. Try to interest your neighbors as well; shooting sports are a way to build both the sense of community and the sense of obligation to community defense. And make sure everyone you know is familiar with the citizen's obligation, as a militiaman, to defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.
The imperative of our age is threefold:
- Make yourself knowledgeable about the threats that surround you.
- Learn to distinguish among observable facts, propaganda, and wishful thinking -- especially your own wishful thinking.
- Be ready.
May God forever guard and guide these United States of America.
Comments
I think “Naseem” was really an opponent of Islam suggesting what an Islamic legislature would do. Too many of his/her statements are comical or borderline humorous for me to think it’s a serious post by a Muslim. This is not to argue with your warnings about Islam.
And pardon me for being off-topic, but I wish you and your family would get the hell out of NYC.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/28/2006 at 04:51 PMBelieve me, More, I wish I could relocate just as ardently as you wish that I would. But our trades are locked to Long Island; there’s nowhere else either I or the C.S.O. can earn a living. If we survive the next eight years, at which point it will be time for us both to retire, I think we’ll probably move up into the northern Hudson Valley, where I grew up. Not much to terrorize up there apart from trees and dairy farms. But for now, cruel economic need forces us to stay in the Danger Zone.
Posted by Francis W. Porretto on 12/28/2006 at 05:07 PMThough the power of the State flows from fear, as you well illustrate here the fear, one layer deeper, is often a product of ignorance.
A wonderful essay, with which you have done your part to reduce this ignorance. Now I’m off to do mine.
P.S. I recommend that if we’re all still in one piece in eight or so years you check out my part of the country, where we have no state income tax and there are lots of free places for target practice. I find the high desert quite beautiful, though of course you and your family might not. But you all are invited anytime to have a look.
Posted by Robert on 12/28/2006 at 07:10 PMExcellent. Thanks.
Posted by Col. Bunny on 12/28/2006 at 10:00 PMWhat do you call what the Supreme Court’s been up to for almost as long as we’ve had one (this document is great, but you can’t just do what some document tells you to do, you need black robed weirdos to interpret it for you in the form of reams of tortured logic and bloated latinate rationalizations of why previous violations of the terms of the document are actually OK) if not a Popish plot?
Posted by Dave Munger on 12/29/2006 at 12:01 AMHere is what a commentor to Rod Dreher’s posting of the transcript had to say:
“.....if people are going to die as they did on 9/11/2001, then that is what we, an open and free society, must be willing to accept as part of the price of our free and open life.
Franklin Evans | Homepage | 12.27.06 - 9:20 pm | #I take great and extreme exception to this. He, Franklin, is willing to accept random murders of innocents by a fifth column so that HE can live in a free and open society, and is of the opinion that we must also accept this—so that he can live in a free and open society.
I don’t. Free, yes. Open, no. We’ve closed immigration in this country before without injury and we need to do so again.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/29/2006 at 12:47 AMA wonderful post. Thanks.
Posted by Keith on 12/30/2006 at 12:14 AMI’m with you, and I’m armed.
Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) on 12/30/2006 at 09:38 PM
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