The Right Planet

By: Diana West
DianaWest.net

"At the Cafe" by Edgar Degas (c) The Fitzwilliam Museum; Supplied by The Public Catalogue Foundation

Some thoughts.

Fourteen years after 9/11, the civilized world has finally become unified, working as one in response to global jihad by … lighting up landmarks in the colors of the latest victim-state.

This is not an effective response.

Nor are public displays of grief, including candles, teddy bears, flowers. Nor is embarking on another pointless war in the Middle East (Syria). One clear lesson of the past decade is that tying the fate of the United States of America to the fortunes of warring Islamic primitives, one indistinguishable from the next, is no way to protect the United States or the wider West.

Today’s update on doings in Syria (hat tip Andrew Bostom) offers an object lesson on “indistinguishable.”

Israel National News reports:

The leader of a jihadist Syrian rebel faction that had pledged allegiance to the Islamic State group (ISIS) was killed Sunday in a suicide attack by rival jihadists, a monitoring group said.

Some details:

“Abu Ali al-Baridi, head of Al-Yarmuk Martyrs Brigade and nicknamed ‘The Uncle’, was killed in a suicide attack by Al-Nusra Front,” Al-Qaeda’s Syria affiliate, the Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said….Baridi’s faction pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014 and operated in the south of the country, Abdel Rahman said.

To recap: The head of the Al-Yarmuk Brigade, which pledged allegiance to ISIS in 2014, was killed by Al Nusra, which pledged allegiance to Al Qaeda in 2013.

Meanwhile, in 2012, the Al-Yarmukis were our boys, genuine Syrian “rebels,” presumably having pledged allegiance to the Free Syrian Army. This may seem like a lot of pledging allegiances, but with jihad and sharia for all.

Any American “boots on the ground” in response should be on the US border. If, God forbid, a soldier is killed there, at least he died for his country.

The fact is, the first line of defense in this war is our border — all of our borders, from the nation-states of Europe, struggling to break free from the socialism- and diversity-enforcing EU behemoth, to these United States of America, struggling to break from the socialism- and diversity-enforcing White House behemoth. These borders — these sovereign states — are all (an exception is Hungary) undefended by governments in thrall to global imperatives, not responsibility for their own citizens or their own laws. It is first and foremost at these borders that the main mechanism of societal destruction is being activated by massive, lawless population shifts from the Third World, the Islamic world.

They are destroying Western societies by making them non-Western. Fighting jihad gangs in the Middle East does nothing to stop this destruction underway at home.

Meanwhile, Islamic society is whitewashed by pretending the dangers it poses to Western societies are non-Islamic (the Left with talk of “extremism”), or so outside the Islamic norm as to render Islam itself beyond debate, beyond concern (the Right with talk of “Islamism”).

Take a recent essay on Paris by Andrew C. McCarthy.

“Allahu Akbar!” cried the jihadists as they killed innocent after French innocent. The commentators told us it means “God is great.” But it doesn’t. It means “Allah is greater!” It is a comparative, a cry of combative aggression: “Our God is mightier than yours.” It is central to a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East, that sees itself at war with the West. It is what animates our enemies.

We are supposed to believe that “a construction of Islam, mainstream in the Middle East,” is what animates our enemies — not Islam.

Is that so?

If this were ten, five, three years ago, I might ask what Koran, sunnas, and hadiths that this “construction of Islam” is based upon? I might break out the poll data that demonstrates strong Muslim affinity for sharia the world over. I might point to a 2013 study of 9,000 Muslims in six European countries which found that 65 percent say that religious rules are more important that the laws of the country in which they live.

But is there a point? Fourteen years after 9/11, Islam is spectrum-wide defended in the public square even as it destroys the public square, while the threat to the public square is usually identitied as coming from Europe’s so-called “far right.”

But never fear. Memorial light displays are ready anywhere, anytime.