A Perfect Lesson

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Islamism, Paris, Samuel Paty, terror attack paris, Terrorism

Someone was beheaded in Paris last week. He was a teacher: Samuel Paty, 47. His crime was to have distributed an unflattering depiction of the prophet Muhammad as part of a class on the importance of freedom of speech. A perfect lesson, it would seem. A perfect illustration. A perfect martyr. If the events described had been depicted as fiction in a novel or play, one might have criticised it on the grounds that the message was too neatly wrapped. But this was reality. And reality is often that simple, that perfect.

Islam is a volatile religion. Not all Muslims practice it to the gruesome extent of the preparator, but enough to make a freeze on Islamic immigration obviously sensible.

I have seen the photograph of Mr Paty’s decapitated head, as you may have yourself. The first few times it scrolled into view, on Twitter, I turned away as soon as possible, shocked by something no civilised person should ever have to see. But after a few more exposures (you can’t escape the wretched thing on some forums), I summoned the courage to study the image in detail. It is a quite amazing thing to look at; a head not where it should be, disembodied, the underside of a severed neck visible, revealing red and pink details only biologists and butchers understand.

This isn’t routine for me. I have never sat down and watched a decapitation video. nor any of the big-budget murder-extravaganzas produced by ISIS. Perhaps I am still too squeamish, which is cowardly; but after looking at the picture of poor Mr Paty, who knows what I’ll dare to face next.

The act was evil, obviously. Heinous. Savage. But hardly surprising. France already knew about this problem. The government knew. The media knew. You knew. And yet the anger is raw and purple, as if the problem had just been discovered.

‘Overreaction’ is not a concern we should have at this time. Exaggeration might be. Let us not gift undue confidence to Jihadis. Islamists are not going to ‘take over’ Paris, let alone France. But a condition doesn’t have to be terminal to justify treatment.

There is no need for any scum in Europe. A third-world neighbourhood of Paris is wasted space. Sooner or later we will have to work out what we want and how we can get it; what we love and how we can best serve and protect it.

***

I remember visiting Paris as a child, and then as a teenager and adolescent. In all, I must have been to the city at least five times. I found the place beautiful and inspiring, the people unfriendly, overrated and rude. I enjoyed using the subway, which for me is the most romantic metro system in the world (and goodness knows what I aim to mean by that). There are memories of mine gathering dust around all the celebrated sites; Tour Eiffel, Champs-Élysées, Montmartre, La Défense, etc.

Hazily I can recall experiences of the non-native Parisians, my pre-political impression of them. The Maghrebi beggar girls (likely of Algerian stock) were strikingly attractive; their elegant black eyes, and sand-coloured, ever-youthful faces produced in me a superficial, decidedly pubescent ‘sympathy’ for their plight. The hijab covering two thirds of their heads didn’t excite any special curiosity back then. I knew nothing about Islam and wouldn’t for several years more.

It was a city more of night than day. I enjoyed the darkness and noticed how it seemed to bring out the beauty and special character of Paris. In the vulgar sunshine, the grand buildings were grey and uninteresting, and the crowded streets more chaotic than romantic. At night I could picture myself as a writer and a bohemian, heir to the great European authors I was beginning to appreciate at home. And that is what Paris remained in my imagination for some time; a writer’s city and intellectual paradise.

The idea that in the future heads would be severed for blasphemy, and that it would come as no surprise to the general population, would have been fantastic. Likewise the idea that those dark-eyed houris rattling cups on the Champs-Élysées were members of a deranged (and deranging) culture of violence; I just wouldn’t have taken it seriously. This was a city of poets and painting, opium and atheism; the deepest West, where reason and freedom were too native to disturb. But here we are.

***

The Anglo-American myth that the French people are quick to surrender was funny once, if even that, but is no longer. Petty divisions between Europeans are of use only to our enemies; anti-French sentiment, like any vulgar Angloism, should be quickly disposed of. The French are a socialistic, idealistic people – and good for them – but only a fool mistakes this for weakness. Indeed, they can be ferocious in their idealism, as demonstrated by the revolutionary baptism of their Republic.

The murderer in this case – an eighteen year old Muslim with roots in Chechnya – was from a family of refugees. This is relevant. How could it not be? We must stop this senseless, suicidal generosity, however superficially admirable, before it destroys us.

I am relaxed in my faith that the lesson heroically taught by brave Samuel Paty will be understood by his people. There are passionate discussions already underway in his name.

This is our conversation, too, don’t forget – for what can be a solution to the problems of France will inevitably prove a solution to the problems of Europe.

David

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Reflections

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Blog, Defend the modern world, Islamism, politics, race, writing

I spent a large part of the weekend revisiting this old project of mine, the first time I have logged in for several years, re-reading what I used to call – with some pretension – my ‘articles’; quickly written opinion pieces about civilisation, Islam, race, politics and the like. It has been a weird, moving experience, as it was always sure to be. I have cringed, smiled, recoiled, occasionally glowed with pride. 

Such is the effect of time, I disagree with a lot of what I wrote then. My priorities are different. Some bad things have become good to me, some good things have become bad; many issues, once critically important, now seem greatly diminished.

I suppose the greatest mea culpa to perform involves the central theme of this blog. I wrote for close to three years in a mood of hot panic over Islamism, believing it was playing a slow, clever game and would, if ignored for too long, eventually triumph over the sleeping cultures of Europe. I wrote in a negative style of negative things, ideas around which a whole blogging subculture had crystallised, such was the uniformity and agreement.

But Islamism, happily, will not conquer Europe, only cause horrible and unnecessary trouble for it. Just the other week, an Islamist nobody went on a stabbing spree in the commuter town of Reading, Berkshire; such is what they have been reduced to – amateurish, Victorian violence; local vandals, neighbourhood nuisances. 

Needless to say, I oppose anyway the subjugation of man, anything that diminishes him, puts shackles on his imagination, forces him to live in a way contrary to his nature. And the stupid and nasty project of Islamism does this professionally enough. But there were then – and surely are now – equally grand and urgent and depressing questions to consider. Isolating Islamism from other processes was a mistake. It would be out-of-date to continue to make it.

We are short-sighted if we pitch the crisis of our age, like the slippery polemicist Christopher Hitchens once did, as a neo-Enlightenment battle between theocracy and reason. Islamic immigration and violence represent only one part of a far bigger issue, rooted as much in the West as the East. Not seeing this clearly enough was my great failing, the parent of all the others.

The religion of peace is crowded out in my thoughts these days. Here in Spain, I have encountered only a few believers in several years. New immigrants from exotic shores are in no short supply; but they do not bring caliphates, just complications. They have night-black skin and wear tribal shawls from the pre-ideological serenity of Africa. There are also little crowds, slowly swelling, of Peruvians, Chinese, Koreans and Vietnamese.

The future of the West will be dominated by questions of race, gender, economy and generation. Islamism, though it will play a destructive role, will not be the predominant theme. This is the reality as I now see it.

The big things are happening outside of the 9/11 universe, the narrow, dimly-lit mind-space in which too many, for too long, were trapped and accordingly limited.

***

My dear father, who passed away at Christmas, was a gentle, conservative man; a rector for many decades in the Church of England. One of his living and dying wishes was for me to embrace the faith that guided him, and which provided him with such amazing courage during those final months of illness. Since then, over a mad period of global unrest,  I have been duly reflecting on what I actually believe in. Re-opening this project is part of that self-interrogation.

Looking back at my blogging here, I find not a slight aspect of performance. I wrote material I believed added to what I had already written, that built upon the same theme and promised to reconfirm the same ideas. I wrote to be consistent, in short, not to explore in earnest issues of real importance. 

Performance politics is the curse of our age; in England, America and doubtless elsewhere, people are arguing and marching and fighting for things they do not, in their heart of hearts, take to be true. I see this more on the left than on the right – which is natural enough – but there are performance artists across the spectrum, as harmful at one point of it as at any other.

On anonymous forums intelligent debate mixes freely with nonsense. Users embrace ludicrous fetishes and equally ludicrous figures to fill the office of interpretation left vacant by a dishonest and corrupted media.

What do people really believe? What would we say if we were forced to speak without thinking, free of care and cant, unconcerned with the pursuit of glamour or acceptance into some intellectual culture or another? The chances are we would not fall neatly into any group or hive but would outrage them all equally. There is great honour in that.

I am not so blindly arrogant to believe I have retained an audience after this much time. People move on, as they should. I am grateful to have had my work considered worthy or readable by anyone at all.

David

Qur’an-Denial: The Foundational Error of the Appeasers

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*Originally published on this blog in May, 2016

The terror attacks in Brussels, Ivory Coast and Nigeria this past week were (if you’ll tolerate a well-worn paradox) notable for being completely unremarkable. The murders were generic, run-of-the-mill, classical and exactly in step with the history and character of the Islamic religion. As I have said previously, such violence is best understood simply as the Qur’an in action, or Applied Islam, if you prefer. This is what all those elegant Arabic characters materialize into. This is their effect.

There is no ingenious metaphor behind Quranic verses imploring Muslims to kill “unbelievers.” and “strike of their heads”. It isn’t an allegorical way of saying “Try your best in life and be proud of your heritage”. It means exactly what you think it means. Mutilate and murder people if they derive from a different religious tradition.

The Qur’an murdered those people in Belgium, Nigeria and Ivory Coast. Without it’s message, they would still be alive.

But despite that terrible reality, this notorious book of death will remain readily available at your local Waterstones or Walmart for the foreseeable future. Your children, if you have any, will be able to purchase it, read it, learn from it, perhaps even act on it. This is because, for all the chaos and bloodshed at the hands of Muslims the world over, our cultural elite still refuse to recognise that it is the text itself which inspires the carnage. Rejecting this idea as essentially ‘racist’, they offer instead tortuous sociological, economic, psychological explanations more palatable to the liberal mindset and harmonious with liberal, multi-cultural doctrine. The Muslims are killing people because they are ‘disenfranchised’, ‘outcast from the cultural mainstream’, ‘oppressed’, ‘economically deprived’ and so on. They will stick stubbornly to these explanations right up to the point a Salafist knife rests upon their throats.

Prime Minister Cameron has repeatedly claimed that Islam is peaceful

Through this prism of misinterpretation, individual terror attacks are not understood as a call to banish Islam forever from the shores of the free world, but as an opportunity to understand better the mistakes WE have made in our diplomacy with the Muslim world. Simon Jenkins, the eccentric libertarian sore thumb over at the Guardian, argued just a few days ago that the reaction of the West (to Brussels and other comparable acts of terrorism) should be to “alleviate” the “rage that gives rise to acts of terror…”, including by instigating a “wiser foreign policy than most western nations have shown towards the Muslim world over the past decade.”

The cretinous Socialist Worker newspaper struck a similar tone: “Wars launched by the leaders of the US, Britain and France” read this week’s opinion column “have created huge resentment and created the space in which groups such as Isis can grow. These same leaders back the brutal governments that have turned back the tide of the Arab Spring—which offered hope…There is nothing remotely anti-imperialist about the bombings. But the reality is that more repression will mean more attacks.”

This bewildering ignorance is the natural result of Quran-Denial. Without reference to the text demanding violence, Islamic violence inevitably seems free-floating, reactive and mysterious. It is only with reference to the text itself that such violence becomes understandable. Denial of the link between violence and the Qur’an is thus the foundational error of the Western appeasers of Islam.

It is worth noting that we rarely fail to trace the origins of other religious practices. One of the key pillars of Christian practice, for example, is the injunction to loves one’s neighbour, the poor and even one’s enemies. Christian charities are acting upon this sentiment when they do charitable work, launch missions in the third world, or stage interfaith dialogues. Only a very eccentric man indeed would try to claim that such people were not directly motivated by the text of their Holy Book. It stands to reason that they are.

Christians are directly inspired by the New Testament

When critics of Christianity and Judaism, such as Bill Maher, reference the textual origins of what they perceive as Abrahamic ‘homophobia’, Christians and Jews are never allowed to claim the verses in question are metaphors or that they discriminate only against ancient homosexuals.

Only Islam is allowed to stand apart from its own Holy Book. And yet Islam is also the faith most fanatical about the literal inerrancy of its Holy Book.

Let’s look at some of the passages which may have influenced the murders this past week. A Hat-tip is due here to the staff at the invaluable websites ‘Gates of Vienna’ and ‘Religion of Peace’ which compiled some of the following excerpts (as well as many others):

Quran (5:33) “The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His messenger and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement”

Quran (8:59-60) “And let not those who disbelieve suppose that they can outstrip (Allah’s Purpose). Lo! they cannot escape. Make ready for them all thou canst of (armed) force and of horses tethered, that thereby ye may dismay the enemy of Allah and your enemy.”

Qur’an

Quran (9:5) “So when the sacred months have passed away, then slay the idolaters wherever you find them, and take them captive and besiege them and lie in wait for them in every ambush, then if they repent and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate, leave their way free to them.”

Quran (9:14) “Fight against them so that Allah will punish them by your hands and disgrace them and give you victory over them and heal the breasts of a believing people.”

That should be enough to prove my point. We need only use Occam’s Razor (AKA Ockham’s Razor: the formula that the simplest explanation is usually the correct one) to discover the root cause of the carnage afflicting the civilised and developing world. Muslims are killing because their Holy Text implores them to kill. No further discussion is needed.

Dear political elite – Islam is violent because the Qur’an is violent. The Qur’an itself is Europe’s mortal enemy. Drop the mystification and start working on a fightback.

What else is there to say about the Brussels attack? Well, for one thing, it happened in a very beautiful city. I went on holiday to Brussels as a teenager with my family and remember enjoying every minute of the two weeks I spent there. If you haven’t been yourself, please consider it (especially now). The famous cobbled streets, superior booze, laid back mood and architectural grandeur repay the price of travel with generous interest.

Watching the news come in after the explosions this week, I recognised with real sadness parts of the city I had strolled through during that halcyon fortnight. One of the massed news correspondents even stood in front of a complex of buildings I once happily photographed, her sad, elongated face starkly out of sync with the pleasant memories I will try – in spite of everything – to nurture and keep pure and intact.

Brussels

Of course, as well as being a charming city in itself, Brussels is also – for now – the Capital of the European Union. Sadly, even if also inevitably, this fact has discoloured some reactions to the bombings. One couldn’t help but detect a mood of political schadenfreude on the part of the British right-wing press last Tuesday evening. From a propaganda point of view, it must have seemed too good to be true. The EU capital, machine-heart of a despised and oppressive bureaucracy, shattered by the fruit of its own myopic agenda. The heat of the explosions had yet to fade from the air when EU-haters excitedly set about refitting the tragedy to add weight to their case for Brexit. This tasteless enthusiasm, understandable but deeply regrettable, says a lot about how badly the European experiment has poisoned continental relations.

Let’s be clear: Those unlucky souls vanquished in Brussels a few days ago did not die entirely in vain. They are (and should always be remembered as) martyrs in a just war of good vs. evil, modernity vs. darkness. My heart goes out to them, their families and their friends. In their memory, I will conclude by restating my motive in writing this blog: I detest Islam. I detest it with all my soul.

D, LDN

Lily Allen’s Shocking Naivety

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I quite like the pop singer Lily Allen. Not her music, you understand, just her. She is roughly the same age as me and I have always found her pleasantly, if also unconventionally, attractive.

Now, with such irrelevant information out of the way, I must say I was stunned, though not surprised, by the news that Allen had been reduced to apologising for her country during a visit to the notorious Calais ‘Jungle’ migrant camp last week.

In case you’ve yet to hear of this incident, Allen, faced with a war-weary Afghan teenager, declared that she was ashamed of Britain for not letting in the teeming hordes currently massed (illegally) on France’s Northern coast, making these remarks through a veil of tears and tear-dampened blonde hair. Later, in conversation with the British press, Allen remarked (presumably seriously) that she would even be prepared to have a refugee stay with her at her personal residence in England.

The UK backlash against Allen’s remarks has been predictably harsh. In the right-leaning papers, critics have lined up to pour cold water on Allen’s dippy sentiments, as well as to explain that the singer knows little to nothing about the realities of the Calais crisis and its multiple backgrounds.

“(Allen) was merely repeating the canards of her arty liberal chums” Zoe Strimpel wrote in the Telegraph “who – despite never venturing outside their own intellectual and social cosmos – are sure that everyone who doesn’t see the world as they do, and especially anyone who voted for Brexit, is a bigoted fool. To reduce the web of direness behind the ongoing migration surge to a simple matter of Western culpability is plainly idiotic. It shows painfully limited understanding of the catalogue of political and human horrors that predated, and indeed motivated, Western intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq…And to weepily lay the situation in Calais purely at Britain’s door was a severe misfiring of sentimentality. Crying in the face of human suffering is one thing. But crying on national TV while telling the audience that their country – merely by trying to control its borders – is cruelly causing the misery of innocents is quite another.”

Personally, I was less struck by Ms Allen’s weak grasp of the political-economic background of the migrant crisis than with her shocking naivety in relation to the religion of Islam and the nature of those currently attempting to force their way into the British Isles. For a young, beautiful Englishwoman such as Allen to offer to take in young (almost always male) Muslim refugees displays a terrifying disregard for her own safety. Can you imagine (do you even need to imagine) what would happen if Allen allowed a 16-20 year old Afghan male to move into her personal residence? True, we cannot say for sure, but I don’t believe it is bigoted of me to speculate that sexual advances would almost be made by the new arrival – and that, should they be rebuffed, sexual violence might well follow.

What will it take for our best and brightest to understand that they are being conned by the lowest elements in the human species? What will it take for Western women to understand that the weeping masses huddled in tents along the French coast are not like the Jews who fled Nazi Germany; that they are rather wolves imitating sheep; devils imitating angels? What will it take?

Several commenters under the articles reporting Allen’s comments in Calais have delighted in speculating the fate that would await her should she follow through on her deranged offer of sanctuary. I don’t believe we should be so cold-hearted. Allen is a good person. She has simply fallen victim to a dangerous lie peddled by a negligent, dishonest media. The blame, should Allen’s words inspire some young girl to expose herself to danger, lies ultimately with them.

D, LDN

Justifying the Extraordinary: Trump and the Debates

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In seven days time the first of four presidential debates between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump will take place in Hempstead, New York State. It is probably fair to say that no such debate has been as hotly anticipated in recent memory as this one now is. The debate marks the biggest test Donald Trump has faced since the launch of his candidacy for the Republican nomination back in 2015. It represents a vital trial of the New Yorker’s presidential character, professionalism and natural wit.

Hillary Clinton, now lagging behind Trump in many national polls, will be placing a lot of her hopes on the debates. Unlike Trump, the Democrat is a natural when it comes to conventional political combat. She – and her team – will be hoping (and expecting) Trump to be suffocated by the polite constraints of traditional procedure and to show his unease by lashing out wildly at Clinton’s character, appearance, dress sense, femininity, etc. Put simply, they hope and expect Trump to suffer a meltdown.

Whilst I would love to say that Clinton’s strategy is unrealistic, I cannot, as it is perfectly feasible. Trump’s Achilles heel, as he has proven time and time again, is his volcanic and unpredictable personality, his tendency to hit back after every real or perceived slight with much greater force and immaturity than is required or appropriate. All Clinton has to do in these contests is provoke that kind of reaction. All she has to do is poke the tiger until it growls.

This is the most obvious and likely strategy for Hillary to pursue, but there are other possibilities open to her. The rabidly pro-Clinton Washington Post made the following suggestions for their preferred candidate: “Take (Trump) up on his word. He said he “regrets” certain things. Invite him to apologize to Judge Gonzalo Curiel or the Gold Star parents of Capt. Humayun Khan… Another tactic is to press him on empty and unintelligible answers. Trump rarely completes a sentence or can articulate any level of detail about his proposals. When Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) and CNN’s Dana Bash tag-teamed, forcing Trump to explain what was in his health-care plan, it became patently obvious that he had a whole lot of nothing to offer. She can certainly take a page from New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie’s book (used against Rubio) in pointing out that Trump repeats the same platitudes. Tell us, Donald, what’s your plan to reduce crime in Chicago? Have you ever sat down with law enforcement?… There are oodles of issues (such as the nuclear triad) about which Trump knows nothing. Challenge him to spell out his stance on net neutrality, the South China Sea and student loans. In other cases — the minimum wage, repayment of U.S. debt and immigration, of course — he has been all over the lot. Force him to pick a position and explain why he has said the opposite.”

The first presidential debate will be held at Hofstra University, Hempstead, New York

Trump’s strategy for the debates is less clear at this point in time. When asked about his intended approach, the Republican has wisely dodged the question, explaining that he would prefer to not give anything away to the opposition prior to the event. We can thus only speculate.

I have a inkling that Trump’s strategy will hinge on portraying Clinton, as he has done all through his campaign so far, as ‘crooked’, dishonest, corrupt and in the pocket of the financial elite; an image he will then contrast with his own man-of-the-people persona.

The email scandal will undoubtedly be raised repeatedly, with Trump going off track and questioning Clinton directly about the thousands of inexplicably deleted messages. He will also link these questions to the issue of the Clinton Foundation and its highly suspicious ties to foreign leaders (including foreign and Islamic dictators).

The Clinton Foundation is coming under intense scrutiny for its ties to foreign regimes

This approach will carry Trump some of the way, but not all of it. He will need to have more strings to his bow prepared if he is to the win the debate outright.

To arrive at the best strategy for winning the debates, Trump would do best to look at what has carried him through the process thus far. I would say that, more than anything else, it is his credentials relating to the Islamist threat that have won over the hearts of patriotic American voters (including true liberals and Democrats). His positions on ISIS, Muslim immigration, Syrian refugee policy and other connected issues have been wildly popular with a broad cross-section of American society. Pushing hard on Clinton’s weakness on Islamism will pave the way for a very important ideological touchdown.

It is possible that in the days that remain before the November election there will be another Islamist atrocity somewhere in the world, perhaps even in the Western World*. This will serve as a timely reminder of how extraordinary the problems we (as a civilisation) face really are, and thus how inappropriate it would be to elect an ordinary candidate to solve them.

ISIS/ISIL/Islamic State

The Islamist challenge is so total and grave that all other issues melt under its heat. Trump and his team must realise this fact and base their approach on it. Sure, there are problems with the American economy which require ironing out; sure, illegal immigration from Mexico is undermining American sovereignty and nationhood; sure, the trade deficit with China is growing at an alarming rate.  But none of these issues are new or so extraordinary as to justify the American electorate taking a risk on a provocative and unconventional candidate (and that, undoubtedly, is what Trump is). Trump’s presidency is so unique and strange a prospect that he must build an equally strange and unique context in which it will seem appropriate and necessary. The only way he can achieve this, in my opinion, is with reference to the Islamist threat.

At the debates, Trump must be specific about how he will deal with this extraordinary issue. Soundbites, however popular they may be, should be avoided. It simply isn’t enough to say things like “We need to get tough and we need to get smart.” This is so vague as to be meaningless. Trump must map out a strategy for pulverising Islamism, demolishing it so severely that it will not dare raise its evil head for decades to come.

*Today, as I write, debris is once again being cleaned up from the streets of a Western city. In Manhattan, NYC, two bombs have exploded, injuring almost thirty innocent civilians. Meanwhile, in the peaceful, Scandinavian-American State of Minnesota, eight people have been stabbed at a shopping mall, the attacker allegedly interrogating potential victims as to their religious beliefs prior to attacking them.

These are indeed extraordinary times. They require an extraordinary leader. Next week in New York, Donald Trump would do best not to try and make himself seem ordinary, but rather embrace his uniqueness, tying it to the uniqueness of the times in which we find ourselves.

D, LDN

Milo Yiannopoulos: The Good and the Bad

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Few stars are rising faster at the moment than that of conservative writer/broadcaster Milo Yiannopoulos. Virtually unknown just three years ago, the Greco-British journalist, 32, is now fast approaching the kind of iconoclastic status attained by such writers as Gore Vidal and HL Mencken (both of whom expended considerably more time and effort to achieve it).

What can explain this success?

Well – for one thing, Yiannopoulos is a quite formidable debater, and it is for this talent that he is primarily known. Type in ‘Milo Yiannopolous’ into YouTube and many of the videos returned to you will have titles containing words like ‘destroys’, ‘eviscerates’, ‘owns’ and so on… These are not exaggerations. Yiannopoulos has a unique way of making the people he engages seem naive, foolish and weak-minded. He is even – I have found – able to achieve this effect when the other person is in the right; and there is surely no greater testament to a debater’s skill than that.

Yiannopoulos is not merely good with words, he is good with emotions, presenting his side of any argument in a relaxed, self-assured and matter-of-fact style that naturally makes the arguments of the other side seem less certain, more bizarre and fundamentally weaker. In this sense he reminds me in speech of Mark Steyn in print. Both put to use the same rhetorical trick – the insinuation – quite deliberate – that they know they are right. Both treat contrary points of view as amusing, forgivable, even charming eccentricities. Yiannopoulos and Steyn are not trying to make the other side look stupid, so they have us believe, they are trying are help them understand reality – and by arguing this way, they do make them look stupid. There is surely no better way of wounding an intellectual’s reputation than to sympathise with his failures and politely excuse his errors.

Yiannopoulos’s writing, though less spectacular than his debating, still passes with ease any quality test for the journalistic mainstream. Here is a representative excerpt from an article taking down the goodwill-bloated ‘astrophysicist’ Neil Degrasse Tyson:

“Neil deGrasse Tyson is a philistine with no love of learning except for popularisations and oversimplifications that serve his political purposes… (He) constantly situates himself in the big brain league, but he has done nothing in his life to demonstrate that he belongs there — and a lot to suggest he doesn’t…. (He) claims to have been “mentored” by Carl Sagan, for instance. Yet it appears this “mentorship” boils down to little more than a couple of traded letters. If Tyson thinks that qualifies as mentorship, I wonder what he’d call my nocturnal liaisons with other men who share his skin colour. Adoption?… As dumb as Tyson is, his fans are even more preposterously thick, which is probably to be expected given that they’re all liberals. But the extent to which they hoover up and retweet his contradictory and brainless provocations is matched only by the hilarity of the occasional social justice car crash, in which the politics of grievance that Tyson likes to encourage comes back to bite him.”

But neither Yiannopoulos’s skill in writing or debating can fully explain his meteoric ascent. Beyond the mechanics of his profession, Yiannopoulos is himself remarkable. For one thing, he is gay. Indeed, if homosexuality can be graded, he is very gay; audaciously, flamboyantly so. He is also Greek, Jewish and Catholic. This exotic quality, brim-full of apparent contradiction (Gay, Jewish, Catholic, Conservative – are not words used to being in each other’s company), has combined with Yiannopoulos’s oratorical (and occasionally bitchy) style to produce a ready-made object of media fascination. Yiannopoulos gets ratings up in a way no other public commentator has since the death of Christopher Hitchens, a person with whom the journalist bears many important similarities.

Like Hitchens, Yiannopoulos expresses with intelligence arguments traditionally expressed with stupidity. Though I do sympathise with many right-wing concepts, it is nevertheless a fact of politics that the conservative side of the political spectrum attracts more dullards than the liberal side. Many – perhaps the majority – of those inclined to oppose Islam, for example, do so in a crude, yobbish style that puts off the discerning classes and fails to excite anyone else.

Yiannopoulos is successful precisely because he refines gut-sentiments into intelligent arguments. People watch Yiannopoulos debate Islam on television and scream ‘That’s what I think!” or “That’s what I’ve always said!”. He articulates feelings many desperately want to – but cannot – put into words.

So, that’s the good. Now for the bad.

Despite the considerable talents I have described, Yiannopoulos is not without his faults. He has, for one thing, consistently demonstrated a worrying lack of intellectual discipline; a tendency to seek controversy (for its own sake) over positive political impact. On twitter the writer has repeatedly engaged in pointless arguments with entirely apolitical pop-cultural figures, most recently Leslie Jones, the simple-minded comedienne and star of the much-maligned 2016 Ghostbusters remake. After a brief back and forth over various trifles, Milo made a joke implying that Jones (who is admittedly unfeminine looking) is actually a man. This comment then led to Yiannopoulos’s twitter account being deleted by the administrators of the site – (he is still banned).

Was this necessary? Did it serve a purpose? I don’t think so.

Like this author, Yiannopoulos is an outspoken supporter of Donald Trump’s 2016 bid for the US Presidency and has written countless articles explaining this support, most of which have been reasoned and compelling. But on this matter, too, he has a tendency to drift into inexplicable weirdness. Yiannopoulos often refers to Mr Trump in a sexualised voice as ‘Daddy’ and once stated that the “trashier” the Republican nominee becomes the more he loves him.

Now, I have no moral objection to any of this, but surely such unseriousness runs the risk of undoing the good work the journalist has done elsewhere. Once again I ask, is it necessary? Does it serve a purpose? Does Milo wish to be a neo-Orwellian truth-teller or a contestant on Celebrity Big Brother? Christopher Hitchens or Pete Burns? One cannot combine the two aspirations indefinitely.

The atheist Voltaire once remarked that the only prayer he had ever offered was ‘O Lord, make my enemies ridiculous’. I can well imagine Islamists and Leftists offering this same plea to the Almighty in view of current political circumstances. On the issue of Islam – as on many others – we are so far in the right that a misstep on our part is probably the best the opposition can hope for. Milo and others would do well to bear this in mind.

On balance, I am of the opinion that Milo Yiannopoulos can be a very effective soldier for the anti-Islamist cause. His oratorical skill, humour and minority-status make him a very difficult target for the Left to hit with their favoured weaponry. They cannot possibly call Milo, a gay man of partially Jewish descent, irrational or paranoid for worrying about the advance of ISIS. They cannot possibly accuse him of being a Nazi, a White nationalist, or a possessor of ‘privilege’ (the Left’s favourite buzzword of the moment). Milo’s exotic qualities form a wall of confusion around his arguments, giving them a better chance of being considered for what they mean rather than as an extension of who formed them.

And while there are those who will object outright to the inclusion of an actively gay man in the conservative movement, one must strive to remember that the threat of Islam is so broad that it will necessarily require an equally broad coalition to prevent its success.

If you find the right’s embrace of Yiannopoulos strange, you’ll be even more surprised by what the future holds.

D, LDN.

Staring into the Abyss: Germany’s Sad Decline

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An article in the Daily Telegraph last week reported that a group of Muslim men recently swam ashore onto a nudist beach in Germany and abused the women relaxing there, calling one of them a ‘sinner’ and a ‘slut’, and going on to threaten everyone gathered in a mixture of German and Arabic. At the foot of the same article, the reporter offered a larger context for the incident, recounting a worrying list of related events in the EU’s largest nation over the last few weeks:

“(First) a 27-year-old Syrian refugee blew himself up outside a bar in Bavaria in what was described as an attempted Islamist attack which injured twelve people….On the same day, a pregnant woman was hacked to death by a Syrian man in the German town of Reutlingen… Last week, a teenage refugee from Afghanistan attacked passengers on a regional train in Bavaria with an axe, seriously injuring four of them, after pledging allegiance to the Islamic State in a video posted online….(Finally) the worst attack was carried out by a German-Iranian teenager who gunned down nine people outside a shopping centre in Munich on 22 July.”

And shortly after the article cited was published, a suitcase loaded with deodorant cans exploded outside an immigration processing centre in Zirndorf in Bavaria. It is not yet clear whether the package was designed as a makeshift bomb or whether the incident merely represents a (very bizarre) coincidence.

This is happening, lest we forget, in Germany; an economic powerhouse and one of the most important countries in the Western World. This is happening in the homeland of Kant, Nietzsche, Heine, Goethe, Planck and Beethoven. This is not happening in Iraq or Somalia. This is happening in Germany.

In response to this unprecedented chaos, Angela Merkel, the woman to whom the most blame belongs, has been stone-facedly defiant. Against all evidence and logic, the Chancellor claimed the open-door asylum policy she initiated just requires more time to work; that integration, though a slow process, will eventually bear desirable fruit; that terrorism and the beginnings of a widespread civil conflict are simply the birth pangs of a new and better order for natives and immigrants alike.

There is no way of changing the mind of someone this deluded. If she truly believes what she is saying, Chancellor Merkel has succumbed to the kind of magical thinking rarely encountered outside of psychiatric wards and millennial cults. If she truly believes that one million Syrian and Afghan single men, almost all of them fleeing nothing more than the natural consequences of their own culture – a culture to which they remain perversely wedded – will in time blend seamlessly into Northern European civilisation, then she is ill and dangerous; unfit to lead even a scout troop.

But she is not, sadly, untypical of the German political elite.

As a recent editorial noted: “For historical and understandable (reasons), German politicians are wary of acknowledging, first, that there are questions about whether all immigrants can smoothly integrate into Western societies and accept Western values and, secondly, that some voters have legitimate worries about the arrival in their country of people whose attitudes seem far removed from their own.”

It is perhaps this historical handicap that Islamists are pinning their hopes on. And it’s a tactic that may just work.

How many times have you heard in the UK or US that anti-Muslim sentiment is ‘reminiscent’ of German propaganda against the Jews in the 1920’s/30’s? How many times have you heard in the UK or US that ‘Islamophobic’ political leaders are ‘reminiscent’ of Adolf Hitler and Heinrich Himmler? Now think how successful such slurs have been in these countries; how they have successfully made taboos out of commonsensical concepts and obvious realities.

In Germany, a country still overcast by the chimneys and moral blackness of the Holocaust, this is a hundred times more effective. Here, the Left possesses all the trump cards they require to shut down sensible debate and set the mainstream narrative all must follow to get a public hearing. They did this successfully after Cologne, and they will do it successfully after every additional outrage. The horror of Hitlerian ideology is such that anything seems preferable to agreeing with a single part of it – even if the part in question was never Hitler’s to trademark in the first place; such as patriotism and the will to national-cultural self-defence.

The backdrop against which all this is happening is worthy of noting. Just a few months ago, the toxic pseudo-memoir ‘Mein Kampf’ was republished in Germany (albeit in prohibitively bulky, heavily annotated form) for the first time since the Second World War. After less than a fortnight, the volume found itself on the national bestsellers list, and public interest in Hitler and the Nazis spiked on internet search engines.

In a loosely related development, the leadership of the main patriotic opposition party in Germany – Alternative for Germany, or AfD – has recently been dogged by accusations of anti-Semitism, a charge that is vigorously denied by party officials, but to which much press attention continues to be dedicated.

The ghost of Hitler is rising again in Germany. And whether this ghost is illusory or substantial matters little. Its effect is all that counts. The Muslims currently terrorising the country have no greater ally than this national curse. It may well prove to be the deciding factor as to whether Germany steps back from the abyss or slips irrecoverably into the darkness.

What can be done about this in the short term? Well – for one thing, the German people must make sure to remove Angela Merkel from power. Anyone else will do for now. By removing Merkel a message will be sent from the public to the political class that the policies the Chancellor has initiated are unacceptable and democratically illegimate.

As to who would make the best replacement for Merkel, my first choice would obviously be Frauke Petry, the beautiful and strong-minded leader of the AfD. With that being said, any accusations of anti-Semitism must be fully addressed by the AfD leadership if international alliances are to be protected and maintained. Given Germany’s recent history, some back-bending by its patriots is only to be expected, even if it seems on occasion like an excessive and unnecessary exercise.

It would be hyperbolic and unconvincing to call this crisis, as some are, the ‘end’ of Germany. It isn’t necessarily the end of anything. It is however a crisis with the potential to trigger the unravelling of modern Germany’s ideological consensus; the progressive and pleasant Weltanschauung, built upon rubble and regret, behind one of the longest periods of affluent stability in Germany’s short and chequered history.

D, LDN

The Banality of Terror

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The attack in Nice, France – which resulted in the death by crushing of over 80 innocent civilians – has hardly caused a ripple on social media.

After the news had come through the place-name ‘Nice’ trended on Facebook for little more than an hour or so, after which it rapidly tumbled out of the ranking, replaced by such stories relating to the appointment of Boris Johnson as Foreign Secretary to the UK government, speculation over Donald Trump’s VP choice, and the latest gossip relating to the Palin family.

There have been no diaphanous tricolours draped over the profile pictures of my friends this time around. Few have chosen to mention the incident in a status update, or even to share a relevant news story. And I have been no different.

I just can’t quite bring myself to be angry over this latest atrocity. I am not shocked, frightened, or agitated by it. The news of the attack has hit me rather like a report of sleet in Scotland, or wind in Wales. Terrorism, especially terrorism in France, now seems ordinary, banal, unremarkable.

This attitude (which is largely involuntary) is especially disturbing when one contemplates the gruesome manner in which the victims of the Nice attack perished. Unlike the more professional attack of last November, the victims this time were not put out of their happiness by a painless bullet to the head. They were crushed by several tonnes of metal and rubber; flattened, deformed under wheels. As banal as the observation might be, this must have been a hellish way to die.

But still, I’m not outraged – only bitter and depressed. I want all this to stop, but I really don’t think it will. And if an anti-Islamist blogger is becoming desensitised to terrorism, how on Earth can we expect the average Joe to maintain the required level of interest?

The man suspected of carrying out the Nice truck attack: French-Tunisian – Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel

The official response to Nice has been just as lacklustre as the public reaction. Boris Johnson, (whose appointment as Foreign Secretary must rank as the worst national embarrassment in years), has expressed little more than sadness at the news. In America, Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton offered only cheap, hollow solidarity on her personal Facebook page. Even Donald Trump has been more muted than usual.

The only exception to this icy disregard has been (or seemed at one point to be) former US house speaker Newt Gingrich, who used the aftermath of the attack to suggest a very sensible policy by which the US would quiz individual Muslims upon entry to America on their views of Sharia Law.

Unfortunately, if also inevitably, when this commonsensical notion received the usual abuse from the usual abusers, Gingrich promptly drained the idea of its force, over-clarifying the concept to the point of retraction. How pathetic; how telling.

The reaction of the Western media (or at least the UK/US media) was to dampen out any loose sparks of anger that might have escaped the general apathy described. The ever-reliable ‘don’t panic’ libertarian Simon Jenkins, for example, hot-footed it into the Guardian offices to inform us that: “A Nice truck driver does not remotely threaten the security of the French state, any more than such acts do the security of America or Britain. The identification of the nation state with random killings of innocent people has become a political aberration….The implication that leaders can somehow prevent such attacks by armed response is a total distraction from the intelligence and police work that might at least diminish their prevalence. It nationalises and institutionalises public alarm. It leads governments into madcap adventurism abroad and “securitises” the private lives of citizens at home…What has happened in France is tragic and calls for human sympathy. Beyond that, there is nothing we can usefully do – other than make matters worse.”

Though this argument has the flavour of reasonableness, the implication of it is surely that we should do absolutely nothing in response to terrorism; indeed, that we should actively prevent our governments from doing anything about it – on libertarian grounds.

Someone should really inform Mr Jenkins that Western states in fact need little encouragement to under-react to terrorist atrocities. Doing nothing has been standard operating procedure ever since the twilight years of the Bush administration.

I personally have no doubt that Francois Hollande’s bungled security measures (including his declaration of an extended state of emergency) will end up doing more harm than good. Nevertheless, the general preference of the public must surely be for the state to do more to address this threat, not less. Jenkins and his ilk appear obsessed with getting the masses to calm down and to put things in a rational, non-emotional, context. We have been doing that for over a decade. A bit of non-rational rage really wouldn’t go amiss at this point.

French President Francois Hollande

All things considered, Nice has been an unmitigated triumph for ISIS. Not only have the swinish degenerates managed to send dozens of unbelievers to perpetual hellfire, they have also further diminished the life-force and rage-reflex of the continent on which they resided.

(On a side note  – It is worth noting that Westerners have not become incapable of getting angry about anything. We are still liable to go ape over the unlawful killing of gorillas and lions. It is only the value of human beings, and of Western culture, that is collapsing. One might justly speculate that if a dog or a cat had been caught under the wheels in Nice the reaction would have been rather more vigorous.)

Europe seems ever more like a wounded animal, yelping and moaning, bleeding and weakening. The old spark, the energy behind colonisation and empire, has been all but exhausted. The deathly prefix ‘post’ is now attached to every formerly noble concept: post-modern, post-national, post-racial, post-Christian etc… Everything is watered down and submissive enough that even the most barbaric challenger can overcome it.

I have nothing original to say about Nice. I will simply close by reiterating that Islam does not belong in Europe and never will. It is backward, violent, boring and false down to the letter. It must be resisted with everything with we have.

If indeed we still have anything at all.

D, LDN

Islam and Black Americans

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A common perspective holds that America is a haven of non-Islam, of kafirdom and cultural infidelity, and that while Europe is destined to become ever more Middle Eastern and North African in the future, America shall long remain a shining city on a hill; proudly old-fashioned in its Christian, patriotic Anglo-Saxonism.

This is not entirely inaccurate. Compared to Western Europe, America has certainly retained an enviable cultural-religious clarity. It is still uncontroversial to postulate that America is a ‘Judeo-Christian’ country, either in the media or from the political podium. The only protest aroused by such a claim tends to be from spectacle wearing atheists, and who on Earth could find them intimidating? By contrast, if one made the same claim about Europe, the backlash would be of an immeasurably more serious kind. People would die. Windows would be smashed. Heads might possibly be removed. America is simply more confident and self-assured than Europe – more willing to stand its ground and preserve its original identity.

But this is not to say that America doesn’t have a problem with Islam. On the contrary, the nation may have more of a problem with Islam than Europe, depending entirely on how ‘Islam’ is defined.

African-American Muslims are today the most powerful Muslim community in the United States and in the West more broadly. Unlike the Arab and Persian Muslim communities, African-American believers are socially and culturally integrated, acceptable, part of the national fabric. Many African-American icons are or were Muslims: from Malcolm X (AKA el-Hajj Malik el-Shabazz), to the late Cassius Clay (AKA Muhammad Ali), to Shahrazad Ali, to Louis Farrakhan. These figures are not like marginalised Arab-American activists or obscure Pakistani-American Imams. They are nationally recognised faces, with enduring influence on the mainstream media and the mainstream political conversation.

Louis Farrakhan

They are also protected against the kind of contempt one might safely direct against Arabs and Pakistanis by the firewall of political correctness. You cannot speak as liberally about Black people as you can against Middle-Easterners. Given the horrors of the African-American past, Black leaders are typically treated gently and apologetically by White political analysts. Their comments, however ridiculous, are rarely dismissed, but debated and scrutinised. Therein lies political power.

Of all the African-American Muslim movements in operation today, none is more famous, or infamous, than the so-called ‘Nation of Islam’. Conceived in Detroit in 1930, the Nation of Islam (or NOI) now commands the allegiance of up to 50,000 American citizens; a membership that has in the past included such figures as Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X.

The NOI ‘brand’ is recognised across the United States. Few people have never heard of the organisation. And this notoriety is well earned. NOI members are routinely condemned for their homophobic, anti-Semitic and anti-White demonstrations, some of which have proven very difficult and expensive to police. NOI chapters on university campuses are also noted for their combativeness and hostility to rival groups and demographics, including more moderate or secular African-American fraternities.

Women of the NOI

So what do they want? It’s difficult to say. The NOI website currently features a list of ten ‘demands’, entitled ‘The Muslim Program’. It functions as a kind of manifesto, and has been little changed for several years. I won’t paste the entire thing, since many of the demands are vacuous and jingoistic. But here are three of the most interesting:

“3. We want equality of opportunity. We want equal membership in society with the best in civilized society.

4. We want our people in America whose parents or grandparents were descendants from slaves, to be allowed to establish a separate state or territory of their own – either on this continent or elsewhere. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to provide such land and that the area must be fertile and minerally rich. We believe that our former slave masters are obligated to maintain and supply our needs in this separate territory for the next 20 to 25 years–until we are able to produce and supply our own needs…..

10. We believe that intermarriage or race mixing should be prohibited. We want the religion of Islam taught without hindrance or suppression.” – Source: https://www.noi.org/muslim-program/

The Nation of Islam was founded in 1930

Eagle-eyed readers will notice at once that all three of these demands are in contradiction with each other. How can there be equality of opportunity (presumably they mean between different races) in a Black-only state? Why also would race-mixing need to prohibited in that state? And so on…

But while one can nit-pick this manifesto for hours on end, that is not the point of this article. What we are trying to scrutinise is the nature of Black Islam and what its followers are aiming to achieve in the United States of America. Judging by the text quoted (as well as other texts available on the Nation of Islam website), Black Islam appears to be a movement dedicated to racial separatism; that is, to the permanent separation of Whites and Blacks, ostensibly for the benefit of both.

Whether you find this a good suggestion or not is not the issue to focus on; rather, we should ask: What has this to do with the Islamic religion authored by the Arabs in the 7th century? Indeed, is this Islam at all? Does the Nation of Islam actually care about Islam, or are they merely using it as a façade, as a cosmetic and/or political cover?

Few questions are more important for the future of America. Given how many African-American ‘Muslims’ there are in the country, and given how mainstream some of them have become in the Black community, the answers to these questions may reveal whether Islam, in the truest sense of the word, has any future in America at all.

‘Conventional’ American Muslims

It is revealing (and comforting) to note that Black Islam has yet to be formally recognised by any conventional Islamic authority, either in America or around the world. The Sunni and Shia religious establishments have only limited ties with the NOI. Even al-Qaeda, an organisation usually welcoming to Western supporters, has greeted Black Islam with a mistrustfully slow handclap.

We hardly need wonder why this is the case. The Nation of Islam has a very, very liberal attitude to Islamic dogma. Not only do NOI clerics preach the infallibility of the Qur’an; they also provide a generous heap of new-age, Afrocentric Apocrypha to go with it. In NOI theology, for example, White people (understood as those of pure Northern – but not Southern – European descent) are a breed of scoundrels and devils, inferior to the pure and ancient Black African race (the race, allegedly, of the Egyptians, Moors, Ancient Arabs, Hebrews, Romans and Greeks). NOI theorists explain White misbehaviour as being congenital to – and ineradicable from – White psychology. Slavery was not, then, a terrible aberration by an otherwise civilised people, but merely the natural expression of White human nature, of White evil.

As much as they might find this kind of analysis appealing, given the contemporary antagonism between East and West, no orthodox Muslim would recognise these ideas as Islamic. They are not based in the Qur’an, and nor do they have any root in the sayings or teachings of the Prophet. For those reasons, Orthodox Muslims will reject a great portion of Black Islamic thought outright. Then there are the UFOs to consider…

The NOI has a lot to say about spacecraft, especially a peculiar UFO called the ‘Mother Wheel’. Minister Farrakhan is quoted on Wikipedia as having said the following: “That Mother Wheel is a dreadful-looking thing. White folks are making movies now to make these planes look like fiction, but it is based on something real. The Honorable Elijah Muhammad (Note: NOI leader from 1934-75) said that the Mother Plane is so powerful that with sound reverberating in the atmosphere, just with a sound, she can crumble buildings.”

Ufology is integral to the NOI worldview

I think that’s probably enough to prove the point. These frankly daffy beliefs are not compatible with any major school or tradition of Islam. On the matter of theology, Black Islam is out on its own.

What about politics? What about the aims of Islamism? Well, happily enough, I have yet to hear of a single case where a Black Muslim (of the NOI style) has travelled to join either al-Qaeda or ISIS, or has carried out, or been apprehended in the process of carrying out, a major terrorist attack. This is most probably because there is a major disconnect between the goals of the NOI Muslims and those of the conventional Islamists. Radical Islamists of the conventional style wish to create a global, multiracial caliphate under the rule of Sharia law. NOI Muslims, by contrast, wish only to create a Black homeland in America or in Africa where they can be free from non-Black oppression. Would NOI Muslims be happy living in an Arab or Pakistani-controlled caliphate? No, of course not. The NOI only exists because Black Americans became tired of being treated as secondary human beings. In a caliphate, the White devils would quickly be replaced in NOI grudge-theology by Arab devils.

For these and various other reasons, I find it quite unlikely that Black Islam will ever threaten American culture in the same way that real Islam threatens Europe. Black Islam is just too silly, too fake, and too cobbled-together to ever mount an effective opposition to modern civilization.

D, LDN

The Neo-Conservative Tragedy

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I used to consider myself something of a neo-conservative (pejoratively abbreviated ‘neo-con’ by the left, often with an anti-Semitic edge to it). I was genuinely enlivened by the prospect of the West enforcing its moral and political standards on the rest of the world, believing for some time that the project was a simple yet complete fix for the problems of our time; most importantly, the problems of terrorism and Islamic anti-development.

Like many, I now know better. Neo-conservatism has failed, and failed badly, in practice. The use of the doctrine to liberate and improve the condition of Iraq has barely succeeded. While the country is now technically democratic, it remains crippled by religious tradition, unable and unwilling to develop beyond the limitations of that tradition. This should really have been predicted from the get-go. The fact that it wasn’t exposes the fundamental naivety at the heart of the neo-conservative experiment.

Put at its most basic, neo-conservatism pushes the idea that democracy has a positive value. Neo-cons (if there still are neo-cons) believe that democracies are less likely to go to war, less likely to collapse into chaos, tolerate corruption and extremism or shelter terrorists than are dictatorships and autocracies. On the surface this sounds reasonable enough. The Western democracies of today are certainly more averse to these evils than the third world; as are the remodelled nations of the far-east. Why wouldn’t the same be true for the rest of the world?

The answer in the case of the middle east is Islam. As political equations go, Islam plus democracy equals regression is one of the most reliable. The evidence for this can be found in modern ‘liberated’ Afghanistan – a country which has gone from a tribal theocracy controlled by the Taliban, to a democratic theocracy policed by the Taliban. One can also point to ‘liberated’ Iraq, which itself has gone from a secular Baathist dictatorship to a democratic Shia theocracy. Looked at from this vantage point, was either project worth thousands of free Western lives lost in the course their completion?

I was a fool to have ever thought so.

As well as Iraq and Afghanistan, neo-conservatism has also destroyed the nation of Libya, a country that previously had the highest Human Development Index ranking in the world. Post-liberation, the country is a sharia-ridden desert, robbed of its infrastructure, foreign investment and political coherence. As to whether Syria falls to the neo-con wave remains to be decided. One can justifiably presume that if democracy does strike the country, it will swiftly go the same way as Iraq and Afghanistan have.

If neo-conservatism was – as its detractors have always maintained – merely an ideological cover for destroying the Muslim world, then it has been remarkably successful. But I don’t believe in that conspiracy. Neo-conservatism – I think – was simply an embarrassing misfire of the Western intellect. We will be living with the consequences for a very long time.

D, LDN