“Those who committed these acts have nothing to do with the Muslim religion.”
So said France’s socialist president, Francois Hollande, after Islamic terrorists recently attacked the office of a satirical magazine in Paris and generally had a jihadi field day during which they turned the City of Light into a city of fear and tumult.
Nothing to do with the Muslim religion? Even when they screamed, “Allahu Akbar” and when they also declared that “the Prophet has been avenged?” (That would be the Prophet Muhammad, founder of the Muslim religion with which, according to Hollande, the terroristic besieging of Paris hadn’t anything to do – even though the terrorists themselves indicated otherwise.)
Such stupefying denial comes straight from the handbook of the only major ideology that, in terms of pure craziness, can compete with radical Islam. That would be the ideology of multiculturalism which promulgates the self-evident lie that all cultures are deserving of equal respect and accommodation, and insists that, in particular, no non-Western culture or religion be unduly criticized no matter how despicable the behavior. It’s an ideology that unfortunately infects all of Western civilization to varying degrees.
At the liberal heart of this destructive ideology is a twisted sense of guilt and the desire not to give any more offense to all those cultures that the West is said to have trampled over in its rise and domination of the world over the last 500 years. The problem is that when multiculturalism is so extreme that it demands mindless tolerance of the world’s most intolerant people who ultimately seek the West’s destruction, it starts to border on a civilizational suicide pact.
Hollande did come around to say that France is in “a war against terrorism and radical Islamism,” which, for a man of the Left, must have been painful to enunciate. But given that his approval ratings were already in the tank, it would not have been politically expedient to spout politically correct nonsense so counter to reality that the French people would have become even more enraged. Of course, he had to get in a couple of P.C. qualifiers, tempering his remarks with the insistence that France is not at “war against a religion, not a war against a civilization.”
In any case, Hollande, at least on this issue at this moment, is to the right of President Obama who only a few months ago insisted that the barbarians of the Islamic State were not, well, Islamic, even though they call themselves Islamic, seek an Islamic caliphate and commit all their atrocities explicitly in the name of – wait for it – Islam!
But you’re never going to hear Obama put the words “Islamic” and “terrorism” together in the same sentence. The guy absolutely refuses to acknowledge the concept of something that, for the rest of us, is a stark and irrefutable reality that is played out daily on the world stage. It’s utterly baffling, but if you were to delve into the fever swamp of his personal psychology it must have something to do with his “diverse” upbringing, his years in Islamic Indonesia and his messianic idea that he is uniquely qualified to bring together all the world’s peoples and religions through sheer force of his charisma, compassion and multicultural street cred.
Or some such.
Well, it hasn’t worked. Today under Obama the United States is less popular with the Muslim world than it was under the unilateral cowboy crusader, George W. Bush. More importantly, jihadists are running wild over a substantial portion of the globe in rather sharp contrast to Obama’s 2012 campaign claim that the bad guys, who of course had nothing to do with Islam, were on the run and all was well.
This perverse denial of the obvious reality of radical Islam is tantamount to that of an alcoholic who keeps belting ‘em back despite the potential risk of losing everything dear to him. Likewise, Western civilization has been imbibing for decades now and is absolutely three sheets to the wind on the tainted hooch of political correctness and multiculturalism. The question is, can the West sober up and snap out of it before it’s too late?
Over the weekend after the French terror attacks more than a million people gathered in the streets of Paris to rally against the terrorism they had just endured. World leaders marched arm in arm (although, funny thing, no one from the U.S. was able to make it – must have been a scheduling conflict). So, do they get it now? Will it make any real difference?
It’s doubtful that anything less than a catastrophic hit will turn the West around. Apparently, even the horrors of September 11, 2001 were not enough, at least for the long haul. Only seven years after that seminal event, “war weary” Americans elected a man who refused to say we were at war specifically with Islamic terrorism and who believed that curtailing American influence around the world would be hunky-dory, allowing the beautiful human tapestry of diverse cultures to finally flourish in a new ambiance of international peace and cooperation. It was something that only a president who had spent his formative years with his head in a cloud of reefer smoke, running with his beloved “Choom Gang,” could possibly still believe well into middle age.
France, with Europe’s largest Muslim population, is on the front lines of the potential Islamization of Europe. Paris is ringed with “no go” zones of unassimilated, surly Muslims where grievance and fanaticism thrive. Similar circumstances exist in many other Western European countries. Surveys of Muslims living in those countries consistently show substantial percentages (sometimes more than half) who would like to see Islamic sharia law imposed on their host countries.
In the Islamic countries themselves, violence, backwardness and fanaticism continue unabated.Blasphemy is punishable by death, bibles are illegal, women are treated worse than dogs and beheadings are as common as weddings. But according to the ideology of multiculturalism, it’s all good! Islam is actually a “religion of peace” that somehow weirdly got “hijacked” by a few fanatics. It was just the darnedest thing, but we mustn’t overreact because that could lead to Islamophobia. And anyway, every religion has its extremists, right?
No civilization clueless enough to follow indiscriminate, unquestioning multiculturalism can possibly survive intact, particularly when bending over backwards to accommodate alien hordes bent on its destruction. If we in the West don’t get our heads out of the multi-culti clouds (and out of our nether regions), it’s hello caliphate, goodbye tolerance of any kind.