“A big juicy target”

To which may be added this: Christchurch Murders: The Real Accomplices.

The reactions that followed were marked by legitimate indignation. Unfortunately, the attack was also used to launch a campaign both dangerous and treacherous.

Tarrant, in his manifesto, defined himself as an “eco-fascist” and wrote that he admires British Nazi Oswald Mosley and China’s communist regime, and that he rejects conservatism. Even though US President Donald J. Trump condemned the murders, the killer’s remarks were used to attack him.

Possibly because Tarrant opposed Muslim immigration to Western countries (mostly, he wrote, because it leads to overpopulation), many of those who expressed concerns about Muslim immigration to the West, or criticized Islamic violence or anti-Semitism, were immediately accused as having been partly or fully responsible for the massacre — even US President Bill Clinton’s daughter, Chelsea Clinton.

By contrast, many Muslims, when extremist violence in the name of Islam takes place, state that they cannot be held “collectively responsible” for the actions of their co-religionists, and that to try to do so is unjust and “Islamophobic.” Often, however, it seems as if members of other religions are not held to the same presumption of innocence.

Sometimes your enemy’s enemy is your enemy too

Sometime around the 1960s, the left decided to switch sides on its allegiances in the Middle East and since then Israel has been the villain. That Israel, with its majority Jewish population, has been threatened with destruction since it was founded in 1948 is of no mind to the Europeans who had tried to do the same thing a few years before, and is part of the mindset of the national socialists of today who would see the outcome worked towards by the National Socialists of an earlier era. Stalin’s death, among other things, forestalled the “Doctor’s Plot” which would have been a Soviet purge of its Jewish population. And to its last days, if you were a child of or a grandchild of someone who was Jewish, it was stamped on your internal passport even if you were not interested in your own Jewish origins, never mind not being allowed to practise your mandated religious identity even if you had wished to. Hamas and Hezbollah and the rest are just part of an anti-Semitic Israeli ethos that has existed since the declaration of the State of Israel in 1948.

But in siding with Israel’s Islamist enemies, these same leftist fools have not just given them official cover and supported their efforts, they have gone well beyond that, not only pretending that their self-declared ideological enemies are the morally virtuous side, but have allowed, if not actually encouraged, mass migration of Islamists into their own societies as a form of showing their virtue and solidarity with the “oppressed”. Sweden is now the textbook example of civilisational suicide, with Merkel’s Germany right up there with the worst of them. I would be of a mind to say they are getting just what they deserve, but this is also my culture they are putting to the torch. And that they most certainly are. Your enemy’s enemy is not your friend, as they are finding out to their immense regret, but to my immense regret as well.

It’s more than just a matter of words

I wrote this the other day but didn’t push the “publish” button. But with Andrew Bolt having put up a post today on The West attacked: killers to the right, ferals to the left, which begins with the sentence, “Islamists on the Right, anti-capitalists on the Left”, I will just have to buy in. The rest of this was written on Tuesday.

There are no two people in politics I agree with more consistently than Andrew Bolt and Peter Costello, so if I bring up one of Andrew Bolt’s posts in which both feature, it must be understood that I don’t disagree with a single point they make, only with the terms they use. Andrew’s post is titled, The Left now sounds just like the Islamist Right, in which Peter is quoted as saying:

Australia is one of the most successful, open, prosperous, accepting societies that the world has ever known. Being born here is one of the best things that could ever happen in a person’s life. That is worth explaining as part of immunising the young against the false political claims of extremists.

Andrew began the post with this where I will begin myself:

One of the most disturbing developments in public debates has been the Left giving cover to Islamists of the far Right.

There is, I must insist, no such thing as “Islamists of the far Right”. The right-left divide in politics is between those who value individual rights above collective rights and those who do not. The only person who ever correctly thought of Hitler as to his right politically was Joseph Stalin who introduced this notion into our political direction finder. To think of racists and extreme nationalists as part of the right is merely to defame those of us who see ourselves on the right, far or otherwise. It is we members of the right properly understood who almost alone have been willing to take the fight up to Nazis, fascists, communists and Islamists and have been able to do so without missing an ideological beat. To describe Islamists as “far right” wrongly aligns people such as ourselves with people such as themselves, and introduces a confusion of terms since the right-left divide then becomes less clear cut than it ought to be. No one on the right is ever described by those on the left as anything other than “far” right. To be on the right should be seen as a badge of honour.

Same with the word “conservative” who are people, again like ourselves, who find the open and tolerant society in which we live one we would like to see preserved, and therefore are very careful about the nature of change, and are never in any great hurry to see things radically altered. I am at one with Edmund Burke in believing in “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages”* as the great repository of common sense and social morality. It is being worn away as the left has continued its march through the institutions, but it has a powerful hold even still.

And then there is the quote from Peter, where he wrote, “the false political claims of extremists”. The word “extremists” is commonly used about Islamists. But calling Islamists “extremists” makes it seem that these views are well beyond some kind of norm, a thousand miles from the political centre. And so they are, if we restrict the frame of reference for other people’s political morality to our own view of things as found in our own culture, whose traditions travel back in time through to the British Isles and the values that have developed as part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. These are the great bequest we have inherited and we must do everything we can to defend this history from the ignorance of the fanatics in our midst. To call our enemies “extreme” is to misread how they think of themselves. They are perhaps on the more aggressive side of their own value set, but they seem to be far from “extreme” within the communities in which they live. The extremists in such communities are more likely to be the people who agree with us, the ones who would like to share in our own cultural tradition and make common cause with us. Even living here in a Western nation, it is still not easy for them, as the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown. The proper word to describe Islamists is “barbarians”. If the left chooses to side with them, that is what they are as well.

____________

*”You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 145.

Islamists are not on the “far right” and they are not “extremists”

There are no two people in politics I agree with more consistently than Andrew Bolt and Peter Costello, so if I bring up one of Andrew Bolt’s posts in which both feature, it must be understood that I don’t disagree with a single point they make, only with the terms they use. Andrew’s post is titled, The Left now sounds just like the Islamist Right, in which Peter is quoted as saying:

Australia is one of the most successful, open, prosperous, accepting societies that the world has ever known. Being born here is one of the best things that could ever happen in a person’s life. That is worth explaining as part of immunising the young against the false political claims of extremists.

Andrew began the post with this where I will begin myself:

One of the most disturbing developments in public debates has been the Left giving cover to Islamists of the far Right.

There is, I must insist, no such thing as “Islamists of the far Right”. The right-left divide in politics is between those who value individual rights above collective rights and those who do not. The only person who ever correctly thought of Hitler as to his right politically was Joseph Stalin who introduced this notion into our political direction finder. To think of racists and extreme nationalists as part of the right is merely to defame those of us who see ourselves on the right, far or otherwise. It is we members of the right properly understood who almost alone have been willing to take the fight up to Nazis, fascists, communists and Islamists and have been able to do so without missing an ideological beat. To describe Islamists as “far right” wrongly aligns people such as ourselves with people such as themselves, and introduces a confusion of terms since the right-left divide then becomes less clear cut than it ought to be. No one on the right is ever described by those on the left as anything other than “far” right. To be on the right should be seen as a badge of honour.

Same with the word “conservative” who are people, again like ourselves, who find the open and tolerant society in which we live one we would like to see preserved, and therefore are very careful about the nature of change, and are never in any great hurry to see things radically altered. I am at one with Edmund Burke in believing in “the general bank and capital of nations and of ages”* as the great repository of common sense and social morality. It is being worn away as the left has continued its march through the institutions, but it has a powerful hold even still.

And then there is the quote from Peter, where he wrote, “the false political claims of extremists”. The word “extremists” is commonly used about Islamists. But calling Islamists “extremists” makes it seem that these views are well beyond some kind of norm, a thousand miles from the political centre. And so they are, if we restrict the moral compass we use to judge other people’s political morality to our own view of things as found in our own culture, whose traditions travel back in time through to the British Isles and the values that have developed as part of our Judeo-Christian heritage. These are the great bequest of our cultural traditions and we must do everything we can to defend this history from the ignorance of the fanatics in our midst. To call our enemies “extreme” is to misread how they think of themselves. They are perhaps on the more aggressive side of their own value set, but they seem to be far from “extreme” within the communities in which they live. The extremists in such communities are more likely to be the people who agree with us, the ones who would like to share in our own cultural tradition and make common cause with us. Even living here in a Western nation, it is still not easy for them, as the life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali has shown. The proper word to describe Islamists is “barbarians”. If the left chooses to side with them, that is what they are as well.

____________

*”You see, Sir, that in this enlightened age I am bold enough to confess, that we are generally men of untaught feelings; that instead of casting away all our old prejudices, we cherish them to a very considerable degree, and, to take more shame to ourselves, we cherish them because they are prejudices; and the longer they have lasted, and the more generally they have prevailed, the more we cherish them. We are afraid to put men to live and trade each on his own private stock of reason; because we suspect that this stock in each man is small, and that the individuals would do better to avail themselves of the general bank and capital of nations and of ages.” From Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, p 145.