How 9/11 Finally Ended

Tags

9/11, America and Islam, Islam, September the 11th

September the 11th, as a political era, lasted approximately ten years, beginning with the attack itself in 2001, and ending with the massacre of left-wing youth in Norway in the summer of 2011.

It progressed in three stages: first, a period of Islamist aggression and Western shock, followed by an era of wars in the Middle East and Islamist retaliation, and finally a broad social and intellectual reaction against Islam in Europe, America and various other affected regions.

For these ten years, Islam was never far from the minds of anyone with a taste for politics, or simply for reality. A foreign religion, once rarely considered deeply outside of specialist academia, dominated the Western news cycle. There was hardly a day when it wasn’t mentioned.

The whole decade was like a movie; explosions, beheadings, tanks, protests, philosophical screeching, warring interpretations. September became everything. For millennials like this author, it defined our development, shaking us out of our youthful disinterest in all things serious.

My initial reaction to the attack was liberal, if not leftist. I gobbled up books by the likes of Noam Chomsky and William Blum, short-cutting my way to the conclusion that America had in some way ‘asked for it’. I was shocked by the extent of America’s past interference in the Middle East, the Western sponsorship of the Saudi police-state and the black helicopter autocracies in Egypt and Jordan. Why were we doing this to people so far away? For oil? How immoral.

That this was an over-simplification became clear several years into the decade, at university, where I came into contact with British Muslims. They were bolshy and serious. They advocated reactionary ideas about gender, sexuality and religious choice, completely (and ironically) in conflict with the worldview I had embraced in their defence. 

I was seized with a terror of being trapped with such people. I imagined dystopian scenarios in which they formed a majority. My politics flipped. 

In America, though with far less demographic urgency, millions were introduced to the same fear and the same confusion. Why were there any Muslims anywhere in the West? They were swimming against every positive current, commanded to do so by a faith that could never be reformed or questioned as a matter of doctrine. Then came theories of a Muslim conquest of Europe by prolific reproduction, and America hardened still further.

The effects on Americanism during this period are particularly interesting in light of current issues. Having suffered an attack by a completely foreign culture, for completely alien motives, America’s racial system was radically (though temporarily) unsettled. Black Americans were lifted from the bottom of the racial hierarchy, replaced by Arabs, Muslims and anyone resembling them. For much of the decade, a very pure kind of civic nationalism thrived on the American right, with dissensions from the likes of Pat Buchanan (now very much back en vogue) relegated to the far fringes. Black and Hispanic people were more comfortable than ever in identifying as conservative, and were welcomed as such, given their relative patriotism and relative harmlessness. Indeed, America’s traditional minorities all enjoyed a new warmth within Republican circles primarily due to this kind of comparison.

Arabs and Muslims were beheading hostages and blowing up trains for exotic theological ideas completely unrelated to reason. They wanted to enforce laws forbidding miniskirts and porn, music and alcohol, sport and hot dogs. By comparison, blacks and Hispanics, despite their flaws, were essentially benign. Black people made catchy music. They served in the military and killed America’s enemies. Hispanics liked carnivals and girls in bikinis. In a war of modernity against medieval darkness, all who were on the modern side, even primitively, were suddenly native everywhere modernity prevailed. If you were OK with naked women and pork, you were a patriot enough. (Similar weird shifts in right-wing priorities later occurred in Europe.)

Buoyed by this new acceptance, some black and Hispanic Americans, and also LGBT Americans, strode into areas of right-wing society they once felt were too hostile for them. Muslims were the new blacks, the new fags, the new antithesis of America, and not a few minorities were comfortable with this transformation.

The new emphasis of the mainstream Western right played a significant role in the election of Barack Obama in 2008. The greater acceptability of blackness in light of anti-Muslim sentiment meant that much of the popular anxiety the black candidate aroused was wasted on absurd theories about the senator’s religion and middle name. (Recall for illustration the old woman warning John McCain that Obama was an ‘Arab’).

But this could never last.

America wasn’t Sweden, let alone Lebanon, and though great effort might have been expended to keep them so, the inhabitants of suburban Illinois could not remain convinced that ISIS and al Qaeda were the greatest threat to their physical and cultural security.

In time, as the “smoke and dust” of 9/11 faded from popular memory, replaced in vividness and urgency by nearer hazards like Chicagoan gun fights, BLM and swelling illegal immigration from Mexico, people shifted back to traditional American anxieties about race, suburbia, history and the status of black people.

The alt-right subculture idiotically promoted by Hillary Clinton during the 2016 election represented in part a restlessness among right-wing youth to get away from 9/11-ism and return to broader themes of race and identity.

It may be counted as part of the historic character of the Trump phenomenon that it marks the beginning of true post-9/11 politics.

David

Advertisement

Islam is Ruining Everything

Tags

2001, 9/11, American, BBC, Christianity and Islam, Defend the modern world, DTMW, dtmw dtmw, dtmw dtmw blog, Facebook, german, Hindus, Indian, Iranian, Islam, Israel, Jews, kosovan, Multiculturalism, munich shooting, Muslims, No to Turkey in the EU, political commentary, politics, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, racial tension, Siklhs, taylor, tension, Terror, Terrorism, turk, Twitter, USA, War

The past fortnight has seen Islamic (let’s stop calling it ‘Islamist’) violence in Nice, Turkey, Germany (twice) and the narrowest prevention of terrorism in Latin America. The breathing space between atrocities is progressively diminishing, leaving the public disorientated and confused, and politicians struggling to issue apologies and rationalisations at a matching speed.

The situation is now clear as day. In small towns and large cities alike, Westerners are no longer able to go about their everyday lives without the risk of horrific and merciless slaughter at the hands of people who shouldn’t even be in the same part of the world as them. Even if one still feels moved to deny this, one runs the risk of being interrupted mid-sentence by reports of a fresh atrocity. In the time it takes to say the sentence ‘Not all Muslims are like this’, the chances are some fresh batch of innocent humans have been dispatched to an early grave by Islamic hands. It is no wonder then that even the most doctrinaire leftists are pausing for as long as possible before offering excuses for their pet Rottweiler’s latest ‘aberration’.

Where is all this leading? Where can it possibly end? It is to me entirely infeasible to expect Europeans or Americans to put up with Islamic violence indefinitely. Even a castrated man still possesses adrenaline – the base material of anger and resistance; the same is true of a castrated population. It may take time, and I cannot say exactly when it will happen, but there will one day be a ferocious rebellion against the deteriorating condition of the Western World; a unified, grassroots drive to wind the clock back in order to wind it forwards. Who knows who will start it, or what event will provide the back-breaking straw. We can only be sure that it will happen.

And what will it look like when it does happen? Fascism? Concentration camps? Ultra-nationalist racism and anti-democratic thuggery? On current trends, I see no reason why not. Madame Le Pen, with her indoctrinated anti-German bigotry and anti-free-market fanaticism, is fast rising in France. The anti-Semitic far-right in Austria only narrowly lost out in the country’s last presidential election and look set to make it the next time around. And here in the UK, renegade Brexit supporters, buoyed by their unexpected triumph in June, are attacking foreigners en masse; not only third-world migrants, but also Poles, Bulgarians, Portuguese and Ukrainians.

Let there be no doubt about whose fault this is. It is the doing of Muslims and of Islam, a toxic degeneracy that, having long ago ruined the countries now oppressed under the star and crescent, is actively poisoning the world. Islam is ruining everything.

Before September 2001, the European Union was broadly regarded (by most Europeans) as a noble and constructive enterprise that promoted unity and peaceful cooperation; the dream of such patriotic visionaries as Winston Churchill and Charles De Gaulle. Now, after decades of Islamic violence and rape, the EU concept is seen as being decidedly anti-patriotic, even anti-European. This was never inevitable and it is something worth being angry about.

Before September, 2001, the far-right in both Europe and America was close to oblivion. No-one beyond a few tattooed skinheads took the likes of David Duke or Nick Griffin seriously. Now, after 15 years of global chaos, both men command a social media following of thousands; numbers which continue to grow rapidly by the hour.

Before 2001, race riots in the United Kingdom were small enough and rare enough to be ignored altogether by cultural historians. Though there were often local tensions over black muggers and Indian corner shops, these were minor, resolvable blips on an otherwise shining record of integration and social harmony. Now, with Muslims slitting throats faster than non-Muslim migrants can make positive contributions to society, that happy reality is all but disappearing. All migrants, of all faiths and traditions, are having their record of integration thrown into jeopardy by Islamic misbehaviour.

It matters little to a rage-infected, low-IQ skinhead whether a bearded man adheres to Sikhism or Islam. As long as he looks like Anjem Choudary, he is Anjem Choudary. Muslim evil has endangered all Asians equally, and who can say for sure this wasn’t intentional?

Even Jews, the most valuable allies the Western world possesses against the Islamist hordes, have been assaulted and victimised by numb-skulled hotheads intent on punishing Muslims. It would take a very imaginative mind to come up with a more appalling irony than that.

And the fallout continues to get even stranger. Though the details of the story are still developing, the massacre in Munich yesterday is thought to have been carried out by an 18-year-old Iranian migrant suffering (as many Iranians do) from a cultural identity crisis.

According to the Guardian – just before the killer turned the gun on himself, he is said to have engaged a member of the public in a vicious argument about his national status, screaming at one point “I am a German!” and cursing ‘Fucking Turks’ and ‘Dirty foreigners’. This makes a lot of sense to me.

Not only does Muslim misbehaviour poison attitudes among the natives of the West. It also distorts and deforms the thinking of those unfortunate enough to be caught somewhere between modernity and darkness. Think of it this way: If you were a young Moroccan, Turkish or Iranian migrant in Europe, in love with modernity and desirous of shedding your Islamic identity, you might well find yourself whipped up into an anxious frenzy by the growing backlash against people who look like you, and for whom you might naturally be mistaken in the whirlwind retributions to come. In order to make yourself safe from those future pogroms, you would have to strive to differentiate yourself from your own community, all the while risking the disapproval of your family and friends (some of whom might be inclined to punish your cultural apostasy with death). And even if you managed this, you would still have to find a way of marking yourself off physically or bureaucratically from the community you have left. And so on.

This is a very hard task, and many see no way of getting all the way through it. (*As I say, details are still emerging about Munich. Even if I am wrong about the intentions of the shooter, I will leave this part of the text as it is because I feel the point is worthy of being made).

When liberals, despite their doubtlessly manipulative intentions, claim that Muslims are the principal victims of radical Islam (or Islam – as it’s more accurately called), I tend to believe them. No-one is born a Muslim. No child believes in Allah before he or she has learnt to fear violence and hellfire. To reflect on what 1.6 billion people could have achieved were it not for Quranic indoctrination is one of the saddest thoughts one can entertain.

In so many countries and in so many ways, Islam is ruining everything.

D, LDN

9/11 Anniversary Reflections

Tags

9/11, 9/11 anniversary, 9/11 attacks, America, America 911, American Liberty, attacks on 9/11, BBC, Bin Laden, Britain First, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Coffee, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Demographics of Europe, documentary, English Defence League, Facebook, pentagon plane, september, september 11, terrorism new york, Twitter, United States, video

Though the memories get dimmer with every passing year, 9/11 – at least for those alive on that day – will retain its horrible stature in the imagination forever. The story is now old, cinematised, novelised and set to music. Everyone alive knows the order of events, the reactions that followed them and – increasingly – the ‘reasoning’ used by those who set the nightmare in motion. But it was a truly universal event and one that has an enduring story to tell for all of us.

As it is the thing writers always relay before talking about the tragedy, I will briefly recount the circumstances of my own September the 11th.

I was at college while the towers stood burning. They had fallen by the time I returned home.  I breezed into the house and headed straight upstairs to listen to music. Before I could get halfway up the stairs, my father shouted from the living room the memorable words – “Have you seen this?”

I went over into the living room and looked at the television. It was a scene of thrilling mayhem unlike anything I had ever seen. To be perfectly honest, I felt rather enlivened by it, childish as my sensibilities were at that point. Everywhere was drama, apocalypse, fire and smoke. People ran in screaming packs from a swelling cloud of dust chasing them over and between the gaps of buildings. Black suited men doused in white particles wandered around like zombies. It was all so strange, so otherworldly.

Every fifteen minutes or so the BBC coverage would feature a brief recap of the days events, including the – now familiar but at first bewildering – footage of the second plane melting into the concrete and glass of the south tower.

“Who did this?” I asked my parents, both of whom were now gathered.

“People from Afghanistan.” my father replied, having been informed by the red ticker running ceaselessly along the bottom of the screen.

“Could it mean war?” I asked, with cute naivety.

“Yes it could” he replied.

Tony Blair’s reaction was repeatedly broadcast, usually straight after the summary of events. He looked tearfully angry and pledged every effort and skill Britain could offer to the United States. Looking back, it was probably a good thing that he was in charge on that day. Despite his numberless infirmities, he eloquently captured the popular reaction and fulfilled rather well the duties of the UK/US brotherhood – a brotherhood that had just become sacred.

After 9/11 I tended to align with the anti-war, anti-American, anti-Israel crowd. I reasoned that since the Middle East had been bombed for decades, attacks the other way were practically inevitable. It only later occurred to me that bombs are dropped for both moral and immoral reasons; that the bombs dropped to protect Kuwait from Saddam, for example, or to protect the Kurds from genocide, or to liberate Europe from Germany and Asia from Japan were moral bombs; imperfect implements of a perfect goodwill, and that, by perfect contrast, the kerosene missiles fired at New York and Washington were tools of malevolence; a massive and important distinction, and one which the Left seems determined to ignore.

Truth be told, I will never forgive Islam for 9/11. I will never forgive it for spoiling the liberalising trend of the nineties and providing in its place an age of war, suspicion and hatred. It ruined more than buildings. It wrecked the dreams of a peaceful, enlightened cosmopolis, a globalised America. Without its handiwork, we could have gone down a very different, much prettier road. Before the Islamic zombie returned, racism, homophobia, xenophobia and religious intolerance were beginning to crumble. They were no longer fashionable. We were beginning to find modern solutions to ancient problems. Then, with one psychotic gesture, we were thrust back into the darkest throes of history.

Never forget. Never forgive.

D, LDN

Jihad vs. McWorld.

Tags

9/11, American Liberty, Benjamin Barber, Big Mac, Christianity and Islam, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, Jihadism, Lexus vs the Olive Tree, Multiculturalism, New York, New York holidays, NYT, Race and ethnicity in the United States Census, Terror, Thomas Friedman

It’s been a full ten years since the publication, originally to much derision and apathy, of American political scientist Benjamin Barber’s book ‘Jihad Vs. McWorld: Terrorism’s Challenge to Democracy’.

Seen by some as a dumbed-down popularisation of Samuel Huntingdon’s ‘Clash of Civilisations’ thesis, this slim volume (and especially its title) has always seemed to me a more accurate framing of the same struggle.

The struggle with/against Islam is a clash of civilisations (in that Islam is a civilisation and that there is a ‘clash’ involved) but not entirely in the way Huntingdon predicted. The war is not Islam pitched against the West specifically, but Islam versus the modern age and all who aspire to dwell in it. Muslims are as hostile to Kenyans and Japanese as they are to Brits and Americans. The Jihadi elite correctly identify the modern ideal of globalisation as a lethal threat to the integrity of Islamic culture. This is not then a clash between ‘East and West’, but a battle between progress and the 6th century, between Starbucks and the Mosque, the Lexus and the Olive Tree (to quote the title of an excellent book by Thomas Friedman).

Islamism derives it energy from the same place as neo-Nazism. Those who pine for ancient castles, Germanic runes and maidens milking cows are one and the same with those who pine for the tent-life of ancient Arabia. Though officially opposed to one another, Islamists and Nazis alike share a burning disgust at the golden arches of McDonalds, at the white tick of Nike sportswear, at the homogenisation of the global high street and of national cultures. Both long for a misty utopian past; an older, simpler way of living that was cruelly interrupted by industry, but that is recoverable if only the capitalists (Jews) can be brought down from their dominant position.

This is what Barber meant by ‘Jihad’ – the poisonous ideas that appeal to those ill-equipped to compete in a meritocratic world. This is broader and more interesting than the crude differences Huntingdon presented us with. As Barber’s definition allows us to see, we have our own Jihadis in the West, and not all of them are Islamic.

The modern world needs to be defended from all its enemies, whatever they look like and whatever language they speak. We would be fools to presume, like Huntingdon, that the battle lines will fall neatly on the borders of cultures and languages.

D, LDN.

Islamic State and the Coming Terror Wave.

Tags

9/11, Barack Obama, Civilisation, Counter-Jihad, Counterjihad, Defend the modern world, ISIL, ISIS, ISIS Attacks Against Europe, ISIS FIghters Returning, Islamic State, Islamic State of Iraq, Peshmerga, Terrorism, United States, Yazidi

Those who believed Islamic State was a threat exclusive to the Middle East now have occasion to revise their opinions.

Intelligence agencies and government ministries across the West are warning of a direct threat to Europe and America from ISIS operatives. This morning it was also reported that photographs have been published on twitter featuring ISIS sympathisers standing beside American landmarks including the White House. While it is impossible to know whether these images are doctored, the ambition they portray is surely authentic.

An Islamic State is not a bear-trap, its cruelties barbed inward against its own population but leaving the external world at peace. The idea of a new Caliphate is to provide a united Islamic world, strengthened in numbers and wealth in order to project superpower onto those it has long defamed as ‘aggressors’; most notably Israel, the United States and Britain.

ISIS may already have the ability to launch strikes against our civil society. Its position next to the traditional transit route of Turkey gives it a portal to Europe, and its international recruits (and their paperwork) provide easy access to places like Australia and the United States.

Before the images mentioned above were published, David Blair, the Telegraph’s Middle East correspondent wrote the following:

“(With) the inflow of volunteers carrying European passports, including some from Britain, and with his control of territory and almost limitless resources, Baghdadi (The ‘Caliph’ of Islamic State) has a real opportunity to attempt to strike the West. Put simply, his goals are about to become clear. Either he will be content with suffocating his new domain, or he will lash out and seek to damage ours. There is every reason to suspect that he is capable of the latter. All that remains in question is his intent.”

While America therefore has sufficient reason to feel uneasy about ISIS, we in Europe should rightly be terrified. It would take very little planning for ISIS to launch a campaign of violence against this continent, and I strongly believe that is what is going to come about. As our militaries engage more directly against Islamic State targets in Northern Iraq, reprisals are almost certain to come, and quickly.

I don’t mean 9/11 style attacks. I mean something bigger and more professional. Unlike al-Qaeda, ISIS is a modern military with sophisticated lines of communication and countless foreign recruits at its command. There are ISIS contacts from Portsmouth to Paris, Malmo to Madrid. Be prepared for co-ordinated operations in many European capitals. London is particularly vulnerable given the large number of ‘Brits’ departing for Syria every week. Indeed, David Cameron has spoken today of the risk to British streets. Perhaps even our elites are waking up to what is coming.

Note that the initiators of the wave won’t all be Pakistani or Arabic men. There has been talk of black, Malaysian and White Norwegian fighters heading back and forth from the region, as well as countless females. This will be altogether new. Symptomatic of Islamism’s evolution from amateur to pro.

How should we feel then? Part of me dreads the coming terror wave. It will be chaotic and expensive in blood. Another part of me feels strangely excited. This is a time for heroes. We will all need to find the man in us (and yes, feminazi, I said MAN). Let battle be joined. We cannot co-exist with cave-men.

D, LDN.