By Srdja Trifkovic
Monday, 19 Jul 2010

My Meaning of the Myth elicited a strange diatribe on AltRight. My reply focuses on the curious fact that a visceral Islamophilia is shared by the multiculturalist Left and some on the self-styled radical Right. It is different in motives but similar in symptoms and consequences.

It is hard to take seriously “Richard Hoste”’s latest article. It is tempting to indulge in sarcasm and disparagement. I’ll refrain, not for the sake of the author, whose diatribe is undeserving of such consideration, but because the topic is too grave to be treated frivolously.

If my latest piece on Islam was written by somebody of Jewish descent, Hoste claims, “90 percent of the commentators would’ve been telling the author that he was being hyperbolic and to fight his own battles."

The view of Islam as the existential foe of Europe and its civilization -- its outré-mer offspring included -- is based on Islam’s own teaching and 13 centuries of blood-soaked practice. It is based on Europe’s long and appalling experience of Islam in action. Mr. Hoste is advised to acquaint himself with the Old Continent’s history and culture, perhaps focusing on Spain and the Balkans, before judging my views “hyperbolic.”<?xml:namespace prefix = o />

He would have to apply the same verdict to a host of other, better known authorities, including Tocqueville, Renan, Gladstone, Churchill, Belloc, and Chesterton -- to mention but a few of those who would pass Mr. “Hoste’s” ethno-racial screening test. Bat Ye’or would not, however, which is a pity, because her splendid work on Eurabia and Dhimmitude would help Mr. Hoste understand the roots of his peculiar mindset, and perhaps help him overcome them.

In the United States, Mr. Hoste claims, “of a Muslim population of six million or so, there have been at most 50 arrests for terrorism in the last decade (most of which are probably fake) ... [T]here is no Muslim threat in America...”

Tell that to the families of Maj. Nidal Hasan’s victims (unless we accept that Ft. Hood was not an act of “terrorism,” of course, or that it had nothing to do with Islam). Tell that to the families of the victims of Sgt. Hassan Akbar, who murdered his fellow-soldiers in Kuwait in the name of Islam. Tell that to the families of the victims of Sulejman Talovic, whose episode of the Sudden Jihad Syndrome left five people dead and four wounded in Salt Lake City three years ago. Would Mr. Hoste claim that the plot by four Albanian Muslims from ex-Yugoslavia (plus a Turk and a Jordanian) “to kill as many soldiers as possible” at Ft. Dix in 2007 was “fake”?

The list goes on. It indicates that, statistically, a Muslim is about twelve to fifteen million times more likely to commit religiously inspired terrorist murder of a fellow American citizen than a non-Muslim.

Mr. Hoste’s claim that Osama bin Laden “would let Christians live and practice their religion in Muslim lands” is unfunny in the extreme. The suffering, decline, and eventual disappearance of the indigenous Christian communities in Muslim lands is a crime of cosmic proportions, affecting hundreds of millions of people through the centuries. The record is well known and widely available to the curious. Osama’s native Saudi Arabia was the first to kill or expel all non-Muslims, of course, and Mr. “Hoste’s” apologia for that kleptocratic freak show in the desert is both factually and morally on par with Walter Duranty’s whitewash of Stalin’s Russia at the time of the Great Terror.

Mr. Hoste’s remarkable assertion that “from the perspective of white survival, Islam may be the best bet” is not without precedent. Reichsfuhrer SS Heinrich Himmler also regretted the fact that Germany had adopted Christianity, rather than Islam. He raised several Muslim SS divisions, such as the 21^st Skanderbeg, composed of Albanians, and the 13^th Handschar, recruited in Bosnia. That was only the first step in Obergruppenführer Gottlob Berger’s grand design: “a link is created between Islam and National-Socialism… [which] will be directed in terms of blood and race from the North, and in the ideological-spiritual sphere from the East.”

Those acquainted with the early fruits of Mr. Hoste’s best bet in the Balkans in 1943-45 may be forgiven for preferring them Swedes, even in their current state of moral decrepitude.

In reality, banning Islam or the Kuran would not “lead to civil war”: who would fight to keep it, except those who do not belong to the “civitas” to start with, and should leave anyway? It would not be “incompatible with civilized society,” quite the contrary.

At the end of his article Mr. Hoste admits that he has no good answers, and he is right. He claims that “neither does anyone else,” and he is wrong.

“If you know the enemy and know yourself you need not fear the results of a hundred battles,” says Sun Tzu. We know the jihadist enemy. We know his core beliefs, his role models, his track-record, his mindset, his modus operandi, and his intentions. We also know his weaknesses, which are many, above all his inability to develop a prosperous economy or a functional, harmonious society.

Islam has been for the past thousand years a gigantic grinder that turns its adherents into intellectual and moral cripples. Mr. Hoste does not know this because he does not know Islam and does not understand its debilitating effect on the soul and the mind. At the same time he has clearly absorbed the postmodernist assumptions of the Western elite class he claims to loath. His readiness to contemplate Islam as a substitute for the PC-liberal-secular pap is but the opposite side of the same coin. Both lead to a soul-numbing monism. For all the outward differences, Swedish feminists share with Mr. “Hoste’s” mullahs the desire for a monistic One World. They both long for the Great Gleichschaltung that will end in Strobe Talbot’s Single Global Authority, post-national and seamlessly standardized, an ummah under whatever name.

The Christian vision of Triune God is the enemy to both. All authentic Europeans and their overseas cousins should revive it and stick with it, not only because it is true -- which it is -- but also because it has been inseparable from their culture and civilization for over two millennia.

Recovery is still possible. A colossal, rapidly spreading global economic crisis, far harsher than the unpleasantness of the past two years, is coming. The meltdown and the collapse of confidence in the ability of the all-pervasive State to manage relief will force tens of millions of “Swedes” to re-examine their lives and their assumptions. By being disillusioned in progress they will rediscover the value and force of tradition. The ensuing struggle for diminishing resources will make them drop the neurotic becoming in favor of just being, that is, surviving. Children will no longer be a burden and a financial liability, they’ll regain their traditional value as economic assets and the substitute for collapsed social security and pension systems. The family will re-emerge as the essential social unit. Amidst collapsing political structures all ideological “propositions” will be recognized as empty abstracts. Communities linked to their native soil and bonded by kinship, memory, language, faith, and myth would be revived. The parasitic and hostile alien ghettos would be expelled or otherwise neutralized. And in adversity the eyes of men would be lifted, once again, to Heaven.

This scenario is far more likely, and far more desirable, than Mr. Hoste’s best bet.

Even in the absence of a life-altering event, normal people should not succumb to the myth that the game is up, that Dar al Islam is the end of the road for all of us, let alone “the least of all evils.” We Europeans are endowed with feelings and reason, with the awareness of who we are and the pride in our patrimony. Being the heirs of the greatest and best civilization the world has known, we know we will not fail it.

The coming struggle against Jihad is just and natural. It is inevitable even if the outcome is uncertain, just as the knowledge each of us has of his mortality does not stop us from holding on to life, and beauty, and truth. That struggle will be won, with or without Mr. Hoste and his ilk, and if need be in spite of them.