Generally I try to refrain from scare-mongering, for fear of frightening my readers away.
So how do some of them repay my self-restraint? By scaring me instead.
One such reader drew my attention to an American article considering the possibility of Muslims using the Ebola virus as a weapon in their 1,400-year war on the West.
My first reaction is always to dismiss such doomsday scenarios out of hand: they’ve too often come from mentally unbalanced individuals or out-and-out madmen.
Yet if a chap had told me 15 years ago that some nice young men would be able to hijack airliners and use them as flying bombs, I would have doubted his mental health too.
The problem with modernity is that crazy delusions of yesteryear increasingly become commonplace actions of today.
The same arbitrary 15 years ago I wouldn’t have believed anyone predicting that within one generation we’d have female bishops, jogging archbishops who doubt the existence of God, homomarriage, and human rights for apes.
Yes, I would have said, I share your general misgivings about modernity, but let’s not get carried away when it comes down to the particulars. Let’s use our sense of proportion.
Yet here we are, and any sense of proportion is right out of the window. That’s why one feels duty-bound to consider every future possibility, regardless of how insane it sounds at first.
Thus, in addition to scaring me, my reader got me thinking thoughts and asking questions. Such as:
Are the Muslims really at war with the West?
The answer is an unequivocal yes. Islam is inherently, scripturally and historically an expansionist creed bent on world domination.
Being an Abrahamic religion doesn’t make it well-disposed towards other Abrahamic faiths – quite the opposite.
This is predictable: none are as hostile as exponents of superficially similar but fundamentally different creeds.
Thus Christians of the first several centuries AD were less kind to heretics than to non-Christians. Lenin reserved his vilest invective for other socialists, not for the kind of people he dismissed as ‘noxious insects’, that is non-Bolsheviks. And within Islam, the internecine hostility between its two main denominations fully matches the enmity each feels for the infidels.
The history of Islam shows that its ill feelings towards the West have invariably found practical outlets.
Every now and then, the pent-up energy building up in the Muslim world would burst out in blood-red splashes, with passive hostility becoming active warfare. When repelled and appropriately punished, Islam retreats and regroups – only to come out fighting again when duly resuscitated.
The Muslims are clearly going through an active phase now, and their feeling they are at war with the West is no longer dormant. The fact that the West, corrupted by its liberal silliness, refuses to acknowledge this only makes defeat – or, barring that, massive casualties – more likely.
Would terrorists use biological agents or other WMDs if they had them?
I don’t see why not.
Guerrillas in our midst are much more likely than Islamic states to resort to such apocalyptic weapons. The states would be an easy target for equally apocalyptic reprisals, whereas gangs of seemingly stateless thugs, such as the IS, would have no such fears.
The only way for the West to punish them for such crimes would be to accept that we are at war not with any particular Islamic fanatics but with Islam as such.
The specific punitive measures would then be easy to devise, but Muslims already know that such a development isn’t on the cards. An alliance whose leaders repeatedly spread the lie that ‘Islam is a religion of peace’ won’t violate the diktats of Zeitgeist.
Can Western police and intelligence services preempt such an attack?
They have so far. Yet even though the past is a good predictor of the future, it’s not foolproof.
In important ways those services are hamstrung by the same liberal silliness I mentioned earlier. Hence they are prevented from using such prophylactic techniques as ethnic profiling or stop-and-search.
Nor does the track record of such services inspire unlimited confidence. They bungled the run-up to 9/11 in New York and 7/7 in London, for example.
True enough, no major terrorist acts on Western soil have occurred since then, but then there had been no air attacks on New York buildings during the previous century of aviation either. There’s always a first time, in other words, if you’ll forgive the cliché.
Also, given the notoriously porous borders of all Western countries, one doubts it would be easy to intercept, say, a suitcase containing a primitive nuclear device or a few vials containing an infected liquid.
I bet that even a morbidly impractical chap like me could find a way of smuggling such items in, especially if money were no problem – which it isn’t for Muslim terrorists, who can always rely on the permanently open chequebooks of our good allies, such as Saudi Arabia or Oman.
How about Muslim terrorists using human carriers of deadly contagion, such as Ebola?
Why not? They seem to have no shortage of people willing to strap explosives to their bodies and blow themselves to bits, along with a few bystanders.
No doubt the promise of Houri, 72 virgins, in paradise facilitates the recruitment of such martyrs. After all, if a man dreads comparison to such an extent that he prefers virgins and yet balks at paedophilia, paradise may be the only place left to find 72 chaste girls.
Then again, the Arabic word ‘houri’ is a cognate of our ‘whore’, which makes one realise than not only God but also etymology works in mysterious ways.
If a fanatic is prepared to kill himself with Semtex, why not with Ebola? No reason at all. And, if anything, biological agents are easier to smuggle in than plastic explosives.
Could it be Ebola then?
Somehow I doubt it. The purpose of terror is to terrorise, as Lenin explained on the basis of impressive personal experience. It follows that the more victims a terrorist can claim, the better he fulfils his mission.
Ebola, however, is transmitted the same way as Aids: by direct contact with blood or bodily fluids. It’s still possible to use this virus as a WMD, but some other agents are just as deadly but easier to administer.
It’s hard to second-guess murderous fanatics, but they are more likely to consider viruses transmitted through air particles, such as Variola vera (smallpox).
An Ebola carrier would be able to infect only a relatively small number of people, and the resulting epidemic would be limited and containable. Not so with a virus that can be transmitted simply by walking through crowded places.
In any case, my reader succeeded in scaring me. It’s best not to ponder such possibilities, unless of course one works for an organisation whose job it is to keep them purely theoretical.
My forthcoming book Democracy as a Neocon Trick can be pre-ordered, at what the publisher promises to be a spectacular discount, from http://www.roperpenberthy.co.uk/index.php/browse-books/political/democracy-as-a-neocon-trick.html or, in the USA, http://www.newwinebookshop.com/Books/0002752