The conventional analyses of Obama’s victory have their place, and one needn’t look far to get one’s fill.  But readers of these pages will appreciate that the only true significance to any event—even a presidential election—is to be found in the realm of the eternal.  Temporal matters matter because, though temporal, yet are they nonetheless bound up with the eternal.  The sparrow does not fall from the sky, nor a hair turn black or white, apart from the providence of the eternal God.  The fool saith in his heart there is no God, and the thinking man appreciates that the only true consequences are the eternal ones.  If we are nothing more than cleverly arranged amino acids, if the sun will one day die, protons fizzle out, and the whole universe grow cold—then so what about anything?  Obama, McCain, war, peace, prosperity, impoverishment, American greatness or decline—who cares?  Well, we care, because we sense in all of these things—however tentatively—questions of eternal significance.

With this in mind, we ask again: what is the significance of Barack Obama’s victory?  Can we discern its transcendent significance—even if our speculations, made as they are through a glass darkly, must embrace provisionality?

I propose that with president-elect Obama we have taken a significant step toward the end of the world—and not just because a left-winger is likely to make a botch of whatever he touches.  By the end of the world we mean the end of human history, which had its beginning with the fall of man in the Garden of Eden.  The fall was the beginning of history; the Second Coming of Christ and the Last Judgment—when we shall all be changed in the twinkling of an eye and the elements burn with fervent heat—will be the conclusion.  History as we know it is the story of the separation of man from God through disobedience and the saga of his redemption through divine grace.  We do not know when the Master shall return—no man knoweth the day nor hour—but we do have powerful indications from Holy Scripture and Tradition about the general course of history and what its latter days will look like.  It is in this realm that we may endeavor to discern the significance of the events of our time.

During the campaign a running joke was the comparison between Obama and Jesus Christ.  No, tee-hee, Barack wasn’t born in a manger! That sort of thing.  Jokes serve as important political tools.  Through jokes, it is possible to broach topics still inaccessible to non-facetious comment.  If one causes offence through touching a taboo, one can always beat a retreat by saying that it was only a joke.  Over time, insinuating an idea through humor paves the way for eventual, more explicit, acceptance.  Jokes about Obama’s messiahship begin the process of intimating the idea that a political figure could actually be the messiah.

False messiahs only appeal to societies that have abandoned the True One, and Obama’s electoral triumph is an indication of how far Christian America has unraveled.  Obama is hardly the first politician to cultivate messianic comparisons, and he certainly will not be the last.  He is a symptom—albeit a striking one—of a wider disease, namely, that modern democratic politics have become, almost by nature, exercises in false messianism.  Candidates, in particular those on the national level, are successful to the degree they are able to imply their saviorship, their capacity to save people from their existential plight.  Candidates whose pretence to saviorship is inadequate, such as John McCain, lose.  Candidates who eschew pretence to saviorship, such as Ron Paul, haven’t a chance.

You will know them by their fruit, spake the Lord.  The fruits of false christs in the past—from Cromwell to Jim Jones—bear out the forces that drove them.  The fruits of president Obama have yet to be reaped, but on one score he has already accomplished much.  I was astonished during the campaign to hear from many otherwise seriously Christian people their support for a man so extremely pro-abortion.  Barack Obama is perhaps the most charming front man the infanticide business has yet to produce, an industry which has claimed the lives of nearly fifty million Americans in the past thirty-five years (and not incidentally with annual revenues approaching a billion dollars).  Flanked by his innocent little girls, he looks the young women of our time in the eye, pats their hand, and tells them, with profound feeling and sincerity, “It’s OK to kill your child.”  And they, absolved of the guilt of their crime, proceed to do so at the rate of about 3,700 a day.

Obama intimates a change of epochs, from the post-Christian to the anti-Christian age.  Different eras and their dominant characteristics invariably run together, but we can attempt a rough chronology.  The post-Christian era we may identify as roughly coterminous with the end of World War II and the fall of European Communism at the end of the twentieth century.  This post-Christian era was itself the consequence of the age of revolution, or the counter-Christian age, during which Christianity was the avowed enemy.  The revolutionary upheavals of this counter-Christian era—from the French Revolution in 1789 through the European apocalypse of 1945—were explicitly against Christianity; they did their level best to expunge as far as possible the world’s greatest inheritance, its Christian tradition.  Marxism was the leading ideology of the counter-Christian era, which led to Communism in the east and its antithesis, hyper-individualism, in the west.  What secular observers of modern history invariably fail to appreciate, no matter how astute their worldly wisdom, is that the revolutions of the modern era were not merely about dethroning kings, but about dethroning the King of Kings, of stealing His throne and glory for ersatz political entrepreneurs.  While the kings have gone, yet the King of Kings remains, and the world revolution proceeds, morphing through different stages to supplant the heavenly with the worldly, the immaculate with the profane, the Creator with the created.

In the wake of the unprecedented physical and moral destruction of the counter-Christian age of revolution was left a spiritual wasteland, i.e., post-Christianity.  Nihilism, the hallmark of the post-Christian age, was the logical result of the counter-Christian era’s destructiveness, but nihilism is highly unstable.  One can’t believe in nothing—practically or logically—for very long, and so inevitably something must fill the void.

Into the negative spiritual and cultural space of post-Christianity now marches anti-Christianity, an era marked by pretenders to Christ’s throne.  By anti-Christian we mean primarily in place of Christianity: the age in which false churches and false saviors set themselves up in place of the True Church and the True Savior.  Today’s world has substantially abandoned authentic Christianity, yet the problems Christianity addresses—life, death, sin, salvation—persist even while the answers it provides are no longer socially effective.  Thus do we enter the era of anti-Christianity in which salvation is sought in worldly institutions and men, in false churches and false christs, to an ever greater and more explicit degree.  It is in this sense that Obama’s historic triumph is both logical and alarming.

The great world-destroying ideologies of the modern era, viz., Communism and National Socialism, however seductive, were too divisive to appeal on a universal level.  They possessed a decidedly us-versus-them logic that both made them effective yet limited their reach.  Lenin, Hitler, Mao, et al. made their livings excoriating the other, the enemies of their respective revolutions, of saving their societies from the evil machinations of those who would destroy them.  In contrast, in the tautologous newspeak of contemporary democratic politics, the only bad guys are unnamed “extremists” and “terrorists” to be smart-bombed into oblivion or sanitized out of public view.  Identification of specific enemies (remember “the Japs,” “Gerry,” “Charlie”) is increasingly passé.

Obama manifests modern democracy’s bland universalizing tendency to an unprecedented degree.  Two closely related qualities of his campaign stand out: its ability to unite and its indomitable vagueness.  Obama is at once everything and nothing: black, white, Asian, other; Christian but maybe Muslim (and a newfound friend of the Jewish State); pro-children and pro-abortion; a socialist who wants to curb spending; a member of the anti-establishment establishment; pro-America yet friends with Amerikkka-haters and terrorists.  There’s something there for everyone.  We all have a tendency to hear what we want to hear, and the able mass-seducer exploits this principle to the utmost.  In order to unite a diverse audience, his message must be of sufficient vagueness so as not to alienate any significant element.  Like sodium pentothal, Obama’s infantile message of “hope” and “change” (and salvation?) had the effect of reducing the powers of resistance in his audience and warming their affections for reasons they really could not explain.  Recall his Brandenburg Gate speech shortly after his primary victory.  200,000 Germans adoring a black, quasi-Muslim, first-term senator from the Midwest surely represents a breakthrough of some kind, albeit not for the better.

So far, the pretence to messiahship by modern statesmen has been implicit.  But what little may separate us from the actual, explicit worship of a man on a popular level may be illustrated by the following thought experiment.  Imagine this: during the next few months, the financial crisis grows ever darker, and the question of what our new president will do to save his people grows ever more urgent.  Then, during his inaugural address, with the fever-pitch of excitement rippling through the adoring faces, president Obama makes the following statement:

My friends, we have fought the good fight.  We have run the good race.  We stand now at the beginning of a new era for America and for the world.  My brothers and sisters, do not be afraid.  I have come to deliver you from the fears of your former darkness.  Today, the prophecy is fulfilled in your eyes.  Behold your God.

How would the crowd and the nation react?  Many would surely recoil at such monstrous blasphemy; many would conclude that America’s first mostly-black president had, on his first day, taken utter leave of his senses; but some—some—would, one strongly suspects, bow down to the man.  Think of the armies of giddy volunteers, the starry-eyed graduate students, the black grandmothers persuaded that the ancient curse has finally been lifted.  So far fetched?  What is the practical definition of worship?  When does one cross the line into idolatry?  Have some of Obama’s fans already committed sacrilege?  Did the Germans under Hitler?  The French under Napoleon?  Parts of America under Roosevelt, Kennedy—Reagan?

One expects that the messianic sheen will begin to wear off as the Obama administration comes into contact with the realities of governance, but this does not diminish the larger significance of Obama’s victory.  False messiahs invariably disappoint, but their attractiveness indicates the extent to which a society that follows them has grown spiritually leprous.  False messiahs are only possible in societies that have abandoned the True One.  Sarah Palin’s apparently devastating line at the Republican Convention (back when we still had the luxury of speculating about the inadequacies of a McCain administration) that the presidency is not a step on the path to personal fulfillment has been effectively falsified.  Actually, Sarah, it is; it is a step on the path to all of our fulfillment through the incarnation of our hopes and dreams in Barack Hussein Obama.  Kyrie eleison.

On May 28, 1987, a brash nineteen-year old from the Federative Republic of Germany flew a single-engine Cessna from Berlin to Moscow—and landed in Red Square.  The pilot, one Mathias Rust, proceeded to light up and chat with the passersby.  There was no malicious intent and no harm done (Herr Rust later said that he was hoping the incident would end East-West tensions—not quite), but the incident so embarrassed the Soviet defense establishment that both the defense minister and the air defense chief resigned and nine generals and nearly three-hundred officers were sacked—an astonishing slaughter for what was, ultimately, a harmless prank.

The Rust affair indicates that even within the imbroglio of irrationality that was late-term Soviet Communism, certain healthy impulses survived.  One of them was the capacity for officials to be seriously, egregiously embarrassed and to pay the penalty.  Embarrassment requires a) something to be embarrassed about and b) an awareness that there are professional standards to which one will be held to account.  “A” is ever plentiful, though governments are adept at covering them up; “B” is often lacking.  The Rust incident contrasts sharply with the American approach of today in which, whatever the criteria for dismissing officials, manifested ineptitude is not among them.  Indeed, the “capitalist”, “democratic” US of A increasingly bears the marks of the waning Soviet Empire, not least of which in its mindset of unaccountability.  At least the Soviets went through the trouble of finding scapegoats.  In the crises of early twenty-first century America, it seems impossible to fault anyone with enough specificity to fire him.

Even the exceptions tend to prove the rule: one recalls that FEMA chief Mike Brown had to go following the drowning of New Orleans after Katrina, but was anyone at the Army Corps of Engineers—the guys who actually build and maintain the levees—held to account?  What about mayor Nagin or governor Blanco, whose responsibility it was to provide for the evacuation?  (Just a few weeks ago it was the same Nagin tearfully lamenting, as Hurricane Gustav approached, that is was the end of the world.  They got some rain.)

Today’s bank bailout frenzy is classic neo-American unaccountability, going so far as to propose to enshrine the principle in law.  Whatever form the bailout ultimately takes, section 8 of the Treasury’s original draft proposal, preposterously headed “Review”, is illuminating.  It reads (as reported by the NYT):

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Let’s read that again in case we missed something.

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

Did you catch that?  So not merely would the Treasury get a $700 billion (that’s a seven with eleven zeros) check from you and me to buy up “toxic” debt, they would be legally indemnified against doing anything wrong.  They might spend it all on golf course condos for Paulson’s erstwhile colleagues at Goldman, Sachs for all we know but there would exist no agency or court with jurisdiction in which a remedy could even be theoretically effected.  Section 8 (how appropriate!) is Paulson’s get-out-of-jail-free card.  It might as well read, “The act hereby empowers the Secretary to do whatever he damn well pleases, common sense, legal precedent, and the Constitution notwithstanding.”

We do not know the form the bailout will take, or if it will take, but the tremendous frenzy for the government to dive into the financial markets is all justified, of course, by the ostensible exigency of the situation, which is how we got the likes of the Patriot Act, the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc.  The storyline by now is getting a bit hackneyed: we thought everything was going fine; there was a sudden, unforeseeable crisis; we need new powers and funds immediately—i.e., before such new powers and funds may be adequately scrutinized—to forestall a catastrophe.  This is how nascent totalitarian governments bloom.  The genuine conspirators who behind the scenes truly want to turn the US into an impoverished police state (if they exist) are being hugely abetted by the ineptitude of the remaining good-hearted people in government (if they exist) and the near-invincible culture of unaccountability.  While Congress belatedly tries to come to grips with the ponzi-scheme that is central banking, nothing said thus far will impinge on the culture of unaccountability.  There have been noises about reigning in executive compensation, curtailing golden parachutes, etc., but nothing serious about the obvious candidates for accountability, namely, the occupants of the Treasury and the Fed themselves.  In a sane world, the first question from Congress would run as follows:

Chair: Mr Paulson, Mr Bernanke, you say we are in a grave crisis in which only immediate and sweeping action will stave off disaster.  OK, fine.  Question: How on earth did you let it get this bad? Why on earth do we have a Treasury, a Fed, an SEC, etc. if not precisely to bring impending crises to light and forestall this sort of disaster?  Either we are dealing with some sort of truly sinister conspiracy, or we are dealing with criminal incompetence.  Gentlemen, which is it?

In either case, the prerequisite to any “bailout” (the term summons images of a listing ocean liner and a bucket brigade) is the submitted resignations of Secretary Paulson, his senior Treasury officials, Chairman Bernanke, and the other members of the Fed’s Board of Governors, Messrs Kohn, Warsh, and Kroszner.  (The latest hire, Elizabeth Duke, has only been on the job since August, so we might spare her.)  On what possible grounds can we justify writing a blank check to exactly the people who led us into this mess in the first place?  And we mustn’t brook any nonsense about it all being unforeseen, it being the fault of others, of officials no longer in office, etc.  The only answer to such casuistry is to be sure to drag Paulson’s predecessors and Alan Greenspan into the light as well.

(N.B. Senator McCain, running for the top spot back in 1999, actually said this in a New Hampshire debate: “And by the way, I would not only reappoint Mr. Greenspan; if Mr. Greenspan should happen to die, God forbid, I would do like they did in the movie ‘Weekend at Bernie's’, I would prop him up and put a pair of dark glasses on him and keep him as long as we could. The fact is that Mr. Greenspan deserves great credit, great credit for this economic recovery. He's been a steady hand. He's unintelligible, but he's had a very steady hand on the tiller and I am a great admirer and an advocate of his policies and programs.”  Would now be an apropos time for Mr Greenspan to clarify some of those “unintelligible” remarks?  [What I had meant to say at the time was that we were headed for a catastrophe.  I’m sorry if I was unintelligible … ])

Personal accountability in high office is not only indispensable, it is only common sense; but, as the saying goes, common sense is not all that common—not anymore and certainly not in the world of finance or government.  But the bailout, as bad as it is, is just the latest example in the burgeoning culture of unaccountability.  Remember all those children who burned to death at Waco?  Whose head rolled for that?  Not Janet Reno’s—though she took “responsibility” for the holocaust.

The practical problem with unaccountability—as the “rational choice” theorists tell us—is that no one has any incentive to do his job.  At some point, incompetence becomes a positive requirement for high office because everyone is so inept that a capable man would make everybody else look hopelessly out of their depth.  Screwed the pooch, did you?  It’s OK, we won’t hold it against you—we did, too!

But the crown jewel in the American pantheon of unaccountability—one, we must all hope, is not soon eclipsed—is 9/11.  Of all the analysis of 9/11—much of it specious, some of it illuminating, some of it truly unnerving—the question of accountability seems hardly ever to come up.  (I am still fairly new to Chronicles, so perhaps this is a point that has been made here.  In which case, forgive me, gentlemen.)  Among those who accept the official story (we’ll stick with that for present purposes), one thing they should all be able to agree on, is that 9/11 was, at minimum, the most spectacular national security failure in world history.  Here we have the civilian population of the most powerful and well-defended nation in history attacked in broad daylight with its own aircraft.  At best, it amounts to incompetence of a transcendent order.  And so we ask: Who got fired?  The defense secretary?  The Air Force secretary?  Head of CIA?  Head of FBI?  The crew at NSA?  Head of the FAA?  Somebody at customs and immigration?  The security guy at Logan airport?  Anybody??!!  It seems that none of the legally, constitutionally responsible parties even got so much as a slap on the wrist.  The Soviets took the security of their airspace seriously enough to sack half their air defense staff for failing to stop a mischievous teenager in a Cessna—how seriously do we take ours?

This most basic failure to get rid of the people on whose watch disaster occurs indicates a truly pathological corporate mindset.  In a polity in which public opinion ranks so high (one hesitates to say “democracy”), the natural reaction to disaster would be a spectacular witch hunt that would afford endless opportunities for politicians to tell the cameras how much they care about the public welfare, about how no stone will be left unturned in the righteous quest for the truth, etc., etc.  That all we got from our elected officials after 9/11 was the flaccid 9/11 Commission report indicates how far things have unraveled, and the current financial crisis gives little grounds for hope.  When next contemplating worst-case scenarios—whether financial, military, or some other—we must factor in the culture of unaccountability.  Will the US dollar someday not be worth the paper its printed on?  Will a suitcase nuke ever find its way to flattening a US city?  Why not?  After all, why would anyone have a reason to stop it? All 9/11 resulted in was more power, money, and reduced oversight for the same national security-intelligence establishment that permitted the disaster to happen—imagine the wonders a small atom bomb might accomplish.  Without seriously attacking the culture of unaccountability, a bailout would have substantially the same effect on the Fed and the Treasury as 9/11 did for the national security establishment: it would affirm the distorted policies that got us into the crisis in the first place and empower rather than punish the people on whose watch it transpired.  Bad idea.

We have today, in the opening years of the 21. century, front-row seats to what is surely one of the most astonishing revolutions ever to transpire on the face of the earth. Like the spectacular upheavals of 1789, 1848, and 1917, this one has been simmering for decades, but is still in its progressive rather than explosive stage (the latter may not be far off). The revolutions of past each professed a glorious future just beyond the horizon, and while those utopic visions differed, the intent and consequence of those revolutions was primarily destructive. They destroyed rather than created; they left behind not shining cities on a hill, but valleys of woe, carnage, and landscapes of unprecedented material and spiritual wreckage. As it was then, so it is today.

What is happening in Europe is that in the heartland of the leading civilization of the past 500 years, the dominant political culture is being supplanted by an alien invader, hitherto inferior in every dimension. Western Europe, whose influence on the course of modern world history is second to none, is today deliberately welcoming into its midst a civilizational force that strove, unsuccessfully, for a thousand years to destroy it. What that force was unable to accomplish through force of arms is now being accomplished through Europe’s own suicidal policies. The temperate, tolerant Western Europeans are handing themselves over to the leading progenitor of war, slavery, and civilizational disaster of the past fourteen centuries: Islam.

While analysts of recent years have observed the social difficulties facing Europe by its growing Muslim population, few have been willing or able to grasp the bigger picture. In 1945, there were perhaps a few hundred thousand Muslims in Western Europe; today there are twenty-five million. If one includes Russia in the calculation, the figure is fifty million. The societal shift underway in Europe today is nothing short of seismic. While Muslims press into Europe in huge numbers and continue to have children at levels far above the European average, the native European populations are collapsing. While Western Europe’s Muslim population is expected to double during the decade 2005-15, the native population will actually decline by several percent. Perhaps most significantly, it appears that Islamic identity is actually stronger among second and third generation Muslims, a fact that contradicts all of the sanguine hopes about assimilation. And these tendencies are no mere blips on the screen but have shown themselves of transgenerational robustness, dating back roughly forty years, and only seem to be accelerating.

Europe and the Religion of Peace—Major demographic shifts have occurred before, of course, but, in the case of Islam growing in a non-Islamic society, it is more than just a matter of “there goes the neighborhood.” While there have been major shifts of power in Europe before (the Spanish being supplanted by the Dutch being supplanted by the French, the English, the Germans, the Americans, etc.), the major players have -all been grounded, at least loosely, in a Greco-Roman-Christian universe. Not so with Islam, whose inspiration lies not in Athens and Jerusalem but in Mecca and Medina. Thanks to the indiscriminateness of contemporary academic and political assumptions, Islam was casually tossed into that garbage-can rubric, “religion,” and enough said. But far from merely a religion in the personal sense, Islam is a political ideology that has never recognized a distinction between the secular and the spiritual.

Islam is in fact a system of government ordained by Allah to comprehend the planet; any individual or society that does not submit (Islam translates best as “submission”) to Allah’s governance (Islamic law or Sharia), places itself in an ipso facto state of rebellion. While many Muslims (like many Christians, Jews, etc.) are slack in the practice of their faith, orthodox Islam, Sharia and all, is once again asserting itself around the globe and, now, in Europe. From the terrorism that struck London and Madrid to the brazen demonstrations of European Muslims calling for the deaths of European statesmen during the Muhammad cartoon and Koran-commode crises, to the increasing number of “honor” killings against wayward Muslim girls, to the expanding no-go areas off-limits to non-Muslim police and government authority, the violent calling-cards of Islam, seen previously only in the Third World, are now internal phenomena. Yet, whenever a bus or a plane and its occupants are blown to smithereens by a devotee of the “religion of peace,” we hear repeated in ever patient, reasonable tones that Islam has nothing to do with violence and that “extremism” is to be found in every religion. While it is not really so remarkable that there are people who would engage in such transparent sophistry, what astonishes is that so many seem to listen to them.

Europe’s fight against Islamic imperialism is its salient, perhaps defining, historical achievement. It has only been in the post-war, post-revolutionary, post-Christian era that Europe lowered its guard to let in the ancient enemy. For a thousand years (roughly the seventh through seventeenth centuries), Europe existed on the knife-edge of destruction at the hands of Islamic jihad. A quick historical refresher is here in order. Following the death of Muhammad in 632 AD, Islam burst out of Arabia with unprecedented violence. In a centuries’ time, the Muslim Arab armies had crushed Christian North Africa, the Holy Land, overrun Spain and Portugal, and were hammering at the gates of Paris. It was at Poitiers-Tours, in 732 AD, that Charles, King of the Franks, turned back the tsunami—and earned the sobriquet, Martel, “the Hammer.” Following the Islamic destruction of the most holy site in Christendom, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and the defeat of the Byzantine Empire at Manzikert by the Muslim Turks, the Vatican in 1095 commissioned the First Crusade, the first serious counter-offensive against Islamic predations during 450 years of jihadi aggression. Unhappily, the Crusades were as much about Rome’s desire to wrest Jerusalem from the Byzantines (following Rome’s split from the Eastern Church in 1054, the Great Schism) as it was about preserving Europe from the jihad. The Fourth Crusade of 1204, far from helping the Eastern Christians to stop the tide of Islam, culminated in the Latins’ sack of Constantinople, rendering the split between Eastern and Western Christianity permanent and fatally crippling the main bulwark against Islamic aggression, the Byzantine Empire. In 1453, Constantinople, the jewel of Eastern Christendom, having held out against Muslim attacks since the eighth century, finally succumbed. In less than a hundred years, the Muslims would be at the walls of Vienna. They were decisively turned back on their second attempt to take the city by the King of Poland, John Sobieski, on a date that ought to be among the most famous in history: September 11, 1683. Still, Muslim raiders would be abducting Europeans into slavery from as far away as Ireland into the 19. century.

But the high priests of multiculturalism today would have us believe that Europe’s thousand-year struggle for survival against Islamic jihad was just a bad dream. When presented with contemporary instances of the Muslim penchant for violence, they tell us that, you see, the situation is very complex, one mustn’t jump to conclusions, etc. The world is a complex place, of course, but there is no need to complicate something that is actually fairly straightforward.

Let us propose, as a competing hypothesis to the convoluted platitudes about how Muslim terrorists are “disenfranchised” or “undervalued,” about how Europe mistreated them for all those years, about the problems of the inner city, lack of health care, feelings of “isolation,” etc., etc. (all of which possess their grains of truth), the following simple, limpid idea: Islam, as a creed and ideology, is violent. If terrorism is a function of poverty, why have so many Muslim terrorists—from 9/11 to 7/7 to the archjihadi himself, bin Laden—been from wealthy, educated backgrounds? Why so few impoverished Hindu suicide bombers or shamanist jihadis? Where are all those poor, disenfranchised Appalachian Baptist martyrs’ brigades? Why no air piracy waged by radical Christianists? A continent that has in living memory experienced the horrors of Communism and National Socialism should not have so much difficulty appreciating that certain ideas are fully capable of motivating large numbers of people to do very ugly things. If the French salons produced the ideological underpinnings of the Terror, and the most cultured Western nation could hatch National Socialism, what do we expect from a religion forged in seventh-century desert Araby, not exactly the most genteel environment? We have become so domesticated by “experts” and men in white coats as to what to eat, drink, and whom to vote for that we can no longer discern the elephant in the room, even when it’s wearing a suicide belt.

The dominant Islam-is-peaceful crowd would have us reject the plain evidence of our eyes. Of the myriad post-Cold War conflicts in the world, the overwhelming majority of them are Islamic in nature. Of course, we are usually not told what is the common element of the terrorism in the Philippines, the “unrest” in Thailand, the low-grade strife in Western China, Kashmir, Chechnya, Bosnia, Kosovo, Algeria, Nigeria, the Ivory Coast, Sudan, Mauritania, as well as of course Lebanon, Israel, Iraq, and global terrorism from Bali to New York, Washington, London, Madrid, Moscow, Luxor, etc., etc.: it is Islam. Indeed, it is easier to enumerate the wars of today which do not involve Islam than the other way around. Should this tell us something?

The violent nature of Islam is not some recent innovation that distorted an otherwise peaceful religion; rather it is confirmed throughout the life of Muhammad and the Koran. We have not here the space to attempt a full-fledged discussion of the textual origins of Islamic violence, so we shall just mention one illustrative example in the life of al insan al kamil, the “ideal man,” Muhammad, excerpted from the Sira, the canonical biography of the Prophet. The episode is taken from the last ten years of Muhammad’s life, after he set up shop in Medina and had waged several successful battles against his Mecca rivals.

Then they [the Jewish tribe of Qurayza] surrendered, and the apostle confined them in Medina… Then the apostle went out to the market of Medina and dug trenches in it. Then he sent for them and struck off their heads in those trenches as they were brought out to him in batches. Among them was the enemy of Allah Huyayy bin Akhtab and Ka’b bin Asad their chief. There were 600 or 700 in all, though some put the figure as high as 800 or 900. As they were being taken out in batches to the Apostle they asked Ka’b what he thought would be done with them. He replied, ‘Will you never understand? Don’t you see that the summoner never stops and those who are taken away do not return? By Allah it is death!’ This went on until the Apostle made an end of them. (Ishaq 463-4, The Life of Muhammad, trans by A. Guillaume)

A single example cannot be said to establish a general rule. But it is worth bearing in mind, next time one hears about the similarities between Islam and Christianity, that Jesus Christ and the Apostles never cut anybody’s head off.

The only reasonable objection to the idea that Islam as a rule is violent is the fact that so many of its adherents are peaceful (there are now, apparently, more Muslims than Roman Catholics worldwide); but then because there were urbane Communists and pleasant Nazis hardly meant that their ideologies were benign. The question remains as to whether peaceful Muslims are that way because of their religion or in spite of it. In any religion or ideology there are some very faithful adherents who will go to great lengths to fulfill its precepts—the Christian ascetics, for example—while others make greater compromise with the world. Some Muslims with the zeal and opportunity become mujahideen, others encourage jihad with word and checkbook, others are tacitly sympathetic, and still others indulge in hot dogs and beer, attend mosque once in a blue crescent moon, and guffaw at Jewish comedians. Just as not all Christians love their neighbor, so not all Muslims have the inner fortitude to kill the infidel while screaming “God is great!” (“Allah Ahkbar!”)—but this hardly means that Islam is therefore peaceful. Indeed, as the Muslim populations in Europe have grown, we have seen a corresponding increase of their violent minorities. What do we make of the creed of Hamas, that leading social-services and terrorist organization of the Gaza strip, that “the Koran is our constitution, Muhammad is our example, jihad is our path”? Do all those martyrs-in-waiting, reciting the Koran and siting in their Kalashnikov’s, misunderstand their own religion, or—utterly removed from Islamic culture—do we? Do the Western politicians who insist on Islam’s peacefulness do so because they are so knowledgeable of the origins, history, and doctrines of Islam, or because the alternative (now that Islam is inside the walls) is too terrible a reality to accept?

Islam and the Euro-Mediterranean Dream—Having attempted to bring some clarity to the issue of Islamic violence, we come to our next question: If Islam is such bad news, how on earth was it let into the European heartland? A question of paramount importance but one that has only recently received any serious attention. It took Bat Ye’or’s seminal Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis to explain in cogent fashion the actual process of bringing Islam into Europe. While many observed only the outward movements of the Eurabian organism—the increasing commingling of the European and Muslim-Arab polities—yet remained largely oblivious to its internal workings, Bat Ye’or dived in with her scalpel and forceps.

What she revealed was the tangled web of European officialdom in its full mind-bending madness. Eurabia documents the imbroglio of conferences, position papers, cultural exchanges, official declarations, partnerships, etc. that are effecting a quiet revolution that is slowly but surely removing Western Europe as a distinct political region. The picture Eurabia paints is one of officials who took it upon themselves to recast Europe’s destiny without much consulting those they govern (hardly the first time). The policy-making nexus of individual national governments, the European Parliament, the Council of Ministers, the European Commission, etc. along with the vertiginous layers of international finance, NGOs, academia, etc., etc., is effectively unaccountable to the European public by virtue of its own impenetrable complexity. It took someone of Bat Ye’or’s scholarly patience to undertake the gigantic task of political geology required to figure out what has actually been going on.

The upshot is that the opening of the EC and later EU countries to Islam was no accident or natural development; rather it was—and continues to be—a deliberate policy of the EU shared to varying degrees by its member governments. Significantly, Bat Ye’or did not coin the term “Eurabia.” It was the title of a journal of the mid-1970s that had the political union of Europe and the Arab world as its theme. “Eurabia,” in other words, was not originally the term of alarm that Bat Ye’or has made it; rather, it was a positive reference to a new era of Euro-Islamic integration. This fact in itself is enough to lend credibility to the idea that the creation of a Euro-Muslim bloc has been very much intentional and is seen by some as a positive good.

[amazonify]097789844X[/amazonify]The EU’s principle instrument for building Eurabia has been the Euro-Arab Dialogue (EAD), a group of European and Arab-Muslim officials that guides integration at the highest levels; but the proliferation of organizations and bodies devoted to the “Euro-Med” project (as it is now openly referred to) are too many to name. Some of the more significant ones are the Parliamentary Association for Euro-Arab Co-operation (PAEAC), the European Institute for Research on Mediterranean and Euro-Arab Co-operation (MEDA), the Facility for Euro-Mediterranean Investment and Partnership (FEMIP), and the European Committee and Coordination of Friendship Associations with the Arab World (EURABIA—I kid you not). Normal people, of course, have difficulty imagining that obscure bodies composed of career bureaucrats would have the wherewithal to accomplish much of anything. But, like a slowly expanding glacier, one day, after generations of incremental movement, one awakes to a landscape utterly transformed. And now that some are awakening to the burgeoning Eurabian catastrophe, the labyrinthine Eurabian infrastructure effectively forestalls any remedial action.

But the hypothesis that the opening of Europe to Islam has somehow been deliberate runs afoul of many. To them, it seems impossible that the transformation of Europe into Eurabia could wind up somehow being intentional—how on earth could any sane European mind actually want to see Europe absorbed into Eurabia? But the alternative, conventional wisdom, that the ongoing Islamization of Europe is the result of some big accident, that it was the unforeseen consequence of wholly well-intentioned policy, is a non-explanation that provides no insight into the phenomenon itself. Bat Ye’or’s scholarship, like all serious inquiry, takes as its point of departure the assumption that things happen for a reason. While there certainly are coincidences and accidents, it does violence to the spirit of serious inquiry to suppose that an entire continent can, in the course of several decades, be set on its way from a collection of republics with Christian overtones to an Islamic superstate all by accident. Perhaps the reason that people recoil from that idea that Islamizing Europe has been a choice is because the implication is that it didn’t have to happen. It is always tempting after the fact to imagine that it was all “inevitable”—then there is no one to blame and we can all lament the grim inevitability of fate over out espresso. But if there is nothing “natural” or “inevitable” about replacing Europe with Eurabia, the implication is that someone, somewhere is to blame for having brought it about and the rest of us in having lacked the vision and resolution to forestall the disaster.

A criticism of the deliberate theory is that it smacks of “conspiracy,” which for some reason is a distasteful word. Of course, “conspiracy” is a widely recognized legal concept, a crime regularly prosecuted by governments all over the world, yet it is supposedly impossible for government officials themselves to engage in it. But if the Eurabian thesis attests to a “conspiracy” of some kind, it is one that lacks methodical surreptitiousness. Like many of the revolutions beforehand, the Eurabian revolution is occurring, for the most part, out in the open. Thanks to Bat Ye’or, we can see quite plainly that the policies leading to Europe’s ongoing Islamization stem from rational—if highly questionable—perceptions of self-interest. The seminal event appears to have been the oil embargo following the 1973 Israeli-Arab war. It became vividly apparent to Europe at that point that it would be more expedient to play nice with the Arabs if it meant more oil. It did. And playing nice entailed two points: 1) dump Israel and her patron, the United States; and 2) open Europe economically and culturally to the Arab-Muslim states. Right or wrong, shrewd or foolish, this was the calculation the European governments made.

The oil-driven decision of the early 1970s was reinforced by numerous jihadist terror attacks on European interests in the succeeding years. The Europeans chose the well-worn path of greater appeasement in the form of support for the PLO, hostility to Israel and the US, and ever greater openness to penetration by Muslim-Arab finance and culture. The jihadist attacks ceased. Little in the way of Islamic terrorism occurred in Europe pre-9/11.

The Eurabian project has in fact been underway for some time albeit in different forms. Since Napoleon landed in Egypt in 1798, France has dreamed of a broad Mediterranean empire, which she pursued pre-WWII with some success. With the loss of Algeria in 1962, France has attempted to recover her influence in North Africa and throughout the Arab-Muslim world by less imperious means. Germany has also had Eurabian dreams. German penetration into the Balkans in WWII developed contacts with Muslims for whom Nazi fascism meshed nicely with Islam, the oldest global fascist movement in history. Nazi Germany was an obvious ally for Muslims throughout the Middle-East longing to put dhimmis (Jews and Christians, relegated by the Koran [9:29] to semi-slavery) back in their place.

The assumption in Europe, of course, has been that in any political accommodation with the Islamic world, Europe will remain the senior partner. Thus, an emergent “Euro-Med” bloc will serve as a magnified platform for European voices to counter American, Russian, and Chinese ascendancy. But the foundations of that assumption have been steadily eroding since WWII. While the Eurabian project proceeds apace, increasingly it is less a matter of Europeanizing the Arabs than in Arabizing Europe—indeed, Islamizing it. For it is with Islam that Europe has failed to reckon. It is one thing to secularize (Western) Christians, as was done successfully in Europe following the wars of religion, but it is another thing to secularize Muslims. Whereas Christianity seeks a kingdom “not of this world” and is thus compatible with many forms of government, Islamic politics are explicitly prescribed by the Islamic holy texts. Christianity recognizes Caesar as the earthly law-giver; Islam only Allah. Europe was able to pacify Christianity because Christianity is naturally pacific; its violent manifestations a distortion of its doctrines. Islam is another matter entirely. The Eurabian institutional framework is serving—knowingly or not—as the new vehicle for jihad in Europe. What the irreligious, champagne-sniffing Eurocrats have not counted on is having to blunt the religious feelings of millions of Muslims accustomed to having their political religion central in their lives.

Yugoslavia: Nation of the Future—The form the new European jihad is taking and the complicity of Western institutions in their own destruction is nowhere more visible than in the wars of the Yugoslav succession of the 1990s, which continue into the present day in the imposed breakup of Serbia-Kosovo. The conventional wisdom of these wars is that blood-thirsty Serbs (regularly equated during the 90s war with Nazis—in fact the Serbs had fought the Nazis tooth and nail while suffering a genuine genocide at the hands of an Axis power, Croatia, to the tune of a million dead), seizing the opportunity of the breakdown of Communism, unleashed their designs for a “greater Serbia” that involved the destruction of the Croat and Bosnian ethnic groups. Serb aggression was only halted, so the story goes, by the overdue involvement of NATO. This fiction serves a variety on interests (not least of all NATO, looking for something to do in the wake of the Soviet Collapse), but neatly inverts much of what really happened. In fact, Western Europe, had long wanted to bring the historically independent Yugoslavia to heel. The Germans in particular, wanted to pull Croatia (their WWII ally) into the EU system and isolate Serbia (their WWI and WWII enemy). The Americans, ever eager to appear the friends of Islam to their Saudi petro-benefactors, egged on the Muslim president of Bosnia to reject a settlement with the Serbs in Bosnia that would have prevented the ensuing civil war. The Bosnian declaration of independence in April 1992 and Muslim attacks on Serb civilians left the Bosnian Serbs little choice but to defend themselves. What they never learned during the years of war, however, was that the real battlefront lay on American and European television sets, and here the Bosnian Muslims, with multiple star-studded Western PR firms in their arsenal, proved themselves superior. Despite committing just about every sort of war crime imaginable—from rape to ethnic cleansing to wholesale murder, all the while enriching themselves personally through almost unbelievable levels of corruption—the Muslims in Bosnia, like the Albanian Muslims in Kosovo (world leaders in drug and human trafficking) came out as the “good guys.”

Like the throwaway line parroted by nearly every Western leader since 9/11 that “Islam is a religion of peace,” a similar mantra was promoted to explain the war in Bosnia: as Richard Holbrooke put it, “the Serbs started this war, the Serbs are the original cause of the war”; a similar story is being told today about the amputation of Kosovo from Serbia. Those interested in a serious critique of the standard, vicious oversimplification, should read John Schindler’s Unholy Terror. Schindler details how the two leading jihad-exporting countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, vied for position in the Balkans under the conniving eye of the American and European governments, who, in short, wanted the Muslims to win. Prior to 9/11, the West pursued pro-jihadist policies not only abroad but in Europe proper. Thanks to the thousands of mujahideen imported into Bosnia to fight the infidel Serbs during the 90s, major terrorist attacks against domestic Western interests became possible. In fact, every major Muslim terrorist attack since the time of the Bosnian war—from World Trade Center I (1993) to the “millennium plot” against Los Angeles airport, to 9/11, to Madrid, to 7/7—may be traced to the mujahideen brought in to wage the Bosnian jihad with the connivance of the Western powers. The shape of things to come.

The smashing up of the independent nation-state of Yugoslavia was the logical result of policies currently at work throughout Western Europe. During the Sarajevo Olympic games of 1984, no one imagined that, less than a decade hence, the whole place would come apart with tens of thousands killed in a civil war; just as it seems unimaginable today that London, Paris, Rotterdam, or Malmo could disintegrate into urban warfare. Setting off a Muslim jihad in Bosnia was made easier thanks to the relatively large Muslim population and the contradictions of Yugoslav Communism, but the circumstances that fed the Yugoslav breakup—a growing Muslim minority at odds with the secular government and a decomposing welfare state—are fast taking hold in France, Holland, Britain, and elsewhere.

Why Eurabia—But—like the victim in some horror movie pleading with the monster-villain, we are compelled to ask—why? Why support Muslim terrorism in Bosnia and Kosovo against Christians? Why permit Islam to grow with geometric speed within Europe’s borders and set the stage for civil war? Answer: because the millennial project of integrating Europe—a project agreed on by all mainstream parties on both sides of the Atlantic—and the larger project of globalization of which it is a part, cannot proceed as long as political opposition, centered on individual national identities, persists. As long as France is French, Germany German, Spain Spanish, Britain British, and as long as there are independent countries such as Yugoslavia that resist falling into the Western orbit, the dream of an integrated Europe will be impossible. Ergo, national identities must be dissolved, and Islam is the solvent. The integrationists’ object is only possible if the old nation-states are rendered too weak to resist their progressive destruction. The ever-growing millions of alienated Muslims in Europe, deliberately encouraged by EU policy to retain a Muslim identity across borders, thus serve as a means of smashing up the old social and political identities based in territorial nationhood. The tradition-minded Europeans, disorganized, unrepresented, and—increasingly—terrorized by their Muslim minorities, have been rendered politically helpless, which suits the integrationists just fine. Indeed, the logical result of their policies, civil war, would leave a handful of crippled nation-states utterly dependent on the emerging supranational Euro-Med authority—just what they want. The European people have always been suspicious of programs to unite Europe (see Napoleon, Hitler, Stalin), which is why they had to be taken out of the political picture. The growing numbers of Europeans leaving Europe for good (usually well-to-do and educated), the decline of native European birth rates to below replacement levels, and the rising number of suicides in an age of unprecedented prosperity testify to the integrationists’ efficacy in effacing the European national identities.

[amazonify]B000PE0GQO[/amazonify]The modern age is the age of revolution, and the Eurabian Revolution is but a continuation of a process, hearkening back to before the French Revolution of 1789, to eradicate the old ways of doing things in Europe. Today’s Eurocrats are on the verge of accomplishing what previous generations of revolutionaries, with all their evil genius, failed to bring about: the destruction of Europe as a distinct civilization. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Eurabian Revolution is that it is being effected so completely from within the halls of power, which is perhaps why so few seem to be aware that a revolution is afoot at all. But a genuine revolution it is, which, like its predecessors, can only culminate in a similar spiritual and material oblivion.

Gregory M. Davis received his Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University in 2003. He has written for Human Events, World Net Daily, FrontPage Magazine, and JihadWatch, and has appeared as a guest commentator on FOX News and numerous radio programs across America. He is author of Religion of Peace? Islam’s War Against the World and producer and director of the feature documentary Islam: What the West Needs to Know.