By DEXTER DUGGAN
The Middle Eastern guys with assault rifles rather than scimitars want to play Saracen while anachronistically shooting with big ballistics.
They look at you, in your sweatshirt and jeans, armed with an iPhone, as the Christian Crusader, even if your religion is confined to worshiping entertainment venues.
This is a thousand-year-old war you don’t want. And if you’re not prepared to fight it, so much the better for your weapons-bristling assailants’ odds of survival then triumph.
They, after all, enter this urban battle with the traditional aim of victory, not some modernist politicians’ military notions of pinpricks, standoffs, stalemates, and sinuous negotiations that leave the lacerated opponents shell-shocked back where they started.
It’s said today’s jihadis have the mindset of a thousand years ago and the steely determination to take us back there. Even though we have no desire to climb into this time machine of their choosing, might many Westerners’ circumstances revert to the more circumscribed lives of past centuries? Might material life within a perpetually war-torn fortress become worse than better?
Even today, life and lifespan still never are certain, and disease and tragedy continue to walk hidden among us, wearing masks to conceal themselves until their opportunity arises.
But developed Western societies frequently have arrived at the point where a full working lifetime often is assumed to be the standard of existence, followed up with retirement living for maybe a few more decades, perhaps even in “the lifestyle to which you’re accustomed,” as the financial planners say.
A future stretching only so far as one’s third, fourth or fifth decade of rough labor seems downright unnatural on our turf, even though that often was the customary span of man whose main street was dirt and whose window was an open space in the wall at what passed for home. And whose wife might well die in routine childbirth.
Like much in life, there are negatives among positives and positives among negatives. If a more widespread fear of unexpected death in the 21st century recalls people to ultimate realities, at least they’ll learn as well as the First Century Christian peasant that an entire lifetime of wealth is dross if it means the loss of one’s soul.
That peasant wasn’t to be distracted by the widely available diversions of 21st-century life, from bounteous buffet restaurants to wide flat screens in even financially flat homes. Less means more if the more is winning the treasure of everlasting bliss even though earthly life had been lacking. More means less if the less is damnation after a life abundantly misled by modern media to believe that dreadful Hell for a life of unrepentant sin is just fiction.
The Lord on Earth didn’t condemn wealth and wine, but greed and intemperance. To try to better oneself is fine for human dignity. To discard that dignity for false gods is what He warned against.
The forced diminishment of our lives by terrorists to a prison-like existence of pillaged opportunities doesn’t have to be. But we need to touch the hand of the timeless God, He of Abraham, of the shepherds and the Crusaders, the cathedral-builders and freeway surveyors, the Wichita linemen and space-station stayers, the deal makers and pizza bakers.
And sometimes when evil cavorts against the innocent, God sighs and says you need to make peace with arms.
It’s not as if some voice in the past didn’t warn us of this possible Islamist threat. And all the more credit is due for an accurate forecast of the unlikely. No one gets a medal for saying the sun rises tomorrow. A lot of credit goes to him who foresaw Muslim radicals not as spent, inconsequential medievalists but as a resurrected threat to our very ways of life and belief.
More than a year ago, in a September 11, 2014, post at The Catholic Thing blog, “9/11, Belloc and Islam,” Fr. C. John McCloskey wrote:
“After 9/11, no one should be surprised to learn that Islam is turning the West’s superiority back on itself. What is surprising is that a lone historian saw this coming in the 1930s. The great Catholic writer Hilaire Belloc, friend of G.K. Chesterton and a prolific historian, was prescient as no other writer about the resurgence of Islam in our own era.”
McCloskey noted that among Belloc’s warnings were these:
“We shall almost certainly have to reckon with Islam in the near future. Perhaps if we lose our faith it will rise”;
“The future always comes as surprise . . . but I for my part cannot but believe that a main unexpected thing of the future is the return of Islam”;
“And in the contrast between our religious chaos and the religious certitude still strong throughout the Mohammedan world . . . lies our peril.”
As years passed, the potential became plainer, culminating in the explosive Islamist attacks on America on September 11, 2001.
To provide examples of merely two articles in these pages: a front-page story in the December 6, 2001, Wanderer by News Editor Paul Likoudis was headlined, “Some Commentators Observe Kosovo Elections May Portend Militant Muslim Advance Into Europe.”
Likoudis wrote: “‘The Muslim world is on jihad,’ said Tom Fleming, editor of Chronicles, a monthly magazine that has been providing for more than two years some of the most insightful news and commentary from the Balkans published in the English-speaking world, ‘and they will take no prisoners’.”
And the January 10, 2002, Wanderer headlined, “Al-Qaeda Linked to Attacks on Christians in Indonesia.”
More recently, a decade ago, commentator Tony Blankley in 2005 authored a book titled The West’s Last Chance: Will We Win the Clash of Civilizations? (Regnery). Blankley’s credits included being a speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and editorial-page editor of the conservative Washington Times. This book’s topic was the threat of radical Islam.
Blankley wrote: “The threat of the radical Islamists taking over Europe is every bit as great to the United States as was the threat of the Nazis taking over Europe in the 1940s.
“We cannot afford to lose Europe. We cannot afford to see Europe transformed into a launching pad for Islamist jihad,” he wrote, adding:
“If Europe doesn’t rise to the challenge, Eurabia will come to pass. Then Europe will cease to be an American ally and instead become a base of operations (as she already is to a small degree) against us.”
For years the global elite has tried to swat away any suggestion that Islam has elements deserving strong criticism, even though it was plain before everyone’s eyes, even deep-denial Barack Obama’s. For years this elite has plotted to punish traditional Western religious belief, certainly Christians as pummeled by Obama.
Yet which of the religious groups had members crying out for terror, and which was crying out against it?
The internationalism of terrorism works in tandem with other enemies of prudent nationalism, such as illegal aliens on the march for mass invasion. We wouldn’t be where we are today if the elite from big business to bishops had shown more respect to common decency and good sense.
Combining On The Border
A report posted November 22 by Tucson NBC television affiliate KVOA, channel 4, “Group patrols Arizona border for terrorists,” noted the confluence of drug smuggling and terrorism coming across the international line.
The group of military veterans and concerned citizens, named Arizona Border Recon, says it’s out to help the U.S. Border Patrol, not fight the U.S. government.
The KVOA report said all the members of the group are concerned about terrorist crossings:
“‘There’s Palestinians, Afghans, Syrians trying to get in. We are trying to stop everything and anything from coming across,’ said Tim Foley, the field operations director of Arizona Border Recon. . . .
“ ‘We have the war on drugs and the war on terror, and it seems that they are combining right here on the border,’ said Foley,” KVOA reported.
Scimitars amid saguaros are unlikely, but AK-47s coming through the cactuses already are an old, ever-perilous story.
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