Waging The War on ‘Terror,’ Vichy-style
by Victor Davis Hanson //
National Review Online
A few hours before the
catastrophic attack in Paris, President Obama had announced that ISIS was now
“contained,” a recalibration of his earlier assessments of “on the run” and
“Jayvees” from a few years back. In the hours following the attack of jihadist suicide
bombers and mass murderers in Paris, the Western press talked of the “scourge
of terrorism” and “extremist violence”. Who were these terrorists and generic
extremists who slaughtered the innocent in Paris — anti-abortionists, Klansmen,
Tea-party zealots?
Middle Eastern websites may be crowing over
the jihadist rampage and promising more to come, but this past week in the
United States we were obsessed over a yuppie son of a multi-millionaire
showboating his pseudo-grievances by means of a psychodramatic hunger strike at
the University of Missouri and a crowd of cry-baby would-be fascists at Yale
bullying a wimpy teacher over supposedly hurtful Halloween costumes. I guess
that is the contemporary American version of Verdun and the Battle of the
Bulge.
This sickness in the West manifests itself in
a variety of creepy ways — to hide bothersome reality by inventing euphemisms
and idiocies likely “workplace violence” and “largely secular,” jailing a
“right-wing” video maker rather than focusing on jihadist killers in Benghazi,
deifying a grade-school poseur inventor who repackaged a Radio Shack clock and
wound up winning an invitation to the White House, straining credibility in
Cairo to fabricate unappreciated Islamic genius. Are these the symptoms of a post-Christian
therapeutic society whose affluence and leisure fool it into thinking that it
has such a huge margin of security that it can boast of its ‘tolerance’ and
empathy — at the small cost of a few anonymous and unfortunate civilians
sacrificed from time to time? Is deterrence a waning asset that has now been
exhausted after seven years of Obama administration apologetics and
contextualizations?
Our premodern enemies have certainly got our
postmodern number. Newsmen compete to warn us not of more jihadists to come or
the nature of the Islamist hatred that fuels these murderers, but instead fret
about Western “backlash” on the horizon, about how nativists and right-wingers
may now “scapegoat” immigrants. Being blown apart may be one thing, but
appearing illiberal over the flying body parts is quite another. Let’s hurry up
and close Guantanamo Bay so that it will stop “breeding” terrorists; and let’s
hurry up even more to restart the “peace talks” to remind ISIS that we are nice
to the Palestinians.
Hundreds of thousands flock to Europe not in
gratitude at its hospitality but largely contemptuous of those who would be so
naive to extend their hospitality to those who hate them. Barack Obama recently
called global warming our greatest threat; Al Gore — recently enriched by
selling a TV station to carbon-exporting Persian Gulf kleptocrats — is in Paris
in Old Testament mode finger-pointing at our existential enemy — carbon. John
Kerry, hours before the Paris attacks, announced that the days of ISIS “are
numbered.” Angela Merkel welcomes hundreds of thousands of young male Muslims
into Europe, and the more they arrive with anything but appreciation
for their hosts, the more Westerners can assuage their guilt by turning
the other cheek and announcing their progressive fides.
To preserve our sense of
progressive utopianism, we seem willing to offer up a few hundred innocents
each year to radical Islam. The slaughter might cease in a few years if we were
to name our enemies as radical Muslims and make them aware that it could well
be suicidal for their cause to kill a Westerner — or at least remind the
Islamic world in general that it is a rare privilege to migrate to the West,
given that immigration demands civic responsibilities as well as rights and
subsidies, and is predicated on legality rather than the power of the stampede.
But then to do that we would no longer be Westerners as we now define
ourselves.
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