St. James Matamoros, Pray for Us
Two articles from National Review Online:
Five Men of ‘Arabic Origin’ Arrested in Plot to Kill the Pope
[ Via: Fox News ]
Developing: Five men were arrested Friday by British police over a potential threat to Pope Benedict XVI on the second day of his four-day visit to the U.K.
Police confirmed the arrests in a statement Friday, which revealed the men were detained by Scotland Yard detectives about 5.45am local time “on suspicion of the commission, preparation or instigation of acts of terrorism.”
The statement continued: “The men are aged 26, 27, 36, 40, and 50, and were arrested … at [a] business premises in central London.”
The men — reported to be of Arabic origin by Sky News — were taken to a central London police station to be interviewed by detectives from the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) Counter Terrorism Command.
[The NR0 editor comments] . . . And we’re debating a real-estate deal gone bad at Ground Zero.
And this one:
Religion of Peace Alert: FBI Advises ‘Draw Muhammad’ Cartoonist to Disappear
Fox News reports that, at the urging of the FBI, Molly Norris, the “Everybody Draw Muhammad Day” cartoonist from Seattle, has gone into hiding and changed her name after being threatened with death for insulting Islam. Maybe he can hide at Justice Breyer’s house.
As I mentioned in Tuesday’s column, the Obama administration last year co-sponsored a UN resolution to encourage countries to enact laws that would make it illegal to criticize Islam. The president was on the “Repeal the First Amendment” bandwagon before the justice hopped aboard. But if top levels of government are going to signal that Islam should get special immunity, and states like New Jersey are going to follow suit by firing people from state jobs for criticizing Islam, the FBI better be prepared to reassign a few thousand agents to the new “We Can’t Protect You” division.
My comment: Was there some sort of starting gun or declaration that the West is waiting for ere we actually get serious about prosecuting our war aims?
I have no particular interest in hearing about the alleged majority if peaceful Muslims; I consider them to be in the same category as the peaceful Germans who supported the Nazis and the peaceful Communists who supported the purges of Stalin and the Cultural Revolution of Mao. They will not influence the outcome of the war in our favor.
The simple logic of war demands that the peaceful Muslims either declare for us, or declare for the enemy. It is, I agree, a bad result when forcing a wavering party to declare compels him to take up the colors of the foe. But I submit that it is even a worse result when the wavering party has already, de facto, declared support for the enemy, but the strange autohypnotic cultic pseudo-religion that grips our ruling elite requires them relentlessly to maintain the fiction that they declared for us.
We are treating parties that are arguably neutral or hostile (depending on whether their aid and comfort to the enemy is negligent rather than malignant) as if they are friendly. We are giving them the benefits of our laws and legal system, and upholding their rights, even as that legal system demonstrates it no longer has the power or willingness to protect us from the enemy, or avenge us when we fall at their hands.
We are treating an alien civilization possessed of the hostile and fundamentally incompatible ambition to impose Shari’a Law on us as if it were a religious denomination rather than a millenarian totalitarian political movement.
Islam is a political party with religious trappings; it is a system of laws which, because it controls all aspects of life, also controls the religious rites and beliefs of its adherents.
It is a theocracy, not a denomination able or willing to live under a scheme of religious liberty.
In the West, the consensus of history came to the agreement that the wars between the Christian denominations was too violent to maintain peace and civil order, and that therefore the state would be amputated of its power to interfere in Church affairs. Matters of religious conviction and conscience, in civilized and Christian nations, were ruled to be beyond the orbit of state power.
This reasoning does not apply to totalitarian political movements that just so happen to have a theocratic legal theory demanding the conquest, conversion, or extermination of all rival faiths. A theocracy is not a denomination.
This ruling and this decision does not even necessarily makes sense outside the Christian theological and metaphysical belief that the conscience of the individual is sacred, and that individual devotion to God must be voluntary. Nothing in any pagan nor Eastern faith necessitates such metaphysical beliefs nor the ethical and political conclusions flowing therefrom; and Muhammadanism is positively hostile to these notions.
The separation of church and state is like a cease fire that obtained once all sides fought to exhaustion. The Muslim nations were not involved in the Reformation, Counter-reformation, or the Wars of Religion. In a historical sense, they are not party to the cease-fire that obtained during the Enlightenment, between Catholic and Protestant. They have not put down their arms nor have they any intention to do so; nor have they repudiated their ambition of Jihad, nor have they any need to do so.
Our unwillingness to pursue our current war aims in a reasonable and diligent fashion has brought us to a situation which is tantamount to surrender. The Jihad can now compel the President of the United State, the most powerful single man on Earth, to cajole and browbeat an obscure preacher from Gainesville, Florida from burning a heretical book no Christian man has the least reason to respect, much less honor as sacred. Contrariwise, the President cannot compel the Jihad, or even unarmed and unwashed students, from burning the Flag, which all who say and mean the Pledge of Alliance allegedly regard as sacrosanct. What should happen if someone decided to burn a Koran wrapped in the American Flag, I dare not speculate.
Like all legal systems, the legal theory in America has weak points and strong points. In the present case, by hiding under the mask of religion, the enemy exploits a fundamental weak point, and uses our own reverence for our First Amendment Liberties against us. We are not legally allowed to fight this fight as it ought to be fought, as every generation from the Battle of Manzikert to the Battle of Lepanto would have fought it: with the ferocious and joyful certainty that we were utterly in the right, and that God Wills It.
Saint James the Moor Slayer
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
