Survival Strategy

In this passionate editorial Caroline Glick outlines what she sees as a major cause of European self-destruction - multiculturalism. She has a good point, but I suspect there's more to the decline of Europe than just a commitment to "cultural diversity," as fatuous and insidious as that often turns out to be.

I think there is also a collective madness that seizes effete societies which have abandoned a belief in anything transcendent, and Europe is a confirming instance of that belief. How else to explain what Glick says here:

Wednesday's decision by Britain's University and College Union to call for a boycott of Israeli universities and colleges was not only hypocritical. It was suicidal. It is not simply that the British prefer to boycott Israeli universities than say, Palestinian, Egyptian, Syrian, Iranian, Saudi and Jordanian universities where students are indoctrinated to seek the annihilation of the Jewish people and the subjugation of Christianity through the destruction of Western civilization.

It is not merely that they ignored the poor, brave Iranian students who just three weeks ago were brutally attacked by regime forces as they sought to hold elections for their pro-democracy campus organizations.

By calling for a boycott of Israeli universities, Britain's academic establishment is turning its back not only on Israel, but on Britain. When Britain's professoriate rejects Israel's right to exist as a Jewish, democratic nation-state and glorifies Palestinian society which supports global jihad and the destruction of Western civilization, it is rejecting the British state.

Only those who are suffering some sort of psychological impairment which causes them to experience moral inversion can call for a boycott of Israeli academics while feting those from Muslim nations. I can come up with no other explanation.

Europe reminds me of a certain kind of schoolboy, a weakling himself, who always takes the side of the schoolyard bully in hopes of ingratiating himself to the tough so that he won't turn on him. This child is willing to sacrifice anyone else to the bully's abuse, and to abase himself in the process, but it's worth it to him if it avoids a beating. That's modern Europe, or at least much of the elite class in Europe.

They know they have nothing to fear from Israel but plenty to fear from the Palestinians and their allies, so they perversely play the role of protector and advocate of those who want to destroy them in hopes that the destroyers will change their mind and find the quavering Euros useful against Israel. It's cowardly and unprincipled but that's modern Europe.

RLC

Cut and Run

According to The Drudge Report there were 16,185 murders in the U.S. last year, 400 of them in Philadelphia alone. Since the onset of the Iraq war in 2003 there have been about 3500 Americans killed.

In absolute terms it seems safer to be an American in Iraq than to be a resident of our cities. Perhaps John Murtha will soon call for Americans to redeploy from the U.S. to Okinawa.

RLC

They're Coming For Us

Andrew McCarthy has a must-read piece up at NRO. Here's an excerpt:

We now learn that for radical Islamists, lovers of death, the heart is the jihad's most coveted prize. Tear it out, and you get to kill not once but twice. So says 63-year-old ringleader, Russell Defreitas, whose nom de guerre is, of course, Mohammed.

"Any time you hit Kennedy, it is the most hurtful thing to do to the United States. To hit John F. Kennedy, wow!... They love John F. Kennedy like he's the man.... If you hit that, this whole country will be in mourning. It's like you can kill the man twice."

Defreitas, er, Mohammed is a naturalized United States citizen. He is another splash in that gorgeous mosaic of American Islam - the one over whose purportedly seamless assimilation the mainstream media was cooing just a few days ago, putting smiley-face spin on an alarming Rasmussen poll.

Alas, Defreitas/Mohammed turns out to be the part of the story the press dutifully buried in paragraph 19: He is that nettlesome one of every four American Muslim males who thinks mass-homicide strikes against civilians, like the one he and his cell were scheming, are a perfectly sensible way to settle grievances.

Does this mean he never really assimilated during his long journey from Guyana to treason against the adopted country he so abhors? Not hardly. For that one in four Muslim males turns out to be in pretty much the same place as one of every two members of the United States Congress - already tacking toward two of every three as we look ahead to September. All are content to let Islamist savagery carry the day.

Militant Islam, you see, is mustered in Iraq, where al Qaeda - the inspiration for Defreitas and his cohorts - has called America out. Like Defreitas & Co., Osama bin Laden and his ranks see themselves in a world war between the United States and a vision of Islam shared by tens of millions. (Think one-in-four, writ large). Iraq, they have decided, is their frontline, though very far from their only line. Everywhere, America is their target. Everywhere, terror - the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent men, women, and children - is their weapon of choice.

For the new Democratic Congress and its growing wake of jittery Republicans, that turns out to be a choice worth living with. Oh yes, they'll sputter about how barbaric and unsavory it all is. But, like those one in four Muslim males, they're prepared to let terror rule the day. That's the plan: Al Qaeda blows up things and people; we leave, grumbling all the way home about civil wars and intractable hatreds between the Religion of Peace's murderous sects; and al Qaeda triumphs ... with bin Laden reminding his acolytes: See, I told you, they're a paper tiger - make it bloody for them and we win.

Naturally, we'll tell ourselves they're not winning at all. They want Iraq? Let 'em have it. Just like - when they killed enough of us - we let 'em have Lebanon in 1983 and Somalia in 1993. Who, after all, needs these hellholes?

Except ... militant Islam doesn't just want the hellholes. It wants everything. It will take the hellholes. For now. But don't think for a second they'll be appeased.

The appetite grows as it feeds. Jihadists won't stop until they break our will. Give them Somalia and they want the World Trade Center. Give them Iraq and they want JFK ... and Fort Dix. They're coming for us, they're only too delighted to tell us they're coming for us, and still we're stunned when their insatiable hatred draws a bead smack in the middle of our shrinking comfort zone - this time, where a thousand flights move 125,000 people every single day.

They were stopped this time, but they will keep on trying until either they are dead or we are. That's the nature of the conflict we're in. Unfortunately for us, most Americans, including some Democratic presidential candidates, either don't believe it, don't care, or don't realize it.

Read the whole thing.

RLC