Culture

Stream: Brussels Attack And The Ironies Of Muslim Assimilation

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Today’s post is at the Stream: The Brussels Attack And The Ironies Of Muslim Assimilation.

Ironies abound in the latest terrorist attack. Consider this propaganda video in which the organization Visit Brussels on 18 January assures the world that Belgium is a terrific place to visit. As part of a PR campaign, conspicuous phones were set up around the world in which world strangers might call Belgian strangers. At just before the one minute mark is heard this conversation from a distant caller to a Brussels resident.

“Is it safe for this moment?”

“Of course it’s safe, it’s very safe.”

Stick around, because at about 1:10m is heard this from another distant stranger:

“I read in—on—the Internet that it’s dangerous to visit your city.”

“Well actually it’s the media that’s made a whole fuss about it, but nothing is happening.”

The press says that, but they also say that the attacks are “caused” by (a) Islamaphobia, and (b) Muslims failing to assimilate to Western secular culture. On these points, celebrated writer Max Boot burst out of the gate, and even before the blood began to congeal on the pavement, tweeted, “Problem in EU is failure to assimilate Muslim immigrants. US has done better job, but Trump attacks alienate Muslims & threaten security.”…

Because, believe it or not, money, nihilism, and the abandonment of human nature aren’t the ultimate goals of many people. Religious people are immune to the virus. Secularists don’t comprehend this because they never fully accept religious people believe what they’re saying, perhaps because—another irony—secularists never truly believe anything (hence nihilism). Can you imagine the consternation of the frustrated terrorist after an attack? “I said I hated them, but they didn’t believe me! What more evidence do they want?!”…

See the pulse-pounding rest there.

Bonus! The Editors at Stream wisely cut out the final two paragraphs on global warming, a subject which I have ostensibly given up for Lent. But for you, dear readers, a sneak peek.

It’s also worth noting that global-warming-of-doom, since it hasn’t yet arrived (it’ll be here any day now), could not have been responsible for these attacks. President Obama, though, as was pointed out the day before the Brussels attack says he’s “more worried about climate change than ISIS”.

I believe him. I mean, I don’t believe global warming is any kind of threat, or indeed even a minor concern, but I fully believe Mr Obama does not see ISIS as a threat. Well, some people are unable to learn. and it would be cruel to hold his impediment against him given he’s on his way out.

Categories: Culture

35 replies »

  1. The Mammonist virus takes three or four generations to work through a culture sufficiently so that it become solely self-destructive, maybe more for the more stubbornly immune populations. We don’t have that time…

  2. And not only do they hate the Europeans they despise them as cowards. The only thing a bully respects is strength. And the Europeans have feminized themselves to a degree that leaves them vulnerable to force.

    This mass immigration or hijra, is the result, in large measure, of the US withdrawal from Iraq. Outwardly sympathetic to Paris and Brussels, Obama secretly thinks, “Well, they deserve it…because of their imperial past.”

  3. secularists never truly believe anything

    “Those who stand for nothing fall for anything.”
    -Alexander Hamilton

  4. “Saying the cause of terrorism is “Islamophobia” foolishly does not credit Muslims with independent thought.” That is the policy of the left—no one can have independent thought and all are victims of someone/something. You can’t be a leftist without non-thinking victims. It’s a requirement.

    It’s not “Islamophobia”—phobias are irrational fears. Fear of people who blow others to bits without warning is NOT a phobia.

    Actually, global warming causes everything (including logically contradictory things, making it more omnipotent than God) and Obama really isn’t worried about anything, he’s busy playing golf and ignoring Rome burning. It’s who he is.

    Gary: Good point. The strong showing began in the sixties and waned a bit before taking over with a vengeance in the last two or three decades.

  5. There is a problem inherent within Islam that politicians and media are not ready to discuss or admit. There is only Trump for the US and other considered far right politicians in Europe who are prepared to tackle the issue. When Trump refers to “whatever the problem is, and there is a problem” he is hinting at the subject. If it takes Trump to say what needs to be said in such an outrageous way that other mealy mouthed politicians may come forward and pretend to offer reasonable argument on the same subject then that’s what it takes. None of the others are man enough. Too busy looking sanctimonious.

    They are all too scared of being called racist. Trump is saying what many people are thinking about this very topic. The US does not have a pressing problem in the way that Europe does because it is geographically protected. What Trump says and does has a huge impact around the world, however and because some think he’s unseemly and read hitler longings in him people might become scared of him and let the real menace in. That’s irony.

  6. The Koran directs Muslims to hate unbelievers. Unbelievers are to be killed, conquered or converted, whichever occurs first.The Koran contains over a hundred verses calling for violence against unbelievers. Is this too difficult to understand?

  7. “What Trump says and does has a huge impact around the world, however and because some think he’s unseemly and read hitler longings in him people might become scared of him and let the real menace in. That’s irony.”

    Well said, Joy, well said.

  8. You can’t ‘assimilate’ Muslims because, as Watt tells us, they are hypnotized. And just as the trance is (usually) triggered by a visual device, so too it is often broken by the same means. Think back to ‘The Manchurian Candidate’ and the Queen of Diamonds. In this case, the only one who can break the spell is the Queen of Hearts. The Beautiful Lady is the only one strong enough to do this.

  9. Isn’t it time to reconsidered support for hostile interventions in their countries?

    When US drones collateralized innocent folks over there, we shrugged. When US interventions unleashed ISIS and mass migrations, silence. When Bush lied, justification.

    One thing to consider before ignoring or refuting the above: who benefits from sanctions, embargoes, interventions, assassinations, and the stain of blood? If you believe you are a beneficiary, you are owned by the state. And your only hope is a more oppressive state — the antithesis of the liberty you obviously fear.

    Note: thanks to our interventions, there are fewer Christians in the Levant since Paul began his journeys.

  10. Religion is always problematic, all religion. But as it does not really address real life, it can only have so much affect on it. This revolutionary period in the Middle East will eventually play out and things will get better over there. We in the West can help, if we have all our best interests at heart, but we can’t do this for them, and insulting their religion and culture is just counter-productive, and stupidly hypocritical. Just 75 years ago, the Christian West was in the middle of massacring millions of each other and others, lest we forget and come to believe we are somehow superior people.

    JMJ

  11. To the issue above, why do WE believe we can have a colonial empire without blood and blowback? Are we not England with the Levant our India? Did the stiffened bayonet work there? Has it worked anywhere?

    So, let’s cower in fear before the beast unleashed by the state and give the state what it wants: our liberties.

  12. And the day of the attacks, President Obama essentially said, Just say NO to terrorists…because it worked so well against drugs. [Puts hands over ears and sings la la la la la la…]

  13. Steve,

    And the neocons said, “Let’s put another boot on their necks. It’s worked well for us before.”

    I’m reminded of some maxim about the past and the guarantee to relive it.

  14. Jim, no, not remotely. The middle east is not a US colony and that’s just the start. Britain set India up as the country it is today. Much of it’s infrastructure remains and the Indian people are not resentful of the British. It’s the second and third generation of those who left India and were brought up in other countries who have brainwashed attitudes. Many of them have never been to India and believe the propaganda.

    It is quite wrong to blame the US for ISIS or ISIL or Islamism itself anywhere. Islamism is a hydra.
    Even if mistakes have been made by intervension, it is to believe the islamists to adopt this reasoning.

    There is an inherently unstable component within Islam. Until this is addressed nothing will change but the opposition fighting it.

    …and to JMJ This has been playing out for nearly two thousand years. It’s not about to change.

    I have heard people argue so vociferously for both leaving well alone and not.. It’s another complex system requiring another crystal ball. Where are the real historians?

    Defend western borders, each and every one from within it’s own borders.
    If nations want to remain for future generations as non muslim countries they must wake up.
    The US has time but I fear a proportion thinks it will just happen to everybody else, somewhere else. So how long do you wait until you take a meaningful hard line against invasion and colonisation because that’s what is happening under a different guise.

  15. Jim,

    Your maxim is true in either case. At least my example actually happened yours is made of straw.

  16. Jim Fedako: If you are blind to reality, who/what are you owned by? Were you making a reference to conspiracy theory with the “boot on their necks”?

    JMJ: Never happen. Things will never get better in that region. Historically, there has always been war in this region. No reason to believe that would change, unless you believe in miracles. (It would also be a miracle, of course, if you understood that the behaviour of people in the past has nothing to do with today. It’s over and done and using it as justification for bad behaviour is recipe for eternally bad behaviour. The war in the past never ends—we see that in race relations, etc. If you really want peace, stop using the past to justify the present. Stop slamming the Christian religion too—you just said that it was counter-productive and stupidly hypocritical. Atheists have committed full-scale murder and plundering too. They are no better than the religious people.)

    Steve E: Very good! It did work so well for the drug war, didn’t it?

    It is fascinating that people seem to sincerely believe “if we just left these countries alone nothing bad would happen”. I believe that’s how all great dictators rose to power—knocking off small countries while the world stood by and hoped something would happen and the evil plunderer would just wake up and love everyone one day. With the Muslim invaders, the ridiculous notion that appeasement will work is as insane as the battered wife’s belief that if she were just perfect enough her husband wouldn’t hit her. As I have said before, under the current treatment of Muslims by governments, we MUST now blame the wife for being imperfect and it’s her fault he’s hitting her. Otherwise, why do people claim that if the US/Europe would just behave properly, the Muslims would love us? It’s ironic that those who championed telling battered wives and abused children it wasn’t their fault are now clearly tellling them it is their fault. The abuser would not abuse if it weren’t for the other person causing them to do so. Ironic, isn’t it?

  17. Joy,

    What would you advocate if they were in our country? Oh, wait … they are here and you justify advocating retaliation. But you cannot see that they feel the exact same — and we started this whole mess, not them.

    Is this blindness another example of US exceptionalism?

    Two questions: One, how many modern Western states were overthrown by them?

    You can guess my second, but I’ll ask anyway: How many of their states were overthrown by Western countries?

    The winner in all this is the state — not you or me.

  18. Just 75 years ago, the Christian West was in the middle of massacring millions of each other

    How does this square with the claim that the West has been growing ever more Secular since the Renaissance, or ever since the Age of Reason? WW2 was not fought over eschatological reasons, or points of theology.
    ++++
    American “colonialism” does not explain the first and second Sieges of Vienna (1529, 1683), the Sack of Rome in AD 846. The destruction of the kingdom of Dongala in 1276 or the Fulani Jihad of Osman dan Fodio (1804-1810). The conquest of Sicily (827-902) or Hispania (711-718). The battle of Manzikert or the Talas River. Or… The problem, as Hilaire Belloc once wrote, is that we are too overly influenced in our thinking by the most recent events.

    To which we might add, an Americo-centric thinking. It’s always all about us. But it might actually be, as one writer commented after 9/11 that we are simply stage props in someone else’s psychodrama.
    +++++
    According to Mohammed, Jews and Christians are not unbelievers. Pagans, Buddhists, Hindus, Zoroastrians, atheists, et al. are unbelievers. Jihad against unbelievers is always legitimate; but jihad against People of the Book is only permitted when they oppress or oppose Islam. Of course, like many late moderns, muslims too are into personal interpretations, and they have no popes or ecumenical councils to tell them they are wrong.
    +++++
    The ex-head of the CIA had a good point when he said that the US is better at assimilating than Europe is. That’s because, as Chesterton noted long ago, the US is founded on a creed, and as long as you subscribe to that creed there can be a place for you, no matter what nation you are. (But there may be some jostling and shoving at first.) The European countries however are nation-states. That is, they are built primarily around nations, language groups. It is hard for an immigrant to fit in. There are people in the Alsace who still speak German to this day. There are Bretons who still reject the rule of France, and Basques who deny the legitimacy of Spain. In Hero’s Square in Budapest is a stauary group dedicated to the seven tribal chiefs who led the Magyars to the Alföld, the only monument I know of dedicated to a barbarian horde. It is difficult to imagine an Algerian moving into France getting a patriotic tear in his eye as he hears of Charles Martel turning back the Saracen army at Tours. Or a Syrian in Hungary contemplating the virtues of nomadic steppe nomads. In the US, otoh, it is the principles behind Plymouth Rock or Valley Forge, not the nationalities of the players that matter most.

    That is why (the CIA dude said) we may have radicalized individuals here, but not radicalized communities. What we ought to avoid is radicalizing communities the way the British did in Ireland after the 1798 uprising, when they began treating all Irish as possible Fenians and thereby created the very thing they feared. (The managed much the same after the Easter Rising of 1916. The IRA was roundly booed by the people of Dublin when they were led away, but after the round of executions, including those of innocent bystanders, the people lined up behind them in the revolution that followed.)

  19. Steve,

    My example is reality. Did you skip the article by Briggs and miss recent news?

  20. Briggs,

    That comic is silly and naive. Do you really believe a humanitarian dividend was reaped by Western interventions in the Levant going back to the discovery of oil? Do you really believe the basis of Western interventions are for anything other than Great Games geopolitics and oil?

    Really!?!

  21. Greetings Briggs from Blighty.
    Your Stream article supposes “United States have done a marginally better job?”.
    I’d answer “9/11” and that, casualty wise, the USA is in the lead, with Brits 2nd – but only if we ignore the unimportant (sic – although never explicitly stated) Middle Eastern body pile. Bush, Blair, et all.
    I think the article by Edward Fesser that you quoted a while ago has it – Islam is not compatible with “liberal western democracy” (and liberal western democracy not compatible with Christianity, although the former has vanquished the latter, so the latter is not a problem to it).
    We (meaning the media, etc.) are horrified when the world suddenly is not how we’d like to believe it is, but starts to be like it has been through all history. Look at the doings between Byzantium and the Turk. Or, this week in history: “I find nothing wrong in this man – I’ll have him flogged and release him”. And then turned him over to the mob.
    Or much of the 20th Century. Different mind set.
    But to say anything too far from the “correct” line is now (at least in the EU) illegal “HATE SPEAK”.
    Happy Easter.

  22. Thanks to Joy who points out that India was created as a country as it is now by the British. it was a peninsular with warring states always at enmity.
    India is in the Commonwealth. Indians immigrate to Britain and to other Commonwealth countries. There is much contact between these countries, especially sporting contacts. Interminable cricket matches take up much TV time. in all these countries
    Not everyone in the Middle East hates the British either.

    Remember that Palestine was a British Protectorate after World War II ?
    Iraq having been on the Nazi side. Or did U.S history books leave that out?
    Older Palestinians are still quite happy to talk to British people they meet .They feel part of the Commonwealth
    Younger people are more likely to have been educated in the U.S. and have imbibed your prejudices.
    The young men of ISIS want a Caliphate , a State , with themselves as emirs running the state. It’s a political movement and they use Islam as a weapon. Allah is just a name to be conjured with and Islam is an ideology to be enforced. but the driving force is tyrannical power as it was in the Caliphates of the past.

  23. M E —

    What’s your point? The British, US, and other western powers drew lines all over the globe. Ever hear of the Sykes Picot agreement. Ever consider the seemingly endless wars throughout the world that are a direct result of British colonialism.The bloody Indo-Pakistan wars come to mind.

    ‘Cause there ain’t no way those peoples could have entered modern society without the prick of a bayonet from the West. So many humanitarian wars with the resulting millions of deaths — just a few eggs for the omelet, I suppose.

    Also, half of Europe was associated with the Axis as well. Why did you leave out Finland?

    Why are you ignoring this bit of history: The British and their cohorts, the Soviets, staged another Partition of Poland, so to speak, when they joined forces for an undeclared surprise attack on Iran in 1941 (remember, the West abhor both communism and sneak attacks), all for oil.

    And let’s not ignore the subsequent US-led coups.

    It’s all a Great Game for the governments of Europe and the US, played on fields all over the Middle East and South and Southwest Asia, justified by folks who cheer their nation’s interventions. Manifest Destiny with the occasional blowback, followed by cries for the state to keep us safe, all at the expense of our liberties.

    Is this really what you want?

  24. “…and to JMJ This has been playing out for nearly two thousand years. It’s not about to change.”

    No, Joy, it hasn’t. It’s convenient, prophetic-sounding I suppose, to throw your hands and say something so ridiculously simplistic, but it has no merit. That part of the world has not always and perpetually been in such a state. It has been over the past 100 years or so, since the fall of the last great Middle Eastern power, the Ottomans, and the rise of oil and the sheiks, that things have gotten particularly bad. And the Western and Russian meddling well predates that, and did no good for people there either. You should read about it. You don’t need a historian to give you some version of that you would like.

    JMJ

  25. YOS,
    All questions can be handwaved away if we insist on going back centuries. Why did Hitler attack France in 1940? Why, didn’t Napolean attack Germany in 1803 (or 1804)?

    You (conveniently) omit a great deal of recent history, history in which Western countries are implicated in destablizing Middle East countries, esp those unfriendly to the Saudis.Libya, Egypt (almost), Syria and Iraq, of course. Not to forget Afganistan where the govt of Najbulluh was the most secular and progressive govt that country had.

    And we must not forget that all these ventures have been bipartisan. Libya and Syria unite George Bush and Hillary Clinton wings of Republicans and Democrats.

  26. YOS,
    “1the US is founded on a creed”
    A myth beloved of the globalists and a myth about to be decisively rejected by the actual Americans themselves.

  27. JMJ:

    Religion is always problematic, all religion. But as it does not really address real life, it can only have so much affect on it. This revolutionary period in the Middle East will eventually play out and things will get better over there.

    JMJ on JMJ:

    It’s convenient, prophetic-sounding I suppose, to throw your hands and say something so ridiculously simplistic, but it has no merit.

  28. JMJ, Where are all the real historians?
    If you think history is as easy as picking up a book and believing what you read you are the one thinking simplistically. For history I rely on the expert witness. If I thought something was important enough and disbelieved what was being said I’d look for the source. This was, with science ,(not now I don’t think) but history is very different.
    Your argument to leave well alone, I agree. Why? because It’s not about to change. You wishfully hope it will. Possibly to justify doing nothing. I don’t think we need justification to do nothing. We’re dammed if we do and dammed if we don’t. The damming by the way never has a best before date.

    It is absolutely true that fighting in the Middle East has been going on for nearly two thousand years. (as long as Islam has existed) Muslims have been fighting since the very beginning of the existence of Islam. It was the success of the battles which handed so much credibility to the faith. (65 successful consecutive battles) It is harping back to these times with the idea of a Caliphate which drives the Jihad.

  29. Jim, “… they are here and you justify advocating retaliation.”
    That’s vague.
    Sovereign Western countries do not have to seek approval to justify deportation of illegal immigrants; punishment of criminals and terrorist through the normal process. If a terrorist is caught in the act deadly force is justified without a blink.

    “and we started this whole mess, not them.”
    When do you want to start?
    “Is this blindness another example of US exceptionalism? I doubt it.

    “Two questions: One, how many modern Western states were overthrown by them?”
    How many EU members are there? That’s how many are being overthrown right now.

    “The winner in all this is the state — not you or me.”
    Which state? If the states of the West defend themselves like they mean it then everyone inside it’s borders gains security from barbarians. Those who don’t recognise this are, well I, naive.

  30. YOS,
    “The ex-head of the CIA had a good point when he said that the US is better at assimilating than Europe is. That’s because, as Chesterton noted long ago, the US is founded on a creed, “
    I’m afraid he was giving out brownie points without
    Considering geography, location and land mass.
    However, if the US is so good at it, you can have ours.

  31. “The ex-head of the CIA had a good point when he said that the US is better at assimilating than Europe is.”

    So what’s the excuse for Blacks?

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