9. MEN, WOMEN … OR CHILDREN? OR: THE FATE OF THE WESTERN WORLD

The predicament of Western civilization
is that it has ceased to be aware
of the values which it is in peril of losing.

—ARTHUR KOESTLER

Draw your chair up close
to the edge of the precipice
and I’ll tell you a story.

—F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

 

One thing I do as a columnist perusing the morning Internet is read the military obituaries in the British press, usually The Daily Telegraph.

Almost invariably, these write-ups mark the passing of a veteran of World War II in the kind of scope, as critic James Bowman has noted, never found in an American newspaper. The battles of sixty-plus years ago are recounted as though the outcomes still matter, as though the wi-fi, sat-linked, iPod-plugged reader is well-served by a reminder of the obscure men from disbanded armies that vanquished evil for a forgetful world. Sometimes, I print these biographical essays and save them in a file, as though the paper record retains some essence of these indomitable spirits, preventing them from slipping away altogether into the cyber-obscurity of yesterday’s news, not to mention yesterday. A couple of summers ago, there was Wing Commander David Penman, eighty-five, one of five Lancaster bomber pilots (out of twelve who began the mission) to return from a daring, low-flying, daylight raid on a German engine plant in 1942; a while before that, there was Capt. Philip “Pip” Gardner, a Victoria Cross– winning tank commander captured at the 1942 fall of Tobruk. His death at age eighty-eight left only fifteen surviving VC-holders. Now there are twelve. More recently, there was eighty-four-year-old Petty Officer Norman Walton, who, after the British cruiser Neptune was sunk in a minefield off Libya in 1941, endured three days in the sea and two on a raft to become the sole survivor out of 765 crew members. A boxer of some note after the war, Petty Officer Walton let fly a left hook and a head butt to thwart two muggers at age eighty-two.

But there is more to these tales than derring-do. There is usually a line, maybe two, that offers the twenty-first-century reader an almost shocking glimpse of behavior that is not just old-fashioned—as a lacy cravat is old-fashioned next to a necktie—but wholly outmoded, sundered from any contemporary social logic. Just as “men’s clubs” or “polite company” have lost a logical connection to today’s society (after Sex in the City, what’s “polite company”?), the state of mind behind the actions that made these lives noteworthy seems to have been subtracted from today’s human calculus, indicating that a behavioral transformation has taken place. It shouldn’t be shocking, really. In daily life, for example, anyone over forty may mark the transformation every time a grown man doesn’t surrender his bus seat to a standing woman, even a very old woman or even a very pregnant woman because the thought doesn’t occur to him. This reprogramming of the brain waves may seem superficial, but it’s not. It is evidence of the cultural eradication of the communally protective impulse of the adult male that once governed public etiquette, and the ramifications are profound.

Digging into the obituary evidence, like strata of sedimentary rock, we may see how an earlier civilization, one not yet under the influence of a youth culture of licentious boys (sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll) and petulant girls (women’s lib), shaped that most basic human instinct—survival. Elevated by a maturing belief in duty, honor, loyalty, and forbearance, the instinct to survive wasn’t just a self-concern; it was, it turned out, the saving grace of civilization. This realization may help explain the shock value of these obits. It always comes as a shock to recognize that, in their most vigorous youth, these men—now lost to us as “dead, white males”—exemplified something beyond the cultural ken of the post-grown-up mainstream: hip, edgy, and out to “get mine” against “the system.”

Set by fate into the midst of world war, the deceased acquitted themselves admirably, to use the precise parlance of their military service. To be sure, theirs was a way of life untouched by hipness or edginess—nicely exemplified by eighty-five-year-old Maj. Basil Tarrant, a Military Cross–winner, who, after surviving Dunkirk, fighting onto Juno Beach on D-day, and battling retreating Panzer units deep into Germany, resumed a successful career manufacturing decorative, hinged biscuit tins. It was also a life unconstrained by irony’s strictures—as poignantly expressed in the account of the final moments of the Neptune when Petty Officer Walton described clinging to the side of a life raft in cold, heavy seas thick with engine oil and lost sailors. “We saw the ship capsize and sink,” he recalled, “and gave her a cheer as she went down.”

Was it a huzzah? Or did they shout hip, hip, hooray? In their struggle for survival, these doomed men mustered a salute that would save not their lives, but their gallantry. They could have railed at the gods, cursed the boat, and shrieked in extremis, but instead they evinced a courage and fortitude that ennobled both their fight and their fate. But can’t you just see it now: Jon Stewart, say, “interviewing” this sole survivor on The Daily Show, deconstructing a beau geste of the past into jagged bits of present pointlessness. Severed by a cutting derisiveness from the gravity of life and death—and severed from that civilization of grown-ups—such virtues as courage and fortitude do appear to shrink and wither. This diminishment may seem to compensate for the stunted stature of post-grown-up culture, but it also has the unmistakable effect of leaving that culture in a state best described as unmanned.

It’s easy to imagine Lt. Col. Duncan Campbell, ninety-one, who, as his obituary noted, was awarded two Military Crosses in the East Africa Campaign, getting the same sarcastic smack down. Walking ahead of the two infantry companies he was leading on a well-defended Italian position in 1940, The Telegraph reported, “he ensured that his C.O. did not lose sight of him in the rough terrain by singing the theme song from the film ‘Sanders of the River’ at the top of his voice amid the crack of rifle bullets and the noise of shell explosions.” (I gather Sanders of the River is a cinematic ode to empire along the lines of the 1939 version of The Four Feathers.) It’s hard to look back on such a bravura display of selfless determination without also picturing a Monty Python–esque parody popping up like a jack-in-the-box, replacing the officer’s daring leadership in the cause of victory with a knee-jerk mockery in pursuit of guffaws. This is not to call for a ban on laughs, but take Danny Kaye in The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), daydreaming his way into the impersonation of a British officer heroic to a point of comedic absurdity, and compare it to the Strangelove-ian spoof of the warrior that took hold in the 1960s and never let go. Kaye’s comedy makes puckish fun of the henpecked dreamer who is not the hero; Strangelove satire utterly destroys the heroic ideal itself, not to mention any and all violent notions of self-defense. It’s a big difference, one worth marking if only to establish that once upon a time, the cultural mainstream actually regarded stuff like duty and honor as dependable anchors rather than balls and chains.

That, of course, was more than a half century ago. In the interim, the sensibility that prizes such manly virtues has died a death for which there has been no obituary. This is not to say that such virtues no longer exist; just visit Centcom online and read up on manly virtues in action in Afghanistan and Iraq. But these virtues are no longer the object of emulation, admiration, or even consideration among elites and their acolytes who dominate the cultural mainstream. Even after 9/11, that cultural mainstream just keeps rolling along as though such virtues were obsolete and forgotten. This explains why, on 9/11, the heroism of the young and not-so-young men who climbed out of forgotten obsolescence and into the burning towers was so shocking—and, as current events, more shocking than any obituaries—particularly to those same elites who interpret the news of the day.

More than a war was revealed to us that September morning. A throwback world was uncovered, a fireman culture more exotic than that of aborigines in the rain forest—which, after all, is a vacation destination not unfamiliar to trend-conscious ecotourists. In the wilds of Queens and Staten Island, it seemed, there were men who married their high school sweethearts, followed their fathers and uncles into the force, and died to save their fellow man. As stricken office workers fled down the stairways of the burning towers, these same fearless men kept climbing upward, shouldering their fateful responsibilities as purposefully as their one-hundred-pound packs. To the mainstream culture, it was a staggering revelation—all 343 of them who perished, not to mention thirty-seven Port Authority police and twenty-three New York City police.

What was this remarkable new species, many wondered; the American male, you say? But wasn’t he long ago consigned to the ash heap of whatever? His comeback was much discussed. In a 2003 essay in The Nation called “Neo-Macho Man,” Richard Goldstein pointed out, “Not so long ago, you couldn’t say ‘macho man’ without thinking of the Village People. Hypermasculinity was so thoroughly discredited that it seemed fit for camp. Now, it’s back, in earnest.”1 Brooding on this development from the Left, Goldstein wasn’t happy, conflating what he called the “dominant male” with “bitch-slapping” examples of the most infantile brutishness—à la Eminem, gangsta rap, even the “authoritarianism” he decided was personified in Rudy Giuliani. He did manage to squeeze out a single line of praise, sort of, for the “heroes of 9/11”—adding, however, that they presented a “benign image [that] allows us to forget that the dark side of macho has also been unleashed.” Over on the Right, meanwhile, Peggy Noonan heralded the return of traditional “manliness” in “Welcome Back, Duke,” a Wall Street Journal essay appearing shortly after 9/11.2 The way she explained it, “We are experiencing a new respect for their old-fashioned masculinity, a new respect for physical courage, for strength and for the willingness to use both for the good of others.” And, she added, “none too soon.”

Whether it was condemned as “hypermasculinity” or lauded as “manliness,” something lost and forgotten was new and in the public eye again—and, as Noonan wrote, it had to do with the adult males who take care of things, who save lives, who do unpleasant work that must be done. Soon, many of them would be at war, fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq. But if 9/11 revealed the restorative powers of brawny men in a high-tech world under fiery attack, it was the manly virtues—courage, loyalty, duty—inspiring their brawny actions that gave these men stature in the reopened eyes of society. It’s not that these men were supposed to be saints their whole lives through. Under cataclysmic duress, however, in a time of national crisis, they were able to draw from a reservoir of goodness—I can’t think of a better word—that lies apart from the toxic waters of the cultural mainstream, which, from Easy Rider to M*A*S*H to Born on the Fourth of July, from Woodstock to Summer of Love to gangsta rap, from Naked Lunch to Catch-22, from cartoonists Conrad to Ted Rall, has long depicted such “courage” and “loyalty” as a chump’s game or a commodity, and duty as a grind. (The mass, save-yourself desertions of the New Orleans Police Department during Hurricane Katrina in 2005 may offer a more au courant take on “duty.”3) On 9/11, American society was awestruck by the same manly virtues—read: adult virtues—that our youth culture, our rock culture, our MSM culture had long ago derided as uncool, unhip, inauthentic, corny, out-of-touch, old-fashioned, schmaltzy, dry, dead, and totally over.

Given the long-standing entrenchment of these overlapping youth, rock, and MSM cultures, the retro-virtues of the adult weren’t going to prevail as cultural norms without a fight. And they haven’t, so far. No culture war is being waged against them, exactly, but maybe a form of not-so-benign neglect. Capt. Roger Lee Crossland of the U.S. Naval Reserve picked up on this aspect of the stalemate when he wrote in 2004 about the glaring absence of bona fide war heroes—not in the prosecution of what we persist in calling “the war on terror,” but in its all-important narrative.

Everyone knows the name Jessica Lynch. She wore her country’s uniform, went willingly to her duty in Iraq, and suffered grievous injuries, but does she qualify to be known first among those who served in this war? We have brushed aside battlefield resolution and action—which should be foremost—and allowed the image of victimization and suffering to take its place.4

Soon, we would also get to know the name of Lynndie England, the victimizer, whose depredations at Abu Ghraib, of course, make Josef Mengele’s experiments at Auschwitz look like the Pillsbury Bake-Off (not). But Crossland makes an excellent point. Describing the origins of what he calls the “victim-hero,” Crossland looks back to the Vietnam War, domestically contentious to the point where “battlefield heroes were ignored or actively disparaged.” But, as he notes, “the returning prisoners of war (POWs), however, were something different.”

They were unequivocal victims, many of whom had resisted their captors heroically with the little means they had at hand. There were no issues of collateral damage or innocent lives lost in their stories of captivity.… These were noncontroversial stories of great resolve. Contemporaneous stories of battlefield heroism were never accorded the same priority.

Was it at this point that we began our descent on the slippery slope of “safe” heroes, heroes whose conduct was laregly nonviolent, played out off the battlefield? Was it at this point we began to abandon warriors performing warriorlike acts as our models?5

Yes, and yes, I’d say. And, given their nonviolent sacrifice on 9/11, New York’s Bravest fall into this same “safe” hero category. This is not to take away from their heroism, or that of any other rescue workers on 9/11. But the fact remains, the kind of war hero who makes the Heroes in Action page at the Centcom Web site doesn’t show up in the post-grown-up pantheon that showcases Crossland’s victim-hero.

And this is key. If, as Crossland indicates, the victim-hero first emerged as a “noncontroversial” manifestation of patriotism that allowed Americans to wave the flag without antagonizing the “youths” of the antiwar movement, this suggests that the victim-hero emerged in response to the influence of the “youths” of the antiwar movement—and thus has a strong connection to the death of the grown-up. Warriors, after all, are adults, mature men whose example can make non-warriors or anti-warriors feel grossly inexperienced and sheltered—very much like children. Next to the real-life experiences of the battlefield hero, the ideal of “forever young” can feel tediously callow; next to the manifestation of maturity’s virtues (the same virtues the mainstream culture had deep-sixed by the 1960s), the sex, drugs, and rock ’n’ roll ideal can seem downright tawdry. “Victims,” as Crossland points out, “are easier to identify and celebrate than heroes,” they are “less controversial,” and they “inspire sympathy.” And there’s something else: As Crossland notes, “it is their [victims’] status rather than their acts or intentions that define them.”6 And it is that passive status of the vulnerable victim, not the aggressive acts of the valorous hero, that allows the non-adult, non-warrior to continue to stand tall, and to continue to define himself as head mainstream man. From a microphone on high, he can hand sympathy down to the victim: With the hero, he would have to look up. In short, the adolescent culture celebrates the victim because the hero is too big for it.

This explains why, for all intents and purposes, we—our adolescent culture—effectively pretend heroes don’t exist, and why the military itself has been effectively diverted from the mainstream, tied off, in a way, by those ubiquitous yellow ribbons. “Support our troops” may be the talisman we stick to our bumpers to ward off a recurrence of the shameful slanders against our fighting men that sullied the Vietnam era with epithets of “baby killers” and the like, but there remains a telling lack of depth to the slogan. “Support our troops,” after all, leaves plenty of wiggle room not to support our president, a sentiment that may lead to all kinds of actions that don’t, in fact, support our troops. In any case, just wearing our red-white-and-blue hearts on our cars hasn’t changed the fact that bona fide heroes of the war in Afghanistan and Iraq—a Bronze Star–winner such as Spc. Matthew Wester, a Silver Star–winner such as M. Sgt. Anthony S. Pryor, a Distinguished Service Cross–winner such as Col. James H. Coffman, Jr.—remain heroes to a military-friendly subculture, effectively cordoned off from, and unheralded by, the reflexively military-wary and all-enveloping media culture. For example: Superbowl XL included tributes to the late Rosa Parks and Coretta Scott King; however, from the beginning of pregame programming to the end of postgame programming, there was no mention of our many thousands of troops in harm’s way.7 We embrace the heroic victim to the exclusion of the hero every time.

This mainstream reflex offers a vivid insight into post-grown-up culture—and more evidence of the same flattening force that has steamrollered all traditional hierarchies, leveling intrinsic differences not just between heroes and victims, but also between men and women, maturity and adolescence, communism and capitalism, Islam and the West, Walker and Shakespeare, Schubert and the Beatles, Madonna and Child and “Dung Virgin,” terrorists and freedom fighters. But there’s an important psychological dimension that becomes evident in the cultural byplay of heroes and victims, one that takes us away from all the hothouse theories and back to the “real” culture war. Heroes fight. Victims suffer. Heroes take action. Victims languish. And victims are precisely what terrorism—flying planes into office buildings, blowing up commuter trains, pizzerias, discos, and the like—is calculated to create. Inflicting widespread fear and scattershot violence on civilian populations won’t ever result in a military victory; what’s achievable, however, is the demoralization of those civilian populations, which can be fatal to civilization itself. Insecurity, vulnerablity, aching loss, numbing shock—these are the poison fruits of terrorism in a world where anyone who submits to an airport body search, or even looks over his shoulder boarding a train, has assumed, however briefly, the status of a victim. Bat Ye’or would likely call such conditioned reflexes a form of dhimmitude: We are taking fearful or invasive precautions because our freedom—freedom from fear, freedom of movement—has been curtailed by threats of violence (I prefer “acts of jihad”) that are specifically Islamic, and therefore contribute to a culture of religiously dictated fear and limitation. The threat of such violence became more acute after 9/11, but it has been an unclear if present danger for decades. This helps explain why the condition of dhimmitude has in fact become a veritable Western institution. Bat Ye’or looks back to its origins.

It was in the early 1970s, with the outbreak of Arab Palestinian terrorism worldwide, that dhimmitude erupted on European soil through violence and death deliberately inflicted on one category of persons: the Jews, who were singled out as in the Nazi period by their religion. Security precautions and instructions posted on synagogues and Jewish community buildings implied that being Jewish and practicing the Jewish religion in Europe might again incur the risk of death, and that the freedom of religion and freedom of thought had been restricted.8

So, that’s how it started. When I first read that passage a few months after 9/11, something clicked. I remembered a visit to Brussels in December 1990, during which I saw armed guards posted outside a city synagogue. Such security precautions in Europe, as Bat Yeo’r writes, were by then routine, but it was the first time I had witnessed them. And it was only after 9/11 that I realized what they really meant: It wasn’t that government authorities were preparing to target a specific, limited threat of violence to battle and eliminate it; on the contrary, the authorities were responding to an ongoing threat that reflected the permanent fact that Jewish citizens in Belgium (and elsewhere) were no longer able to exercise their religion freely. And why weren’t they able to exercise their religion freely? As in the 1970s, the reason in 1990 was Arab Palestinian terrorists. In retrospect—namely, post-9/11—it seems odd that these terrorists have always been called “Arab terrorists,” or “Arab Palestinian terrorists,” and have never been labeled according to the animating inspiration of their religion as “Muslim” terrorists. Such coyness has buried a relevant part of the story: the Islamic context. Just as a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, it was Muslim terrorism that had come to Europe, and, as a result, Jews were worshiping, if they dared, at their own fearsome risk.

And not just Jews. By now, the same fearsome risk extends to whole populations, in houses of worship and the public square alike. After reading Bat Ye’or, I realized that the now-familiar strategies of fearsome risk management—guns around the synagogue, for example—represents a significant capitulation. The security ring around the synagogue—or the airport ticket counter, the house of parliament, or the Winter Olympics—is a line of siege, not a line of counterattack. The threat of violence has become the status quo, and, as such, is incapable of sparking outrage, and is certainly not a casus belli. Guns at the synagogue door—or St. Peter’s Basilica, or the Louvre—symbolize a cultural acquiescence to the infringement of freedom caused by the introduction—better, the incursion—of Islam into Western society. Thus, dhimmitude—institutional concessions on the part of non-Muslim populations to Islam—has arrived in the West.

And it’s here in the U.S. of A, as well. Brandishing automatic weapons, police and soldiers patrol our cities, our buses, our banks, our institutions, our subways, our trains, our stadiums, our airports to prevent specifically Islamic violence. This, lest we forget, is a situation unparalleled—unimagined—in our history. Official Washington has become an armed camp. No longer does traffic stream down Pennsylvania Avenue past the White House; the historic street is now a cement block–lined “plaza” blocked off by retractable security stumps. The Capitol, meanwhile, sits behind a hamster cage Rube Goldberg might have designed, its grand staircases blocked, and metal posts—called “bollards,” I recently learned—bristling down the sidewalks. The fact is, we are living in a state of siege. After 9/11, the United States embarked on an open-ended war against Islamic terrorism, with varying degrees of foreign cooperation. But even as we fight abroad, we simultaneously assume the status of victims at home, surrendering our bags and purses for security searches, erecting aesthetics-destroying metal detectors, transforming our ennobling vistas and public halls into militarized zones under twenty-four-hour surveillance. This is necessary, we understand, for public safety: But is it the new “normal”? Or do we ever get Pennsylvania Avenue back? Do we ever get to make that mad dash down the airport concourse onto a plane just pushing off from the gate again? (This was an odd, if recurring point of pride, for a family friend who used to time his drive from Kennebunkport, Maine, to Logan Airport with perilous precision). Don’t hold your breath; these homeland defenses sprouting up across the country look and feel like they’re here for good.

In this seemingly permanent climate of fear, then, ignoring genuine heroes—our exemplars of such adult virtues as bravery and sacrifice, honor and duty—is more than a cultural matter of infantile vanity. It is a security risk. “By our focus on victimization,” Crossland writes, “we have adopted our enemies’ standard of measure, and are handing them a victory.”9 It’s a psychological victory, of course, not a strategic one; but this, above all, is a psychological war.

As a people, then, we begin to make choices predicated on our new siege mentality, choices that a free people—free from fear, and, I would add, free from dhimmitude—would never make. Take Cartoon Rage 2006, the cultural nuke set off by an Islamic chain reaction to those twelve cartoons of Muhammad appearing in a Danish newspaper. We watched the Muslim meltdown with shocked attention, but there was little recognition that its poisonous fallout was fear. Fear in the State Department, which, like Islam, called the cartoons unacceptable. Fear in Whitehall, which did the same. Fear in the Vatican, which did the same. And fear in the media, which failed, with few, few exceptions, to reprint or show the images. With only a small roll of brave journals, mainly in continental Europe, to salute, the proud Western tradition of a free press bowed its head and submitted to an Islamic law against depictions of Muhammad. That’s dhimmitude.

Not that we admitted it. Resorting to delusional talk of “tolerance,” “responsibility,” and “sensitivity,” we tried to hide the fear that kept the Danish drawings out of the press. We even congratulated ourselves for having the “editorial judgment” to make “pluralism” possible. “Readers were well served by a short story without publishing the cartoons,” said a Wall Street Journal spokesman. “We didn’t want to publish anything that can be perceived as inflammatory to our readers’ culture.”10 “CNN has chosen to not show the cartoons in respect for Islam,” reported the cable network.11 On behalf of the BBC, which did show some of the cartoons on the air, a news editor subsequently apologized, adding: “We’ve taken a decision not to go further … in order not to gratuitously offend the significant number” of Muslim viewers, both in Britain and worldwide.12 Left unmentioned was the understanding (editorial judgment?) that “gratuitous offense” would doubtless lead to gratuitous violence. Hence, the capitulation to fear—not the inspiration of tolerance but of capitulation—and a condition of dhimmitude. In calling these cartoons “unacceptable,” in censoring ourselves “in respect” to Islam, we brought ourselves into compliance with a central statute of sharia. As Jyllands-Posten’s Flemming Rose noted, that’s not respect, that’s submission.13

There is something weak and underdeveloped in this unprotesting submission—something that strikes me as cultural immaturity. Of course, it would, given my premise about the death of the grown-up. Still, the act of cartoon submission—the quick and easy surrender of a hard-won, core liberty to an implacable religious demand—is not an act to associate with a muscular and robust cultural profile. Revealing infinite give and no take, it is the childlike act of the uncertain minor, not the behavior of the worldly guardian; it is the passive act of the victim, not the take-charge response of the hero. It is the directionless act of the follower who lacks any civilizational orientation—and the follower, here, is following Islam.

This should begin to explain why a world without grown-ups is such a dangerous place. I didn’t realize how dangerous it was a decade ago, when I first began thinking through the death-of-the-grown-up theory. At the time, it seemed to culminate in a Bill Clinton, a presidential phenomenon whose tastes and behaviors, from fast food to quicky sex, were flash-frozen in a punky adolescence from which he never evolved. I thought the theory offered a novel, possibly useful take on the cultural shifts that had brought us up to the Clinton years, and a way to understand the era through its defining death-of-the grown-up moment. This, I submit, took place on the very day the former president’s lewd liaison with an intern was revealed in some—not yet all—lurid detail. It was the day Bill Clinton thought he was a cooked goose. At least, as anyone who recalls his first filmed reactions to the Lewinsky scandal, he looked as though he thought he was a cooked goose. More important, he acted like one, doing everything he could from that point forward to cover up a scandal for which the American public, it turned out, had no intention of penalizing him. But Clinton didn’t know that. He didn’t know there would be no collective wrath—despite the best efforts of the “vast, right-wing conspiracy”—and not even a collective frown. The fact is, Bill Clinton, our first adolescent president, thought his country was more grown-up than he was.

It wasn’t. The United States slouched its way through the 1990s—the decade Charles Krauthammer dubbed “our holiday from history”—as if to prove the point. Rather than censuring Clinton (as Clinton himself so obviously expected) the electorate acted more like a posse, circling the wagons around a man who had demeaned himself, his family, his office, and his country for all the world to see, including, of course, Osama bin Laden and his jihadist gangs of thugs.

It may have been our holiday from history, but it certainly wasn’t history’s holiday from us. On February 26, 1993, thirty-eight days into the Clinton era, the World Trade Center was bombed (six killed, one thousand injured) by an Islamic network with ties to al-Qaeda and Iraq. In early October 1993, the debacle known as the Battle of Mogadishu took place, in which eighteen American soldiers were killed; it is now believed to have had al-Qaeda participation. (It certainly drew al-Qaeda attention, with Osama bin Laden subsequently citing our retreat as a sign of exploitable weakness.) In 1995, the Clinton administration learned of an interrupted plan by al-Qaeda operative Hamzi Yousef (mastermind of the first WTC attack) to hijack eleven airlines and smash one of them into CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. On June 26, 1996, the Khobar Towers Barracks was attacked (nineteen U.S. servicemen killed, 273 wounded) by Iranian-backed Hezbollah, quite possibly aided by al-Qaeda. On August 7, 1998, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed (220 killed, four thousand injured) by al-Qaeda. On October 12, 2000, the USS Cole was attacked by al-Qaeda (seventeen sailors killed, thirty-nine injured). Holiday from history? Looking back now on just some of the bloody milestones to jihad against the West, it’s becomes apparent that we, as a people, navigated the Clinton years in blinkers along an alternate route—a deep, dark tunnel marked, indeed, made by tawdry domestic scandal.

Byron York has highlighted the unmistakable Clinton-era pattern that pit scandal management against fighting terrorism. Nannygate, which brought down Clinton’s nominees for attorney general Kimba Wood and Zoe Baird, served as a distraction from the first WTC bombing; significantly, Janet Reno’s subsequent confirmation hearings to become attorney general never once mentioned the attack. When the Khobar Towers were blown up by Iranian terrorists, we were deep into Whitewater and Filegate. At the time of the twin embassy attacks in Africa, the focus was on Monica Lewinsky and the blue Gap dress she didn’t take to the cleaners. Even as the administration was winding down at the end of 2000, when it came to the October suicide bombing of the USS Cole, negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, ultimately futile, “took the edge in preoccupying senior administration officials,” reported The Washington Post, because “it presented a broader threat to Clinton’s foreign policy aims,” that is, the Legacy. As York summed up, “Whenever a serious terrorist attack occurred, it seemed Bill Clinton was always busy with something else.”14

From this perspective, the post-grown-up president was a dangerous man. And from this perspective, the post-grown-up world was a perilous place. No one, least of all the political class charged with national security, bothered to notice we were living in a period of resurgent Islam, an imperial faith now into a phase of jihadist expansionism for the first time since before the rise of European colonial empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As the Europeans returned home from their empires in the twentieth century, they were followed—or, rather they invited—their former subjects, many of whom were Muslim, into Europe. The resulting demographic shifts of Muslims into Europe in the last several decades were actually part of a strategic policy engineered by Euro-Mediterranean elites—oil for immigration, political power through political alignment—to compete with Superpower America by creating what Bat Ye’or has identified as “Eurabia.” The policy has led not to the Westernization of Islam in Europe, but rather to the Islamization of Europe—a process, Bernard Lewis told the German publication Die Welt in 2004, that will turn the continent Islamic by the end of this century. If true, this represents a tectonic shift in world history.

Even now, has post-grown-up America noticed? What will it do about this? What should it do? What can it do to stop it? Or does it even want to? Does America need to take precautions against Islamization at home? (Yes.) Such questions may expose a widespread, sleepy ignorance, even impotence, but they are the questions of the century, and they must be addressed now. But who will address them? Once it seemed the death of the grown-up took us to the tawdry pass of the Clinton scandals—a smutty low, but survivable. Now it becomes apparent that the post-grown-up freefall extends beyond any one person or presidency. Huge forces are in flux. What is at risk is civilization—and yes, as we know it.

Standing around Logan Airport last summer with some time to kill, I watched crowds of travelers winnow down to single file in order to pass through a phalanx of metal detectors, dutifully unstrapping wristwaches, dropping off keychains, and removing their shoes. They were, of course, cooperating with airport screeners charged with determining whether any of them had secretly bought a ticket to paradise—not the pearly gates one, but the seventy-two virgins kind—and not some earthbound destination. I wondered whether these low-level indignities would get passengers home safe and sound, or whether they would require body bags, burn masks, and prosthetics to reach their final destination. It was shortly after the London Underground bombings, and it seemed like an open question. As this final line of defense against murder-in-the-skies deployed, I wondered when the arsenal would also include those high-tech scopes and scanners we read about that are designed to identify retinas and fingerprints; and I thought how strange it was that even as we devise new ways to see inside ourselves to our most elemental components, we also prevent ourselves from looking full face at the danger to our way of life posed by Islam.

Notice I wrote “Islam.” I didn’t say “Islamists.” Or “Islamofascists.” Or “fundamentalist extremists.” Or “Wahhabism.” Except for Wahhabism—an overly narrow term for the jihadism that permeates all schools of Islam, not just this infamous Saudi one—I think I’ve tried out all the other terms in various columns since 9/11, but I’ve come to find them artificial and confusing, and maybe purposefully so. In their amorphous imprecision, they allow us to give a wide berth to a great problem: The gross incompatibility of Islam—the religious force that shrinks freedom even as it “moderately” tolerates, or “extremistly” advances jihad—with the West. Worse than its imprecision, however, is the evident childishness that inspires this lexicon, as though padding “Islam” with extraneous syllables (“-ism,” “-ist” “-ofascist”) is a shield against PC scorn of “judgmentalism”; or that exempting plain “Islam” by criticizing fanciful “Islamism” or “Islamofascism” puts a safety lock on Muslim rage—which, as per the Danish cartoon experience, we know explodes at any critique. Such mongrel terms, however, keep our understanding of Islam at bay. To take just one example: In writing about Cartoon Rage 2006, Charles Krauthammer clearly identified why the Western press failed to republish the Danish Muhammad cartoons. “What is at issue is fear. The unspoken reason many newspapers do not want to republish is not sensitivity but simple fear.” Clear as a bell, but then he went all mushy on us: “They know what happened to Theo van Gogh, who made a film about the Islamic treatment of women and got a knife through the chest with an Islamist manifesto attached.”15

What’s mushy about that? Well, Krauthammer has written that Theo van Gogh made a film about the “Islamic treatment of women” and was killed by a knife “with an Islamist manifesto” attached. Given that both Theo’s film and the murder manifesto were directly and explicitly inspired by the verses of the Koran, what’s Islamic about the treatment of women that’s not also Islamic about the manifesto? The “-ist” is a dodge, a nicety, a semantic wedge between the religion of Islam and the ritual murder of van Gogh. But why, oh why, is it up to Charles Krauthammer, or any other infidel, to save face when the face is Muhammad’s—the certifiable religious inspiration of jihad murder and dhimmi subjugation, not to mention the oppression of women? If the “-ist” is undeserved here, it is also misplaced—a fig leaf where there should be no shame in understanding.

Am I right? Who’s to say? Both the topic of Islam and, more pertinent to a Westerner, the topic of Islamization—for that is what is at hand, and very soon in Europe—are verboten. And maybe they’re not even verboten; for a topic to be forbidden implies that it’s also on the tip of everyone’s tongue, even if they do keep their mouths shut. Islam as a whole, as a historical continuum, as the theology of what we know as terrorism, as a rationale for dhimmi repression, is off the charts; out of bounds, really, and way beyond acceptable discourse. The issues central to Islam’s incompatibility with modernity—which, where the West is concerned, come down to jihad and dhimmitude, those Islamic institutions on which relations between Muslims and non-Muslims turn—are ignored according to an unspoken consensus and, thus, never appear on the public agenda. What is left is a black hole.

Why did this happen?

We can look to the thick, blanketing fog of political correctness that hangs over the political landscape, shrouding difference, obscuring significance, and clouding debate. But something besides what we know as “PC” plays into the resulting hush. The uniformity of the silence, from Left to Right, from academia to politics to journalism, tells us we have moved beyond PC to a more profound, more enveloping level of orthodoxy. After all, what we know as political correctness implies the existence of a flip side: namely, a school of political incorrectness that supplies the counter-narrative to contradict or subvert the PC orthodoxy. Such a school of thought—at least in what passes for the political mainstream where ideas are publicly debated—has not come into existence regarding the role of Islam in the so-called war on terror, or, worse, the Islamization of the West.

Example: When, in the shell-shocked wake of 9/11, President Bush began his historically inaccurate and theologically absurd “Islam is peace” offensive—which to this day relies on a willful ignorance of the jihad ideology that has driven Islamic history for thirteen centuries—no voices of correction, no attempts at historical analysis coalesced into a school of thought that was admitted into the political mainstream, not even among pro-war, anti-PC conservatives. Ultimately, I came to understand this as a post-adult moment because it felt as if no grown-ups were speaking up; indeed, it became alarmingly clear that there were no … grown-ups … to speak up—at least, in voices heeded and debated in the post-grown-up culture.

But there exists a formidable body of contemporary scholarship that bravely explicates the history of jihad and its modern-day applications—a bibliography I was relieved to find after 9/11 when the happy talk of a Karen Armstrong or a John Esposito sounded out of sync with what was actually being heard on the news. Some of these authors I have cited in previous chapters: Over four decades, Egyptian-born Bat Ye’or has pioneered the study of dhimmitude, the non-Muslim experience under Islam that follows jihad. The Pakistani-born scholar Ibn Warraq has, since the Rushdie affair, compiled a wrenching record of “apostasy,” the fearfully dangerous Muslim experience of leaving Islam. Daniel Pipes has long cataloged the progress of jihad and Islamization in the West. In the years since 9/11, Robert Spencer has produced several clear-eyed studies of Islam for both laymen and experts, also establishing a Web site that tracks current events called jihadwatch.org. Andrew G. Bostom, also since 9/11, has compiled a scholarly compendium of writings on jihad that offers many key texts and studies in English for the first time, including those of Islamic commentators on the Koran (al-Baydawi, al-Tabari, Suyuti), the Sufi mystic al-Ghazali’s surprisingly bellicose pronouncements on jihad war, and those of overlooked historians (C. E. Dufourcq, Clement Huart, Dmitar Angelov, Maria Mathilde Alexandrescu-Dersca Bulgaru). But such research has been largely relegated to the the sidelines, scholarship all but ignored by elites for purposes of public discussion and debate.

It’s enough to engender nostalgia for the Cold War, mushroom clouds and all. From that epic struggle emerged an indomitable anticommunist movement, Cold Warriors who perservered and triumphed by following a clear, rational line of academic analysis and astute polemic. They were ideologues who believed in freedom, but they were also realists who sought to defend the West by repelling and defeating a morally bankrupt ideology—Soviet communism bent on world domination. In those days, in that movement, ex-communist intellectuals and refugees from communism, such as Arthur Koestler, Whittaker Chambers, and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, were embraced and championed by Cold Warriors.

By glaring contrast, ex-Muslim intellectuals such as Ibn Warraq, Ali Sina, Wafa Sultan, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and refugees from Islam such as Bat Ye’or and Brigitte Gabriel, are held at arm’s length by the most fervent warriors on terror, members of a post-PC generation that see in their dreams of Islamic “reform” the key to a strategy of avoiding civilizational clash. Thus, they seek to defend the West by repelling or defeating “Islamic extremists,” but not the ideology contained within mainstream Islam that seeks to establish a world caliphate ruled by sharia. It’s as if yesterday’s Cold Warriors had staked the freedom of the Western world on a utopian vision of communist “moderates” who would someday, somehow emerge to “reform” the Communist Manifesto into something as compatible with the secular, post-Judeo-Christian West as the Girl Scout creed. Far from realpolitik, this is dreampolitik. Warming to their policies of wishful thinking, today’s Terror Warriors keep the apostates and critics of Islam out in the cold, their copious knowledge of the dire perils of jihad and dhimmitude unheeded, unexplored, undebated. This has helped enforce a terrible silence on the urgent questions of our time.

For example: Remember when word came down in 2003 from the Vatican that Pope John Paul II had watched Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ and liked it? The anonymously sourced story sparked a media firestorm around the globe as reporters sought confirmation of the papal equivalent of two thumbs-up. “It is as it was,” the pope supposedly said.16 This sounded like the perfect biblical movie blurb, but did the pontiff actually utter the words? After some nonclarifying retractions from the Vatican, it was ultimately hard to say for sure—although not for journalistic want of trying. This natural curiosity stands in striking contrast to the media silence, journalists, pundits, and politicians alike, that met a far more significant report of papal opinion: namely, that Pope Benedict XVI was said to believe that Islam is incapable of reform.

This bombshell dropped out of an early 2006 interview conducted by radio host Hugh Hewitt with Father Joseph D. Fessio, S.J., a friend and former student of the pope. Father Fessio recounted the pope’s words on the key problem facing Islamic reform this way: “In the Islamic tradition, God has given His word to Mohammed, but it’s an eternal word. It’s not Mohammed’s word. It’s there for eternity the way it is. There’s no possibility of adapting it or interpreting it [emphasis added].” Father Fessio continued, elaborating on the pope’s theological assessment of a religion with a billion-plus followers, some notorious number of whom are currently at war with the West. According to his friend’s report, the pope believes there’s no changing the Koran—that is, no changing Koranic teachings on infidels, women, polygamy, penal codes, and other markers of Islamic law—in such a way as to propel Islam into happy coexistence with modernity.17

As I said, a bombshell—at least to Terror Warriors and other Westerners depending on a mythological Islamic reform movement to reengineer the ludicrously nicknamed “religion of peace” into post-Enlightenment compatibility. But this was a bombshell that didn’t explode because no one wanted to touch it. Hugh Hewitt posted the extraordinary interview online, a couple of Internet blogs picked it up, and Middle East expert Daniel Pipes wrote a short piece taking exception to it,18 but, as the Asia Times Online columnist Spengler noted (in a column called “When Even the Pope Has to Whisper”), “not a single media outlet has taken notice.”19 Posting the Spengler column at the Corner at National Review Online, Rod Dreher wrote: “Spengler is amazed by the silence from the Western media over this remarkable statement attributed to the current pope.… and he suggests that we shrink from acknowledging it because the consequences of the pope being right about this are too horrible to contemplate.”20 Indeed, with one exception, NRO Corner regulars failed to comment on the pope’s putative words—noteworthy, given the magazine’s tradition of a Catholic identity.

Then again, was it really such a bombshell after all? Here is part of a letter I received from a Muslim reader about a column I wrote on the subject.

Dear Diana,

I read your article, but I failed to understand where the bombshell is. The pope has the right to express his opinion about the impossibility to reform Islam. It is just that Islam does not need any reform. We do not as Muslims mess with the word of God, we do not fit the religion to our needs [as] Christians have done and still do.

In other words, while the pope’s reported belief in what amounts to the non-reformability of Islam was, as Dreher put it, for non-Muslims “too horrible to contemplate,” the same notion struck my Muslim reader as being noncontroversial to the point of being unremarkable—not a bombshell, but a dud. Maybe Western horror came from Western embarassment: simply acknowledging the fixity of doctrines so deeply offensive to Western sensibilities struck Westerners as insulting to Islam, and was thus repressed. Here, however, what is offensive in the West is a point of Muslim pride, as in: Of course, the Koran is unchangeable; it is the word of Allah. As my correspondent wrote:

To us Muslims, [the Koran] is the word of God; therefore, who are we to reform the laws He set for his creation? We were given the freedom to either accept them or reject them. If we accept them, then we have to do our best to follow all of them to the limit of our capabilities. However, it would be a form of arrogance if we started fitting the religion to our own desires.… He created us, therefore he knows what’s best for us.

So, accept the Koran, reject the Koran, but don’t change the Koran. In describing the persistence of slavery in Islamic societies, K. S. Lal, an Indian medievalist, came up with a vividly pointed metaphor that helps explain the fixity of the Koran and its teachings.

Muhammed could not change the revelation; he could only explain and interpret it. So do the Muslims do today. There are liberal Muslims and conservative Muslims, there are Muslims learned in theology and Muslims devoid of learning. They discuss, they interpret, they rationalize, but all going round within the closed circle of Islam. There is no possibility of getting out of the fundamentals of Islam; there is no provision of introducing any innovation.21

But please. Let’s not be smug: The West inhabits a similarly “closed circle”—not, in our case, of Islam, but of being politically correct in regard to Islam. And, so far, there’s no getting out of these fundamentals, either; nor does there seem to be, as Lal might have said, a way of introducing any innovation. Just as we refuse to examine the relationship between Koranic fixity and Islamic reform, we refuse to look at the teachings of jihad as revealed by Muhammad. Indeed, Cartoon Rage 2006 has revealed that we refuse even to look at Muhammad—as a show, some would argue, of good manners. Failing to groove to “artistic” attacks on Christianity such as Piss Christ or “Dung Virgin,” the Good Mannerists among us understand the consternation of the Cartoon Ragers—at least to some point shy of death threats, arson, and murder—and see self-censorship as a matter of common decency.

Is their comparison valid? And is their politeness deserved? Absolutely not, and here’s one big reason why. As I have mentioned before, Christianity and Islam are not interchangeable belief systems of generic divinity and influence. One relevant distinction between them is the way they operate in relation to their societies. As I have also mentioned before, historically, Christianity has abided by the separation of church and state; Islam knows no separation whatsoever. This is key. This unity of mosque and state makes the theological teachings of Islam as revealed by Muhammad, codified in the Islamic law that drives Islamic societies, the basis of the Islamic political sphere. For its political role, then, Islam demands what we might think of political scrutiny—analysis and criticism. But it doesn’t get it. And when it does—even in the mildest form of satirical commentary—the Islamic world blows up.

Let’s take what are considered the most inflammatory of the Danish Dozen: Bomb-head Muhammad; and Muhammad in the clouds, telling arriving suicide bombers that Islamic paradise is plumb out of virgins. What Denmark’s cartoonists did in these caricatures is something few writers have dared to do in words: They made visual reference to the copious historical and contemporary theological underpinnings of jihad and suicide bombings. What is offensive here, then, is not the extremely mild caricature, but rather those theological underpinnings of holy war and suicide bombings. When the widely influential Sheik Yusuf al-Qaradawi can praise Muhammad as “an epitome for religious warriors [mujahideen],”22 Muhammad, a jihad model, shouldn’t be a taboo subject in the West, either in caricature or commentary, and certainly shouldn’t be super-sacralized, in effect, by a fearfully polite censorship. The subject should be laid out for all to see, but it isn’t.

The valiant Dutch ex-parliamentarian and ex-Muslim Ayaan Hirsi Ali explained why silence is a problem: “You cannot liberalize Islam without criticizing the Prophet and the Koran.… You cannot redecorate a house without entering inside.”23 But who among us has even gone up to the door to ask whether jihad in all its modern manifestations—airplane hijackings, skyscraper massacres, bus bombings, train bombings, rioting over novels, rioting over cartoons, car bombs, suicide bombs, pursuit of nuclear bombs—is not the perversion of a noble faith, but rather a core institution? In denial there is defeat.

After addressing the Pim Fortuyn Memorial Conference in the Hague—a scholarly conference on Islam in Europe in February 2006—Robert Spencer posted the following anecdote at his Web site jihadwatch.org.24 It concerned an extraordinary discussion he had had at an American embassy reception with an official of the Dutch Ministry of Integration—a woman, Spencer writes, “who spends her days in dialogue” with Dutch imams and other Muslim leaders. I say their talk was extraordinary because Spencer’s summation conveys in almost gruesome detail the acute paralysis of observation and reasoning powers on which multiculturalism, in its practical applications, must rely.

We began a wide-ranging discussion about the nature of the jihad threat and the proper response to it. In the course of this I asked her how many Muslim leaders she encountered who were ready to lay aside attachment to the sharia, and accept the Dutch governmental and societal structure and the parameters of Dutch pluralism, and be willing to live in Dutch society as equals to, not superiors of, non-Muslims indefinitely. She told me that there were only very few, but insisted that we had to work with them, and indeed had to place our faith and hope in them, for otherwise the future was impossibly bleak.

Keep the faith, in other words, or plunge into the abyss. Spencer continued:

I asked her if she had read the Qur’an. She told me no, she hadn’t, and wouldn’t because she didn’t want to lose all hope—and because whatever was in it, she still had to find some accord with the Muslim leaders, no matter what. [Emphasis added.]

The unflinching Oriana Fallaci called the Koran the Mein Kampf of the jihad movement because it exhorts the annihilation and subjugation of the non-Muslim. While her analogy is shattering to any PC peace, as Spencer has pointed out elsewhere, it is also a statement, through analysis and debate, “that can be verified or disproved.” (“And indeed,” he writes, “Islamic terrorists such as Osama bin Laden, Zarqawi, and others have never hesitated to quote the Qur’an copiously to justify their actions. It remains for those who identify themselves as moderate Muslims to convince violent Muslims that they are misusing the Qur’an—if indeed they are—and should lay down their arms. They have had no notable success in this so far.”25) I introduce the notion for a rhetorical reason. Imagine if Spencer’s conversation with the Dutch official had taken place in 1939. It might have gone something like this: I asked her if she had read Mein Kampf. She told me no, she hadn’t, and wouldn’t because she didn’t want to lose all hope—and because whatever was in it, she still had to find some accord with the Nazi leaders, no matter what.

“No matter what”? Was this the clear-eyed assessment of a rational adult seeking information and solutions in her engagement with reality? Or was this reliance on blind faith and studied ignorance a symptom of a fearfully stunted mentality, childishly hoping to awaken from a bad dream?

There’s more.

I urged her to ask the imams with whom she spoke questions that made their loyalties clear, insofar as they would answer them honestly. I urged her to ask them whether they would like to see sharia implemented in the Netherlands at any time in the future, and whether they were working toward that end in any way, peaceful as well as violent. I asked her to ask them whether they would be content to live as equals with non-Muslims indefinitely in a Dutch pluralistic society, or whether they would ultimately hope to institute Islamic supremacy and the subjugation of non-Muslims.

She said she couldn’t ask them those questions.… Such questions would immediately put their relationship on a confrontational plane, when cooperation was what they wanted, not confrontation. But, I sputtered, you’re not getting cooperation as it is. The confrontation is already upon us. What is to be gained by pretending that it isn’t happening?26

A world of make-believe; a world of “cooperation”; a world of silence. Silence on such crucial questions not only denies us answers, it denies us a fighting chance. And you know the silence is deafening when Abu Qatada, a notorious British imam thought to have links to al-Qaeda, has to interrupt his busy jihad to try to set the record straight: “I am astonished by President Bush when he claims there is nothing in the Qur’an that justifies jihad or violence in the name of Islam. Is he some kind of Islamic scholar? Has he ever actually read the Qur’an

Abu Qatada’s darkly comic relief aside, the resolute denial of the relationship between Islam and jihad is perplexing, exhausting all routine exercises of common sense. Indeed, these bizarre loops of logic take us into a psychological realm of delusional thinking—patterns of thought at odds with reality. While this may be terrain best navigated by the nineteenth-century Russian novelist, Harvard psychiatric instructor Kenneth Levin has made a recent study of such patterns in modern-day Israelis and Jews in history. In his 2005 book The Oslo Syndrome: Delusions of a People Under Siege, Levin focused on both the Israeli experience, in which Israel entered into concessionary negotiations with a “peace partner” openly dedicated to Israel’s destruction, and the historical Jewish Diaspora experience, in which Jewish populations typically identified with their tormentors and even echoed their anti-Semitism. According to Levin’s diagnosis, these interactions, engendered by a permanent condition of siege mentality, relied on delusional thinking. There are two kinds: One is delusional thinking about the intentions of the aggressor (Arab Muslim or European Christian); the other is delusional thinking regarding the victim’s ability to change the aggressor’s intentions. Such thinking is common to victims of chronic abuse, particularly children. They fool themselves into thinking that they, the victims, control the abuser by, in their own minds, linking the abuse they suffer to their own behavior. In other words, in their delusional mode of thought, they see their own behavior as the cause of their own abuse. This mind game, Levin says, gives victims a vital sense of control over situations that are expressly beyond their control (an abusive parent, for instance), thus avoiding the devastating alternative: helplessness and despair.

And so the besieged victim pretends: Daddy doesn’t really want to hurt me; if I’m a better girl, he’ll stop. Israel pretends: Muslims don’t really want to destroy us, and so we’ll give them land for peace. Jews in pre-Nazi Europe pretended: The anti-Semites are really right; we deserve a pogrom. Intriguingly, Levin writes, “But the book’s themes have a still broader relevance. Even ostensibly powerful and secure populations, under conditions that entail ongoing threat and vulnerability, can manifest similar trends.”28

Ongoing threat and vulnerability, huh? That certainly sounds like the American condition after 9/11. Our superpowerful condition may not compare with tiny Israel’s; nonethless, color-coded terror alerts are practically part of our daily weather report, security procedures have become routine, and open access everywhere has been slammed shut for the duration. This has placed our population effectively under siege. And don’t forget the toll of the culture wars. Those raging battles, which have severed, or at least weakened, the connection between “dead, white males” and “liberty and justice for all,” among other things, have undermined American confidence and purpose. While similarities between the demonization of Jews in the Diaspora, say, and the demonization of the American white males (dead or alive) are necessarily quite limited, there nonetheless remains a way in which the American male specifically, and the American adult in general, has been subjected to a cultural form of the chronic abuse that Levin pinpoints as a cause of siege mentality. And it is that siege mentality, he writes, that leads to delusional thinking.

Thus, we pretend Islam isn’t a threat to Western liberty; it’s those awful “extremists.” Jihad isn’t a historic and theological tradition in Islam; it’s those awful “extremists.” Sharia isn’t a threat to freedom of expression and sexual equality; it’s those awful “extremists.” This gaping disconnect with reality dovetails nicely with the overall post-grown-up cultural reluctance—dare I say, childish reluctance?—to face extremely unpleasant facts. Rather than confront the hard truths of our times, we tell ourselves soothing tales; rather than act on the logic of reality, we deny its implications. Such delusional thinking, which sounds like something Dr. Levin might care to study next, comes naturally to a culture that has perpetuated and enshrined immaturity for more than a half century. But how much longer can a society in denial last?

Imagine: If, as I believe, the “war on terror” is actually a defensive war against modern-day manifestations of jihad—the same jihad by which Islam has traditionally (and, where dhimmi peoples are concerned, tragically) expanded—the implications are dire. There are implications for our immigration policy (do we allow proponents of sharia to settle here?); implications for our conceptions of religious tolerance (do we tolerate the intolerant?); implications for the way in which we fight the war on terror (are Islamic hearts and minds beyond our infidel reach?). Without a thorough, no-PC assessment of Islam—and in particular, its institutions of jihad and dhimmitude—how do we reckon with these vital issues? For too long, a sketchy, politically correct assessment of Islam is all we have had. Writing in 1991, the French intellectual and Protestant theologian Jacques Ellul observed:

In a major encyclopedia, one reads phrases such as: “Islam expanded in the eighth or ninth centuries…”; “This or that country passed into Muslim hands…” But care is taken not to say how Islam expanded, how countries passed into [Muslim] hands.… Indeed, it would seem as if events happened by themselves, through a miraculous or amicable operation.… Regarding this expansion, little is said about jihad. And yet it all happened through war!29

Ellul made this comment in a foreword to Bat Ye’or’s The Decline of Eastern Christianity: From Jihad to Dhimmitude, a masterful survey of the Islamization of the formerly Christian lands stretching from Anatolia to Afghanistan, from Egypt to Palestine to Syria to Iraq to Armenia to Cyprus. The book is history, yes, but it probably comes as news to many that such “Muslim lands” were once bastions of a varied and vital Christendom, and home to similarly thriving communities of Jews, Zoroastrians, and other religions. As much as anything else, the point of Ellul’s foreword was to prepare unsuspecting readers for the cruel and violent nature of the Islamic transformation of these lands, as unearthed from a compendium of historical sources by Bat Ye’or. This transformation, in short, is the story of jihad. And, as Ellul wrote, “In the general current climate of favorable predispositions to Islam,… there has been a reluctance to allude to the jihad. In Western eyes, it would be a sort of dark stain on the greatness and purity of Islam.”30 Never mind that such a stain is there for all to see; we are just not supposed to notice—not then, not now. Then, perhaps, the exercise was academic; now, it is suicidal.

Ellul was elaborating on a theme begun in an even earlier piece of writing: his 1983 preface to Bat Ye’or’s previous work, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians Under Islam. Ellul described that earlier book as being both “important” and “sensitive”: important, for dealing with “the reality of Islamic doctrine and practice with regard to non-Muslims”; and sensitive, because of the passions this reality could provoke. He was writing four years after the Islamic revolution in Iran, five years before the Salman Rushdie affair, and twenty-three years before the days of Cartoon Rage 2006. In other words, he was writing at a time when such passions were still something new to the modern scene.

Half a century ago, the question of the condition of non-Muslims in the Islamic countries would not have excited anyone. It might have been the subject of a historical dissertation of interest to specialists.… or the subject of a philosophical and theological discussion, but without passion. That which was related to Islam and the Muslim world was believed to belong to a past that, if not dead, was certainly no more alive than medieval Christianity. The Muslim people had no power; they were extraordinarily divided and many of them were subjected to European colonization.… And then, suddenly, since 1950, everything changed completely.31

Ellul identifies four stages leading to Islam’s reemergence on the world stage. First, there was the general process of decolonization in both Muslim and non-Muslim lands. Next, there was a reemphasis on precolonial identity; in the case of Islamic lands, this identity was religious rather than either ethnic or tribal.32 The third stage Ellul described was, despite periodic Muslim-on-Muslim conflict, an overarching “awareness of religious unity in opposition to the non-Muslim world.” And the final stage was the development of Islamic oil clout. Quite suddenly, it seemed, there was nothing ancient about Islam; nonethless, critical study remained mired in premedieval taboos. “The moment one broaches a problem related to Islam, one touches a subject where strong feelings are easily aroused,” Ellul wrote in 1983. On picking up this thread in 1991, the Islamic hypo-sensitivity he described earlier had intensified, demanding not just care, but silence. “So widespread is the agreement on this silence,” he observed, “that it can only be the result of a tacit agreement based on implicit presuppositions”—those presuppositions being the putative “greatness and purity of Islam.” Anything undercutting Islam’s greatness or marring Islam’s purity, he explained, is automatically dismissed as being either “blasphemous” or “polemical.”33

From then to now, it has been ever thus. Ellul’s point is all the more striking today because he was writing in the 9/10 world—that seemingly antediluvian period in which Islam was practically unknown to most Americans. The fact that this same reluctance to discuss Islam—to study its history, dissect its institutions, analyze its impact—is only more rigid after 9/11 is nothing short of incredible. But even twenty-odd years ago, Ellul saw fit to inject a cautionary note: “The Muslim world has not evolved in its manner of considering the non-Muslim, which is a reminder of the fate in store for those who may one day be submerged within it.”34 At this point, “one day” is getting too close for dhimmi comfort.

All the more reason, then, that these Islamic institutions on which relations between Islam and non-Islam turn, jihad and dhimmitude, become the hot topics. But no. Our leaders and pundits, our generals and academics, pay repetitive and obsequious obeisance to “noble Islam” (with never a bow, of course, to “noble” anything else). They depict jihad as a mutation of Islam—the “distorted,” “hijacked,” or “defiled” practice by the “violent fringe” or “tiny band of extremists”—despite jihad’s central, driving, animating role throughout the history of imperial Islam.35 As for dhimmitude, it remains an alien concept, even as non-Muslims in the West are increasingly accommodating themselves to Islamic law and practices. While the president of the United States appears no longer to consider Islam an out-and-out religion of “peace,” he’s settled into an equally ahistorical formulation by delegitimizing jihad violence as “the perversion by a few of a noble faith into an ideology of terror and death.”36 In other words, Jihad Is From Mars and Islam Is From Venus.

Oslo Syndrome, anyone? Historically and tragically, the Islamic extremism the president reviles has always coursed through the Islamic mainstream. Irshad Manji, the self-proclaimed “Muslim refusenik,” has discussed their connection. Asked in an interview to assess the extent to which Islam in Europe could be described as “extremist,” she replied,

It mostly depends on how you define extremism. If you mean “literalism,” then it is more than widespread—it is mainstream. If you mean the overt preaching of violence, then it percolates on the margins. The key here is to recognize that because literalism is mainstream in Islam today, the thin minority of Muslims who have any intention of engaging in terror are nonetheless protected by the vast majority of moderate Muslims who don’t know how to debate and dissent with that proclivity.…

I subscribe to Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s point that “Islamic terrorism, both in the Netherlands and abroad, is able to thrive because it is embedded in a wider circle of fellow Muslims.” This is a reality that most Western security experts have yet to grasp.37

That, of course, is putting it mildly. Not only have Westerners in general “yet to grasp” the connection, we do everything we can to cover our eyes and run away from it.

But why?

Before taking a final fly at explaining this potentially fatal ostrich routine, it’s time for a nice, bracing dose of Churchill—Winnie’s assessment of Islam following his experiences as a young subaltern in the Sudan. Written over one hundred years ago, the excerpt catalogs many of the same problems that remain endemic to Islamic societies to this day—as noted, as a matter of fact, in a widely reported 2002 study commissioned by the United Nations on human development in the Arab world that blamed religious fanatacism, economic stagnation, repression of women, and social paralysis for a lack of progress. What has changed beyond recognition in the intervening century, however, is the mode of expression. Sharp and direct, Churchill says what he has seen, and what he thinks about what he has seen—sans gag, filter, rose-colored glasses, or net. A high-flying display of the late-nineteenth-century British sensibility, it is enough to take one’s breath away in the twenty-first.

How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays upon its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries. Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a power among men. Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities.… But the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world. Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and prosletyzing faith. It has already spread thoughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome.38

Today, some, many, most—all?—would probably call this “hatespeak.” But does Churchill speak hatred? Or is he rather expressing a pre-PC appraisal of Islam that is rooted in a wholly non-Islamic tradition once known as the Western world? There is no answer to such questions, because there is no discussion of such questions. There is only silence—the silence of fear. Fear has become the new reason. We fear more Rushdies, more Cartoon Rage, more protests. We fear more Theo van Goghs, more assassinations, more intimidation. We fear more embargoes, more boycotts. We are afraid of more violence, more burning flags, more gutted embassies. Afraid of more bomb threats. Afraid of more bombs. And so we close our eyes and close our circle, “-ists” and “-isms” going all around, pretending outselves into a status quo of our own making, a condition dependent on our own delusions. Moderate Islam is coming. Democracy is the answer. And don’t ask any questions. Because there is something else post-grown-up culture fears more than anything else: We are afraid to do anything about our fears—even name them.

The war on terror aside: The growth of Islam in the West augurs the peaceful spread of sharia into the West, this by dint of natural procreation and unchecked immigration. Logic should tell us, then, that the growth of Islam in the West threatens Western-style liberty: threatens freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, and upends religious and sexual equality. But logic doesn’t tell us that. Or, if it does, no one will admit it. The logic may be incontrovertible; we are at a point, however, where we are afraid of logic, too. That’s because logic leads to discrimination—and by “discrimination,” I am going back to Webster’s “ability to make or perceive distinctions; perception; discernment.” If we revive our innate ability to make distinctions, suddenly rub our eyes and see the beliefs of Islam and the beliefs of the West at irreconcilable odds, it’s not just Islam’s place in the West that becomes an acknowledged threat to the survival of the West. The multicultural mirage of interchangeable diversity and “universal values” necessarily vanishes as well; in its place arises an inevitable hierarchy of discrimination. Not all religions are equally benign; not all religions are equal. Not all cultures have made equal contributions; not all cultures are equal. To our elites, Right and Left, this is a bad thing because it sets into motion a right of passage, a painful, difficult awakening from a dreamworld of sunny universalism and pale indecision into a stark reality of black and white, good and evil, win or lose, do or die.

Our inaction depends on our silence, just as avoiding clash depends on our self-censorship. For example, as a culture, we ignored Ibn Warraq’s plea in 2006 for “unashamed, noisy, public solidarity” with the Danish cartoonists as a means of safeguarding freedom of expression; we also ignored his warning that from our silence, “the Islamization of Europe will have begun in earnest.” We called our self-censorship the silence of respect; in reality, it was the silence of fear. We called it the silence of tolerance; actually, it was silence of cultural acquiescence. There was no clamor to defend the public square from religious tyranny; there was only shame. In vain, then, Warraq wrote:

Be proud, do not apologize. Do we have to go on apologizing for the sins of our fathers? Do we still have to apologize, for example, for the British Empire, when, in fact, the British presence in India led to the Indian Renaissance, resulted in famine relief, railways, roads and irrigation schemes, eradication of cholera, the civil service, the establishment of a universal educational system where none existed before, the institution of elected parliamentary democracy and the rule of law? What of the British architecture of Bombay and Calcutta? The British even gave back to the Indians their own past: It was European scholarship, archaeology and research that uncovered the greatness that was India; it was British government that did its best to save and conserve the monuments that were a witness to that past glory. British imperialism preserved where earlier Islamic imperialism destroyed thousands of Hindu temples.

On the world stage, should we really apologize for Dante, Shakespeare, and Goethe? Mozart, Beethoven and Bach? Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Gogh, Breughel, Ter Borch? Galileo, Huygens, Copernicus, Newton and Darwin? Penicillin and computers? The Olympic Games and football? Human rights and parliamentary democracy? The West is the source of the liberating ideas of individual liberty, political democracy, the rule of law, human rights and cultural freedom. It is the West that has raised the status of women, fought against slavery, defended freedom of inquiry, expression and conscience. No, the West needs no lectures on the superior virtue of societies that keep their women in subjugation, cut off their clitorises, stone them to death for alleged adultery, throw acid on their faces, or deny the human rights of those considered to belong to lower castes.39

Ibn Warraq’s catalog of Western treasure—onto which I would append an American index represented, say, by the Founding Fathers, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Irving Berlin, Ella Fitzgerald, Watson and Crick, Laurel and Hardy, Ted Williams, Jonas Salk, and the 82nd Airborne—is indeed something to be proud of, to derive strength from; guidance, too. It is also more evidence of the crock that is “universal values.” Be proud, don’t apologize—and don’t look now, but the end of jihad in the West also means the end of multiculturalism in the West. And maybe the truth is that, prisoners of our closed circle, we don’t want that; can’t think that.

All of this makes a new world, all right, but, with apologies to Huxley, anything but brave. And anything but grown-up. Maybe it wouldn’t matter if this really were “the end of history,” that postcommunist pause in the early 1990s that lasted all of thirty minutes. Maybe then we could chase eternal youth all the way to assisted living; revel in self-loathing at the spa; even support our troops and never meet one. But ours is a time of supreme, even ultimate struggle. The cushioning luxury of affluence; the hard sacrifice of our parents or grandparents; the hookah-pipe dream of world peace are no longer sufficient protections of our liberty, if they ever were. They’re gone now, used up, spent on a long and vainglorious youth. What next? Ours is an age marked by a startling confluence of stunted Western models faced with a colossal threat, an almost science-fictional fate of cultural transformation via Islamization. Arrayed against this looming threat stands a veritable gathering of the miniature clans: the perpetual adolescent; the delusional victim; the caving dhimmi whose rush to sharia will surely take us there.

It makes a kind of horrific sense, because it is dhimmitude that is perhaps the ultimate phase of human infantilization: the abject surrender of liberty to implacable authority, the human condition that, by force, is never allowed to attain the maturity of free will. It sounds like a living death. Wasn’t it, “Give me liberty or give me death”? And how many American men have chosen their death for our liberty? For our peace. For our prosperity. For our ease. For our convenience. For our inaction. For our laziness. For our fear. For our closed circle. For our silence. For our dhimmitude?

Never. Eternal youth is proving fatal; it is time to find our rebirth in adulthood.