A New Popular Front: Winning the War on Islamism

As Shelby Steele has so eloquently written about, one horrific side effect of the otherwise righteous movement for civil rights and black emancipation in the late 1950’s to the late 1960’s was conditioning the wider population to view victimization as a claim to moral authority and, through that authority, political power.

The result has been an ever-expanding culture of victimization, where every small interest pressure group fights to prove and establish facts that lay claim to its special victimization, its unique suffering, as a means to power. Environmentalists focus on the harm done to our forests, feminists on rape, homosexuals on hate crimes, and child advocates on child abuse. Only by demonstrating that the wider culture—consciously or unconsciously—has victimized the target group can that group lay claim to the power of modern liberal guilt; and, through that guilt, legislation designed to promote or protect that group’s perceived interests.

The phenomena is so wide-spread, so common now, as to not require much in the way of illustration; any observer of the modern political scene knows all too well the horrible power of victim’s groups. After all, who can stand against them? Do so and you’re a horrible person who cares nothing for the suffering of these poor people. And so it goes, in an ever-increasingly ridiculous circus of victimhood.

The biggest threat Western Civilization faces right now is the threat from Islamic Fascism, or fundamentalism if you will. The threat is both external—in the form of radical Islamic states like Iran, Saudi Arabia and Sudan and terrorist groups like Al-Qaeda—and internal—in the form of immigrant Islamic populations in the West. While the external threat is pretty easily identifiable (except, perhaps, to the Michael Moore wing of the Democratic Party and the entire editorial staff of The New York Times), the internal threat is a much trickier beast to track down.

This is so for a variety of reasons, but two really stand out. The first, at least so far as the United States is concerned, is that we are a nation of immigrants who also happen to hold freedom of religion as one of our highest values. This being the case, the average American is loath to think of immigrants as a threat or the practice of a religion as a threat. Certainly this dynamic goes a long way to explaining the President’s and his Administration’s reluctance to call out domestic Muslim groups as potential enemies. We just simply are unable, most of us, to think of religious immigrants as anything other than more of what we’ve experienced now for more than 225 years: hard-working, pious family-oriented people who want to make a better life for themselves and worship in peace.

The second reason works from the first: Islamic pressure groups, like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), have adopted the liberal/left language of victimization in order to gain political power. Thus, CAIR spends all of its time searching for Muslims who’ve been called names in small-town 7-11s or inflating completely minor incidents after 9/11 into a mythical “anti-Muslim” backlash. And, most importantly, they and like-minded groups seek to demonize any criticism of Islam or Muslims as “Islamophobia." As amazing as it might sound to Americans, who seem, almost alone in the world, to really care about freedom of speech, "Islamophobia" is now a crime in both Canada and the United Kingdom.

This is the type of legislative power true victimhood status brings, which is why a Muslim auto worker beat up in a bar is worth his weight in gold to the grandees of CAIR and other similar groups.

What are conservatives to do in the face of such tactics? The way we see it, there are two alternatives: the first is to take the fight to the larger victimization culture and turn the social tide away from pressure-group politics, while the second is to adapt to the dominant culture and beat the Islamists at their own game.

Ideally, the first appeals to us much more. As Steele has patiently explained and documented to anyone who will listen, the culture of victimization and the power of guilt has led group after group—not least Black Americans—to a never-ending series of defeats that one can see personified in the now-completely pathetic and powerless figure of master victimhood strategist Jesse Jackson. This culture harms our politics greatly and should be confronted and defeated whenever possible.

However, as a practical matter we realize that the power of victimhood is not going anywhere anytime soon. It will be a hard enough battle in America; in New Zealand, Canada and the U.K. the battle is already lost.

Therefore, it seems to us, the only viable and realistic option is to turn the tables and use the power of victimhood to our full advantage against the Islamists. And we can do that by engaging and winning over to the anti-Islamist struggle the biggest, most powerful minority victim group of all time:

Women.

As we have pointed out before, one of the advantages we in the anti-Islamist camp possess is that the Islamists, like the National Socialists before them, are so in love with their ideology that they are loathe to hide it. Instead, they shout it from the rooftops for all to hear: the goal is an Islamic world-state in which clerics of Islam will rule, Islamic law will be the only law recognized, people of other faiths will convert or pay heavy taxes in tribute and where a woman’s every move, every public and private act, will be the target of the most intrusive body of laws and regulations ever imposed on human beings.

Muslim leaders take no steps to hide these goals. For example, just today the indispensable Tim Blair forwarded a report of a speech by an Australian Muslim leader in which he said:

“Every minute in the world a woman is raped, and she has no one to blame but herself, for she has displayed her beauty to the whole world. Strapless, backless, sleeveless - they are nothing but satanical. Mini-skirts, tight jeans - all this to tease men and to appeal to (their) carnal nature."

Given the Islamist agenda, we anti-Islamists have a natural ally not only in approximately 51% of our own populations, but, incredibly, also in 51% of the enemy’s population. As recent elections in Afghanistan and Iraq, not to mention pro-democracy protests in the Islamic Republic, have recently proved, the Islamists have a huge, gaping weak spot, and it has double X chromosomes. Statements like the above cannot help but contrast the diffent deal being offered women by liberal democracy and Islamism.

Our strategy, then, should be this: to form a popular front resistance movement to Islamism with liberal and left forces founded upon our shared conviction that women should, and in fact do, possess legal, social and cultural equality with men and, further, that this value is central to modern Western Civilization. Not only would this popular front serve to lessen the domestic opposition to the War on Terror, it would also serve as effective propaganda beamed right into the veiled sitting rooms of women all over the Islamic world.

How would this be done? Obviously, the Bush Administration would have to take the lead in such an endeavor, to be supported by conservatives and anti-Islamists everywhere. Every time a woman is executed or stoned, or stopped from being educated, or held prisoner in dark age costumes that stop the very touch of the sun upon her skin, we should be there, shouting about it to high-heaven. And everywhere U.S. forces are escorting girls to school, protecting the legal rights of women and advancing the cause of civic and legal equality, we should be beaming the images to all corners of the globe.

This is how we win the battle of ideas. This is how we advance the cause of freedom and expose Islamism for the unpopular, hate-filled ideology that it is.

Nature has given us our weapon, and modern political culture has made it sharp. Let us use it!

The 506th Parachute Infantry Regiment

We just finished watching the tenth and final installment of HBO's film version of Stephen Ambrose's Band of Brothers, and we just want to say:

God bless you Dick Winters, Lou Nixon and the other men of Easy Company, 506th PIR, 101st Airborne Division. We're free men today thanks to your and your comrades' many sacrifices. You brought us victory over evil, even as so-called enlightened people today deny that any such thing exists.

We owe you everything.

Thank you.

The Right and the Pope's Legacy: Willful Blindness

Out of respect for the dead, and for the man’s many positive accomplishments, we were going to hold off on any comment on the death of Pope John Paul II. There is no doubt in our minds that when the history of the Twentieth Century comes to be definitively written, the late Pope’s efforts against Communism and his obviously well-intentioned and heart-felt work to improve inter-faith relations will both be prominent. Along with President Reagan and Prime Minister Thatcher, the Pope’s tireless efforts in favor of liberty and freedom of conscience bore concrete results readily visible in the modern-day reality of tens of millions of free men and women where once walked only slaves.

But the hagiography of recent days, especially among our friends at National Review Online, has served not only to praise the Pope but also to cover over his many shortcomings, especially as related to the Church in the United States. While such a reaction is understandable, especially among good Catholics like Kathryn Lopez, recent events have been such that only a willfully blind person could deny that there is something slightly desperate in the never-ending praise, especially insofar as it ignores two rather giant elephants in the sitting room.

The Left critique of the Pope has been on display for days now, as even the most casual glance at the likes of the New York Times and the Washington Post verifies. Alone among the world’s great religions, the Western Left has been demanding that the Catholic Church—and not, say, Islam—accommodate its social and political preferences, and lamenting the fact that, basically, the Pope was never really the kind of guy people in Manhattan could relate to at a cocktail party. It’s all really as tiresome as it is pathetic and predictable; the depths to which the MSM is now plumbing is truly a world-historic moment and one we don’t think we’ll be seeing again anytime soon.

As usual, however, the Left and the MSM are so blinded by their own prejudices that they’ve missed the big story, much as their sick obsession with Pulitzer Prize-winning images of brutality and defeat have caused them to miss the phoenix-like rise of Arab democracy in the Greater Middle East generally and in Iraq specifically.

The first elephant is the strong and strident anti-Americanism of both the Pope and the Church in general. The Church is, at bottom, a European institution peopled by European intellectuals, all well-schooled in the typically European anti-American narrative. So, it’s not such a surprise to find the Church at the forefront of the vaguely Left critique of American as the Source of All Evil due to its ungodly worship of money, sex and power.

However, this Pope took that stereotype and made a cottage industry of it. In almost all his major pronouncements, Europe and its cynical secularism are mentioned only obliquely, if at all, while not-so-subtle code words for American-style capitalism feature prominently as oppressors of the world’s poor and downtrodden.

The run-up to the Iraq War saw the Pope and his Church not only stake out a radically anti-American position, but the Pope himself treated known genocidal maniac and butcher “Vice President” Tariq Azziz as an honored guest and provided a platform for this most Christian of Saddam’s henchmen to criticize the President of our country as a blood-thirsty madman. Let us not avert our eyes: this Pope said a Holy Mass with and prayed with Azziz as a political gesture to embarrass and harm the United States of America and its President.

As the Leftists are keen to point out—ever-addicted as always to charging hypocrisy—this part of the Pope’s legacy is strangely absent from conservative commentary on his death. In fact, if one were to only read the conservative papers, magazines and websites one would be hard-pressed to find anything mentioning the Pope’s strident anti-Americanism in this regard. This is unfortunate, as the Church is, singularly, the most important pan-Western institution; to surrender it to knee-jerk and unthinking anti-Americanism in the name of a misplaced sense of decorum or loyalty is both tactically and strategically unwise. Friendly criticism would not hurt and is not disrespectful.

The second elephant is the Pope’s and his Church’s wholly inadequate, debasing and insulting reaction to the plague of pedophile priest scandals that have wracked the American church.

Spare us the emails regarding how numerically insignificant the number of actual pedophile priest incidents are compared to the number of parish priests and/or their collective good works: the fact of the matter is that we now know beyond a shadow of a doubt that high level officials of the Church shielded and protected their brethren that they knew were involved in one of the most sickening examples of betrayal of trust and office that we can think of.

One can engage in wishful thinking on this topic all one wishes; but the cold reality is rows upon rows of empty pews and legions of disillusioned and distraught Catholics from Portland, Oregon to Boston, Massachusetts.

Not only has the Church not punished those most responsible by virtue of both official and personal responsibility, the Church has gone out of its way to demonstrate to Americans that it does not care very much that its people raped and brutalized children and did nothing about it.

The inclusion in the ceremonies in the Vatican of disgraced Archbishop of Boston Bernard Cardinal Law is nothing less than a spit in the face to concerned Americans in general and concerned American Catholics in particular. The man should no longer be a priest, let alone given such a vaunted and honored position.

With regard to the larger scandal, let us just add that the Church is very lucky we were not in a position of prosecutorial authority during the worst of the scandals. If the conclave of American Bishops thinks the “secular” world of law enforcement has been a bit rough on them, they certainly would not have liked what we would have had in store. In fact, given their high place in our social structure and their trusted positions, it is a wonder to us that law enforcement has been so deferential towards the Church. Shouldn’t we have a special obligation to exact punishment from those given so much in terms of power and position who abuse it? Is not their transgression the greater due to their offices?

Why the Catholic Church is so intent on antagonizing the only religious country left in the Western World is one of the great mysteries of the age, but we suspect is has more than a little to do with the Church’s latent anti-Americanism.

One of the Left’s greatest fault in the inability to self-criticize. In the face of these two over-whelming issues left by John Paul II, we refuse to engage in the same form of willful blindness. The Pope’s morally reprehensible cozying to the worst barbarians of the Saddam Hussein regime and his shameful silence and inaction in the face of one of the worst crises to strike the American Catholic Church are a part of his legacy, like it or not.

Only by engaging and criticizing do we stand any chance of correcting those errors and strengthening what is by any measure one of the great pillars of Western Civilization.