The Muslim slaughter of 150 Christians in Kenya serves yet another reminder of the West’s impotence. It’s not just that we don’t protect our own; we no longer even realise who our own are.
This being Good Friday, I feel more contemplative than enraged. Hence I wouldn’t be able to write an appropriately indignant piece called for in this situation. In any case, doing so would be repeating what I’ve said many times before in other articles. So here is one of those pieces, from last September, written in the aftermath of some public beheadings perpetrated by Isis.
You’ll find that everything I said then applies, mutandis mutantis, to the Kenyan tragedy.
Religion of peace is getting ever so slightly out of hand, wouldn’t you say?
Suddenly a seditious question crosses one’s mind: can it be that perhaps Islam does have something to do with IS monstrosity, if only a teensy-weensy bit?
No, surely not. In the aftermath of the twin towers collapsing, George W. Bush explained that Islam isn’t to blame for anything Muslims do, even if they claim to be acting in the name of Allah.
One wonders. We don’t see many Buddhists lunching on human organs, nor many Confucians engaged in terrorism and general mayhem all over the world, attacking anyone within close proximity.
Neither do many Christians publicly behead journalists, this in spite of the severe provocation provided by the entire editorial staffs of The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and the BBC.
Sorry about sounding facetious about this, but my first editor all those years ago taught me not to rant, instead using irony as a defence mechanism.
Such self-restraint isn’t easy in the face of the monumental stupidity, cowardice and moral corruption happily co-existing within the breast of our leaders.
It’s thanks to this confluence of character traits that they refuse to acknowledge the obvious. Those IS animals, including the now famous product of our comprehensive education, wouldn’t be committing their midnight horrors on such a scale if they were Buddhists, Confucians or Christians.
They commit them because they are Muslims. Unless we realise this, and act accordingly, things will get much worse and we’ll find ourselves on the receiving end – yet again.
The copout so beloved of our spivocratic leaders, that only a minority of Muslims cut off people’s heads, doesn’t wash.
Only a minority of Dresden dwellers were SS murderers, yet that fact didn’t queer the aim of US and British bombardiers. The Soviet communist party had a total membership of under 10 per cent of the population, yet this didn’t deter us from training nuclear missiles on Soviet cities.
Violence on a massive scale is always initiated by a radical elite, the red-hot end of a largely inert mass. The rest follow half-heartedly or at least acquiesce, until they too get into the spirit and become indistinguishable from the elite in their murderous ardour.
These aren’t theoretical abstractions. They are premises for a coherent strategy executed by appropriate tactics.
When the first American journalist was decapitated on camera, President Obama said “We don’t have a strategy yet” and went off to work on his golf swing.
When the second American pundit lost his head, Obama didn’t say anything. Our own Dave wasn’t particularly forthcoming either – he was too busy fuming about Israel’s ‘deplorable’ occupation of an area roughly equal in size to the parks between London’s Westminster and Kensington.
By all accounts our great leaders are busily working behind the scenes in an effort to put together an ad hoc anti-IS coalition, including the Saudis, the Jordanians, the Kurds and anyone else willing to join.
As far as I know, neither the IRA nor the Tamil Tigers have been asked. They must feel terribly left out, wondering where they’ve gone wrong.
It has to be said that Dubya and Tony were considerably more decisive back in 2003, when committing US and British troops in the Middle East. It was thanks to them that democracy came to Iraq, though it has since left.
The vacuum thus formed was filled by Islamic terror, now threatening to engulf our countries as well. Yet God forbid we should act decisively and unilaterally to stamp out those IS thugs like cockroaches – we only ever go in when we shouldn’t, when doing so is guaranteed to set the world aflame.
A rapid unilateral offensive might look as if it’s us against them, the post-Christian West against the Islamic East. How multi-culti would that be? Not very. Certainly not enough to mollify The Guardian, The Independent, The Times – and, I hope you’re getting up to salute, the BBC.
Turn those chaps against you, and you can kiss the next election good-bye, Dave has no doubts on that score. Nor is Obama in much doubt on the electoral prospects of the Democrats should the TV networks, The New York Times and The Washington Post fall out of love with them, however temporarily.
Hence the urgent need to form a coalition with Muslim wolves, on this occasion donning synthetic sheep’s clothing. Look, we’ve got the Kurds on our side, they are Muslims, so who are you calling anti-Islamic bigots, Mr Voter?
This is all terribly wrong. The proper way for our countries to act is to straighten out the mess of our own creation.
It’s thanks to our own criminal stupidity that Islam has entered an impassioned phase, a development kept in check prior to that by the secular thugs we’ve removed. The region and the religion are now on fire, and only fire can put it out.
Rewind the clock back 100-odd years and ask yourself this question: How would Britain and the USA have responded then to public murders of Englishmen and Americans in Islamic lands?
How likely would those prime ministers and presidents have been to ponder whether or not it was justified to hold a wide group responsible for the crimes committed by a few of its members?
The question contains the answer. They would have hit the whole region with all they had, laying about them with rather indiscriminate violence and without giving a second thought to extraneous considerations. No one murdered Englishmen or Americans and got away with it.
In 1904, when the Moroccan brigand Raisuni kidnapped a Greek-American named Perdicaris, President Theodore Roosevelt (also involved in an election campaign at the time) immediately sent a squadron of warships to Morocco.
The ships levelled their guns on Rabat and flew the signal “Perdicaris Alive or Raisuli Dead!” No poll was conducted to determine the proportion of the Rabat population sympathetic to Raisuli or complicit in his crimes.
How far should the West go to protect its citizens and allies against Islamic barbarism? There’s only one geopolitically viable or indeed moral answer to this question: as far as it takes, and never mind multi-culti rectitude.
Yet we in the West have lost the knack for providing such answers. Nor do we realise any longer that those who won’t fight for their civilisation don’t deserve to keep it.