Understanding the war we are in

The Herald-Sun editorial on Sunday represents the naivety of far too many. It is titled, “We will never understand such hatred” as if the massacres in Paris were a form of irrational madness driven by some unknown motivation. Here is the central point of that editorial:

“Whatever name the terrorists may use to describe themselves, we already know exactly who they are: monstrous, bigoted and cruel Islamic murderers who have betrayed the very mothers that gave birth to them in their deliberate relinquishment of all that humanity holds dear.

“We will never understand what motivates such hatred. To do so would require a guided tour of the most blackened and fouled souls.”

So let me explain. The Islamic State is at war with us because they wish to convert us to Islam. You may think that the way the war is being waged is cruel and monstrous, but it is no more cruel and monstrous than many a war in the past.

What makes this war so bizarre is that the kinds of people who write such editorials do not even know we are in the midst of a war. It is a war for control of territory, in just the same way every other war in history has been fought.

They are attacking us and our civilisation relentlessly. They are attempting to do the same as the Nazis or the Soviet communists attempted to do. They are trying to change our way of life into their way of life through force of arms. They are trying to take our territory from us and replace our way of doing things with theirs.

This is a war that has been on-going for the past 1500 years, with Islamic expansion the aim since the seventh century. What makes this war novel is that until now, each invasion has come in the form of an actual army, and the battles have been in the form of an armed conflict. There are many such battles where Islam has won, such as across the whole of North Africa in the seven century and Constantinople in 1453. And there are others that it has lost, such as Lepanto, the Battle of Tours or on two occasions at the Gates of Vienna. But the war has never stopped, although our modern ignorance of history has made all of this invisible to the vast majority of the population of the formerly-Christian West.

They have a value system and we have a value system. The reality is that in any territory only one of these systems can prevail at any one time. The Western view, our view, is that we can all get along together, with religion a private matter between each of us as individuals and our own conscience. That is not the view of those who are waging war on behalf of the Islamic State. For them, there is only one true belief, and if in some territory it’s not their beliefs that prevail, then, according to them, they have the right to kill us, enslave our women and force us to convert to Islam at the point of a sword. You can see all of this unfolding at the moment across the Middle East.

That is the war we are in. Because we are not fighting this in the same kind of desperate way we fought the Nazis and the Soviets we are losing. They are playing on our ignorance, which has allowed a million invaders to enter Europe, the ultimate aim of their leaders to convert each and every one of us to Islam.

You may deny that is the intent, but it is. You may think they could not possibly do it, but they can. And if we do not resist this invasion, they will succeed. It may already be too late, so that by 2084 – a century after 1984 – most of what had once been the West will be under Sharia law. History is like that. Nothing is pre-ordained.

You will never understand what motivates those on the other side of this conflict if you do not make at least make the effort to see what their war aims are. And so long as our political leaders fail to recognise, or refuse to recognise, what they are trying to achieve, we will continue to lose ground until it is too late, which it almost certainly now is in Europe.

The battle map since the seventh century

Today there is a difference put all too plainly by Mark Steyn: The Barbarians Are Inside, And There Are No Gates.

In the end, the decadence of Merkel, Hollande, Cameron and the rest of the fin de civilisation western leadership will cost you your world and everything you love.

Without Christian civilisation we cannot even tell what to defend or even understand why.

And also in the news today – terrorists have blown up another plane mid-flight

You cannot say that it has not been reported, but on the other hand, it is hardly in the news. Pan Am Flight 103 and Lockerbie remain bywords to this day of an indifference to human life and a terrorist atrocity that can never be forgiven. Why then is Kogalymavia’s flight 9268 not front-page news? Why is this not controversial enough for it to be carried by every newspaper in every country: BRITISH extremists were behind the bombing of a Russian jet over Egypt, intelligence experts believe. Oh yes, Islamic terrorists blew up the plane coming out of Egypt. Is this really now just so ho hum?

They were overheard celebrating moments after the explosion that blew the plane apart, killing all 224 on board.

The jihadis were heard talking in Birmingham and London accents by spies at GCHQ in Cheltenham.

Trained in Syria and with an electronics background, it is believed they may have had a hand in building the bomb.

The success of the attack could inspire them to target British airports next, a former Special Branch officer warned last night.

GCHQ, the Government’s secret listening centre, picked up “chatter” from extremist groups in Egypt immediately after the Russian plane came down.

The regional accents suggest “a definite and strong link” between British extremists and the attack, according to intelligence sources.

Is it because the international economy would collapse if too many people stopped flying? Is it because those who write the papers don’t want to suggest there are certain ideological dangers that are stalking us ever more closely? I am getting used to the idea that newspapers no longer actually carry news that are contrary to the media narrative, this bombing being in every way identical to the invasion of Europe about which there is hardly a story to be found. But with these I at least know certain things that cannot be totally suppressed although they are downplayed to an extreme extent. What I don’t know is what is not reported at all. Does anyone know the term “memory hole” or has that gone down the memory hole as well?

Unprincipled ignorance

It’s clear enough that unprincipled ignorance is the single most defining characteristic of those who consistently attack the PM. His equation of ISIS with the Nazis, with a slight twist towards noting the astonishing pride the Islamic State takes in displaying their barbarity, has called to arms the usual brigade of anti-Abbott hysterics. But there is one difference between the Nazis and ISIS that is of singular importance. The Nazis disappeared in 1945. ISIS is a threat today. To distract from any of this is merely to attack the single most focused enemy of ISIS in Australian politics, and there would be few like him anywhere in the world. Objectively, as Stalin liked to say, attacks on Abbott over this issue transform someone into a defender of ISIS.

Daryl McCann has an excellent article at Quadrant Online: Hold the Front Page! Nazism = ISIS. Here is my choice of its central point, but do read it all.

The bloodcurdling irrationality of the Islamic State expresses itself not only in the annihilation of Christians, secularists, modern women, smokers, archaeologists, Yazidis, Kurds, Druse, Shiites, Alawis, historical landmarks, ancient manuscripts, foreign photographers and aid workers, homosexuals, adulterers, suspected Sunni apostates, but also in its exterminationist anti-Semitism. Thus, the call to “liberate” Jerusalem (al-Quds) refers to the drawing near of Islamic “End Times” and has nothing to do with achieving a two-state solution for the Israeli-Arab conflict (or East Jerusalem as the nascent capital of an Islamic Republic of Palestine). Abbott’s depiction of the Islamic State as an “apocalyptic death cult”, then, appears to be right on the money. Conversely, the accusation by leftist journalists and commentators in Australia that Tony Abbott’s analysis is mere hyperbole, intended only to boost lagging popularity at home, can be dismissed as a combination of ignorance and political point-scoring on the part of the commentariat – the very things, ironically, they accuse the Prime Minister of doing.

If I quibble about this, there is something about the wording at the start that does not come to grips with the intensity or the nature of the problems we face. ISIS are mass murderers who will murder many more if they can. I do not know where their drive for power and dominance comes from but it is not “irrational”. And “bloodcurdling” is too weak a word to do the job. With ISIS we are dealing with very rational people who are seeking power, first in the Middle East but also anywhere else they can. It is a global operation spreading with fantastic success. It is also not difficult to set up a franchise operation anywhere, which is why no country in the West is immune, where there is a large scale risk of much greater insurgency over the coming decades. ISIS is unlikely to have reached anything like the dominance it will one day have. If this doesn’t worry you, you lack political imagination and have almost no historical sense worth discussing. You are, whatever else you may think, helping to open the road to further incursions of ISIS barbarities into every part of the world.

Robert Groot, the President of the Executive Council of Australian Jewry, made this statement absolving the PM of missing the point.

groot-note

OK, I get it. But side by side with that, I would like to see the Executive Council’s words on Obama’s agreement freeing Iran to develop nuclear weapons. Here’s my advice, Robert. You should back this Prime Minister to the hilt because whoever may be the next one is unlikely to take ISIS as seriously as Tony Abbott, and it will not matter which side of politics forms the next government for this to be true.

Who is the ABC to preach to us about anything?

Did Jonathan Green really say this? From Andrew Bolt:

The other thing here on the point of shame and advertising your evil is that IS [Islamic State] depend on the likes of Tony Abbott to do that job for them – to exaggerate their evil, to continually talk about their death cultness, to parade this in front of us, this is doing their promotional work for them.

No doubt he can look himself in the mirror and see a fine, upstanding representative of the highest morality. The fact that others see him in a different way is merely because we are unable to see his virtues and deep insight into the human condition. Let me therefore also bring across the picture that Andrew put up.

isis murder

Pathological and psychotic, and that goes for anyone who does not condemn such barbarity to the absolutely fullest extent. Tell me how to exaggerate this kind of evil. This is sick and disgusting, and if there is anyone who does not agree, then what words shall we use to describe them? Who is the ABC to preach to us about anything?

Pig Iron Mal

Picked up at Andrew Bolt that Malcolm Turnbull wishes to line up on the New York Times side of every issue, in this case possibly the single most important foreign policy issue of our generation. On the ABC naturally, Communications Minister Malcolm Turnbull says Islamic State threat should not be inflated. OK, but it all depends on what you mean by inflated. Here is Malcolm showing off his lack of political imagination:

Daesh is not Hitler’s Germany, Tojo’s Japan or Stalin’s Russia.

Really? What year we talking about, Malcolm? How about 1933? Same kind of stupid remark could have been made about all three at the time. Why don’t we leave it alone to fester a bit. Remember 911? That was the date. The year was 2001, fourteen years ago. Leave this one alone and where will we be fourteen years from now? Like Pig Iron Bob, we now have pig ignorant Mal.

What would Churchill have done?

Either we are at war with an existential enemy or we are not. Either these things are a threat to our way of life or they are not. We are either so in command of the situation that it does not much matter what we do today or we are not. From how things look to me, we are on the losing side in a hundred years war that will end early in the next century. Any thoughts on what the name on the door of what we today call Westminster Abbey or Notre Dame will be on this day in 2115?

The 800th anniversary of the signing of the Magna Carta will be commemorated on 15 June. On 18 June, we will also be commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. And also this year, on the 25th of October, we will be celebrating the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Agincourt. And do you know what they all had in common? Each was a contest using force of arms to determine an outcome.

Tell me this as well. If Winston Churchill were in the Abbot cabinet, would he side with the PM or with Turnbull over how to deal with dual citizens who take the side of the enemy? This is from Gerard Henderson today:

Here’s a news flash (without an exclamation mark). The so-called Islamic State, or ISIS, or ISIL or Daesh, is intent on establishing a caliphate run by Sunni Islamists throughout the world. Contrary to Vanstone’s opinion, there is no evidence that the leaders of Daesh have a cunning plan to reduce the democratic protections that prevail within democracies. Rather, they want to destroy democracies and autocracies alike and establish a theocracy.

There is a genuine debate in Australia and elsewhere as how to handle the Islamic State threat, at home and abroad. This extends all the way to the Abbott cabinet as was evident in leaks about the discussion among senior members of the Abbott government (the Prime Minister himself, Julie Bishop, Kevin Andrews, George Brandis, Peter Dutton, Barnaby Joyce, Christopher Pyne, Malcolm Turnbull) about the implications of terrorism on Australia’s citizenship laws.

As the Australian government’s discussion paper “Australian Citizenship — your right, your responsibility” makes clear, the Abbott government “intends to modernise the Australian Citizenship Act to enable the Minister for Immigration and Border Protection to take action in the national interest to revoke the Australian citizenship of dual citizens who engage in terrorism that betrays their allegiance to Australia”.

There appears to be a broad consensus among Coalition and Labor parliamentarians in support of the proposal that Australian dual citizens who fight with IS should have their citizenship revoked. This would extend the 1948 legislation which entails that dual citizens who fight with a country at war with Australia will lose their Australian citizenship.

The dispute on citizenship turns on the issue of whether the Minister for Immigration should be able, in the words of the discussion paper, “to revoke Australian citizenship where there are reasonable grounds to believe the person is able to become a national of another country under their laws and would not be made stateless”.

The Government has made a judgement call about how best to go about preserving our freedoms in the face of a barbaric and determined enemy that has made astonishing headway in the 14 years since 911. As Henderson says at the end of his article, “There comes a time when democratic rights have to yield to national security considerations.” Democratic government, whatever else it may be, is not a suicide pact. We will either defend this way of life or we will lose it. The Turnbulls of the world have so little political imagination that they cannot picture the world in any other way but the way it is. It is an extreme form of ignorance, who would rather lose in a dignified way than win even if we have to bomb Dresden into matchsticks.

The Management of Savagery

A quite fascinating and eye-opening article in the paper this morning by Jennifer Oriel. Her title is, You can’t be a jihadist and a good citizen, but it was this that I had not heard before:

The recent revelation that Islamic State rose to power using a jihadist playbook has offered the world a blueprint of their battle plan. Written by Abu Bakr Naji (nom de guerre of former al-Qa’ida official Mohammad Hasan Khalil al-Hakim), The Management of Savagery exposes jihadism as the centrepiece of militant Islamist plans to destroy freedom from within legitimate nation states. It is a game changer for the Western approach to terrorism.

A revelation indeed. Why had I never heard of it? There really is such a book, with the full title, The Management of Savagery: The Most Critical Stage Through Which the Umma Will Pass. Oriel also writes that “the three-stage strategy of jihad mirrors the method Bolsheviks used to establish the world’s first totalitarian state, and Naji duly acknowledges communists as an inspiration for his masterplan.” In reality, this is a much older battle plan. Any pretence that this is a strategy picked up from communist practice of the last century is just one more bit of subterfuge among so many.

What you are looking at today is a re-run of the virtually unknown Mughal invasion of India, or at least unknown to us, who should do more to find out what we are dealing with. I knew nothing of it until I came across the story reading through Will and Ariel Durant’s eleven volumes on the history of civilisation (highly recommended, by the way). They begin with these words, from which they go on to show in complete detail just how sound their judgment is:

The Mohammedan Conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. It is a discouraging tale, for its evident moral is that civilization is a precarious thing, whose delicate complex of order and liberty, culture and peace may at any time be overthrown by barbarians invading from without or multiplying within. [My bolding]

It is a story being repeated in the midst of our own Western civilisation. It is being exactly repeated everywhere the Islamic State manages to find its way to power. I am not interested in debating theological issues. But I am very interested in protecting our way of life from marauders who undertake their invasions under a strategy that has been their way for more than a thousand years. If you read first Will and Ariel Durant and then turn to our newspapers of today, on those all too rare occasions when someone prints what is really happening, you will see everything that took place a thousand years ago taking place again, right now. Which is why this is important news from today:

The Islamic State has spread its tentacles beyond the borders of Syria and Iraq and has become a global terror movement whose ultimate aim was “universal dominion”.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has opened a regional summit on terrorism with an urgent warning on the long term ambitions of the Islamic State, also known as ISIL, or Da’ish.

Addressing a room full of ministers and delegates from around the region, Mr Abbott said ISIL’s reach now extended well beyond the Syrian-Iraq conflict.

ISIL, Mr Abbott said, now had outposts in Libya, Afghanistan and the Horn of Africa, and was seeking to expand its violent ideology into South Asia and beyond.

“We have all seen on our screen the beheadings, the crucifixion, the mass executions and the sexual slavery that the Da’ish death cult has inflicted mostly on Muslims in the Middle East,” Mr Abbott said.

“That is what the death cult has in store for everyone if it has its way.”

Mr Abbott offered an implicit challenge to the view that ISIL’s success in Syria and its annexation of much of northern Iraq, rode on the back of long standing sectarian grievance between Sunni and Shia Muslims.

He said ISIL’s barbarity went beyond any “local grievance”.

“This is terrorism with global ambitions,” Mr Abbott said. “Da’ish is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: submit or die.”

The Prime Minister said IS’s declaration of a Caliphate last year was a “brazen claim to universal dominion”.

“You can’t negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it,” he said.

And for those who think we have damaged our relationship with Indonesia, there is this they need to dwell on along with so much else:

Indonesia has thanked Australia for hosting the summit and stressed the importance of nations working together to stop extremism, Brendan Nicholson writes.

“Indonesia views the Summit as an important event in our regional effort to combat terrorism and extremism,” a government spokesman told The Australian.

“We appreciate Australia’s initiative to host and bring together representatives of the region to better coordinate our efforts to counterterrorism, extremism and blunt extremists’ propaganda.”

This is really no longer an area for partisan difference. On this there needs to be the same sense of unity and purpose across the nation as there is between us and the Indonesians.

Living with political insanity

The continued fixation on Archbishop Pell by a certain class of media fools would be unacceptable in even the most benign environment. Picked up at Andrew Bolt, here is the quote from Miranda Devine he uses to fully explain there is no there there, but at least it allows these people to indulge in their anti-Christian obsessions:

David Ridsdale told the royal commission last week that he phoned Pell in early 1993 to inform him about the sexual abuse he had suffered at the hands of his uncle, and that Pell said: “I want to know what it will take to keep you quiet.”

Ridsdale says he remembers those exact words and his response: “F… you, George, and everything you stand for.”

This has been reported as fact and underpinned the venom against Pell last week. But the allegation does not even make sense.

At the time of the alleged phone conversation, Gerald Ridsdale had already been charged and had pleaded guilty to 46 charges involving 21 children. There was no reason to keep anything quiet.

Is this truly a story from 1993, from possibly even before Gillard set up the slush fund? But if there is a story that is not discussed day after day, it is the murder of Christians in the Middle East at the hands of Islamic State fanatics. Like this:

The video starts with what it called a history of Christian-Muslim relations, followed by scenes of militants destroying churches, graves and icons. A masked fighter brandishing a pistol delivers a long statement, saying Christians must convert to Islam or pay a special tax prescribed by the Koran.

It shows one group of captives, identified as Ethiopian Christians, purportedly held by an Islamic State affiliate in eastern Libya known as Barqa Province. It also shows another purportedly held by an affiliate in the southern Libyan calling itself the Fazzan Province. The video then switches between footage of the captives in the south being shot dead and the captives in the east being beheaded on a beach. [Bolding added.]

They have the video, but here the oh-so-cautious media says “purportedly” since it is only an allegation and even if they have said themselves that this is what they did, you do not want to go too far in blackening their name. This is a story for which there are probably no end of possible news items each week, of which there are now hardly any shown or even discussed at all.

Our perceptions are in the hands of the media, and therefore as a society we are now fixing on the trivial and ignoring what may yet bring our entire civilisation down.

Barbarism and the modern world

Where are all those who were oh so concerned about the museum in Baghdad when George Bush took the war to the Taliban in 2003. As it happened, every one of the museum’s historic treasurers had been preserved. Now where are these same leftist scum when mankind’s dwindling stock of historic sites is set upon by Islamist vandals. See the real thing in action. From Reuters: With sledgehammer, Islamic State smashes Iraqi our history. And do please note that as they wrote the headline, it is merely Iraqi history, once again covering up both for the Islamists and for the American President who does the least possible he can get away with:

Ultra-radical Islamist militants in northern Iraq have destroyed a priceless collection of statues and sculptures from the ancient Assyrian era, inflicting what an archaeologist described as incalculable damage to a piece of shared human history.

A video published by Islamic State on Thursday showed men attacking the artifacts, some of them identified as antiquities from the 7th century BC, with sledgehammers and drills, saying they were symbols of idolatry.

“The Prophet ordered us to get rid of statues and relics, and his companions did the same when they conquered countries after him,” an unidentified man said in the video.

The smashed articles appeared to come from an antiquities museum in Mosul, the northern city which was overrun by Islamic State last June, a former employee at the museum told Reuters.

And now there is this to add to the above: Islamic State jihadis bulldoze ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud.

THE Islamic State group began bulldozing the ancient Assyrian city of Nimrud in Iraq on Thursday in the jihadists’ latest attack on the country’s historical heritage.

IS “assaulted the historic city of Nimrud and bulldozed it with heavy vehicles,” the tourism and antiquities ministry said on an official Facebook page.

An Iraqi antiquities official confirmed the news, saying the destruction began after noon prayers on Thursday and that trucks that may have been used to haul away artefacts had also been spotted at the site.

It’s from an AFP story, and again the telltale diminishing the story to merely one of local Iraqi interest, nothing to do with the historic stock of our common human heritage. It is we too who are amongst the barbarians if we cannot find it within ourselves to fight these people until they are defeated and ground into the dust.

Barbarism Update: I suppose we should be grateful that these things even get a mention:

IS destroying another ancient archaeological site in Iraq

It’s a brief seven para story from an unknown news source. If you are looking for some kind of context not just for the barbarities themselves, but for the lack of any serious reaction across the entire spectrum of our media-political elites, let me draw your attention to Roger Scruton’s Culture Counts: Faith and Feeling in a World Besieged which I have just read. Like everything of his, I have come away with a sense of conservative reality I seldom find in the world in which I am personally surrounded by.