Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the head of anti-terrorism efforts within France, does not tolerate -- nor need he -- the kind of things that the British have permitted. The French, though they have the disadvantage of idiotically allowing in so many Muslims, nonetheless have a few advantages when it comes to listening in and monitoring. Not everyone who fled North Africa was an Arab or a Muslim. There are among the pieds noirs some who knew some Arabic. Arabic-speaking Jews, and Berbers of a secular bent, hardly wishing to have Arabs and Islma imposed on France, the country in which they now live, are all pools of talent from which to draw.
Compare the level of the intelligence of our intelligence agents with what the French possess. Think, for example, of that simpleton Michael Scheuer, who was actually put in charge of something called the "Bin Laden" desk, and who knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about Islam, and what's more, appears to be touched by the same pathological view of "Jewish power" which, by now, we all recognize not as something merely unpleasant, or deplorale, but nowadays, as in the 1930s, given the nature of the enemy, renders Scheuer and others like him positive security risks.
The French media's coverage of the Middle East is intolerable, but that does not mean, among those casting a beady eye on domestic Muslims, there is any illusion that this is merely a matter of "Palestine" or that by throwing Israel to the wolves (i.e., giving the Arabs and Muslims what they want in their Lesser Jihad) that the Greataer Jihad against all Infidels will cease, or do anything but display a triumphalism and determination.
But the French still think that the intervention in Iraq was "pire qu'un crime" -- worse than a crime, it was a mistake, in the phrase of Talleyrand (the same Talleyrand who was booed in New York, incidentally, by American supporters of the Revolution -- see the "Travels of Moreau de St.-Remy"). As to the original intervention, one can still maintain that that was rational and was worth it. But as to the rest of it, the sticking around for what no one could describe as even a reasonable facsimile of "democracy" but rather ethnic and sectarian power-seizing at its most obviuos - there the French, it is clear, have a point. We should put down the silly Infidel Man's Burden, cease to watch America Being Held Hostage In Ira...q, and get on with the thousand things that could be done, that make sense to have done, to contain Islam, to diminish the power of Muslims, and the presence of Muslims, behind enemy lines (not too strong a way to describe the Lands of the Infidels, for those who take just a moment out of their busy Washington schedules, photo-ops, reading of 2-page summaries of the world every morning, to read Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, even in abridged form).
Of course the American government has learned a lesson that it will not admit too -- it knows it must never again try to refashion a Muslim country by sending large numbers of troops, for by now 425,000 Americans in the regular military, in the Reserves, and in the National Guard have served in the Iraq theatre and not all of them are mindless, a good many can compare the Iraqi reality with what the Adminstration and some -- but not all -- of the dutiful generals insist, in hallucinatory fashion, is that reality.
And that is a lesson that France, possibly for all the wrong motives, understands. The way to deal with Islam is to recognize what Islam is all about, recognize the immutability of the doctrines, recognize that the only "moderate" Muslims one can really rely on not to relapse into "immoderate" Islam, or to be true "moderates" in any useful sense, are those who are not really Muslims at all, but rather what I continue to call "Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims. In other words, those who essentially do not believe in Islam at all, but are too afraid, or too wary of offending family members, or even as a career move (one can do well as a "good Muslim" but outright apostates tend not to be given the hearing, the respect, and the financial support that "good Muslims" busily "reforming" Islam find so available.
The islamization of Europe, and not who wins or loses in Iraq, where the war is not between the "freedom-loving Iraqis" (good god) and the "terrorists" but, in the main, between the Sunnis and Shi'a -- a fight for power, for who rules over whom, for what Lenin called Kto Kovo ("Who -- (does it to) -- Whom?"
Europeans are now coming out of a deep dream of peace. There is no peace. They have done something tremendously stupid, and more than stupid, by allowing in people who bear in their mental luggage something inimical to Western ways, who are hostile to Western political and social understandings, and who -- save for a few who will leave Islam altogether -- cannot be integrated. These peopole, now close to 20 million, also reproduce at rates three to four times higher than the indigenous Infidels. The mathematics of this, and the misery of this, and the menace of this, is clear.
Let Iraq be Iraq -- that is, let "Iraq" the pseudo-nation devolve into, dissolve into, the three vilayets put together by Sir Percy Cox back in 1920. The last 80 years of the "nation" of Iraq under Sunni rule did nothing to diminish, and everything to increase, the Shi'a resentment and hatred of Sunnis, and the Kurdish resentment and hatred of Arabs.
Whenever our President prates about "democracy" and "freedom-loving" people in Iraq, whenever he avoids carefully the subject of Islam which he still sees as through a beer glass darkly, whenever he or his crazed claque (for whom he can do no wrong, he must be right, if for no other reason -- and there now is no other reason -- that Cindy Sheehan is a sinister simpleton, and so are all those who are like her. And so they are -- but so what? Stalin was sinister, and no simpleton, and we worked to defeat Hitler with him, and it might have appeared to the Man from Mars that we were on the same side. But we weren't.
The E.U. bureaucracy is as hopelessly philo-islamic, anti-American, and anti-Israel as the U.N. and should simply be ignored. But the days of Javier Solana, Chris Patten, and so on are numbered. The E.U. has been permanentlly weakened as an institution, and Muslim attacks within Europe have made its bureaucrats even more distasteful to European publics, more unrepresentative, than they were before -- for they are the complete Eurabians.
By removing ourselves from Iraq, and ceasing to claim that "democracy" will bring a better outcome for Infidels. We can see already that if the Americans remain to keep Iraq together, and to keep an Iraqi state together, it will perforce be much more Muslim than it was before. Is this what the Administration wants? Well, if it thinks that the problem is not Islam, if it continues to pretend otherwise, because it lacks the wit to discuss the problem in terms that could be plausibly presented (the words "Jihad" and "Anti-Jihad" scream out for use; so do such phrases as "we are not against Islam, but only against those who apparently believe in the Jihad to force their own beliefs on the rest of the world, which of course the vast and overwhelming majority of law-abiding Muslims do not" (this is nonsense, and false, but useful nonsense, useful falsity).
A little reconciliation with Europe needs to take place. But the Administration for all of its tough-guy rhetoric, is timid about Islam, afraid of offending Muslims, afraid to recognize that a belief-system is a permanent menace, and therefore keeps clutching at the straw of "democracy" in Iraq, and in the process of herding those Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurdish cats, shows us, shows the Europeans, that some in this Administration, despite their boots and spurs and swaggering walk, are All Hat, and No Cattle.
The French are right
Hugh Fitgzgerald of Jihad Watch, comments on the French approach to Islam versus the American approach.
France's policies were never quite as intolerable as depicted. Chirac is a crook, DdeV a preener, a poseur, and a poetaster. Nicholas Sarkozy, the unbeatable future president, has his embarrassments with a wayward wife, but when it comes to Islam, he is somewhat less foolable that the others. He left Tariq Ramadan exposed and humiliated on television, every taqiyya-fiber shredded. But Sarkozy also still believes that "integration" of Muslims is the key, failing to comprehend, not allowing himself to comprehend, that "integration" is not the key, and above all, not the kind of "integration" that will make Muslims better able to manipulate the minds of Infidels, which the kind of knowledge of language and moeurs can do -- akin to what was taught in those KGB spy villages.
Jean-Louis Bruguiere, the head of anti-terrorism efforts within France, does not tolerate -- nor need he -- the kind of things that the British have permitted. The French, though they have the disadvantage of idiotically allowing in so many Muslims, nonetheless have a few advantages when it comes to listening in and monitoring. Not everyone who fled North Africa was an Arab or a Muslim. There are among the pieds noirs some who knew some Arabic. Arabic-speaking Jews, and Berbers of a secular bent, hardly wishing to have Arabs and Islma imposed on France, the country in which they now live, are all pools of talent from which to draw.
Compare the level of the intelligence of our intelligence agents with what the French possess. Think, for example, of that simpleton Michael Scheuer, who was actually put in charge of something called the "Bin Laden" desk, and who knows nothing, absolutely nothing, about Islam, and what's more, appears to be touched by the same pathological view of "Jewish power" which, by now, we all recognize not as something merely unpleasant, or deplorale, but nowadays, as in the 1930s, given the nature of the enemy, renders Scheuer and others like him positive security risks.
The French media's coverage of the Middle East is intolerable, but that does not mean, among those casting a beady eye on domestic Muslims, there is any illusion that this is merely a matter of "Palestine" or that by throwing Israel to the wolves (i.e., giving the Arabs and Muslims what they want in their Lesser Jihad) that the Greataer Jihad against all Infidels will cease, or do anything but display a triumphalism and determination.
But the French still think that the intervention in Iraq was "pire qu'un crime" -- worse than a crime, it was a mistake, in the phrase of Talleyrand (the same Talleyrand who was booed in New York, incidentally, by American supporters of the Revolution -- see the "Travels of Moreau de St.-Remy"). As to the original intervention, one can still maintain that that was rational and was worth it. But as to the rest of it, the sticking around for what no one could describe as even a reasonable facsimile of "democracy" but rather ethnic and sectarian power-seizing at its most obviuos - there the French, it is clear, have a point. We should put down the silly Infidel Man's Burden, cease to watch America Being Held Hostage In Ira...q, and get on with the thousand things that could be done, that make sense to have done, to contain Islam, to diminish the power of Muslims, and the presence of Muslims, behind enemy lines (not too strong a way to describe the Lands of the Infidels, for those who take just a moment out of their busy Washington schedules, photo-ops, reading of 2-page summaries of the world every morning, to read Qur'an, Hadith, and Sira, even in abridged form).
Of course the American government has learned a lesson that it will not admit too -- it knows it must never again try to refashion a Muslim country by sending large numbers of troops, for by now 425,000 Americans in the regular military, in the Reserves, and in the National Guard have served in the Iraq theatre and not all of them are mindless, a good many can compare the Iraqi reality with what the Adminstration and some -- but not all -- of the dutiful generals insist, in hallucinatory fashion, is that reality.
And that is a lesson that France, possibly for all the wrong motives, understands. The way to deal with Islam is to recognize what Islam is all about, recognize the immutability of the doctrines, recognize that the only "moderate" Muslims one can really rely on not to relapse into "immoderate" Islam, or to be true "moderates" in any useful sense, are those who are not really Muslims at all, but rather what I continue to call "Muslims-for-identification-purposes-only" Muslims. In other words, those who essentially do not believe in Islam at all, but are too afraid, or too wary of offending family members, or even as a career move (one can do well as a "good Muslim" but outright apostates tend not to be given the hearing, the respect, and the financial support that "good Muslims" busily "reforming" Islam find so available.
The islamization of Europe, and not who wins or loses in Iraq, where the war is not between the "freedom-loving Iraqis" (good god) and the "terrorists" but, in the main, between the Sunnis and Shi'a -- a fight for power, for who rules over whom, for what Lenin called Kto Kovo ("Who -- (does it to) -- Whom?"
Europeans are now coming out of a deep dream of peace. There is no peace. They have done something tremendously stupid, and more than stupid, by allowing in people who bear in their mental luggage something inimical to Western ways, who are hostile to Western political and social understandings, and who -- save for a few who will leave Islam altogether -- cannot be integrated. These peopole, now close to 20 million, also reproduce at rates three to four times higher than the indigenous Infidels. The mathematics of this, and the misery of this, and the menace of this, is clear.
Let Iraq be Iraq -- that is, let "Iraq" the pseudo-nation devolve into, dissolve into, the three vilayets put together by Sir Percy Cox back in 1920. The last 80 years of the "nation" of Iraq under Sunni rule did nothing to diminish, and everything to increase, the Shi'a resentment and hatred of Sunnis, and the Kurdish resentment and hatred of Arabs.
Whenever our President prates about "democracy" and "freedom-loving" people in Iraq, whenever he avoids carefully the subject of Islam which he still sees as through a beer glass darkly, whenever he or his crazed claque (for whom he can do no wrong, he must be right, if for no other reason -- and there now is no other reason -- that Cindy Sheehan is a sinister simpleton, and so are all those who are like her. And so they are -- but so what? Stalin was sinister, and no simpleton, and we worked to defeat Hitler with him, and it might have appeared to the Man from Mars that we were on the same side. But we weren't.
The E.U. bureaucracy is as hopelessly philo-islamic, anti-American, and anti-Israel as the U.N. and should simply be ignored. But the days of Javier Solana, Chris Patten, and so on are numbered. The E.U. has been permanentlly weakened as an institution, and Muslim attacks within Europe have made its bureaucrats even more distasteful to European publics, more unrepresentative, than they were before -- for they are the complete Eurabians.
By removing ourselves from Iraq, and ceasing to claim that "democracy" will bring a better outcome for Infidels. We can see already that if the Americans remain to keep Iraq together, and to keep an Iraqi state together, it will perforce be much more Muslim than it was before. Is this what the Administration wants? Well, if it thinks that the problem is not Islam, if it continues to pretend otherwise, because it lacks the wit to discuss the problem in terms that could be plausibly presented (the words "Jihad" and "Anti-Jihad" scream out for use; so do such phrases as "we are not against Islam, but only against those who apparently believe in the Jihad to force their own beliefs on the rest of the world, which of course the vast and overwhelming majority of law-abiding Muslims do not" (this is nonsense, and false, but useful nonsense, useful falsity).
A little reconciliation with Europe needs to take place. But the Administration for all of its tough-guy rhetoric, is timid about Islam, afraid of offending Muslims, afraid to recognize that a belief-system is a permanent menace, and therefore keeps clutching at the straw of "democracy" in Iraq, and in the process of herding those Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurdish cats, shows us, shows the Europeans, that some in this Administration, despite their boots and spurs and swaggering walk, are All Hat, and No Cattle.
Posted by Ted Belman at August 29, 2005 10:23 AM