In light of today’s events in Paris, this seems to be an even more important point:
Glamour is undermined by mockery. People steeped in multicultural respect will find that mockery difficult. The other thing that undermines glamour is crushing defeat. The Axis had glamour of its own, until Dresden and Hiroshima.
Both the Bush and Obama administrations suffered far too much from a lack of willingness to call the enemy what it is. The people who hijacked the planes were Islam, and they killed in the name of their religion. The same thing happened in Paris today, and they are starting to harvest the fruit of their unwillingness to confront the enemy they have absorbed within their midst over decades. Somewhere, Charles Martel weeps.
Here is the original piece from Virginia.
[Update a while later]
Holy crap. Claire Berlinsky was on the scene:
This was the worst terrorist attack in Europe since the London tube bombings of 2005. If I’m correct — I have not checked carefully — it was also the worst in France since the Nazis were running the place.
I was there only by luck: I had no desire to see this. Luck is probably not the right word. I wish I hadn’t seen it. But lucky, certainly is the right word to use in noting that I was running late, and thus there a few minutes after the fact. Had I not been running late, it’s fairly obvious what might have happened. They weren’t discriminate in their targets.
Do not submit.
[Update a few minutes later]
A little more from Claire:
The assailants are as yet at liberty. I hope they’ll be dead by the time you read this. But if not:. You want me too? Come get me. Because nothing short of killing me — and many more of my kind — will ever shut us up.
And if you don’t believe that now, you’ll believe it very soon. Because there are more of us willing to die for that freedom than those of you eager to take it from us. And soon you will find out that those of us willing to die for that freedom are also much better at killing than you.
So come and get me. Je suis Charlie.
If the Islamists understood a little European history, they would, and should, be very afraid. This won’t end well, and many thousands will die, most of them innocent. If the French decide to remove the invasion they’ve invited and ignored for decades, it won’t happen peacefully, or bloodlessly.
[Update a few minutes later]
The Washington Free Beacon lives up to its name, and republishes the offending cartoons.
[Update a few more minutes later]
Thoughts from Larry Correia:
Because of my job I follow a lot of authors, artists, and creative types, so I noticed something this morning. Many of them were compelled to say something about the events in France, but most of them wouldn’t say anything about who did this horrible thing. They talked about tragedy, and violence, and shootings, and terror, but very few would come out and say anything about the actual bad guys. Anybody who did mention the actual bad guys had to put in the obligatory Most Muslims are Peaceful disclaimer and then walk on eggshells to avoid being slandered as hatemongers by their followers who are members of the Goodthink Police.
I felt like writing something here. But then I felt this momentary pang of dread. What if my words make somebody angry? What if I upset them? And that’s when it hit me, every single public figure, every person with an audience, felt that same doubt. That same little bit of fear that evil Islamic lunatics would take offense and kill them. No matter how unlikely or irrational, they felt it.
And that is exactly what evil wants.
Yes. We cannot let them cow us. But of course, it’s a lot easier for me to write this than Claire, who is in the city where these vicious monsters are still at large.
[Update a while later]
…although, thank goodness, Rushdie remains safe, the Islamists have largely been winning this war since. They have successfully intimidated a very large number of writers and artists and journalists and film-makers all over the world into silence (and many live in exile because of threats to their safety), and within Muslim countries they have in addition used blasphemy laws to persecute their enemies and basically make any discussion of religion impossible. All this while religious apologists continue to proclaim to CNN and the BBC that their religion stands only for peace. Tell that to the tens of thousands of victims of religious violence in Pakistan alone. “Oh, the number of extremists is very small; most Muslims are peace-loving people.” The number of actual terrorists is always small. The problem is that a great proportion of Muslims sympathize with these people, which is why it is impossible to eliminate them.
Yup.
[Update a few minutes later]
Christopher Hitchens speaks from the grave about today’s Paris massacre:
This is not new. I’ve written about this many times. It’s reverse ecumenicism. It first became obvious to me when the fatwa was issued against Salman Rushdie in 1989. The reaction of the official newspaper of the Vatican was that the problem wasn’t that the foreign leader of a theocratic dictatorship offered money, in public, in his own name, to suborn the murder of the writer of a book of fiction in another country, who wasn’t an Iranian citizen. The problem was not that.
You and I may have thought, bloody hell, this is a new kind of threat. But it’s an old level of threat. Blasphemy is the problem. That was also the view of the archbishop of Canterbury. The general reaction of the religious establishments to that and to the Danish case—and, by the way, of our secular State Department in the Danish case—was to say the problem was Danish offensiveness. A cartoon in a provincial town in a small Scandinavian democracy obviously should be censored by the government lest it ignite—or as Yale University Press put it, instigate—violence.
Instigation of violence can only mean one thing. I know the English language better than I know anything else.
Yes, blasphemy is the problem. But now it’s only when it comes to one totalitarian belief system.
[Thursday-morning update]
This is for people attempting to make an equivalence between Christianity and Islam:
Can anyone point out the equivalent of this in Christendom?
[Bumped]