Except that this morning my French friends aren’t referring to Islam in such terms. Actually, they never have.
‘Religion of peace’ is a term coined by les Anglo-Saxons on either side of the ocean. I wonder if Bush and Cameron still think that’s what it is. I wonder if they ever did.
Probably not: even our politicians seldom reach such levels of ignorance and stupidity. They do, however, operate at a level where suicidal, subversive multi-culti twaddle has been elevated to a religion, the only one they have (apart from looking out for Number 1, narrowly defined as themselves).
Otherwise they’d see that what goes on isn’t just isolated terrorist acts here or there. There’s a war on, and only one side is fighting it.
It’s not a war between our limited forces in the Middle East and any specific groups, from ISIS to el-Qaeda. It’s one between whatever little is left of our civilisation and Islamic barbarism, of which there is an inexhaustible supply.
A civilisational clash is a game that never ends in a draw. One side vanquishes, the other dies, if not physically then in every other meaningful sense. And we are losing.
What happened in Paris yesterday is but a skirmish in an all-out war of annihilation. Those killed aren’t victims. They are casualties.
The papers everywhere are full of expressions of solidarity, condolences and sympathy for the casualties’ families. These aren’t out of place; they are much needed.
Yet what doesn’t seem to appear anywhere is an answer to the lapidary question inevitably asked by les Anglo-Saxons, with their congenital pragmatism: So what are we going to do about it?
If the present is a reliable indication of the future, the answer is nothing. Nothing positive anyway.
For the present shows a civilisation desperately looking for a knife to slash its own collective throat. Well, this weapon has been found, and before long it’ll be sharp enough to do the job.
A civilisation can’t resist vicious predators when it itself is caught in the vicious circle of the virtual world, stripped of everything real and filled with apparitions, shadows, vacuous phrases flowing in and out of thin air, ideologies rather than ideas, fads rather than convictions, inner mushiness rather than a steel core, sentimentality rather than sentiment.
We’re under fire, ladies and gentlemen, and we have the guns to shoot back. But our trigger fingers are paralysed, our eyes can’t focus, our guns are silent – we are targets, not combatants. With every pseudo-liberal word uttered we’re painting a bull’s eye on our chest.
At a time when Muslims, even those born and bred in our countries, increasingly see themselves as soldiers in visible or invisible armies, we are admitting hundreds of thousands of them into the heart of our civilisation, what’s left of it.
This in the knowledge, recently conveyed by a Muslim scribe, that 40 per cent of the ‘refugees’ are agents on active jihadist duty – with the rest ready to provide support, physical or at least moral. (I don’t know what the proportion is among the Islamic multitudes already here, but it can’t be dramatically different.)
This at a time when assault rifles are firing in the middle of our great cities, when grenades are exploding in the middle of our ambling crowds.
We won’t sacrifice a single one of the bogus principles we mendaciously pretend to cherish in order to defend our people, our cities – our civilisation, what’s left of it.
We not only fail to answer the perennial question of what’s to be done – we fail even to pose it. For if we did so, the answer would offer itself, and out would go the puny, craven, utterly corrupt ethos of our post-modernity.
Name one nation, if you can, that didn’t suspend civil rights when its survival was threatened. You won’t be able to, for there has been none.
Just ask the children of those Nisei Americans, many of them native-born, interned in camps for the duration of the Second World War. Ask the children of those German refugees, including Jews, interned on the Isle of Man, with no individual wrongdoing anywhere in sight.
We made them suffer for their group association with our enemies, which was an awful thing to do. Yet it was also a necessary thing to do because our survival was at stake.
Going against the grain of our civilisation was hard, but we had the backbone and moral fibre to do it. The backbone has now been broken in too many places to count, and the fibre has turned to vapour.
We are so scared that we may have to fight an all-out war that we refuse to admit we’re already in the middle of it.
We lack the courage to deploy the weapons without which we are defenceless: mass deportations instead of mass importations, internment instead of benefits, blanket retribution against countries even tangentially involved in the murder of our people instead of precision strikes against villains most in the public eye.
That means we’ll lose – quite possibly that we’ve lost already. All we seem to able to be do is count our dead and shed a tear or two, with variable sincerity and invariable fear.
The Paris casualties, RIP.