Fear’s Missionaries

After the La Rambla atrocity I hoped, although not with much conviction, that the Spanish might do more than engage in yet another resolute clenching of the collective jaw we have seen so often across Europe. I was right, sort of, because Spanish police did a very efficient job of first shooting dead the Islamists, but then it was back to the Continental norm – flowers piled on the site of the latest massacre, candles lit, cuddly toys for the dubious comfort of the dead. Oh, and resolute words, always those vows and pledges never to “let the terrorists win”, as countless politicians have said while the cameras roll. Quite likely they will have grabbed the nearest tame imam to stand beside them for the obligatory photo op. Perhaps someone is playing Imagine in the background.

And after that? To be blunt, nothing. The boatloads of illegal migrants from Africa and the Middle East keep coming, with nary the hint of consensus that a slow-motion invasion needs to be stopped, let alone how this might be achieved. Indeed, the exact opposite. When Poland and other nations swear they will not have their cultures overrun, they are denounced as Islamophobes and bigots. With few exceptions, that’s the pathetic extent of fearful Europe’s resolve in the face of terror.

Nobody seems to notice that terrorists could not care less about the immediate reactions of the societies they are changing and squeezing every day, the societies whose liberties and freedoms are being constricted in the name of security. It is a sure bet they are not intimidated in the least by Teddy bears and wreaths on blood-stained pavements. What future victims do immediately after the body parts and dead children are scraped off the streets does not matter to future killers. What does matter is that their targets are afraid, softened up for future submission.

Fear is the weapon of Islamic Terror International. It does not have color or texture, one cannot touch it or see it. One can smell it, though, the sickly, hopeless, constant whiff of unarmed helplessness. Cattle in the abattoir’s holding pen must catch the same scent. This fear is all-pervasive, shaped and crafted by the human bombs and van attackers to percolate through the interstices of our lives, our thoughts, our behavior. It works, too. How many AFL fans heading for the MCG will be thinking the shuffling lines outside the ground make perfect targets — queues waiting for the bag checks, wandings and pat-downs that Islam’s shock troops have made ubiquitous.

This fear pervades our public discourse, just as intended, clouding our responses, our plans and actions — and it is an incredibly cost-effective weapon against our freedoms. This fear is easy to introduce, debilitating in the extreme, insidiously corrosive and easy to pump up to saturation point. It distorts perceptions and inverts logic. Aggressive, intolerant Islam is the reason our malls and public spaces are dotted with bollards, why we are now asked to arrive at the airport a full and inconvenient two hours before flights. Yet what do our leaders tell us? Why, that the greater problem is Islamophobia! We’ve heard it all so often: “exclusion”, “marginalisation”, “disempowerment”, fear of “the other”.

That fear, it has many faces.  So many are afraid to state the obvious loud and clear, to proclaim that we do not wish to change our laws and the way we live in order to accommodate a separatist minority whose very garments proclaim a refusal to integrate and assimilate.

The recent massacres in the UK, France and Spain confirm that terror has become simple and  cheap. Rather than the immense planning that must go into hijacking aeroplanes and flying them into tall buildings, knives and motor vehicles are the latest keys to martyrdom, paradise and the eternal orgasm with those 72 virgins.

This change in terror’s tools and tactics creates additional difficulties for law enforcement agencies by its unpredictability and lethal simplicity. Any Tom, Dick or Harry (or rather, Mohammad, Mahamad or Mohamet) with a cheap kitchen knife or a rented minivan can become a champion of Islam’s glory.  In their personal fight against the infidel rest of us — the Dar al-Harb, the House of War by Islamist designation — the killing of  kafirs is a sanctified pastime. Allah’s warriors make no distinction between Jews, Christians or Hindus, men or women, children or the aged, and it is working for them. It took just one man and six pistol shots to ignite Europe’s tinder box and start World War One. A sustained terror campaign ultimately led to the October Revolution. Arab hijackers and the Munich murderers of Israeli athletes were stepping stones on the path to a Palestinian state. Terror is effective because it infests entire societies with existential fear, thus destabilizing them. Even those terror campaigns which failed to achieve their political goals because they were vigorously opposed  – here I think of the IRA and Tamil Tigers – achieved measures of success by imposing enormous costs on the societies they targeted.

I often compare Islamist tactics with those of the Communist USSR. While differing ideologically, both are similar in their aims and ways of achieving them. Both are messianic in their outlooks, convinced against all the evidence that their way of life and belief is superior to any other and, as such, will inevitably by adopted by all mankind, willingly or not.

In this context,  the changes Muslim immigration and associated terror brought to the West deserve to be examined. The low-skilled and poorly educated migrants came from failed or barely functional, poverty stricken societies often torn by religious conflicts and further complicated by their endemic corruption. Many were traumatized by their experiences of living in what amount to semi-feudal states. The backgrounds of these immigrants have virtually nothing in common with the Judeo-Christian culture of the West, especially in their  rejection of religious tolerance. If pervasive, open and vicious anti-Semitism is not enough, an aggressive and often violent Sunni/Shia schism will always be alive and well.

As an aside, I find it grimly amusing to see Muslim clerics from countries with no histories of religious tolerance become sudden and ardent advocates of interfaith dialogue and universal brotherhood as soon as they arrive in Australia. When invited to Kirribilli to break the taxpayer’s bread with a prime minister hot for a multiculti photo-op, subsequent revelations that among his feted guests were would-be executioners of homosexuals and sexually active unmarried women are seemingly of no importance. Apparently it is only native Australians who can be hateful bigots. Sit tight and Waleed Aly will soon produce a column lamenting the racism and intolerance of those who baulk at “cultural differences”.

Not that there is much “cultural difference” to be observed these days in Lakemba and other thriving ghettoes, where many parents seem disinclined to inspire their children to pursue the numerous opportunities offered by the adopted country. It seems kids should not grow up to defy, reject or modify the old, imported ways of their elders. Were that to happen, familial and tribal connections might be weakened and eventually broken. As a result the second generation of Muslim immigrants find themselves floating between the adopted country’s culture and the mores of their kitchen tables and ghetto neighbours. Some become low hanging fruit to be gathered, inculcated with hatred and turned loose by radical preachers.

In Europe an army of angry Muslim males has swollen the ranks of Allah’s potential soldiers, creating an explosive mixture of locally born and newly arrived Islamic radicals, all residing in the no-go zones of Muslim-dominated suburbs where Sharia prevails, not the law of the host nation. Often these areas are patrolled by zealots checking the compliance of females’ attire and enforcing halal dietary laws.

Such suburbs are mini-copies of the wretched countries these migrants left — copies in all respects bar one. In their former homes they were poor; in their new ones the detested kafir underwrites with welfare payments the old ways and the separatism. In Muslim lands non-believers pay the jizziya tax. In Brussels and Malmo, in the banlieues of Paris and elsewhere, it is the postman who delivers the state’s tributes to the supreme faith.

I can hear the indignant chorus of tolerance’s defenders accusing me of Islamophobia, of generalising and hatemongering. Well, I have to confess, that I do not hold any particularly warm feelings towards a creed whose radical proponents draw their inspiration from its sacred books and believe the world would be better off without me and every other Jew. Should I thank them for the attention?

As to being guilty of generalisation, I could not agree more that an absolute majority of Muslims are peaceful and law-abiding people who wish to do exactly what I wish to do – raise their families and get on with their lives. However, it is a well known fact that crowd behavior is determined by 5 to 10  percent of its leading members. Nazis started with just a handful and Bolsheviks a miniscule band of malcontents and psychopaths. Christianity began with 12+1 persons, and the mighty USA was launched by a small assembly of men who gathered in Philadelphia. The majority of people, however peaceful they might be, are not relevant under the parameters of this discussion. The prevailing ideology, the accepted religious and ethical framework of the small group is important, not that of the majority, which can be manipulated, convinced or scared into acquiesence or, at the very least, a cowed and consenting silence. Considering that there are about 500,000 Muslims in Australia, we might have some 500 potential martyrs. The question is, how do we know which ones are likely to start shooting, stabbing, driving through a crowd of people, take hostages or blow things up? How about an explosion during the Grand Final at the MCG?

As to the charge of hatemongering, I am not going to declare that some of my best friends are Muslims because I have no Muslim friends. My attempt to acquire one ended when my guests, whom we invited for dinner, asked me in all seriousness why Jews engage in black magic. I did not know what to say, so I had a shot of Scotch with my Ozzie son-in-law. I do not feel hatred towards any Muslim person. I do not, however, wish to become a Muslim or pay the jizziya. Most particularly, I do not want to be killed. These are my options under Sharia.

I will not deny that I feel fear – for myself, for my family, for my Australia, this country which gave me and mine a refuge in our time of need.

We live in a society permeated with that ambient fear of terror and it is making us other than we should be. We are all exceedingly polite and obsequious with any Muslims we meet lest we give offence. We try so hard to convince our Muslim Australians that we are universally inclusive, that we are keen to learn about their faith and doctrines, which in most instances is nothing but a lie. Do we profess a passion to learn the articles of Buddhism? Do we invite inside every Jehovah’s Witness who knocks upon our door, that we might gain deeper insights into their beliefs? Buddhists and Jehovahs are different — they don’t bother anyone, let alone run them down with Transit vans.

So the terror and the fear of terror garners special treatment. We convene interfaith meetings, which accomplish nothing, except to convince Muslim observers that we are scared and soon will be ready to submit. We present public platforms to Muslim speakers — here I think of the ABC and its affection for hijab’d guests, no matter how asinine — in the hope they will convince us of their good intentions towards the country they live in. We avoid talking about the Islamic nature of the worldwide terror, convincing our Muslim interlocutors that we understand their outrage at being tarred with the same brush as the “bad” Muslims who blow up teenyboppers at pop concerts. That they are actually the “holy” Muslims, according to the Koran, we don’t dwell upon. We allow Muslim spokesmen to influence parliamentarians who find it comforting to dwell in the illusion of a nation united, not one being divided by a specific religion’s intolerance.  Religion is now such a minor shaper of the Western mind we find it hard to grasp that one religion actually adheres to the militant, expansionist course its founder charted. We dismiss that power of religious belief at our immense peril.

No other ethno-religious group in Australia is accorded the exalted status of approved victim. But then no other creed has adherents who stab policemen, shoot dead computer workers, hold coffee shops to ransom or dream of ascending to Heaven atop the mangled bodies of MCG spectators.

We have accepted fear as a given and the Islamists know this. The Europeans, due to their insane policy of open borders, are on the brink of cultural dissolution and submission. They allowed their fear to win. Are we the next ones? Or will we switch the vector of fear and make Islamists fear us?

Dr Michael Galak and his family came to Australia as refugees from the Soviet Union in 1978