Ten Years

Ten years ago, a band of Muslims attacked the United States of America. In the ten years since, the semi-free governments of the world have done exactly nothing about it except to surrender, yield, appease, and apologize. 

George W. Bush immediately (and correctly) called for retaliation against the regimes that harbor and support the killers--but he did it in speech only, not in action, then used his years in office to subvert it all by insisting that we are not a war with Islam and that it is a religion of peace. After this, Americans enthusiastically placed into office the most overtly un-American president in history, Barack Obama, a man who both figuratively[1] and literally bows to the leaders of Muslim nations (as did Mr. Bush). Ten years after the atrocity, we hear Tony Blair boast that he reads the Qur’an every day.[2] (Can one imagine Winston Churchill, ten years after the Blitz, boasting that he reads Mein Kampf every day?)

September 11th was not a tragedy; it was an atrocity. It was not a mass murder perpetrated by mere crazy people, disconnected from larger ideas, as the apologists would have us believe. It was an explicit attack of Islamists acting as Islamists upon the institutions of the West. Robert Spencer summarizes it well:

We were attacked on Sept. 11, 2001, by Islamic jihadists who explained, in writings they left behind, that they were committing mass murder in the name of Islam, inspired by the teachings of Islam, and in defense, as they saw it, of Islam. They struck the United States in service of their hope of destroying it, and ultimately imposing upon the U.S., the West and the world an Islamic government that would rule according to Islamic law, which denies the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience and equality of rights for all people.[3]

The fact that mass murderers hijacked airplanes was all but forgotten amid the rush to insist that the murderers hijacked a religion--a “religion of peace.” 

Islam is indeed a religion of peace in one and only respect: When every human being on the planet has yielded to Sharia law, devout Muslim men will at last consent to leave the rest of us in peace . . . to be the subjects of their cruelties, superstitions, appetites, and perversions. Until then, their holy commandment is to “slay the idolators wherever you find them.”(Sura 9:5)

Unlike Westerners, who with few exceptions do not understand the nature and purpose of the enemy, the jihadists know exactly whom they are fighting. In order to make room for Sharia, in order to achieve universal obedience to Allah, in order to enslave the human race to the will of Mohammed and his followers, it is necessary to destroy the human mind. One could hardly have picked a better target than the World Trade Center in New York City. The Twin Towers are--or rather, were--the embodiment of human achievement, set in the capital city of human achievement. Skyscrapers soar skyward with foundations that rest upon science and technology, which in turn rest upon trade, which in turn rests upon freedom, which in turn rests upon reason. The Towers were the conspicuous monoliths of modern civilization--the twin pinnacles of the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution--and it is precisely those values that the jihadists wish to knock down. Free men do not obey Allah; thus, freedom must be destroyed.

It is beside the point to cite the fact that America has not been attacked on our soil since that infamous day in 2001. It is no matter to the Islamists if they knock down our institutions or if we will save them the trouble and do it for them. If David Letterman cannot crack a joke without being threatened by killers who are confident that they can get away with their threats, then we are losing--or have already lost--the war. 

War, you may ask? What war? The “war on terror” is not a war. Only Congress can declare war, and our Congressmen lack the courage to do so, despite our enemy declaring war upon us at least as far back as the 1979 Iranian hostage crisis. War cannot be declared upon a tactic, terrorism. War must be declared upon an enemy: the states that support Islamic totalitarianism.

In the aftermath of September 11, there was much talk about the failure to “connect the dots,” aimed largely at the intelligence agencies and politicians who “let this happen.” But it is absurd to blame intelligence agents for failing to “connect the dots” when the weight of the mainstream intellectual elite is overwhelming dedicated to disconnecting dots--which is to say, performing the mental contortions required to hold countless Muslim terrorist attacks as disparate and unconnected events, and evading the meaning of the explicit goals and intents of our enemies.

If there is such a thing as a history book in the future--which, in this self-loathing culture bent on submitting meekly to a multiculturalist elite, is no sure thing--the men who are still permitted to read books will be amazed at these inexplicable events of our time. They will see the United States of America, the most glorious product of the Enlightenment values of reason and freedom, being defeated by a marauding band of anachronistic barbarians. 

Why, future historians will wonder, was the strongest nation in the world militarily simultaneously the weakest morally? Stranger still, why was this so when the United States was objectively the most moral nation in history--the nation explicitly founded upon individual rights, the nation born of the idea that all men must be free to live their lives as they judge best? How could mobs of primitive, superstitious thugs who explicitly embrace death cause a population of civilized people who want to live and be happy to doubt themselves?

The answer is that thanks to the philosophical trends of the last century or so, Americans on the whole have lost the moral conviction that we are right--and have lost the moral courage to say so. 

But it must be said: The American way, by which I mean the explicit, constitutional enshrinement of individual rights as the law of the land, is superior in every possible respect to the Islamist way, by which I mean the enshrinement of Mohammedan commands as the will of Allah. Reason is superior to faith. Thinking is superior to believing. Freedom is superior to slavery. Life is superior to death. Trade is superior to murder. Self-interest is superior to sacrifice. Capitalism is superior to theocracy. Acting on one’s judgement is superior to obeying the Qur’an (or Bible, Torah, etc.). The freedom to speak one’s mind (including the freedom to offend someone) is superior to the fear of being beheaded for doing so. Respectfully holding a door open for a beautiful, bare-shouldered woman as she passes is superior to beating her to death for not covering her face.[4]

For holding these apparently controversial opinions, I would be condemned as a “bigot” by nearly every journalist, university professor, and self-proclaimed enlightened intellectual, and condemned to death by perhaps a billion people on the planet. 

As Daniel Pipes has accurately identified, Islamist terrorism does not constitute a clash of civilizations but a clash of civilization and barbarism. The barbarians cannot possibly defeat us militarily, but they can defeat us by default if we do not stand up for what is right. Ten years after the September 11th attacks, we as a nation have yet to do so.

NOTES

[1] See, for example, Mr. Obama’s 2009 speech in Egypt, http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09.

[2] “I read the Holy Quran everyday: Tony Blair,” The Express Tribune, http://tribune.com.pk/story/188297/i-read-the-holy-quran-everyday-former-british-pm-tony-blair/.

[3] Robert Spencer, “A decade out, we’re losing,” Jihad Watch, September 11, 2011, http://www.jihadwatch.org/2011/09/a-decade-out-were-losing.html.

[4] I used the term “is superior” here in a terse series of sentences only to emphasize the point from the aspect of cultural evaluation--namely, that America is superior to her enemies. Every sentence actually understates the case. For instance, “reason is superior to faith” hardly captures the fact that reason is the only means of obtaining knowledge and faith is absolutely impotent. Faith is not merely inferior to reason; it is nothing.

It Was Not Yet Clear

In case anyone needed a reminder of the effectiveness of “tolerance” and debate in the face of fanatic killers, the last couple of weeks in Pakistan have produced a few instructive examples for those who care to heed them. On Friday, a dozen gunmen, presumably Taliban, attacked the home of a fifty-year-old female police officer, killing her along with two sons, two daughters, and a daughter-in-law. On Thursday, two police officers were killed by a roadside bomb. On Wednesday, eighteen police officers and six civilians were blown up. And a couple of weeks ago, Salman Taseer, the outspoken liberal governor of Punjab Province, was assassinated, evoking memories of the murder of former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto in 2007. Taseer was murdered by his own elite security guard, who riddled him with bullets at close range.

If multiculturalism has demonstrated anything, it is that a feeble set of modern ideas--“tolerant,” “democratic,” explicitly anti-ideological, and denying the absolutism of values--is no match for a fanatic ideology bent on destruction. How does one seek appeasement and conciliation with fevered killers who want nothing more than martyrdom? What does it mean to be diplomatic--to “meet halfway”--thugs who wish to murder you because you are free and prosperous, because you think for yourself and speak your mind, because you do not bend your knee to their superstitions?

The weakness of today’s intellectuals can be seen in the reports of Taseer’s murder. This was no ordinary Pakistani official; Mr. Taseer was an outspoken opponent of the blasphemy laws that were put in place during the rule of Mohammad Zia ul-Haq in the 1980’s. A New York Times article noted:

[Taseer] recently took up a campaign to repeal Pakistan’s contentious blasphemy laws, which were passed under General Zia as a way to promote Islam and unite the country. The laws have been misused to convict minority Pakistanis as the Islamic forces unleashed by the general have gathered strength. The laws prescribe a mandatory death sentence for anyone convicted of insulting Islam.[1, emphasis mine.]

The blasphemy laws have been misused? How, in the minds of New York Times reporters, would laws that sentence people to death for insulting Islam be used properly? Would the Times be satisfied if, for instance, the Islamists had more “fairly” distributed the death sentence to non-minorities?

Later in the same article, the reporters demonstrate an astonishing refusal to connect the dots.

[Taseer’s] attacker was identified as Malik Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, an elite-force security guard, who surrendered to the police immediately afterward and implied he had killed the governor because of his campaign to amend the blasphemy laws.

“I am a slave of the Prophet, and the punishment for one who commits blasphemy is death,” he told a television crew from Dunya TV that arrived at the scene shortly after the killing, according to Nasim, Zahra, the director of news at the channel.

It was not yet clear whether he had acted alone or on behalf of some extremist group.[1, again, emphasis mine.]

Not yet clear? What could possibly be more clear than the fact that the assassin acted on behalf of Islam? Perhaps this is what passes for unbiased reporting, but it is the very opposite of objectivity. No objective mind could observe the facts and refuse to judge that Islamic totalitarianism is the motivation, the justification, and the inspiration of not just this murder, but all the other acts of Muslim terrorists for the last thirty years.

As long as the western world continues to placate barbaric murders instead of identifying their nature and confronting them with unapologetic force, we will be threatened. I came across an article describing the stepped-up security of a former minister Sherry Rehman, who is also an outspoken critic of the blasphemy laws and now fears for her safety in the wake of Taseer’s assassination. “The number of policemen deputed to guard Rehman’s home in Karachi was increased,” the report said. [2] Considering the fact that Mr. Taseer was killed by his own guard, it is not obvious to me how increasing the number of Ms. Rehman’s guards makes her safer.

NOTES

1. Salman Masood and Carlotta Gall, “Killing of Governor Deepens Crisis in Pakistan,” The New York Times, 4 Jan 2011, “http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/world/asia/05pakistan.html?_r=2&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=tha2”.

2. “Pakistan increases security for former minister Sherry Rehman,” Daily News & Analysis India, 5 Jan 2011, “http://www.dnaindia.com/world/report_pakistan-increases-security-for-former-minister-sherry-rehman_1490703”.

The Carter-Bush-Obama Mosque

On Friday, President Obama finally threw his explicit support behind the building of the mosque at Ground Zero. Echoing George Bush and virtually every conservative and “liberal” politician, Mr. Obama reiterated the standard line: “Al Qaeda’s cause is not Islam––it’s a gross distortion of Islam.”

As one might expect, Obama couched this craven surrender in terms of defending freedom. He even had the gall to quote Thomas Jefferson and to invoke to old canard that the Founders were “deeply religious.” Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared, “This proposed mosque and community center in Lower Manhattan is as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime, and I applaud President Obama’s clarion defense of the freedom of religion tonight”[1]––as if the Founders would have considered it an expression of “freedom of religion” to murder thousands of innocent workers, use airplanes to knock down their institutions of commerce and free trade, and install a house of worship on the blood-soaked holy site as a symbol of the conqueror stepping on the neck of the vanquished.

Incredibly, on top of it all, in a contrivance that would have seemed a gross exaggeration if it had appeared in a novel or movie, the occasion upon which the President chose to make this announcement was at the White House Iftar Dinner. The White House Iftar Dinner is, of course, part of the Executive Branch’s official promotion of the “Holy Month of Ramadan” in order to “reflect on the principles of a faith that is practiced by more than a billion women and men worldwide.”[2] In the Orwellian fantasy land of current political discourse (and the sheeplike acceptance of an unthinking public), this is what passes for “as important a test of the separation of church and state as we may see in our lifetime.” Declared the President:

Here at the White House, we have a tradition of hosting iftars that goes back several years, just as we host Christmas parties and seders and Diwali celebrations. And these events celebrate the role of faith in the lives of the American people. They remind us of the basic truth that we are children of God, and we all draw strength and a sense of purpose from our beliefs.[3] [Emphasis mine.]

No, Mr. President, the fact that these events (apart from Christmas, which has happily substituted its religious meaning for a commercial one) occur in the White House at all indicates how far the federal government has become completely unmoored from its founding principles. The government has no business propping up any religion. To do so destroys, not reinforces, the wall of separation between church and state. And it is utterly obscene for the federal government to be acting in its official capacity to promote a religion that is openly an enemy of freedom, and to do so in the name of freedom.

Religious freedom is a subset of freedom in general––and freedom means one and only one fundamental thing: securing individual rights. A man certainly has the right to believe anything he wishes (including medieval superstitions), and he may act upon those beliefs as long as his actions harm no one else. A man does not have the right––nor do a billion men[4] have the right––to destroy a free country with a succession of murderous attacks and legal maneuvers.

_______________

I have been extremely troubled by the controversy surrounding the Ground Zero mosque. It is obviously an outrageous affront to America, to freedom, and to civilization. But what should the America government do about it now? Countless opportunities to do the right thing have gone by. (This is why I dubbed it the “Carter-Bush-Obama mosque.” The prospect of building a holy shrine of Islam’s victory over America in Manhattan is possible only after a generations-long chain of capitulations by our morally-bankrupt culture. Perhaps I should include Eisenhower in the title as well; he should have opposed the outrageous nationalization of Western property during the Suez crisis. But if Jimmy Carter had responded with immediate overwhelming force to the American embassy takeover by soldiers of the Islamist Revolution, there would have been no fatwa against Salman Rushdie a decade later; if George H. W. Bush had properly recognized the fatwa as an act of war and a mortal threat to all civilization, there would have been no September 11 atrocity; and if George W. Bush had not merely given lip service to destroying the nations that harbor terrorists and if Barack Obama were not a thorough multiculturalist, we would not now be threatened by Islamic totalitarianism and be on the doorstep of Sharia law in the United States. Sure, it sounds like a crazy and unreal exaggeration to say that Sharia law could take hold here––but then again, I used to think it impossible that the American government would ever take over car companies and the health care industry.)

The trouble I have with the Ground Zero mosque controversy is that because the United States government has placated the enemy for so long, it is difficult to sort out exactly what should be done by the government in this instance. It goes without saying that every private citizen and politician––every editorial, radio program, television commentary, and blog––should denounce the mosque from the rooftops in the most explicit terms. It is an outrage and a monstrosity. But if government force is used to block the mosque, exactly what form should that take? Should American soldiers storm the mosque after it is built? Should the CIA or FBI take it down covertly? Should New York City policemen padlock the door? Should bureaucrats wrap up the project in red tape and deny approval? On its face, every one of these seems wrong; American soldiers (or better yet, American aircraft) should be destroying the root of Islamic totalitarianism in Tehran before it does so in New York City.

Many excellent essays have been written on this topic by Ed Cline, Diana Hsieh, Amy Peikoff, Paul Hsieh, and others. I find myself in the most unusual of circumstances––seeing both sides of their arguments and having trouble identifying the correct application of principles. The problem amounts to this: Because of the past and present failings of the federal government, the only immediate way to stop or eliminate the Ground Zero mosque is to use government force in an abusive, non-objective fashion. The government ought to have eliminated the threat generations ago. But it didn’t. So, the only (apparent) solution remaining is to exert government force that I would ordinarily regard as violating rights. (By “ordinarily,” I mean outside of a declared state of war.) Naturally, every philosophical alarm bell in my head goes off at the prospect of such a compromise; it seems to contradict a principled defense of freedom and to open the door to untold future abuses of power. I habitually argue against this sort of support for the “lesser of two evils” because it concedes the basic premises of the argument to the irrational.

A comment in a private email list has put a fact in place to help me through the dilemma. Reflecting my own concerns, one post expressed the reasonable worry that the use of government measures that are either outside the law or exploit existing bad laws (such as non-objective regulatory or zoning laws) creates a dangerous precedent that threatens the rule of law itself. In reply, Ed Mazlish made an excellent point: The government has already assumed this power. It cannot be a precedent to block the building of a mosque with zoning laws when New York City already routinely blocks other types of building, “as evidenced by the fact that Walmart is not allowed to open any store in any of the 5 boroughs despite repeated attempts and petitions for permission. If the government has already arrogated to itself the power to ban Walmart from NYC, then the horse is completely out of the barn and allowing this mosque to be built does nothing to protect private property rights from arbitrary zoning powers.”[5]

This is a crucially important observation. If individual rights were being upheld in a reasonably consistent fashion in America, one might argue that the breach constituted by blocking the building of the mosque would threaten the rule of law itself. (Such a breach still might not compare to the threat of Islam, but the argument could be made.) However, this is not a case of “the cure being worse than the disease.” We already have the disease. The government seems to recognize no restraint on its powers to regulate and control our lives. Furthermore, in very broad and fundamental terms, if our government were the sort that consistently secured individual rights domestically, it would likely also have had the proper foreign policy, which would have eliminated this controversy altogether.

In light of this, my dilemma can be expressed more clearly: Given the past and present failings of the federal government, should it now apply an incremental evil of its own to stop a monstrous, civilization-threatening evil? In those terms, the answer in the affirmative is obvious.

_______________

The tenets of Islam are not secrets for those who care (or dare) to look, but it is easy to obscure and dismiss the nature of those ideas, especially when our morally bankrupt culture wants to pretend there is no problem.

In Modern Times, historian Paul Johnson cited a remarkably candid passage that rings true today. It is from a secret briefing issued by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich Minister of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, in April of 1940, four days before the Nazis invaded Norway:

Up to now we have succeeded in leaving the enemy in the dark concerning Germany’s real goals, just as before 1932 our domestic foes never saw where we were going of that our oath of legality was just a trick. We wanted to come to power legally, but we did not want to use power legally . . . . They could have suppressed us. They could have arrested a couple of us in 1925 and that would have been that, the end. No, they let us through the danger zone. That’s exactly how it was in foreign policy too . . . . In 1933 a French premier ought to have said (and if I had been the French premier I would have said it): ‘The new Reich Chancellor is the man who wrote Mein Kampf, which says this and that. This man cannot be tolerated in our vicinity. Either he disappears or we march!’ But they didn’t do it. They left us alone and let us slip through the risky zone, and we were able to sail around all dangerous reefs. And when we were done, and well armed, better than they, then they started the war![6] [Emphasis in the original.]

The apparent strategy of the West is to keep mouthing the words “religion of peace” over and over until it somehow becomes true . . . or at least until the “religion of peace” silences us once and for all. Assuming civilization survives, we will someday look back at the words of President Bush, President Obama, Mayor Bloomberg, and the many other politicians and intellectuals who apologized for Islamic totalitarianism, and marvel at the incredible moral cowardice, deceit, and naivete they exhibited.

NOTES

1. “Obama Strongly Backs Islam Center Near 9/11 Site,” New York TImes, 13 Aug 2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/14/us/politics/14obama.html?hp.

2. Quote from Farah Anwar Pandith, Special Representative to Muslim Communities, in “Remarks at the Annual State Department Iftaar Dinner,” US Department of State, http://www.state.gov/secretary/rm/2009a/09/129232.htm.

3. “President Obama’s Iftar Remarks,” distributed by the Bureau of International Information Programs, US Department of State, http://www.america.gov/st/texttrans-english/2010/August/20100813211535yggep0.050237.html.

4. From Mr. Obama’s remarks: “To you, to Muslim Americans across our country, and to more than one billion Muslims around the world, I extend my best wishes on this holy month. Ramadan Kareem.”

5. I am grateful to Mr. Mazlish for permitting me to quote him.

6. Paul Johnson, Modern Times (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, Inc.,1983), p. 341.

Massacre at Fort Hood

I like the “Today’s Headlines” email feature that the New York Times provides free for the asking. The daily post starts with links to three top stories and a quotation of the day, this last of which is generally intended to pique interest in one of the headline stories.

So, I find it interesting that on a day when more and more alarming details emerge about the connections between the Fort Hood murderer, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, and virulently anti-American Muslims, the daily quote that the New York Times chose to present was this:

“Whether it’s self-medicating, anger or violence, these are the consequences of war, and you have to think about all the people affected by soldiers coming home, the parents, spouses, children, brothers, sisters, aunts and cousins.” - Cynthia Thomas, an Army wife who runs a private assistance center for soldiers in Killeen, Tex., called Under the Hood Café.[Note 1.]

Are we supposed to infer that this is the source of last week’s massacre at Fort Hood?

Obviously, there are very real troubles related to suicide and violence among returning soldiers, who have undergone stresses unimaginable to those of us who have not seen combat. These are serious problems that deserve attention, and it is perfectly appropriate for a newspaper to run an article on the topic. But the presence of this quote on this day, along with the accompanying story, “At Fort Hood, Some Violence Is Too Familiar,” leaves little doubt that the Times is pressing hard to scatter some chaff, the purpose being to direct attention away from Hasan’s Muslim connection and to make this atrocity seem like just one more in a series of violent acts by American soldiers.

Is Nadal Malik Hasan really the typical troubled soldier with post-traumatic stress, as the Times would have us believe? Maj. Hasan had not returned from combat; he had never been deployed. He was himself a psychiatrist. While his fellow American soldiers were fighting in the field, Hasan was busy surfing radical Islamist web sites urging Muslims to kill U.S. Troops; he had been in occasional contact (“10 to 20 times”) with an Islamist spiritual leader in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had previously been the imam of Dar Al Hijrah Islamic Center, the Virginia mosque attended by Hasan. (Awlaki, who knew three of the September 11 hijackers, had “drawn the interest of law-enforcement officials in several terrorism investigations since the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.”[Note 2.])

Hasan did not quietly and desperately commit suicide as tragically ten American soldiers have done this year alone at Fort Hood. He did not kill his wife and then turn the gun on himself, as happened in one awful incident at Fort Hood last year. He did not kill a fellow member of his division in a moment of violence at a party, as did a soldier last July.

No, Maj. Hasan systematically shot forty-three of his fellow American soldiers, killing thirteen of them while shouting “Allahu Akbar!”

Because there is no indication that Maj. Hasan was part of a conspiracy - and perhaps also out of obedience to political correctness - the incident is not being classified as a terrorist attack. But his actions, with their apparent jihadist motive, the plodding pre-meditation, and the sheer casualties of his final fury, have much more in common with say, the attack on the USS Cole than with the violence of a distraught soldier. In fact, if one looks clearly at the matter, Maj. Nadal Malik Hasan acted much less like a soldier (no matter how troubled) of the United States Army than as an enemy of the United States.

If the New York Times had wanted to capture the essence of the Fort Hood massacre, they would have done better to select for the daily quote the words of the imam that Hasan had contacted. Anwar al-Awlaki wrote on his web site, following the incident, that Hasan was a “hero”:

“He is a man of conscience who could not bear living a contradiction of being a Muslim and serving in an army that is fighting against his own people . . . The only way a Muslim could Islamically justify serving as a soldier in the U.S. Army is if his intention is to follow the footsteps of men like Nidal.” - Anwar al-Awlaki.[Note 3.]

NOTES

1. From the “Today’s Headlines” email distribution, The New York Times, 10 Nov 2009.

2. “Hasan, Radical Cleric Had Contact,” The Wall Street Journal, 10 Nov 2009.

3. “U.S. Knew of Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric,” The New York Times, 9 Nov 2009.

The Obsolescence of the Fifth Column

I have been reading (and in some cases re-reading) a lot of Agatha Christie novels recently.  I love the settings - they are generally placed in early twentieth century England, though sometimes they venture to more exotic locations - and her characters are usually complex and richly drawn.  Having just finished N or M?, a novel set in 1940 wartime England, I was struck once again by the astounding difference between that age and ours.  It is amazing how far the western world has sunk in only a few decades in terms of its moral certainty and its ability to think in principles.  

Which is to say: I was reminded how disarmed the west has become in its self-defense.

One passage from the novel captures the essence of the attitude in Britain as Hitler’s forces overran France and prepared to invade England.  A diverse cast of characters has assembled in a Victorian villa - young and old, mothers, fathers, an old soldier from the last war, a domineering female IRA sympathizer, a mother with her infant, a doting housewife and her sniveling husband, a young girl in love with a German émigré.  They sit around the dinner table, chatting amiably:

The conversation during the meal turned on the absorbing subject of spies.  Well-known hoary chestnuts were retold.  The nun with the muscular arm, the clergyman descending from his parachute and using unclergymanlike language as he landed with a bump, the Austrian cook who secreted a wireless in her bedroom chimney, and all the things that had happened or nearly happened to aunts and second cousins of those present.  That led easily to Fifth Column activities.  To denunciations of the British Fascists, of the Communists, of the Peace Party, of conscientious objectors.  It was a very normal conversation of the kind that may be heard almost every day... (Note 1, emphasis mine.)

In other words, each character in his own way identified and denounced the enemy.  The tacit assumption was: England is good, Nazi Germany is bad.

Such a “normal conversation” is almost inconceivable today.  Even after the September 11 attacks and the London and Madrid bombings, which were direct military assault against western institutions by Islamic fundamentalists, I cannot imagine a randomly assembled group of American or British strangers today being in basic and unanimous agreement about the identity of the enemy and the nature of the threat against us - at least, not if that group had any modern “liberals” among it, or even just average, apolitical second-handers who uncritically digest everything they hear from their colleagues, their preacher, or the network news.  There is certainly no longer a general tacit assumption that America and the west is right and that enemies who attack us are wrong.  

This is not to say that everyone ought to be in complete agreement, of course.  The characters in Christie’s novel disagreed about particular aspects of the war, and some even hinted at sympathy with some of the Nazi aims.  But no Brit in his right mind would have feared being accused of “Nazi-phobia” if he denounced Hitler, nor would the typical Englishman have felt that the German bombing of London would be a well-deserved punishment for British “imperialism” and hubris.  Yet that is the state of affairs today, when critics of Islam are accused of “Islamophobia” and the September 11 atrocity is considered to be expiation for our sins. 

If a similar fictional portrayal of such a scenario in a movie or novel were translated to modern times, it would be incomprehensible to a general audience.  Words such as “enemy” or “evil” applied to jihadists would cause many westerners to squirm uncomfortably, and if any one member of the group were bold enough to speak out against Islamic fundamentalists, multiculturalists, or pacifists, he would be portrayed as a jingoistic xenophobe, a gun-toting, blockheaded bigot who simply couldn’t comprehend the “nuance” of international affairs.  

Don’t misunderstand me.  I am not arguing that the moral clarity of the characters in N or M? indicates that seven decades ago most citizens of the west were properly grounded philosophically.  It’s not true, and I make that point in the conclusion of this post.  Furthermore, the novel does not even attempt to show this; some of the characters turn out to have evil intentions and even the heroes’ motivations are a well-meaning but jumbled mixture of benevolence, traditionalism, nationalism, and stiff-upper-lip resolution.  Agatha Christie is not Ayn Rand; she does not develop an explicit philosophical defense of liberty.

What is remarkable is the implicit context in Christie’s novel: everyone understood that a war was on and that one’s very survival was at stake.  

This brings me to the subject of the novel and the title of this post: the Fifth Column.  The so-called “fifth column” is a small group of foreign enemies (or sympathizers of those enemies) within a country that secretly tries to undermine national security in a time of war.  (Wikipedia provides an interesting description of the term’s origin.)  In N or M?, the heroes Tommy and Tuppence go undercover to root out the members of the Fifth Column that are diabolically plotting to weaken the British defense against Hitler’s impending Blitzkrieg.  The heroes succeed, of course, but only after employing all their faculties, courage, and a little luck to unmask the Nazi sympathizers who had so cleverly and painstakingly installed themselves secretly into the fabric of British life.

This novel seems impossible today.  In a modern context, the very concept of a Fifth Column seems to be inapplicable - not because the west has no enemies, but because those enemies need not hide anymore.  Does a Fifth Column that is neither clandestine nor a minority remain a Fifth Column?  

There may have been a time when to weaken a free country, it was advantageous to infiltrate the workings of its government, to steal its military secrets, to quietly sow ideas that could destroy it from within, and to break its laws and escape detection.  But that sounds downright old-fashioned today.  Why bother to steal plans for an advanced missile when one can simply hijack commercial airliners and fly them into buildings?  Why whisper anti-western sentiments when one can publish and broadcast them to the delight of the intellectual establishment, be acclaimed by the New York Times, and win Academy Awards?  Why bother to kill all westerners to silence them when they can en masse be made afraid to speak?  Why risk breaking the laws of a free country when one can use those same laws against its citizens?  Why murder innocent people when they can be convinced to commit suicide?

Thus, the Fifth Column has been rendered obsolete.

What is the Fifth Column?  A weapon.  When is a weapon needed?  When one’s opponent will fight.  Of what use is a weapon when one’s opponent humbly dons manacles, slips its own head in a noose, and hands over the end of the rope in submission?  Eagles and tigers may be snared with a trap and shot with a gun; such weapons are not required for sheep.  The Fifth Column is no longer needed, the west having decided not to defend itself.  One does not infiltrate an establishment that opens its door to you.  The western institutions themselves - elementary schools, universities, government agencies, churches, newspapers, Hollywood - readily propagate the enemy’s message, which is: apologize and submit. 

Author and columnist Mark Steyn succinctly described this weakness of modern western institutions in a recent article.  (He knows firsthand how the west’s own institutions are being used to silence criticism of Islam; for a 2006 article he wrote, Steyn is entangled with Canada’s “human rights commissions,” which have been enlisted by the Canadian Islamic Congress to choke off ideas with which they disagree.) 

Every day of the week, somewhere in the West, a Muslim lobbying group is engaging in an action similar to what I’m facing in Canada.  Meanwhile, in London, masked men marched through the streets with signs reading “Behead the Enemies of Islam” and promising another 9/11 and another Holocaust, all while being protected by a phalanx of London policemen. (Note 2.)

It is hard to say exactly when the “multiculturalist” trend reached enough of a critical mass to put us firmly on a path of self-destruction.  Steyn identifies Ayatollah Khomeini’s 1989 fatwa against Salman Rushdie, the subsequent murderous outrage of Muslims against the author, and the frightened silence from western nations as the significant indicator.  I tend to think of the 1979 Iranian Revolution and Jimmy Carter’s woeful response to the embassy hostage-taking as the watershed event.  In any case, though “multiculturalism” is a many tentacled beast, the most important tentacle of this dreadful idea is the one being exploited by Islamic groups.  As Steyn notes, although in one respect Muslims are “insufficiently assimilated” in the western nations to which they’ve migrated, “in their mastery of legalisms and the language of victimology, they’re superbly assimilated. ” 

Much more can be said about this, but it would digress from the scope of this post.  The relevant part to note is that today there is nothing clandestine required for enemies of the west to install agents within those free countries.  It is all done quite openly.  

During World War II, in order to intercept particular Allied communications or spread a certain piece of misinformation, Nazi Fifth Columnists would have had to install themselves with great risk and difficulty in order to succeed in their mission, and if they were caught, they were summarily executed as spies.  They could count on very little cooperation from the government and the citizens.

In contrast, observe how much easier we make it for our enemies today.  To effectively intercept and censor virtually all mainstream communications today, Islamic fundamentalists need no Fifth Column.  They do not hide; they declare their hostility openly.  They do not fear the authorities; indeed, they enjoy the protection of the police and legal system.  Most media outlets already happily fall in line with anti-western propaganda, but for those that criticize Islam (like the Mark Steyns and Oriana Fallacis and Danish cartoonists who have the courage to stand out), Muslims set up tax-exempt organizations that use the west’s own laws to silence dissenters and to gradually impose Sharia law.  This last is not yet prominent in the United States - we are precariously hanging on to our First Amendment - but as indicated in Steyn’s case above, there is a chilling trend in Europe and Canada.  As Steyn writes, “If the story of The Three Little Pigs is forbidden when Muslims still comprise less than ten percent of Europe’s population, what else will be on the black list when they comprise 20 percent?”

So, what is the root of this difference between the World War II setting of Agatha Christie’s novel and the situation today?  Why, seven decades ago, did the citizens of a western nation threatened with force believe that they must respond with force, while today westerners who are attacked believe that they must shower their enemies with apologies and billions of dollars of aid?  

The tragic answer is that the moral case for liberty that underpins freedom wherever it exists was not made explicit.  Liberty resulted from the application of reason to social systems, and this is the implicit foundation of freedom’s greatest example, the United States of America: each individual is sovereign and has a natural right to pursue his own interests.  In lieu of this explicit defense of liberty upon self-interest, however, the west is wracked by self-doubt, and is left to float rudderless upon a sea of bad ideas.

Thus, even though the west seemed to demonstrate more moral clarity during World War II than it does now, it was not firmly rooted in individual rights and rational self-interest.  This left us open to the innumerable ideologies based in self-sacrifice: chauvinism, nationalism, socialism, nihilism, and all the religions.  It is no surprise that a civilization beset by the more skeptical of these ideologies, as we have been in the last few decades, would be vulnerable to the assertive ideologies - the religions.

If there is a positive side to this gloomy observation it is this: the reason that the “multiculturalists” have made such inroads is that we do all the work for them.  They count on us being too “liberal” to recognize (or at least proclaim) that western civilization, in its institutionalization of liberty, is objectively better than all others in history.  (By “liberal,” I mean the word in the sense that Robert Frost did when he said, “A liberal man is too broadminded to take his own side in a quarrel.”)  To save the free world, it is as simple - and as difficult - as recognizing the source of freedom.

NOTES

1.  Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie’s Detectives: Five Complete Novels, Avenel Books, New York, 1982, originally published, 1941.

2.  Mark Steyn, “Lights Out on Liberty,” August, 2008. (“http://www.hillsdale.edu/news/imprimis.asp”)

3.  The 2006 article in Macleans magazine that got Mark Steyn in trouble with the Canadian government is called “The Future Belongs to Islam,” available online at “http://www.macleans.ca/article.jsp?content=20061023_134898_134898&source”.