We are at war

This simple statement needs to be repeated. Propagandists and demagogues think “that if we oust specific politicians from office – replace Bush with Kerry, Blair with Brown – the Islamic fundamentalists will leave us alone”. This is a huge mistake: Appeasement never works. As Bat Ye’or points out, Europe’s voluntarily becoming Eurabia,

The spirit of dhimmitude which today blinds Europe springs not from a situation imposed from without, but from a choice made freely, and systematically carried out, in its political dimensions, over the course of the last 30 years.

but so far that’s not working. Yes, being at war is exhausting, and of course it’d be nice if we could just relax and go back to the long vacation of the 1990s, but the fact is, We are at war.

I also maintain that this is a religious war.

Thanks to Roger‘s blog, I came across Cella’s Review. On June 30, Cella was writing,

For religion is not so much the beliefs a man holds as the world in which he lives, or the vision he possesses of the world in which he lives. Bush and his men seem not to have considered the possibility, supported by 1400 years of history, that the world of Islam and the world of Christendom are irreconcilable. They have been in a state of war, with only brief moments of quiescence, for that entire time.

The idea of religious war is not something modern man ever contemplates; he only shudders at it. But this is a religious war, whether or no we in the secular world of the West will take it seriously. Only one fact obscures this huge truth from our view; the fact that it has been a very long war, waged over souls and for the souls of whole nations; therefore it has been slow and erratically conducted. Rare is the war that occupies the leaders of more than one generation of men; rarer still is the war that occupies leaders of more than one age of men. This one has occupied mediaeval men, modern men, and it will surely implicate postmodern men. It began in what we call the Dark Age and has not yet ended; and we would do well not to sneer at a war that has gazed with patient jaded eyes on the fall of Constantinpole and the Siege of Vienna; the victory of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and her defeat; the break up of Catholic Europe and the decay of Protestantism; and the rise and fall of Feudalism, Monarchy, Aristocracy, and Democracy, each in turn.

Hugh Fitzgerald proposes five “to-do’s”

1) shoot down, interfere with, or otherwise put out of commission Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiyya. If they cannot be put out of commission, then have hackers arrange things so that, randomly, pornographic movies will come on during broadcasts; this should cut down on the number of Muslim families willing to get Al-Jazeera by cable, if only because their sense of female “honor” may be impugned if it is known that they subscribe to Al-Jazeera and that it has some peculiar interruptions.

2) seize, with a small force, the southern Sudan, and hold it until the southern blacks can hold a referendum on independence. Such a seizure, a bold taking back of part of what the Arab Muslims are insisting is part of Dar al-Islam, would establish a fault line and an issue that the Arabs cannot win.

3) end all military aid to Muslim countries.

4) Begin to educate large numbers of people about Jihad: what are the sources in Qur’an and Hadith? What is the history of Jihad in time and space? What is the institution—Dhimmitude—which, post-Jihad, defines the status of all non-Muslims who remain alive, and still unconverted—what precisely are its elements? When, and where, were some of those elements modified or mitigated, and why? And what is the current evidence as to how non-Muslims are treated in the Muslim world—using Indonesia, Pakistan, Nigeria, the Sudan, Lebanon, Iraq (the Chaldeans, the Assyrians, the Mandeans), Saudi Arabia—as places to examine in detail.

5) Attempt to arouse publics in the cretinized world of “Eurabia”—that is, a demoralized Western Europe that now has a horrific problem with its Muslim population, a population that the criminally negligent elites (especially in France) allowed in to the country, without understanding, or even attempting to study, the tenets of Islam, and the reason why this kind of immigration was completely different from all other kinds, given the inculcated hostility toward all non-Muslims, and the uncompromising war between Dar al-Islam and Dar al-Harb.

Or, to put it another way (borrowing Fitgerald’s words), Shall we think this through now, or wait another decade? Victor Davis Hanson, for one, knows we don’t have “another decade” to think it over, and poses the question Another 9/11? The awful response that we dare not speak about, and proposes

Perhaps it would be best to inform hostile countries right now of a (big) list of their assets — military bases, power plants, communications, and assorted infrastructure — that will be taken out in the aftermath of another attack, a detailed sequence of targets that will be activated when the culpable terrorists’ bases and support networks are identified and confirmed. We would have to draft a formal declaration of war — as we should have against the Taliban, bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein — against those countries that harbored or even aided the next 9/11-like cell. Both sides should anticipate the consequences should another 3,000 Americans be incinerated at work.

We are at war.